I slowly grew more frustrated, as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months. The words floated through my head every day, I knew them well enough to recite them forwards, backwards and in any order I chose. Yet still I had no clue what any of it meant and that fact was driving me insane. I was on the verge of giving up, when I had the brilliant idea of translating all three into one language. I just knew it was going to work so I did it; and exactly as I thought it was still complete nonsense. No matter what language I translated them into it still said the same exact thing. Nothing! I just wanted to snap and bang my head into the walls of the cave, until all the words were knocked right out of my head.
After taking a few days off to clear my mind and not think about the code at all, I had a good idea for once. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before; the language they spoke in the village was different from any of the ones on the cave walls. But what made this so special was that this language was spoken differently than it was written. I started rewriting the words on the walls, and at first it seemed as though it was still making no sense at all but I still had hope, because the way the words in the language were spoken was so much different than it was written.
It took me almost the entire day, but I actually did it, now all that was left for me to do was to read it aloud. I started to read it aloud, but it didn’t make much sense making me almost gave up. However, I didn’t for one reason and one reason only it was actually making some sort of sense, well more than it was making before anyway. Which meant I was going in the right direction, but I was still missing one key thing. I went back to the cave sat on the floor looking up and all around me at the glowing words wondering what I had missed. The Hours passed by slowly, my head fell in frustration, and there between my folded legs was quite literally the key to the whole code.
My legs were covering parts of the letters that were on the ground and the part that was left for me to actually see was in the shape of a key. Then it hit me, the letters on the ground weren’t gibberish or a distraction, but instead they were the key to solving the code. I quickly jumped up and instead of looking at the ground as another language, that was translated badly, I just looked at the shapes and the way they pointed and suddenly it started to make sense. The shapes on the ground where the key to translating the code, and once I understood that it was only a matter of time before I could read the code.
“The code of the Phantom for those that wish to have the power of the unseen.” That first line put a huge smile on my face, so interesting and mysterious it sent chills down my spine. Before it told me anything useful about using the Phantom style, it started to describe a fighting style known as the Phantom 10. It is more for defensive fighting than offensive, but it allows the user to fight off 10 opponents at once, and do it with ease. It also referred to this fighting style as the one-man army of 10. It also said that this was the most powerful and ultimate way of using the Phantom style.
Soon after, it began to describe how to properly of using the Phantom style, in step-by-step instructions. Now that I had the instructions, nothing was going to stop me from mastering the style. I began to study it day after day, and started to see exactly where I was going wrong before. And exactly how I would master the style. The first and most important step was to get your mind in the correct place, to see the actions I wanted to do and where I wanted to go before I attempted to make them. However, not just seeing them, but also feeling the actions, and become them, then I had to get my body to a state where it could move faster, much faster than anything normally does. And Just to get into this state required incredible concentration and knowing exactly what is going to be done and where I needed to go. However, the more I read, the more discouraged I grew. It seemed as though this task would be impossible for me to learn in a few months. It would take half a lifetime to learn everything the code had to teach me about the style in order to perform it correctly.
However, I’d had it with waiting and I decided that I was going to do it in under a month. The years of meditation and preparation that was needed in order to master this style would just have to wait. I was going to do it whether or not anyone thought I could, even if the instruction said I couldn’t. And in order to do that I would have to take on this final task in a completely new light than anything I’d ever done in my life. So I did.
I memorized every word of the code in the exact order it was in, then I took it to heart. Following every word of it to the letter. It was working well at first. Though I was moving a lot faster than I had before, I was still not at the point where I would become unseen. So it was time I took it to the next level, the style required me to be focused beyond anything I would normally do, or have ever done for that matter. So I was going to focus more than I ever had in my life. I put myself into a deep state of meditation, deeper than I had ever been in my entire life. My mind left my body as it drifted away, I separated every thought, then I separated everything in myself from everything I was focusing on, so that only what I needed to achieve was left. My mind let go of the control of my body completely for two weeks straight.
My heart was hardly beating by the first week in, and my breath had all but stopped. The second week was the real trick, it was something only someone of my kind could do. As the minutes tick by seamen as though they were lasting for hours, and the days turned into months. My breathing and heart stopped completely for hours on end, my body died and brought itself back to life over and over again, as my mind escaped to find the answers I needed to finally master the style.
As my eyes opened at the end of the second week I understood everything about the fighting style, I understood how to push my body past its limits nature had set for it. I stood to my feet, looked around me closed my eyes then focused, I knew everything around me , I knew how far everything was from me, and I knew exactly where the fruit on that tree was. The expressions dropped from my face and I vanished in the blink of an eye, then I was back standing in the same place with the fruit in my hand. I smiled for a moment, take a deep breath and vanished once again.
I walked over to my master at the training grounds and handed him the fruit, he looked at me from head to toe to see if I had a drop of water on me. Then he smiled even though he still looked annoyed with me. Then I smiled at him and looked at the targets in front of us. “Fire an arrow at 10 of them at the same time, doesn’t matter which ones it is. And I bet none of them will hit their target.” I said with a smirk on my face, he quickly called ten men over to help him and instructed them to take aim. They all took aim at different targets, then looked over at me and then they release their arrows.
The arrows ripped through the air heading straight for each of their targets, I didn’t flinch keeping my eyes on every single arrow. Then the instant the first one was about to hit I moved. I vanished. I appeared In front of some of the arrows next to some and behind some of them all at the same time. Stopping every one of them before they had a chance to impact the target, then I let go of the arrows and reappear next to my master. His draw dropped no one had ever actually master the Army of 10 before. And he couldn’t believe that the first person he had ever seen using was me. An outsider.
Continues in Chapter 9 or go to previous Chapter 7
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