I don’t wait for the next complaint. I trot up the slope, toward the narrow cart path that leads to the main gates—old wooden beams with iron nails driven by hand. Opening them is easy. Kenji never bothered with locks. Locks aren’t challenges. Locks don’t separate the worthy from the dead.
No, the real challenge is knowing where he’ll strike from.
I slip through, eyes scanning everything. Shadows stretch long over the courtyard. The gardens he tends are quiet, still. The stream murmurs behind the main building. The air smells like pine, stone, and memory.
For a moment—just one—I feel that old whisper of nostalgia. This place made me. Broke me. Built me again. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m here. Maybe he’s away. Maybe?—
The thought dies as something snaps past my cheek, so close the wind of it stings my skin.
It hits the wooden post behind me with a loudping, burying itself into the beam.
One of Kenji’s infamous glass beads.
I pivot, already dropping into a crouch?—
A blur of white flashes to my left and there he is.
He moves like lightning and living steel—faster than anyone his age has any right to. His white gi flickers in the moonlight as he closes the distance, silent as snowfall.
I only avoid the first strike because I trained under him.
He aims a palm strike at my sternum. I twist sideways, grab his wrist, go for a sweep?—
He’s gone before my leg even commits to the arc.
He counters with a hooking kick that whistles past my jaw. I duck, roll, come up in a fighting stance. He doesn’t wait. He never waits.
He leaps, spinning—heel aimed at my temple.
I block with both forearms, the impact jolting down to my spine.
“Still slow,” he says calmly, landing light as a feather.
“Still short,” I shoot back.
He narrows his eyes—amused, insulted, both.
He lunges again, this time grabbing for my collar. I let him get close, palm the back of his hand, twist with my whole shoulder?—
He redirects my leverage like water slipping around a rock and sends me skidding back three steps with a flick.
I grit my teeth and launch forward, snapping a kick toward his ribs. He blocks with his elbow,catches my ankle, and flips me—except I catch myself mid-fall, palms hitting the ground, legs sweeping around in a low spinning kick meant to knock him off balance.
He jumps over it.
Jumps.
At sixty-something.
He lands, grabs my wrist, tries to leverage my weight forward?—
But I’m taller and stronger than the girl he trained years ago.
I anchor my stance. He doesn’t move me.
“Better,” he murmurs.
“Older,” I counter.
