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.

Vincent found the old gymnasium three blocks from where he'd built his training dummies. The windows were shattered and the floor was warped, but heavy bags still hung from rusted chains in the ceiling. He circled them slowly, studying how they moved in the draft. One swayed left. Another hung perfectly still. A third rotated on its chain. Each bag offered a different lesson—timing against movement, precision against stillness, adaptation against chaos. He stepped close to the first bag and threw a jab. The chain creaked but held. This place had what he needed. Real equipment meant real progress toward mastering every style, every technique. He could train here between cases, between roles, between the gaps in his memory. The voices would find him again soon, but for now he had found something solid. Training alone would only take him so far. He needed sparring partners, people who could push back when he struck, who could test what he'd learned against real resistance. On the far wall, he spotted a faded poster half-peeled from the old brick—two fighters mid-strike, their forms frozen in time. The paper was yellowed and torn at the edges, but the image still held power. He pulled it carefully from the wall and smoothed it flat against his palm. This could work. He could put it up somewhere visible, let other fighters know this gym was open again. Let them come find him. Vincent tucked the poster inside his coat and stepped back into the street. The gymnasium would be his base now, a place to refine what the action heroes had taught him through countless films. Here he could measure his progress in sweat and impact, in the give of leather and the strain of chains. When the case pulled him back to Detective Matsuda's work, when the voices returned with their accusations, he would have this place waiting. A world of heavy bags and open floor, solid and real, where his dream of mastering every fighting style could take shape one punch at a time.