The training yard at six in the morning was empty except for Soren and a practice dummy, and the dummy was winning.
He'd thrown the same opening four times.
Four times his body had moved before he decided to move, the old reflex, the one that had always landed because he'd already seen it land.
Four times the dummy's counter-arm swung through where his head used to be, except his head was still there, because the reflex had been built on knowing and the knowing was gone.
He sat down in the dirt.
[DING! — no preview available.]
The system gave him that now? Helpful.
Soren didn't sit there long.
The reflexes weren't his. That was the thing he kept circling.
Every clean move he'd ever made in this world had been a memory of watching the move work, played back through his arms.
He'd never learned to fight. He'd learned to remember fighting.
So the equipment was wrong but the operator was new.
He broke it down on the back of his hand with a stick in the dirt.
