Ryuken's individual session with Ashe took place on the third morning.
He found her out in the sprawling outer ring. It was exactly where she always went when she had nowhere else to bleed. She had been relentlessly running Asura's Dance since long before dawn. It was the exact same brutal sequence she had run every single morning since arriving at the compound. When Ryuken materialized at the arched stone entrance, she was suspended mid-air in the violent transition from the first form to the second. She deliberately finished the lethal arc before she even acknowledged he was there.
He stood silently at the entrance and watched her land.
She snapped to a neutral stance and looked at him. The specific, heavy quality of her attention when her father was in the room was entirely different from how she looked at the rest of the world. It was not more guarded. It was not more open. It was simply a completely different, deeply wired biological register she reserved exclusively for him.
