The second Circuit fight was against a man named Dekker Foss.
B-rank. Level Forty-one. Primary: power-type close combat. Secondary: mana-reinforced grappling. The matchmaking notes from Cole were five lines this time.
Koren had adjusted. After the Voss fight exposed Shin's mana vulnerability, she'd matched him against a grappler — a fighter whose reinforcement application was sustained contact rather than striking impact. A different test. A different gap to map.
Shin stood on the surface and looked across at Foss and thought about what Koren wanted to learn from this fight.
Foss was big. Six-two, heavy musculature, the build of someone whose stat distribution favored strength and endurance over agility. His mana output read at a higher sustained level than Voss's — the grappling application required continuous reinforcement rather than the burst-pattern of strike reinforcement.
Continuous reinforcement meant Shin's newly calibrated prediction model was partially relevant but not fully. Hadley's training had covered strike-timing recalibration. Grapple-timing was a different dataset.
"Begin," Koren said.
Foss didn't rush. He walked forward. The pace of a grappler who understood that closing distance was the fight — everything else was positioning.
Shin circled. Twenty-eight agility against Foss's estimated nineteen gave him the mobility advantage. Keep distance. Force Foss to chase. Use the speed differential to control engagement range.
The first thirty seconds were spatial: Foss advancing, Shin circling, the distance maintained at just outside Foss's reach. The observers in the perimeter seating watched with the patience of people who recognized the technical game being played.
Foss changed. The big man feinted forward — not a committed advance, a test of Shin's reactive speed. Shin moved offline. Foss tracked the movement and adjusted his angle of advance.
Foss was reading him too.
Three more feints. Each one producing data for Foss's approach algorithm. The grappler mapping Shin's preferred escape angles, his reactive timing, the direction he defaulted to under pressure.
On the fourth feint, Foss committed.
The advance was faster than his size suggested — the mana reinforcement feeding into his legs, the sustained reinforcement converting to burst acceleration. The timing shift Hadley had taught him was there but the application was different: not a late-peak strike acceleration but a movement-speed multiplier that compressed the closing distance faster than raw agility numbers predicted.
Shin moved. Got clear. Barely.
Foss's hand closed on air where Shin's forearm had been three-tenths of a second earlier.
Close. Too close.
He reset. Foss walked forward again. Patient.
The problem crystallized. Shin could maintain distance with twenty-eight agility against Foss's non-reinforced movement speed. But Foss's burst-reinforced closing speed temporarily matched or exceeded Shin's agility. The grappler didn't need to be faster all the time. He needed to be faster for one second — the closing second — and then sustained contact would do the rest.
If Foss grabbed him, the fight was over. The grappler's reinforced control against Shin's non-reinforced resistance was the same asymmetry as the Voss fight: mana versus no mana.
Don't get grabbed.
He needed to make Foss pay for the closing attempts. Punish each burst-advance with a counter before the grapple initiated.
Foss came again. The burst-acceleration closing the distance. Shin timed the counter differently this time — instead of moving away, he stepped to the angle and threw a straight right into Foss's lead shoulder. The impact caught Foss mid-advance, the twenty-six strength connecting at the shoulder joint.
Foss absorbed it. The endurance stat on a power-type fighter at Level Forty-one was significant. The strike that would have dropped a C-rank fighter barely altered Foss's trajectory.
But it altered it enough.
Foss's grab missed by the margin that Shin's counter had created — the shoulder impact rotating Foss's reach angle by six degrees. Shin stepped through the angle and reset.
Information. Counters during the closing advance worked if the targeting was precise. Shoulder joint. Hip joint. The articulation points where force applied during movement created angular displacement.
Three more exchanges. Each one: Foss burst-advancing, Shin countering to a joint, the angular displacement creating the margin to escape the grapple. The rhythm established.
Foss recognized the pattern at the fourth exchange.
The big man adjusted. Instead of a straight-line burst-advance, he came from an angle — the approach vector offset from Shin's counter position. The shoulder-joint targeting that had worked three times required Shin to be at a specific angle to the advance. Foss had eliminated that angle.
The grapple connected.
Foss's hand closed on Shin's right wrist. The sustained mana reinforcement activated at contact — Shin felt the energy threading through Foss's grip, the reinforcement converting grip strength into something that his twenty-six strength couldn't break.
The strength differential was 26 versus an estimated 60+ with reinforcement. He wasn't breaking the grip.
Foss pulled. The grappler's technique took over — the wrist control transitioning to inside position, the body manipulation that would end with Shin on the surface.
Three seconds.
Shin had three seconds before the position became terminal.
He didn't try to break the grip. He went with it. The pull's direction was toward Foss — so he stepped into it, faster than Foss expected, converting the pull into forward momentum that Foss hadn't initiated.
The sudden acceleration closed the distance to zero. Shin was inside Foss's grappling range, chest to chest, close enough that the grappler's leverage mechanics couldn't function at this proximity.
Foss adjusted. Started transitioning to a clinch. The sustained reinforcement in his arms wrapping toward Shin's torso.
Shin headbutted him.
Twenty-two endurance into Foss's nose. The range was too close for Foss's grappling framework to account for. The impact broke something in Foss's face — cartilage, probably — and the grappler's grip loosened for half a second.
Half a second was enough.
Shin ripped his wrist free and created distance. Three meters. Reset.
Foss's nose was bleeding. The big man wiped it with the back of his hand and looked at Shin with an expression that had moved past professional into personal.
The next exchange was harder. Foss came in angry — not sloppy, angry. A professional's anger: hotter, faster, more committed. The burst-closing speed was higher. The grapple attempts more aggressive.
Shin managed it. The recalibrated prediction model handled the strike-type timing adjustments from Hadley's training, and the real-time reactive mode handled the grapple-type timing he was learning on the surface. Two systems running in parallel. Not elegant. Functional.
He survived three more closing attempts. Landed counters on two. Took a body shot from a clinch escape that drove the air from his lungs.
"Stop," Koren called.
---
He sat on the surface's edge with the towel and the taste of copper in the back of his throat.
"Point-four-eight percent," Cole said.
Higher than the Voss fight. The performance had been better — he'd avoided the takedown, landed effective counters, and demonstrated adaptation against a new combat type. The system's experience attribution rewarded demonstrated capability against superior opponents.
22.88%. The day's total: 0.2% from C-rank grinding plus 0.48% from the fight.
"Koren wants to talk to you," Cole said.
Shin looked up. Koren was at her console, but she was watching him. She gestured — a single motion that said come here.
He walked to the console. The displays around her showed data streams he couldn't read at this angle — fight analytics, biometric data, something that looked like a network diagram.
"You adapted faster than the Voss fight," she said. "The grapple defense — the first three exchanges were patterned. Counter to the shoulder joint. Consistent. The fourth exchange, when Foss adjusted, you switched to a different approach within half a second." She looked at her displays. "The headbutt was crude. But it worked."
"The crude options are the ones grapplers don't account for."
Her mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "Rahl said the same thing fifteen years ago." She turned one of the displays toward him. "Your accumulation data. The Five Pillars' Framework is tracking in real time."
He looked at the display. She had access to the Coordination Framework's data portal. The same data Orin had described — real-time shadow experience tracking, attribution events, the behavioral detection algorithm's baseline model.
"You have Framework access," he said.
"I have access to everything," she said. It wasn't a boast. It was a statement of operational capability. "The Framework went live four days ago. Its data architecture is sophisticated but its security implementation has the usual institutional gaps."
She'd breached the Five Pillars' intelligence-sharing portal. Or she had someone inside who provided the data. Either way, Koren's intelligence network was reading the same information the guilds were reading.
"Your C-rank baseline is established," she said. "Point-four per day. Today's accumulation will show point-six-eight. The deviation is point-two-eight."
"Above the flag threshold."
"Above the flag threshold." She looked at him. "The algorithm will register the deviation tomorrow morning when the daily aggregate processes. You have until then before the Five Pillars' monitoring teams start asking questions."
"One fight per card was supposed to keep me below the threshold."
"One fight per card at point-three would keep you below. This fight credited point-four-eight. The performance improvement changed the attribution." She paused. "Better performance produces more experience. More experience produces a larger deviation. The system punishes you for getting better."
He looked at the data.
The constraint was mathematical. The C-rank baseline was 0.4 per day. The detection threshold was 0.2 above baseline. Any Circuit fight that credited more than 0.2 would trigger the flag — and a good fight credited more than 0.2.
He couldn't fight well and stay hidden. Not both.
"Options," he said.
"Three." Koren counted on her fingers. "One: fight badly. Keep the attribution below point-two. Waste your time and mine." She folded one finger. "Two: fight on non-card days. The C-rank baseline accrues on dungeon days. If you fight on off-days when you're not in the dungeon, the daily aggregate doesn't stack."
"The Framework tracks daily totals."
"It tracks daily totals from all attributed sources. If the C-rank attribution stops for a day and the Circuit attribution replaces it, the daily total stays within range." She folded the second finger. "Three: let the flag trigger and deal with the questions."
Option two was workable. Instead of grinding C-rank every day and fighting on event nights, he'd alternate: dungeon days and Circuit days. The daily total would show either 0.4 (dungeon) or 0.5 (fight), keeping the deviation narrow.
"The schedule changes," he said.
"I'll restructure the card bookings to non-dungeon days." She looked at the data streams. "Which means your weekly accumulation drops. Fewer dungeon days means less C-rank baseline. The Circuit days replace rather than supplement."
The math: three dungeon days at 0.4 plus three Circuit days at 0.5 per week. Total: 2.7 per week. Lower than the 3.7 estimate from combining both.
"Two-point-seven per week," he said.
"Twenty-nine weeks to Level Two." She turned the display back. "Seven months."
Seven months. The timeline kept stretching. Every constraint lengthened it. Every institutional pressure on the experience pipeline pushed the target further.
"Unless," Koren said.
He waited.
"Unless you find a way to increase the per-fight attribution. Higher-level opponents, longer fights, more demonstrated capability." She looked at him. "The system rewards dominance against superior opponents. A point-five fight against a Level Forty-one is a point-eight fight against a Level Fifty."
Higher-level opponents. Bigger risks. Bigger payouts.
"You're offering Level Fifty opponents."
"I'm offering the matchmaking. What you do on the surface is your problem." She turned back to her console. "Next card is in five days. I'll book you against someone worth the trip."
He stood at the console and looked at the data streams and thought about the timeline and the constraint and the algorithm watching his counter.
Seven months. Or faster, if he fought harder. Or slower, if the institutions closed more doors.
The baseline kept shifting. The target stayed the same.
He walked to the elevator with Cole. The basement emptied behind them.
"She likes you," Cole said.
"She likes data."
"Same thing, in her world." Cole punched the elevator button. "The headbutt, man. Foss's nose." He shook his head, the almost-laugh that preceded real statements. "You're going to get a reputation in the Circuit."
"Good or bad."
"Depends on whose nose you break next."
The elevator rose. The night air hit them at the loading dock. Mira's transport at the curb.
She looked at the bruising on his ribs — new bruising, layered on the old.
"Don't say sit," he said.
She held up the reader. "Sit."
He sat.
