The End
#1 of A New Life In A New World
Remember those first few years of your life, where everytime you turn around, there is something new that you don't understand? Or, how there are some things that you instinctively know about and can tell if they are good or bad? How about, when your mother looks at you, smiles ever so lovingly, and says that you will live a happy life and nothing bad will ever happen to you? Remember those times?
.............I wish I didn't. Maybe then, I wouldn't be in so much pain: physical, emotional or otherwise.
Back then, life was so simple. Everything was looked at in awe and wonder always with a smile on your face. Always laughing and giggling, exploring and learning, growing and just being who you want to be, whether it be the lone army commander one day or the famous pirate king the next.
Then, one day comes when you wish that you couldn't remember things like that. Cause then, maybe the real world wouldn't come as such a shock. Maybe then, there wouldn't be any pain because there is nothing good to remember. Maybe........Maybe I wouldn't be kneeling in the middle of what used to be Paris, France, staring at the broken and twisted landscape, listening to the dead and the dying, smelling the smoke and the blood.
In this day and age, nothing is certain. The words: could, should, would or any variation of them mean nothing. Not: "This shouldn't have happened.....", "This would have begun.....", nor "It could happen......"
Looking around myself, blood dripping from the many wounds that scatter my body, all I see is what IS and what WAS. Nothing else. This was once a beautiful city. Now, it is the physical representation of Hell. Bodies lie mangled and tattered where their owners drew their last breath, blood flows freely and collects in ever growing puddles, fires burn and scorch the air, craters and fissures reform the land into a forest of rocky spires, some of which have a corpse hanging from it. The final battleground of this pointless war.
World War III. The Final War. The Greatest War. The War to End All Wars.
Heh. Sorry. I have to laugh. I don't know if anyone can understand just how insignificant or pathetic those other wars were. Then again, I also don't know if anyone will ever realize just how true those names really are, seeing as how I might be the last living person in the world. I don't even know if that is true. Like I said, nothing is certain anymore.
Like all wars, this one was fought because someone wanted something. The previous wars were fought for money, land, freedom, terrorism, and sometimes it was just because they wanted to. Not this one. This one was fought for power. Not political power, not economic power, not for any concievable glimpse of known power in any government, nation, or otherwise. Just power.
I guess I should explain what I mean. A little over ten years ago, science made a discovery that fractured the very foundation of all we know. Power existed. The power that many people claimed could never exist because it came from us. The same power that martial artists use for breaking stone. The same power that healers all over the world use to make their medicines "magical". The same power claimed by magicians, sorcerers, wizards, witches, and any other being that we claim was just fantasy.
What is even more shocking is the forms that these powers come in. Yes, "powers" plural. There are actually six of them, each with a purpose and an origin in the body. There is chi, mana, reishi, chakra, aura and tenshi. Each powerful in their own right and in need of training to control properly and acurately.
Chi is the power of the body. It is generated through every cell in the body and becomes stronger as you do. As you increase your physical strength, you increase your amount of chi until one day when you can actually project it from your body. By doing so, the physical limitations on the human body are released and you can become much stronger than before and continue to increase in physical capabilities as well as chi amount. Want to move a mountain? With enough strength or chi, you can, either by picking it up or by blasting it to pieces. Martial artists are the best people to train you in its use as they teach you the best way to conserve the energy and teach you how to use it to use it to its full potential with short arcane chants to direct to flow of it. Not to mention the fact that you learn many hand-to-hand techniques that can, and will, shatter stone. Drooling yet? That's just the first one.
Mana is the power of the mind. Witches, wizards, sorcerers and any other magical being draws their power from it. At first, people thought that intelligence played a key factor in the strength of mana. Wrong. I've known some really stupid people that could decimate cities with more finesse and less power than even the most intelligent magician. Unlike chi, mana has one set amount and is restored when one rests. The difference is, with training mana uses less power each and every time that you cast a spell. Incantations of varying length and complexity dictate the spell that you use and require a lot of memorization in order to use properly. Wands and tomes act as conducters as well as enhancements for certain types of spells, more specifically, necromancy, healing, shape-shfting and various other non-battle purposes.
Reishi is the power of the spirit. It is generated in the soul and grows with life-experience and spiritual understanding. Spiritualists, shamans, exorcists and ghost-hunters are the ones who use this power the most. It allows people to see the dead and summon powerful beings. It also acts much like chi, in that it is extremely powerful but unlike chi, it does not affect the physical plane of existence. Meaning, you could use chi to wipe out an army and the area surrounding it or you could use reishi and produce the same result without destroying the landscape. Reishi is usually focused into the form of a weapon or armor to better channel and strengthen it. The beings one summons depends on the users strength and skill making so that a weak user doesn't get in over their head. The beings themselves can range from the size and strength of a kitten to the size of a mountain with the strength of a god. Training usually involves many spiritual "quests" designed to give a person a lot of experience in a very short amount of time.
Chakra is the power of life. It is created when chi and reishi mix and can be trained to increase the amount and increase the potentcy of the mix, resulting in more powerful techniques. Samurai and ninja are the main users of this power. Unlike chi or reishi, chakra is not about using raw power to decimate your enemies. Instead, by using seals and hands gestures, one uses chakra to manipulate the various forms of nature including fire, water, earth and several others to subtly complete your goal. It can also be used to heal many injuries and to stimulate the growth of nature. Chakra can also be used to enhance physical capabilities. To train this power, you learn to manipulate things on a small scale like cutting a leaf using wind or walking on water.
Aura is the power surrounding all things. Aura is different in that it is not created by the body. Instead, it is formed within the Earth and can be drawn upon by all living things. It is how people have their "sixth sense". Psychics, fortune tellers and hypnotists use this people to sense a person's intentions and desires. There really is no way to train this power. It can be developed to the point where it becomes as strong as the five physical senses combined. It can also be refined to the point where one can harm or heal another being simply by touching them and manipulating their aura. Unfortunately, this power is much more obscure than the others, leading to the belief that there may be more to it then we can currently comprehend.
Tenshi is the power of the cosmos. Like aura is created from the Earth below, tenshi is created from the heavens above. Nothing religious about it. Tenshi is, for lack of a better term, power. Pure power. Unlike the other energies, tenshi can be converted into the other energies to restore them faster than normal. Like aura, we know little to nothing about tenshi, save for the fact that it will destroy the user if used for too much. There was also the rumor that with enough understanding of it, one can become a god amongst mortals. Again, there is no known way of gaining control of it.
That was what this war was about. That was what caused tens of millions of people to go out and learn all about these powers and how to use them. A rumor of ultimate power. The only problem? The number of people capable of actually using more than one power barely reached a quarter of the population. About 70% of humanity could use chi, mana, chakra or reishi. Another 12% could use aura. A total of 9% could use 2 powers, 5% could use 3 powers, 3% could use 4 powers and the rest, save for three people, could use 5 powers.
Those last three people were the only ones that could use tenshi. Coincidentally, they were also the only people capable of using all of the energies, to their maximum capacity, no less. I am the last of those three. The other 2 I only met briefly, I didn't even get their names. Only a handshake and the story of their deaths some hours or days later. The first was a young Hindu from Calcutta. He was only 16 when he died. He defended his homeland by using tenshi to utterly destroy the invading Chinese army. It was found out that the massive amount of power vaporized his insides, killing him in mere moments but it also took out the remnants of the invaders. The crater from the explosion is still there and was dedicated to him, complete with a statue and a holiday.
The other was a shinto priestess from Kyoto. Her sacrifice saved hundreds of people from certain death. She used tenshi to amplify her other abilities and spent 3 days traveling her home, healing people as she went and slowly destroying herself from the inside out. She passed from this world in her home in Kyoto not 10 hours later.
Myself, I have used tenshi once. In that single moment, I was utterly changed forever.