04 Tyche in Friendship and Focus
Added 2020-03-05 20:00:03 +0000 UTC
I am, she said without a hint of modesty, equal to the best Olympic athletes in the world, at least in my chosen disciplines, and my various metahuman gifts make me more than a match for any single non-meta opponent. I’m stronger than the vast majority of men, stubborn, blisteringly fast, and I’ve been perfecting my technique for more than three decades. Added to that, my body-awareness and spatial awareness is so close to perfect as to make distinction meaningless and I have an ability to predict the future with sufficient accuracy that I could reliably counter attacks that no normal human had any business being able to even react to. I was also tough enough to walk away from a shotgun blast to the face with nothing more serious than a broken nose.
The advantages my opponent had, on the other hand, were comprised of close to seventy years studying kung fu and the sort of inoffensive charm that might make even the most paranoid opponent drop his guard. There was no question that his technique was better; he moved, despite his years, with the effortless fluidity of a man for whom each distinct motion and technique was as natural as breathing.
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This story has been sitting on my hard drive for more than a year; it was never released, although, properly, it belongs between A First Small Apocalypse Part 01 and A First Small Apocalypse Part 02. I like it because it's a good little slice of life, but it was always too short to stand by itself as a purely textual story, clocking in at only a little over 1300 words, all told.
