Chapter 166 - No Quarter

I was breathing hard by now, the three back-to-back fights truly catching up with me as I stood over Thomas. He stared up at me with an incredulous look, like his brain was still trying to catch up to what his eyes had just seen.

‘ I might’ve overdone it a bit there… ’

I’d honestly panicked when he’d suddenly lunged for me like that and instinctively used part of [Narrow Twist] to slip out of the grapple before it could fully close around me. It wasn’t a sure thing like [Slippery Body] would’ve been, but it clearly still managed to give me just  enough extra flexibility to  wriggle free—as long as I wasn’t already fully locked down.

‘ That probably looked freaky as hell from his side though… My bones didn’t even feel solid for a split second there. Really hope he didn’t notice that part. ’

Thankfully, Miss K didn’t give either of us much time to dwell on it before she stepped in with that familiar, no-nonsense authority that shut down spiraling thoughts real fast.

“Thomas, that was a good attempt at the end,” she said. “But you overthought the majority of that fight— again .”

Tom winced slightly as she continued.

“You had two full rounds  to watch Sera fight and get a read on her current physical limits. That should have been more than enough to estimate whether you could realistically gas her out or not. Instead, you kept reassessing and second-guessing yourself, never committing to your initial conclusions.”

He looked like he’d just bitten into a raw lemon at that.

“Being careful is good,” Miss K went on, “but there’s a point where caution stops being productive. If you’d committed early— really  leaned into your superior stamina and applied sustained offensive pressure from the start—you would’ve had a much better chance of taking this. That only works if you do it immediately , though. Half-measures don’t get you there, as we just saw. By the time you realized you had to change tactics, you were already so far on the back-foot you had no way to come back without risky moves.”

She tapped the side of her head lightly. “Your shard already covers aspects of this. Review them before next  session. You need a better instinct for when to press and when to pull back—when to stop thinking so much.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Tom replied, pushing himself fully upright now. “I’ll put more work into that.”

His tone was tight, but decidedly serious—and honestly, fair .

Miss K nodded once, then turned her attention to me—and I instinctively braced myself for another verbal flamethrower.

“Sera, you did pretty well this time around,” she said evenly. “Good pressure, not overextending, and you didn’t rely on overly risky moves just to force a win. That was solid.”

I blinked.

“ But ,” she continued, because of course there was a but, “your arsenal is still far too limited. Review sections four through seven on your shard before the next  session. You can’t keep throwing the same kinds of kicks and punches and expect it to work forever just because you’ve got some physical advantages over your opponents.”

My eyebrows shot up—and not just for one reason.

First, I genuinely hadn’t expected praise. The last bout had felt… rough . Clumsy, even, when compared to the previous two. If Tom hadn’t suddenly committed to that desperate lunge, I wasn’t sure how I would’ve actually ended things.

‘ But maybe that is the whole point, ’ I thought. ‘ I managed to back him into a corner without struggling much. His choices were either something incredibly risky—just like I’d done with Jin—or stepping out of bounds and losing. ’

That was… unsettlingly tactical by accident.

The second reason her words hit weird was the phrase “physical advantages.”

Because, objectively, everyone else here had literal  physical advantages over me.

Cybernetics. Bionics. Genetic mods.

That was kind of their whole thing  and the very reason I had even been allowed into this group. My normal-human-ness made me the outlier here.

Then again… the System was absolutely cheating on my behalf.

Between Body and Reflex alone, I effectively had the kind of focused, high-end muscle training most people needed a decade or more to even approach.

So yeah. I could see it. Intellectually, at least.

‘ Still feels really damn weird to be told I have physical advantages over these guys… ’

Especially  Tom.

Knowing what he’d been like in the game—how much of a monster he’d been—it felt surreal to be considered physically superior to him in any meaningful way.

There really wasn’t a clean way to wrap my head around that.

“Now, get yourselves cleaned up, drink some water, and we’ll continue in five,” Miss K ordered, her voice clipped like a drill-sergeant’s as she stepped back into the middle of the ring.

I followed Tom toward the benches where Kenzie and Jin were already waiting—and, on a whim, I flicked my Anima Sight back on and glanced over my shoulder.

Doing it on the move, and trying to do it only through one eye, took way more effort than I’d expected, but after a bit of fumbling around for a few seconds, I somehow managed it.

The result was… deeply unpleasant.

My stomach lurched, the world tilting sideways for a split second.

I stumbled and immediately shut one eye, playing it off as a leg cramp while I bent slightly and started rubbing at my thigh.

‘ Okay. Yeah. Doing that while moving is a terrible idea. Lesson learned. ’

Once I steadied myself, I looked back again—this time only opening one eye.

And, yeah . My earlier suspicion had been dead on.

Miss K was cleaning the mat the same way she had before, just on a much smaller scale.

There were far fewer Sprites at work, but the color mix was unmistakable. Same makeup of the general group of coloured Sprites, but far less volume of them.

She barely seemed to move, only the faintest shifts of her fingers guiding the Sprites as they flowed, gathered, and vanished.

‘ I wonder if she’s doing this mentally and the fingers are just… leakage, ’ I thought. ‘ Or if the movements actually matter. ’

My mind immediately drifted to Sigils.

To my [Anima Razor] and the required, deeply structured motions that acted as the anchors for whatever it was that Anima really did, when I used it.

That second option felt a lot  more likely.

Subconscious movement didn’t really track for someone like Miss K. You didn’t become a Grandmaster of martial arts without absurdly precise body control.

Accidental motion felt borderline impossible to even imagine being a thing for her.

‘ Then again, ’ I conceded, watching the Sprites fade back into the air and ground as Miss K finished up, ‘ it’s Anima. So who the hell really knows how any of this works. ’

I focused and carefully eased my Anima Sight back down, relieved when the world settled back into something normal again.

It worked—cleanly, even—though it still felt a bit finicky, like handling a switch that hadn’t been properly labeled yet. I’d already been half-prepared to come up with an excuse to ask Miss K for help, so not having to do that right now felt like a small win.

If I kept using it regularly, hopefully it’d become more second nature.

That was how it looked for Miss K and Valeria. Downright effortless.

I finally reached the benches and started slathering myself in the anti-bruising and cut treatment Miss K provided every session, working it into sore spots out of habit—when an unexpected System chime cut through my thoughts.

I froze.

I recognized the sound.

‘ …A level up? ’

I glanced around to make sure the others were busy, then quickly pulled up the notifications.

[System]: 100xp gained for [First-Aid] Skill.
[System]: [First-Aid] Skill has reached  Level 3. Knowledge and Muscle-Memory download available . [First-Aid] Perk Point obtained .

I stared at the interface for a solid few seconds before letting out a long, tired sigh.

‘ Of course. Nearly dying—what—two? Three times in a row, holding myself together through sheer spite and luck, and the thing that finally pushes [First-Aid] over the edge is rubbing no-no-bruise cream on my arms. Are you kidding  me, System? ’

I closed the interface before I could get more annoyed, rubbing the last of the medication into my skin and refocusing on the dojo around me.

I could look at the Perks later and agonize over choices then.

Right now, I didn’t have the time to truly dive into it.

As if to underline that thought, Kenzie dropped down right next to me, close enough that her shoulder brushed mine.

Her eyes were practically drilling holes through my skull.

“So,” she said, blunt as ever, “you’ve improved, huh?”

I didn’t really have a clean answer for that, so I just shrugged. “Yeah. I guess so. Things’ve been… kind of wild lately.”

She huffed softly, ears flicking once. “I’m guessing you won’t—or can’t —tell me what the fuck actually happened? Because this is kinda insane, you know? We don’t see you for a week and suddenly you’re, what, two steps ahead of everyone in like… everything? And still completely unaugmented…?”

That last part had definitely been a question.

I let out a heavy sigh—not because she was being annoying, but because I genuinely had no good way to explain any of this. I turned to meet her gaze properly, holding it and putting as much weight into my words as I could.

“I honestly don’t know much more than you do,” I said. “Miss K’s trying to help me figure it out too. Because, yeah—things’ve been really strange. I wish I could tell you more, but some of it’s… classified—” I winced at how cliche that sounded, “—and most of the rest, I just flat-out don’t understand. And yes, still completely unaugmented. Fleshy human all the way through, barring the usual stuff.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her ears twitch as she watched me, still searching my face.

I kept my gaze steady, hoping the sincerity came through.

I really didn’t want her to hate me, or think I was hiding things out of spite—which… okay, technically I was  hiding things, but not out of malice or anything. Mostly because I couldn’t exactly tell people about the System and Anima just for the heck of it.

Kenzie had been nothing but kind to me since day one.

I liked being around her—more than I’d expected to, honestly—even if we hadn’t done much together outside of dojo sessions.

And with the way things were going, that was probably about to change very soon.

We’d already talked about meeting up outside the dojo for some extra training before, and after today’s session—judging by everyone’s barely veiled, burning desire to beat me to a pulp—that was almost certainly going to happen sooner rather than later.

They’d want to “catch up” to me as fast as possible, after all.

‘ Not that I actually think I’m that far ahead… ’ I thought, trying to keep my ego in check. ‘ Just like Miss K said—if they fixed the really obvious holes in their game using the shards they already have, I honestly wouldn’t know how to beat any of them. Which means I’ll have to put in extra work too, if I don’t want to get outpaced the moment they put in effort. ’

Thankfully, Kenzie seemed to decide that I’d been about as honest as I could reasonably be—or at least that was how I chose to read her body language—and the tension eased.

We ended up just chatting about nothing in particular for a few minutes, small talk and idle comments filling the gap while we both caught our breath and rehydrated.

It didn’t last long.

Miss K called us all back to the mat right as the five minutes were up, her voice cutting cleanly through the room. We fell into our usual lineup without much fuss, waiting to hear what fresh horrors she had planned for us next.

“Now,” she began, wearing that same infuriatingly attractive smirk she always did, “I’d wager that was a very interesting way to start today’s session.”

I already didn’t like where this was going.

“It’s good to see that all of you seem to have taken the right lessons from the little thrashing Sera decided to hand out.”

I physically cringed at the phrasing.

‘ Please don’t make them hate me, Miss K, ’ I silently begged. ‘ I’m trying to build some rapport here. ’

She continued without mercy. “I can see the fire in your eyes. That’s good. Keep it. But focus it—especially into your shard work. I didn’t spend several hours tailoring those things for each of you just so you could cherry-pick two or three comfortable parts and ignore the rest.”

Every single one of us suddenly found the floor, the walls, or the far corner of the dojo fascinating enough to avoid eye contact with the Grandmaster.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t exactly been diving headfirst into the deep end of their shard with boundless enthusiasm—which, to be fair, wasn’t for lack of motivation so much as a brutal lack of time.

Life hadn’t exactly been kind or relaxing for me these past few weeks.

Between nearly dying—several times—getting rebuilt by reality itself, and trying to keep half a dozen secrets from eating me alive, I’d done about as much shard  work as was realistically possible without completely burning out.

“And since that seems to be everyone’s major issue right now,” Miss K continued, seemingly revelling in our collective guilt, “we’ll be spending the next hour and a half fixing that. Get your shards out, slot them in, and keep working from where you left off. Don’t jump ahead. They’re ordered for a reason.”

So we did.

We all pulled out the Miss K–designed shards, slotted them in, and dropped back into the impressively deep, painfully personalized martial arts curriculum she’d built for each of us.

For me, that meant returning—once again—to section three.

Section one had been humiliatingly titled “How to throw a Punch.”
Section two followed right along with the similarly apt “How to properly Kick.”

Section three, mercifully unnamed, was where things actually got a bit more serious.

It broke down punches and kicks in obsessive detail, layering in stance theory, weight transfer, balance, footwork, and how even tiny adjustments completely changed power, responsiveness, and recovery.

And it was massive .

By far the largest section so far, which explained why I was still stuck in it despite weeks of steady progress. My daily routine usually only carved out fifteen minutes or so for shard  work every morning, squeezed in between everything else trying to kill me or demand my attention.

Honestly, the fact that I’d gotten as far as I had already was kind of impressive—if I ignored Miss K’s expression every time she reminded us just how much more there was left to go.

And so we spent the next hour and a half exactly as Miss K had promised, each of us buried in our own shards.

The Grandmaster paced the room, stopping by one student at a time to offer corrections, ask sharp questions, or casually dismantle someone’s assumptions with a single, well-placed comment that made you rethink an entire movement chain.

For my part, I focused almost entirely on getting the movements right— really  right.

I paid close attention to how my muscles engaged, how weight shifted, how tension flowed and released, all so I could later reproduce it cleanly through [Elemental Balance].

That approach had already proven absurdly effective for tearing through the shard faster than I reasonably should have been able to—or anyone, really.

‘ It truly is a cheat to be able to control every muscle on command, ’ I thought, unable to stop the faintly smug curl at the corner of my mouth.

Instead of grinding the same motion for hours until my body grudgingly learned it, I only needed one or two solid repetitions. Once I understood which muscles moved and in what sequence, I could lock it in and recreate the motion perfectly, every single time.

Honestly? It felt downright unfair, considering that the other three people next to me were doing rote repetitions until they got it down.

And, judging by the shard’s curriculum itself, Miss K had absolutely accounted for that advantage already.

The amount of hyper-specific muscle isolation work baked into my shard was downright obscene—far more than anyone else could realistically brute-force their way through in months, maybe even years.

‘ Yeah… she definitely took my description of [Elemental Balance] at face value and decided to lean into it as hard as possible. ’

That was a Grandmaster for you.

Adapt instantly, recalibrate without ego—and then exploit every advantage to its absolute limit.

Eventually, though, even that had to stop.

We were all starting to look a little glassy-eyed from the constant drills, muscles twitching and brains thoroughly cooked, so Miss K finally called a halt.

“Good work, all of you,” she said, a genuinely warm smile softening the authority in her voice. “Take five. Hydrate. Then we’ll finish today’s session the same way we always do—by having all of you try to land a hit on me for that sweet reward.”

Also colloquially known as Miss K throws us all on the mat for fifteen minutes straight until every single muscle in our bodies begged for mercy.

And, honestly? I loved  this part.

‘ And definitely not because the idea of Miss K repeatedly slamming me into the mat is… tinglingly enticing, ’ I told myself, very firmly.

No, the real reason was simple: Watching a Grandmaster move and feeling their actions firsthand, was absolutely priceless.

It gave us a glimpse of what the end of the road actually looked like.

Most of her movements were still far beyond my ability to even properly parse, but she deliberately slowed things down, dulled edges, made things readable—just enough to show us what the human body could become if pushed far enough.

Those last fifteen minutes were an invaluable lesson all on their own.

‘ And this time, I’ve got a secret weapon, ’ I thought, a spark of anticipation buzzing through me. ‘ One good surprise. One clean hit is all I need. ’

[Flow].

The ability I’d earned through [Martial Arts] and never actually gotten around to using.

Until now.

Today was the day.

After a quick round of rehydration, we spread out around Miss K on the mat, settling into the familiar loose circle we always formed for this part of the session.

“Same rules as always,” she said easily, rolling her shoulders once. “One hit and the reward is yours. Coordinate—or don’t. Entirely up to you.”

Her grin turned sharp. “Let’s see if you’re going to make me dance a little harder today than usual… or if all that shard work just fried your brains.”

She raised her hands, fingers loose, ready to clap.

All of us dropped into our stances on instinct.

Kenzie to my left sank low, powerful legs coiling like springs under her, ears twitching with focus. Jin settled into his usual boxing stance, shoulders relaxed but loaded, cybernetic arms already rolling through tiny test movements. Tom took up his neutral posture, measured and careful, eyes never leaving Miss K for even a second.

I slipped into my own… thing.

Still a bit of a mish-mash, if I was being honest.

Part learned form, part adaptation, part “this feels right.”

It wasn’t elegant, but it worked—for now, at least—and that was what mattered.

Then, Miss K’s hands came together.

The sharp, echoing clap cracked through the dojo, and the last, most important part of the session began.

We surged forward almost immediately, all pretense of caution gone before the clap faded.

Kenzie was first, as usual, exploding off the mat in a low, feral rush, legs snapping out in a vicious opening kick meant to force Miss K to move. Jin followed half a heartbeat later, stepping in behind her with a sharp one-two aimed high, while Tom circled just wide enough to cut off angles.

I darted in from the opposite side, trying to time my entry for the instant Miss K committed to dealing with the others.

None of it mattered.

Miss K slipped Kenzie’s kick like it had never been aimed at her, redirected Jin’s punch with a lazy twist of her wrist, and stepped straight through the space Tom was trying to claim.

In the same smooth motion, she “tapped” Kenzie’s thigh, nudged Jin off-balance with a shoulder, and hooked Tom’s ankle out from under him.

All three of them hit the mat in different directions.

I barely had time to register it before she was already on me.

A light shove to the chest sent me stumbling back, followed by a perfectly placed foot sweep that dumped me flat on my back, the impact knocking the breath right out of me.

She didn’t even look like she was putting in effort at all.

We scrambled back up and went again.

And again.

And again.

Then, Tom started calling out ideas. “Together—now!”

We rushed her as a group, trying to collapse space all at once.

When that failed, he switched it up. “Staggered! Keep her moving!”

We attacked in waves, one after another, then deliberately broke rhythm and went completely random, trying to overwhelm her attention.

It still didn’t matter.

Miss K was everywhere .

She flowed between us, always just out of reach, always exactly where she needed to be.

Every kick got redirected, every punch slid past empty space, every grab attempt ended with someone eating mat. Sometimes she barely moved at all, just adjusted a shoulder or shifted her weight, and suddenly one of us was airborne.

We lasted maybe five seconds before we were all smacking into the mat again, over and over, no matter how we tried to approach it.

On the surface, it honestly felt like we hadn’t made any real progress at all compared to our very first day at the dojo—but we all knew that was bullshit.

We had  improved. A lot .

Miss K was just so absurdly far above us that our gains didn’t even register on the same scale. It was like trying to measure an ant hill against a mountain range.

‘ Alright… let’s try this, ’ I finally decided, once we were properly warmed up and had gotten the worst of the initial chaos out of our systems.

I caught the others’ attention and started signing, using the same quick, clipped hand signals Tom had introduced weeks ago, back when we’d first realized that trying to talk through a plan against Miss K was a lost cause.

To her credit, Miss K immediately turned her back toward whoever was signing, very deliberately giving us the space to plot.

No spoilers. Fair game. That was her motto for this.

I laid out the plan as simply and cleanly as I could.

This was it—the one, singular opening I was going to take with [Flow].

I only had surprise on my side once , and if I wasted it, that was it.

The other three didn’t hesitate for even a second. They were all in, no questions asked.

We’d already taken turns throwing out ideas so many times, trying anything and everything that might work, that this was just how things went: Someone had a thought, we ran  it.

That was the only way you even had a chance at toppling something like Miss K.

I took a breath, met everyone’s eyes one last time, and then gave the signal.

I went first—straight down the middle, loud and obvious, making damn sure Miss K’s attention locked onto me. Jin and Tom split wide, angling in from either side, while Kenzie ghosted out of sight behind her, coiling up like a spring.

I rushed into Miss K’s range without throwing a single strike.

That part was deliberate.

She always waited for commitment before she dismantled us, and I needed her focused on reading me—not swatting me aside yet.

Tom and Jin moved first.

They almost connected, too. Almost , as we always did.

Miss K caught both of them mid-approach, one hand snapping out to each of them in the same heartbeat, flipping them cleanly over her hips like they weighed nothing at all. And right then—right as she was still mid-motion—Kenzie came in from behind like a missile.

That was my mark.

I reached inward, zeroed in on that strange lever inside me, and pulled.

[Flow].

The world didn’t stop—but it slowed enough that I could finally breathe inside it.

Miss K’s movements stretched out into something readable for the very first time.

I could see her react to Kenzie while she was still finishing off Tom and Jin, her upper body twisting, muscles firing in perfect sequence. She sidestepped, redirected Kenzie’s momentum, and lined up a counter in one seamless, impossible motion.

And I went in.

I threw a punch—not fancy, just as fast as I possibly could.

Faster than anything I’d ever  done before.

Her eyes widened. Just a fraction. But I saw the recognition in her eyes that this was not like anything I had shown before; that I had kept something hidden this entire time.

She flowed out of the way, rolling her body through a ridiculous chain of muscle movements, almost flipping herself sideways to avoid the strike. I adjusted mid-motion, riding the momentum, and followed up with a kick aimed straight at her standing thigh.

Somehow , she still made it.

Her shin came up just in time to catch the kick, and in the same breath her hand clamped around my outstretched arm from the first punch.

I felt her weight shift. Saw her muscles move. Felt the throw coming.

But that had been the plan all along.

I lunged forward and drove my head toward hers.

Her eyes widened properly this time, in true unfettered surprise, as she realized what I had been doing. She was on one leg, the other braced to take my kick, her grip committed, her balance occupied.

There was nowhere left to go  for her. Even Miss K could not break the laws of physics.

Adrenaline flooded me.

A grin threatened to break loose—And then I saw her  smile.

Her head drew back.

My eyebrows shot up in sudden, horrible understanding.

She did  still have one counter left. A counter I had completely forgotten about because I had simply been thinking about hitting her, rather than what that hit would actually look like.

And I couldn’t stop.

I was already moving, already committed, my forehead driving forward—

Bone met bone with a brutal, hollow crack .

The impact detonated behind my eyes, white-hot and overwhelming. My vision exploded into stars, sound warping and fading as pain drowned out everything else.

[Flow] collapsed instantly and the world’s colours and sounds came rushing in around me again. I didn’t even feel it go—I just didn’t have the mental focus left to hold onto it.

I would’ve dropped like a stone, but instead, I felt strong hands keep me upright.

I dimly heard Miss K call for an emergency break, her voice slightly cutting through the haze, and then felt myself being carefully lowered to the mat. My head rang, my teeth buzzed, and my entire world narrowed down to breathing and not throwing up.

‘ Concussion… Definitely a concussion… ’