Ryu stared at him for a while without saying anything.
Then he sat down. He didn't fall down, but it was close. He lowered himself onto a thick root at the edge of the bank, and the root groaned and sank into the moss under his weight, and he rested his iron forearms on his knees and looked up at Jin.
"Okay," he said. "Go on, then. What's my problem?"
Jin didn't answer right away. He picked his words carefully, because this wasn't the kind of thing he wanted to say badly.
"You fight exactly the way you did on the first day," he said.
Ryu raised an eyebrow. "And?"
"And that's it," Jin said. "That's the problem. You jumped off that roof on the first day and turned to iron and punched through everything in front of you. I remember it. I'd never seen anything like it. And today you did the same thing. You turned to iron and punched." He shrugged. "It was good on the first day, and it's still good now. But it hasn't changed. Not once, in all these months."
