Chapter 8 : GRINDSTONE
Marcus's right hook came in like a freight train with an attitude problem.
I got my hands up — left guard high, right guard tucked — and the impact still rocked me sideways, rattling teeth I was starting to take personally. The mat caught me. I slapped it to break the fall, rolled to my knees, and was halfway up when Marcus reset to his stance and waited with the patience of a man who'd been doing this since before I was born in either life.
"You read it."
I spat into the bucket by the cage. Metallic taste — bitten cheek, not blood. Progress.
"I read it and it still dropped me."
"Reading and blocking are two different paychecks. You're earning the first one. Second takes longer."
He held up the pads. I hit them. Jab. Cross. Jab-cross-hook. The hook was improving — Marcus had spent Monday fixing my hip rotation and the power transfer had jumped noticeably, each strike landing with a satisfying crack against the leather that would have been impossible ten days ago.
Ten days of mornings in this gym. Ten days of getting dropped by Marcus, by the teenagers, by the woman in the thirty-something age bracket who hit like she had personal grievances with the concept of mercy. Ten days of running the Glades before dawn and working the warehouse until three and training until six and collapsing into the apartment bed with muscles that felt like they'd been put through a wringer and reassembled by a committee.
The body was changing. Not fast — nothing about a six in Endurance changed fast — but measurably. The shoulders had definition they hadn't owned before. The legs drove off the mat with more authority. The lungs lasted three rounds now instead of two before the gasping set in. Small adaptations, invisible day by day, obvious week by week.
The System tracked it all.
[PASSIVE TRAINING MILESTONE: STR 6 → 7. CONTINUOUS PHYSICAL CONDITIONING LOGGED.]
[PASSIVE TRAINING MILESTONE: END 5 → 6. SUSTAINED CARDIOVASCULAR AND RESISTANCE TRAINING.]
I processed both notifications between rounds, the text scrolling across my peripheral vision while Marcus adjusted his pad angles. Strength and Endurance, both crossing the threshold from below average to still below average but less embarrassingly so. The gains were passive — earned through sweat and hours, not CP — and they felt earned in a way the AGI investment hadn't. The number changed the same way, but the body's opinion of the change was different. This one had been paid for in bruises.
After class, Marcus tossed me a protein bar from behind the folding table. The wrapper was plain — generic brand, the kind sold in bulk at the kind of store that didn't have aisles, just pallets.
"You're improving faster than anyone I've trained."
I tore the wrapper open. Peanut butter flavor, chalky, barely edible. Perfect.
"Good instructor."
"Bullshit. I've been teaching twenty years and I've never seen someone go from zero to where you are in ten days. You've got no background. No muscle memory. No foundation. And you're absorbing technique like you've been doing it for months."
His eyes were steady. Measuring. The same clinical assessment he'd given me the first day, but deeper now — not sizing up a body, but trying to understand the engine behind it.
"Some people learn fast," I said.
"Not this fast." He let it hang. Then: "Whatever you're training for, CW — and you're training for something, don't insult me — make sure it's worth what you're putting your body through."
He walked away to set up for the next class. I sat on the bench and ate the protein bar and considered the fact that Marcus was the first person in this world to notice something unusual about me. Not dangerous unusual — the man had no framework for Systems or transmigration or stat points ticking upward. But unusual unusual, the kind of observation that a perceptive ex-military gym owner filed away and didn't forget.
I added his name to the mental list of people paying attention, right below Danny. Two acquaintances in three weeks. Not bad for a man wearing someone else's life.
---
The CP decision came that evening, sitting on the bed with the closet door open and the butcher paper timeline staring at me from inside. Fifteen CP remaining. The Perception investment was overdue — I'd missed the fourth dealer at 4th and Rackham because PER 8 wasn't enough to catch a man sitting in shadow behind a steel door. I'd missed the crumbling edge on building three because PER 8 didn't flag the texture difference between solid brick and weathered mortar.
PER was the survival stat. The stat that stopped things from killing me before I knew they existed.
[CP INVESTED: PER 8 → 9. COST: 5 CP. REMAINING: 10 CP.]
The change was immediate and disorienting. The apartment sharpened. Not visually — my eyes hadn't changed — but the brain's processing of visual input had been tuned upward by a single notch. The stain on the ceiling had depth now, layers of moisture damage I could parse. The hum of the mini fridge contained a harmonic I hadn't noticed before, a faint secondary frequency that suggested the compressor was three months from failure. The street noise outside — sirens, traffic, a dog barking four blocks away — separated into individual threads instead of blending into soup.
I blinked. Adjusted. Let the enhanced perception settle into the body's baseline like a new prescription finding focus.
Then the System pulsed.
[MISSION GENERATED — STANDARD]
[DISRUPT WEAPONS SHIPMENT AT DOCK 14, STARLING PORT. REWARD: 40 CP. TIME LIMIT: 48 HOURS.]
Dock 14. I knew that name. Not from the show directly — the specific dock number hadn't been mentioned on screen — but the weapons pipeline through Starling Port was a Season 1 plotline. One of the List targets received illegal arms through the port, and Oliver had disrupted the operation in an early episode. The timing matched.
Which meant the Hood might hit Dock 14 himself. The System was sending me into territory Oliver Queen was already hunting in.
Forty CP. Four times what the drug den had paid. The mission was an order of magnitude more dangerous — armed guards, a commercial port with security cameras, a weapons cache that attracted the kind of people who shot first and didn't bother with questions.
And a ticking clock that overlapped with the Hood's operating schedule.
I pulled out the city map. Dock 14 was on the east side of the port, accessible by two roads and a service entrance. The next morning, before the warehouse shift, I drove past in a borrowed delivery truck — Danny owed me for covering his Thursday route, and the truck gave me a legitimate reason to be in the port area.
Three guards visible at the gate. A warehouse with a commercial shipping container parked at the loading dock, the container's markings matching a logistics company I cross-referenced on the phone during my lunch break. The company name wasn't familiar from the show, but the registration address was: a Merlyn Global subsidiary. One of dozens, buried in layers of corporate shell structure, but the Merlyn name was there if you knew to look.
After the shift, I went back on foot. Civilian clothes, ball cap, the demeanor of someone walking to nowhere in particular. PER 9 earned its investment in the first ten minutes — I caught three camera positions the earlier drive-by had missed, noted the guard shift change at 6:00 PM, and spotted a gap in the perimeter fence on the north side that was hidden from the road by a stack of empty containers.
[GLADES INTELLIGENCE: 18% COMPLETE. DOCK 14 DATA LOGGED.]
The Stealth skill hummed in the background, cataloguing noise levels, sight lines, the rhythm of passing traffic. Basic tier — not enough to infiltrate a guarded port, but enough to make me a better observer. Every skill worked like this: not a switch that flipped from useless to competent, but a gradient that shifted the body's defaults by fractional degrees.
And CQC. The System had been watching the gym hours, tracking the technique, and somewhere between Marcus's fifteenth knockdown and my sixteenth recovery, the threshold had crossed.
[SKILL REGISTERED: CQC (Basic) — Street Brawler. Handle untrained opponents. Sloppy form.]
Sloppy form. The System was not a flatterer.
Basic CQC meant I could throw a punch that landed where I intended and take a hit without losing my feet — against someone who didn't know how to fight. Against trained guards with weapons, it was a party trick. Against the Hood, it was a funeral arrangement.
But it was registered. The skill existed in the System's tracking, and every hour I spent on the mat pushed it incrementally toward Trained. Months away. Worth every minute.
I sketched the dock layout on the back of a napkin during dinner — microwaved ramen from the corner store, eaten standing at the kitchenette counter because sitting down felt like wasting time — and pinned it next to the butcher paper timeline inside the closet door. The wall of obsessions grew one pushpin at a time.
Dock 14. Forty CP. Forty-eight hours. And somewhere in the dark, a man in a green hood with the same target list.
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