B2 Ch. 10 Heart Power

Ichiro left those words hanging in the air as he walked smoothly to a nearby bolder.  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 onyx metal, Ichiro’s blade shone with a silvery light, visible 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, 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 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 Tichi, 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 in Tilly’s consciousness were impressed with the concept of sharpness.

Amazingly, the swing actually 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 through 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 about all this, but that was insane!”

“Mr. Tillman, please…”  Ichiro responded lifting a hand and motioning in the international, ‘calm down’ motion.

“Intent, partnered with a deep understanding of a concept can produce incredible power, but none of it is possible without diligent training of Will. May we begin?”  He asked, his voice calm as ever as if he was wrangling a rowdy class of first graders.

Tilly beat back images of the lamest kid from Captain Planet walking around like he had just hit the gym with the ability to punch boulders in half.

“Yeah… absolutely, where do we start?”  he answered distractedly.

Ichiro nodded, his voice growing serious,

“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 layers.  Eventually, I did not need to 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 naval, 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.  There was magic 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.

“This will more than work!  The flame you hold before you is more Concept than Mana, and it is already linked to your Intent.  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 trialed off, awe suffusing his voice as he struggled to find words for the implications of such a feat.

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 road 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 running 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, will 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… and exhale, feed the flame.”

As he spoke, Tilly let himself be carried along with the almost droning instruction 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.  Like blowing on embers at the bottom of a pile of leaves in a campfire until a new flame sprang up to consume the dry material all around it, releasing the dead matter from its prison 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 more steady.

The noise of the forest faded away, as his whole sensory world became the sound of Ichiro and his breathing and the feeling of the small flame growing minutely hotter and larger with every cycle of breath. 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.  This internal tension imparted a slight 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.

What if he failed 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 lock 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.

He never froze in the face of danger.

But he was frozen now.  Trapped in a cycle of his own making, emotions finally 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, and the darkness all around him that seemed endless and close at the same time acted 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 out all other thoughts or feelings. The dread of possibly failing others who depended on him.  The panic he had all but forgotten of being someone's last chance.  He gave the faceless crowd staring in on him in hope specific identity.  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…

The thought of failing them still filled him with panic, but to give up 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 were not burdens… they were his strength.

He was their Champion.

This 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.

But somewhere along the way, that had gotten lost.  It was a horrible thing to hold someone's life in your hands, but Tilly was beginning to believe, not just in himself, but the one who had chosen him…

The flame was roaring now, not consuming the emotion, but integrating it.

“Jonathan” A steady strained voice interrupted.

Tilly’s eyes flickered open, as 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.

Tilly’s eyes flickered to his notification log which was blinking with a new alert.