My cheek barely hurts now.
The first day after the fight, it pulsed. Second day, it was just a bruise. Now it's a faint yellow smear on my face that only shows in certain light.
The seventeen-year-old probably still feels every shot I put into his ribs.
The math is ugly if you write it down:
Age: 9
Opponent: 17
Result: I walked away. He almost knelt.
Good for me. Bad for my ability to pretend I'm normal.
I head for the alley anyway.
If beating one idiot means I stop training, I deserve whatever kills me later.
Kain and Bruk are already there.
No pads, no extra gear, just the usual: Kain rolling his shoulders like he's permanently warming up, Bruk against the wall like he grew there.
I drop my bag in the usual spot, kick off my boots, and start to raise my hands.
"Don't," Kain says.
I freeze.
"That's not ominous at all," I say. "We cancelling tonight because I upgraded from 'hopeless' to 'mildly functional'?"
"Sit," he says, nodding at an overturned crate by the wall.
He almost never tells me to sit.
I sit.
The stone is cold under my feet. My muscles twitch, expecting work that isn't coming. Yet.
Bruk uncrosses his arms. He looks more awake than usual.
"First," Kain says, "we need to talk about what happened with that seventeen-year-old."
I stare at a crack in the wall.
"Which part?" I ask. "The part where he tried to mug a kid or the part where I restructured his priorities?"
"The part," Kain says, "where you dismantled someone almost a decade older using basics you've only had for months."
He looks at me like he's dissecting my skull.
"That's not normal," he says. "And I don't mean that as an insult."
"I wasn't planning to make a career in normality," I say.
He ignores that.
"You know what the average nine-year-old does when a seventeen-year-old rushes them?" he asks.
"Cries, runs, or dies," I say. "Sometimes in that order."
"You didn't," he says. "You stepped off, framed, hit the body, took his legs, played with the clinch. You used your head first and your fists second."
He glances at Bruk.
"Most grown men can't do that," Bruk says. "Even if you show them where to put their feet."
I fidget with a loose thread on my pants.
"You're the ones who taught me," I say. "I just did what you drilled into my bones."
Kain shakes his head.
"We gave you tools," he says. "Plenty of people get tools. Most of them hit their own fingers with the hammer. You don't."
Silence settles for a moment.
Wind slides down the narrow alley, carrying the sound of the city: distant arguments, a cart rolling, someone laughing too loud.
"So what?" I ask. "You kicking me out because I used your lessons outside class?"
"No," he says. "We're telling you where your path leads if you keep going like this."
He leans back against a crate, arms folding.
"There's levels to this," he says. "You're starting to understand the bottom one. Street fighters. Thugs. Drunks with good right hands. Seventeen-year-olds who think years equal strength."
He taps his temple.
"With two, three more years of this, you'll outmatch most of them before they even realize they picked the wrong target."
"That's the plan," I say.
"That's a plan," he corrects. "But it's not the whole board."
Kain POV:
He's taking it better than I expected. No smug grin. No "so I'm amazing, right?"
Just that focused stare like he's waiting for the rest of the problem statement.
Good.
First thing I learned when I started bouncing in bad places was this: there's "strong" and there's "out of your league."
He can handle "strong" now, in our weight class. That's impressive for nine. Stupidly impressive.
But if he walks out of here thinking he's ready for whatever this world throws, some thing he's never even seen before is going to put him in the ground so fast he won't have time to be surprised.
So I have to build him up and cut him down in the same breath.
Hate that part. Necessary, though.
Ryu POV:
"What's above them, then?" I ask, even though I already know half the answer.
"Professionals," Kain says. "Bodyguards. Soldiers. People who get paid to fight and defend, and actually train for it. They're not all good, but the good ones? Different breed. They know distance better than these punks know their own names."
He looks past me for a moment, memory dragging his eyes elsewhere.
"And above them," he says slowly, "are the people who don't move like anything I recognize."
He doesn't name it. Just leaves it hanging.
"Story time?" I ask.
"Short one," he says. "You know that big city three days east? The one with the rail hub?"
"I've heard of it," I say. "People go there to disappear, mostly."
"Exactly," he says. "I worked a door there, once. Bad job. Place where idiots thought they were tough and came to prove it. Alcohol, money, too many knives."
"Sounds cozy," I say.
"One night," he goes on, "three men start trouble with the wrong stranger. You could see it in their eyes: they've done this before. They spread out, try to box him in. One behind, two in front."
"What did the stranger do?" I ask.
"He sighed," Kain says. "Like he was tired. Then he moved."
He shifts his hands as he speaks, unconsciously replaying something.
"He took the first one's balance with a step I still can't copy right," he says. "Dropped the second with a hit I barely saw. The third didn't even have time to run. Three bodies on the floor before the first bottle hit the ground."
"Fast?" I ask.
"Fast doesn't cover it," he says. "It wasn't just speed. It was… off. Like everyone else was late to the moment and he was exactly on time. Like the room belonged to him and the rest of us were just visiting."
He rubs his thumb over his knuckles.
"I've spent years learning to move," he says. "That wasn't what I know. Not at all. I don't have a word for it. I just knew I wanted no part of it."
"Hunter?" I ask quietly.
"Maybe," he says. "Maybe something else. Point is, there are people like that out there. People who make what we do here look like kids' games."
I let that sit in my chest.
I already knew this world had monsters. I've seen glimpses from the outside, with anime and manga and stupid death scenes burned into my old brain.
But it hits different hearing it from someone who watched it for real, had no idea what he was looking at, and walked away anyway.
"So I'm strong against street trash," I say. "But there's at least two more layers above that. Pros and… whatever that guy was."
"Probably more than two," Bruk says.
Kain nods.
"And between you and them," he adds, "there's another problem."
"Which is?" I ask.
"People who watch for kids like you," he says. "You think that seventeen-year-old works alone? Maybe. Maybe not. But there are always eyes in a city."
He starts counting off on his fingers.
"Small gangs," he says. "They like recruiting young. Someone fast, mean, good with their hands? Useful. Easy to control if they get to you early."
"Then you've got the ones who run the pits," Bruk says. "Illegal fights. Betting. They pay good money for someone who can take hits and look impressive without dying too fast."
"People who collect muscle around the markets," Kain continues. "Protection rackets. Smuggling crews. They hear about a nine-year-old who folded a teenager, they don't think 'what a promising child.' They think 'asset' or 'threat'."
He looks hard at me.
"Guards too," he adds. "Not the noble kind. The bored ones. The ones who don't want wildcards in their district. You cause enough noise, they decide you're trouble worth stepping on early."
I swallow.
"So when you say 'you're getting noticed'…" I start.
"I mean all of them," he says. "Gangs. Pit owners. Shady employers. Nervous officials. None of them see a child. They see something they can use or something they need to stop."
"That's optimistic," I say dryly.
"That's reality," he says.
Kain POV:
He needed to hear that. Not the fairy-tale version. The real one.
Every time some kid gets good at something dangerous, a certain kind of adult starts doing math.
How much is he worth in a ring?How useful is he as a knife in the dark?How much trouble will he be if we leave him alone?
Ryu's already on the edge of those calculations. Better he knows who might be doing them.
Ryu POV:
"So I was already a target," I say slowly. "Just a weaker one."
"You were a forgettable one," Kain says. "Now you're not. And forgettable is safer in some ways."
"I'd rather be dangerous and alive," I say. "Even if it paints a bigger target."
"Then you have to be smart dangerous," he says. "Pick where you show it. Pick who sees. Don't start doing tricks on every corner because you like feeling strong."
"I don't like feeling strong," I say. "I like not feeling helpless."
"Good," he says. "Hold onto that."
He pushes off the crate and walks a slow circle in the small open space, thinking.
"You're at a ceiling," he says finally. "For this stage."
I raise an eyebrow. "Ceiling? I don't feel like I'm hitting my limit yet."
"You're not," he says. "We are."
That hits harder than any body shot.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"We're good at what we are," he says. "We know how not to die in bad places. We know enough about structure to not trip over our own feet. We can teach you to outmatch most people who never trained properly."
He looks me straight in the eye.
"But you?" he says. "With that brain and this growth? If you only stay with us, you'll end up with very sharp bad habits. You'll refine the rough version, not build the art."
"Art?" I repeat.
"Fighting's a craft," he says. "We gave you the street version. There are people who treat it like architecture. Every step placed, every angle planned, every strike part of a larger design."
"Masters," Bruk says.
"I thought that was a myth you tell drunk guys who want to 'learn to street fight' in a week," I say.
Kain's mouth twitches.
"Most of them are myths," he says. "A few aren't."
He leans back against the wall, arms folded again.
"There's a point where alley lessons aren't enough," he says. "You're scraping against it now. If you want to keep climbing without breaking yourself, you need someone who understands the whole building, not just how to stop the roof falling on your head."
"And you know someone like that," I say.
He goes quiet.
Kain POV:
There it is. The question I didn't want to get to this early.
He's nine. Nine. I met men at nineteen who weren't ready for the old bastard.
But if he keeps going like this with just our patchwork training, he's going to start filling in the blanks on his own. That's when kids like him turn incredibly effective or incredibly dead. Sometimes both on the same day.
The old man knows structure. Knows timing I can't even see. Knows how to build a fighter from base to peak without wasting motion.
He also knows how to break people. Not just their bones.
Handing Ryu to him feels like handing a sharp knife to a blacksmith who sometimes forgets metal can scream.
But leaving him at this ceiling feels worse.
Ryu POV:
"You're thinking loud," I say.
He huffs.
"There's someone," he admits. "Old bastard. Runs a small shop closer to the main road. Tools, odds and ends. Looks harmless until you watch him pick up something heavy like it weighs nothing, or see how he steps around people without touching anyone."
"Neighborhood gossip?" I ask.
"Rumors," he says. "Some say he used to fight in a place where floors go up forever and the air gets thin the higher you climb."
He doesn't say "tower."
I don't say "Heaven's Arena."
"People talk too much," Bruk adds. "But I've seen enough of the way he stands, the way he looks at exits, to know he's cut from a different cloth than us."
"Why hasn't he trained anyone else?" I ask.
"Who says he hasn't?" Kain says. "Maybe he did. Maybe it went badly. Maybe he got tired. Maybe he doesn't want to be responsible for the kind of people he can help build."
"And you want to send me to him," I say slowly.
"I didn't say that," Kain says. "I said eventually, if you keep climbing, you'll need someone like him. Someone who understands more than we do. Whether it's him or someone like him, that's later."
"Later as in… years?" I ask.
"At least a few," he says. "Your body's still growing. You're not ready for his level of obsession. Or his kind of standards."
"Standards worse than yours?" I ask. "Terrifying."
"Trust me," Bruk says. "You've had it easy."
I snort.
"But you wanted to know the path," Kain says. "So here it is, as I see it."
He holds up fingers as he talks.
"Stage one: survive," he says. "Build a body, learn not to fall apart, get basics. That's us. That's this alley. That's almost done."
"Almost," I echo.
"Stage two: refine," he says. "Learn real structure from someone who treats this like a craft, not just survival. Someone who can clean up what we've taught you and stack proper layers on top."
I can see it in my head as he speaks. Foundation. Floors above it. Staircase.
"And above that?" I ask.
He shrugs once.
"Above that is where the things I don't understand live," he says. "People like that man in the rail city. Tricks I don't have words for. I've seen just enough to know I don't want any part of it."
"Same," Bruk says quietly.
My chest feels tight.
Not with fear. With wanting.
Old me watched that "above" from a couch, thought it was entertainment.
New me wants to stand there and not die.
In my mind, the door labeled Nen glows a little brighter. Kain can't see it. No one here can. It's just mine.
"So right now," I say slowly, "I'm near the end of stage one. Street level. Strong against normal, but still meat against the bigger world."
"Correct," Kain says. "Very high-end meat, but still meat."
"Flattering," I say.
He ignores it.
"Our job now is to tidy up what we've already built," he says. "Fix gaps. Polish instincts. Make sure you don't start believing this level is the top just because you can bully teenagers twice your size."
"I didn't bully him," I say. "He started it."
"He started it," Kain agrees. "You finished it. Good. Now we make sure you don't let that win rot your brain."
I let out a slow breath.
"So what happens today?" I ask. "Philosophy hour only, or do we still get to fall on purpose?"
"Light drills," he says. "You've had enough reality for one week. But from now on, we're training with the assumption that you'll leave this alley behind one day."
"Not that I'll stay your loyal punching bag forever?" I say.
"You're too ambitious and too annoying to stay," Bruk says. "We knew that from the first week."
I grin despite myself.
We do work, but it's different.
Less new material. More tightening screws.
Angles we already covered, but cleaner. Clinch escapes we practiced, but with less slop. Footwork patterns run again and again until my feet move before my doubt does.
All the while, the conversation sits behind my ribs.
Ceiling.
Stage one. Stage two. Whatever waits above that.
Old man in a shop who might have the blueprint for the next structure. Unknown monsters on hills I haven't even seen yet. Gangs, pit owners, nervous men who count teeth and scars like currency.
By the time we finish and I limp home, my legs are screaming and my brain's too full.
I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling stain.
"I'm almost done with you," I tell it quietly. "Phase one, at least."
Out there, there's a tower where floors go up forever, and a world where people break common sense with things I used to call Nen.
I'm not ready for that yet.
But now I know, clearly, finally:
Kain and Bruk are the beginning.
Not the end.