Every combination Garou threw carried killing intent.
Not the theatrical kind—not the kind that announced itself and gave opponents time to adjust. The real kind: cold and structural, built into the geometry of each attack the way load-bearing walls are built into a house. The form was Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist, recognizable in every transition and pivot. But the intent threading through it was something Bang had never put there.
The Flowing Water fist was, at its core, a protective style. Redirection over destruction. Defense as philosophy, not just technique. What Garou was throwing looked like the same river from the outside—but the current inside it ran in a completely different direction.
He hadn't corrupted the form. He'd rewritten what it was for.
Jordan turned this over while cracking a sunflower seed.
Self-developed. That was the honest assessment. A fifteen-year-old had taken a grandmaster's life work, learned it thoroughly enough to use it as raw material, and then built something new on top of it according to an entirely different set of principles. Violent principles. The principles of someone who had decided what absolute power looked like before he knew how to shave.
You had to respect the craft, even if you were also watching it construct a future catastrophe in real time.
In the corner of his mind where he kept the things he'd observed and hadn't acted on yet, Jordan filed a note.
Bang's reasoning about this situation ran something like: The boy is a genius. Geniuses are strange. I wasn't a saint at his age either—
(Here Bang's internal monologue presumably glossed over several decades of personal history at high speed.)
—so this is probably fine.
The flaw in this reasoning was that Bang was pattern-matching to himself and arriving at a comfortable conclusion. He'd seen this shape before—the obsessive talent, the ruthlessness, the hunger that didn't know how to be satisfied—because he'd looked in the mirror with it for years. He assumed the shape meant the same thing.
But Garou had come to the Flowing Water Dojo carrying something Bang had never carried: a childhood he'd never talked about. A specific, formative experience of being on the wrong end of the world's arbitrary cruelties, absorbing it with the particular silence of someone who was already planning what to do about it once they were strong enough.
That kind of silence, at that age, took a mind and character operating in ways most fifteen-year-olds hadn't developed yet. It also built a foundation under everything he'd learned here—the forms, the breathing, the footwork—that wasn't protection. Wasn't service. Wasn't any of the things Bang's martial philosophy pointed toward.
It was a different project entirely: rewrite the world by force, starting with becoming something the world cannot refuse.
Bang had a brother who'd stopped him, once, when his own road had bent in a bad direction. Someone who'd arrived at exactly the right moment with exactly the right authority to redirect him.
Garou didn't have that.
Jordan watched the boy drive another relentless combination at his master's guard and felt something that wasn't quite sympathy and wasn't quite calculation—a third thing, somewhere between them.
The old man's one of the founding members of the hot pot group, he thought. And Garou's the same generation as Genos. Can't really justify investing in one and ignoring the other.
He picked up the second can of soda.
We'll find some time. Figure out a better approach than "spar and hope the platitudes land."
Back in the hall, the sparring had reached its conclusion.
It didn't end dramatically. Bang raised both hands—not fast, not forceful—and the flowing energy in his defense suddenly consolidated, merged, and closed around the boy's spinning back kick like a riverbank closing around a current. One grip. Precise and absolute.
For a held breath, the two of them were frozen: master and student, both forces meeting and neither moving, like a photograph of something that had been very fast a moment ago.
Then stillness.
The disciples exhaled. Some of them grabbed their own thighs as the tension released, heads dropping, suddenly realizing their bodies were carrying exhaustion they hadn't accumulated themselves—just from watching at full attention for the duration. It hit harder than a fight they'd actually been in.
Garou gritted his teeth.
He pulled. His left leg didn't move. It was locked in Bang's grip with the specific immovability of iron, the kind that doesn't flex no matter what you apply to it, and he understood all at once and without ambiguity what the end of this session looked like.
Damn it. His jaw tightened. Still not enough.
Bang released his grip when the force against his hand went quiet. He let the boy recover—straighten, breathe, find his footing—and then spoke with the unhurried cadence of a man who had done this a thousand times.
"Garou." A pause. "Your problem is still the same."
Garou looked up.
Bang was stroking his beard with one hand, his eyes clear and direct, the way deep water is clear—you can see into it, but you can't see the bottom. "There is confusion in your fists. You haven't yet found the path that truly belongs to you."
The bow Garou gave was correct. The angle was right. The duration was appropriate.
Pointless, he thought behind it. More of these empty words, old man. What I need isn't a path. What I need is power. Absolute power. Everything else is decoration.
Bang watched the bow without comment. Let it be what it was.
"Train your mind first," he continued. "Learn to listen to your inner voice."
"I understand, master."
"Good. You can go."
The hall waited until Garou's footsteps had carried him through the door. Then the next name was called, and the rhythm of the lesson resumed.
Bang worked through the remaining disciples with the patient thoroughness of someone who had never believed in shortcuts. Each one was called forward. Each one sparred briefly. Each one received specific commentary on what they'd done and what needed work.
The gap between Garou and the rest of the roster was not a small one. It was the kind of gap that made comparisons feel slightly unkind to both sides. Bang was aware of this. He was also aware that the Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist existed to be learned by everyone—that its original purpose wasn't to produce exceptional fighters, but to give ordinary people something worth having. A healthy body. A means of protection. A practice that could belong to anyone willing to show up.
Lower barriers, broader reach. Not everyone who learned it needed to become its heir.
He poured himself a cup of tea from his thermos when it was done. The disciples dispersed in pairs and small groups toward the midday meal, their voices picking up as they moved into the courtyard—the ordinary human sound of people who had been concentrating hard and were now allowed to stop.
"Master Bang. It's been a while."
Bang looked up.
Jordan was standing in the middle of the training hall with the easy posture of someone who had been there for an indeterminate amount of time and was comfortable with how that read.
"Jordan!" Bang's surprise was genuine and slightly delayed—the particular reaction of someone who had sensed nothing, processed that he'd sensed nothing, and only then registered that the person was standing right there. He set down his thermos. "...Ah. Right."
He remembered.
The boy had crossed into that state a long time ago—the one where presence became optional, where the natural energy a person radiated quieted down to something indistinguishable from the surrounding air. Bang had noticed it the first time it happened and filed it away: returned to simplicity. Further along than he should be at this age, but there it is.
He'd almost forgotten, in the time since they'd last met, how complete it was.
"You've picked up something new." Bang's eyes moved over him with the reflexive assessment of a grandmaster cataloguing what was in front of him. His gaze settled on nothing specific—because there was nothing specific to settle on—and that itself was data. "Before, when you used that teleportation, there was always that blue light going off. Bright enough to leave spots."
He tilted his head slightly.
"But just now, nothing. Not even a flicker."
Jordan smiled pleasantly and said nothing immediately, which Bang had learned was its own kind of answer.