Dreaming Under

She was a vision to beheld. A slight of a figure that didn’t seem that could hold onto dual katanas, let alone being able to wield them with masterful skill. She was this mold created from years of training with an ancient order of warrior monks who had adopted her as a child. The village at the bottom of the valley she protected felt intimately familiar, as if she had spent her entire life among its bamboo houses and narrow pathways.

When disaster struck in the form of a raging fire threatening to consume the village, Kelko leapt into action without hesitation. The heat of the flames felt scorching against her skin, the smoke burning in her lungs. She could smell the bamboo homes beginning to burn, hear the panicked cries of villagers. With impossible agility, Kelko orchestrated a rescue operation. She sliced through burning beams that blocked escape routes, carried elderly to safety on her back, and organized the villagers into a water brigade.

When the fire threatened the village granary, their only hope for surviving the coming winter, Kelko orchestrated a daring plan. She led four other warriors through the heart of the inferno, using her blades to cut through the burning support beams that had fallen across the only path. At a critical moment, she spotted a family trapped on a balcony above the main square. Without hesitation, she used her swords to vault herself upward, catching the edge of the wooden platform. Despite burns forming on her palms, she pulled each family member to safety, lowering them one by one to the rescuers below. They also discovered children trapped in the village school. Smoke had filled the building, and the youngest ones had hidden themselves in terror. With the roof minutes from collapse, she tore strips from her own clothing to create makeshift masks soaked in water from a nearby well. Moving through the darkened rooms with only instinct as her guide, her and the other warriors located seven children huddled beneath desks and in closets. Kelko moved through the burning village with supernatural precision. As flames engulfed the eastern district, she scaled a burning watchtower to ring the warning bell, her movements fluid and decisive despite the collapsing structure beneath her feet. The villagers would later say they owed their lives to those three desperate peals that cut through the night.

These were only mere moments that felt like days of exhausting effort. In only one instance did she panic, desperately entering a collapsing temple to save an elderly monk, the very master who had trained her. Kelko faced the impossible choice between saving her master or retrieving an ancient scroll containing the village's history and sacred teachings. She chose both, sustaining serious injuries as she shielded the elderly monk with her body while clutching the precious document to her chest as burning timbers fell around them. As she reached the monk, the building began to crumble around them. Kelko felt a sharp pain in her side as a burning beam struck her. The final echoes of burning orange and red flames dancing all around as her world went dark...

...And suddenly, Kelko was blinking against harsh fluorescent lights. Confused voices spoke around her in modern English. Medical equipment beeped steadily nearby. The transition was jarring—one moment she was a centuries-old warrior, and the next, she was lying in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask on her face.

As visitors filled Kelkos' hospital room in the days following her medically induced coma, Maria from apartment 3B came first, tearfully explaining how Kelko had been the one to pull the building's fire alarm at 2 AM after noticing smoke while returning from a late shift. "If you hadn't reacted so quickly," Maria said, clasping Kelkos' bandaged hand, "the fire department said most of us would have been trapped." The Rodriguez family arrived with flowers and hand-drawn cards from their children. Mr. Rodriguez recounted how Kelko had pounded on their door when they didn't respond to the alarm. "You kept shouting until we woke up," he explained. "Then you helped carry our youngest down six flights when the elevators shut down."

Most surprising was the visit from Ms. Patel, the elderly woman who lived on the top floor. Firefighters revealed that they'd found Kelko unconscious in Ms. Patel's apartment, with an axe laying next to her. When she didn't see her among the tenants on the street, she had gone back up, concerned that her most favorite neighbor, who used a walker, might need assistance. She had managed to help Ms. Patel to the stairwell before returning for the woman's photo albums—irreplaceable family heirlooms containing five generations of history, the ones that every time she made cookies and invited her over, she took them out to tell her stories of her growing up. It was during this second trip back up that she had grabbed the axe from the fire box in the hallway to break open the curio cabinet that housed the photos when the smoke had overcome her.

As evening fell during her third day in recovery, something unexpected happened. The hospital staff made an exception to visitor policies when nearly twenty residents from her building gathered in and around her room. They brought food, cards, and small gifts, but more importantly, they brought stories—pieces of a puzzle that Kelko herself couldn't remember. How she had remained calm and reassuring even as smoke filled the hallways. The fire chief himself made an appearance, explaining that Kelkos' actions had given them critical minutes that almost certainly saved lives. "We don't recommend civilians do what you did," he said with a respectful nod, "but the fact is, the building's fire suppression system failed, and your quick thinking made all the difference."

Perhaps most moving was when little Emma Rodriguez, just seven years old, handed Kelko a crayon drawing showing a figure with two swords standing amid flames. "My mom told me you carried me away from the fire," she whispered. "So, I drew you as a superhero."

As her consciousness slowly reassembled itself, shards of reality began filtering back. There had been a fire, but not in a Japanese village—but in her apartment building. The disorientation was profound, yet the emotions—the courage, the determination, the selflessness—had felt authentic to her core. In some of these fragmented moments, she could still feel the weight of the swords in her hands and still smell the cherry blossoms that had fallen outside her home.