Jack found Akiko and Saburo sitting on the steps. He slumped down next to them.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Akiko, clearly concerned that the lesson had taken a great toll on Jack.

‘Fine. But you won’t believe what I just saw…’ replied Jack and he told them about Sensei Yamada’s startling abilities.

‘In the name of Buddha, Jack! Even I can work that one out,’ said Saburo dumbfounded. ‘He is sohei!’

‘Sohei? But I thought all the warrior monks were killed by Nobunaga?’

‘Clearly, not all of them,’ said Saburo, gazing in awe at the Buddha Hall. ‘I bet you Sensei Yamada can strike a man dead just using his ki!’

‘Here comes Kiku,’ said Jack, seeing the little girl emerge from the Hall of Lions and run across the courtyard towards them.

Kiku raced up the stone steps.

‘What is it?’ asked Akiko, worried by Kiku’s obvious urgency.

‘Yamato has run away!’

35: THE SWITCH

35

THE SWITCH

‘Jack-kun! Jack-kun! Jack-kun!’

Jack blinked into the bright summer sunlight. It was going to be another scorching day, he thought, as he was drawn out of the cool shade of the Hall of Lions and into the baking courtyard by the cheers of the gathered students.

The past three months had been a gruelling schedule of relentless training for Jack, Akiko and Saburo. Yamato, whose absence had been keenly felt by all of them at first, had been almost forgotten in the face of such an onslaught of instruction. Jack had lost count of the number of ‘cuts’ they had practised with the bokken to improve their kenjutsu, the quantity of arrows they had shot, lost or broken in kyujutsu, and there was not a single part of their bodies that hadn’t been bruised during taijutsu.

On top of that, Jack had needed to fit in clandestine training sessions with Sensei Yamada in his attempt to learn Chō-geri with the hope of revealing the meaning to his vision. But the intricacies of the complex technique still eluded him. He had done everything Sensei Yamada instructed, but he simply was not good enough. At the rate he was going, it would take him years to master Chō-geri.

‘I won’t ever be able to do this,’ Jack had said in despair as he’d landed upon his back for the fifth time, barely a week before the Taryu-Jiai.

‘Whatever you believe, will be, Jack-kun,’ replied Sensei Yamada matter-of-factly. ‘It’s not the technique you need to master, it is yourself.’

That was all he had proffered as encouragement. This had left Jack more frustrated than ever at the sensei’s garbled teachings. Could the old monk not see that the technique was beyond his abilities? Yet still Sensei Yamada demanded he practise Chō-geri every night until his body ached with the effort.