By hour sixteen, sweat-soaked and breathing hard, Bruce faced down all five dummies simultaneously in a final test sequence.
They came at him from every angle, styles blending and shifting with no pattern he could consciously track.
He didn't try to track it. He let his body answer instead.
Thwack! Crack! Thud!
Three strikes landed in under two seconds, each one drawn from a different discipline without a flicker of hesitation between them.
A palm strike flowed directly into an elbow, which flowed directly into a takedown, no gap, no decision point, just movement responding to movement.
The fifth dummy went down. Bruce stood in the center of the wreckage, chest heaving, and felt something settle into place inside him that hadn't been there an hour ago.
*[SKILL UNLOCKED: COMBAT SYNTHESIS]*
*[DESCRIPTION: PASSIVE INTEGRATION OF ALL MASTERED MARTIAL ARTS DISCIPLINES INTO A SINGLE UNIFIED FIGHTING FORM. STYLE SELECTION NO LONGER REQUIRES CONSCIOUS DECISION. TECHNIQUE ADAPTS AUTOMATICALLY TO OPPONENT POSITIONING AND RHYTHM IN REAL TIME.]*
Bruce read the notification twice, then let out a short laugh despite his exhaustion. Not a new power.
Just the natural end point of nine years of guaranteed, uninterrupted progress, arriving all at once instead of gradually.
He rested for two hours, ate, and moved on to the next thing he wanted to build.
Battle sense wasn't something he could train the same way. It wasn't about technique.
It was about seeing an attack coming before it fully arrived, reading the subtle physical tells that preceded any strike, weight distribution shifting a fraction of a second early, a breath held, eyes flicking toward a target before the body followed.
He'd need something harder to predict than the dummies. Something closer to a real, thinking opponent.
"NEXUS, pull the combat data you've compiled on Bane. Movement patterns from the warehouse surveillance, whatever fragments exist. I want a simulated opponent built from it."
"I have limited data. A single thermal silhouette and general build estimates. Simulation fidelity will be low."
"Do what you can with it. Combine it with generic elite-combatant baseline data to fill the gaps."
The dimension's replica gym reconfigured itself, and a new combat dummy activated, larger than the others, moving with a heavier, more deliberate rhythm than anything Bruce had trained against before.
Crude, since the underlying data was thin, but different enough to force new patterns of attention.
Bruce circled it, watching. The dummy lunged. He caught the shift in its weight a half second before the strike actually came, some small signal his conscious mind hadn't fully processed yet but his instincts had already flagged.
He adjusted, deflected, and reset.
Hours passed the same way, Bruce forcing himself to notice earlier and earlier, training his mind to process the pre-attack signals faster than the attacks themselves arrived.
It was exhausting in a completely different way than physical training, a kind of mental strain that left his temples throbbing by the end of each session.
*[SKILL PROGRESS: PREDICTIVE COMBAT ANALYSIS - 22%]*
*[SKILL PROGRESS: PREDICTIVE COMBAT ANALYSIS - 47%]*
*[SKILL PROGRESS: PREDICTIVE COMBAT ANALYSIS - 63%]*
By the end of the second full day inside the dimension, Bruce stood across from the crude Bane-simulation dummy and watched it move through a full attack sequence in something that felt like slow motion, even though NEXUS's shadow instance confirmed afterward the dummy's speed hadn't changed at all.
*[SKILL UNLOCKED: THREAT SENSE]*
*[DESCRIPTION: ACTIVE REFLEXIVE PROCESSING OF PRE-ATTACK PHYSICAL TELLS, INCLUDING WEIGHT SHIFT, MUSCLE TENSION, BREATH PATTERN, AND EYE MOVEMENT. FUNCTIONS AS ADVANCE WARNING OF INCOMING ATTACKS, TYPICALLY REGISTERING A FRACTION OF A SECOND BEFORE THE ATTACK ITSELF BEGINS. NOT PRECOGNITIVE. A PRODUCT OF PROCESSING SPEED AND PATTERN RECOGNITION OPERATING FASTER THAN CONSCIOUS THOUGHT.]*
Bruce sat down on the mat, letting his head hang for a moment. Two skills unlocked. One more to go, and this one he suspected would hurt the most.
Strength wasn't something he could simply drill his way into unlocking. His myosin modification had already given him a stronger baseline. What he wanted now was something beyond baseline, an active reserve he could call on deliberately when the baseline wasn't enough.
He knew from research, both his own biochemistry study and half-remembered fragments of how adrenaline worked in genuine crisis situations, that the human body kept reserves locked behind neurological safety limits, strength the muscles could technically produce but the nervous system refused to authorize except in extreme, life-threatening circumstances.
Bruce intended to convince his nervous system those limits no longer applied.
He spent the next several hours in a brutal cycle of controlled overexertion, pushing his enhanced strength to genuine failure again and again, forcing his body to briefly access reserves it wasn't supposed to release, then recovering, then doing it again. Each cycle left him shaking, his enhanced regeneration barely keeping pace with the damage he was doing to his own muscle fibers.
*[SKILL PROGRESS: FORCED RESERVE ACCESS - 41%]*
*[SKILL PROGRESS: FORCED RESERVE ACCESS - 58%]*
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