The Journal of Jacob Rivers – Entry Two
Being someone who played football for the worst high school team in the state, and who by cruel twists of fate always wound up on the losing side of every team competition while growing up, victory was a sensation that I seldom experienced. So today, I’m enjoying every drop of it. I’ve come to the proverbial Big Leagues, the Tournament of Champions, and I walked (well, crawled) away from my first fight in victory.
Master Silas and I stepped into an infernal battlefield of fire and ash. There, we did battle against a pair of sinister otherworldly beings and we disproved the common cliché that Earthlings are always inferior. Explosively.
For once, victory hinged upon my own prowess, and I didn’t have to stand aside and watch my teammates cost me yet another victory – because my teammate was Master Silas Gesse. Regardless of how irritating and mysterious he can be, that old man is one badass bastard. As much as I’ve been loath to put faith and trust in the competence of others, I definitely believe in Silas to not let me down. And I trust in myself to make him proud.
Most importantly of all, for a while, I could ignore my illness. I lost myself in the excitement of battle and forget that I was dying. It didn’t matter that I had maybe a year left to live. Pardon the cliché, but for that moment, I felt truly alive. Gesse warned me to not covet the thrill of combat, but if he knew about my condition, he would be more understanding. Then again, he would also surely leave and take me back with him, so I’m willing to put up with a little disapproval now and then.
From their first challenge to the next, Jacob and his sensei passed from one sulfurous, fiery wasteland to another. This time, instead of a hellish wilderness, they found themselves in a filthy, blistering industrial complex. Mighty crucibles brimming with red molten metal towered over master and student, suspended above massive, glowing furnaces. They belched enough smoke and heat to burn flesh from bone and melt eyes from their sockets. Cranes, lifts, and other machines cluttered the mill’s concrete floor in a jumbled mass of gears, cranks, and hydraulics. It was all sprawled out before them for hundreds of yards, standing as a testament to the raw power of human industry.
“A steel mill?” muttered Jacob. His sickly lungs burned from the heat and smoke; he stifled a cough. He rubbed irritably at his eyes as stinging sweat trickled down his brow. “I don’t know if this is an improvement or not from the last round.” Even in its dormant state, the abandoned mill pulsed with a dull hum of ambient dissonance as the dim rumbling of the blast furnaces melded with bubbling metal and the hissing of cooling hydraulics and grated discordantly in the young telekine’s skull. “It’s a far cry from a peaceful meadow with chirping birds and fresh air. The Cabal running this tournament must not believe in pleasant arenas.”
“It is nothing more than a battlefield with its own unique challenges, challenges we must overcome and master to achieve victory,” stated Sensei Silas Gesse, his voice discreetly quiet. “Do not fret over aesthetics. Instead, look around and tell me what you see. What can you tell me about this place?”
“I see a steel mill, master – what else would I see?” sighed Jacob, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “It looks like the one my dad used to work in. The workers must have cleared out all of a sudden, though.”
“That’s a start, but look beyond what it is in terms of labels,” Silas replied. “Tell me what it is to us right now.”
“Well, it’s loaded with a lot of potential weapons,” he answered.
“And?”
“And hiding places. Clearly, the Cabal did not choose this arena with a swift, mindless battle in mind. Victory here will hinge as much on cunning and wits as it will power.” He glanced around, examining his surroundings with a different purpose in mind. “There are a lot of hazards that we will surely need to contend with, but if we can do it on our terms, we’ll have the advantage.”
“Go on,” Gesse prompted, the faintest smile appearing on the old man’s face.
“Ugh, always a lesson with you,” Jacob grumbled. “Fine. Unless we’re fighting a pair of ninjas, we should be able to hide in this metal jungle and get the drop on our opponents. We need to be the ones who find them, not the other way around.”