Holograms Make Excellent Martial Arts Teaching Aids
A single martial art is built from many individual forms.
Take, for instance, the Haenam Sect’s Parangjang. It consists of seven forms in total. Here, a “form” means a single discrete motion—something like a straight punch or a roundhouse kick.
And all seven of those forms share one common root image: the wave.
In other words, a martial art is a collection of various combat movements that branch out from a single mental image.
The mental image of the Haenam Sect’s Parangjang is the wave—more precisely, the principle by which the currents of the distant sea transform into fierce breakers. Its forms, accordingly, are motions that give that image concrete shape.
The seven forms of Parangjang are as follows.
[Basic Forms]
1. Wind Across Flowing Water — The wind sets the surface of the water in motion.
2. Flow Becomes Wave — For the flow is itself the wave.
[Intermediate Forms]
3. Waves Crash the Cliff — Waves strike the precipice.
4. Self-Rising Wave — The wave rears of its own accord.
5. Two Waves Meet — Two waves encounter and frolic together.
[Advanced Forms]
6. Reef That Toys With Ten Thousand Waves — A single reef toys with ten thousand waves.
7. (Ultimate) Weak Flow, Mighty Wave — Even a feeble flow is the wave itself; a humble beginning can yet become great.
The first two basic forms were the ones that laid down the fundamental framework.
The opening form, Wind Across Flowing Water, was less a palm technique than an internal-energy method—a way of structuring and circulating inner force concentrated in the arms and hands. You treated your arms and hands as the sea and blew “wind” into them, the way a breeze sets the surface of the ocean trembling. The point was to generate the faintest of swells, and so create a current of internal energy through hand and arm.
The second basic form, Flow Becomes Wave, was something you could actually call a palm technique. If the arms and hands were the sea, this stage treated the palm as the shoreline. The ocean’s swell grew fiercer the closer it came to shore, until it became a wave that crashed upon the coast—exactly like breakers shattering across a sandy beach. Complete the form, and a shockwave radiated outward from the palm.
Up to that point, it was more or less like any other palm art. If anything, its raw power was weaker than most.
But past those forms, the range of applications opened wide. The intermediate and advanced forms covered long-range attacks, projectile-defense matrices, area-of-effect strikes, and more. They happened to be exactly what Gong Ryun lacked—which was why he had chosen this martial art in the first place.
At the moment, the only offensive technique Gong Ryun could truly use was Geumnasu. No matter how terrifyingly skilled he was with it, relying on a single art had clear limits. Geumnasu, after all, was nothing more than “reach out and grab.” The sheer power of it was a blessing, at least.
—Heh heh heh heh. Gong Ryun. I do believe I’ve told you more than once that Geumnasu is a joint-locking art, not a palm-mounted hydraulic press.
For some reason Un-rang’s voice seemed to drift through his head. He decided to ignore it.
In any case, Parangjang was a martial art that could fill in a great deal of the versatility Gong Ryun had been missing—the man whose entire toolkit amounted to “walk up, stick out a palm, seize, and crush to death.”
Its relatively low firepower was the art’s weakness, but that was no problem.
This was Gong Ryun, after all—the man who had already twisted even Geumnasu into a high-yield technique. For someone whose talent was limited to the palms, weak raw power was a flaw he could easily overcome. Probably. Gong Ryun made the claim with full confidence. And lower firepower meant lower internal-energy consumption, which was actually a plus.
Anyway.
Gong Ryun was currently attempting the first intermediate form: Waves Crash the Cliff.
—Whoosh!
He swept his palm through the air, mirroring the demonstration of the humanoid one-on-one 3D holographic avatar in front of him.
That wasn’t all. The moment Gong Ryun set his stance, another hologram projected around his own body—tracing the path of his swinging arm in blue, flagging any broken posture in red.
—Whoosh!
He tried again, and the red shrank further. Steady improvement.
—Whoosh!
—Whoosh!
—Whoosh!
He kept at it, again and again.
At last the alert appeared, declaring his posture complete. The avatar in front of him gave a thumbs-up.
Nailing the stance itself had been easy enough.
Gong Ryun had already learned the basic forms of Parangjang last time. The form he was attempting now was only a slight variation on the fundamental posture of the second basic form, Flow Becomes Wave, so his body already knew it.
What remained was the critical part: the circulation of internal energy.
The avatar demonstrated the next stage of the form.
—Whoosh!
—Shwurrrrrk
As the arm swept out, the flow of internal force was rendered visually inside the semi-transparent holographic body—accompanied, for some reason, by that bizarre sound effect. Gong Ryun watched it in stillness. Deeply.
“Seeing once really is better than hearing a hundred times.”
It was a world apart from reading theory off a page. Gong Ryun was strong at this kind of learning—watching and absorbing directly. Principles, formulas, scientific knowledge from the manuals were all well and good, but nothing beat observing a phenomenon unfold right in front of him and stacking the data. It was absolutely not because he couldn’t understand the theory manuals.
—Whoosh!
—Shwurrrrrk
He watched. He observed.
The hologram drew its arm back. A current formed along the limb.
Then it thrust the arm forward. At the same instant, the current rode the arm and poured into the palm.
He watched the entire process—and memorized it wholesale.
Internal-energy algorithms, wave mechanics, amplitude, sine and cosine functions: he set all of that aside for the moment and simply committed the phenomenon itself to memory. He was “inputting” the motion into his mind as raw data.
Memorization first, understanding later. Learn it by heart; the comprehension can come afterward. That was his method of study.
If Un-rang had seen it, he would have clutched his head and demanded to know what kind of slapdash, half-baked learning this was supposed to be.
But Gong Ryun trusted himself and pressed on. Call it guts, maybe.
And so Gong Ryun carved out a stretch of learning that was entirely his own.
—Whoosh!
—Shwurrrrrk
—Whoosh!
—Shwurrrrrk
—Whoosh!
—Shwurrrrrk
The hologram repeated the demonstration; Gong Ryun kept following along.
Today he meant to drill this one form and nothing else. Mastering a martial art didn’t happen overnight—he might spend the entire day on it and still not have it down. Well, fine. He could take it slow. Nobody was holding a knife to his throat.
Surely some robed lunatic wasn’t going to barge in out of nowhere and try to pick a fight to the death. Surely not.
Several hours of practice slipped by that way.
Un-rang messaged him about getting coffee, so Gong Ryun took the chance to rest and headed down to the cafeteria on the first basement level.
B1 held a library restaurant, a café, a vending-machine corner, and more. In front of the bank of every kind of vending machine imaginable, Un-rang was just pulling a can of nanobot coffee from one of them.
Gong Ryun walked over and drew a can for himself as well.
“Un-rang. How’s the new martial art?”
“Truly, the Haenam Sect lives up to its renown. I expect my range of movement in combat will widen considerably.”
They sat at a nearby empty table and fell into idle talk.
“…So the holograms seem to suit me better than the theory manuals.”
“Ha. Remarkable, truly. Ordinarily one reads the manuals through first and only consults the hologram at the very end, as a reference for posture. Almost no one learns from start to finish on holograms the way you do, Gong Ryun.”
“That so? I find it stranger that someone like you can sit and read theory manuals all day long.”
“One does not read the manuals for nothing. The most important thing in any martial art is realizing the mental image, and a solid theoretical foundation is a great advantage there. In the long run as well, only those who build their theory well ever achieve true greatness. Like a building—the foundation must be the firmest part.”
“Uh… aren’t there floating buildings and such? Those don’t have a bottom; they just hang in the air.”
Floating buildings were structures fitted throughout with anti-gravity devices so they hovered in midair—cutting-edge luxury tech used for important government offices in major cities. Gong Ryun had only ever seen them in pictures.
“What are you even—”
Un-rang put a hand to his forehead.
“Hrm. Well… you can use martial arts, Gong Ryun, so further lecture would only be nagging. Watching you work Geumnasu alone, the talent is clearly there… perhaps it’s simply another shape of talent…”
“Heh. Fair enough. My Geumnasu is freaking amazing, after all.”
Gong Ryun hadn’t become a mercenary for nothing. He had talent for martial arts. It was just that the talent came in a somewhat peculiar shape.
Un-rang sighed. If that gift had not been confined to the palms—if it had been spread evenly through the body—the whole galaxy would have been scrambling to recruit him. And if he had been born into an orthodox lineage and given elite training from childhood, he might well have been one of the galaxy’s representative rising stars by this age.
Still, at least he hasn’t fallen onto a dark path… Amitabha…
Watching Gong Ryun adapt to the galactic martial world with a decent measure of integrity, Un-rang found him genuinely admirable.
While the two of them were chatting, someone approached their table.
“Haha! Big brothers! How do ya do!”
It was a suspiciously pretty, boyish young man.