12 The Legacy

It's been a year since I broke my leg and Jessica left, my leg healed up quickly and I began my training under the headmaster right after. We started from the bare basics of ki and slowly worked up our foundation for 3 months before beginning to spar again. Nico also unlocked his ki, and joined our classes, but only the theoretical ones. He truly did not want to learn how to fight, but rather wanted to invent as much as he could using his ki.

Speaking of ki, during this past year, the headmaster has been teaching us the basics of how to control our own ki. She taught us various exercises about how to control ki, the most notable one being the ki strings that were mentioned in the novel. I already had a lot of applications for how to use these in a fight and had practiced various scenarios. If someone were chasing me, I now had a reliable way to trip them.

My ki pool had grown to ten times it's previous size, the strain I placed on it helping it's exponential growth. With my newfound ki control, this meant that I could effectively use about twenty times more of my ki than a year ago. Alongside this improvement, Grey and I began training in specific elements, with Grey being talented in everything, but was more talented water and fire. In contrast, I only had talent in one element, Water, but I had talent that the headmaster referred to as 'never seen before'. I was quite proud of that statement, was this because of the colour of my soul being a deep blue? That's a thought for another day. Regardless, we had never been given the chance to even touch a weapon, using solely martial arts in our spars.

My mind palace has continued developing at a similar rate compared to before, and my combat meditation has effectively reached its limit. I don't believe I will be done with my mind palace for many years so I'm planning on simply slowly developing it in the background over time. Another thing that has only been slowly developing over time is my sensing of ki, I've hit a roadblock. I can sense every speck of ki in my body and have nowhere to improve, so I've been trying to sense ki outside of my body, but have made little progress.

Now, I found myself in a situation where I needed to use all my skills in order to keep myself from being knocked out. I was sparring against the one and only combat genius, Grey, with the headmaster supervising us. She gave us the go ahead and I immediately entered a state of focus using combat meditation.

Grey launched himself at me swiftly and threw a fire ki empowered jab at my face, hoping he could finish me quick. Unfortunately, I guessed that he would try to end this quickly and had improved the speed that I processed information, using a burst of ki to my mindscape. I channeled water ki through my body and dodged leaving a minimal space between me and Grey's fist before front kicking into Grey's chin. He retracted his arm and slipped closer to me, dodging in the process. I knew he would do this, so I pumped my ki through my leg and quickly aimed my heel at the back of his head.

Without looking, Grey nonchalantly ducked under my foot, causing me to lose balance. Noticing my dilemma, I pumped my ki to my brain and prepared to defend from his next attack. Grey quickly took advantage of my off balance state and grabbed my shoulders. He swept his leg behind my knee and tried to trip me but I quickly escaped his hold with a ki empowered push and backed off.

Grey should be low on ki, I just need to outlast him now, and then I win. Grey ran at me and repeated his previous tactic, I knew he had a trick up his sleeve so I once again sped up my brain and paid attention to my surroundings. He threw a punch using fire ki yet again, I stepped back to dodge and was left surprised when his fist smoothly swerved towards me and caught me off guard. WATER KI!

I quickly empowered my body with my own water ki and smoothly slipped out of the way, backing away in the process. Before I knew it, I found myself falling backwards and felt string at the back of my ankles. He caught me, I reached my hands out to the floor in order to prevent the rest of my body from hitting the floor and succumbed to my mistake. I tried jumping but my legs had been put into a weak position and I couldn't put strength into them fast enough. I saw Grey rushing at me with a fire ki enhanced punch and heard the headmaster yell "Grey wins!"

I landed flat on my butt and sighed. This was quite the sad occasion, I thought I had that one in the bag. Grey must have set up ki strings to trip me at some point in the fight and then backed me into them with that water ki enhanced attack. My false sense of security at the end of that fight led to my loss.

I looked over at Grey, who seemed exhausted and out of ki, and said "I suppose you're winning now, our sparring record is 131 wins for you and 130 wins for me. I'm going to go eat some lunch."

I stood up and walked off to eat, Grey trudging along behind me, clearly too tired from our spar to talk. I was still full of energy that I didn't have the chance to use, leaving me very frustrated. I chomped down my food and went to find the headmaster, I wanted to spar with her to use up all my ki. Grey was too tired to spar again.

I walked over to her office and knocked. I had made a habit of just waltzing in and not waiting for a reply, so I did just that. When I entered, I saw one more person than I anticipated, a person with earthy brown hair and clear blue eyes that looked coldly in my direction.

It was the legacy, Cecilia.