Akira's dimensional tear spat him out, and he had exactly 0.3 seconds to think "Oh shi—" before his face met what had to be the most solid oak tree in the entire continent.
THWACK!
"Owwwww..." he groaned, peeling himself off the bark. His nose was definitely bleeding, there were leaves in his hair, and he was pretty sure that ringing sound wasn't coming from any temple bells.
He sat up slowly, spitting out what he really hoped was just tree sap and not something gross. "Okay, note to self: work on portal landing technique before trying to escape from eight incredibly powerful people who could probably turn me into confetti."
Looking around, Akira tried to get his bearings. The landscape was... actually pretty beautiful. Rolling hills covered in green grass, scattered groves of trees that looked nothing like the ones back home, and a big sky that seemed to go on forever. The air smelled different too, cleaner somehow.
"Where the hell am I?" he muttered, then paused. "Wait... this looks familiar. Like, really familiar." He scratched his head, dislodging another leaf. "What was that place called in grandmother's stories... America? Holy shit, did I actually portal myself to America?"
The realization hit him like another tree to the face. He was in America! The land his grandmother had told him stories about, where the native spirits were supposed to be incredibly powerful and the connection between the earthly and spiritual realms was so strong that even regular humans could sometimes perceive it.
"Okay, this is actually kind of awesome," he said, grinning despite his bleeding nose.
Feeling slightly more optimistic, Akira decided to try opening another portal. How hard could it be? He'd just done it while having a complete emotional breakdown, surely he could manage it while calm and collected.
He closed his eyes, reached for his three conflicting energy sources, and tried to recreate the technique that had gotten him here. Hindu fire for raw power, Chinese qi for precise control, Japanese ki for dimensional navigation...
Nothing.
"Come on," he muttered, trying again. This time he put more effort into it.
Still nothing.
"What the fuck?" Akira opened his eyes and stared at his hands like they'd personally betrayed him. "I literally just did this! How can it not work now?"
He tried seventeen more times, getting increasingly frustrated with each failure. On the eighteenth attempt, he managed to produce a small spark of tri-colored energy that immediately fizzled out.
"Oh, come ON!" he shouted at the sky. "I can accidentally tear holes in reality when I'm having a panic attack, but when I actually need to get somewhere NOTHING."
A bird chirped mockingly from a nearby tree.
"Shut up, bird. Nobody asked you."
The bird chirped again, and Akira could swear it sounded smug.
Since dimensional travel was apparently off the table, Akira decided to explore his surroundings. Maybe he could find a town or something, figure out where exactly in America he'd landed, and then... well, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.
Walking through the American landscape was actually pretty therapeutic after everything he'd been through. No convergent councils dropping outrageous revelations on him, no demons trying to kidnap him for mysterious purposes, no masters giving him weird training advice. Just him, the open plains, and the sound of wind.
"You know what?" he said to no one in particular, "I could get used to this. Maybe I'll just become a wandering hermit in America. Learn to speak with buffalo spirits or something. That sounds way less stressful than potentially ending the world by existing wrong."
He was just starting to relax when he heard voices in the distance. Human voices, speaking in a language he didn't recognize but somehow sounded... earthy? Like the words themselves were connected to the land.
"Oh good," Akira said, straightening his clothes and trying to look less like someone who'd recently been face-first into a tree. "People! Maybe they can help me figure out where I am."
That's when he remembered he was in historical America, and the people approaching were probably Native Americans, and he was clearly some random Asian guy who'd just appeared out of nowhere.
"This is either going to go really well," he muttered, "or I'm about to get my ass kicked by people who are way better at fighting than I am."
The voices got closer, and soon Akira could see them, a group of about a dozen people dressed in what his grandmother's stories had described as traditional Native American clothing.
Leading the group was a girl who looked maybe a year or two younger than Akira, with long black hair braided with feathers and beads. Her eyes were sharp and intelligent, and when she spotted him, her expression immediately shifted to 'suspicious stranger alert.'
She said something in her native language to the others, and Akira caught the universal tone of "What the hell is that guy doing here?"
"Uh, hi!" Akira called out, waving awkwardly. "I'm... friendly! Very friendly! Not dangerous at all!"
The girl's eyes narrowed. She said something else to her companions, and Akira was pretty sure he heard the equivalent of "Yeah, that's exactly what a dangerous person would say."
Then, because the universe apparently had a sense of humor, one of the older men in the group pointed at the scorch marks around the tree Akira had crashed into and started talking rapidly. The girl's expression went from suspicious to 'oh shit, this guy might actually be dangerous.'
"Wait, wait!" Akira said, holding up his hands. "I can explain! Well, sort of. Okay, not really, but I promise I'm not here to cause trouble!"
The girl barked an order, and suddenly Akira found himself surrounded by very serious-looking people with very sharp-looking weapons.
"Okay," he said slowly, "I'm starting to think this is going more toward the 'ass-kicking' option."
The girl, clearly the leader despite her age, charged at Akira with what looked like a tomahawk made of some kind of mystical stone that practically hummed with spiritual energy. Behind her, her companions spread out in a coordinated attack pattern.
Akira, panicking, tried to dodge and immediately tripped over his own feet.
"Shit shit shit!" he yelled, rolling away from a spear thrust that definitely would have hurt if it connected. "I don't want to fight you guys!"
His protests were somewhat undermined by the fact that his qi was responding to the threat, automatically enhancing his reflexes and speed. Doing a perfect backflip surprising himself.
The girl paused mid-swing, looking impressed despite herself. "Okay, that was actually pretty cool," she said in perfectly clear English.
"You speak English?!" Akira gaped.
"Of course I speak English, dumbass. What did you think, we were gonna communicate through interpretive dance?" She resumed her attack, this time aiming for his legs. "Though that flip was sick. Do it again!"
"I don't know how I did it the first time!" Akira yelped, jumping over a low sweep and accidentally doing some kind of spinning aerial maneuver that definitely came from his Japanese martial arts heritage.
The fight continued in this fashion for several minutes, the Native Americans attacking with coordinated skill, and Akira flailing around like an idiot while his unconscious training turned his flailing into surprisingly effective evasion techniques. At one point, he tried to block a staff strike and ended up somehow disarming two people at once using what he was pretty sure was a legitimate ninja technique.
"Where the fuck did that come from?" he wondered aloud, staring at his own hands.
"Language!" the girl scolded, then immediately tried to tackle him.
The tackle turned into an impromptu wrestling match, which turned into both of them rolling down a small hill, which ended with them in a tangled heap at the bottom with Akira somehow ending up in what was definitely a submission hold he'd never learned.
"Okay, okay!" the girl called out to her companions. "I think he's more confused than dangerous!"
The girl untangled herself from Akira and helped him sit up, brushing grass off both their clothes. Up close, he could see that her eyes were brown with flecks of gold, and there was something about her presence that made his ki react in interesting ways.
"I'm Aiyana," she said, holding out her hand. "And you are clearly not from around here."
"Akira," he replied, shaking her hand. "And yeah, I'm... really not from around here."
"No shit, Sherlock. The mysterious flash of light and the scorch marks kind of gave it away." Aiyana looked him over critically. "Plus you fight like someone who learned martial arts from books but never actually got in a real fight."
"Hey!" Akira protested. "I'll have you know I've been training my whole life!"
"Training to do what, dance? Because that's what it looked like up there." She grinned, and despite the insult, there was something friendly about it. "Though I gotta admit, some of those moves were pretty impressive. Where'd you learn to fight like that?"
Akira hesitated. How much should he tell them?
"I'm... different," he said finally. "Like, really different. In ways that are hard to explain."
Aiyana's eyebrows went up. "Different how? You got magic powers or something?"
"Sort of? It's complicated."
"Different, huh? So you can fight?"
"I mean, I guess? I've been training, but I'm not really-"
Aiyana's fist connected with his jaw before he could finish the sentence.
"What the hell?!" Akira yelped, stumbling backward and clutching his face. "Why did you hit me?!"
"You said you could fight!" Aiyana said. "I wanna see what you got!"
"That's not how conversations work!" Akira protested, then had to duck as she threw another punch. "You can't just punch people because they might be able to fight back!"
"Says who?" Aiyana grinned, and this time her punch was aimed at his stomach.
Akira twisted away from the strike, and suddenly muscle memory kicked in. Not his muscle memory, his grandmother's training, his father's techniques, his mother's spiritual disciplines, all flowing together in a way they never had before.
His hand came up in a perfect defensive block, deflecting Aiyana's punch while simultaneously positioning him for a counter-attack. His feet shifted into a stance that combined Chinese root-setting with Japanese mobility principles. His breathing was aligned with his prana
For the first time since his training began, all three traditions were working together instead of against each other.
"Oh," Aiyana said, her eyes lighting up as she recognized the change in his posture. "Now we're talking!"
What followed was less of a fight and more of a dance. Aiyana attacked with the grace of someone who'd been fighting since she could walk, her techniques incorporating what looked like traditional Native American martial arts mixed with practical street fighting and what might have been spirit-animal mimicry.
Akira responded with a fighting style that shouldn't have existed, a blend of Chinese kung fu, Japanese ninjutsu, and Hindu combat meditation. Every block led into a counter-attack, every evasion set up the next defensive position.
"Holy shit," he breathed, catching one of Aiyana's kicks and redirecting it into a throw that she somehow turned into a backflip. "I'm actually doing it. The three styles are actually working together!"
"Less talking, more fighting!" Aiyana called back, landing from her flip and immediately launching into what looked like a combination inspired by eagle and wolf movements.
They sparred for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, both of them grinning like idiots as they pushed each other to try new techniques and combinations. Aiyana's fighting style was unlike anything Akira had encountered, it was practical and spiritual at the same time.
Finally, they broke apart, both breathing hard and sporting various minor bumps and bruises.
"Damn," Aiyana said, wiping sweat from her forehead. "You're actually pretty good when you stop overthinking everything."
"Thanks?" Akira replied, "You're... really fucking scary."
"Language!" she scolded again, then immediately grinned. "But thanks. I try."
Around them, Aiyana's companions had formed a loose circle, watching the impromptu sparring match with expressions ranging from impressed to amused to slightly concerned. One of the older men said something in their native language that made several others chuckle.
"What did he say?" Akira asked.
"He said you fight like someone who learned from spirits but never learned to trust his own body," Aiyana translated. "And that maybe you should stick around for a while and let us teach you how to fight like a human instead of a ghost."
Akira looked around at the group, these people who had attacked him on sight but then stopped the moment they realized he wasn't actually a threat, who had watched him spar with their apparent champion and were now looking at him with something approaching acceptance.
For the first time in days, he felt like he might have found somewhere he could actually belong.
"You know what?" he said, surprising himself with the decision. "Maybe I will stick around for a while. I'm kind of between homes right now anyway."
Aiyana's grin got even wider. "Awesome! This is gonna be fun. I've never had a training partner who could actually keep up before."
"Just... maybe warn me next time before you decide to test my fighting skills?" Akira asked. "I'm still getting used to the whole 'magical martial arts' thing."
"Where's the fun in that?" Aiyana laughed. "Besides, you're gonna need to get a lot better if you want to figure out whatever the hell that energy signature you're carrying around is."
Akira blinked. "You can sense my energy?"
"Honey, everyone within fifty miles can sense your energy. You're like a walking spiritual bonfire. The question is whether you're gonna learn to control it or let it control you."
As they walked back toward what Akira assumed was Aiyana's village, he couldn't help but feel like this was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Besides, he was pretty sure he was going to learn a lot from these people.
This was going to be interesting.
---END OF VOLUME ONE---