Miguel's day off started the way most things in his life started — with forward momentum and no particular plan.
He had been out since seven. The city was different at seven on a day when you had nowhere to be — looser, less directional, the morning crowd moving with purpose while he moved through it without any, which was its own kind of pleasure. He had taken the long route on his bike from the residential block where he rented a room, through the Fan District while it was still setting up for the day, banners being adjusted, a merchandise stall owner arguing with a delivery driver in two languages simultaneously. He had stopped for food at a stall near the edge of Kwan Market that he had been going to since his third week in New Kong — the woman who ran it knew his order and had it ready before he finished parking.
He ate standing up, watching the market wake. This was the part of the city he liked best — the part before it became the thing it was performing. The vendors talking to each other across the path, someone's radio on too loud somewhere inside, the smell of the morning mixing with cooking smells and sea air from the channel two blocks over.
He had no particular plan. He had been thinking about getting new gloves — his current pair was starting to wear at the palms from training. He had been thinking about visiting Liam and seeing if he wanted to do something. He had been thinking about a great number of things with the easy, rolling momentum of a brain that was not required to be operational today.
What he had not been thinking about was going back to the office.
And yet.
---
It was a minor thing. He had left his phone charger in the team rotation room, which he only remembered because his battery was at eleven percent. He could have bought a new one. He nearly did. Then he thought about the charger sitting there and the new one sitting in his pocket being a waste, and that was the kind of logic that sent him back.
The Central Tower lobby was busy in the particular mid-morning way. He nodded at the guard on the floor access and took the lift up.
The office floor was running. Hannah's door was closed, voices audible from the conference room — Moses, probably, working through campaign numbers. Sol's polling had come off its peak in the last two weeks, not dramatically but enough that the team had been in earlier than usual three days running. Kit was near the assistant station with his usual expression of a man cataloguing information without having opinions about it. Toby was at the corridor access by the east window, watching the approach below.
Miguel collected his charger. Pocketed it.
He looked down the corridor toward where Lucius usually positioned himself during rotation.
Not there.
He turned to Liam, who was near the kitchen doorway holding something that had been a reasonable breakfast approximately twenty minutes ago and was now mostly a project.
"Where's King?"
Liam looked up. "Downstairs. Training facility in the sub-levels. He does that sometimes — goes down there when he has time. Been doing it since we got back from the estate." He looked mildly curious. "Why?"
Miguel was already moving.
Not walking. Moving — at the specific pace of a man who has identified an opportunity and is not going to let it close on him. He hit the lift button before the thought had fully finished forming, stepped in the moment the doors opened, and turned around.
Liam looked at his breakfast. Looked at the lift. Looked at Miguel's face.
He wrapped the rest of the food in a napkin and got in.
The doors closed.
---
The NovaBreed training facility was three levels down, accessed through a corridor that had the aesthetic of somewhere that did not want to be found by accident. The lift required a specific access level. Miguel had it — contracted personnel clearance included the sub-level access during designated hours, which was something he had read in the orientation documents and filed away immediately as potentially useful.
He heard it before the doors opened. Not loud — the facility was insulated — but present. The specific rhythm of someone working alone, focused, no audience required.
The doors opened.
The space was large. Genuinely large — the ceiling high enough to accommodate flight trajectories, which was a deliberate design choice. The floor was reinforced composite that absorbed impact rather than cracking under it. Blast panelling on the walls. Open sparring areas and dedicated impact zones. The place smelled of metal and the faint char of energy discharge — the accumulated record of many sessions at full payload capacity.
Lucius was in the centre of it.
He was running a movement drill — footwork, angles, the kind of practice that existed below the level of combat and was the reason combat looked the way it did when someone was very good at it. Dark pants, a loose shirt. The left arm bandaged. He had clearly been here a while.
He did not look up.
"No," he said.
Miguel stopped. "I haven't said anything yet."
"You don't need to." Lucius moved through the next step of the drill without breaking. "The answer is no."
"I was just going to ask if —"
"No."
Liam found a position near the wall, settled in with his napkin-wrapped breakfast, and watched with the expression of a man who had seen this exchange before and was content to see how it developed today.
Miguel stepped onto the floor. "Every morning. I ask every morning and it's always no. You're already down here. The space is already set up. One round, that's all I'm —"
"Why."
Lucius stopped his drill. He stood perfectly still, turning to look at Miguel with that usual, unreadable calm. "You've been asking me to spar every morning since I sparred with Mavrick. Why."
Miguel held his gaze. "Because I want to beat him. Because I've been trying to beat him since the day I got here. But he got promoted, got busy, and stopped making time for me. Now I can't even get in the same room to challenge him. The next opportunity I get, I want to make sure I actually can."
The facility was dead silent.
Lucius looked at him, his eyes narrowing slightly as he ran a calculation that had nothing to do with the conversation on the surface and everything to do with the fighter standing in front of him.
"Move to the center," Lucius said.
Miguel blinked.
"Fine, however we are not sparring," Lucius added, walking toward the wall. He grabbed the edge of the bandage on his right arm and began unwrapping it.
Miguel watched as the layers fell away. What lay underneath defied expectation. It wasn't ice, and it wasn't metal. It was a crystalline formation, articulated perfectly at every joint. It looked like thick, sculpted glass, but it wasn't cold—it radiated a faint heat, catching the facility lights. More unnerving was the inside; through the translucent structure, Miguel could see the dark, rhythmic pulse of actual blood flowing through synthetic veins. It was integrated. Alive.
Lucius flexed the crystalline fingers. "I'll use what I have. You'll use your payload. Your actual payload. You've been fighting with a fraction of it for so long you think it's the whole. We're fixing that." He stepped into the center.
"And understand something before we start." His tone did not change — unhurried, factual. "I'm going to train you the way I was trained when I was coming up. What that means is you're going to come very close to your limit. Not past it. But close enough that you'll know exactly where it is and what it feels like from that side." A pause. "You're going to think at some point that I'm trying to kill you."
He waited.
"I'm not. But don't confuse that for comfortable."
Miguel's hands began to glow, the bio-thermal charge building at his knuckles. "Don't get it confused," he echoed.
---
What followed wasn't a spar. It was a dissection.
Miguel threw a heavy, charged strike. Lucius didn't just block it; he redirected the kinetic force with the crystalline arm, stepping inside Miguel's guard and striking him hard enough in the ribs to steal his breath.
"You're backing away," Lucius stated calmly as Miguel wheezed, stumbling backward. "When your cells latch onto a target, you retreat to avoid your own blast radius. You're giving them time to scrape it off before detonation. Press the advantage. Push."
Miguel gritted his teeth, lunging forward, sweeping a hand across Lucius's shoulder and depositing a cluster of bio-thermal cells. This time, Miguel didn't retreat. He pushed in, throwing a left hook—
Lucius ducked, swept Miguel's legs out from under him, and vaulted backward.
Miguel hit the floor hard. A second later, the cells on Lucius's shoulder began to glow intensely. They sparked violently, hissing for a fraction of a second before detonating in a concussive boom that rippled Lucius's sleeve, but missed the man himself entirely.
"Five to eight seconds," Lucius said, circling him. "That is your delay once the cells leave your person. You don't control the timing. It glows, and it sparks before it blows. If I can see the spark, I can move. You aren't timing your detonations. You're just throwing them and hoping."
Miguel pushed himself up, his vision blurring slightly. He rushed in again, throwing a flurry of heavy, explosive punches.
Lucius dismantled him. "You fight like you don't have legs," Lucius said, sidestepping a massive right hand and driving a knee squarely into Miguel's abdomen. Miguel folded, coughing violently. "Your upper body is entirely predictable."
The composite floor took the brunt of the wild detonations. Overpressure shockwaves rattled the blast panels. Liam had dropped his breakfast ten minutes ago, his back pressed flat against the wall, eyes wide with genuine panic as he watched Miguel get systematically broken down.
It was agonizing. Every time Miguel found his ceiling, Lucius violently shattered it and forced him to find the next one. Miguel's ears were ringing with a deafening whine. The metallic taste of copper flooded his mouth. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass. His legs were shaking so violently they could barely hold his weight.
He swung once more, running on nothing but stubborn fumes. Lucius parried with the crystalline arm, stepped inside the guard, and delivered a devastating open-palm strike to Miguel's chest.
Miguel crashed to the composite floor. His vision blacked out at the edges. The ringing in his ears pitched up, morphing into a sound he hadn't heard in years.
*The deafening roar of military treads.*
*He wasn't on a composite mat. He was fourteen again. The air smelled of burning rubber and ozone. The uprising. Martial law in the favela. The military had rolled tanks into the streets to crush the riots. He was a kid with absolutely nothing to lose, throwing raw bio-thermal charges at armored hulls, screaming until his throat bled.*
*Then, Big Boys sent the heavy hitters to put them down. They sent Mavrick. Miguel had seen him—the strongest thing on the battlefield—and charged. He went for the king.*
*He was in the dirt four seconds later. Lungs burning, vision swimming, waiting for the killing blow.*
*Instead, the shadow shifted. A hand reached down.*
*"You've got fire," Mavrick's voice echoed through the haze, "but you burn too fast. Learn to control it, and I'll show you what you can actually do."*
Miguel gasped, inhaling the bitter char of the training room. He coughed violently, spitting blood onto the mat. He was on his hands and knees. The detonation cells in his palms were giving off weak, involuntary sparks—completely spent. The room was spinning.
Lucius stood a few feet away, entirely unbothered, the crystalline arm catching the overhead light.
"You pulled back every time you hit the ceiling," Lucius said. "Three times. That's the habit. We'll break it."
Miguel let out a ragged, wet breath. Slowly, agonizingly, he forced himself to a seated position. He looked at the massive scorch marks decorating the room. The actual version of his power.
Lucius picked up his bandages. "Three hours."
Miguel's head snapped up, his bloodshot eyes trying to focus. He stared at Lucius, chest heaving. "You're... kidding." He could barely get the words out.
"I told you," Lucius said, his voice flat, factual. "I'm going to train you the way I was trained. We go again in three hours."
Lucius looked at him. He did not say anything else.
Miguel turned to Liam.
Liam was looking at the scorch patterns on the floor. Then at Miguel. Then at the patterns again. His expression had the quality of a man doing a calculation he had not expected to be doing today.
"I'll get you food," he said. "And water. A lot of water." He paused. "Are you going to be okay?"
Miguel looked at his hands again. The residue cells had stopped sparking. He flexed his fingers once.
"Yeah," he said. He didn't entirely sound like he was sure. Then, more solidly: "Yeah."
He sat down on the composite floor to wait out the three hours.
Liam left to find food at a pace that suggested genuine concern about the timeline.
Lucius sat against the wall on the opposite side, closed his eyes, and went still in the way he went still when he was doing something internally that had no external component. Like a machine in standby. Like something that had decided resting was simply the efficient use of available time.
The facility ventilation ran quietly overhead.
Miguel looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling he had hit today was further out than he had thought it was.
He sat with that for a while.
---
To Be Continued