Yanel Gates moved like water given purpose and violence given form.
His S-rank Close Combat talent wasn't just about speed or strength—it was about achieving perfect economy of motion, about understanding that every movement in combat either advanced toward victory or wasted toward defeat. There was no middle ground, no neutral action, only efficiency or failure.
The Echo Phantom facing him—that memory-construct of his greatest failure, that manifestation of the training accident where his technique had proven insufficient and someone had nearly died—moved with identical precision. Because it was him, pulled from the Archivist's catalog, every mistake he'd made preserved and weaponized against him.
