Path of the Warrior Ch.1
By Shadow Ryu

The twenty-first of July was never much of a day for Ryu. While other people his age would be out celebrating their birthdays in various fashions, he was meditating in an empty alleyway in Thailand. He never made a big deal out of his birthday. It was just another day to train, another day to live. Whether or not he had just turned seventeen did not matter much to him.

It was his first time travelling alone. He had often travelled with his sensei and fellow student, Ken, most recently into China, where both he and his friend excelled against their opponents in a friendly competition. Gouken, his teacher, had advised him to start seeing the world as it was on his own. Ken had recently left their old training grounds to pursue his own future, and his sensei decided it would be a good time for his other student to also discover his own path. Although reluctant to leave at first as Ryu generally wanted to stay on the training grounds, his sensei eventually convinced him to leave. In truth, after spending the last month on his own, Ryu found himself enjoying his travels so much that he didn't understand why he was so initially against leaving Japan.

Ryu had travelled through south-east asia. He was now intending to make Bangkok his main destination, but was content now to spend a few days around Nakhon Ratchasima in the southern central part of Thailand. The past few days were particularly uneventful for him, at least compared to the fights he had gotten into in Laos the week before. He generally attracted a lot of attention with his uniform wherever he went, often that of a hostile nature. But it all led him to where he was now; doing his daily meditation chores to start of the next day of his journey.

In a sudden second, his was distracted from his meditation by a small sound of a light footstep on concrete a few feet from him. Looking over at where the noise originated from, he saw a young boy, no more than eight years old, looking at him in awe. The boy tensed up and shyly backed away when Ryu looked at him. Ryu noticed this and tried to relax the boy a bit by giving him a small smile.

"Hello." he said simply to the boy. "How are you?"

After greeting the boy, Ryu suddenly felt something coming toward his face. Reaching his hand up, he grabbed a foot that was about to hit him in the face. Turning his attention away from the boy, he saw four teenagers, three of them very skinny and one very fat, standing on the other side of him. Quickly leaping to his feet, he threw the one boy who had tried to kick him to the ground. He looked over at one of the skinny teens and realized that he was holding his dusty duffel bag.

"Thief?!" Ryu said to himself. He immediately grabbed the nearest thief and threw him into the alley wall, kicked him in the side with a roundhouse and tossed him over his shoulder. The three other thieves watched in awe of the quick attack and paused long enough to look at each other before realizing it was in their best interest to run away as quickly as possible. The one thief that had snatched Ryu's duffel bag took off first, with the other two trailing behind. As Ryu tried to pursue them, the more rotund thief who could not run nearly as quickly as the other two decided to stop running. Turning around, he produced a knife from his pocket and pointed it menacingly at his pursuer.

Ryu stopped, noticing the possible threat, but only to get his bearings. The moment the obese thief lunged forward with the knife, he kicked it out of his hand and spun around kicking his attacker in his belly and knocking him out of the way. Without delay, he then rushed on to try and catch up with the other two thieves who had now gotten a rather substantial head start. As the alleyway ended, he looked around quickly but could only see the skinnest one running down the west side of the street. Taking off as fast as he could, Ryu pursued. Due to the fact that this particular thief was not in great shape, visible by the way he was sucking air, it did not take him long to catch him. Grabbing him from behind, he pushed the skinny boy, who looked no older than fifteen into a wall of a store and looked into his eyes. The boy responded with a look as though he was fearing for his life.

"Where's your friend?" Ryu asked him in English. "The one with my bag?"

The boy only responded with the same scared look.

"Where can I find your friend?" Ryu asked again, this time in Japanese, his original language.

The boy said something in Thai that Ryu could not understand. With a sigh of frustration, Ryu relaxed the grip on the boy and looked around again trying to find the other thief. When he failed to locate him, he swore in Japanese and then pushed the boy aside. He was not interested in beating up these boys. All he wanted was to get his bag back. The thief ran off immediately, not looking back after his attacker had let him go. All Ryu could do was watch him run. Scolding himself for being so careless and not being able to prevent the theft from happening in the first place, Ryu wondered what to do now that all the money he needed for his trip was still in the stolen bag. He took one last hopeless look around for a glimpse of a boy with his duffel bag, swore once again to himself in Japanese, and then decided it was time to start searching.

*****

Narin ran through the streets as quickly as his little feet could take him, nearly tripping a few times as he continued on. He wouldn't stop though. After seeing the man in the karate suit do what he did, he had to tell Thuy all about it. After a few more minutes of running, he jumped up the front stairs of Thuy's restaurant and barged through the front door. There was a wide smile on his face that beamed through despite the huffing and puffing that came from his mouth as he did.

"Thuy! Thuy! I've found someone!" he said brightly. "I've found someone who can help!"

Thuy looked over at the young boy with a concerned glance. She shook her head slightly in the hope that it would prevent the boy from saying anything else. Narin did not realize that she currently had an unwanted visitor. Unfortunately, the big brute who had come to pay her a visit had already taken notice of the youngster. Narin's smile quickly disappeared when he felt something metal wrap around his neck. Suddenly lifted off his feet, he felt the metal choke at his throat.

"No! Stop it!" Thuy yelled. "Let him go."

Narin's face was quickly turning red from being choked. Looking to his side, the boy could see that his assailant, a dark-skinned brute with a punk-like blonde hairdo, was smiling at him as he looked him over. His generally happy appearance had quickly turned to that of horrid fear of what this brutish figure could do to him. As the grip seemed to tighten, Narin tried to kick frantically out of his grasp.

"I don't know, dearie." the brute said. "This might be an efficient way to make you learn to pay off your debts. My employer wasn't too happy with you missing your last payment, so he sent good ol' Birdie here to come settle up." Although he was a rather intimidating looking fellow and had the most negative of intentions, Birdie certainly talked in a genuinely professional tone. This was his job after all.

"Please! He's just a kid." Thuy pleaded. "I'll pay you off anyway I can, just leave him alone, please!"

With a quick flick of his wrist, Birdie removed the metal cuff around young Narin's neck disappeared and the youngster fell to the floor on his bottom. "Well, this is your last warning, old lady. You've got two days to pay up, or there won't be anything left of your fine establishment. You don't want trouble do you, miss?"

Thuy ignored the question and walked over to Narin and tried to help him up, swearing at the intruder under her breath in her native Thai language as she did. He coughed a little, and began to cry. The poor boy certainly had the scare of his life.

"Nothing personal, of course." Birdie said in a casual friendly manner. "Just doin' what pays my bills is all." With that, Birdie turned away, and promptly waddled to the door, punching a hole in the wall and smiling at the inhabitants once before leaving.

Wiping his tears away, Thuy sighed at her misfortune. Although she was only in her fifties, she seemed quite a bit older. The stresses of trying to keep her little restaurant open, with so little help from anyone were finally getting to her. Now, without enough money to pay off a debt she had obviously made with the wrong type of people, she had more stress on her than ever.

Fighting the tears, Narin managed to choke out some words. "I've found someone who can help you, Thuy." he said. "He's a great fighter, I can tell. He can protect you!"

"Relax, boy." Thuy responded. "Just relax for now." She helped the boy onto a chair, thinking to herself what an overactive imagination he had. Even if the young boy had found a great fighter, she didn't know how or even why a fighter would want to help her anyways.

"I'll go find him." Narin told her. "I know he'll help us, you'll see!"