First comes hands. It’s a simple principle I learned late in my fighting career, but one that shaped me forever. Power, focus, balance; it applies to all. Recognize the energy around you and guide the flow. Nurture it. The day you don’t is the day you learn what your own limits truly are, and just how short they can fall. I’ve learned that lesson my fair share of times. No one person is infinite. No one can fight forever without friends to lean on.

In maturity, my hands, like my body, are springs of kinetic destruction. The tape I’ve worn over the past four years has changed innumerable times. I’ve got new cuts, new bruises, and a few new scars. All earned on the path I made to the major leagues. I’m a different fighter in incalculable ways from my younger self, the Mars that took down a corporation and saved a city. And I’m a different man, too. Tempered by the lessons I learned and overcame on the way.

My smile hasn’t changed at all, though.

At twenty-five, I’m broader and stronger than even my peak at university. Taller, too. Hair a bit longer, skin a bit darker from the time I’ve been spending in the sun, body fittingly sharpened to the needs of an apex predator. My movements have a laconic blend of new power and Ajax’s old flair to them. A smoothness that sweeps from action to action, never being caught by surprise, always ready with a laugh or a smile.

I guide the smoothness now as I sweep my feet across the polished marble slab. Eyes closed. Breaths even, hands outstretched and palms open to the sun. Around me, nature flourishes; blooming and vibrant. Life energy suffuses the air from a multitude of sources. Cicadas buzz a rattling beat. Seaside breezes howl over the rice fields, cooling my shoulders. Hot summer sunlight beats into my back. Chirping songbirds idle in rustling stands of bamboo nearby. My soul cheers with them when shade from the grove spills over my side. The cool relief almost breaks my focus. But I bend with it, returning the noon heat as I ease through the last mantras of the Lungracian stance.

Even my sweat has its place in the flow. In the moment, I’m hyperaware of the droplets that fall from my shoulders, arcing through the simmering current of white aura that flourishes from my skin. My sixth sense for ki, the primal energy found within all living things, intuits the garden around me as a nebulous picture of touch and feel in my mind. Squirrels and fat tanuki are small sparks in the dark, little stars that sun themselves amidst the rocks. Plants and insects are even fainter. Bright lights burn where two humans watch from nearby. I trace the wind as it wends between them all, curling around the gentle eddies of aura put out by my own soul.

I know without seeing that I’m approaching the edge of the marble slab as I end the seventeenth mantra, right where I began the first. Numb now to the sounds and distractions. Hands outstretched before me. Feeling the vitality of the summer world almost overflowing into reality. One guiding touch will caress it into existence. My mind echoes with the stillness. My old, comforting aura fades. Everything slows as a final breath empties my lungs. Time dilates, slows. A single drop of sweat beads on the tip of my nose.

And then, empty in mind, I coax the world into ignition.

I sweep my hand to the side, drawing out the vast sea of kinetic energy I can feel in the air and spooling it into reality. It manifests unwillingly at first. Like I’m ripping into a plastic bag. The first resistance fades to a jerking tear I can’t help but wince at. I weave the mistake into my martial tapestry and accelerate the flow anyways. Sweep harder. Curl my fingers further, blending the physical and mental foci into one as I retake the beginning stance of the first, most basic form every martial artist knows.

Shimmering energy burns along my arms in a wreathing trail. The heat is intense, nettling my skin until I’m panting just from seconds of exposure. I keep drawing out more energy in slow handfuls, fully opening the rift I’m making like it’s a floodgate at the bottom of a pool. Superheated wind distends my hair into a bloody comet. A subliminal shudder vibrates through the air. Then I dive in, shiver at the current that roars through my body, and slam a hand from open palm to closed fist, releasing a thunderclap of ki straight at the sky.

A surge of electrifying energy jolts through me like a lightning rod and lances toward heaven. Earth and sky connect in a needle of light for the briefest moment. A kinetic shockwave hammers over the sea of rice around me. Then the recoil slaps my eardrums like a thunderclap. The garden sucks in a breath around me as it recovers from the outblast of power, trees and bamboo bending into the low pressure. All the aura that wreathed me moments before completely vanishes as the tingling rush fades from my arms. Yet even as I stand there with a hand outstretched towards the sun, I feel the current sweeping back as strong as before around me, my own stamina completely untaxed.

My eyes crack open to a perfect blue sky and five splayed fingers. Miles overhead, a puncture wound punches through the only cloud for miles. While I watch the vapors dissipate, the ethereal, cyan ki wreathing my arms dies a quick death, evaporating into embers that the wind whisks away with the leaves. I try to catch one and restart the flow, but my concentration was blown away with the cloud. I can’t be mad.

Sound returns with an atmospheric pop while I scratch at the back of my neck. Distractions I only just blocked out rush back into my awareness like they never left. The birds, quiet. Insects scared into silence, though I can already hear them picking up again. Deeper in the garden, a hidden brook gurgles quietly. A single set of hands applaud my lightshow with sun-drunk lethargy over the brook’s liquid rumination.

I turn from the sun and shade my eyes against the glare, glancing back at the covered deck and half-finished estate bracketing two sides of the marble slab I stand on. The slab itself was a gift from Champion Fang to commemorate my entrance into the Section’s minor league. Everything around it, I made myself or with help. The house is a labor of love. Only in its infancy, it’s truer to the archaic roots of village architecture than most buildings closer to the sea, down to the paper walls and wooden foundations. Geometric shapes define its square rooms and tatami floors. There aren’t many yet of those yet- most of the estate is just its bones, not even covered by a proper roof- and Mori and I only finished the kitchen last month. But I can see already the shape it’ll take.

It’ll be perfect. Exactly how I dreamed it would be. An earthy, meandering collection of villas and gardens set amidst the rice fields, far on the outskirts of the Section’s villages. The kind of place I’ve always dreamed of living. And someday, maybe even raising a family.

Miles of raw agriculture surround us. My nearest neighbor is the Champion, though he’s minutes of flight away. Low, forested mountains corral the horizons, making a natural valley capped by the sea on one side and wide, empty prairies on the other. I can’t see the rest of the village from here, not even when I’m working on the roof. It’s remote for a reason. Privacy is a rare commodity at my stage of life, and it’ll grow even more scarce in the future. I savor the quiet days like these, when Mori and I can sneak away from the capital to work on our home in secret.

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My wife- still feels weird saying it, much less thinking it- whistles a lewd catcall from the porch, coaxing me towards the shade. I relent with a toss of my head. Brush my hands against my shorts and start to put my hair up before deciding against fighting the tangle. My steps slow as I pass a fledgling grove of bamboo, running my fingers along the stalks.

“That was it, right?” she calls, jerking a thumb at the growing hole in the clouds.

I’m surprised she can even see the sky through her shades. “Close enough,” I reply. My hand moves with an echo of my earlier practice, trying to draw on the ki of the natural world. For a moment, a swirling multitude of cyan droplets drift from the bamboo and coalesce into a shimmering, translucent sphere above my palm. Not unlike the orbs of water Mori can summon at will. Just way, way more explosive.

The sphere fizzles out and evaporates after only a second. Grunting, I palm off my JOY and fling it underhand at Mori, then join her on the steps of the porch. She catches it without looking. Salty wind blows through the unfinished kitchen behind us, freeing strands of straw from her oversized hat while she rolls the decades-old sphere in her hands.

“I’m getting closer every day,” I say. Throw a towel over my bare shoulders. “Always a little closer. It’s just… not there yet.” A disgruntled noise escapes me. “There’s so much ki in the air, it should be so easy to draw on it now that I know how. But every time I open my eyes, it slips away. I can find it as long as I block everything out, even if I can’t use it well. But I can’t fight if I’m blind and deaf. And the instant I try to open myself up again, I’m back to running on the old engine.” My own heart, and all the mortal limits that come with it. Limits that even Ajax could recognize.

Over a decade of fighting, I’ve made the best I can of my body’s natural tolerance for ki. Some people have the kind of boundless hearts that can generate and exude incredible torrents of energy. Others are attuned to the flow of it and can control it with incredible precision, or are more resilient to the burning stress of letting that energy flow from within to without. Rare are the warriors who can do all three. And I’m not rare. Just determined.

Make all the ki I want, there’s no surpassing the simple fact that my body can’t handle more than a low level flow- unless the energy I draw on doesn’t come from within at all. The old man’s been teaching me to open my awareness to the potential there, but it’s like learning how to swim in an invisible ocean. You might be able to feel the water, sure. Good luck holding onto it for long.

A fingertip of basic white aura ignites over my palm, then whirls through a quick figure-eight before I curl my hand closed. Mori and I look out on the garden together. Like the house, it’s a work in progress. Walls half-finished, rocks freshly scrubbed of their moss. In the center of the greenery, where the hidden brook ends in a pool disguised as a koi pond, a blooming Lungracian apple tree marks my sister’s favorite place to read when she visits. Pink and golden leaves from its silver branches scatter the marble under my toes.

Mori picks at her nails. “You’ve only been training on it since the minor league, babe. And you’ve been using normal ki your whole life.” She settles back in her chair, and as she does, I catch a glimpse of the little red-haired bundle that’s been sleeping against her stomach this whole time. “No one learned how to quickscope in a day. You’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

“Fang says it’s all about finding inner peace.”

“He also says a lot of other mystical bullshit. Like Jolie and her canola plants.”

I snort out a laugh. “Don’t let her hear you. Both of you are on thin ice after that fight at Cayman’s.”

“The old man was asking for it after he cheated at arm wrestling,” Mori chuckles, wagging her revolver defensively. “I was just giving him a little comeuppance. Keeping him on his toes. Gods know he wouldn’t even think about the Vents otherwise…”

I don’t even hear her voice trail off. She’s still talking, grumbling about something else the two of them managed to find time to argue about. My attention has fallen entirely on the child she’s somehow managing to avoid dropping. He’s surprisingly big for not even being fully grown. Not much time left in his months-long gestation cycle, according to the growth pod cooling in the shade behind Mori. She’s made a regular habit of taking him out of the pod to soak up the sun. Says it’s good for his skin. I know she just wants better for our son than she had. No child of the Vents sees sunlight until they’re old enough to sneak up to the overcity themselves. Some never make it that long.

Mori’s playful voice darts into my awareness after a particularly long lull in her rambling. She tosses an amused grin my way when I look up, having noticed my staring long ago. “Take him,” she says.

Her grin slims into a catlike smirk at how delicately I do it. My hands are tools of battle, refined for martial purpose. Made to break things, not build them, as the house around us has shown so many times already. They were never meant to hold something so soft and vulnerable.

My heart is another story entirely.

“Kids don’t break that easy, Mars.”

“I’m just being careful.”

I can’t hide the proud flush that colors my cheeks as I shift the sleeping toddler to my lap. He’s heavier than he looks. Big head for such a little guy. Hair a fiery mix of Mori and I’s colors, though the length and flair are mine in miniature. He’s got her small nose. A sleepy frown I’ve seen on Jolie too many times to count. Not the happiest looking baby, I’ll admit. But scrappy. And cute. Very cute, as his still-unconscious mind registers the heat of my shirtless chest and nestles closer still.

Mori curls a hand under her chin while she watches. She reaches out with a finger and brushes an errant petal of hair away from the baby’s eyes. “Look at that. You two match.”

“I should hope so. You thought any more about a name?”

“‘Mars 2’ is leading the pack.”

“…Give me my JOY back.”

“Ha-ha. Wait, hey! No, don’t grab it! Sit down. Why do you want it?”

“I’m going to look up where I can get a divorce. We’re through.”

“Come on, you’re telling me you don’t think it would be funny? Because it totally would.”

“We’re not starting a dynasty, Emmy.”

“Maybe you aren’t,” she huffs, crossing her arms defensively. “I have a fashion line with my own face on it. My ego knows no bounds.” Her bare foot pushes the baby against my chest as she lifts my JOY out of reach. “No no, you get to keep that kid. I’ll take the next one. And it’s going to be a girl. Mori 2.”

“You’re terrible.”

“You married me, flyboy.”

“Mhm?”

A chortling scoff snorts its way out of Mori’s nose. “We’re using that tone of voice now? When the bedroom doesn’t even have a roof yet.” One of her eyebrows arches suggestively. “I always knew you were a rebel.”

She groans loudly when my JOY starts rumbling in her hand. Then her eyebrows knit together in confusion. She glances down to her hip.

“Both…?” Sunlight catches on her own JOY’s shell as she draws it out. It’s rumbling too. Her voice sinks to a growl. “I told your sister not to call us on vacation…”

“She’s not the only one with our numbers,” I say, stealing the sphere back when Mori absentmindedly holds it out to me. A projected screen flares to life and blankets us with virtual light as I answer the rumbling.

“Jojo’s the only one with the balls to call both of us at the same time.”

“Mori, quiet.”

“I’m just saying, girl could use a little-”

“Mori!” I snap. She hears the urgency in my voice and glances over on instinct. “It’s not her.”

Just as confused as my wife, I rotate the projection for her to see, still trying to process the incoming message for myself.

“It’s… from the Creators.”