Urehara-sensei leaves my room, and I return to meditating. There will be time enough to pursue matters, once I am free of the hospital.
*** Central California - Earth ***
September 12, 2077
Even though hospital regulations should stipulate that I be wheeled out in a wheelchair, no one even offers, let alone demands, that I be taken to the lobby in one. Most of the hospital staff on my floor ignored my presence or glared at me.
The only member of the hospital staff that shows to see me off is John. I feel his presence behind me, while signing the release paperwork, but I do not do anything to show it. As I turn around, he is staring at me with a faint smile and slightly squinting eyes.
“Congratulations on your release, Mark.”
“You make is sound like I'm being released from prison.” My tone is flat and emotionless, the way I always try to keep it.
John glances around uneasily. “Hospital policies and jurisdictions are for the benefit of the American citizens. Haven't you ever read the Extended Healthcare Acts of 2023 and 2051?”
“Of course, they are.”
He chuckles, while looking relieved. “Honestly though, I've never seen anyone complete a rehabilitation program as quickly as you. It's amazing considering how your body rejects medical treatments.”
“I just wanted to move on with my life, as quickly as possible.”
“I know you were a Taereun player. If you keep on playing, look me up in the game. My character is a human archer, named Sigurd.”
I shake my head. “I don't think I'll go back to playing that game, but if I do, I'll see if I can find you.”
John holds out his hand. A bit surprised, I shake hands with him.
“Good luck, Mark.” His parting words come from behind me, as I walk through the hospital's automatic doors.
Preparations
*** Central California - Earth ***
September 15, 2077
Urehara-sensei's home is a compound, with a mansion for the main family and several buildings for the staff hidden by the landscape. The front gates are made of wrought iron, and a concrete guardhouse is in the middle between the entry and exit lanes. Sensors installed in the guardhouse can detect virtually every type of known weapon and explosive, but they serve no real purpose, since the only firearms and explosives left in America are installed on government drones, military not police. One would almost think that Urehara-sensei's security was designed to protect him from the government itself.
As my taxi pulls up to the guardhouse, the guard's expressionless face, with his eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, stares at me. I do not know his name, but I have seen his face hundreds of times. He looks down at a monitor screen out of my line of sight before addressing me.
“Mr. McGuinness, Mr. Urehara left instructions to direct you to go straight to the dojo, when you arrive. You know the way of course?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I tap the final destination point into the automated taxi's navigation interface, and it proceeds under the control of its GPS, when the gate opens. The long driveway is lined with perfectly manicured hedge rows, that conceal more scanning equipment, as well as weapons. Even though there are no military weapons, the pneumatic rams and harpoon launchers are more than capable of stopping anything short of a military drone. The taxi turns onto a smaller side branch of the driveway, that circles around to one side of the mansion.
The dojo is on the east side of the main house, hidden by woods that have been allowed to run wild. It appears to be a mix of Northern European and Japanese construction, with dark stained beams that create an X within squares pattern on white stucco walls. The floor is raised off the ground on posts, and there is a crawlspace that extends under the entire area of the dojo.
A small gravel parking area in front of the dojo could squeeze in about thirty vehicles, though in a pinch more could be parked under the trees on the pine needle covered dirt. I cannot imagine that ever being needed, since I have never seen more than twenty-five or so cars in front of the dojo. The nature of Urehara-sensei's dojo makes it rare to have a large groups attend, and the few times it has happened, the guests usually piled into a small number of vehicles.
After paying the fare with my universal banking card, I exit the taxi and stand in front of the heavy wood doors. This building is almost a second home to me. Thousands of times over the years, I have stood in front of these same doors. Here is where I learned to hurt the people who attempted to bully me. Here is where I learned a martial art that was meant for fighting and killing, one that was never reduced to the level of a sport.
From inside the dojo, I feel Urehara-sensei's wild ki. If I was still the same person who I was before the Great Fuck Over, I would probably feel intimidated. Eleven years in a world where I was fighting for my life against people, monsters, and people who were worse than monsters inevitably changed me. Urehara-sensei's wild ki no longer holds any threat for me.
The doors open silently, and I step inside the entryway. The hardwood floor shines, and a shoji style wall blocks the direct line of site into the main floor of the dojo. Racks for shoes line both walls, and I put my sneakers on a rack.
The main floor of the dojo is two hundred feet long and one hundred twenty feet wide. It was built to allow large groups to train comfortably, but in the time I have been here, all the classes have been small groups. Martial arts are mostly illegal in the United States, and the few that are still legal have very small followings. More than half of Urehara-sensei's students were involved with the government, generally, in some form law or regulatory enforcement, or a part of the military.
Hanging on the walls, there are racks with hundreds of weapons, of a variety of styles. The majority are Japanese, but a surprising number of western and Chinese weapons are mixed in. Even though the Urehara Style is Japanese, Urehara-sensei taught his students how to use and counter a large variety of weapons.
Urehara-sensei is sitting in seiza, at the head of the dojo. His eyes are half-closed, but he is almost certainly aware of my presence. I sit, forcing my still stiff muscles into a full-lotus position and wait for him to acknowledge me. As I have been doing since the day Urehara-sensei came to the hospital, I circulate ki through my body. By doing it every second I was not sleeping, eating or in rehabilitation, I exponentially increased the amount of ki that my body can withstand, but I am still far short of the level I will need to be at to venture into the Battleground of the Damned.
After a short time has passed, I notice Urehara-sensei's attention solidly focused on me. His eyes are squinting, as though he is trying to focus on something he cannot really see. Curious, I project a ki based aura slightly outward from my body, and Urehara-sensei's face changes, revealing an expression between surprise and shock.
“Is there someplace we can talk, that the government's surveillance equipment will not be able to record us?”
Urehara-sensei smiles, a predator's smile. “Neither the Japanese nor the American government has the technology to spy in my estate. We can speak freely.”
“You have acquired the ability to see ki, Sensei.”
Urehara-sensei's expression turns slightly grim. “So that is what ki looks like. I have met many people who claimed to have mastered ki, but they were all charlatans. No matter the methods that I tried, I was never able to learn how to use it. How on Earth did you ever master ki?”
I cannot keep the bitter smile off my lips. “I know that it will sound completely insane, but it was not on Earth. Most if not all of the comatose gamers were living in the world of Taereun: Battleground of the Damned, in the bodies of our game characters.”
Urehara-sensei is silent for several minutes, while weighing me with his eyes. I can guess what he is thinking about: am I telling the truth? am I sane? Finally, he seems to come to a decision and nods at me.
“I don't think the game was ever really a game. The Battleground of the Damned exists and is part of something called the Lab
yrinth of Yggr. We were in another part of the Labyrinth, called the Lands of Despair. From things that I learned there, I think that we have always been taking over the real bodies of our characters, and their souls were probably destroyed the first time we connected to the game.”
I begin to tell Urehara-sensei the tale of my time in the Labyrinth of Yggr. Hours pass while I talk and he listens, day fades into night. I tell him enough to let him understand the reasoning behind my suspicions about the game, and why I think that the deaths of their original bodies does not mean that they died. I tell him about the general situation and politics of the former players. I tell him a lot, but I do not tell him all. There are too many things that are entirely too personal, they are none of his business.
“With the obsidian guardians destroyed, the players should have been able to reach Haven, but I do not know what the results were. Even though I was murdered in the Plains of Despair, Mei was still alive, when it happened.”
Urehara-sensei's eyes lose focus on me for the first time since I began my tale. I pause to let him adjust to the fact that his beloved daughter might still live, even if she is not in her own body. For as long as I have known them, Urehara-sensei has doted on Mei. He gave her everything she wanted and would never accept that she had done any wrong. If this man has any true weakness, it would be his excessive love for his little bitch of a daughter.
“Do you believe she is still alive?”
I shrug. “I have no clue, but she was still alive when I died. I'm going back there, to the Labyrinth of Yggr and to Taereun. I'm going to learn the truth about that fucking bastard that calls himself a god. I'm going to pay some people back for what they've done, both the bad and the good. I don't belong on Earth anymore. Maybe, I never have.”
“You are telling me all of this for a reason. What do you want?”
I look Urehara-sensei straight in the eye, without blinking. “I need to use the resources you control. Your zaibatsu is not a simple conglomerate. You have resources and ties to governments that will allow you to get information that I could never get myself. The game was never a real game, so there has to be a link between Earth and Taereun. I need to find where The Nameless, Inc. set up their magic technology and break in. There should be a way to physically travel between Earth and the Labyrinth of Yggr, and I think it will be in that location.”
Urehara-sensei just stares back at me for several long minutes. “I will help you, but there are two conditions. First, you will teach what you know about using ki. Second, we will both go to this Labyrinth of Yggr.”
After a few moments, I realize my mouth is hanging open and close it, with an audible clacking of teeth. “Sensei, do you understand that there might be no easy way back, maybe no way back at all?”
Urehara-sensei grins. “After you and Mei started to play Taereun: Battleground of the Damned, I too created a character in that game. I used it to test my martial arts in what I thought would be as close to a real battle as I would ever come. I never played games in my youth, and that world fascinates me. I do not intend to return. Nobuhiko has control of my companies. He will probably be even better at managing them than I have been. My wife died giving birth to Mei. If not for the patents and technology my companies control, you, I and all my other students would be jailed or executed because of the Urehara Style martial arts. The world today is not the same as the one I grew up in. I have nothing to tie me to it anymore.”
Death during childbirth is extremely uncommon in America or any other first world nation, but it still happens. Even with the level of modern medical technology, women will still sometimes die from the strain of giving birth or damage that cannot be treated, until the child is actually born.
I bow to Urehara-sensei. “I agree. Thank you, Sensei.”
Urehara-sensei's face turns grim, and he bows to me. “Please forgive me. You lost your family because of my pride and my bother's incompetence. The day of the accident, your father ended your family's vacation early, because of my demands that he correct problems caused by my brother's incompetent handling of labor negotiations. Your parents' deaths and your scars are because I refused to wait for your father's vacation to be over, before having him deal with the situation.”
I sit stunned for a few minutes, as memories of the the past flood my mind: the truck sliding down the mountain road; our car swerving to avoid it and crashing through the guardrail; the pain of being trapped in the wreck, while the flames slowly roasted the left side of my body; waking up in the hospital with scars and being told that there is nothing that can be done about them; the barely concealed disgust on my aunts face, every time she looked at me; being laughed at and reviled for my appearance; hurting the ones that mocked me in places where the social cameras could not monitor us; hating myself; hating the world; training with Urehara-sensei; being talked to and treated like a human being by Urehara-sensei, when no one else would.
I never blamed Urehara-sensei for the accident, but I had never known that he had anything do with our leaving the ski resort early. I am not sure what to think, but I do not want my relationship with Urehara-sensei to change.
“Urehara-sensei, please don't prostrate yourself to me. I never blamed you. The past is what it is, and if you feel that you are to blame, you have more than made amends with how you have treated me over the years.”
Urehara-sensei sits up again. “It needed to be said. For my own peace of mind, I had to tell you the truth.
“The past is the past. Now is what matters.”
Urehara-sensei nods, but there is still a shadow of loss and maybe shame on his face. “While we prepare to enter Taereun, you can stay at the main house or one of the guest houses, whichever you prefer. It will be easier to train and safer, if we both remain on the estate as much as possible. If anyone becomes aware of what we are doing, this could become very ugly, before we make our escape. The Japanese and American governments, any government and most corporations, would commit any crime necessary to obtain control of a technology that would allow them to travel directly to other worlds. We must be exceedingly careful.”
“Thank you, Sensei. I would prefer one of the guest houses.”
Urehara-sensei stands. “I will have Tanaka make the arrangements.”
*** Central California - Earth ***
October 28, 2077
Nine hundred ninety-eight.
Nine hundred ninety-nine.
One thousand.
I finish my last sit-up and relax my abdominal muscles, as I lay back on the ground. Rapidly straightening my arms, I hurl the rock that weighs more than I do into the air. The thump and vibrations of its impact behind my head are transmitted to my body, through the ground. Compared with the past, my rate of improvement is greatly accelerated. After pushing myself to the point of collapse, I can recover with a single night's rest.
In only a month and a half, I have progressed from performing my exercises with difficulty to performing them while carrying weights greater than my own body weight. The circulation of ki through my body has allowed me to develop stronger muscles than I had been able to in the past, even if I they are still only a shadow of my Half-Dvergar body's muscles. If my development continues at the rate, I will surpass the boundaries of anything that could be called human within another month or so.
I never understood how much ki could affect one's body, but there are so many things that I do not understand. Every day, I make new discoveries about what I can do with ki. I have no clue where the road I am walking will take me, but with every new discovery, I am more and more excited to find out.
Unconsciously using my ki, I rise to my feet, without using my arms to push myself off the ground. More and more I have been doing things like this over the past month. I no longer need to meditate and focus to keep the ki flowing though my body, it now moves naturally with the cycle of my breathing. Even though I no longer have to focus on ki to use it, the amount of ki I can channel is still pathetically weak compared what I could have u
sed as a Half-Dvergar.
The forms of Shadow Fist are easier to practice with the ki in my body, but they are still not complete. Until I can use the Od, I will never be able to fully use Shadow Fist.
To compensate, I have begun to practice with the Urehara Style and what I remember of the other fighting styles that Talon learned. Over the decades of his life, after learning Shadow Fist, Talon studied dozens of other fighting styles. He never used them, but he wanted to understand the differences between normal styles and Shadow Fist. That old monk Tae Sun changed Talon's very way of thinking, when he taught him Shadow Fist.
Talon's memories are still partially intact within my mind. I am certain I lost parts of them, when I died. There are gaps that I cannot fill in, events and knowledge that seem to be far larger than the parts that remain. Without an eidetic memory, it is natural to forget and lose parts of your memories over time, but the gaps are too pronounced within Talon's memories. It must have something to do with the nature of bodies, minds, and souls. The three can apparently be separated but are probably not entirely distinct and separate. When I was in Talon's body, I could not remember some things about my life that I was certain I should know, and a few things I know I could not remember, I once again remember. Parts of Talon's memories have become my own, attached to my mind and soul now, but others have been lost forever.
With the help of Urehara-sensei's maintenance man, I built several wooden men. Both Urehara-sensei and myself are hitting far too hard to use normal punching bags any longer. After rupturing the seams on several, we decided to use posts and wooden men for our training. It sounds like I am hitting the wood with a heavy hammer, as I begin my striking practice. The distinct sounds of my hands, feet, legs, and arms impacting the wood turns into a continuous sound that continues to drone on, when I push my speed to its current limit.
Path of Transcendence 1: Ultimatum of the Nameless God Page 8
