Ichiro left those words hanging in the air as he walked smoothly to a nearby boulder. Tilly leaned forward, unable to keep himself from being drawn in by whatever Ichiro was about to demonstrate.
The lapin samurai smoothly drew his sword, his face taking on an almost reverent expression. Tilly realized he had never seen the blade before and noted that where Hiro’s blade was made of an onyx metal, Ichiro’s blade shone with a silvery light, visible even under the bright sun.
Ichiro extended his sword arm, and tapped the edge of the blade against the stone, producing a predictable clang.
“What you are about to see is not due to a high strength stat, or an empowering Ability. It is the power of my heart alone that I will demonstrate to you. Attend!” He shouted, breaking the soft explanatory tone of his speech and drawing back his sword. The motion was slow, almost glacial, and Tilly found his eyes focusing on the blade as the Samurai drew it back.
It suddenly felt… weighty.
Ichiro drew the blade back until it was pointed completely away from the boulder. He slowly bent both legs crouching slightly as his eyes hardened. Then moving even slower he swung the blade forward from his crouched position. His back foot pivoted and his legs pushed up from the ground perfectly in sync with the diagonal strike. The strike played out slowly, arduously over long moments pregnant with some unknown promise.
It almost reminded Tilly of Tai Chi, except for the terrible inevitability beginning to radiate from the strike. Halfway through the swing, something flashed on the edge of the blade, and the deeper places of Tilly’s consciousness were impressed with the concept of sharpness.
Amazingly, the swing slowed down even further as the sword gathered more of whatever it was building. Tilly could see veins standing out on Ichiro’s neck as his look of concentration doubled down into the gritted snarl of extreme effort.
The moment before the blade touched the boulder, it parted. It was almost like the boulder had lost some unseen contest and gave way before the blade even arrived, consigning its defeat. Ichiro’s swing sped up and he followed through smoothly, before re-sheathing the blade in a flash, his eyes closed and his expression returned to complete serenity.
Tilly watched in amazement as a third of the boulder slid off at an angle, crashing to the ground with a rumbling crack. Then, twenty feet away at the treeline beyond the boulder, the sound of snapping limbs popped off like gunshots as several enormous trees toppled, shaking the ground with their impact.
Ichiro calmly turned and walked back to his place in front of Tilly settling back down on his knees with the sword resheathed and laid across his knees. Tilly felt almost like he had swallowed a frog.
He had seen magic plenty of times at this point, but this was something more… this felt like authority.
“Well then, shall we begin?” the lapin asked calmly, his eyes still closed.
The shock seizing his thoughts finally cleared and Tilly exploded,
“HOLY SHIT, ICHIRO!” Before clearing his throat in embarrassment at his exclamation,
“Ahem… I mean, if I’m being honest, after the ‘power of my heart’ line I wasn’t so sure about all this, but that was insane!”
“Mr. Tillman, please…” Ichiro responded lifting a hand and motioning in the international, ‘calm down’ motion.
“Will, partnered with a deep understanding of a concept can produce incredible power, but none of it is possible without the diligent training of meditation. May we begin?” He asked, his voice taking on the icy calm of a teacher wrangling a class of first graders.
“Yeah… absolutely, where do we start?” Tilly answered pulling his eyes away from the tall angled tree stumps.
Ichiro nodded and shifted into a lecturing tone,
“When I first started, I sat with my blade drawn for hours moving through the surface of my soul with the intention to navigate deeper by cutting through the barriers separating my actions, will, and emotion. Eventually, I did not need the blade anymore as the concept began to imprint itself on my being. This became my concept, my focus. You must start with a focus, something that you can pour yourself into endlessly that resonates with your whole being.” As he delivered the information his speech took on a strange cadence, one frequently interrupted by inhales and exhales that remained consistently rhythmic. Tilly found himself matching the breathing rhythm without consciously choosing to do so as he processed what Ichiro had said.
“I guess for me, Inhale, a flame makes the most sense, exhale,” Tilly responded, attempting to keep the rhythm even as he spoke. It was awkward, but Ichiro nodded in encouragement at his attempts.
“Good, can you call forth a flame in a position that you easily see?” Ichiro responded, smoothly fitting in his words between breaths so that his rhythm was hardly interrupted.
Tilly thought for a moment… he could enflame anything touching his body, but he didn't want to look down at his hands for however long this would take. He wondered just what it would take to keep a flame going away from his body.
In curiosity, he lifted his hand to his navel, feeling the heat there, and the flame he had started visualizing within his center. He closed his eyes and leaned into the image, doing his best to maintain his breathing. Magical crap was happening all around him, why couldn’t there be an actual flame burning in the midst of his organs?
Before he could think about what he was doing, he made a pulling motion with his hand and he felt a piece of the flame come free from his center. He opened his eyes in amazement and found a tiny, pure white flame dancing above his palm.
Carefully, as if it would go out at any stray movement. He lifted his hand until it was a foot in front of his chest and then fixed that position in his mind, focusing on that point as the place he wanted the flame to keep burning.
Amazingly the flickering flame stayed in place as he slowly removed his hand, not wanting to disturb whatever was happening. Once it was firmly in place, Tilly tore his eyes away from the flame to find the normally placid lapin with his mouth hanging open. As he caught Tilly’s eyes, his features sharpened to an almost vulpine satisfaction.
“Will this work as a focus?” Tilly asked quietly, not sure what would or wouldn’t break his connection with the little piece of his core fire floating in front of him.
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“This will more than work! The flame you hold before you is more concept than Mana, and it is already linked to your Will. After hearing more of your class and how you grew, I suspected you had already been harnessing this to some extent, but for you to produce something like this with no meditation skill yet activated… ” He trailed off, a smugness suffusing his voice as his chosen path for Tilly was confirmed almost immediately.
Those eyes and the expectations they had to represent hit Tilly in the abdomen like a brick. What was he doing that was so special?
Could he keep doing it?
What if he lost it?
The flame snuffed out before their eyes, and he fought back a sudden surge of panic. As the flame snuffed out, a shiver wracked his body, and some sort of feedback hit his center, wracking his body with pain.
“Shit, sorry Ichiro!” Tilly growled out in frustration, bending over his middle.
“Peace Mr. Tillman…” Ichiro replied, his face schooling itself to its normal calm. He began to inhale and exhale loudly while giving Tilly a meaningful look, and Tilly responded, doing his best to imitate. Pushing back against the pain, he straightened his back and shoulders until he was sitting upright, and rode out the rest of the pain one intentional breath at a time.
“This is my fault…in my excitement, I departed from the breathing and threw off your inner balance. You are farther along than I could have imagined, and as such it is even more important that you train this aspect of your path of ascension. But without learning to walk, every step at a run is an invitation to calamity.”
Tilly nodded and did his best to keep up the breathing cadence: deep inhale, hold, full exhale, hold, repeat.
“In time, we will bring back the flame, but for now, I want you to close your eyes and visualize it in the same place it was.” Ichiro invited softly, keeping the rhythm of his words between his breaths. Tilly closed his eyes obediently, trying to relax into the motions of his body pulling in and pushing out the environment around him.
“Good, now I want you to understand, that everything that you are, your mind, desire, and emotions can be fuel for your Will. So with each exhale, I want you to picture your flame gradually growing stronger. Thoughts and feelings will come, let them. Experience them, accept them, and in so doing, add them to the flame, where they will not be destroyed, but integrated with your whole self. Breath in… hold… exhale, and feed the flame.”
As he spoke, Tilly let himself be carried along with the droning monotone of the lapin’s voice, picturing the flame exactly as it had been. He took time to think about what Ichiro had said and connected his exhales with the oxygen any fire needed to continue combustion. He treated every exhale like he was blowing on embers at the bottom of a pile of leaves until a new flame sprang up to consume the dry material. As he watched his breaths slowly impact his visualized flame, he realized that each dead leaf was energy trapped in a prison of expended purpose. Then the flame would come, releasing the dead matter from its locked form and giving it new life as light and heat.
With every inhale, the flame would flicker as if disturbed by the passage of air, but as he exhaled, the fire would grow slightly more intense taking in the conceptual fuel and becoming hotter and more intense.
The noise of the forest faded away, as his whole sensory world became the sound of Ichiro and his breathing. The small flame slowly grew larger, every cycle of breathing feeding it as he slowly unlocked the doors of his heart. As the process grew easier, Tilly became aware of the tightness in his chest once again. This time, instead of trying to ignore it, he breathed through it, like you would a cramp in a run. He strained the auxiliary breathing muscles between his ribs against the tightness as it attempted once again to constrict his desire to succeed with the fear of failure. This internal tension imparted a feeling of claustrophobia, which in turn called to mind his inability to escape his present circumstances. The hopeful faces of everyone in the refugee camp came back to him, crowding in on the darkness of his contemplation.
His breathing hitched, and the flame flickered suddenly unstable.
He forced himself to stay in rhythm with Ichiro and instead of moving away from the feeling he dived deeper into it. Following the flow of his emotions, allowing them to intensify with every breath.
'So many people were depending on him.
but he was just a grunt who broke everything he touched...
What if he failed all over again?'
The thoughts rolled through him, accompanied by increasingly strong emotions. Dread and even animal-like panic came to the surface as he searched out his feelings on the new role he held amongst the people of the Alliance. His side squirmed in delight at the delicious brew now steeping in his mind. His chest tightened further, and it felt like he was breathing through a straw as he fought against the need to increase the pace of his breathing.
In the past, seeing something like this hidden in his psyche would have caused him to slam the door on this trail of emotions and seal it with as much apathy as possible. This was the kind of stuff that caused you to hesitate… to doubt. Something that he could not afford to do in the kinds of situations he had faced on a daily basis.
'He never froze in a burning building...
But he was completely stuck now.
Trapped in a cycle of his own making, the emotions he had finally let free were wrapping him in knots of panic and doubt. He wanted to stop, he needed to get more air than these slow breaths would allow. Yet the sound of Ichiros's breath echoing his own. It imparted a feeling of vastness to the darkness behind his closed eyes. The space his flame floated in seemed incomprehensibly large, and yet at the same time intimate. The darkness covered him, hiding him and acting like a balm against his panic.
He wasn’t ok… But he was safe. It was time to stop running from this part of himself.
He opened himself further to the feelings that had lurked in the deep places of his mind for decades. They rushed into him, choking his internal environment. The dread of failing others who depended on him.
His failure pushing the people around him away.
The panic of being someone's last chance.
The expectation of the crowd once again surrounded him, watching him with misplaced hope, asking him to do something that he couldn't... He scrutinized those faces, looking until they shifted from vague, conceptual entities, to real people. They were the children from Amelia’s shop, the old couple that had slipped him an apple. One by one the faces became real, and that changed something…
It changed everything.
The thought of failing them still filled him with panic, but to give up on them before trying was far more terrifying.
The flickering flame steadied, tripling in size on his next exhale as he let go of outcomes and leaned into what he was.
Their hopes and expectations no longer threatened to crush him… they became his strength.
He was their Champion.
Truth crashed into him as some deep part of him identified with the role that he had thought an arbitrary title by the System. He had always wanted to be a hero, it is what had compelled him to join the Fire department out of high school. They were the only figures he could think of that had existed on the edges of his shattered life as beacons of consistent good.
But somewhere along the way, he had lost that. The toll of the job, shift after exhausting shift as life shoveled more and more shit onto him... It was a horrible responsibility to hold someone's life in your hands, and under that weight, his cracked foundations had slowly crumbled until he had become a bitter shadow of himself.
But Tilly was beginning to believe again, not just in himself, but the one who had chosen him…
The flame was roaring now, not consuming, but integrating his whole being into a state of purpose-filled oneness.
“Jonathan.” A steady strained voice interrupted.
Tilly’s eyes flickered open, and the flame winked out of existence. He looked around in sudden confusion to find the sun setting and Ichiro now sitting ten feet away, with sweat dripping down his face. This did nothing to dampen the fierce smile playing out over his features. A ring of scorched earth surrounded him and Tilly’s eyes jumped to his notification log which was blinking with a new alert.