He was deep into a sword technique video, watching a master swordsman break down a footwork sequence he'd been meaning 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 flame, wrong color. Something hit something.
He grabbed the Tang Dao and left the apartment 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 some form of martial arts and nobody pretended not to be curious about a fight. A steady stream of armed figures was converging on the flames.
Ren activated Presence Concealment 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 meant real combat rather than panicked civilian response.
He came around the edge of the park and got a clear look.
A basketball court. Maybe thirty people in a loose ring around a three-meter-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 elemental spell variants that were genuinely interesting.
He watched and absorbed, methodically 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 Megumi 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 meters away, watching the Minotaur fight with the focused attention of someone who wanted to be in that fight and had correctly concluded it wasn't the right moment. Long hair, clean footwork even at a standstill.
Asuna Yuuki.
He processed this. She lives around here too? And she came straight to the fight. Of course she did.
A rustling in the bushes directly beside him. Low and careful — something 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 moment, then glanced back at Asuna.
Backup would be useful.
He slipped through the dark without activating more than a minimal degree of his concealment — enough to keep random bystanders from noticing, not enough to make him invisible to someone 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 me," Ren said quietly. "I found something."
She looked at his face, made her decision in about two seconds, and came.
Walking beside him, she kept her voice low: "What is it?"
"Something 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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