Something solid. Believable. A reason the league could point to and say, Ah, that explains it.
The answer he could come to as of now with his limited knowledge was "The Grandmaster Stage"
Every martial artist aimed to achieve it, a realm of mastery where the brain itself was pushed beyond its natural limits, flooded with Chi until perception, calculation, and movement transcended the ordinary. Few attempted it. Fewer survived. The risk was simple and merciless, one wrong step and the brain cooked itself, nerves burned out like wires under too much current.
Once, John had hesitated to even approach that line. The price was too high.
But now, he was Ajin.
Death was no longer a wall, but a revolving door. A cooked brain? A ruptured nerve? Fatal mistakes, yes but temporary ones. He could die, reset, and return. Each failure would be undone in an instant, each experiment wiped clean until he perfected the output.
The thought was grimly liberating.
He could pour Chi into his brain, sharpen his senses until the world slowed, until every move was optimal, and if the strain snapped something inside him? He would rise again, intact.
For others, the Grandmaster Stage was a gamble with death. For John, it was a practice ground.
But the plan carried a flaw sharp enough to unravel it all.
If his brain fried mid-process, if the surge of Chi melted the pathways that carried his thoughts, how would he even remember to reset himself? A dead mind couldn't give commands. A broken consciousness couldn't comprehend escape.
The thought clawed at him, circling, relentless.
John turned it over again and again, searching for a failsafe, but every path bent toward the same conclusion. The solution wasn't in trying to save himself. It was in letting others do it for him.
He could not trust his own damaged mind to pull the trigger. But he could trust his enemies blades and guns.
If he attempted the breakthrough in solitude, one mistake could leave him drooling, comatose, alive but useless. But if he attempted it in combat, against killers who would never hesitate to strike the opening… then failure became a guarantee of death.
And death was not the end. Not for him.
The answer then was simple, he would break through during a fight.
Every surge of Chi would sharpen his edge, push him closer to the Grandmaster Stage. And if he miscalculated, if his brain short-circuited, if he faltered even for a heartbeat, the gang would cut him down. That cut would reset him. Each death, a correction. Each resurrection, a refinement. Until the control was perfect.
Once he was a grandmaster, he would be left with no hole for the league to look into, even with all their suspicion, nothing would be found by them unless for whatever reason they decided to take his head to see if he would survive it.
With a plan in mind, John began to act on it. At night time, he scanned the street, blending into the darkness. Sometimes he would locate a gang member and trail them from the shadows, following their movements until they reached the threshold of their hideout.
Once the location was confirmed, he would find a place nearby, sitting out in the open with a deceptive calm. He let his IBM handle the rest. In its "invisible" state, the black matter walked unseen into the hideouts, acting as John's eyes to map out the layout of the entire facility, noting every corridor, exit, and blind spot.
It seems the leader of this gang had taken John's threat seriously, the atmosphere inside was suffocating. Every member was on edge, each with a gun held firmly in hand. The presence of the Ajin's IBM brought an even more heavy sense of unease to these vigilant and tense gangsters. While they could not see the IBM as it walked past them, it didn't stop them from feeling a sense of wrongness in the room.
Each time John's IBM moved through the hideout, it seem to leave a trail of cold dread. It brought a sense of unease that had everyone clutching their weapons tighter, their emotions strained to a breaking point. John, sitting outside, was deeply perceptive to the function of adrenaline. He could feel the spike in their heart rates and the frantic energy in the air. He was tempted to use his ability and give a physical nudge to a body already locked in a state of fight or flight, but he held off, maintaining his silent vigil.
While he waited for Thorne's information to arrive, John remained patient. Once those details gets into his hands, it would mark the beginning of the end for this gang. He hoped his current loud actions would finally draw the gaze of his supposed mentor during this stage of his training. Even if the mentor never came close or stayed hidden, John knew he would eventually find him out, as long as his IBM was out and scouting the perimeter from high in the sky.
Meanwhile, the ninja assigned to trail him was no longer having an easy day. Tracking John from the shadows had become a psychological nightmare. John was now "spamming" his scream, the paralyzing Ajin roar directly at the hidden observer, keeping the ninja's nervous system in a constant state of shock.
He even added a cruel twist to the pursuit. Once he breached the distance between himself and the ninja, John would reach out with his ability and nudge the man's adrenaline flow, artificially forcing a spike in his fight-or-flight response. The ninja, trained for combat, naturally chose "fight."
John expected this reaction and played into it perfectly. The moment the ninja tensed to strike, John would have his IBM retreat just outside the ninja's active reach, leaving the warrior standing on guard against thin air. Then, for the next three minutes, John put him through a repetitive loop, his IBM would cross the distance, looming just on the edge of the ninja's perception, only to quickly retreat into the dark the moment the man prepared to engage.
John's psychological warfare had the ninja's body and brain in a complete mess. The constant spikes of adrenaline followed by the sudden disappearance of the threat were so draining that the ninja began to doubt his own reality. He started to think he might really be sick or suffering from a series of powerful hallucinations.
He questioned himself relentlessly, Was he simply too stressed from all the nights he had spent awake trailing John? Was someone actually messing with him? If they were, he couldn't understand why they hadn't used the numerous clear opportunities to take him out while his guard was compromised.
This last point, the fact that he was still alive made the ninja, who was accustomed to the brutal logic of life and death, lean toward the idea that it was all his own fault. He became convinced that something was fundamentally wrong with his own mind. He began to fear that the invisible presence and the sense of threat appearing around him were just things his mind had conjured up, and that he was slowly going insane.
There was no way he could report his current state to the League, admitting to such mental instability would be a death sentence or a disgrace. As he watched John casually walking the street below, the ninja reached a point of desperation. He actually began to think about booking a doctor's appointment during the daytime, while John was safely tucked away in his apartment, just to see if a medical professional could explain the madness taking over his senses.
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