Reyna sat cross-legged on her dorm room floor, laptop balanced precariously on her knees, replaying the Crucible fight for what had to be the seventh time since midnight had come and gone. The soft glow of the screen cast flickering shadows across her face as the footage looped, the timestamp in the corner marking each viewing like some kind of obsessive ritual she couldn't quite break.
Her ribs still ached where Satori's bat had connected—a deep, persistent throb that radiated outward with each breath. Emi's healing had done its job perfectly: mended the fractured bone, stopped the internal bleeding, repositioned everything back where anatomy textbooks said it belonged. The medical scan had come back clean, showing nothing but perfectly healed tissue. But pain had memory, stubborn and insistent, and hers remembered with crystal clarity what it felt like to get hit by someone who, by all rights and reasonable expectations, shouldn't have been able to lay a finger on her.
