Learning the Rokushiki (2)

The next Rokushiki technique that I wanted to train was Tekkai, so I went to Jiro to begin the training.

Right now I had no real good defensive moves other than the normal defensive dodges and blocks I learned from Renewal Taekwondo, so this would increase my vitality by a lot.

I went to the training hall for it and it was just a massive indoor gym. I could see the other students standing in front of machines and getting hit.

But before I even started to do that Jiro first led me to the back of the gym where I saw doctors tending to the injured and concocting something.

Jiro said, "It is very hard for a person to tense their muscles hard enough to become as hard as steel. So we have developed a shortcut."

"The world government has made a toxin that forcefully makes your muscles contract into just the right form so that you perform Tekkai."

"Of course, you once inject you can't control your muscles so this is just to let you have a feel of how to perform Tekkai. And this will be excruciatingly painful."

Then he injected me with the toxin before I could react. My muscle contracted violently feeling like the worst cramp I have had in my entire life, just all over my body.

I could feel the muscle in my face, arms, and body all flex so much that I felt that they were going to snap. But they didn't and I was frozen in place.

Jiro walked up to me and punched me in the stomach, but I barely felt it. He then moved on to punch me elsewhere to allow me to get a feeling of how Tekkai worked.

But then it wore off after 10 minutes. Jiro said, "Wow you're tough. That poison was supposed to last around an hour but you managed to shrug it off after 10 minutes."

And so the rest of the day went we me being poisoned and hit. And after 2 weeks of this, I managed to do it in my own power. It was much easier than learning the Geppo.

All Tekkai really was, was just the ability to control your muscles to flex really hard. I could already control my body pretty well due to Renewal Taekwondo this was just an extension of that.

After that, I moved to the machines that would punch you. I could consistently keep my Tekkai under those punches after more weeks of training.

Then I was moved to the advanced part of Tekkai, here I was put in more situations that could break my concentration and push me out of Tekkai.

I was flash banged, set on fire, and poisoned just to make sure that no matter the situation I could keep my Tekkai active, and after 2 more weeks, I finally could.

Then I moved to the Shigan, I was not really enthusiastic about this until I learned the actual technique used to make this work.

I thought that this was just making your fingers really tough through training, then performing Tekkai on it, and then poking someone really hard with it.

No, it was actually much more complicated than that. If it were that simple then it wouldn't be worthy of being called one of the Rokushiki.

No this is muscle control on the highest level. If you look at the tip of your finger you will notice that it is pretty round, not ideal for piercing targets.

You would be right, so what Shigan aims to do is tense the muscles on the tips of your fingers to form a sharp point using Tekkai to make the point as hard as steel.

This gives you a viable piercing attack that if mastered to its peak will allow your finger to be as piercing as the greatest spear.

It also allowed the user to fill do all types of physical damage. Shigan covering piercing damage, Rankayku covering slashing, and your normal fists covering blunt damage.

So to train this we first had to train our fingers like crazy, there was no toxin that could do this for us this was too precise for that.

I spent a month just smashing my fingers into a wall, lifting weights with them, and submerging them in weird chemicals to temper them.

After that was the actual technique. I first performed a Tekkai with only my finger but that just made it a particularly tough finger, not a stabbing implement.

So I had to constantly tweak it, tensing certain muscles in one way and others in a different way till finally, I did it. After another month of training, I managed to perform the Shigan.

So 3 and a half months to learn these skills put me on track to learn all of the skills before the next exam. The other kids were now also finishing up learning with their instructors and moving on to new skills.

I headed to the final one, to learn Kami-e and Soru. These ones I wasn't as excited for as they didn't fill a weakness that I was lacking but I thought they could help.

And boy did it do that. Kami-e was what we first learned and it focused on making your body so flexible and relaxed it moves away from any attack, like a leaf in the wind.

It was basically like Tekkai but instead of tensing all your muscles you had to relax them, not all the way, or you would collapse but enough to make them respond to any movement.

It even started the same way, I got injected with a muscle relaxant, and while my body couldn't resist instructor Hughy twisted my body into unnatural shapes.

This was done for a month, making sure that I had the flexibility to move in all the manner required for the technique.

Damn, I thought I was flexible before due to learning Renewal Taekwondo, nope! Now I can turn all my limbs 180 degrees and control them perfectly, even my head.

But now I was left with the mastering part of the course. Now I was blindfolded and put in the middle of a bunch of robots trying to punch me.

I was supposed to dodge the robots by only sensing the airwaves it made in its passing and move out of the way instinctively.

Considering my master of the air by learning Geppo and Rankyaku this was easy and I managed to master Kami-e in just 2 weeks of hard training.

Lastly was Soru, which allowed people to move at incredible speed by hitting the ground at least 10 times in a split second.

The concept was pretty simple and I managed to do it after only 1 week of training. The hard part was the control over the Soru. How far would you launch yourself?

If for example, you did 10 kicks to perform the Soru then you would need to be 10 times more precise with each individual kick to reach exactly where you wanted.

This problem continued the higher amount of kicks you went, the more kick and speed you wanted the more precision you needed as well.

You also had to focus on the part where I said 10 times in a split second. How long was that exactly? Apparently, you needed to do 10 steps in 0.5 seconds at the minimum.

0.5 seconds was way too long when I was capable of dodging bullets. No, you also now had to keep in mind when you would shoot forwards.

If you kept kicking the ground then only after 0.5 seconds would you be launched forward, no matter how many kicks you did.

So what you needed to do was to initiate the launch early which was a whole other thing where you had to press off the ground in a certain way.

So after 1 month and 1 week, I managed to master the Soru and it was worth it. I had thought that I was just something like my Bo-bup, I didn't need it.

But it was actually completely different. Bo-bup worked by maximizing the force you strike the ground with while Soru worked by maximizing the number of times you struck the ground.

This mix of 2 techniques that on the surface seems the exact same actually boosted both of them to new heights. I could move so fast using this combination that I couldn't properly utilize it.

My perception was not enough to maximize the advantage of using this skill. I could only use the lower level of this advanced technique.

But I was happy. I had managed to learn the rest of the Rokushiki before the 2nd trial, and this time I was ready, I would win this test with no issues.