The memory of Joren's fist stopping an inch from my chest was a phantom limb, an ache I felt even when my body was perfectly still. The shockwave that had rattled my bones had become the baseline rhythm for my life, a constant, low thrum of humiliation. His condescending departure, a silhouette against the light, was the ghost that stood over my bed when I tried to sleep and the specter that judged me with every failed repetition. I didn't just want to train; I needed to. I needed to burn away the weakness he had so effortlessly exposed, to smelt down the boy who had collapsed at his feet and reforge him into something unbreakable in a crucible of relentless effort.
The hum of the gravity room was my new dawn and dusk.
I began every cycle in the Ultimate Instinct simulation. It was no longer just about survival; it was a laboratory. A construct modeled on a Kyokushin master lunged, its fist a piston aimed at my sternum. My mind identified the linear trajectory instantly. Predictable. I pivoted, redirecting the blow with an open palm, but a second construct, a Capoeira specialist, was already in motion, its sweeping kick coming from an impossibly low angle. I had to abandon my counter and leap back, the simulated wind of the kick grazing my shin. A third enemy's knife flashed past my ear. A jolt of simulated pain from a missed block was just data, another variable in an endless equation, a lesson etched directly into my nervous system.
From the simulation, I moved straight to the gravity room, doubling the weight that fought every motion. The list of arts I was integrating was a testament to my obsession: Muay Thai for its brutal close-quarters elbows, Kyokushin for its body conditioning, Capoeira for its unpredictable flow. Sensei had arranged for sparring partners, masters of each discipline. They were not opponents; they were living textbooks, their bodies filled with paragraphs of knowledge I was desperate to read.
During a session with a Silat master named Kai, I was thoroughly dismantled. He flowed around me like water, his movements deceptive and fluid. My analytical mind, my greatest asset, was useless. I'd predict a strike from the right, and his arm would collapse and reform into an elbow from the left. He was chaos in human form, and my ordered, logical counters were always a step behind.
Frustration burned in my throat. I lashed out—a wild, telegraphed kick born of pure anger. He didn't even bother to block, simply swaying aside like a reed in the wind. As my foot slammed into the padded floor, I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, shutting out the visual noise and pushing my enhanced hearing to its absolute limit, desperate for any clue.
That's when I perceived it. Not a sound, but something carried on sound. A kinesthetic echo. As Kai shifted his weight to counter, I heard it: the faint groan of the floor plates, the whisper of his calf muscles clenching, the almost imperceptible intake of breath that preceded motion. My hearing had become so acute it was beginning to translate the physical intent behind the noise.
The chaotic fight suddenly went silent in my mind as I focused on this new layer of data. I opened my eyes. Kai moved again, a blur of motion. But this time, I didn't just see him. I felt him through the resonance in the air and the floor. The echo of his intent reached me a nanosecond before his body followed.
He lunged. I didn't think. I simply moved to where the echo told me he wouldn't be, my arm rising to block an attack that hadn't yet fully formed. His eyes widened in surprise as my forearm met his, deflecting his strike for the first time in the entire session.
Every motion, every pivot, every transfer of mass—it all had a unique signature, a resonance I could perceive. I had been fighting a two-dimensional battle of sight and sound, when a third dimension had been hiding in the echoes all along.
The hours blurred into a relentless cycle: simulation, gravity training, sparring, study. I slept only when my cognitive functions began to degrade, sustained by the Iron Will Vial that kept my body primed. The physical toll was immense, a constant landscape of deep-tissue bruises and aching joints, but the mental exhaustion was worse. Some nights, the data streams from my training would continue to run behind my eyelids, my mind refusing to shut down. Two months bled together into one long, unbroken effort.
One afternoon, Sensei led me to the force-measuring machine. The chamber was cold, the metal walls reflecting my strained face. The machine hummed with contained power, a beast waiting to be tested. "You have forged your body into a weapon," he said. "Let us measure its edge."
I stepped onto the platform, the cold metal a stark contrast to the heat coiling in my gut. I closed my eyes, silencing the hum of the machine and the weight of Sensei's gaze. My mind wasn't on Joren, not directly. Instead, I focused on the principles of Fa Jin, visualizing the kinetic chain. The force began in the floor, traveled up my legs, torqued through my hips and torso, channeled down my shoulder, and finally, waited to be unleashed at the tip of my knuckles. It was an equation of mass, velocity, and will. I took a breath and punched.
The machine's readout spun wildly before stabilizing: 8,462 N. The force of a small truck hitting a wall at ninety miles per hour. An impressive number.
But not the number that mattered. The baseline for a newly awakened Martial Master was 9,000 N. I was at the door, but the lock was still engaged.
I allowed myself a moment to process. The path forward was clearer now. The echoes, the resonance… that was the key. If I could learn to truly read an opponent's intent before they moved, I could close the gap between my mind's prediction and my body's execution. Raw force was only one part of the equation.
Sensei watched me, his expression unreadable. "Force is meaningless without control, Zander. What you have achieved is remarkable, but it is raw material. It must be shaped by perception."
I nodded, the fire in my gut burning low and steady. "I will keep pushing," I said. "I will catch up."
He gave a single, small nod. That was enough.
As I walked away, my mind was no longer on the numbers. It was on the feeling—the subtle, almost imperceptible resonance of the world around me, a bridge I had yet to fully cross.
Sensei Slade remained, his gaze fixed on the glowing digits of the machine. He had seen the flicker of disappointment in my eyes, the steel of my resolve. He pulled up a report on his private datapad, its screen reflecting in his stoic expression.
His force isn't there yet, he thought, confirming the machine's verdict. The 9,000 Newton threshold was absolute. But the report from AXIOM tells a different story.
He scrolled to the latest Ultimate Instinct simulation data. The numbers were almost unbelievable.
Level Three. Duration: seventeen minutes. He survived for seventeen minutes. The others can't last five before they are forced to neutralize the targets. Some of our instructors—fully-fledged Martial Masters—fail to pass Level Three.
Slade's expression remained unchanged, but a new understanding settled in his mind. Joren is a hammer, designed to shatter anything in his path. Predictable, but overwhelming. But Zander… he is becoming a razor. His evasiveness, his ability to process and adapt to overwhelming odds, is already unmatched. A hammer's purpose is obvious. A razor... a razor can be used with surgical precision, or it can sever an artery by mistake. He is becoming a weapon we don't fully understand. More dangerous to our enemies, perhaps, but also more dangerous to himself.
*He cannot break a Martial Master head-on. Not yet. But if he can find the right moment, the perfect opening… he might just be able