The footage arrived at six forty-three PM on Monday.
Nine fights. Tan had said nine publicly available, and nine was what came through — a shared folder link from Tan's communications team, no message attached, just the link and a file name for each fight labeled by opponent and date in descending order from most recent.
Vael was at the apartment table eating when his phone buzzed. He looked at the link, looked at his food, finished eating first. Raza had been clear about food before footage — you didn't watch footage hungry because hungry made you impatient and impatient made you miss things.
He finished the rice. Put the bowl in the sink. Made coffee.
Sat down with the laptop.
Opened the first file.
The first thing he noticed was the distance.
Not Reyes's distance management specifically — the literal camera distance in the footage. Whoever had filmed these fights had done it from further back than the underground circuit's cameras, the whole fighter visible from head to foot with enough space around both men that you could see the full geometry of their movement. It made Reyes look smaller than he probably was. It also made everything legible.
Dominic Reyes was thirty-one years old and moved like someone ten years into a very specific conversation with space. He didn't fill a room the way Jin-ho filled a room — none of that coiled economy, that sense of compressed intention. Reyes was almost relaxed. He stood in a slightly open stance with his hands at mid-guard, weight balanced, and he watched his opponents with the patient attention of someone who had decided to let the other person tell the story before he responded.
Fight one. Round one. His opponent threw a jab combination — Reyes slipped the first, rolled under the second, stepped to a forty-five degree angle outside the third. He didn't counter. He just wasn't where the combination was going, and he used the positioning to reset at a slightly different angle than where he'd started.
The angle was better than where he'd been.
Vael rewound it.
Watched it again.
The opponent had thrown a three-punch combination and Reyes had used all three punches to reposition himself into a better geometric relationship with the opponent, without throwing a single punch back.
He let the fight run.
It happened again in the second minute. Different combination, same principle. The opponent attacked, Reyes moved through the attack in a way that left him better positioned than before.
By the end of round one Vael had a word for it.
Construction.
The opponent was fighting a fight. Reyes was building one. Each exchange was a brick placed somewhere specific — not for immediate effect, for structural purpose. He was building something and the opponent was attacking it without understanding what they were attacking.
Round two Reyes started using the position he'd built in round one.
The jab arrived from the angle he'd established, which was not the angle the opponent had been trained to protect against because it was the angle Reyes had specifically constructed access to. It landed. Clean. The opponent's guard adjusted — which opened a different angle that Reyes filed and didn't use yet. He used it in round three.
The fight ended by decision. Reyes's corner barely reacted. His opponent's corner was animated and frustrated. Reyes himself came to the center, received the decision, nodded once, went to check on his opponent.
Vael looked at the screen for a moment.
Then he opened fight two.
He watched all nine fights back to back.
It took three hours and forty minutes including the times he rewound specific sequences — and there were a lot of those, because Reyes's game had layers that didn't announce themselves on first viewing. The third time you watched a round you'd see something in the first minute that you'd missed the first two times because it only made sense in the context of what happened in round three.
That was the point, he realized. Reyes wasn't trying to be hard to read. He was building something that only became legible in retrospect.
By the ninth fight Vael had a rough picture.
Reyes's strengths: the positioning game, obviously. The patience — genuinely extraordinary patience, the kind you couldn't fake and couldn't rush. His jab, which was fast and placed with the specific accuracy of someone who threw it to a pre-calculated address rather than in the direction of someone's face. His ring generalship — he controlled where the fight happened and at what range and he did it so gradually that opponents never noticed the moment they lost control of the geography.
Reyes's weaknesses: Vael sat with this for a while, coffee going cold, because the honest answer was that after nine fights he'd found two things that looked like weaknesses and he wasn't sure either of them actually were.
The first — Reyes was slow to aggress. When he had an opening he sometimes held it an extra beat, measuring the position, making sure the structure was right before using it. Against most opponents this didn't matter. Against an opponent who could read the opening in real time and close it before Reyes fired, that extra beat was a window.
Maybe.
The second — Reyes had never in nine fights been genuinely hurt. Both his losses were decisions, close, and he'd been competitive in both. But he'd never been in the position of fighting through significant damage because no opponent had managed to put him there. That wasn't exactly a weakness. But it was an unknown. You didn't know how Reyes responded to real hurt because nobody had shown you yet.
Vael picked up the recorder.
He talked for twenty-two minutes.
The construction game. The positioning. The jab's specific address. The extra beat before aggression. The unknown damage response. The comparison to Jin-ho — similar patience, completely different application, Jin-ho's patience being the patience of a weapon waiting for the right moment while Reyes's was the patience of a builder who needed the structure right before he put weight on it.
He stopped recording.
Played it back while he poured fresh coffee.
Halfway through the playback he stopped it.
Rewound.
Played one section again.
The comparison to Jin-ho. Similar patience, completely different application.
He put the recorder down.
Picked up his phone.
Footage arrived, he texted Raza.
I know, Raza wrote back. What did you find?
He builds fights, Vael wrote. Not fights in the way we usually mean. Literally constructs the geometry across rounds. By the time he's ready to land something clean the opponent has been repositioned into making it available without knowing it happened.
A pause.
How long did the footage take, Raza wrote.
Three hours forty, Vael wrote.
You rewound things.
A lot.
Another pause. Longer.
Come in tomorrow at seven, Raza wrote. Before the others. Bring the recorder.
Vael looked at the message.
Seven AM was not eight AM. Raza asking for seven meant something specific.
Alright, he wrote.
He put the phone down.
Sat back.
The laptop screen showed the last frame of the ninth fight — Reyes in the center of the ring, hand raised, that single nod he gave after every decision win. Not celebration. Confirmation.
Something about the nod bothered him.
He looked at it for a moment, trying to identify what.
It was the same nod across nine fights. Not identical in the way of a performed gesture — genuinely the same, the same head angle, the same brief downward movement, the same quality of a man confirming something internally rather than demonstrating anything externally.
Like Raza's nod.
The specific nod of someone who has decided something was true and is confirming the truth of it rather than celebrating it.
He closed the laptop.
Went to the window.
The KL night was doing its amber thing, the haze layering the darkness into something warm, the city breathing its own light back at itself the way it always did.
He thought about construction.
About building a fight from the first exchange the same way you built anything — foundation, then structure, then the thing the structure was designed to support. Reyes's opponents didn't lose fights. They lost the geography of fights early in round one and spent the rest of the night fighting for territory they'd already ceded without noticing.
The question was how you stopped someone from building when the building process was invisible until it was complete.
He didn't have an answer yet.
That was fine.
He had ten weeks.
He went to the bedroom.
Mei Lin was at the side of the bed with her laptop — the case files, always the case files, though they had a different quality to them now, something winding down rather than escalating, the architecture complete and the legal process moving through its own timeline.
She looked up.
"How bad," she said.
"Not bad," he said. "Complicated."
"How complicated."
He sat on the edge of the bed. Thought about how to describe it.
"You know how you built the case against Victor," he said. "Eighteen months. Document by document, record by record, building something that only made full sense when it was complete."
She looked at him.
"He fights like that," Vael said.
She was quiet for a moment, processing it.
"He builds the fight the same way," she said.
"Yes."
"Across rounds."
"Yes."
"So by the time you understand what he built—"
"It's already built," Vael said. "And you're standing inside it wondering how you got there."
She looked at the laptop screen. Back at him.
"That's a real problem," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"What's Raza going to say."
"I don't know yet. I'm going in at seven tomorrow. Before the others."
She nodded. Then she looked at the laptop again and typed something, and he could tell from the way she typed it — three fast lines, not the careful deliberate case-file typing — that she was noting something down. Not for the case. For herself.
"What are you writing," he said.
"Nothing," she said.
"You're writing something."
"I said nothing." She closed the laptop halfway. "Go to sleep. You have a seven AM."
He looked at her.
She looked back with the flat expression that wasn't actually flat anymore — hadn't been for a long time, the flatness having worn away gradually until what was underneath was simply what was there.
"Mei Lin," he said.
"Sleep," she said.
He lay down.
She kept working for a while, the laptop's light soft in the room, her typing quiet. He listened to it and thought about construction and geometry and the specific problem of fighting someone who turned your attacks into building materials.
He was still thinking about it when he fell asleep.
Seven AM. The gym.
Raza was already there. Of course he was already there — Vael was starting to think Raza lived in the building, that the desk and the notebook and the shelf of previous notebooks behind it were the whole of his domestic life, that somewhere behind the storage room door that wasn't a storage room there was a very small apartment with a single bed and no decoration except fight schedules.
He put the recorder on the desk.
Raza looked at it.
"Play it," he said.
Vael played the recording. Twenty-two minutes. Raza listened with his elbows on the desk and his hands folded and his eyes on the middle distance, the specific posture of someone receiving information they're filing rather than reacting to.
When it finished Raza was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: "The extra beat before aggression."
"Yes," Vael said.
"You think that's the window."
"I think it might be. I'm not sure."
Raza unfolded his hands. Picked up his pen. Set it back down.
"Stand up," he said.
Vael stood up.
Raza stood up from the desk — slowly, the morning stiffness that he never acknowledged but that showed in how he moved in the first few minutes before the body warmed itself up. He came around the desk and stood in front of Vael in the middle of the empty gym.
"Show me how Reyes stands," he said.
Vael thought about the footage. The slightly open stance. The mid-guard. The weight balanced.
He assumed the position.
Raza walked around him slowly. Looking at the geometry. The same way he walked around problems on the board.
"How does he jab," Raza said.
"Fast. Placed. He's not throwing it at the face — he's throwing it to a specific address he's already identified."
"Show me."
Vael threw the jab at the air. Raza watched it.
"Again," he said.
Again.
"Again."
Again.
Raza stopped him.
"The address," Raza said. "You said he throws to an address he's already identified. How does he identify it."
Vael thought about the footage. About the way Reyes moved through the first round building position without throwing — the angles, the footwork.
"He builds access to it first," Vael said. "The first round isn't fighting. It's surveying. He maps where the openings are and then in round two he starts using them."
Raza looked at him.
"What happens if you don't let him survey," he said.
Vael looked at him.
He hadn't thought about it from that direction. He'd been thinking about how to read the construction once it was underway. Raza was asking what happened if you disrupted the survey before the construction began.
"I don't know," he said.
"Neither do I," Raza said. "Which makes it interesting." He went back to the desk. Sat down. Picked up the pen. "The preparation for Reyes isn't about reading his game. Reading his game tells you what he did. He's not going to do what he did — he's going to build something specific for you." He wrote something. "The preparation is about denying the survey. If he can't map the openings in round one he can't build in round two." He looked up. "Which means round one is the most important round you've ever fought."
Vael sat back down on the bench.
"Round one," he said.
"Round one," Raza said. "Not to win it. To make it unreadable. To give him nothing he can build from." He wrote something else. "Which means you need to be more unpredictable in round one than you've ever been in any round of any fight."
Vael thought about that.
"My game is patience," he said. "Reading and waiting."
"I know," Raza said. "That's exactly what Reyes wants to survey. A patient opponent gives him clean information." He tapped the pen on the notebook. "We need to make you illegible in round one. Not aggressive — illegible. No patterns. No readable tells. Nothing he can place into his structure."
Vael looked at the board.
At Dominic Reyes at the bottom of the building column.
"How do you train for illegibility," he said.
Raza looked at him.
The slight pause of a man who has a good answer and is deciding how to deliver it without it sounding like more than it was.
"Badly," he said. "At first." He opened the notebook to a fresh page. "We start tomorrow. The others will be here for their own preparations. Your session is different from today." He wrote something at the top of the page. Underlined it.
Vael tried to read it upside down.
Raza turned the notebook around so he could see.
Make yourself unreadable.
"That's the preparation," Raza said. "Ten weeks of that."
Vael looked at the words.
Thought about nine fights and twenty-two minutes of recording and a man who turned opponents' attacks into building materials and had never been genuinely hurt.
Ten weeks.
"Alright," he said.
"Go warm up," Raza said. "The others arrive at eight. Your session starts now, before them, because what we're doing this morning is going to look strange and I don't want Jin-ho observing it and developing opinions."
Vael stood.
"Jin-ho is going to observe it anyway," he said.
"I know," Raza said. "But if he arrives after it's started he'll spend the first five minutes trying to understand it instead of immediately forming conclusions." He picked up his pen. "Five minutes of Jin-ho not having conclusions is worth something."
Vael almost smiled.
He went to warm up.
Outside on Jalan Ipoh the city was doing its Tuesday morning thing — school traffic building, the provision shop opening below, Farouk's blue shutter rolling up with its usual metal sound. Ordinary. Specific. Real.
The board had a new line on it.
The work had a new shape.
Ten weeks to make himself unreadable to someone who built fights the way Mei Lin built cases — document by document, record by record, until the picture was complete and everything made sense in retrospect.
He started warming up.