Ken looked at the captain as lightning crackled around his sword.

"Tch." He clicked his tongue. "This guy might actually be worth something," he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He wasn’t saying it out of fear; he was saying it out of eagerness. The hunger for a real fight.

The captain looked at Ken, saw the smile, and something shifted in his own expression.

"Seems I’m looking forward to this more than I expected," the captain said.

But then his face hardened, the look of a judge about to deliver a verdict.

"But I am not here to play, kid."

And then he vanished.

Ken couldn’t even sense him the moment he moved. He had moved so fast that the dust on the ground didn’t have time to react. He reappeared directly behind Ken, blade coming down at a speed that was nothing short of immaculate.

Ken felt it before he saw it. He reacted on instinct, wrenching his sword to the side to block. Steel met steel with a sharp clang, and then a burst of lightning exploded from the impact and slammed into him, hurling him backward. He flipped through the air and landed on his feet, skidding across the ground and carving a long line into the floor.

He looked up. The captain hadn’t moved. He stood exactly where he had been, like he had already mapped out the entire battle and was simply waiting to deliver the conclusion at his own pace.

"The Royal Guards are a symbol of justice," the captain said. "We stand for the people. We protect them. We ensure peace and proper structure. So when someone begins to threaten that structure, it reflects poorly on us, on our image, on everything the Royal Guard stands for." His gaze settled on Ken, cold and final. "Especially when the threat comes to someone connected to my branch. Death is your only option. Let the people see what happens when you stand against us."

He slashed, and an arc of lightning tore through the air toward Ken.

Ken rose to his feet and raised his left hand. The shield materialized across his gauntlet, and the arc slammed into it. He was pushed back a few feet. Nothing more.

He smiled. "For an organization built on structure, you do a pretty terrible job of it."

He blasted forward. The ground cracked beneath his feet as he launched into his attack, but the captain was faster. He blocked every strike Ken threw, unhurried and precise. When Ken retreated and hurled the shield at him, the captain deflected it without breaking his stance. Ken charged in harder, faster, and even knowing full well that the captain outclassed him in raw strength, he couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t want to.

The captain saw it. The relentlessness. And it made him angry.

So when he blocked the next strike, he did something Ken wasn’t expecting. He stepped in close, reached out with his free hand, and grabbed Ken by the shoulder. Then he unleashed a point-blank blast of lightning.

The explosion sent Ken flying. He crashed through the doors of the shop behind him, shattering them, and hit the floor hard inside.

"You’ve played enough, kid. I’ll admit, your skills are impressive."

Ken lay there on the ground. And then he laughed. A quiet, satisfied sound.

"Yeah," he said. "I can’t really push you back at my normal strength."

He got to his feet.

"Let’s try this again."

He began to channel his Ki. It moved through his body like a current, sharpening everything, strength, speed, presence. He gripped his sword and fixed his eyes on the captain.

The captain felt the shift immediately.

Despite his rough edges and the underhanded tactics he’d used to claim his position at such a young age, the captain was no amateur. He had been raised as a prodigy, shaped by a noble family with generations of discipline behind them. He could sense things, see things that most people couldn’t.

He felt the change in Ken the moment it happened.

But he didn’t take it seriously. A power-up, maybe. Some kind of technique to temporarily boost his strength. Everyone had something like that. What ultimately mattered was that he was overwhelmingly stronger, and nothing Ken could do now was going to change that.

Or so he thought.

The difference was immediate.

Ken moved, and the captain’s eyes barely caught it.

He closed the gap in an instant, sword already swinging by the time the captain registered the shift. The captain blocked, but the force behind it pushed him back a half-step. His boots scraped the ground. He blinked.

When did he get this strong?

Ken didn’t give him time to think about it. He came in again, low, then high, then a diagonal slash that forced the captain to pivot. Each strike landed with a weight that hadn’t been there before, like the air itself was being compressed behind every swing. The captain blocked them all, but he was moving now. Actually moving. Retreating.

Ken was smiling the entire time.

Not a taunting smile. Not arrogance. It was the smile of someone doing exactly what they were born to do, the kind of expression that made him look almost unhinged in the middle of a fight. He stepped into a thrust, the captain parried, and Ken twisted the blade at the last second and drove his shoulder forward, slamming into the captain’s guard and sending him skidding backward across the road.

The captain caught himself after three steps. He stared.

The nearby stalls had gone completely silent. Nobody breathed.

He pushed me back.

The captain raised his sword and lightning screamed down the length of the blade. He slashed once, twice, three times, each arc cutting through the air like jagged white fire. Ken weaved between the first two, deflected the third off his gauntlet in a shower of sparks, and was already inside the captain’s range before the smoke cleared.

Steel rang against steel. Again. Again. The exchange blurred, a rhythm of attack and counter so fast that watching it felt like trying to follow a single raindrop through a storm. Ken’s footwork was fluid, precise, each step feeding directly into the next strike. The captain matched him, technique for technique, and for a few seconds the fight looked almost even.

Then the captain exhaled, and the air changed.

The lightning around his blade didn’t just crackle anymore. It roared. A dense, suffocating pressure radiated off him as he poured something deeper into his power, the kind of strength you only reached when someone had genuinely annoyed you. His next strike came down with both hands behind it, and when Ken blocked, the shockwave knocked him off his feet entirely.

He landed hard. Rolled. Came up on one knee.

The captain was already moving. A single thrust, fast as a bolt. Ken twisted aside, but it still grazed his ribs, and the lightning discharge that followed lit up his entire left side with white-hot pain. He hit the wall behind him, cracked the stone, and slid down a few inches before catching himself.

He breathed.

Okay. That was different.

For the first time since the fight started, Ken’s smile faltered. Not from fear. From the quiet acknowledgment that this man had another gear, and he’d just shown the first edge of it.

Ken looked at his hand. Then he closed it into a fist.

Fine.

He exhaled slowly, and then let go of something he’d been holding back.

The True State opened like a door blown off its hinges.

His Mana and Qi stopped running parallel and collapsed into each other, braiding through his body in a single unified current. Everything sharpened. The world slowed. He could feel his own heartbeat like a drum, could see the minute shifts in the captain’s stance, could feel the weight of the air between them.

He also felt the clock start.

Sixty seconds.

He rolled his neck, raised his sword, and moved.

What followed was something else entirely. The fight before had been fast. This was a different category. Ken hit like something that had no business being human. Every exchange was a collision of force that sent shockwaves rippling down the street, cracking stone, scattering dust. The captain held. Barely. For the first time, his expression was unreadable.

They clashed again and again, a stalemate drawn in lightning and motion, burning through seconds Ken didn’t have.

Forty.

Twenty-five.

Twelve.

And then, cutting clean through the sound of battle like a blade through silk,

A voice. Deep. Unhurried. Carrying the kind of weight that didn’t need to be loud to silence everything around it.

"What exactly is going on here?"