Yusho
9:00 AM Nexus Time
Against a clear blue sky, Yusho's torn coat flapped in the wind, loosely opened. The hard lines of his torso rose and fell like a tide against the white bandages that covered most of it, except for a small depression right in the center of his body.
The dragon-blooded swam in vivid recollections of the battle that had dealt him his current wounds. No matter how many outcomes he envisioned, the truth of defeat was only one. His strength had simply not sufficed. If not for the prompt woman who called herself the Headmaster, Yusho wouldn't be here, and the results could have been much worse. He was indebted. Repaying this debt (and the one to the boy and the beast) was looking like a difficult proposition, however.
He sniffed peevishly. It's not as if meditating to find answers he already had would help in anything. The demon Dassu would be laughing at his bad eye now. The exalt would have liked to share the laugh, honestly.
But with his concentration interrupted, he opened his eye and looked down from the flat top of the marble column where he sat in the lotus position. This open hall of stone situated like an altar in the middle of a green lot resembled old, pale temples he had seen in kingdoms of the Scavenger Lands - but the divinity followed here was muscle. In this district where training devices seemed to rise out of every corner, countless women and men labored and pushed the limits of their bodies in whole-hearted dedication to a physical ideal. Some, against all odds, forged might that matched or surpassed the Dragon-Blooded without mastery of essence by whatever means.
It made Yusho ponder: perhaps he needed to go back to the basics.
