It happened on a Tuesday at four in the morning in the outer ring, which he had not planned and which Ryuken had apparently anticipated.
He had been awake since two. The hip joint had been approved the previous afternoon and the body had the specific restlessness of a system that had just been reconfigured at a foundational level, the way you could not stop tonguing a loose tooth. He lay in the low bed for two hours running the Quicksilver Thrust in his mind with the ankle, knee, and hip all transmitting, feeling the difference in the Silver Fang's delivery at the point of impact, and eventually he got up because lying there was not useful and the outer ring was twenty meters away.
