Earth, throughout its history, has had no shortage of martial arts and monastic practices that stressed mind over matter, but they long ago stopped being true martial orders… more like schools of thought for the wealthy or trend-seekers than filled with true believers. Once upon a time, orders like the Shaolin had been warriors… and the Templar are their modern equivalent.
The arrival of the Void Tracers on Earth caused incredible upheaval, not just because of their ferocity but the aura of mind-melting fear that accompanied them. The sheer chaos and horror that their presence inspired chaos upheaval and disruption wherever they rained down on Earth… but in some places, the HEF forces held. Invariably, they were anchored by Templar.
More than a martial art, the Templar code was a mindset… a form of mental discipline resembling a trance. The order taught its members to sink into a purely analytic flow state where fear had a hard time finding a grip on them. This mind-over-matter state allowed a skilled warrior to almost turn off the parts of their mind that the Void Tracers attacked, rigidly holding their fear in place and acknowledging it as just one more data point to consider rather than a mind-destroying horror. Such warriors could keep calm against the Void Tracers and employ their weapons calmly against a species that did not use any of its own.
After their efficiency in fighting the Void Tracers was discovered, the order ballooned in size with new members eager to learn, and a surprising discovery was made… the Sethis were especially well suited to it. The way their brain chemistry worked, slightly different from humans, made slipping into that flowstate a little easier, and staying in it during the head of combat much much easier. Nearly half of all Templar in the HEF are Sethis.
John Drake's Stories 