Chapter Fifteen: The Real Deal
The gym sat three blocks past where the guild towers stopped being visible from street level, a squat brick building with a hand painted sign so faded I had to squint to read it. No AI training pods in the window. No holographic sparring partners. Just heavy bags hanging in a row, chalk dust in the air, and a silence that felt earned instead of engineered.
I stopped outside long enough to take the blowpop out of my mouth and tuck it into my jacket pocket, because whatever was waiting inside felt like it deserved that much respect before I even opened the door.
The man behind the counter looked up when the bell rang, older, broad through the shoulders in a way that hadn't softened with age, a faint scar tracing one eyebrow that told its own story before he ever opened his mouth.
"Help you with something?"
"I want to train," I said. "Real training. Not the fancy machines. Not the AI labs."
He looked me over slow, taking in the hair, the tattoos, the eyes that still made most people flinch on first contact. If any of it bothered him, he didn't show it.
"Youngin like you could afford any lab in the city right about now," he said. "Why here?"
"Because I can punch," I said. "I don't know what it feels like to get punched back. Not really. Not by someone who actually knows what they're doing."
Something in his face shifted then, respect creeping in where skepticism had been sitting a second earlier. He wiped his hand on a towel and held it out.
"Marcus Boone," he said. "A rank, retired, before you ask. Six A.M. sharp, every morning. You miss a day without calling first, don't bother coming back."
I shook his hand. His grip nearly crushed mine, an old habit from a career built on testing exactly that kind of thing in everyone who walked through his door.
"I'll be here," I said.
"We'll see."
I was there at 5:45 the next morning, and every morning after that.
Running came first, laps around a cracked outdoor track behind the gym that Marcus insisted built more than just legs. "Builds patience," he said, jogging beside me without breaking a sweat despite being easily three decades past his prime fighting years. "Fancy labs give you power. Don't teach you when to spend it."
Weights came next, heavier than I expected given how little my system enhanced strength actually needed the assist, but Marcus didn't care what the System had given me. He cared what my body actually understood how to do with it.
"Speed's wasted if you don't know when to slow down," he told me the third week in, watching me overcommit to a strike and nearly stumble past my own target. "Strength's wasted if you don't know how to absorb a hit instead of just giving one. You got both of those in spades, kid. What you don't got is control."
He was right, and it stung exactly as much as good coaching is supposed to sting.
He put gloves on me himself for the first real sparring session, wrapped my hands with the kind of careful precision that told me he'd done this a thousand times for a thousand different fighters, most of them probably better trained than I was walking in.
"Hit me," he said, squaring up.
I hit him. He barely moved.
He hit me back.
I went down.
Not hard. Not cruel. Just precise, exactly enough force to teach the lesson without breaking anything, and I lay there on the mat for a second, blinking up at the gym's water stained ceiling, laughing despite the ringing in my ears.
"There it is," Marcus said, offering a hand to pull me back up. "Now you know what it feels like. Everything after this, you're learning on purpose instead of by accident."
I trained with him every morning for two hours straight, rain or shine, guild recruiter messages piling up unanswered on a phone I mostly ignored during those windows. It became the one part of my day that had nothing to do with streams, or viewers, or a class the System still didn't fully know what to do with.
It just had me, and gloves, and a man who'd earned the right to teach me the difference between power and control.
The recruiter found me outside the gym on a Tuesday, four weeks into training, sharp suit standing out hard against the cracked sidewalk and faded brick.
"Valentina Cross," she said, and something in my chest went cold at hearing my actual name spoken out loud by a stranger, proof that the wall between V and me hadn't held as long as I'd hoped. "Or should I say V. Either works, I imagine."
"Depends who's asking."
"Fifth ranked guild in the region. We've been trying to reach you for two months." She held out a card, sleek and dark, edges catching the light in a way that felt deliberately expensive. "We're prepared to offer more than most would even consider for someone without formal guild history. Full sponsorship. Resources. A support structure most solo climbers spend years trying to build on their own."
"Not interested."
She didn't look surprised, which told me she'd expected this answer and had a follow up ready anyway.
"You can only go so far by yourself," she said, not unkindly, more like someone stating a fact she genuinely believed. "Eventually the towers stop caring how creative your kit is. They start caring what backs you up when things go wrong."
I thought about Priya and Marcus, about a hand I'd reached for that never came back for me, about exactly what kind of backup a party actually guaranteed when the moment mattered most.
"I'll take my chances," I said.
She held the card out anyway. I took it, mostly because refusing felt like more effort than just accepting a piece of plastic I had no intention of ever using.
"If you change your mind," she said, already turning to leave. "Or if you need anything at all. That number reaches me directly."
I watched her walk off down the street, sharp suit and expensive shoes completely out of place against Marcus's faded gym sign, and slid the card into my jacket pocket next to the blowpop I'd tucked away an hour earlier.
Then I walked back inside, wrapped my hands, and went another six rounds with a man who'd never once asked me to be anything other than exactly what I already was.