LotS/The Story/Puny Human Birthdays/WusChoice

Battle raged around him. Phantom soldiers clashed with swords and halberds, filling the air with ghostly weapons and shouts of war.

The boy passed through their midst, unfazed by the spectral onslaught and its unreal slaughter. That tumult, the simulated chaos of martial strife from ancient China, was merely there to serve as the backdrop to his thoughts.

These holographic projections, this immersion in a strange and violent realm, drew and distracted those senses which might have nibbled at the depths of his cogitations. They ensured that the greater, more potent elements of his mind would be undisturbed.

That was important. He had a great deal to consider.

Wu Tenchu stood on the cusp of a monumental decision which would forever alter his destiny. The choice he made that day would shape his existence -- both his boyhood and the adulthood which lay beyond.

It was his tenth birthday, and he had been chosen.

Phantasmal swords flashed by his head. Shimmering blue warriors crashed and struggled around him. The kinship between their combat and his turbulent thoughts wasn't lost on him.

Beyond that room, with its synthetic vastness, his parents and the man in ornate robes awaited his answer. They'd acceded to his request for time to think in this special place of his, but he knew he couldn't keep them waiting for long.

He glanced up, and saw that he'd reached the periphery of the battle. Only the bleak emptiness of the plain and the clear sky upon the horizon met his gaze. He turned back to the fighting.

His eyes scanned it all out of instinct, as they always did. He understood the ebb and flow of battle, the order among the chaos. Weakness and strength, victory and defeat, life and death... All these things were laid out before him. Attack and counterattack played out in his mind before they did so in his vision.

Wu Tenchu strode back across the battlefield, and let it all engulf him.

He spoke a word, and that world vanished. The warriors were gone, along with the land and sky themselves. His bedroom appeared in their wake. He looked around it for the last time, letting his gaze roam over all the treasures he'd amassed during the course of his short life. The neat rows of books on the shelf, the figurines of ancient Chinese warriors so like those he'd banished a moment prior.

Then he walked into the corridor and closed the door behind him.

His parents and the grave man looked up at him as he entered. There was anxiety in his mother's eyes, mirrored but tempered with pride in his father's. The other man's gaze was inscrutable.

"I've decided," Wu Tenchu said. "I'll go."

"You understand what this means?" asked the man in ornate robes.

He nodded. It meant he'd leave his home and his parents, and be taken to a distant academy on another planet. A secret, secluded place where people with his talents were trained -- away from the galaxy's sight, beyond the knowledge of even their dearest loved ones.

"It means my skills will be used to serve the empire," he replied. "I accept that duty."