CRASH!
Debris came down exactly where I'd been standing a second earlier. I rolled sideways and kept moving, pressing my back against the nearest solid surface and trying to manage my breathing into something quieter than what it currently was. Charged. Loud. The breathing of someone being hunted in a room that had run out of hiding places.
I just needed to awaken my ability. That was the whole problem. Playing hide and seek with tournament challengers was one thing when I had a functional toolkit. Right now, the toolkit had a gap in it the size of whatever I was supposed to be.
You're probably wondering how I ended up here.
Three minutes ago I was asleep during math class. Not a subject I've ever had a natural relationship with, and the teacher had long since made peace with the reality that his classroom contained people who weren't listening to him. Whatever mechanism governed his investment in that fact, it didn't extend to actually checking.
I don't know how much time passed. When I opened my eyes, I was on the floor of a small dojo.
Taekwondo classroom, by the look of it. There were mats, mirrors along one wall, that specific smell of chalk and old canvas. No warning from the system. No beacon. No polite request for my participation before it had already dropped me into Stage 7.
The opponent's name was Kyon.
He didn't look like a martial arts master in the way movies had taught me to expect. He was lean. Rugged hair sitting across his forehead like it had made its own decision about the morning. A black belt around his waist that was worn enough to look less like a prize and more like a statement, something that had survived a lot and didn't feel the need to explain itself.
[Stage 7 | Player VS Kyon | Difficulty: Hard]
Hard. Not insane. I'd clocked that and made assumptions I shouldn't have made.
The problem wasn't his offence, it was his architecture. Taekwondo master meant legs as primary weapons, which meant his lower body was always doing something that looked decorative but wasn't.
His hands stayed high, guarding his face like he'd decided it was the most valuable thing in the room. His torso was permanently contracted, the kind of core engagement that made hitting him there feel like punching a load-bearing wall.
Even his legs were weapons while they were defending. There was almost no angle I'd tested that didn't have an answer waiting for me.
And then there was the ability. Nano Punch. If I gave him distance, any distance, he could pull his arm back and throw a punch into the air and two compressed energy blasts would come screaming toward me like they had opinions about my continued existence.
I'd been dodging those for several minutes and each time I confirmed my head was still attached it felt like a minor miracle.
Now I was crouched behind debris, breathing loud enough to hear myself, with absolutely nothing useful in my head.
"Amelia." I kept my voice low. Old habit at this point. "Please tell me you have something."
"Kyon is a built war machine." Her hologram materialised before me, arms already folded into the posture of someone delivering a medical verdict. "Combat knowledge, ability, physical conditioning — he outclasses you across the board." She paused just long enough for that to settle. "But not completely."
"Keep going." My heart was making itself very known inside my chest.
"You need an advantage. Something equivalent to what he has." She shifted, moving her weight onto one foot, the other hand going to her chin. "His weakness—and it is a weakness — is that he prioritises defence over speed. His entire system is built around not getting hit, which means he's less focused on how fast he gets to you."
She looked at me directly. "You need something that breaks through the defence before he has time to respond. Something with enough force that his guard becomes irrelevant."
Something to break through his defence.
My fists had already confirmed themselves as insufficient for that task. Ember had made that point with efficiency, and Kyon's torso had reinforced it.
Whatever I needed, it had to be harder than skin, faster than repositioning, and capable of getting through regardless of how solid the defence was.
I looked around the debris field. Chunks of material — too heavy, too unwieldy. A pair of boxing gloves hanging a few feet away, useless, just fists with better branding. And then, half-buried on the ground a few metres out, at the specific angle of something that had been knocked there rather than placed—
A knife.
Short blade. Floor-level. Like it had arrived there by accident and was now being offered.
I didn't think past the moment. I went for it, staying low, timing the movement between Kyon's cycles, and grabbed it in the same motion as ducking back behind cover.
I held it up. Looked at my reflection in the blade.
Sweaty. Eyes doing something I didn't like. The face of someone who was currently more afraid than he was prepared.
I closed my eyes. Put my head down.
Said something to no one in particular.
Now.
I came out of cover rolling, found my footing, and moved. Five seconds, that was the window between his last Nano Punch and the next one. I covered the ground and hit him at full speed, wrapping both arms around his torso and pulling him down with my own weight into a free fall.
We both went over.
And while I was still trying to figure out where my arms had ended up, he'd already figured out where his legs were. They came up, both of them, hooking around my waist, and then I was airborne, kicked clear with the force of someone who had trained that specific movement until it happened without thought.
BAM. My head hit first on cold floor. It wasn't severe enough to go dark, but the synchronising ring that followed made thinking temporarily optional. I lay there for a second letting it pass, then pushed myself upright, groaning through the inventory of complaints my body was filing.
I swiped the blade at him as soon as I was standing. He moved. I tried again. Again. Not one of them connected, and I started to understand from the way he was tracking my movements that this was less a fight for him and more a coaching moment, patient, unhurried, almost educational.
He confirmed that by grabbing my wrist and removing the knife from my hand with the calm professionalism of someone correcting a student's grip.
"Give me that—" I threw a punch. But he caught the arm and sent me sideways with a front kick to the gut that had a full opinion behind it.
I felt it a few seconds after impact: deep, internal, the kind of pain that sits at the level of organs rather than muscles. Standing wasn't available option anymore. I got to a crawl and stayed there, one arm braced on the floor, the other pressing against my stomach.
[Recovery Rate Up — Level 3]
Thanks a lot.
Kyon had already reset. He was drawing back for the finish, the full version, both arms cocked, the expression of someone closing a chapter. He looked at me once, that final assessment, then threw.
WHACK.
The sound of the punch leaving his hand was real. But the impact never arrived.
I opened my eyes I hadn't remembered closing.
I was still crouched. One arm on the floor, one on my stomach. Everything exactly as it had been. Kyon was standing in front of me with his fist extended toward a point that was precisely where my face was, wearing an expression I had no immediate explanation for.
Then the system messages came.
[Error: Anomaly Detected]
[Section: Ability]
[Rank: Error — Scanning]
What.
[Rank Decided: A+]
I looked at the screens. At Kyon, whose fist was still extended into nothing. At the screens again.
A plus.
Kyon had stopped waiting for any of this to make sense. He started throwing everything. Nano Punch after Nano Punch, ability blasts in quick succession, a dozen attempts all landing on the same result.
Still nothing happened. Like something had inserted itself between us that had no interest in being identified.
I watched him throw and looked at my hands and tried to understand what was happening to me.
"Heavy signals," Amelia said, arriving without her usual preamble. "Your ability tremored again."
I looked at her. "Again?"
She went quiet in the specific way that meant there was information she wasn't delivering yet.
Right.
I stopped trying to decode the system and started moving. Low, fast, sliding across the floor toward Kyon—under his guard, past his legs — and SPLAT. My right fist went directly up into his groin with every remaining unit of strength in my arm.
"AARGH—"
The sound he made was architectural. He folded immediately, both hands going to the relevant location, dropping to his knees with the trajectory of a building that had lost its foundation.
I watched him for a moment.
There was something genuinely funny about the fact that this was the move I'd planned back at Stage 1 against Stone and never actually pulled off. And here it was, not strategic, not calculated, just the instinctive response my body arrived at when everything else had been exhausted. The body remembering something the brain had filed away.
It worked.
Kyon was completely immobilised. Not going anywhere. I gave him two full minutes to process the situation, which I spent partly catching my breath and partly chuckling in a way that hurt my ribs.
When the humour had run its course, I walked over, crouched, and picked up the knife that had fallen from his hand during the earlier exchange. I held it at the angle I'd seen in every movie where someone was about to do something decisive.
"Please—" It came out through the groaning, compressed and wet. "Don't kill me."
"I won't." I looked at him. Let the moment breathe. "But this is going to hurt."
SLICE.
"AARGHHHHHH—"
Blood moved down his cheek. He went flat.
[Player Wins]
[Reward: Force: +7 | Agility: +4 | Stamina: +9]
Something moved through me at that, a shiver that started somewhere I couldn't locate and ran the full length of my spine before I could stop it. The knife hit the floor. My hand went back to my stomach and the other braced on the ground and I focused on breathing until the thing that had moved through me settled back down.
It isn't real.
None of this is real.
This is a system. It's all constructed.
I stayed with that until the breathing was normal again.
"Amelia," I said, when the cloud had cleared enough. "What have you been hiding from me?"