The community dojo was less a facility and more a covered asphalt court—a few hanging punching bags filled with sand and gravel, and a worn, mirrored wall that had seen better decades. It was the only place outside his workshop where Kai felt fully alive and truly in control.
He was here not to vent his rage, but to find his center. The combined insults of the Gut Pit scout, the extortion by Grix, and the anxiety from the drone's appearance had left his Inner Force feeling turbulent and uneven.
He was working through a complicated defense routine, a hybrid of traditional Inner Force martial arts and his own street-fighting techniques. Unlike the standard, flowing movements that conserved energy, Kai's style was sharp, efficient, and explosive, designed to maximize kinetic output from unexpected angles.
He was clad only in worn training pants, sweat already slicking his torso. He hit the heavy bag with a precise side kick, focusing his Outer Force—the energy he used to interact with the external world and, eventually, his mech suit—at the point of impact.
WHUMPF.
The bag swung wide, a perfectly controlled transfer of kinetic energy.
He paused, recalling the Master who had thrown him out of a real dojo years ago. "Your energy is chaotic, boy! You are not building, you are destroying the meridians!"
Kai was doing both. He wasn't following the traditional flow; he was building new pathways based on the movement of his physical body—a practical, result-oriented cultivation that mirrored his engineering style. This was the essence of the Divergent Flow: allowing the mind to forge unique paths of energy distribution based on creative necessity.
He felt a deep, profound sense of loneliness in his practice. He was doing something no one else understood, forging a path no one else could follow. He didn't have a mentor to guide him, only the constant risk of burning out his own systems.
He moved into a sequence of throws and sweeps, concentrating on the integration of a small, precise thread of his Inner Force into his stabilizing stance. The energy acted as a subtle gyroscopic field, allowing him to maintain perfect balance even on the uneven asphalt.
Suddenly, a massive surge of Outer Force erupted from his core—unbidden, surprising even himself. It was a wave of pure, raw energy, far more powerful than he intended.
CRACK!
The nearest punching bag, a heavily used one, tore from its moorings and slammed into the mirrored wall, shattering a large section into thousands of glittering fragments.
Kai stood frozen, his breath hitching. The sheer, uncontrollable power of the surge both exhilarated and terrified him. He had achieved a breakthrough—a sudden, massive boost in his Divergent Flow—but it was volatile. It was too much.
He sank to his knees, his energy system buzzing uncontrollably. He realized this breakthrough must have been a delayed reaction to the immense stress and focus of the last few days: the Gut Pit win, the legal fight with Grix, the drone capture. His system had been pushed to its limit, and it had finally broken through its own constraint.
He worked quickly, channeling the excess energy into a stabilizing loop, the way he would stabilize a mech core. The process was agonizing, but it brought his system back into control.
He looked at the shattered mirror and the ripped punching bag, the physical evidence of his volatile power.
This moment of powerful, unintentional discharge was, unbeknownst to him, the signal that had been waiting for the right moment to fire. The energy spike, massive and unique, would now travel through the low-grade comm network, far exceeding the trace energy leak from Chapter 7, and would be impossible for the Grimstone investigators to ignore.
He felt an immense, quiet determination. He had achieved a form of power that the Top 5 would never understand and could never control. He would have to learn to harness this chaos, to make the volatile energy his own. The price of his unconventionality was instability, but the reward was unmatched potential.