No quotes today. Let’s go for a walk.
I want you to live through me, just for a minute. Waking up not to an alarm, but circadian paranoia. Bleary-eyed, pawing away the sleepies, scratching them from the corner of my eyes as I gently close the door behind me. Rough up my hair into its usual shape. Blue light in my face as I power on my JOY and my classes. A surge of sharpening hits my brain. Fresh, clarifying energy. Enough to remind me to double back and grab an acidproof windbreaker before I head out.
Down the creaky wooden steps from the loft down to the shooting range I’m holed up in with Cal, every step on my toes so the boards don’t creak. My left hand, real hand, calloused fingers padding down the rough concrete wall. Down in the range, it’s quiet. One light on. Bench by the door where I left my shoes. That rough feeling as I fight with the tongue and shove my foot in, it’s the same thing every time. One click seals the battered sneakers tight to my feet. All this focus on the external, it’s for a reason that you’ll soon understand. A distraction from the maelstrom inside my chest.
You’d think a ki fighter would boot up their class and start glowing like an angel, fired up like a literal ray of sunshine. They’d feel the pulse of their heart and will it to increase until it physically drove their steps. Like that surge I felt before but exponentially stronger, so much overflowing energy that they couldn’t and wouldn’t keep bottling it up inside their body, instead letting it surge through their pores and into the world beyond. Bathing the souls around them in the song of their heart. And you would be right to think that. Most ki fighters do.
My song is one that not even I can bear. Not anymore, at least.
So I distract myself from it; that dark ichor pulsing through my veins. The serrated edge of every heartbeat. The ache of my own power trying to find a single crack to escape through. I focus on my hands, just like my father taught me. And I breathe.
In, out.
The door is creaky, battered metal. The chain for the shutters is oily inside my palm, greased with smog from the undercity air.
In, out.
While the chain works, my mind roams; my sixth sense for life energy pushing out into the world beyond the range. The shutters clack loudly as they finish rolling. I twist the doorknob, have to stop to unlock it, twist again, and I’m outside. Standing in the shadows of an apartment complex, lost within the upside-down undercity of the capital, slapped in the face with a lungful of muggy, oily air. Concrete rough and firm against my sneakers. Pull out a filter mask, secure the clasps, let it seal tight around the lower half of my face. Sag against the brick wall and threaten to slump down because I’m so tired, so goddamn tired, I was out street fighting at gyms and fight clubs for the entire day yesterday and the week before that and I can’t hardly sleep anymore and it’s too much sometimes, too much for one person to carry it all, but someone has to and no one’s going to do it for me, even if my chest hurts so bad and my heart is doing its damndest to kill me with the ki it makes because it’s hurt too, jagged and bitter and weeping still from the things I’m fleeing, and these streets hold no comfort for me. This is not home. This is not the rice fields, the seaside wind, the noonday sun on an empty asphalt road. This is the Vents. The concrete. The neon. The smog. The shadow of an alley in a slum that’s never seen the sun. Reality.
There’s a reason I’m having you soak in every detail. Being a ki fighter means being tuned to the energy of living things; their hearts and the auras they exude. It’s not all flashy blasts and flying like a comet.
Ki emanates from all things that live, from the faintest plants to the brightest humans. Light is usually the best metaphor for describing how things feel in your kinetic sense. The stronger a creature’s heart, the more vibrant light it puts out. Plants exude the kind of light that you wouldn’t even normally notice with your eyes, like the gleam of reflection on a can of caf. Fighters who have trained their heart from their earliest years are like walking stars, emanating so much passive aura that it prickles your skin and raises every hair on your body.
If you don’t have the class, a normal human can only feel the smallest amounts of the aura, and it’s something that you might not even recognize. Ever gone in a room where someone’s sick? Or taken an exam where everyone around you is doing bad? At the most basic level, aura is just an amplification of emotions. Ki fighters can escalate that amplification so far that it manifests physically. But if enough people manifest enough of the same emotion in the same space, or someone with a high natural talent in amplification feels a really strong emotion all at once, that aura can get so strong that even non-ki fighters can sense it. Like how anyone who comes down to the Vents immediately knows that it’s not a good place.
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Picture that, but you can feel it to an unimaginably amplified degree. A world polluted with suspicion and worry and exhaustion, a downcast and defeated miasma that pours against your sense for life energy like a dam broken. Hopelessness. Desperation. Misery. The crushing, invisible lament of a forgotten people.
It’s not an easy place to live in. Especially for someone like me, who grew up on a farm near the sea with my closest neighbor about five miles away. It’s crowded, always hammering at my skull through my kinetic sense. Shutting myself off from it and completely drawing myself inwards helps, but it also blinds me to my own ki.
Ki itself is a form of raw, malleable energy that follows a short life cycle. When your heart starts amping up, ki begins to generate and swirl out into the rest of your body until you’ve hit your saturation point. Once that happens, the excess ki begins leaking out of your pores and into the air around you, forming a loose aura whose size scales with your passive output- the amount of energy your heart produces without actively forcing it. It’s like your normal walking speed that you adopt without thinking. Ki fizzles out pretty fast once it leaves your body, so it takes a logarithmically increasing amount of output to keep growing your aura. People who pick up the class for flying home from school might make enough to find their way around the apartment without turning on a light, while a pro fighter will be maintaining a twenty-foot pillar of venting energy for the entirety of an eight-minute regulation fight.
Like most energies given by JOYs, your capacity for creating ki follows the normal rules of cardio and musculature. Repeated stress and strain helps build your endurance, and when you push your heart to really amp up ki production, it starts tiring you out like a run. Once you’ve got an aura forming around you, just like an Elemental, you’ll grasp that energy with a trained will and transform it into a specific purpose.
As raw energy, ki isn’t inherently easy to shape, nor can it do things as creatively as a Magus’ mana or an Elemental’s chosen element. It makes up for that in blunt-force power. Small surges of ki along your limbs can help you burst forward in quick movement, leap far distances, or reinforce a limb for striking and blocking. Concentrating on your aura itself can let you tighten it into an almost solid barrier for defense, and it can also help you develop reaction instincts for incoming attacks before they even hit you, sensing them as they pass through your aura. When it comes to transforming the aura into more explosive uses, there’s no more iconic ones than ki blasts and flying. Flight alone is the major draw most casual JOY users even grab the class- it’s got easy flight and some small starter perks, and isn’t as clumsy as wings from the Modd or Mytho classes. Beyond that, it’s flexibility is limited only by your ability to generate and concentrate.
On paper, it’s the least demanding, most universally applicable Shaper class; the sledgehammer to the Elemental’s ice pick. Growth in the class is easy and instinctual- literally just physical training, which any serious fighter already puts several hours a day into. It’s highly popular because of that simplicity, and it’s also got a pretty high power cap to boot. Not to mention that my Section has a history of Champions who are high-profile ki fighters, like Champion Fang. Historical precedent, ease of use, flashy and fun… it’s not hard to see why it’s so commonly adopted, even if those adoptees aren’t pushing the class to its limits. In the overcity, at least. In the Vents, I don’t think I’ve sensed a little other ki fighter. No one would willingly pick a class that has them soaking in depression like the kind they brew down here.
It’s said that the more powerful a ki fighter becomes, the less they are physical creatures as they are spiritual. Food isn’t so necessary, as we sustain ourselves more on the spiritual energy of the world. Injuries, too, are more a reflection of a heart’s will being battered down than an actual physical detriment. Used to be that I’d be walking off even grievous injuries within a couple of days. These days, I’m not so lucky. Ki being a manifestation of one’s heart is what gives it its color and feel, but that manifestation can just as easily be a double-edged blade, especially in a case like mine.
My heart has the triplet problem of extreme natural aptitude, ridiculous amounts of training, and overwhelming sorrow. The energy it produces is as polluted as the smog of the Vents, like ethereal black smoke that even now leaks out of my heart, trickling from a cut in my shirt. All it has for fuel is illness. Dark thoughts the same color as the smoke. I can barely even draw on my ki, and when I do, it cuts like claws on the way out. Nearly unusable even when I fight through the pain. Wasn’t always that way, of course. Back in the day it was straight gold. Dad’s was white. Champion Fang’s was jade green. When Thane used it, his was cyan blue, the same color as a JOY screen.
I’m a two-classer, so ki has always been my weapon, and martial arts the way of delivering it. Big surprise, right? Tetsuka Taylor Mons, daughter of the most famous warrior in the land, a two-classer. Took me far too long to understand that I’m too instinctual to be concentrating on three classes at once. Instead, I’ve made these mine. My ki used to be on a caliber that outshone even my father like a candle to the sun. Now, though… it’s just the embers.
Deep down, I know exactly what I need to do to bring it back. I need something new to fight for; something to replace the pain with a better fuel to draw on. Hate and anger is anathema to my heart’s nature. Yet it’s all that I have left.
Hasn’t worked out that well, clearly. Fighting the current of my heart just put me here: hiding in the Vents like a rat, flopped out on a gravel rooftop tossing my JOY like a ball, staring at the blank black sky of the next layer up while oil droplets splatter off my head. But it’s so goddamn hard to let go of that anger, especially when it’s the only thing that dragged me back to my feet on all those mornings of empty stomachs and sleeping in ditches since Thane’s betrayal.
Three years I’ve spent obsessing how I’m going to pay him back for everything he’s taken from me. Hard to let go of something like that, even if I know I need to.
Nights like these make me miss the stars.