FSIS brought a mannequin up from the floor panel, joints rigged with breakaway sensors calibrated to human bone tolerance. It stood the way an untrained suspect stands, weight forward, arms loose.
Peter moved in the way he had moved a hundred times before Phase 2, a wrist lock into a controlled takedown, muscle memory doing the thinking.
Crack!
The mannequin's shoulder joint separated at an angle no real shoulder should ever reach.
"Simulated fracture," FSIS said. "Grip force applied was ninety-one percent of current maximum. Fifty percent would have been sufficient for full compliance."
Peter stood over it for a second, hand still closed around where the arm used to be.
'That was muscle memory built for the old numbers,' Peter thought. 'It does not know the new ones exist yet. I need to teach it.'
"Reset it," he said. "We do this until it stops happening."
---
He started smaller after that. A punching bag on the reinforced rig, and a percentage instead of a target.
Ten percent. The bag swung.
Twenty. The chain groaned.
At thirty the bag burst, sand scattering across the mat, and FSIS logged it without comment.
"Again," Peter said.
He worked through it round after round until his hands stopped needing to think about the difference between thirty percent and forty. Then he went back to the mannequin.
The second attempt, the joint held. The third, the fourth, the fifth. By the tenth pass he could put a suspect on the ground with exactly the amount of force the situation called for, nothing more, and feel the difference in his hands before FSIS confirmed it in numbers.
'Good,' Peter thought. 'Now it is not luck.'
---
Combat Precognition needed its own reckoning. The trait had learned its timing against his old reflex speed, and a body that now moved faster than it used to kept outrunning its own predictions.
"Set the swarm simulation to hard," Peter said. "Six opponents. Give one of them actual training, not just numbers."
FSIS built the scenario, five street-level attackers and a sixth who moved like he had done this before, feinting low before committing high.
Peter's precognition fired late on the first exchange. He took a hit he should have seen coming, simulated pain flashing bright and gone in an instant.
"Recalibrating," Peter said out loud, mostly to himself.
He reset and ran it again. By the third pass, precognition caught up to his new speed on the easy opponents. By the sixth, it caught the trained one too, reading the feint a half second before it committed, close enough that Peter's counter landed before the man's fist finished traveling.
Thud.
The simulation ended. Six down, zero hits taken.
"Precognitive window realigned to current reflex baseline," FSIS said. "Confidence interval improving with each repetition."
'It just needed to see me be fast enough,' Peter thought. 'Same as everything else. Nobody hands you good instincts. You build them one bad guess at a time.'
'But with my spider sense it's even more overpowered.'
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