Ark 23 Episode 33: A body is only as good as what you can do with it.

((The events in this solo take place before the festival.))               Yasei sat in the middle of a room, dark and filled with all manner of wicked training machines. Sweat poured down his body in droves, he panted like dog in heat, eager to suck in every ounce of oxygen he could. He’d been working non-stop for weeks to train his body beyond the skills he currently possessed. There hadn’t been a day so far that he’d spend away from this dark basement, day in day out for three weeks so far he’d been spending most of his days sweating his ass off, working his body half to death and back again to force himself to get better, push past his current limits because he knew that if he didn’t, sooner rather than later he’d be dead and what good would that do him? He had to do this, it was his next step and Yasei because of that set up what most people would consider suicide, speed training where Yasei wore weights too heavy to move with. He spent the first week just working on moving with them on, week two was running through the basement with them on, full on sprinting the lengths until he could run a normal speed with them attached. If he took them off, he ran at a speed most humans wouldn’t be able to catch. Once that

week he spent one full day sleeping and the rest of the time his muscles protested every movement but he pushed past that. When he trained he hardly had any time to do anything but, food came in the form of short breaks to inhale some rice and maybe some meat if he could swing it but he wanted to get to the point to where his body would break and work past it and that’s what he did.



The end of the third week wasn’t kind to Yasei, this week he’d been dragging around more weights, literally dragging them along the basement. He started out dragging what his max lifting capacity was around for a day before increasing it 40 LBS the first day, dragging that around and continuing until he was up by Saturday to 160 extra LBS over his maximum weight. Each day he was about r

eady to almost pass out from sheer exhaustion but he wouldn’t allow himself to take the plunge into unconsciousness. No, he pushed himself past that point because if he didn’t he wouldn’t learn, it was how Yasei’s body ran thanks to him being Jack’s kid and with the Oni in his body. Right now though, Yasei sat in the middle of the room sweating like a pig, panting like a dog in heat because he had just spent the last eight hours focusing more on his strength, he may have been increasing his weight limits this last week but in order to put it to good use he had to keep it up or else his muscles wouldn’t commit it to memory and let him do it for any length of time. No, he spent the last four hours lifting those insane weights and then the last four have been him doing nothing but martial arts training with the running weights strapped to his body. Each section had a set of heavy weights set on and he worked to move each part of his body the same as he would without them. Sure, he could run with them on but that was it so far, he needed to fight with the same speed he could run with and this was what he had to do. Yasei’s breaths came in agonizingly fast gulps as if he started drowning. His body screamed in lack of oxygen. He scrubbed a shaky hand through his hair and stood back up, the weights thudding against the concrete he sat cross-legged on, scraping a few new scratches on the previously unscathed surface. He allowed himself only a moment to close his eyes and steady himself before he suddenly shifted back into fight mode. The expression on his face snapped from calm and serene to alert, focused and deadly. Yasei sucked in one last shaky breath before his posture shifted; knees bent, arms held chest high and close together, he kept one leg further in front than the other but still he faced forward. Last thing he did was snap his head up into position, his hair saturated with his sweat flipped over him in dramatic fashion, sweat droplets flinging from the stringy strands. His gold eyes glittered in honed energy, they had focus deep set in the shimmering hues and Yasei Murasame got to work.





In front of him, a training dummy reminiscent of those they use in Kung Fu training stood before him and Yasei struck with a blinding force and speed. Marking the pseudo humanlike body were pads, small little sensors that scattered around the dummy, that measured many different factors of his strikes. They told him the amount of ‘Gs’ he generated with each strike, how fast his motions went and many more things. He had a friend of his (someone who owed him a favour) set the dummy and computer system up that had a 3D model of a human body and each strike recorded told him how much damage to each part of the body he dealt. This dummy was made specifically for him so that he couldn’t break it, yet that is. As of now, his easy hits shattered normal bones easily and he moved right now at high speeds that masters of the hand to hand arts only aspire to get to at the peak of their training and even then most don’t ever come close. The amount of damage Yasei could pull with his hand to hand only could be akin to a car crash at severely high speeds and this was only the beginning. Each time he struck the dummy it shrilly beeped at him, a single piercing note that denoted the amount of damage he dealt, the higher the pitch, the more damage being dealt. Beep after beep he moved like some form of dancer, his movements precise and calculated if only in a split second. He wasn’t working at his peak capacity, oh no, this was just a warm up. The shrill piercing beeps bounced around the echoing room, compounding shortly into a continuous stream of noise as Yasei worked into a fluid form of movement after movement, strike after strike in such forces that each hit would have killed the man just from the internal bleeding all the shattered bones would cause shredding through their insides. Each muscle strained to keep up with the punishing pace Yasei worked at, they shrieked in agony but he didn’t care. Yasei slipped once, missed and nearly smashed his face on the harsh material of the dummy but he corrected for the slipped movement and with a hoarse voice angrily spat out “AGAIN!” before going at the dummy again. From the sheer amount of work he was pushing himself through, pockets of bruises littered his lithe body and his knuckles were almost bloodied. He looked dragged through hell and back again at least three times and bags hung around his eyes from his lack of sleep. And yet he pushed.

'“AGAIN!” '

 Beep, beep, slip, stumble, reset.

'“AGAIN!” '

Beep, beep, beep, beep, trip, fall, reset.

'<span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;line-height: 115%;color:#F79646;mso-themecolor:accent6">“AGAIN!” '

<p class="MsoNormal">More, and more and more, farther and farther and farther Yasei worked. He added more weights to his body.

<p class="MsoNormal">'<span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;line-height: 115%;color:#F79646;mso-themecolor:accent6">“AGAIN!” '

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">Three days passed and Yasei shakily got up from the floor, his last efforts finally wore him out that he collapsed right in front of the dummy and was unconscious for two days. (One day and just a regular sleep on day two.) His muscles were so stiff that he felt like an old automaton who’s gears were rusted and barely functioning. Every movement he protested with a hiss or a groan and a quite a few choice swear words dotting the air. The last thing on his list of training to accomplish is his new chi abilities, he managed to pull it off in passing a while ago but only as an accident, he wanted to perfect it so what he did was now sit on the one bench in the room and gathered his chi to his hand. Electricity crackled up his arm and formed into a neat little sphere in hovering just over his palm. It was a strange hue of black and purple mixed together and it crackled with much power. He concentrated more, increasing the heat around that small orb until the air around him was hot enough to ignite, the orb crackled but it changed, dancing purple-esque flames shot out around the orb but Yasei couldn’t keep it up for long and it dissipated not too long after that. So, for the next 6 days, he pushed himself again but this time draining his chi in mastering this new ability, fire and lightning, the fire coming from how hot his lightning became. He worked and worked until he could conjure the flames with his lightning at will, the sector games weren’t too far away and now that he could manage this ability, he was golden.