The problem with fire, I reflected, wasn't the initial spark. It was the embers. The stubborn, glowing remnants that refused to die, waiting for the slightest breath of oxygen to roar back to life. I had doused Leon's heroic bonfire with the cold ocean of my indifference. I had thought I'd left him a pile of wet ash.
Instead, I'd created a forge.
The thwack-thwack-thwack of his sword against the training post had evolved. It was now a more complex, desperate rhythm: the shuffle of exhausted feet on dirt, the ragged gasp of breath, the sharp crack of a poorly executed strike against the few remaining un-splintered parts of the poor, abused oak. He was no longer practicing; he was waging a one-man war against his own limitations, and the collateral damage was my peace.
For a week, it had been a constant soundtrack. Dawn to dusk. It was worse than the silence that had followed my brutal dodging demonstration. That silence had been heavy with defeat. This was noise polluted by a fanatical, grinding hope. He hadn't taken my lesson as a reason to quit. He'd taken it as a benchmark. "If I cannot touch a background character," his relentless training screamed, "then I must become something more."
It was maddening. And worse, it was loud.
My carefully cultivated routine of serene nothingness was being shredded by the sound of futile effort. I couldn't read. I couldn't nap. I couldn't even properly enjoy my sourdough without the metallic tang of desperation fouling the air.
The final straw came on a Tuesday. I was attempting to meditate on the profound simplicity of a dew-covered spiderweb outside my window—a masterpiece of quiet engineering—when Leon's latest training mantra pierced the morning calm.
"AGAIN! FASTER! STRONGER! THE BACKGROUND CHARACTER IS THE MOUNTAIN! I MUST BE THE WIND THAT WEARS IT DOWN!"
I closed my eyes. The spiderweb, in all its delicate glory, was forgotten. A cold, petty, and immensely satisfying idea crystallized in my mind. He wanted a lesson? He wanted to understand the mountain? Fine. I would give him a lesson in topography. I would show him the mountain was not something to be worn down. It was something that simply was, and his wind was less than a sigh against its face.
I didn't storm out. I exited my cottage with the deliberate, calm steps of a man going to check his mail. Leon was a whirlwind of motion in the clearing, drenched in sweat, his tunic stained and torn. He saw me and froze mid-swing, his chest heaving. A wild, desperate hope flared in his eyes.
"Bob! Have you… have you reconsidered?"
"No," I said, my voice flat. "But you're disturbing the local wildlife with your existential crisis. And my nap."
His face fell, but the determination hardened. "I will be quieter. But I cannot stop. Not until—"
"Until what?" I interrupted. "Until you can touch me? You remember how that went."
"I remember!" he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "I remember every second! The way you moved… it wasn't human. It was like you were reading my thoughts before I had them! That… that is what I must become!"
He had it backwards. I wasn't reading his thoughts; I was reading the physics of his intentions, the micro-tremors in his muscles, the shift in the air. But explaining that would be engagement. And I was done with engagement.
"Alright," I said, a slow, weary sigh escaping my lips. "One more demonstration. A final one. After this, you either understand, or you're too stupid to live. And either way, you stop this noise."
His eyes lit up, mistaking my annoyance for a reluctant teaching moment. "Yes! Thank you, Bob! What is the lesson?"
"The lesson," I said, walking to the center of the clearing, "is the same as last time. Simplicity is best. Your goal is to touch me. One hour. I will not move my feet from this spot." I toed two small lines in the dirt. "If you can so much as brush my tunic, I will acknowledge you. If you cannot… you will cease this incessant, noisy suffering. You will accept that you are not special. You will live your life as the marginally-below-average person you are, and you will let me enjoy my retirement in peace. Do you understand the terms?"
The conditions were even more insultingly restrictive than last time. I wasn't just dodging; I was planting my feet. It was a declaration of absolute supremacy. A lion telling a gnat it could try to land, if it wished.
Leon swallowed hard, his knuckles white on his sword hilt. The hope was battling with the sheer, terrifying scale of the challenge. But the hope, as it always did with him, won. "I understand! I accept!"
"Then begin," I said, clasping my hands behind my back. "The clock is ticking."
He didn't waste time with a battle cry. He launched himself at me, a silent, focused bolt of golden-haired desperation. His sword lanced out in a straight thrust, aimed at my shoulder—fast, for him. Almost competent.
I didn't move my feet. I didn't need to. I leaned my upper body back, a precise, forty-five-degree tilt. The tip of his sword passed through the space where my chest had been. He recovered, swinging horizontally. I arched my back, the blade humming an inch over my stomach. He reversed his grip, stabbing downwards. I shifted my hips slightly to the left, a movement of maybe two inches, and the sword buried itself in the dirt between my feet.
His breath hitched. He yanked the blade free and attacked again. And again. And again.
What followed was an hour of surreal, soul-crushing ballet.
Leon was a tempest. He used every trick, every feint, every desperate, wild swing he could muster. He tried to grab me with his free hand. He tried to kick my legs out from under me. He even, in a moment of sheer absurdity, tried to headbutt me.
I was the eye of the storm. A statue that flowed. My feet remained planted within the two lines in the dirt, rooted not by effort, but by the immutable laws of a reality I casually bent. My upper body became a liquid abstraction of evasion. I swayed, I bent, I contorted. I leaned at angles that defied human anatomy. A sword tip would streak towards my eye, and I'd move my head just enough that it parted my hair. A fist would rocket at my gut, and my abdomen would concave in a way that should have snapped my spine.
I didn't block. I didn't parry. I didn't even look like I was trying. My face remained a placid mask of mild boredom. I watched him, not as an opponent, but as a scientist might watch a particularly energetic insect trapped under a glass.
Sweat poured from him, forming dark patches in the dirt. His breath became ragged sobs of exertion. His arms trembled so violently he could barely hold his sword. Tears of frustration mixed with the sweat on his cheeks. He was giving it everything he had. Every ounce of strength, every shred of willpower, every flicker of his so-called heroic destiny.
And it was nothing. Less than nothing.
With five minutes left on the imaginary clock, he made one final, despairing lunge. It was slow, clumsy, a collapse more than an attack. I didn't even bother with a fancy dodge. I just turned my head to the side, and his exhausted form stumbled past me, crashing to the ground in a heap. His sword skittered away, landing near my perfectly clean boot.
He lay there, gasping, his body wracked with shudders. The sound was terrible: the raw, scraping agony of someone who had poured their entire soul into a task and come up emptier than when they began.
I looked down at him. The silence stretched, broken only by his wretched breathing. This was the moment. The culmination of my lesson. The absolute, undeniable proof.
I spoke, my voice cool and clear in the quiet clearing.
"See?" I said, the words dropping like stones into a well. "You can't even touch a background character. Give up."
I let the statement hang there. It was the truth, stripped of all pretense, all false encouragement, all patronizing platitudes. It was the distilled essence of his failure. I expected the last of the light in his eyes to gutter and die. I expected the sobs of defeat. I expected him to finally, finally, leave me alone.
I turned my back on him, ready to walk back to my cottage and the silence I had earned.
A sound stopped me. Not a sob. Not a cry of despair.
It was a low, gritty, choked sound. A laugh. But not a happy one. It was the laugh of a man who had just seen the abyss, and found a terrible joke at the bottom.
I glanced over my shoulder.
Leon was pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. His body shook, but he raised his head. His face was streaked with dirt and tears, but his eyes… his eyes were different. The hollow shame from his public failures was gone. The fanatical hope from his training was gone. The naive light of destiny had been extinguished.
What was left was a cold, hard, blue flame. A flame forged in the furnace of absolute, undeniable, and utterly humiliating inferiority.
"Give up?" he rasped, the word scraping out of his raw throat. He looked at his own trembling hands, then up at me, his gaze locking onto mine with an intensity that was unsettling. "You… you stood in one place. You didn't even use your hands. For an hour. And I… I couldn't do anything."
He said it not with despair, but with a kind of awful, dawning reverence. He wasn't mourning his failure; he was measuring it. He was finally comprehending the true, vast, astronomical scale of the gap between us.
"You're right," he whispered, his voice gaining a sliver of strength. "I can't touch a background character. Not this one. Not as I am." He slowly, painfully, climbed to his feet. He didn't look broken. He looked… focused. Terrifyingly focused. "All this time… I thought the world was asking me to be a hero. To be special. It's not." He looked at me, and the blue flame in his eyes burned brighter. "It's asking me to be more. More than I am. More than I ever thought I could be. You're not the mountain, Bob. You're the tape measure. And you've just shown me exactly how far I have to go."
My blood ran cold. This was the exact opposite of the intended result. I hadn't crushed his spirit. I had given it a direction. A terrible, impossible direction: me.
"No," I said, taking a step towards him, my calm facade cracking for the first time. "That's not—"
"Thank you," he said, cutting me off with a solemn, bloody-mouthed smile. It was the most sincere thing I'd ever heard him say. "For the demonstration. It was… illuminating. I have my terms. I will cease the noisy training here. I will not pester you. But I will not give up. I will find another way. A quieter way. And one day…" He didn't finish the sentence. He just gave me that terrifying, flame-filled look, retrieved his sword, and turned away.
He didn't shuffle back to his stable in defeat. He walked with a new, grim purpose, his exhaustion seemingly forgotten. He looked like a man who had just been handed the blueprints for his own obsolescence and had decided to build himself anew from the ground up.
I stood alone in the clearing, the two lines in the dirt at my feet seeming to mock me. The silence had returned, but it was a different silence. It was no longer the peaceful absence of sound. It was the silence of a predator waiting in the tall grass. The silence of a timer that had just been set, ticking down to an unknown, but inevitable, confrontation.
I had tried to kill a fire with a demonstration of overwhelming force. Instead, I had compressed it into a diamond-hard core of resolve. I had wanted him to see an insurmountable wall. He had seen a finish line.
Worse, as I replayed the scene in my head, I realized with a sinking feeling that I had slipped. Just for a moment. The way I had moved, those impossible, fluid contortions while rooted to the spot… it wasn't something a normal person could dismiss as "good posture" or "luck." If anyone had been watching…
A chill that had nothing to do with the weather shot down my spine. I slowly turned my head towards the treeline at the edge of my property.
There, half-hidden by the boughs of an ancient pine, was a flash of vibrant red hair. It vanished a second later, but the impression was seared into my mind.
Lily. She had been watching. How much had she seen? The beginning? The end? The whole, devastating, inhuman hour?
My clever plan to demoralize my neighbor had backf spectacularly. Not only had I created a more determined, more focused version of the Hero, but I might have just handed the most perceptive person in town a front-row seat to my greatest vulnerability: a display of power that defied all rational explanation.
The ripples from my actions were no longer gentle waves. They were converging into a tidal wave, and I was standing directly on the beach. Leon was a lit fuse. Lily was a detective with a magnifying glass. And I was the powder keg in the middle, desperately trying to look like a harmless loaf of bread.
I walked back to my cottage, the weight of my own power feeling heavier than ever. For the first time, the thought occurred to me: Celian, the flustered bureaucrat, might have had a point. Perhaps having this much power did come with an unavoidable tax. And the bill, it seemed, was finally coming due.
The quiet life wasn't being threatened by external forces anymore. I was becoming my own greatest enemy. And the next move, I realized with a cold knot in my stomach, might not be mine to make.