13 Chapter 13

Training Day 4

"Here I come!!..... Haaaaaa!" Hiro was holding a massive claymore-shaped aquamarine crystal shard in his hands. He charges toward Vi as he positioned the tip of the shard forward, clearly attempting to puncture his teacher's stomach.

<Poke>

He missed.

Hiro quickly pulls at the shard and backsteps as he tries to find where his pompous instructor is. The edge of the shard extends suddenly under his grasp as he swings to his right.

But again, before it hits its intended target, it is dodged skillfully. Vi continues to stand on the floor unperturbed by the fact that he could have been split in half moments ago. He looks at Hiro and finally allows a smirk to dance on his lips as he sees Hiro's heaving form. 'Clearly, the boy was not used to combat yet.'

For a moment Hiro just stands there. As if too weak to even move. He poises his body straight and wills his hands to stop shaking despite the dreadful pit swirling in his stomach. He turns his thoughts away from his shaking hands and projects them under him, deeper and deeper into the ground. He then poises himself as if preparing to take a devastating hit, with his right leg forward, supported by his left in the back and arms holding the shard close to his chest.

And just as Vi approaches him, Hiro lets them loose. In a single swift motion, his right foot glided backward and a massive spike bursts forth from the ground and pierces Vi's stomach.

'Looks like he's stuck. Good...'

Now it was his turn to smile as Vi. Because the old geezer had fallen into his obvious trap. Indeed, when he looks up, he sees the previous smirk had vanished from Vi's lips. Blood gushes down from his mouth like an unimpeded waterfall and drips down from the now gaping hole in Vi's stomach like water from a water hose. Vi claws at it to free himself from his newly made support stand. He fails spectacularly. For a moment he feels pity for the man he has just impaled. But Hiro thinks otherwise. If he has to hold back on them, on the supposed Guardians of the Neoverse, then what good are they? Surely they are not meant only to work as showpieces and dare he say, are useless.

"Oh am I?"

"An after imag-"

Hiro cranes his neck in the direction of the voice as fast as he can before his eyes could. As if following an innate instinct. Hiro realizes only later that his vision had become blurry from the sudden maneuver as he was sure he could have seen the strike coming otherwise. A heavy object strikes the back of his neck and his vision goes dark again. In the throes between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the adrenalin rush, he could only see the tall figure of Vi walk away from him. Ever so slowly.

But he jerked awake. There, in his chest, a spark suddenly manifested itself. A spark of burning fire and piercing needles. It dug into his chest as if trying to claw his heart out. He could only clutch his chest and stand up as the pain wanted. Because he could certainly hear it whispering obscenities into his ears. White hot pain eats away at him from the inside. However, wherever it goes, a new vigor returns. So despite feeling like he had to scream for 10 minutes straight for all the pain he felt, he found himself standing up again.

To face his nightmare in this battle and charges into him.

But what Hiro didn't consider in his equations was that he was still human. Sure he was stronger than most but he was still human. So in fact he could only muster so much speed when he ran toward Vi.

As such it was painfully slow in Vi's opinion. He sighed as he stood his ground, remaining carefree, and whistling unbidden while maintaining a loose stance with his rather frail-looking Katana.

Hiro was getting really annoyed at this old man, after yesterday's rather painful event, Hiro had barely gotten any sleep in. From what he had heard from those two, seizures could happen at any moment with varying intensity. That frightened him more than almost anything. However, Hiro had seen these types of situations before. His life at this moment was a perfect parallel to a patient suffering from panic/heart attacks. Just like them, he also would not know when an attack would hit him. And it is this living under constant fear, he was sure, would make his life much worse than living nightmares. Imagine being able to do nothing, bound by the fear inside you.

Imagine, one moment you might go outside, thinking it is snowing so beautifully, thinking and hoping that you would be ok. And BAM, It hits you like a train and leaves you paralyzed, foaming pathetically in a street. Your body's rapidly losing temperature because of the cold and you cannot even cry out for help. And even if you did, maybe no one will hear you. What will you do then? What can you do before you freeze to death? What can you do when you are that powerless?

Nothing...

But that is why the treatment of such attacks is necessary for normal people. That is why understanding them is far more important. Because what we understand, we come to fear less.

But Hiro was anything but normal. There was no cure to this if he were to go by those two's advice.

'That what can I do besides lying down and taking it?' Hiro promised himself he would get to the bottom of these attacks. He asked both of his guardians for help. He would overcome this through the power of friendship and sheer willpower.

Oh! How he should have known that such kind of power fixes naught any type of heartache.

Besides, though he was meant to wield this power, his body was long from completely adapting to its use. So while he had to use his powers, the process would only accelerate the Soul-Seize countdown. He would gradually adapt but would still suffer from this indefinitely, he was sure. Hiro was not all that terrified at the prospect but when he eventually thought about it sounded pretty bad. He felt the familiar chill in his mind as he thought about getting attacked while he was sleeping. Hell, what if he was doing something delicate, like hypothetically speaking, diffusing a bomb? That sounded like it couldn't get any worse.

Clearly, it felt like something Vi will say. Vi did have childish imagination but within the infinite expanse of possibilities, it was just another one, something Hiro thought could definitely happen.

He knew in his mind that this was not just a onetime-joke as he saw an almost imperceptible glimmer of worry in Vi's eyes.

<Flashback End>As Hiro gradually approached Vi, Hiro quickly stepped forward with a sudden burst of speed. He then twisted his torso towards the right, bending outward as if to lift the shard up but instead spun on his heel as he rotated his arms, bringing the shard curving forward utilizing his momentum. He was using the shard, not like a blade but a glorified baton.

<BOOM><CREAK>The massive shard headed straight, trying to smash into Vi's torso. Vi would have been smashed into two parts if he didn't block it almost simultaneously VI's katana. Vi was moving to intercept his attack automatically like the katana was attracted to his shard, like an iron nail to a powerful magnet. But this alone was not enough to make Hiro give up,

Even faster than before, Hiro used the force of Vi's deflection and spun in the opposite direction as he attempted to slash at Vi's legs.

This ultimately proved to be useless as this time Vi countered instead Hiro's strike with a vertical upward slash from his katana. But before the strike could bisect Hiro, Hiro's mind was hit with the familiar chill.

Hiro was still in the dark about 'this' power. He had spent almost three days meditating just to know a little more about this but had not even come close to knowing anything. He still didn't know why this happened or how this happened, only that this would allow him to move superfast before his body would be out of commission for a while. However, he had to find it if he wanted to use it.

But all that was for later contemplation. He must survive this deadly strike first!! That old geezer didn't know the meaning of holding back even in a sword fight!! Hiro knew he was still holding back a lot, if not 85% of his power.

Hiro didn't want to find out what would happen if that geezer did go all out. All Hiro could do was tap into the sliver of power he had felt before.

Using the 'temporary powerup' or rather perhaps going with the flow, Hiro jumped slightly before bringing his shard horizontally on the approaching katana with all the force he could muster. He would have to break this katana if he wanted to win.

The two objects collided. A super dense shard and a rusty katana!!

<BBBBOOOOOOOOOOMMM!><CREAK><CREAK><Shatter>

Hiro watched in horror as his poor 'super-dense' shard was quickly reduced to smithereens, establishing that even a simple weapon is deadly in the hands of a master. Hiro was sent reeling backward in a straight line.

He quickly got to know how it felt to undergo the G-training used to train the astronauts.

As he saw the rapidly approaching roof, four words repeated themselves in his mind.

"THIS IS GONNA HURT!!!!!!!"

<BOOM!!!>

Hiro's body was plastered straight into the roof for a moment. He was for a second a squashed house lizard.

He started to fall....

<Thud>

Vi quickly teleported to him and reached out to hold him but before he could reach Hiro, the air surrounding Hiro began to vibrate.

'There was only so much a person can hope to do with just 3 days of training and granted powers....'

'I had wanted to at least try and prove I was worthy of those powers. Not that I had read and watched every manga/anime/movie but I knew a good amount of the characters in them that sometimes did not deserve certain circumstances.

Just like me, some don't deserve their powers and some their deaths, their happiness snatched away from them. I however didn't put much thought into it. They were just drawings, characters that were just people's imagination.

Until they weren't...

They have turned real, and with them all those horrifying situations I wished I could prevent. Any other person would have done the same if he was in my situation. Hardships and struggles may be the very beauty of anime/manga but it was only half the truth. No one would like them to happen in real life.'

'My first love was an anime character, my joy, and thrill, a movie. The first person who I aspired to be and respected was a manga character. Now some ridiculous thing tries to destroy them all.

I would destroy that very thing with my own hands. But for that, I needed to grow stronger. Far stronger than I could ever hope to be.'

<BOOM>

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