>>5936553He briefly struggles and eventually manages to get some air back into his lungs. “Sometimes…” he rasps out. “Sometimes the world just doesn’t have any higher meaning to it. Sometimes people just fight. There isn’t a scheme to it, there’s not always a moral quandary. Sometimes blows just flow down from the sky like rain, and there’s no reason to talk about it.”
With that, he’s got no more to say. The two of you carry on like that for almost an hour. You don’t manage to hit him again, but he’s also not trying to simply bully you into submission anymore.
It’s ironic, you think. Since he attacked you, you hadn’t said a thing. It was Naoki who did the talking, and it was he himself who talked himself into the purposelessness of it. Regardless, you have an awareness that in some oblique way he’s proven himself wrong.
There was no such thing as pure violence happening in a vacuum. Even in this case, a training exercise, one of the purest expressions of fighting that could be imagined, there was still a higher meaning to the combat. There was always something to be learned, and every strike was just a smaller part of a greater whole: A fight, a battle, a war, the reason for the war, the battle, the fight, and the reason behind every strike.
Every blow was illuminating, an expression of a higher order that hovered just beyond the edge of conscious thought, but was nevertheless omnipresent. You can’t help but imagine that somewhere out of sight someone or something was watching you with great interest.
>You have roughly 6 days more of just walking before you make it to your first stop at the aptly named Sunlight Inn Town. What are you going to do with your next six days?>Do you have any plans for what you’re going to do when you get there?>Otomo’s outlook is colored by your general adherence to the Will of Fire and conceptions of benevolent justice, even if he’s also turned out a bit melancholy and alienated. Is there anything you want to add or change about Otomo’s growing moral philosophy? What is your ninja way? 