Vincent pressed his palms against the cracked concrete wall, feeling for gaps in the texture. Twenty-seven faces flickered through his mind like old film reels. He was Detective Matsuda now, hunting for the vanished in the ruins, but between each scene the voices found him—*Remember us, remember what you did*. His hands trembled as he traced the wall's surface. He'd done nothing wrong, just solved crimes, just played the roles. But the whispers knew something he couldn't recall, gaps in his memory wide as canyons. He pulled back from the wall and flexed his fingers. Every fighting style, every action hero—that was the dream that kept him moving forward. Master them all. Become them all. Even if he couldn't remember why he'd started. The case could wait. His body needed this. Vincent found an empty space behind a collapsed storefront and started building. He tied a torn jacket around a wooden beam, stuffed rags into a bucket and mounted it on rusted pipes. Each dummy took shape from debris—metal frames, bundled cloth, anything that could take a hit. He positioned them at different heights and angles. One for high kicks. Another for low strikes. A third hanging loose for speed work. He stepped back and rolled his shoulders. Bruce Lee's stance first, then Jackie Chan's flowing blocks, then the brutal efficiency of Jason Bourne. His fists connected with cloth and wood, each impact shaking through his bones. The voices faded when he moved like this. The missing faces blurred. Here, in the rhythm of strikes and blocks, he was nobody's detective and everybody's fighter.

Vincent's knuckles ached from the morning's training. He flexed his fingers and watched the skin stretch white across the bones. The dummies had taught him stance and speed, but real fighting meant knowing distance and timing. He needed to measure strikes, count out the moves. He pulled a length of measuring tape from his coat pocket and stretched it against the wall. Six feet. The perfect range for a roundhouse kick. He marked the distance with a piece of chalk, then stepped back and threw the kick. His boot stopped exactly at the line. Again. And again. Each repetition carved the distance into muscle memory. This was how Bruce Lee had started—obsessing over inches and angles until his body knew them without thinking. The sun climbed higher and sweat soaked through his orange shirt. Vincent's legs shook. His lungs burned. He stumbled away from the wall and found a small pool tucked behind a section of collapsed fence. The tiles were cracked and moss grew thick along the edges, but water still filled the bottom. He knelt and splashed his face, then dunked his whole head under. The cold shocked his system awake. He came up gasping and sat on the edge, letting his boots dangle in the water. The voices stayed quiet when he trained like this. The missing faces stayed buried. He had measured his kicks today, mapped out his range, learned to trust his body's knowledge of space. Tomorrow he would measure his punches. Master one piece at a time until every move became automatic. That was the only way forward.