[Irn League] The Zen Of War

[Briarheart]

[[Closed to Philomel.]]

Find your center.

Take a deep breath... and hold.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Good. Now exhale.

Take another breath.... and hold.

Purge your mind of all doubt. You are the master of your Self. Your body obeys your every command.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Very good. Exhale.

One last breath. You must purge your mind of all doubt. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Exhale.

Open your eyes...

...and promptly fall to my hands and knees and vomit anyway.

Thick, acrid liquid rushes to the ground. It looks like congealed beef stew, minus the vegetables. It doesn't smell much better. Bits of it splash onto my nice new leather gloves and the cuffs of my shirt. The rest of it starts to clump up near the edges of the pool, mixing in with the pale color of the sand, forming a nice little protective wall to keep the rest from spreading any further.

I take a moment to scoop some of the nearby sand over the rest of it. Out of sight, out of mind.

A very foreign, very furious string of words ripped through the air. I felt the vines of my neck tingle as I tried to make out the source. While I couldn't understand what they meant, half of them most certainly were curses. Looking around, I caught the sight of this squat, bald little man dressed in a plain faded orange robe. His only flourish was a wide red sash with gold trimming draped over his shoulder that wrapped around his waist.

He shook a fist at me, and I silently slid my mythril face mask back into place and deflected his outburst with a wave of my vomit-stained middle finger. Eventually, his unintelligible ranting died down to grumbling and muttering as he turned around and left.

Wiping the little dribble of crap that stuck to my chin off on my sleeve, I found the energy to stand up. Had to admit, I was still feeling a bit queasy from the whole ordeal. And I looked like a mess. A well-dressed mess, but a mess nonetheless. Beige stains mixed with clumps of sand decorated me like a harvest festival tree. I gave myself a quick pat down, wiping off my slacks and sleeves and gloves. The bits of my lunch and sand slid off with nary a trace left behind, leaving me looking like the world's freshest, most villainous casino dealer. Gods bless the stain-resistant powers of enchanted clothing.

And fuck the Ai'Brone's teleportation magic with the rustiest of Aurelianus Drak'shal's eldritch adult toys.

Where the hell did they dump me this time? I took a few seconds to look around. At first glance, it seemed like my kind of fabricated arena to kick someone's teeth in. Maybe

I had seen drawings of places like this in a few of those picture epics you have to read from right to left. Akashiman zen gardens. They usually set them up near their temples, or other various places of importance or interest. This one was in the backyard of a temple, or tea house, or something. It was rectangular in shape, fenced in on two sides by the temple (or tea house) itself, while the other two sides were tall stonework.

Roughly two-thirds of the yard were dedicated to the pit of sand I found myself kneeling in at first. The entirety of the border was lined with smooth fist-sized rocks. Six jagged boulders that rose to my knee sat equidistant from one another in little circles of grass. The sand itself had been meticulously raked in a checkerboard pattern, each square measuring a foot and a half on each side and crafted with nine perfect lines spaced two inches apart.

Interrupted only by the pair of hand prints and the oblong splotch of darkened sand near the edge at my feet.

I could see why I got my earhole chewed off by that monk. Something like this probably took a lot of effort--effort that was presently wasted and will be further so in the near future, of course. The garden was kept in pristine condition. Not a single weed was to be seen in the grass, which was itself cut down to a perfect two and a half inches. Off in the distance, beyond the walls, I could hear the chirping of birds and the unmistakable splashing of a nearby stream.

All that was missing was my opponent. No idea who that was or when they were going to show up, of course.

See, I signed up for this little thing called the Iron League. Advertisements were posted in every tavern I liked to frequent whenever I made it to Radasanth. If you're looking for a bunch of people who want to beat the shit out of one another for fame and coin, you could put up papers in worse places. And considering that, frankly, I don't get as much exercise as I'd like anymore, being cooped up in that abandoned fort deep in Concordia, I figured why the hells not?

It'd be like the good ol' days, in the Dajas Pagoda. Apparently, the organizers took a glance at the records the monks keep in the Citadel about its patrons. Even walking into the whole thing blindly, I had a pretty decent standing.

Now, to hope that whoever showed up was enough of a puss to take a swift kick to the nethers and a loss.