Kiriya woke up minutes before the sunrise, lately he made the early getting up a habit of his morning routine. This night he didn’t sleep well, several times he woke up dripping with sweat. He was having the same dream over and over again for the past two or three weeks. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept good. The dream he was constantly having was about his father. Not that he could remember him because he died before Kiriya was born. As he sat on his bed, thinking about the gloomy dream, the sun had already risen. The plan for today was only to train. Kiriya stood up, put on his clothes, got his rusty wakizashi and left the house without having a breakfast.

When he began going out early in the morning, his mother was quite worried about him, but after couple months had passed she did not mention it so often. They would get into fights for his early leaving and because sometimes he did not come back before eleven pm. Of course, this was all because his training and studying duties.

This morning, Kiriya did not go for his usual run but decided that he will compensate for it in training. The path leading to the practice area, that Kiriya and Takuya built two years ago, was not that long. It took him approximately twenty minutes to get there. Takuya was the fatherly figure that Kiriya never had. They shared a deep connection and it’s safe to say that Takuya was Kiriya’s role model. When he had problems, he never talked about them with his mother, but rather he went to Takuya for advice. The first exercise of his training routine was meditating. Kiriya took off his shirt and sat on the cold ground, which was covered with green and dark brown colored leaves. When meditating he did not think about his life. Takuya had told him that in order to achieve the best effect from meditating, the mind had to be clear the whole time.

After two hours of meditating in the forest with cold wind going through him, Kiriya decided that it’s time to train his sword technique. He took out the rusty wakizashi from his back pouch, looking it and thinking about the dullness of the blade. The next four hours passed quickly in changing stances, striking the practice dummy and practicing defensive techniques. Kiriya started to feel hungry, it was good that his mother always prepared him a couple of sandwiches the previous night. After having a twenty minute break, he decided it was time to go back to training. The final thing he needed to train today was his strength. Takuya had told him about a new training method that, if done correctly, would increase his strength by thirty percent. The method consisted of doing an exercise for a total of twenty sets, with the first set starting with ten repetitions and every next set making one more repetition. The resting period between sets had to be no more than sixty seconds. Kiriya was always considered relatively strong for his age, compared to the children of his age, and thought that this method would not be hard for him. After finishing the twelfth set of push-ups he started to feel the lactic acid in his muscles.  This was harder than he had anticipated. Would he be able to finish this damn exercise? The other major trait of his character was his unbelievable stubbornness. He would finish this stupid exercise even if it costed him his life. The last couple of sets were really hard for him. He started to feel pain in the tendons of his arms, it did not matter things like that would stop him.

Kiriya did not realize that he had fallen asleep on the cold ground. It was already dark and it was time to leave. His mother hated when he was coming late, which happened more frequently than it should for a 16 year old boy. The dark did not bother him, he enjoyed walking through the dark forest and looking up to the sky, full of stars.  It took Kiriya around thirty minutes to arrive at his house, he was walking relatively slow. When he came home, his mother was already asleep. He did not bother to have supper. Kiriya removed his dirty clothes, emptied his backpack, left the rusty wakizashi on the floor and fell on his bed. This time it was not difficult going to sleep.

{Exit topic}
WC - 761
Stats to increase:
Strength E-0 to D-0 (750 words)