The morning mist clung to the trees like old breath, heavy and still. Raizō sat beside a dying campfire, its last embers cracking in the cold air. Across from him, Taren leaned against a slab of bark, lazily carving lines into the soil with the tip of his spear. Neither spoke for a long while — the silence between them had grown comfortable since their departure from the Veyraen settlement. Raizō finally broke it.

  “You said something yesterday, about lightning.”

  Taren’s ear twitched slightly. “Yeah. I said it dances around you.”

  Raizō looked down at his hands. His fingers were still wrapped, calloused from years of training back in Tokyo, but they trembled faintly. “I don’t feel anything. No current. No heat. Just… the same as before.”

  Taren gave a toothy grin, half amusement, half disbelief. “That’s because you’re trying to feel it the way mortals do. You’re still thinking like a man who bleeds red.”

  Raizō didn’t respond. He glanced toward the horizon, the light between the clouds shifting like liquid silver. It reminded him of a lab light back at the university. Focus on what’s constant, his professor used to say. If you understand the pattern, you understand the power. He remembered Arin, standing at the front of the lab during one of their group projects.

  Power is only for those who can command it.

  That smug smirk. The six faces around him were laughing as though it were law. Raizō had ignored them then, choosing instead to study the patterns of discharge on the oscilloscope. He’d noticed that even static followed rhythm — buildup, pause, release. Maybe that was what Taren meant. They traveled for hours through the Wildlands, the terrain oscillating between glassy marsh and spindled trees blackened by old lightning strikes. The air was alive with distant rumbling, not thunder, but something heavier, older. At times, they’d stop so Taren could listen to the ground. He claimed he could hear the “pulse” of the land. Raizō couldn’t hear anything, only the ringing in his ears that never truly went away since the Ruins.

  “You’re too stiff,” Taren muttered as they walked. “Power doesn’t like hesitation. You think. I move. That’s the difference between us.”

  Raizō exhaled slowly. “And yet you still got hit last time.”

  Taren barked a laugh. “Touché.”

  The banter was brief, but it grounded them. It made the journey human. That evening, after setting camp near a ridge of petrified trees, Taren decided it was time to test Raizō’s words.

  “Show me how you fight,” he said, planting his spear into the dirt.

  Raizō stood, tightening his gloves. “You really want me to hit you?”

  “Try.”

  The two circled each other. Raizō’s stance was deliberate, Kyokushin base, knees low, weight centered. His breathing slowed. Every motion was practiced, mechanical, until Taren lunged with predatory speed.

  Raizō reacted instinctively, block, pivot, counter with a short hook. Taren deflected, smirking. “You fight like you’re thinking of equations.”

  “I was taught control,” Raizō muttered, launching a kick. Taren caught it, twisted, and slammed him into the ground.

  The impact forced the air from his lungs. Taren crouched beside him, eyes gleaming with faint golden light. “Control is fine. But tell me — what happens when control burns you alive?”

  Raizō pushed himself up, coughing. The world around him shimmered, faint arcs of light pulsed at the edge of his vision. The static in the air grew sharper, louder. He blinked, and for a moment, his heartbeat echoed. He felt it. Not as energy, but as rhythm. Buildup. Pause. Release. The fire beside them hissed as a single spark leapt from his hand and split the ground.

  Taren froze. “…Now that’s more like it.”

  Raizō looked down at his palm, where faint blue threads crawled between his fingers, fading as quickly as they appeared.

  He exhaled shakily. “I didn’t— I didn’t mean to—”

  Taren grinned. “You didn’t mean to, yet it happened. That’s instinct. The body knows before the mind does.”

  Raizō frowned, flexing his hand. The memory of Arin’s voice returned — “Power belongs to those who can command it.” He thought about how wrong that was. Power didn’t obey commands. It answered only to truth. Later, when Raizō had fallen asleep, Taren sat by the dying fire. The lightning scar that laced Raizō’s forearm still faintly glowed beneath his skin. He’d seen men touched by storm before, but never like this. This one didn’t wield lightning — it lived in him.

  He poked the fire with his spear and murmured quietly to himself, “Instinct meets intellect… if he learns to let one guide the other, he might actually survive.”

  He didn’t notice the faint static crawling through the grass around their camp, converging slowly toward Raizō like a pulse returning to its heart. The rain had not come, yet the air felt damp as if the clouds were watching them and waiting. Taren’s spear was buried in the dirt again, marking a rough perimeter around their camp. Raizō stood in the center, still sore from their last spar.

  “Again,” Taren said. “But this time, don’t think. Move.”

  Raizō exhaled, lowering his stance. “You keep saying that, but instinct isn’t a switch I can just flip.”

  “Then stop trying to flip it,” Taren said, pacing around him. “You think too much about movement, about breathing, about consequences. The storm doesn’t ask permission to strike.”

  He jabbed a finger toward the clouds. “You shouldn’t either.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Raizō closed his eyes. The sound of the wind brushing through the trees filled his ears, steady, consistent. He tried to mimic that steadiness in his breath. Buildup. Pause. Release.

  He threw a punch into the air, but there was nothing. Another, still nothing. On the third, a faint spark crawled across his knuckles and died. His jaw tightened. “There’s a method to this. A rhythm—”

  “There’s no rhythm,” Taren interrupted, his voice firm but not cruel. “There’s only moment. Either you’re in it, or you’re not.”

  They trained like that for hours. Raizō analyzed. Taren attacked. Each time Raizō calculated a counter, Taren changed his rhythm, a sudden feint, a wild charge, a low sweep that didn’t belong to any disciplined form. Eventually, Raizō stumbled backward, landing hard against a tree trunk. His knuckles were raw, his breath ragged.

  “You fight like a beast,” he muttered.

  Taren laughed. “And you fight like a book.”

  Raizō smirked faintly, despite himself. “You’re infuriating.”

  “I’m alive,” Taren said, grinning. “That’s why.”

  He crouched down, tracing a claw through the dirt. “You humans build walls around your power. Name it, study it, measure it. But the storm doesn’t want your measurements. It wants your trust, your emotions. You have to stop trying to own it.”

  Raizō’s gaze drifted to his hands again. The small burns across his knuckles pulsed faintly blue. Trust, the word sat in his chest like a foreign language. The last time he trusted anyone, it nearly got him killed.

  He stood again. “One more time.”

  This time, he didn’t think. He let Taren come first. A blur of movement, claws flashing. Raizō pivoted low, felt the air bend around him, and struck upward. Something inside him cracked, not bone, but pressure and light erupted from his palm. Taren was sent skidding back several meters, his spear barely catching his balance. The ground between them hissed where the lightning had struck, seared into a spiderweb of glowing cracks. For a long second, neither spoke.

  “You’re smiling,” Taren said finally, dusting himself off.

  Raizō hadn’t realized it. “It’s… different. I didn’t plan it.”

  “Exactly,” Taren said, smirking. “That’s instinct.”

  Raizō flexed his hand again, blue veins pulsed faintly beneath the skin. It didn’t feel like power. It felt like release. Like something long restrained was finally breathing again. They sat near the fire that night, their silhouettes framed by the soft, pale light of three moons.

  Taren leaned back on his elbows. “Tell me more about your world.”

  Raizō stared into the flames for a long while before answering. “It’s loud. Bright. Everyone’s trying to get somewhere, even if they don’t know where that is. I was… studying electricity. It made sense to me. It followed laws.” He paused, his tone tightening. “Until it didn’t.”

  Taren tilted his head. “You still think this is the same thing?”

  Raizō shook his head slowly. “No. This is different. This isn’t energy. It’s… alive.”

  Taren smiled faintly. “Then stop studying it. Start listening.”

  Raizō looked at him. “And if I can’t?”

  Taren shrugged. “Then it will keep talking until you do.”

  Taren finally slept, Raizō stayed awake, watching the sparks dance faintly along his skin. They weren’t violent anymore, they pulsed in time with his heartbeat, soft and rhythmic. He reached out to touch one of the scorched trees nearby. The moment his fingers brushed the bark, a faint pulse of light traveled through it, not destructive, but warm, almost soothing. The air smelled faintly of ozone and rain. Raizō smiled weakly.

  “You’re alive, huh?”

  A soft rumble of thunder answered from the distance, low, calm, like a heartbeat returning his own. The wind grew colder the farther north they traveled. The forests thinned into twisted trunks glazed with frost, and the air smelled faintly metallic, like the edge of a storm that never came. For days, Raizō and Taren walked in silence, their breaths visible in the pale air.

  “Frostmarch,” Taren finally muttered, his voice low. “They say it’s where secrets go to freeze… and where the desperate go to thaw them out. I told you, the wild always guides in the right direction.”

  Raizō adjusted the strap of his pack. “Sounds charming.”

  Taren grinned. “You’ll fit right in.”

  They had no map, only a random direction. The Wildlands gave way to barren ridges, where old trade markers jutted from the ground like bones. Raizō kept a small notebook, scribbling rough sketches of terrain and landmarks. He wasn’t trying to be a cartographer, he was trying to think. To understand.

  “You do that a lot,” Taren said one night, watching him draw by the campfire.

  “Think?”

  “Overthink.”

  Raizō’s pencil paused. “It’s how I stay sane.”

  Taren smirked. “No, it’s how you stay human. But the storm doesn’t care about sanity. It cares about motion.”

  Raizō looked at him. “You think I should stop being human?”

  Taren’s golden eyes reflected the firelight. “I think you already stopped the day they left you to die.”

  Raizō didn’t respond. He stared into the flames until the embers blurred, until they looked like lightning fading in reverse. The terrain became harsher. The air stung his lungs with each breath. But it was in this stillness that Taren trained him.

  “You’re trying to move the lightning,” Taren said, circling him. “That’s your problem. You don’t move lightning. You become the path it wants to take.”

  Raizō exhaled, closing his eyes. He remembered the scientific definition: Plasma channel formation between regions of high potential difference. He chuckled under his breath. Potential difference. That’s all he’d been, potential. The next strike wasn’t planned. It just happened. His right arm flickered with faint blue current — controlled, steady, like veins glowing from within.

  Taren watched, impressed. “That’s it. Not too much. Keep it humming, not screaming.”

  Raizō opened his eyes, and small arcs rolled off his forearms like lazy snakes. He could feel the storm’s rhythm again — the same one that saved him. But there was fear too. Because this time, he knew what it could do. At night, while the storm hummed faintly in the distance, Taren spoke of the world beyond.

  “The humans of Eryndor think their god rules everything,” he said, carving meat from a freshly hunted creature. “But they don’t understand what they worship. Their ‘light’ blinds them. They call themselves saviors, but they’re just chained to the oldest lie, that order means safety.”

  Raizō listened quietly. “And what about your people?”

  Taren shrugged. “We believe in balance. The storm takes, the storm gives. You resist it, you die. You move with it, you live. Everything else is noise.”

  Raizō thought about that. For someone so instinctual, Taren’s philosophy was painfully simple, but it worked. Maybe that’s what the lightning was too. Simple, brutal, and honest.

  “You talk like someone who’s given up,” Raizō said.

  Taren grinned. “No. I just stopped lying to myself.”

  By the end of the second week, the horizon had turned white. Mountains rose like teeth from the fog, and dark birds circled high above them. The temperature dropped with every mile, biting into their skin.

  Raizō pulled his coat tighter. “You sure this is the right way?”

  Taren chuckled. “Depends on what you’re looking for.”

  “I need information,” Raizō said. “About Eryndor. About what really happened.”

  Taren twirled his spear idly. “Then Frostmarch is your place. Nothing stays buried there, not even the dead.”

  Raizō frowned. “Sounds like you’ve been.”

  “Once.” Taren’s grin faded. “I swore I’d never go back.”

  He didn’t elaborate, and Raizō didn’t ask. Some silences weren’t meant to be broken. That night, as they camped near the edge of a frozen river, Taren handed Raizō his spear.

  “Try channeling it,” he said. “Not to attack, but to connect.”

  Raizō hesitated but obeyed. The wooden shaft felt cold in his hands. He took a slow breath and let the current rise, not forced, but allowed. The spear’s tip shimmered faintly, then sparked blue. The air vibrated softly. Snowflakes hovering midair for half a second before falling.

  Taren smiled faintly. “See? You don’t command lightning. You ask it to listen.”

  Raizō lowered the weapon, staring at the faint traces of electricity fading into the night. “Then what happens when it stops listening?”

  Taren looked at him, eyes glinting gold. “Then you remind it who survived the storm.”