August 2024 – Along the Path

Nothing in this world is without meaning. No concept, large or small, is arbitrary—even arbitrary things. If that is confusing, good—even confusion is not arbitrary, but an invitation toward understanding. Everything in this world is taken for granted, especially obvious things, and discovering within oneself the understanding of such things is one step forward on a journey toward enlightenment. Toward new perception. New meaning. At its core, enlightenment and the pursuit of enlightenment is the achievement of happiness, though what happiness means to the individual is altogether another matter.

For Shì Jiān Yǒng, practitioner of Shaolin and conscript in the YuJingyu White Banner Army, happiness was not being shot at by Nipponese secessionists. It was not crouching behind scorching hot machinery with particle ammunition whistling overheard. And it was most decidedly not wrestling with a Nipponese double-agent who’d just recently decided perhaps the StateEmpire’s best interests and theirs actually did not align, after all.

Yǒng did not know their language, though his comlog provided translation, both transmitting and receiving. Neither truly mattered. The delegate had refused to be taken into custody and had drawn arms when confronted. Everything from when Yǒng’s lens had picked them out in the crowd and his Lieutenant had requested a closer examination, from when the JSA rebels had melted out of thin air like hungry ghosts, to just before the Zhēnchá came to collect the HVT and his faceplate hollowed red like a meadow of spider lilies at dusk—none of that mattered, either.

What mattered was Yǒng’s heartbeat, continuing. His breath, hot and damp. The pin on his smoke grenade flown free, dancing on the grate below. The bitter cloud enveloping him, obscuring even his own sight as bullets trailed through the growing churn like breath into silk sleeves. The heft of his Teseum-alloyed staff, anticipating the arrival of a sightless, soundless foe—and the noise it made connecting with the materializing Iga Clan ninja’s spine. 

Sparks scattered over his shoulder, staff impacted. The lethal do of their counterattack redirected from his throat to thin air. Pressure subtracted. The clash ended. For an instant, a Nipponese form, human, backstepping through the fog until the shimmer of thermo-optic camouflage on smoke swallowed up his foe again.

His com chirped in his ear, gravelly yet calm. Their Hùndùn sharpshooter, Yī jī. “Yǒng, I have overwatch on your position. Status? Over.”

“Engaged,” Yǒng said, and the disarray of his own breathing surprised him. “For now.”

A curse. “Break engagement. I’ll cover you.”

Wind caressed Yǒng’s face—the near-miss of a nigh-invisible katana blade. He jerked back, standing over the wailing delegate. “Can’t. Out.”

A second curse. The line broke.

Holding his staff by the end, Yǒng turned in a tight circle, warding the area around him. His toe dug an invisible line into the steel underfoot. It marked the length of his enemy’s arm. After the first strike, the follow-up had been quick, capitalizing on the distraction Yī jī had unknowingly given. Now, for seconds—nothing. Breaking their pattern. Forging a new one. Clever, this Iga ninja. Observant. Patient.

Only so much smoke left in the grenade. Only so much focus, steeled against the protestations of his unwilling charge. Only so many seconds left to think before either he or his foe would be relieved from that burden forever.

Thoughts of the past bubbled up unbidden. From Svalarheima. From before he had been outfitted with this ridiculous armor and this ridiculous lens, from when his staff was supple and wooden instead of rigid, inflexible Teseum. He had been penalized for speaking out of turn, and in the fifth hour of carrying the water bucket—frozen since the second, of course, by the ruthless cold of such northern exposure—a fellow student, years above him in age but not in skill, had passed by him and said:

“Two monks are arguing about a flag. One says, ‘The flag is moving.’ The other, ‘No, the wind is moving.’ A third walks by, and seeing their argument, raises: ‘Not the wind, nor the flag. The mind is moving.’”

Now, arms aching, lungs burning, concentrating on a thousand spots all around him while waiting for the moment to end—Yǒng found the koan and its sentiment just as impenetrable.

Movement. Fast. A swipe, lateral. Forced to block. Weapon locked. A high kick feint into a knee, deflected with a palm. A shadow speared for Yǒng’s left eye. Too slow. His left eye stung, blurry. Blinded. Gritting his teeth absolved him of pain. Kept focus.

The ninja attempted to break away again, to slip into the blind spot he’d created. But the weapon lock went both ways, and like an eel with teeth turned inwards Yǒng kept his foe trapped in arm’s length. 

Camouflaged blows rained down onto his jaw, his temple, his chin. Pain slathered his face along with fresh blood from his lips, his nose.

Momentary. Fleeting. 

Not enough.

The ninja struck. His fist withdrew, threading blood. The next blow fell and Yǒng threw his forehead into it. Two pops, a muffled grunt meant a boxer’s fracture—superficial damage. But the fraction of a second where the ninja hesitated was invitation enough to follow through with a side palm strike to his enemy’s larynx.  

The ninja gurgled. Dropped his guard. Let himself lose to the pain, to be disarmed. Staff twirling, Yǒng rearmed himself and with all the care and application of a USAriadnan baseball player relieved the Iga ninja of the burden of thought.

Smoke faded. His pulse slowed. Thermo-optic camouflage glitched, headless, at his feet. Lip curled, Yǒng picked an off-white fragment from his staff’s engraved head when a double-action crack-boom went off a meter away.

Yǒng spun. Behind him, the Nipponese delegate staggered, face ripped open in more ways than one. A knife lay in their hand. Blank, milky eyes widened in shock. Their jaw, burst in two, twitched—no, not burst, but split like pincers or pedipalps, almost—and a second round cut through their chest and exploded out their back.

The delegate fell.

Shocked from propriety, Yǒng could only muster, “Huh?”

His com chirped again. Yī jī. “Both hostiles neutralized. What’s your status, monk?”

“Status,” Yǒng repeated, and ran both hands up his chest. No pain. “The delegate, was she not—?”

“Nope,” Yī jī said. “Decoy, I guess. Some kind of Zellenkrieger’s my guess. Command says we go station-starboard, now, back up the Blue Wolf. But before we do, monk, I asked: status?”

Yǒng exhaled. “Alive. Thanks to you.”

Yī jī chuckled. “I don’t do thanks. Buy me a drink, instead?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Pity,” Yī jī said. 

The flag, moving; the wind, moving; or, perhaps, the mind. In a strange way, maybe he understood it more now than he had before. “That wasn’t a no.”

Another small step toward enlightenment.