“Hello.
I’m Adam Howers.
Boss Allen said there’s nothing off limits for you.
Is there anywhere specific you want to go?”
“Hello.
Saint John Leighton.
Friend of Allen’s.
Nothing specific, just looking around.
I don’t know the building at all, so tell me what’s actually worth seeing.”
John Leighton smiled and looked up at the young man in front of him.
At least six foot three, well built through the shoulders and chest, with the kind of face that defaulted to serious without effort.
As they started moving, Adam explained the layout.
Two floors above ground, one below.
The underground floor was restricted to core members of the Black Python Gang.
The people John Leighton had seen on the ground floor and outside were peripheral members.
The real inner circle was downstairs.
…
John Leighton had spent enough time talking to people to know how to make conversation feel easy rather than interrogative, and within a few minutes Adam had relaxed into something more than professional courtesy.
Through the conversation, the details came out naturally.
Adam was also an orphan, taken in and raised by the Black Python Gang from childhood.
He was twenty years old, just started his actual involvement with the gang this year, which meant his official record was still clean.
No criminal history yet.
He had also, despite everything, graduated from the University of California’s business school.
That detail landed with more weight than Adam seemed to realise he was giving it.
When Adam learned that John Leighton was also an orphan, and only fifteen, something in his manner shifted slightly.
The shared experience of growing up without a family had a way of creating an immediate, wordless understanding between people who had been through it.
Adam’s tone became noticeably less guarded.
…
They walked the first floor and the surrounding grounds.
The gym equipment, the training area, the outdoor field.
Reasonable to look at, nothing that held John Leighton’s attention for long.
What he actually wanted to see was the underground floor.
Core members, real capability, the actual quality of what Allen Francis commanded.
That was the more interesting question.
“Adam.
Let’s go downstairs.
There isn’t much to see up here.”
Adam looked at him with a brief, measuring pause.
He understood what the underground floor was.
Bringing a guest down there was not something that happened routinely, regardless of what Allen had said.
But Allen’s instruction had been clear.
He nodded and led John Leighton back to the second floor, where the elevator to the underground level was located.
You could not access it from the ground floor.
John Leighton noted this silently.
Cautious design.
Though he also noted that it created a natural chokepoint, which was a different kind of problem if things went wrong.
He kept the observation to himself.
The elevator descended.
A quiet chime.
The doors opened.
…
The sound hit first.
A rhythmic, heavy impact, accompanied by shouts and encouragement from a crowd.
Adam read John Leighton’s expression and supplied the explanation before he could ask.
“Boxers training.
The others are watching.”
John Leighton moved toward it immediately.
The underground space was large.
Fitness equipment along the walls, and in the centre, a proper boxing ring.
Around it, a crowd of people pressed close, their energy loud and invested.
Inside the ring, two fighters were working at each other with genuine force.
This was not exhibition sparring.
Sweat moved through the air.
The impacts were real.
John Leighton stayed back with Adam and watched from a distance.
He noticed that Adam, looking at the ring, carried a faint expression at the corner of his mouth that was not quite contempt but was not far from it.
“Intense.” John Leighton said, watching.
“It’s alright.” Adam replied.
…
“Bang.”
A sound from the ring.
The Mexican fighter went down.
The Black fighter opposite had caught his moment and delivered a side kick directly to the forehead, clean and fast.
The protective headgear absorbed enough of it to prevent real damage but the effect was immediate.
The Mexican man tried to rise, staggered in a slow circle, thought better of it, and stayed on the canvas.
The crowd erupted.
In the ring, the Black fighter was still moving with the satisfaction of the moment when he spotted John Leighton and Adam standing at the edge of the crowd.
His attention shifted to Adam with the fixed quality of a man who had been looking for a specific target.
“Hey, Adam.
You want to come up here and try?”
“Bob.
You’re not my opponent and you know it.
How many times does this have to happen?”
…
The crowd had registered John Leighton and Adam’s presence and the noise shifted accordingly.
People called out from different directions.
“Adam, you’re here.”
“Go on, Adam.
Show Bob something.”
“Bob, come on.
You get taught the same lesson every time.
Haven’t you learned it yet?”
The man named Bob in the ring went visibly rigid at the last comment, his expression moving through several colours before settling on determination.
“Adam.
Get up here.
This time it’s different.”
Adam’s expression went flat.
He told John Leighton he would be back in a few minutes, handed off his jacket, changed into sparring gear with efficient movements, and stepped through the ropes.
The crowd compacted around the ring immediately, sides forming, most of them behind Adam.
John Leighton stayed where he was and watched.
…
The fight was more interesting than most sanctioned bouts he had seen in either life.
No restrictions on technique beyond avoiding the genuinely lethal targets, temples, throat, back of the head.
Both hands and feet in use.
Both fighters working with the directness of people who had learned to fight in contexts where the result mattered.
Adam was clearly the better of the two.
His movement was considered, his timing measured, and when he chose to strike he committed fully.
Bob was capable and strong but reactive in a way that Adam was not, always slightly behind the moment.
John Leighton watched and ran his own parallel calculation.
How would he counter each combination if he were in the ring.
Not using magic, purely physical, the way he would have to operate if the situation ever demanded it openly.
He had Einstein’s combat knowledge embedded in his memory.
Not the magic, but the fighting techniques that existed alongside magic in the other world, the methods developed for people who could not become magicians and had to survive on the battlefield through physical capability alone.
Those techniques were built for efficiency and lethality in a way that organised sport was not, because they had been designed for situations where losing had permanent consequences.
In John Leighton’s assessment, those methods had a passing resemblance to the principles underlying the best traditional fighting systems he had heard of in his previous life, different in form but similar in the underlying logic.
Maximum effect, minimum wasted motion, targeting what actually ended a confrontation.
The Magic God had practiced those techniques in his youth before advancing far enough in magic that physical combat became irrelevant.
The memories were there, thorough and detailed, even if the Magic God himself had eventually set them aside.
John Leighton was thinking that on Earth, where magic progressed at the pace of watching grass grow, those techniques might be worth developing seriously.
He watched Adam move in the ring and thought about what a person with that physical foundation and those fighting principles combined would look like.
The thought was interesting enough to stay with him.