He was deep into a sword technique video, watching a master swordsman break down a footwork sequence he'd been aning to incorporate, when the night split open.
The explosion was close enough to feel in his chair.
Ren was at the window before the sound finished echoing — and through the glass he could see fire licking at the skyline two blocks north.
Gas explosion? Maybe. He looked at the angle of the column. No — too much fla, wrong color. Sothing hit sothing.
He grabbed the Tang Dao and left the apartnt in under thirty seconds.
The streets were already collecting people. The residential neighborhood he lived in was exactly the kind of area where everyone practiced so form of martial arts and nobody pretended not to be curious about a fight. A steady stream of ard figures was converging on the flas.
Ren activated Presence Concealnt and drifted with the current, keeping to the edges.
He heard the fight before he saw it — a different quality of noise breaking through the general commotion, the kind that ant real combat rather than panicked civilian response.
He ca around the edge of the park and got a clear look.
A basketball court. Maybe thirty people in a loose ring around a three-ter-tall figure with the head of a bull, the torso of a man in real armor, and a battleaxe that had clearly already demonstrated its capability for violence.
Several people on the ground — not dead, he thought, but definitely down. The others pressed their assault in rotating waves, trying to find an angle.
"A Minotaur," Ren said quietly, to no one.
Greek mythology. Bull-man. Apparently real here. He watched the creature absorb a coordinated strike from three people simultaneously and respond by sweeping all of them back with a single arc of the axe.
Not at my tier. Not yet. He took a step back, found a dark corner at the edge of the park, and crouched down.
The sensible move, while the monster was occupied, was to learn from the people fighting it. He activated Jianjigu and started observing.
Magic techniques he hadn't seen before. Combat forms specific to fighting large opponents. A few elental spell variants that were genuinely interesting.
He watched and absorbed, thodically cataloguing everything.
Good crowd. Decent variety. He tried to sense if any of them carried innate talents worth copying, and got a distinct sense of… nothing. His eyes didn't engage in the way they had with gumi and Yukino.
Either they're not showing their talents clearly enough, or my eyes have opinions about what's worth copying. He wasn't sure which was more disconcerting.
Motion at the corner of his vision.
He turned slightly.
A figure at the park periphery, about twenty ters away, watching the Minotaur fight with the focused attention of soone who wanted to be in that fight and had correctly concluded it wasn't the right mont. Long hair, clean footwork even at a standstill.
Asuna Yuuki.
He processed this. She lives around here too? And she ca straight to the fight. Of course she did.
A rustling in the bushes directly beside him. Low and careful — sothing that didn't want to be heard.
Ren went very still.
Through the dim light and the moving shadows, he made out a shape. Small, crouched hard into the underbrush. Not human — the proportions were wrong. But also not trying to attack anything. It was hiding.
More than one? He couldn't tell. The bushes were deep enough to conceal a group.
He thought for a mont, then glanced back at Asuna.
Backup would be useful.
He slipped through the dark without activating more than a minimal degree of his concealnt — enough to keep random bystanders from noticing, not enough to make him invisible to soone who was actively looking — and made his way around the park's edge until he was behind her.
He tapped her on the shoulder.
Asuna spun so fast her hand was on her hilt before she'd finished turning. Then she saw who it was and went through a rapid sequence of expressions.
"Follow ," Ren said quietly. "I found sothing."
She looked at his face, made her decision in about two seconds, and ca.
Walking beside him, she kept her voice low: "What is it?"
"Sothing in the bushes. I don't know how many. We take it together."
Asuna's eyes lit up with a speed that suggested she'd been looking for a reason to do exactly this.
"Let's go."
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