The Great One's Journey

Call of the Abyss

It had been around four days after the canyon incident. His teacher had deemed him healthy enough to continue training yesterday.

That didn't mean he was at full power, though. When he tried to use his skill, it failed to activate. The Voice of the World informed him that because he had overused his skill, he had to wait a week for it to cool down. In other words he still had three days to go.

"Thirty one, thirty two, thirty three," counted Jack as he did his handstand push ups.

Ever since his teacher taught him how to handstand, he'd been doing it almost all the time. When he did this yesterday on the field, he earned the stares and giggles of the local girls and the jealousy of several boys.

Just as he was getting smug over his daily training routine, his teacher had to ruin it by saying, "Oh? Trying to impress girls, are you? Well, then. You should be able to do your daily THOUSAND push ups right now."

That cut him down a peg. Even if he did get used to training every day, asking an eleven year old to do a thousand handstand push ups would be a bit too much. Of course, he still did it (who knows what his teacher would've done if he skipped training), but he came out much more pathetic and tired in the end. That taught him to stop focusing on girls and keep focusing on getting stronger.

Which brought him to a question, "Why am I trying to become strong?"

The first thing he could think of was that he wanted to get his teacher's approval. Second was to be more like Johnson, who vowed to protect the orphanage. Third was because being strong is great. He wanted to be like the Great Nine; the group of heroes from all over the world united against the forces of the demon lord.

But he knew that if his teacher asked him that question, she would be dissatisfied with his answer. He didn't know why, he just had a gut feeling.

So, why was he doing this?

...

Jack walked around the place for a bit. From what he had gathered, this place was a nameless village in a fairly remote area in the forest near the canyons.

When he was walking, he was called out by some of the village children to play together. At first he felt conflicted. He was a disciple to a great sword master. He shouldn't be goofing around like this.

"Hey there," he heard someone call out to him. He looked to the side and saw a group of girls waving and giggling at him.

And just like that, his teacher's lesson yesterday was all but forgotten.

"H-hey," Jack tried to reply coolly as he walked over to the group.

The girl who called him waved at him and smiled, "Haven't seen you around here before. Are you new?"

To which he nodded and answered, "Yeah. I'm just passing by."

He then suddenly heard a wooshing sound from behind and immediately turned around and immediately kicked at it. He had left his bokken at the inn.

The thing he now realized was a ball then flew over back to the field. He saw a group of boys on the field looking at him, surprised.

The boy who looked like the other group's leader clicked his tongue before asking, "Yo. You wanna play ball?"

The boy didn't like the attention the new kid was getting and wanted to mess with him. He tried punting a ball to his head, but the new kid was more agile than he'd thought. He then thought of a new idea.

"Yeah, sure," Jack, ignorant of the boy's malicious intent, went ahead to the field, his head thinking that this would make him be able to show off to the first group.