Cultivating Heroism Read online

  He took Lance’s offer and allowed his teacher to drag him to his feet.

  Drake wasn’t paying any attention. He was looking at the girls to see if they’d seen him floor Mack. They were busy sparring—properly, with the actual techniques they’d been taught—rather than looking at Drake.

  “Sorry,” Lance said. “I thought that maybe going against someone with good technique would show him that there was more to it than just using brute force. I underestimated his pigheadedness.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Mack said. “I learn something from going up against someone with brute force like that too. You have to adjust your fighting style, and I didn’t.”

  Lance nodded. “You understand what I’m trying to teach here perfectly.” He clapped Mack on the shoulder. “Go and switch partners with Harry.”

  Harry was another of the jocks and he was sparring against Mack’s closest friend at the gym, Leroy. Leroy was a stack of muscle just like the football guys, but he was interested in perfecting the technique rather than flattening people smaller than him, so Mack and Leroy made a lot of progress when they sparred.

  “Hey dude,” Leroy said as Harry walked over to Drake with a slight limp. Leroy’s better technique and strength meant that he could flatten the football guys without lifting a finger. “Bit rough of Lance to put you with Drake.”

  “He explained why, it made sense.”

  Leroy nodded. “Cool. then let’s spar.”

  It was a good session that Mack came away from aching all over, but with certainty that his kicking technique had improved. As was standard, Lance closed the session with some general words of wisdom about things he’d picked up on during the day’s session, and then disappeared so that he could get to his car before his three hours ran out on the parking meter.

  The group gathered around one of the mats and considered going out for a drink like they always did, until enough people had come up with excuses that they decided to just head home instead.

  “I saw that kick you landed on Drake earlier,” Haley said, leaning closer so that Drake didn’t hear his name being mentioned. Neither of them wanted to have to deal with him entering the conversation. “I’d kill to be able to perfect something like that. I made Jenny work on them all evening with me, but I can’t even come close.”

  “You should ask Lance to spar with you. When you try it on him he’ll be able to tell you exactly how to change it to make it better. That’s how I learned.”

  “It’s so intimidating sparring with Lance though! I don’t know how you do it.”

  Mack laughed. “After the first time, you realize he’s got no intention of styling on you. He really wants to help everyone learn.”

  Haley shifted her weight, still uncertain. “You could just teach me instead. You’re just as good as him at it.”

  He forced himself not to get excited by the opportunity. Her long black hair was tied up in a pony tail that swished as she moved her head. She smelled of something like a mix between roses and heaven, and her body was a perfect hourglass shape while still being slim and firm. He’d had a crush on Haley since she’d started at the gym, but he knew that she wasn’t interested in him like that, so he’d been content to share conversation about Muay Thai with her instead. He wasn’t under any illusions. “I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you how to change it though,” he admitted. “We can give it a go next session and if I’m useless you can ask Lance. He’s really not as scary as he seems. Honestly I can’t believe you’ve gone this long without sparring with him.”

  She gave him a soft punch on the arm. “One day I’ll reach your brave heights.” Then she turned back to the group, who had by now voiced their excuses as to why they wouldn’t be going for a drink after work.

  People started to dissipate and without the distraction of the sparring, Mack’s mind returned to the book he’d been working on most of the day.

  It wouldn’t hurt to go back and at least finish reading it. It was like he’d decided earlier: it didn’t matter whether people recognized his effort, he knew he’d done something important, and there was a chance this book was worth a lot of money given its donor. Getting a big score like that for charity was always some overtime.

  Instead of jumping on the bus that would have taken him home, he made the short trek back to the office and swiped into the building with his key card. It was silent at this time of night, and he meandered his way through the lobby and up the stairs guided by the dim glow of the evening lights. He didn’t want to turn on the lights and risk drawing attention from another employee who might ask him a bunch of questions or distract him from that fascinating book. When he reached the storeroom he had to turn the light on, and he grabbed the book from place he’d stored it just hours ago.

  The office was much more bearable at this time of night, and he sat at his desk in silence with just his personal lamp switched on. He’d made a note of which page he got up to during the office, but because they weren’t numbered he had to flick through until he found the one that started with the phrase he’d jotted down.

  He had no idea how much time had passed when his head began to spin. The words turned to blurs on the page as though someone had put frosted glass in between him and the book. It was so rapid that he couldn’t catch himself; couldn’t look away or press his palms to his eyes and rub the sleep away.

  The letters seemed to rearrange themselves into patterns and suddenly it was like he was looking at another language. He forced his gaze away and the rest of the office still looked the same as normal. He thought maybe he saw something lurking in the shadows, a figure that he could see clearly outlined one minute and then gone the next. He blinked and looked back to the words.

  They were back to English.

  He pressed a hand to his forehead, but it didn’t feel warm. He didn’t have a headache.

  He looked at the time on his watch. “Oh, shit.” It was nearly eleven. He’d been there for hours. “No wonder I’m hallucinating. I haven’t eaten in twelve hours.”

  Now he’d noticed it, his hunger seemed to consume him, clawing at his stomach and making him feel nauseous. He shut the book and flirted for a second with the idea of taking it home with him so he could keep reading. It was already too late though, he had to get up in less than eight hours and he wasn’t even home yet, and he would lose his job if he was caught taking a lot item home, no matter how good his intentions were.

  So he forced himself to put it back in the storeroom and then went next door to the greasy takeout place, where he got a burger and fries and tucked it under his arm as he tried to hail a cab. The buses had stopped running an hour ago.

  It took him nearly ten minutes to find a cab to stop for him. But his mind was completely occupied by trying to figure out what was going to happen at the end of the book, and why it had been donated to the charity in the first place.

  Chapter Three

  The planet was exactly as Mack had imagined it when he was reading. Had he ever gotten home? Was he dreaming? Swirling grey, red, and orange clouds covered a large planet split into different biomes that made it look patchwork. He started off zoomed back, as though he was floating above it.

  Then he went rapidly forward. He didn’t have a body, he couldn’t have, because he felt no wind in his hair as he sped toward the planet. He didn’t need to breathe. The vacuum wasn’t making his lungs collapse in on themselves.

  He was just there. Floating. And observing.

  He flew toward a biome that looked blue from the sky, but when he got closer he realized it wasn’t water. The space was covered in what looked like trees, grown so close together that he could see nothing beyond the turquoise canopy.

  Not until he was suddenly beneath it, having passed through the leaves as though they didn’t exist.

  He would have gasped if he’d had lungs. The trees were much taller than he’d anticipated, and beneath their cover was a sprawling city that was up in flames. He hovered just beneath the canopy for a w
hile and watched as men and women who must have been larger than life used extravagant power to reap destruction on the city.

  A man wearing centurion-style metal armor clapped his hands and a beam of pure orange energy appeared in a cone in front of him. The house that had been there a minute ago evaporated.

  A woman wearing armor so skimpy it couldn’t have provided any real protection did a forward flip from standing, and as her legs followed her over, her feet cast what looked like small metal balls into the sky. There must have been at least two dozen of them. They hovered there for a moment before all glowing red and flying toward a nearby house and exploding it.

  Mack tried to speak, he tried to demand what the fuck was going on, but nothing happened. He was a captive audience.

  He whooshed forward again and his instinctual fear when he’d seen the city on fire was revealed to be true. There were dead bodies everywhere. Some charred so badly they were unrecognizable, some with missing limbs, or wounds that had caused them to bleed out, and some still in the agonizing process of dying.

  Some of them he wasn’t sure were people at all. There were some covered in fur that could have been animals but wore clothes like a human would. Some were reptilian. Plenty seemed to be a mixture of things. But what was worse, was that some looked so close to human that he couldn’t help but imagine San Diego suffering the same fate.

  He turned abruptly away from the catastrophe beneath him just in time to come face-to-face with one of the authors of destruction. A large humanoid with graying hair platted down to his waist and a beard that reached his navel. The man’s eyes appeared to glow a sinister red, and Mack didn’t know if they were really that color, or if it was just because of the fire reflecting in them.

  The man seemed to look straight at Mack. Just when he pulled his lips back, as though he was about to speak, Mack woke up.

  He was breathing heavily, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He kicked off his comforter and tried to slow his pounding heart. “Jesus,” he said, laying back down. “Just a dream. Just a dream.”

  A very vivid dream though. His subconscious had been captured by the strange book at work just as much as his imagination had. It was exactly as the words had described it in his mind, but none of the events he’d witnessed in his dream matched what he’d read in the book so far. The book itself was much tamer. It was almost pastoral. A slice-of-life from a faraway planet.

  When he looked at his bedside table, it was just three minutes until his alarm was set to go off. He canceled the alarm and dragged himself out of bed, heading straight for the kitchen to make himself a morning coffee and a large breakfast. His stomach still felt empty, and he was sure that was causing his mind to be overactive. He needed to eat more when he’d had that good of a workout the day before.

  Work was the same as ever. As promised, Derek and Jeremy had acquired a new mini basketball to throw across the office, and Mack was seated right in the middle of them. After his stunt the day before, he ended up with many more hits to the side of his head.

  This time he was so engrossed in the book that he barely noticed. He never plucked the ball off the floor beside his chair, but forced one of them to get up and retrieve it so they could keep playing. He received a whack on the head from the ball in the hand of whoever had come fetch it each time, and it hurt more than he wanted to admit, but he never protested. It was easier to ignore them and focus on his own task. Not just easier, but almost freeing—he felt driven to get to the bottom of this book’s mystery. Stopping would have almost caused him actual pain now when he was so wrapped up in it.

  He was well over halfway into the book now, and it had just started to get truly interesting.

  He recognized characters from it. The man with the cone of energy, the woman with the silver metal balls, and the man with the gray hair and beard.

  They were all there. Not destroying cities, but ruling them.

  I must have read this before somewhere, he decided. That was the only explanation. Something he’d read in his childhood and forgotten, or something that had been adapted into a terrible TV movie that he’d half paid attention to some time. Now he’d gotten further along it was all coming back to his subconscious mind, he just couldn’t place it yet. That had to be it.

  It made him read quicker though, sure that when the book came to a climax it would make something click in his head, and where he’d seen the story before would come rushing back to him.

  Only there was no climax. The book ended just as it had begun, without protagonist or antagonist. It was more like a history book than a story. Maybe it was even closer to a philosophical book. It followed the history of the planet and watched people rise and fall. Demise was always caused by overconfidence, by too much greed or desire for praise or lust. People worked hard to get where they were, and then they threw it away by giving into their selfish instincts.

  And none of it was jogging Mack’s memory, beyond the faces he’d imagined in his dreams. Maybe he’d seen a spin-off of this book, with the same characters but in an epic story that made it more interesting for a TV audience.

  He flicked back a few pages to a line that had stuck in his head:

  Only read this aloud if you are willing to dedicate yourself to cultivating heroism.

  It was followed by a small paragraph detailing the moral of the story.

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a while and looked around the office. Derek and Jeremy were eating lunch, which meant they were quiet for a short while. The others were chatting in their small kitchen.

  He opened his mouth and then shut it again. He couldn’t just read out a paragraph like that in the middle of the office. They’d laugh him out of the building if they found out.

  It was stupid, but he couldn’t resist reading it aloud anyway. Maybe there was something in the way the words were pronounced that revealed some kind of hidden meaning. He realized, as a cold sweat formed on his face and neck, that he was sincerely afraid of this thing. He still had to know, if only to set his mind at ease and put the stupid idea that this was anything but fiction out of his head.

  Closing the book, he walked out of the office trying not to look too shifty. Instead of going down to the store room where someone might interrupt him, he instead went to the toilet block on the same level as the storeroom. This one was always empty, because barely anyone worked on that floor, and everyone took the elevator instead of the stairs, which put them on the opposite side of the floor to the restroom. Mack always used it though, because no one else went there to mess it up.

  Opening the door, he double-checked to make sure there was no one inside before locking himself in one of the cubicles.

  He scratched the back of his head, hesitating on the first word and feeling like an idiot.

  Then he went for it.

  The words rolled off his tongue easily. There was nothing difficult about the language. It just felt natural. Shit, it felt amazing.

  “I wish to devote myself to becoming strong of character, not so that I may beguile others or win favor, but because it is the foundation of greatness.

  I wish to devote myself to standing up for what is good and fair, not in expectation of rewards or accolades, but because it is right.

  I wish to devote myself to learning and mastering each new skill that is required for my journey, not in competition with others or to sate my ego, but because it is true to my being.

  I wish to dedicate my life to cultivating heroism!”

  He practically shouted that last line without meaning to. Mack waited a moment, looking around the empty toilet stall as though he half expected some kind of swirling portal to open up or a magical guide to float through the wall. It didn’t reveal any of the secrets he’d hoped for though. They were just words.

  He shut the book and felt stupid. Maybe the donor was playing a trick on the charity. Maybe there was a hidden camera and it was all being filmed so he could laugh at his prank.

  Then the bathroom van
ished.

  Mack, who had been seated on the toilet lid, fell to the floor in surprise when it was suddenly whisked out from under him. A startled cry left his mouth as he landed on uneven ground.

  “What the fuck?”

  He tried to look around but was overcome by sudden nausea, and doubled over, retching but not losing his breakfast. His head spun and he was forced to close his eyes for a moment, despite the overwhelming desire to look around at his new surroundings. “I was so sure I woke up this morning,” he muttered. “What a fucking long dream.”

  “You are not dreaming.” The voice crackled on the word ‘not’ as though it was coming through a speaker.

  Mack kept his eyes closed, breathed deeply, and waited for the wave of nausea to pass.

  When he opened them, he was greeted by a hologram. It shimmered blue in front of him, translucent and life-size.

  He was in a temple of some sort, he guessed. The stone was grass green and formed walls as high as his office block. Instead of cement holding the bricks together, a metal grid sat over them with spines jutting out and sticking into the stone. The ceiling moved. Well, the images painted there did anyway. Mack blinked and rubbed his eyes, sure he must be imagining the way the figures on the ceiling fought each other. They were using the same sort of insane powers that he’d seen the villains in his dream using: blasts of energy, the ability to manipulate the ground beneath them, conjured projectiles being fired from hands and feet. They looked like paintings, but instead of a freeze frame of a battle, they were fighting each other.

  Then there was a flicker, just like the hologram, and he realized it was a projection of some sort.

  His head jerked back to the hologram in front of him. The man looked human, with hair worn in limp strands down to his waist and a pointed nose. His lips were thin and in a straight line. It was hard to tell his coloring because of the light blue glimmer of the hologram.