Michael
The past five months had been...curious, to say the least. Training Breeze and Mordred, of course, had gone about as well as expected thus far, with Breeze making surprising progress considering how short the timespan had been, and Mordred not making as much progress as she could've. It was unfortunate, really, as while the attitude she'd presented was a welcome change, there had been some sort of...gap, for lack of a better term, between them. Unfortunate, but Michael wouldn't be losing any sleep over it.
After all, it was just another drop in his impossibly deep well.
Keeping the dojo running hadn't been particularly difficult either, even if he'd refused to let Mordred pay for the rent. That had definitely been a tense moment, her pride against one of the few standards he had left to him, but the enforcers they'd sent hadn't turned out to be particularly decent training, and so Michael decided to try giving lessons to anyone the group he was dealing with, apparently something called the 'Yakuza', bothered to send in. ...Well, that, and apparently the ad revenue from sending recordings of the immortal's drunken Friday evenings to that one website had also helped out.
Possibly the most curious thing, however, had proved to be Oren. While he'd fully expected Breeze to make the progress she had, he hadn't quite expected what Oren had managed. While he could always practically feel the shapeshifter's eyes on him when he was training Mordred or Breeze, after a while, he found himself with twinges of that same feeling during his morning practices, something that was more or less a habit by this point. The truly curious part came in the latter half of the training session, when Oren had come to him for solo training. To his surprise, she'd managed to figure out how to replicate some of his more advanced techniques. Granted, it was a mere shadow of what the techniques could actually do, but that she'd managed to copy any part of it was all the same interesting.
Of course, he'd agreed, partly out of curiosity. She'd insisted on solo training, which he'd had little problem with. Besides, it filled in the gaps when Mordred and Breeze went off monster hunting quite nicely, and looking at the results in the next day's news usually proved entertaining. The most curious bit, however, was how he could finally feel like last hints of that fugue-like state he'd been in vanishing, like he was properly awake now after an inordinately long bout of sleep-walking, a process that had probably started around when they fought that Elemental, or some time right before that.
Ah, I suppose I owe Rikuyo a proper match the next time I see her, but we'll cross that trench when we come to it.
All the same, at the current time, the immortal found himself waiting in a clearing, staff laying across his lap, whispering to him of destruction incessantly. By now, it had become simple background noise to his thoughts, though Michael found himself wondering if he could get the entity in there to shut up every now and again. Nonetheless, this was likely to be a curious occasion. After all, Oren had noted that she wanted to try sparring this time around, which was how the immortal found himself waiting here in the first place. He'd considered doing this at the nearby waterfall instead, but it wouldn't be fair to her to have to deal with making use of stolen shadows of his techniques and unfriendly terrain at the same time. Besides, it wasn't about winning or losing here, but seeing what she'd managed to reach through their training.
