Morning hit Raizen like a bruise. He woke sore in body and hollow in the chest.
He sat up anyway.
The training plan on his desk—pages of drills and tidy boxes—looked small now. He picked it up, scanned the neat handwriting that had once felt like salvation, then folded it twice and dropped it in the trash.
He'd outgrown it.
No more pretending the blind side wasn't there. He would stop hiding from it and make it part of him. The Mid-Terms had done their job: they'd pointed at the cracks. Now he'd fix them.
Taijutsu? Still a problem. But the real hole was space—awareness, angles, turning a missing eye from a liability into a trigger.
He was building ideas when a knock rapped twice at his door.
He opened it to find his father—and Taro.
Jairo didn't smile. "Raizen. We're ramping your training. Effort isn't your problem. Blind spots are. We're going to iron them out."
Raizen blinked. His father rarely stepped into his training, not like this. Surprise flickered, then steadied. "What are my weaknesses?" he asked, voice low.
Jairo held up a finger.
"One. Blind side. In the Tetsuo match he feinted at your good eye and buried his fist into your left ribs. You flinched late. That was the door. After that he kept circling left—temple, jaw, ribs—until you were always a beat behind."
A second finger.
"Two. You bite feints when rattled. He flashed a straight at your good eye, then whipped a kick into your blind temple. While you were stunned, he jabbed the good eye and took the board."
A third.
"Three. Clinch exposure under shock. Disoriented, you lost your base and got dragged into a headlock to close it."
Fourth.
"Four. Form collapses when you're angry. Wide swings. He slipped, punished, repeated."
Fifth.
"Five. Context. Your friends protected you. Daichi, Mizue, Aika—none of them attacked your blind side in practice. Kindness cost you in public."
Jairo's jaw set; the sixth finger rose.
"And six is the one that kills teams: control. You lost it. Your chakra crushed the courtyard—kids couldn't breathe. Kanzō put you down and called it what it was: power without control. One more outburst, and you're finished here."
Silence. Raizen realized his hands were knotted on his knees. He loosened them one finger at a time.
Jairo's voice eased, but didn't soften. "Now the part you miss when you're busy hating yourself: even the laziest teacher saw it. If you control that storm, Tetsuo won't stop you. And Takuma told you from day one—your blind side bleeds because you won't face it."
He stepped closer until their eyes lined.
"So we do the work. Blind-side elimination. Anti-feint reads. Clinch escapes. Breath-bound chakra caps. You're not broken, Raizen—you're incomplete. There's a difference."
He tapped two knuckles against Raizen's sternum. "Three months. We fix what they used. Then we dare them to try it again."