Wonderful Insane World

Dylan wiped his blade on the orc's fur, his heart pounding not from effort, but from adrenaline and frustration. The lesson — always the lesson — even in the midst of carnage.

He had just felled an orc war chief in a matter of seconds, and the only thing Julius found to say was that he'd been too slow.

But how could he possibly be faster than that? Dylan felt his muscles burning; he could repeat those movements once, maybe twice, but a third attempt would leave him breathless and unable to move a single limb.

The thought was bitter. He had pushed his body to its absolute limit — a blur of motion that would have seemed supernatural to any observer. And yet, in his mentor's eyes, it was merely… inefficient. Wasteful.

A low chuckle broke through his thoughts. Julius stood a few paces away, not even looking at him, but at the terrified orcs hesitating at the edge of their macabre circle.

"You feel the burn, don't you?" Julius said, his voice a relaxed rumble. "Like acid in your fibers. You think that's the price of speed." He finally turned his head, his gaze piercing through the haze of dust and fear. "It's not. That's the price of strength. You're trying to push the air itself out of your way. You're a storm unleashed. A storm is powerful, yes, but it has no precision. It spends all its energy in one breath."

He took another step forward, his very presence thickening the air.

"True speed isn't how fast your muscles can contract. It's the path of least resistance. It's the flash of thought before motion. It's letting momentum carry you — not fighting against it. You used three moves where one, flowing cleanly, would have been enough… and you'd still be breathing easily."

He gestured vaguely toward Dylan's chest.

"You're trying to fuel the mechanism with raw combustion, and it's burning you from the inside. The speed I'm talking about — it comes from breath. From spirit. It doesn't consume the body; it guides it. Until you understand that, you'll keep hitting that wall. You'll keep standing there, gasping, wondering why your best is never good enough."

Julius's words carved a wound deeper than any blade could. Their truth was inescapable. Dylan lowered his eyes to his trembling hands, still buzzing with residual energy and fatigue. He had focused so much on the how of movement — the brute power, the explosive force — that he had completely ignored the why and the when.

He wasn't fighting the orcs anymore. He was fighting himself.

And until he learned to harmonize the storm inside him, he'd remain a gifted apprentice on the verge of collapse, never truly grasping the art of the forgemaster who stood before him — calm and unyielding at the heart of the chaos they had wrought. The path to manifesting his spiritual breath felt farther than ever, a distant peak lost in the tempest of his own making.

Dylan clenched his jaw but didn't respond. Julius's words echoed with a truth he couldn't deny. He turned away from the chieftain's corpse and went to work, methodical as ever.

As dusk thickened, tinting the sky in hues of purple and indigo, he walked the silent battlefield. He searched each lifeless body, extracting from their chests and foreheads the anima gems — those faintly pulsating crystals that glowed with an inner, troubled light. He gathered them in his palm, their cumulative energy radiating a heat that was almost painful.

Meanwhile, with macabre efficiency, he stacked the orc bodies at the center of the village. The pyre he lit with a dying torch rose swiftly, crackling and roaring. A greasy smoke, heavy with the sweet, nauseating scent of burning flesh, spiraled into the darkening sky — an incense offered to the indifferent gods of this world.

Julius, as always, did not help. He stood at the edge of the clearing, back to the fire, eyes scanning the encroaching shadows. He was an unmoving sentinel, a rock around which chaos broke and dissolved. No beast, no scavenger, no morbid curiosity dared to approach while his aura lingered.

Sitting cross-legged by the fire, Dylan closed his eyes, the gems pressed tightly in his palms. He felt the brutal rush of anima surging into him — a torrent of wild energy burning through his meridians, trying to consume everything in its path. It was always like this: a violent invasion.

But this time, instead of fighting the flow, instead of trying to dominate it through sheer force, he remembered Julius's words: "Let it flow. Observe it."

He tried to relax, to find that "silence" his mentor spoke of. Not easy. The energy roared within him like a caged beast, shaking his focus. Frustration welled up. The power was there — vast — but it kept slipping away, bleeding out as heat and uncontrollable tremors.

He forced himself to breathe deeply, to imagine the anima not as a fire, but as a river — wild, yes, but alive. He didn't try to stop it, only to follow its course, to understand its bends and currents. Gradually, his erratic heartbeat steadied. The burn in his muscles softened into a gentler heat, easier to bear.

He did not manifest his spiritual breath. The energy didn't become a blade of light or a tangible shield. But for the first time, it didn't leave him utterly drained. When he opened his eyes, the sweat on his forehead was cool. The gems in his hand were nothing but gray dust.

The fire still crackled before him, reducing the corpses to blackened skeletons. Julius was still there, unshaken.

"Better," the older man said simply, without turning around, as if he had followed every phase of Dylan's inner struggle. "You heard the current. Now learn to guide its flow."

Dylan rose, limbs heavy but mind clear. The road was long — endless, even — but for the first time, he had glimpsed, however faintly, the other shore. And that, amid the ashes and the stench of death, was worth every massacre.

As the last dust of Dylan's gems drifted away, Julius took his place. The pile of crystals he had gathered was far larger. He didn't even need to sit. He simply lifted his hand, and the gems began to float around his fist.

The spectacle began.

The essence didn't rush into him like a wild torrent. It seemed summoned — drawn by some inner gravity. Streams of energy, visible to the naked eye like ripples of heat, converged on his torso with hypnotic precision. It was a dance — an offering the universe made to him, which he accepted with sovereign calm. Dylan could literally see the paths of essence tracing through him, a perfect, meticulous circuit with no waste, no dissipation. The energy didn't seek his spiritual core — it obeyed it.

When it was done, a soft golden light enveloped Julius. Not a blinding flare, but a deep internal glow, as though his flesh had been dipped in molten gold. There was nothing outwardly menacing about it, and yet Dylan felt a pressure tighten around his chest, squeezing his heart. His sharpened instincts screamed at him to step back — the thing before him was beyond human, beyond comprehension, something that could erase him with a thought.

Yet Julius moved calmly. He bent down, picked up a small pebble, no larger than a fingertip. He rolled it between thumb and forefinger, then, without effort, flicked it.

The sound was a crack — sharp, supersonic.

Dylan saw only a flash. He felt the air sizzle against his neck, so close it raised goosebumps. The pebble had vanished, having torn through the village's wooden palisade and probably the trees beyond — without even leaving an echo.

"Did you see it coming?" Julius asked, his voice perfectly neutral.

Dylan's heart hammered. He had managed to turn his head, to follow the blur — but that was all.

"I even managed to turn in time to watch it pass," he admitted. "Too fast. I'm not confident I could catch it mid-air."

The truth was, trying might have cost him his hand. All his essence, all his focus, he was saving desperately for that ultimate goal: to manifest his breath. To waste it blocking a supersonic pebble was unthinkable.

A more pragmatic thought slipped through his irritation.

"Why not teach me how to strengthen my bones — my flesh?" he asked, his tone almost accusatory. "For an Awakened, I get hurt too easily, don't you think? Every fight is cuts, burns, torn muscles. This energy — if I could just use it to harden myself…"

Julius looked at him, one eyebrow arched, a faint smile on his lips.

"Strengthen the flesh?" he repeated, as if tasting the absurdity of the request. "That's like putting armor on a bag of bones and water. A patch, not a cure. A foolish waste of energy."

He stepped closer, his gaze sharp enough to pierce.

"You really want to stop getting hurt? Then don't be there when the strike lands. Be faster. Anticipate. See the movement before it's born. The best armor is not being hit. And to do that…"

He paused, letting the words sink in.

"…you must first feel. Not with your eyes — with your breath. You think I flicked that pebble so you'd catch it? No. I did it so you'd feel the air tear before it moved. So you'd learn to read intention in silence. Strengthening your body is the dream of a barbarian. Sharpening your mind until it senses danger in the void — that's the path of a master."

He turned toward the dark line of the forest.

"But since you seem so eager to learn… perhaps pain is a good teacher after all. Next time," he added, glancing over his shoulder with a faint smirk, "I won't aim beside you."