Why shouldn't martial artist Seth Trask feel a little cocky? The son of the City Director of Washington, D.C. and the unbeaten champion of his master's one-and-fifty-year-old dojo, he thinks nothing of dispatching a red-eyed skeleton and his gang of kung-ju-kicking skeletons. But what should he think of the strange old man who calls himself Jostheu and approaches Seth talking about Atonement? What does Seth have to atone for? Far too proud to give the old man a hearing, Seth launches a hand strike at the old man's scrawny neckand finds himself at the point of a flaming sword.
Seth is about to learn that the toughest discipline of the martial arts doesn't come from hardening the body and mastering the moves for a myriad of potent leg kicks and arm strikes, but from controlling the self. Behind the familiar noises and smells of the dojo lurks another reality, where good contends with evil for mastery over the universe, and a Universal Champion preserves the balance between chaos and order. Awakened to his potential for good and his responsibility to act, Seth accepts Supra-master Jostheu's command to accept his destiny as the one person who can challenge the demonic being Shatoth for the Belt of Authority for control of the universe.