Before the fight, a lesson.
Not because the fight requires explanation. The fight will explain itself, as all genuine things do, through the unambiguous language of consequence. But because what Syra Descartes is about to do belongs to a category that most people have heard described and none have seen in person, it is worth taking thirty seconds to establish the architecture.
There is power. And then there is what power looks like when a person has fully understood it.
These are not the same thing.
---
In this world, hunters train techniques. They refine them, stack them, sharpen them across years of repetition until the technique becomes reliable, then fast, then second nature. Most hunters spend their entire careers in this loop. Most hunters die having never exited it, and that is not a tragedy — that loop produces real results, real capability, real threat-level output. The loop is sufficient.
But the loop has a ceiling.
