CHAPTER 75: LYNX FOOTWORK

The fifth dawn in the hidden basalt valley arrived without the slightest warning, bringing with it a thick, biting frost that coated the edges of the black arena in a thin, crystalline layer. The sun, hanging low over the jagged line of the forest horizon, offered not a single drop of warmth. Its pale, winter rays merely bounced off the smooth, dew-slick basalt slab, casting blinding, razor-sharp glints of light across the dark stone. The river in the canyon roared fiercely, and cold mist drifted lazily over the foaming water, settling on my bare shoulders.

I stood dead center on the slab. In accordance with the merciless discipline and austerity of this training, I wore nothing but my short underwear. My bare feet, though heavily bruised from the penetrating morning cold, were firmly planted into the rough, cracked texture of the basalt. The skin across my back, chest, and thighs resembled a dark purple map—a dense network of bruises and red welts from the bamboo staff over the past days still throbbed with a dull, burning ache at every deep breath.

My inner reactor, however, operated with flawless, predatory stability. The conduits in my chest, following yesterday's innovation with the sliding cushion, conducted sapphire current with absolute, laminar fluidity. Internal friction had dropped to zero.

I relaxed my shoulders, lowered my arms, and tucked my hands loosely behind the waistband of my underwear, imitating my constant, brazen habit of shoving my hands into the pockets of my black coat. I tilted my chin up, narrowing my sapphire eye with an easygoing, cold, and calculated composure. I was trying to maintain a posture worthy of a classic, inscrutable martial arts master straight out of an otaku vision—a straight spine, an unmoving chest, and that ideal, dignified chill.

"Let’s begin, Sensei," I uttered quietly into the open air.

The old man, standing at the very edge of the basalt slab, slowly released a cloud of aromatic smoke from his clay pipe. For a long moment, he observed my new, artificially stiffened posture with a raised brow. A shadow of grim amusement flickered in his eyes, which bore the shade of hazy Tiger’s Eye. Without a single word, he set his pipe down on a smooth pebble, leaned over, and grasped his supple bamboo staff.

In a fraction of a second, the air in front of my face simply exploded.

Sensei closed the distance with inhuman, terrifying speed. The sound of his first bare footstep on the stone reached my ears only when the flexible bamboo was already halfway to my head.

Instead of relying on my developed dynamics, my analytical mind decided to fall into the trap of aesthetics. I wanted to execute an ideal, elegant, and restrained head dodge to the side—a clean, classic slip of a single centimeter, exactly as legendary duelists do on the pages of dark stories.

That was an absolute, fatal logical error.

My restless, hyperactive brain, driven by my innate ADHD, instead of focusing on a single, fluid biomechanical movement, immediately began processing hundreds of useless stimuli all at once. I registered the steam rising from the old man’s mouth, the diagonal crack in the basalt under his left heel, the roar of the stream on my flank, and the angle of the morning sunlight. That sudden, uncontrolled informational noise caused me to tense my left shoulder for a fraction of a millisecond, trying to force that artificial, statuesque body structure.

The laminar flow in my conduits instantly collapsed. A turbulent jam of energy formed in the copper channels, and my body stiffened like a dead log.

WHACK! BZDURA!

The dull, lethal crack of the bamboo echoed across the entire valley. The flexible staff struck me directly on my right ear, shattering my traction. A fraction of a second later, Sensei, with a fluid, rotational sweep of his bare foot, brutally took my legs out at the ankles.

I lost my balance on the slick frost. With terrifying impact, I crashed sideways directly onto the hard, black rock. The basalt scraped the skin off my hip, and a loud, high-pitched ringing exploded inside my skull.

I lay on the cold stone for a moment, feeling warm blood seep from my torn earlobe and bright crimson drip once again from my nose, staining the gray frost beneath my face.

"What are you messing around with, boy?" Sensei’s rough, deeply disappointed voice came from above. "You look like you swallowed a stick and got stuck halfway. This new posture of yours... what kind of pathetic theater is this supposed to be?"

Slowly, I pushed myself up on trembling palms. I spat a glob of thick blood onto the basalt, turned over, and stood up. Despite the tearing pain in my ear and scraped hip, there wasn't a single grain of frustration on my face. Instead, with a completely stony expression and brazen confidence, I looked the old man straight in the eyes.

"That was a controlled fall simulation, Master," I rasped, wiping my nose with the back of my hand and quelling the tremor in my calves. "I was evaluating on a cold read whether the angle of the morning light on the basalt blinds you when delivering a strike from the right flank. I also wanted to test the resistance of the temporal bone to sudden kinetic pressure. Your alertness and technique are at a satisfactory level. Congratulations."

The old man froze for a moment with a raised brow. He looked at the bloody boy standing in his underwear in the freezing cold, who, with the expression of a grand visionary, was currently trying to brazenly gaslight him. After a moment, Sensei slowly shook his head, and a deep, silent sigh of resignation escaped his chest.

"You're an idiot, kid. A brilliant idiot, but still an absolute idiot."

"It’s called tactical analysis and data collection, Sensei," I countered with a predatory smirk, even as the pain in my hip tore at me with every micro-shift of body weight. "But I don't expect you to understand modern process methodology."

Sensei set the bamboo aside and sat down heavily on a rounded basalt boulder near the bank. Taking advantage of the free break I had won for myself with that brazen chatter, I immediately rested my hands on my knees and began breathing deeply and rhythmically. I allowed the sapphire mana to flow laminarly through my conduits, slowly regenerating the damaged tissues around my ear and hip.

"You're trying to be someone else, kid," Sensei spoke up, relighting his pipe and letting out a slow plume of smoke. "You want to copy cold, symmetrical elegance because you've read about great masters or seen them in your visions. You think true mastery is the ideal, unmoving peace of a statue. But combat isn't theater for the aristocracy. Your mind and your body weren't created for that kind of movement."

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I raised my sapphire eye, listening intently to his words.

"Your mind isn't a calm, clear pond reflecting the moon," the old man continued, gauging me with the assessing gaze of Tiger’s Eye. "Your mind is a fucking storm, kid. I see it in your eyes in every exchange. Your attention jumps like a rabid flea. You register every whisper of wind, every quiver of air, every lizard on the rock. Trying to cram that chaos into the rigid framework of a symmetrical, slow style is like trying to seal a volcano in a clay pot. It’ll simply blow you apart from the inside."

"So what am I supposed to do with it, Sensei?" I muttered, wiping my bloody chin. "My ADHD isn't something I can just turn off with a remote control. My head has operated like this since birth on Earth."

"And who told you to turn it off?" Sensei smiled slightly, though his eyes remained deadly serious. "Don't fight your chaos, kid. Channel it. Instead of wasting gigantic reserves of energy trying to pretend to be a calm monk, use those sudden, jerky thoughts and micro-twitches as direct propulsion. Let your enemy try to read the pattern in a storm that doesn't even know where it'll strike next. Turn your distraction into your greatest, most lethal advantage."

I froze in the center of the arena. The old man’s words struck my analytical processor with the force of a titanic battering ram.

As a gamer and pragmatist, I had always sought clean optimization. In a fraction of a second, I realized my mistake: attempting to be "elegant and calm" demanded gigantic reserves of mental energy from my brain. I had to constantly fight my own nature to maintain that artificial structure! It was an extremely inefficient waste of calories.

What if, instead, I used those natural, sudden nervous impulses and micro-twitches as direct signals for direction changes?

A predatory, psychopathic smile slowly spread across my lips. My ADHD was not a weakness or an innate defect. It was my unique, sharpened operating system, which I was now going to fully integrate with the physics of my conduits!

I returned to the center of the basalt slab. I loosened my hips, let my arms hang casually, and raised my bare feet slightly onto my toes. I closed my eyes for a moment and completely let go of the reins. I stopped trying to control my thoughts. I allowed my restless mind to spread wide over the entire environment—I registered the roar of the river, the smell of pipe smoke, the humidity in the air, and the smallest vibrations of the rock beneath my feet.

"Let’s try again, Sensei," I muttered with cold, predatory readiness.

The old man stood up, his eyes flashing with a golden gleam. Without a word of warning, he rushed forward, his bamboo staff exploding in a lethal flurry of cuts aimed directly at my exposed torso.

I engaged the micro-propulsion.

Instead of weighing the movement in my head, I yielded to the first random impulse in my nervous system. I channeled a micro-flash of sapphire plasma through my laminar conduits into my right calf, directly into the black basalt.

The momentum of that energy strike literally severed the inertia of my body, shifting my frame by several inches to the side in a fraction of a millisecond. The bamboo staff sliced through the air right where my chest had been a moment before.

Before Sensei could adjust his trajectory and deliver another downward cut, my attention jumped to the smell of burnt sulfur from my own plasma. Another micro-flash burst from my left shoulder, abruptly lowering my center of gravity at the hips. I slid smoothly under the incoming wood, executing a jerky, irregular, angular dodge that completely defied the laws of traditional biology.

This was the birth of a new technique—Lynx Footwork.

I moved low to the ground now, resembling a wild forest cat weaving through dense underbrush. My dodges were inconsistent, full of sudden halts, micro-twitches, and asymmetrical leaps. There wasn't a single grain of classical elegance in it—it was pure, biomechanical chaos that nevertheless retained terrifying speed and silence thanks to the laminar flow of mana. Every random impulse in my hyperactive head became an instant, physical change in movement direction.

SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!

Sensei’s bamboo staff sliced through the empty air time and time again. The old man, despite his inhuman speed and decades of combat experience, began to miss! His Tiger’s Eye widened in subtle surprise. He was unable to predict my next dodge because I myself didn't know where I would hop a fraction of a second later until the random impulse in my head forced it!

Around my bare feet, at every angular leap, quiet sapphire plasma discharges crackled, scorching a chaotic, jagged line of blue lightning tracks into the black basalt. I floated and hopped around the lethal strikes with that predatory, brazen smile on my bloody face.

At one point, making a swift hop behind Sensei’s back, I decided to test something else. My pragmatic nature immediately began calculating: training barefoot in the freezing cold was exhausting, and every second of free recovery was worth its weight in gold.

As Sensei spun on his heel to deliver another blow, I raised my hand and asked out loud with absolute seriousness:

"Sensei! When you twist your hip like that, doesn't your knee pop? I heard that at your age, joints damage easily, and I wouldn't want to carry you off this slab on my back!"

The old man, hearing this sudden, complex, and brazen question right in the middle of a lethal sparring session, froze for a fraction of a second with his staff raised, trying to process the words. The trajectory of his incoming strike slowed by about five percent.

That was all I was waiting for.

Instead of dodging under tension, I took advantage of that minimal slowdown to completely relax my core and back muscles, taking a deep gulp of air and giving my laminar conduits precious milliseconds to cool down. My analytical brain immediately registered the benefit: Trolling and asking questions slows the enemy's reaction time. Energy gain: five percent free recovery in flight. Pure profit.

Sensei, however, instantly saw through the audacious trick. His eyes narrowed into slits. Instead of completing the elegant cut, he abruptly closed the distance and, with a loud, dry crack, struck me with the end of his staff directly on my right buttock.

"Ouch!" I yelled, leaping into the air and grabbing my rear. "That was unprofessional! Pure physical violence with no educational value!"

"Talk less, think more, kid," Sensei grunted, stepping back and resting the staff on his shoulder. Though his voice was rough, a very subtle smile of recognition blossomed on his wrinkled face for the first time. "Trying to chatter to catch your breath? Clever. But that won't work on me. Though I have to admit... that jerky step of yours... you've finally stopped pretending to be someone you're not."

I wiped my bloody nose with the back of my hand, my sapphire eye flashing with wild satisfaction.

"It’s called Lynx Footwork, Sensei. And believe me, this is just the beginning of my optimizations."

In the evening, dense, black darkness enveloped the valley, and dry frost once again froze the edges of the roaring stream. The two of us sat by the crackling campfire, whose red flames licked the basalt pebbles.

Dressed at last in my dry trousers and wrapped in my thick, black leather coat, I slowly drank hot water from a clay mug. Every muscle in my body throbbed with a dull ache, the skin on my hip was scraped raw from falls onto the basalt, and my left ear still pulsed from the bamboo hit. But inside me burned incredible satisfaction.

My hyperactive, analytical mind operated at maximum capacity, arranging today's experiences into complete combat blueprints. I had stopped fighting my own nature. Instead of wasting energy suppressing my ADHD, I had converted my mental chaos into an unpredictable, physical weapon. Lynx Footwork was amazingly energy-efficient, and its irregularity rendered traditional enemy defense completely useless.

"A true fighting style, boy, isn't born from copying books," Sensei spoke softly, letting out a slow plume of smoke from his pipe toward the starry sky. "It’s born from who you truly are. You aren't an academy knight. You're a wild, clever predator who can spot a pattern where others see only chaos. Remember what you felt on the basalt today."

I nodded slowly, staring into the dancing flames of the fire. In my sapphire eye, the red glow of the fire reflected, blending with the natural, blue sheen of my unblocked conduits. The ordeal continued, and with every passing day, I was becoming an increasingly elusive, relentless monster.