Blame it on an aggressive stomach.

Pokey was sharp, sharp enough to clock quickly that the ball wasn’t what I was actually focused on. He moved sideways when my hands swept forward, clawed out in a genuine attempt to gouge his eyes out.

Those eyes. They were doing most of the work, tracking, calculating, and watching the way he adjusted around my reach made it obvious that he’d spent a significant portion of the last several years training his body to respond before his brain had finished deciding.

Reflex. Real reflex, not the practiced kind that only worked in expected scenarios. Faster than anything I’d gone up against during the fights that had brought me this far. Technically, the task was simple— grab the ball from his hand. But if the person holding it was seemingly untouchable, then something much smaller and rounder was going to be considerably harder to get to.

I already had the shape of a plan. Distraction and action. Make him think I was operating at the same level as everyone else— aggressive, predictable, running entirely on physical confidence. Let him get comfortable with the pattern. Then break it.

That was the only way I was going to get an opening.

I drove a punch toward his nose. Faster than my previous attempts, enough to make him feel the step up. He dropped low anyway, smooth and economical — and my fingers caught a few loose strands of his hair on the way through.

I stared at my hand.

Ugh, disgusting.

Pokey had recalibrated within a split second, tossing the ball casually between both hands like this was a warm-up exercise. The flex across his shoulder gave him away though— the specific involuntary flex of someone exhaling a close call they weren’t about to admit out loud. His silence lasted exactly the right amount of time before he decided to end it.

"It’s going to take more than just that to get it from me." He said it somewhere between pride and settled confidence. Then he raised the ball and looked at it. "So far, all I’m seeing is weakness."

I couldn’t really argue. Partially because he was right that I hadn’t gone all out— and partially because going all out wasn’t an option I had access to right now. Any extension beyond normal physical effort had a real chance of triggering my nullification. And ability activation at the BHA camp, apparently, meant disqualification.

Which meant I had to win with exactly what a cripple was supposed to have. Which meant Pokey’s whole point was intentional. He’d said it himself; tactical intelligence, physical skill, adaptability. He hadn’t designed this exercise to test whether a cripple could overpower him physically. He’d designed it to see who could think past the obvious problem fast enough to act on it.

The ball was never the real target. The timing was.

"Alright then."

I moved toward his left angle without wasting space on a wind-up. The plan had three beats. Right punch to the face, let him adapt to it. Left punch to the face — reinforce the pattern. Third right punch— let him get fully comfortable. Then the fourth beat breaks the rhythm entirely: redirect downward, toward the ball, in the window where his face was already moving out of the way before his hands could compensate.

Right punch. He blocked it clean.

Left punch. Blocked again, faster this time.

Third right— he had the pattern by now, I could see it in how he shifted. Good. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

The fourth beat came. My other fist swung lower, angled toward the ball. His face was already in motion before the signal even reached his hands.

And for the first time since this whole exercise started, his eyes went wide.

He leapt backward— full commitment, real urgency. One hundred milliseconds. That was the window. I drove myself toward him, planted, and swung a kick to his torso — the trajectory of someone who had timed it to send him flipping back, losing balance, losing the ball on the way down.

That was the plan.

My legs never made contact.

He vanished midair. Not a sidestep, not a roll— just gone, the way things in anime do when the animators decide physics is optional. I completed the kick into empty space and had approximately one second to register the confusion before I felt the back of a foot that clearly had not skipped a single leg day in its entire career.

My body made a decision about the direction it was going in, and the decision did not involve my input.

CRASH.

The wall said hello.

Side murmurs rippled through the group watching.

"That was so... epic!"

"Ugh, that must have hurt."

Honestly, I was starting to build a tolerance for walls. I’d been introduced to enough of them recently that the experience had started to feel routine. I was still pulling my face out of the debris when Pokey produced a pocket watch from his breast pocket, checked it, and looked back at the group.

"Your timer ended twenty seconds ago." He said it with the specific relief of someone who had just finished a shift they’d been looking forward to ending. His eyes moved across the rest of them. "Training’s over. Everyone."

Malik spoke first. "Does this mean we—"

"Two laps around the camp. Now."

Gosh, I hate this guy.

***

LATER IN THE CRIB

"I can’t feel my legs."

Dinner was supposed to be the reward at the end of a bad day. It was not functioning as a reward. My legs were sore in a sustained, specific way that communicated they intended to keep being sore for a while. My skull was beginning to process all the pain it had politely deferred during the wall incident.

"You’re exaggerating." Aria said, scooping another spoon of her meal with the energy of someone who had spent the afternoon in a significantly better physical situation than I had. "It was just training. How bad could it have been?"

"You have no idea." I looked at Malik across the table. He was asleep in his chair, snoring with the dedicated abandon of something that had given everything it had. "Pokey. Malik was right, that name does have a weird energy to it."

"Pokey?" Kali had looked up. "As in S.K Pokey?"

"You know him?"

"He was an athlete. A really good one. Retired early though. I think he had an accident, something about a serious leg injury that ended it."

"A leg injury?"

She nodded. "That’s what the rumours say. I didn’t expect to see him working camp trainer."

I sat with that for a moment. A leg injury that ended an athletic career. Which meant every dodge during that exercise, every movement that kept him in that one spot rather than crossing the room— that wasn’t showmanship. That was management. He was working with something that still had tremors in it, and he was still faster than anyone I’d gone up against.

The vanishing midair thing still had no logical explanation. I was going to need more time with that one.

"Let me get this straight." Aria was chewing loudly as she said it, which was a choice. "This man possibly had a career-ending leg injury and still couldn’t you take a ball away from him?" She waved the spoon once, dismissively, and clicked her teeth. "Weakling."

I was assembling the full breadth of my frustration into a response when a chair scraped back across the floor and someone settled into the seat between me and Aria with the naturalness of someone who had always planned to sit exactly there.

Cael.

He began to eat. Began immediately picking around the green beans in his porridge, which was, objectively, the most childish possible nitpick to have about food at a military-style training camp.

Kali looked between all of us. "Do you guys... know him?"

"He’s a nobody." Aria said, without looking away from her bowl. "Ignore him."

Cael continued eating with the composure of someone who had heard that before and had made a decision about how much it affected his appetite.

I couldn’t do it. I hated his guts in a way that made ignoring him physically uncomfortable.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Eating."

"Is this another one of your plans? Come sit near me, ask vague questions about Aria, establish some kind of threat—"

"I’m hungry." He put another spoon in. Swallowed. Let out a sigh that communicated something had been trying his patience for a while. "Besides, threatening you is pointless." He set the spoon down. "Not when you like her."

"What?" The word came out sharper than I planned. "Stop talking nonsense and finish your damn meal."

"The earlier you admit it, the better it is for everyone who’s been reading this and waiting—"

"Hey." Aria’s voice had the specific quality of a grudge that had been warming up. She hadn’t even looked at him yet and it was already in the tone. "You heard what he said. Finish your meal and be quiet about it."

"I lost my appetite, actually."

"Then leave." She looked at him now. "Looking at you right now makes me wanna pulp your brain."

Kali’s expression across the table had done something interesting. She was trying to keep it neutral and failing at one specific detail — there was something in her eyes when she looked at Cael that she was working actively to conceal. A fluster. The kind that got stronger the more someone tried to manage it.

"I’m just saying." Cael gestured in my direction, apparently done being indirect about it. "You both like each other. You act like enemies, but you’re clearly not. Has it occurred to either of you to have an actual conversation about that instead of whatever this ongoing performance is?"

"There are no feelings." Aria said it with a finality that was meant to end the conversation. "I don’t like anyone. Not now, not in the foreseeable future. So whatever trajectory your hopes are on, bring them back down."

"I wasn’t talking about just anyone." Cael said. He looked at me. Then back at her. "I was specifically talking about him."

"No difference." Her voice went up slightly. "Anyone. Everyone. That includes—" a half beat, like the sentence was moving faster than she’d planned for, "—that includes Ren."

My spoon hit the inside of the bowl.

Oh.

.

.

.

Extra:

[Name: S.K Pokey || Ability: Temporal Perception + Matter Restructuring (Hybrid) || Rank: B (High Tier) || Fortitude: 6.1]

Ability Explanation: Temporal Perception allows the user to perceive the world in slowed motion, dramatically enhancing reaction speed, movement, reading ability, and evasive maneuvers in real time.

Think of Pokey like a housefly: his neural processing speed is abnormally fast, allowing his reflexes to trigger within 3–5 milliseconds. Because his brain processes information far quicker than a normal human’s, attacks appear slower from his perspective, making dodging feel almost effortless.

To Pokey, an opponent like Ren seems to move in slow motion, even though both are technically moving at normal speed.