Chapter 16

Five years had passed in the valley, which was inhabited by Dragon and his brothers.

They were ten years old now, but their bodies let them appear like fifteen to sixteen year old youths. During the five years they steadily raised the amount of training, until they did every exercise with multiple additional stone weights.

And the training bore fruit. The five boys looked completely different in comparison to their appearance five years ago. Their long black hair was almost flowing to their knees, even though they often cut the hair with sharpened stones. Their faces had become much more masculine and were no longer the faces of small boys.

But there were two much more outstanding characteristics that changed on the bodies of the five.

The first were the obvious muscles, which were all over their body. Their arms were triple the size as five years ago and brimming with power. Their chests and stomachs were trained to the max, as one could hardly miss the outstanding chest musculature or the conspicuous six-pack. Their hips and legs also gained more muscles, the upper legs were almost double the size as their arms.

The most obvious changes on the bodies of the five however was something entirely different. And that change came in form of drawings on their skin, exactly on the same spots their old bodies were tattooed, before they died.

Those drawings didn’t form any specific shape yet, but the five brothers could more or less guess which form the drawings would take.

The drawings appeared after their inner energy started to take a visible form in their heads, which they could observe with their inner eyes. The energy rose with the consummation of the spring water and the leaves in combination with the hellish training no normal human could accomplish.

It would be a giant coincidence if the drawings wouldn’t form in to the shape of a Dragon on Dragon’s body, a Tiger on Tigers body, a Hawk on Hawk’s body and so on.

Today was the day the five brothers finally finished their foundation training.

It was a glorious day for the five and as they looked at each other obvious pride could be seen.

“We finally did it and completed the foundation training from hell!” Dragon said solemnly and gazed at his brothers with a gentle, yet proud smile.

“Yes!! Now we can start practicing our individual techniques!!” Hawk said with an excited look in his eyes.

That was the truth. After the completion of the foundation training, which the five brothers accomplished like no one else, they could learn their old techniques again. They perfected these techniques specifically for themselves, and even named them. That was the reason the five brothers names were Dragon, Tiger, Hawk, Snake and Turtle as they originally were nameless orphans. They named themselves after their techniques. Thus their names were titles at the same time.

Dragon’s technique was a modified version of MMA, which focused on the unpredictable movement-and attack pattern. Except, instead of the normal MMA he included various other techniques into his own, such as Dim Mak, the art of winning a fight through hitting various vital points every human body had, or the flying-and round house kicks of the basic martial arts, like the Axe Kick, Roundhouse Kick, Flying Kick, Back Kick and so on. He named this technique

‘The Dying Dragon’ on a poetic evening, thus gaining his name. He was the first of the five brothers that developed his own technique.

Tiger’s technique was a modified version of Muay Thai, which heavily focused on super close combat with his fists and elbows and output of strength. The speciality of his technique was a strange movement technique, which he developed himself. This movement technique makes it possible to lift his feet only to a centimetre above the ground, letting him easily and fast shift his position, while still maintaining a steady foothold. The only downside of his technique was that he traded the attack power of his legs for the movement technique. He named the technique ‘Heavy Tiger’, earning him his name.

Hawk’s technique was a modified version of the basic martial art kicks. All the moves (Axe Kick, Back Kick, Front Kick, Push Kick, Roundhouse Kick and Side Kick) were heavily modified by him allowing him to attack in a never ending combination of kicks, all chained together and from every position. This changed the more or less balanced technique into a purely attack based technique, which made him vulnerable. So, to counter the weakness of his technique, Hawk focused on speed. This way he could relentlessly attack and escape in critical moments, transforming him into a demon on the battlefield, able to kill even groups of enemies on his own. This technique was named ‘Immortal Hawk’ by him, but his brothers and enemies only called him ‘Crazed Bird’. Thus after they agreed on a compromise and named the technique ‘Crazed Hawk’, earning Hawk his name.

Snake practiced a modified version of Dim Mak, the technique revolving around the vital points of the human and animal body. His modifications allowed for the normally not actively practiced technique to become a dangerous and life threatening method to fight. He focused on nimbly whirling around the enemies, searching for openings and as soon as one was found he attacked as fast as lightning. Its only weakness was the need of finding an opening, a weak spot. He happily named this technique ‘Poisonous Snake’, because of the potential to kill with one strike, just like strong poison and thus earned his name.

Turtle’s technique wasn’t really a modified technique, but just simply the durability of his body working together with unstoppable force and wrestling. If he grabbed someone that poor guy was doomed. And if he was surrounded by too many enemies he would shield his face with his crossed arms, blocking almost all of the damage from close combat attackers, even if they had swords or other close combat weapons. At some point even bullets could only penetrate a few centimetres into his flesh, which did not really harm him. His weakness was, that his movements were really slow, except for the grabs of his grappling and wrestling moves. As they realized the terrifying potential of this technique they sat together and, after some discussions, named it ‘Diamond Turtle’.

This was how Dragon and his four brothers got their names, together with their perfected techniques. At least at that point they were perfect.

After the five brothers discussed their training they decided that three people would train alone and one would train with Turtle, as he needed to be hit to build up the hardness of his body. At the end they decided that Dragon, Tiger, Hawk and Snake would switch every day, so that everyone could at some days train alone and on one day train together with Turtle. Everyone agreed to this solution and thus they decided to relax for the rest of the day, as they hadn’t really relaxed in a long time and they knew that they wouldn’t relax when they started training their respective techniques.

So all of them sat together in the small pond, talking and laughing with each other until late into the night. After that they decided to get some sleep and left the pool.

In this night Dragon was abruptly woken from his sleep and as he observed his surroundings he realized that the blue, normally opaque pond was emitting a strange blue glow.

He stood up and went towards the pond, only to realize that the water of the pond was crystal clear. That never happened before.

‘Strange…wait what’s that?!’ Dragon thought alarmed and gazed concentrated into the depths of the pond. There was a small hole, at the side of the pond, looking like it was drilled with a big drill from earth.

The blue glowing light came from this hole.

Dragon decided to take a look and jumped into the pond, not even caring about his clothes. As soon as his body hit the water a strange scene flashed in front of his eyes.

An icy desert, the wind was whirling above the desolate lands with a howling sound. Suddenly, directly in front of Dragon’s eyes something rose slowly from underground. It was a tower, fully build out of ice. Then a flash, the pictures vanished and Dragon found himself swimming in the pond.

The mysterious glowing light was still present and so he dove down and, without thinking too much about it reached into the hole.

He had to stretch his hind as hard as he could before he finally felt something iin his hand.

Dragon pulled the hand out of the hole and looked inside. A blue stone was lying on his palm, slowly pulsating with blue light. Mysterious runes were scratched into the surface. Dragon didn’t know what it was and he also didn’t know where he could search for answers about this strange object, thus he simply put the glowing runic stone into the pocket of his belt.

Fortunately the glowing stopped.

After this incident he went to bed again and at the next morning he was too excited to finally start training his beloved technique again and thus forgot about the stone temporary.

On this morning the second half of their long training started, which would continue until all five brothers were on the same level as they were on earth.

(WN: So I wrote until 11:00 am on that day, which is kind of fucked up and this is the last chapter of that session, hope its not too obvious that I was tired as hell…)