The gym falls into a strange quiet. Even the shuffle of feet fades beneath the steady slap of Elliot's jabs…

Pak, pak, pak!

…each one swinging with that hypnotic pendulum motion.

Ringside eyes follow the sway, breath held, as Ryoma inches forward again, guard tight, refusing to break the spell.

He's deciphered Elliot's rhythm. He has confirmed it, and now it is time for a test run.

His Vision Grid continues tracking the tempo, each jab measured and mapped. Ryoma uses the data to search for an opening to slip deeper inside.

For now, he just blocks.

Pak, pak, pak!

He could slip, duck, weave. But no, he doesn't do it. He just keeps blocking, letting his body absorb the pattern, feel the beat.

To everyone else, it looks like stubbornness, a fighter running out of answers.

Nakahara and Sera think the same but stay silent. They just let Ryoma use this spar as a live experiment.

But Elliot reads it differently, sees it nothing more than a bushido, the Japanese grit.

He's already punished Ryoma before, buried two body shots, and walked away untouched. Nothing to fear now. Ryoma's inside game is sharp, but manageable.

"Lure him in. Mix in hooks. Get out."

He keeps the pendulum rhythm steady, inviting Ryoma to step closer.

But now Ryoma's focus sharpens. The world seems a bit slower. Every twitch, every exhale, every weight shift falls into place.

He's not in the zone yet, but close, enough for him to observe better.

He watches, times the gap, then dips his head in a faint fake, just enough to bait the next move.

And there they are: left eye contraction, both ears twitch back, right neck muscle tightens.

Small, but unmistakable. All three at once. The rhythm-breaker cue.

Elliot's weight shifts forward, jabs snapping out…

Ryoma knows what comes next. The tempo spike. The flurry.

So he cuts it off before it begins, ducking, pivots his lead foot deeper, and drives a spear jab into the solar plexus.

Bug!

Elliot's breathe catches, his rhythm stutters.

"What the…?"

Ryoma steps in again, rear foot sliding forward, and snaps a compact uppercut.

Dhuak!

Ringside gasps. Elliot's head snaps back, stunned for half a heartbeat.

And Ryoma seizes it.

Dsh! Dsh!

A sharp one-two to the face, and Elliot's head jerks twice.

He raises his guard, but Ryoma only taps it with a feinting left, then buries a right into the guts.

Bug!

Then two hooks, low-high combination, fast as a blink.

Bug! Bam!

Elliot's head whips sideways. His balance wavers, headgear shifting.

Ryoma winds up the finishing cross, but Elliot still manages a double guard, covering his face.

Bam!

Elliot staggers backward, knees softening.

And the bell rings.

Ding!

Ryoma's punch halts mid-swing. His face tightens in irritation.

Elliot glares back, breath ragged behind his guard, blood glinting at the corner of his mouth.

But he holds the anger down. This is only a spar, and exactly the kind of push he expected from Ryoma.

Still, as he turns for his corner, his jaw tightens, teeth grinding behind the mouthguard. The irritation won't fade.

***

The bell's chime fades, leaving behind a strange quiet that lasts only a few seconds before soft voices begin to fill the air.

The gym, once holding its breath, now stirs with scattered murmurs, restrained at first, and then spilling over as excitement takes hold.

The journalists, unable to contain themselves, whisper among one another, their disbelief slipping through their lowered tones.

"Did you see that? He completely turned the exchange around."

"Unbelievable… holding his ground against a world contender like that."

"If they weren't wearing headgear, Elliot might've gone down."

"That's nonsense. Without headgear, Ryoma wouldn't have survived the first round."

The voices stay quiet, but the tension carries clearly across the ring. Shoji and Narisawa can make out every word, even from where they stand.

And they are clearly far from happy. They expected those journalists talking about their gym, how they helped a world contender in sparring, maybe got some good lines later in the newspapers.

But here they hear them talking about an uninvited guest, an unranked boxer from an unknown gym who just secured his A-license only recently.

In the ring, Elliot and Sergei glance toward the journalists. Their faces are expressionless, but their silence betraying a cautious awareness of how quickly the mood has shifted.

They don't understand the Japanese, yet they catch the meaning through tone alone. Then Sergei stares at Elliot, a sharp questioning look that asks what words cannot.

Elliot just exhales through his nose, the sound half fatigue, half disbelief.

"He caught me completely off guard. Just when I was about to shift tempo, he hit my core. Couldn't breathe for a second."

Sergei remains silent, studying his fighter, mind turning over what he's just heard.

He can't decide whether Ryoma had timed it with surgical precision, or if the punch was just a coincidence, a desperate punch that happened to land at the perfect instant.

The uncertainty bothers him more than the result itself.

***

Nakahara rubs Ryoma's legs in the corner, more from habit than necessity. His face stays composed, but a faint smile pushes through, subtle and genuine.

"Good work, kid," he says, patting Ryoma's thigh. "You managed to turn the tide back there."

Ryoma only grins, not in pride but in quiet satisfaction, the kind that comes from proving a theory right. The punch, the timing, the read, it all lined up exactly as he'd calculated.

Sera, standing nearby with arms crossed, doesn't share Nakahara's smile. His tone cuts through the moment, flat and cold.

"If you're feeling proud about that counter, you'd better forget it."

Ryoma's grin fades. He turns his head, eyes narrowing. "What, you're not happy seeing your own fighter doing well? You sound bitter."

Sera exhales through his nose, unimpressed. "You got lucky. You timed it right, sure, but luck runs thin when you chase it. Fighters who use the Soviet rhythm never stay fixed on one tempo. They change it, break it, rebuild it. Sometimes you'll catch them clean, sometimes you'll walk into their setup."

He lets the words settle, then adds, quieter but sharper:

"You're an out-boxer. Don't trade inside just to prove you can. You're here to learn, not to make a statement."

Sera's warning hangs in the air for a moment before Ryoma finally looks up, his voice calm but edged with frost.

"It wasn't luck," he says. "I timed it. Planned it."

Sera doesn't flinch. "Don't fool yourself. The Soviet rhythm isn't fixed, but fluid. They change tempo constantly. So far, Elliot's only shown two patterns: the slow sway and the sudden flurry. But there's more to it than that."

Ryoma exhales through his nose, uninterested. His expression drifts somewhere between confidence and boredom.

It doesn't matter how many rhythms they have. Ryoma no longer times his counters by Elliot's tempo.

He's reading him instead, tracking the tiny habits, the unconscious tells that leak through each movement. Cues so small that even Elliot himself might not realize he's giving them away.

When the bell rings for the final round, Ryoma steps forward still in his in-fighter stance.

It isn't pride that drives him now, or defiance. It's curiosity.

There's still something he needs to confirm, another theory to test.

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