I blinked. "What?"

"No Aspects. You want to see what I’ve got underneath the styling, and I want to see what you’ve got underneath the registrations. Physical only. No Corona, no telekinesis, no whatever else you’re hiding. Just bodies. Just skill. Just the parts of us that don’t come from genetic inheritance or cosmic accident."

That was not what I’d expected. Corona was Hiro’s primary advantage, the thing that made him a legitimate threat at range, the thing that would have required me to work for a victory. Taking it off the table meant he was either supremely confident in his physical capabilities or genuinely curious what would happen when we met on equal terms.

Or both.

No Aspects meant I could push harder. See what this body could actually do against someone who knew how to fight.

"Rules," I said.

"First to yield or first to incapacitation. Nothing that requires medical attention afterward. We both have class tomorrow and explaining fresh injuries to Steele seems like a waste of time."

"Agreed."

Hiro rolled his shoulders. The last traces of Corona faded from his chest, that golden luminescence dimming to nothing, and without it he looked different. Smaller, somehow, though he wasn’t actually small. Just human. Just a guy in expensive training gear who’d picked a fight in an abandoned field with someone he’d decided was a moral problem.

I mirrored his stance, settling my weight onto the balls of my feet. The Demigod trait hummed beneath my skin like a live wire waiting for somewhere to discharge. No Aspects meant no Spectral Reach, no constructs, no force projection. Just whatever this body could produce on its own.

Which, thanks to the System’s gifts, was considerably more than my registration suggested.

We circled each other. The grass whispered under our feet, still damp from morning fog that hadn’t fully burned away. Somewhere in the trees a bird called out, oblivious to what was building twenty feet below.

Hiro moved first.

He closed the distance with a burst of speed that shouldn’t have surprised me but did anyway. The guy looked like he belonged on magazine covers, not in actual combat, but he crossed twelve feet of grass in the time it took me to register he was moving. His leading jab came straight down the center, textbook form, shoulder rotation perfect.

I slipped left.

Not planned. Not conscious. The Demigod trait firing on instinct and my body responding before my brain finished processing the threat. Hiro’s fist passed close enough to my ear that I felt the displaced air, and then I was already moving, already counterattacking with a hook aimed at his ribs.

He wasn’t there.

The moment my jab missed, he’d pivoted, dropped his weight, and repositioned to my outside. My hook found nothing but empty space and then his elbow was driving toward my floating ribs with the kind of commitment that suggested he wasn’t worried about tomorrow’s classes after all.

I twisted away. The elbow grazed my side instead of burying itself between my ribs, and the impact still sent a jolt through my torso that reminded me what it felt like to get hit by someone who knew how to generate power.

We separated. Reset. Circled again.

"Fast," Hiro said. Not a compliment. An observation. Like he was updating his tactical assessment in real time.

"Surprised?"

"A little." He didn’t elaborate. His eyes tracked my movement with the focus of someone who’d spent thousands of hours learning to read body language and predict attacks before they launched.

I went on the offensive this time. Closed hard and threw a combination that should have been too fast to track. Jab, cross, low kick targeting the outside of his lead leg. The Demigod trait pushed my speed past what my frame should have been capable of, past what any registered mid-tier telekinetic had any business displaying.

Hiro slipped the jab by a margin so thin I could have shaved with it. His head moved maybe three inches, just enough to let my fist sail past his cheekbone, and then he was inside my guard with his shoulder driving toward my chest.

I sprawled backward, barely avoiding the clinch, and caught his follow-up knee on my forearm. The impact rattled through my bones. Hiro hit harder than he looked. A lot harder. Whatever genetic lottery had given him Corona had apparently thrown in some physical gifts as a bonus.

We traded position. He pressed forward. I gave ground, circling, looking for an opening that he refused to provide.

This was the gap. The thing I’d been afraid of discovering and now couldn’t ignore.

Hiro Sato was better than me.

Not stronger. The Demigod trait gave me raw physical stats that matched or exceeded what his Aspect-adjacent physiology provided. And definitely not faster, because when I committed to movement, I could close distance or create angles that made his eyes widen slightly before his training caught up.

But technique. Fight IQ. The accumulated hours of sparring and drilling and learning to read an opponent’s weight shifts before the attack even started.

In all of that, Hiro Sato had me beat by a margin wide enough to drive a truck through.

He’d probably been training since he could walk. Rich family, early manifestation, the whole package that came with being identified as special before you understood what special meant. Coaches and sparring partners and video analysis and every other resource that money could buy thrown at his development.

I’d had a previous life that taught me how to survive bar fights and a System that gave me supernatural capabilities without bothering to include an instruction manual.

My speed kept me in the fight. Every time Hiro tried to pressure me into a corner, I had the acceleration to escape. Every time he overcommitted to an attack, I could punish his exposed angles with counters that landed clean.

I caught him with a straight right that snapped his head back. Followed with a body shot that drove the air from his lungs in a grunt he couldn’t quite suppress. Landed a leg kick that buckled his stance for half a second before he recovered.

But none of it mattered.