Lucas drew the attention of the other contestants immediately, because none of them knew a thing about him.
He had never appeared in this circle before.
There was simply no record of past results anyone could dig up.
The only information they could find was that he had dealt with a great many street thugs, and that plenty of those thugs regarded him as a man you absolutely did not provoke.
Beyond that, the only match of his that anyone could point to was the one against Fukuda Takeoki.
But nobody had filmed it.
All they could do was hear about that sparring session secondhand, and all they learned was that Fukuda had lost.
Now, at last, they were seeing his strength for themselves.
He spent the opening of the match on defense, and even so, the technique he showed was beyond anything they could match.
Whatever attack an opponent threw, he answered it with the most precise and most appropriate block available.
When they pictured themselves in that position, they knew they could not do the same.
The men they were up against had fought their way up through their own regions.
Their credentials were real.
Against opponents at that level, blocking every single attack cleanly is simply not possible.
Lucas broke that rule outright.
None of them could compare with technique like his.
And most importantly, he did not only know how to defend.
His attacks were just as impossible to guard against.
After one match, the remaining contestants marked him as the enemy to beat, and a group of them gathered to discuss what to do before the afternoon round began.
One person can only see so much.
Analyzing him thoroughly from a single match was impossible.
They had already gathered recordings from others.
The tournament was broadcast live, so plenty of people had filmed it, and every dojo had someone responsible for recording.
Even that was not enough.
“Where on earth did the Tatsuoka Dojo find a monster like this? There isn’t one flaw on him. Meanwhile, the second his opponent shows the smallest opening, it’s over.”
They replayed the footage and slowed it down again and again, and every one of them came away hopeless.
There were no weaknesses to find. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
Every block and every strike he made was an adjustment built around the man in front of him.
You could still see traces of the Ryugo Style in his movements.
But what he was doing had already gone past the boundaries of the Ryugo Style.
At this point he was less a practitioner of any one school than a man who could read whatever came at him, take it apart, and answer it with something fatal.
The afternoon matches went ahead, and everything played out exactly as their study had suggested.
He did not attack at the start.
He defended, and he let his opponent come.
Their one chance was to break him during that defensive stretch.
Unfortunately, his defense had no seams in it.
After every method had been tried and every method had failed, the opponent was knocked out without much trouble.
It was a near-exact repeat of the morning bout.
And when they went back through the recordings a second time, the despair only deepened.
His overall pattern was the same as the morning, yes.
But the techniques he used inside that pattern were completely different.
He had countered his opponent piece by piece.
In other words, he could adjust himself to whatever style he was facing and assemble a set of movements built specifically to shut it down.
That discovery told everyone in the room that first place was already decided.
The only thing left worth competing for was second.
Breaking the spirit of a group of experts like that says everything about what Lucas had become.
He was not idle in the meantime, either.
He had picked up a great deal over the course of the day, and he spent the evening folding all of it into his own technique.
The night passed without incident.
On the second day, the opponents did not surrender outright when they faced him.
But their fighting spirit was clearly gone.
After each loss, the expression on the man’s face was closer to confirmation than shock, as though he had already made his peace with it.
And so Lucas took the championship easily, and in a way that left every contestant accepting the result without complaint.
That night, after the celebration banquet ended, he and Tatsuki left together.
By this point her admiration for him had reached its limit. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The reason was simple.
If he had won by brute strength, she would not have been nearly so impressed.
He had won on technique alone.
Tatsuki had a strong personality, but she also had enormous respect for people who were genuinely strong.
He was firmly one of them now.
“Congratulations on the championship, Sado. But are you really not tempted at all, with that many invitations coming in?”
After the tournament ended, the fact that he had never actually joined the Tatsuoka Dojo naturally became public.
It was hardly a secret.
The dojo did not try to hide it either, because they knew his situation.
He was not going to join anyone.
As for whether rival dojos might recruit him for future tournaments, they were not worried.
They had paid a large sum to bring him in for this one.
And this was the highest-level competition in the discipline, held once every two years.
Winning it a single time was enough for them, since they had never held the title at all before.
Once word got out that he was unaffiliated, the other dojos extended offers immediately.
They could all see it.
With someone like him on their roster, they could hold down every other dojo in the country.
In the end he turned down every one of them.
His whole purpose in learning these moves was to develop a fighting style that belonged to him alone.
He had learned what he came to learn.
There was no reason to spend time on anything else.
“Why would I be tempted? I’m not short on money, and I already got what I came for. I have more important things to do now.”
Lucas made it clear that none of it interested him.
After spending these past few days around him, Tatsuki knew exactly what his goal was.
Which was why she was genuinely looking forward to seeing him build a system entirely his own.
Take the strengths of that many schools, add talent on his scale, and whatever came out at the end would be frightening.
She had studied martial arts for years.
How could she not want to be there when something like that was born?