The triceratops charged and Ryo didn't move.
He stood his ground in the clearing, bare feet sinking into wet mud, until the three horns were close enough to smell the rotting grass on the beast's breath. Then he stepped left. Not a jump. A boxer's pivot. His hip turned, his shoulder dropped, and he drove his right fist straight into the dinosaur's eye socket.
Bone crunched. The triceratops bellowed, momentum carrying it past him in a blind stagger, and it crashed into a palm tree hard enough to shake coconuts loose.
Ryo shook out his hand. Blood dripped from his knuckles, but the skin wasn't torn. Just bruised. Two weeks ago—that first morning on the beach—his fist would have shattered against that skull. Now the bones felt denser. The muscle moved differently under his skin, like the body was learning what the mind wanted.
He walked over to the thrashing reptile and kicked its throat once. The bellowing stopped. The beast went still.
"Still too slow," he muttered.
He wasn't talking about the dinosaur.
Ryo dragged the carcass to the stream. The water ran clear here, cutting through the jungle toward the ocean he'd crawled out of. He'd made this spot his territory without deciding to. The first night, he'd slept in a tree and woken up with a sabertooth cat trying to bite his head off. He'd broken its neck before his eyes fully opened. After that, the smaller predators stopped coming around. Then the bigger ones started testing him. Now the scavenger birds circled overhead whenever he made a kill, waiting for him to finish.
He gutted the triceratops with a sharp stone and washed his hands in the stream. The sun sat high, baking the humidity into his skin. He needed to eat, but his stomach could wait. What he needed more was the thing he couldn't grab with his hands.
Ki.
Roshi's blue ball hung in his memory like a screenshot he couldn't delete. The old man had made it look effortless. Gather from the gut, focus through the palm, release. Three steps. Ryo had watched it once and his body had answered with that red-black lightning thing that had scared the hermit's sunglasses off.
But that wasn't control. That was instinct. A reflex. Like a sneeze.
Ryo sat on a flat rock by the water and crossed his legs. The position felt wrong immediately. His hamstrings screamed. His lower back tightened. Hanma blood didn't want to fold up like a pretzel. It wanted to run, hit, break. He forced his breathing slow anyway.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
He remembered Dragon Ball. Not perfectly—memories from his old life came back in flashes, like trying to watch a show through static. But he knew Goku had trained with Roshi for months before the Kamehameha. He knew ki was life force. Spiritual energy. The stuff that separated martial artists from brawlers.
"Spiritual," Ryo said to the empty jungle. "Not physical."
His body was a heavyweight champion wrapped in a six-year-old's frame with the Hanma curse wired into every cell. Physical growth came easy. Too easy. Yesterday he'd sprinted up a granite cliff face just to see if he could. The day before, he'd held a full-grown allosaurus in a headlock until it stopped struggling. His muscles swelled and hardened by the hour, feeding on conflict, growing through damage.
But ki sat in his gut like a stone he couldn't shit out.
He closed his eyes and tried to feel what Roshi had shown him. The circulation. The way energy moved from the center, up the spine, down the arms. He searched inside himself for that river.
Nothing.
Sweat rolled down his neck. A mosquito landed on his arm and he didn't swat it. The itch grew until it felt like fire. His jaw clenched. Still he sat there, hunting for that spark.
His mind wandered. He thought about Yujiro. The Ogre. The creature who'd sent him here. In Baki, Yujiro never sat still. He fought armies, wrestled dinosaurs, walked through bullets. The Hanma way was violence as language. But even Yujiro understood technique. The Aiki. The demon back. The way he could read muscle tension in an opponent's eyelash.
Ryo's hands twitched. The mosquito flew off, bloated and fat.
"Fine," he said.
He opened his eyes and stood up. The rock beneath him had heated up from his body temperature. He walked to the nearest tree, a thick hardwood with bark like iron plating, and set his stance. Left foot forward. Guard up. He jabbed twice, fast enough to make the air pop, then drove a straight right into the trunk.
Thud.
The tree didn't shake. His fist sank a half-inch into the wood. He pulled it back and hit again. And again. He wasn't trying to knock it down. He was listening to the impact. Feeling the vibration travel back up his arm. Learning the exact angle where his knuckles met the least resistance.
Boxing was his foundation. Footwork. Distance. Timing. He'd died with thirty fights worth of muscle memory, and that memory was translating into this new body faster than he'd expected. But boxing was limited. Two arms. Two legs. No ki blasts. No flying.
He wanted to fly.
Ryo stopped punching and looked at his palms. They were calloused now, the skin rough and darkened from sun and blood. He closed his fingers into fists and felt the power there. Physical. Hungry. Dumb as a rock.
"Different muscles," he said.
He tried to imagine ki as a second skeleton. A framework underneath the meat. He raised his hand and focused on the center of his palm, trying to push something out through sheer will.
His hand trembled. Veins stood out on his wrist.
A flicker of red light sparked at his fingertips, then died.
Ryo stared at his hand. "There you are."
It wasn't much. A candle flame compared to Roshi's bonfire. But it was real. He'd felt the tug inside his gut, the same place where fear lived, where excitement pooled before a knockout punch. Ki came from there, but it needed a road to travel. And roads took time to build.
He spent the next hour trying to recreate the spark. Each attempt drained him in a way fighting never did. His head ached. His vision blurred. By the time the sun started dropping toward the treeline, he could barely stand without swaying.
A shadow moved at the edge of the clearing.
Ryo didn't turn around. He smelled it first—wet feathers, carrion breath. The pterodactyls had learned to follow him, waiting for the scraps he left behind. But this one was big. Bigger than the yellow one that had swallowed him on the beach.
He smiled.
"Good."
He needed something to hit.
The pterodactyl shrieked and dove from the canopy. Ryo dropped into a crouch and let it come. At the last second he rolled forward, under the snapping beak, and came up behind it. His hands found the joint where the wing met the body. He pulled, using his whole body as leverage, and felt the socket pop.
The beast screamed and tried to turn, but Ryo was already on its back. He wrapped his arms around its neck and squeezed. Not trying to kill it immediately. Testing. Feeling the pulse, the struggle, the exact point where the animal realized it had picked the wrong prey.
It took forty seconds. The wings stopped beating. The body went limp.
Ryo dropped off and landed in the grass. His arms burned. His lungs pulled in humid air. He felt the growth happening in real time, the micro-tears in his muscle fibers knitting back stronger, the bone density shifting to accommodate the new load.
He dragged the carcass to his camp—a hollow between two fallen logs where he'd piled leaves and dried moss. The fire pit still held embers from breakfast. He stoked it with dry twigs and sat down, watching the flames eat the wood.
His mind went back to the anime. Dragon Ball Z specifically. Power levels. Super Saiyan. Frieza. Cell. The power scaling got stupid after a point, but the basics mattered. Gravity training. Zenkai boosts. The idea that Saiyans grew stronger every time they nearly died.
He wasn't a Saiyan. But the Hanma blood felt similar. Every fight fed him. Every injury was a lesson written in scar tissue.
Ryo pulled a strip of pterodactyl meat from the carcass and held it over the fire. The fat sizzled. He didn't have salt. Didn't have spices. Didn't care. He ate it half-raw and let the protein settle in his stomach like fuel.
The jungle got loud at night. Insects screamed. Something big splashed in the river downstream. Ryo sat with his back against the log and tried the ki exercise again. This time he didn't close his eyes. He watched the fire and imagined the heat traveling up his legs, pooling in his stomach, then pushing out through his chest.
His hand glowed faintly in the dark. Red. Unstable. It looked like a ember trying to become a flame.
He held it for three seconds before it fizzled out.
"Better," he said.
It wasn't the Kamehameha. It wasn't even a proper ki blast. But it was a start. And starts were the only thing that mattered.
Over the next stretch of days—he stopped counting after nine—Ryo settled into a rhythm that wasn't comfortable but was his. Mornings were for the body. He ran through the jungle until his lungs burned, using the trees as obstacles, leaping over roots, ducking under low branches, letting the terrain try to kill him. Then he found something big and hit it until it stopped moving. Triceratops. Allosaurus. Some kind of giant snake with armored scales that had nearly crushed his ribs before he tore its jaw apart.
Afternoons were for technique. He practiced combinations on tree trunks until the bark stripped away and the wood underneath turned to pulp. Jab-cross-hook. Footwork circles. Head movement. He kept the boxing clean because boxing was honest. No tricks. Just physics and pain.
Evenings were for ki. The sitting still. The mental grind. He hated it every single time. His legs cramped. His mind wandered to fights he wanted to have, to the sensation of knuckles against bone, to the smell of a gym at five in the morning. But he stayed on the rock until the sun disappeared, because he knew that without ki, he was just a strong kid in a world where people could blow up planets.
The jungle changed around him. The dinosaurs that used to charge him started giving his clearing a wide berth. He'd find fresh tracks in the mud that turned away suddenly, as if the animals could smell what he'd become. The scavenger birds stopped circling. Even the insects seemed quieter near his camp.
One morning he woke up and found a leopard-sized predator dead at the edge of his clearing. Its neck was broken. He didn't remember killing it. Must have happened in his sleep, some reflex when the thing tried to sneak up on him.
Ryo looked at the body for a long moment. Then he dragged it to the stream and washed his hands.
He was becoming something the woods recognized. Not prey. Not a visitor. A predator that walked on two legs and didn't need claws or teeth.
The ki spark lasted seven seconds now. He could hold it in his palm without it shaking apart. Still no blast. Still no flight. But the sensation was familiar enough that he could find it without hunting for twenty minutes.
Ryo sat on his rock one evening, watching the fire die down to coals. His hands were scarred. His body had thickened, the childish frame packing on dense muscle that moved like coiled wire. He was six years old on the outside and something much older on the inside.
He thought about Roshi. The old man had offered more, maybe. Or maybe he'd just been passing through. Ryo hadn't followed him because following felt like begging. And Hanmas didn't beg.
But he couldn't stay in the jungle forever. The woods had taught him everything they could. The dinosaurs were running from him now. The trees broke too easily under his fists. The ki practice needed more than solitude—it needed pressure, competition, someone who could push back.
Ryo stood up and stretched his neck until it popped. The moon hung fat and low over the canopy, painting everything silver.
He looked east, toward where the ocean met the sky. Somewhere out there were people. Martial artists. Fighters with techniques he couldn't imagine yet. And beyond them, gods and monsters that made dinosaurs look like house pets.
He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.
"Time to leave," he said.
The jungle didn't answer. It already knew he was gone.
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