Mahou Sensei Negima: Fabula ex Mundus Novus

Unexpected Visitors

Deep in the forests of Mt. Atago, a curious phenomenon had taken over the area, stunning the visitors to the Mt. Atago shrine for the past three months. The trees in the area, hefty things born decades before had grown into giants, and were being cut down with more force than was humanly possible. A perfectly clean slice through the thickest trunks in the grove, a diagonal slash was all that this person needed to fell a tree thirty meters high.

That person was Takashi, wandering through the deepest and roughest parts of the mountain, normally stoic and even-handed, the swordsman had been stricken with a burning anger that would not cease. Three months previous he had survived an attack by his kin and clansmen, not nearly strong enough to beat his cousin Aozo or his uncle Kurozawa, he was ashamed that he needed to rely on H. J.'s powers to defeat his enemies.  Kurozawa was his master, once he had spent every day of his childhood with them, now he barely had barely a moment to speak with them before they turned into beasts, letting the Darkness of Shinmei-ryu overcome them, engorging them with power at the cost of turning them into demons.

Just like that his art was lost, with no master to teach him the arts of the sword, and no fellow students to encourage him forward with rivalry and opposition, he had been lost most of his life, but now he had nothing left to return to. 

The art of the Shinmei-ryu was taught from master to student, through oral tradition and carefully honed practice, and without a source of new techniques, his swordsmanship would stagnate. He could recall a scant few that he observed from fellow practitioners, but those were faltering memories that he was not sure he could replicate from imitation alone. He tried over and over to manifest a particular technique, channeling Ki energy into the blade of his sword and practicing on every tree he had come across.

The Hyakka Ryoran was an elevated Ougi of the Shinmei-ryu school, when the move was performed correctly it would create a cone of spectral flower petals, sharpened to an absolute point like a razor blade, that would engulf the opponent and wound even the hardest demon's skin. Like his Hyakuretsu Okazan technique it was used as a finisher against particularly powerful opponents and demons, he had some idea on the process based on the prior technique, but he still could not perform it. Every time he would simply slice and scar through the bark of the tree trunk and the frustration building up in him would continue.

The only thing that could ebb his feelings of total failure was the growling in his stomach. He had been training since dawn and well into the afternoon, and now his body was beginning to tell him that it was time to recover.

He sat on the trunk of one of the fallen trees he created, slipping into his backpack and taking out his lunch, nothing but a meal from the grocery store he had worked at, it was just cheap enough for him to afford on his meager salary.

While eating Takashi looked off the mountainside down on the city, right about now he imagined that his friends would be getting out of school, under a cloudy sky, they would continue about their lives. He wished that he could join them, but could not stand the sight of his own weakness; he would leave when he was ready, and he was not ready.

He was halfway through his meal when he sensed something peculiar, from just out of eyesight he was being watched. The fighter made no effort to hide their presence, going to far as to make themselves visible once Takashi realized they were there.

It was man in tattered cloth, standing at nearly 7 feet tall, he loomed in the distance like a specter. His wild hair and even wilder clothing gave off the impression of a hermit. Takashi could not sense any killing intent from him, in fact he seemed ambivalent to him being there.

" Do you be Takashi Yokohama? "

In a single second, a short enough to just barely react to it, the man went from standing at least one hundred meters away to appearing before the Shinmei-ryu. Takashi knew it had to be some kind of movement technique, more complex than a Shundo.