Most adults would freeze up if a guy came at them with a blade. Even trained fighters sometimes got tunnel vision, eyes locked on the weapon, brain scrambling to calculate every move. That's just human nature.
So seeing Max handle the situation the way he did? That caught the Rejected Corps off guard. All of them.
He was just a high schooler. No military background. No combat history.
But the way he moved, quick, focused, deliberate, wasn't just good. It was professional. He'd disarmed the attacker and dropped him with a single, clean blow. Efficient. No wasted movement.
What really shook them, though, was how he did it.
The technique Max used? It wasn't random. It mirrored some of the exact methods they used. Stuff they were trained in. Moves they'd picked up through years of hard, ugly experience.
And Max had done it after seeing it once.
