They landed in Tokyo at half past six in the morning. After resting for the entire morning, they rode the bullet train to Yokohama in the afternoon. Yokohama was precise. The QA facility near the port had a defect rate of 0.4% per unit, which was admirable. They also had records and documentation going back four years. It was within his expectations, especially after Monterrey. The manager of the facility was named Nakamura, who did a decent job of maintaining operations, even after all this. What baffled him was how they went out of business when they were competent.

  He suspected that it was the higher-ups, especially the CEO and the board. He shook his head. That was one of the reasons he would never go IPO. Doing that would dilute his control and vision, and he couldn't allow that to happen.

  The hotel was in Motomachi. Their room was on the seventh floor and overlooked the harbor.

  William showered, changed, and sat on the bed waiting. Eve took longer. When she came out, she was dressed differently than usual. Instead of her typical tailored whites and sharp lines, she was in a fitted dark jacket and slightly more casual trousers. She'd left her white hair down.

  He blinked.

  "Stop staring," she said, without looking up.

  He laughed, "Never."

  "Pervert." She smiled and grabbed his hand. "Come on. Let's go."

  "It's not another mountain, right?" He asked, suspicious.

  "I said no questions."

  They took a taxi to Kamakura. It was about an hour south along the coast. Eve gave the address to the driver in English, and the driver nodded.

  The taxi dropped them off outside a building that looked old enough to be unironically old. The wood was dark with age. A short stone path led to an entrance screened by a noren curtain. Above it, a wooden sign with kanji that William translated without effort: Mushin Dojo.

  "Kendo?" he asked, his eyebrows raised.

  "Kenjutsu, actually. It's a traditional school." She clasped her hands behind her back. "I found it while doing research for the trip. The sensei here trained under a line that goes back to the Edo period. They occasionally take outside students for single sessions." She paused. "I thought you might find it interesting. Given our interest in martial arts."

  He looked at the dojo. Then back at her. "How long did it take you to find this?"

  "A while."

  He smiled. "Thank you."

  She tilted her head as if to say obviously. "Shall we?"

  They were met inside by a man in his sixties who introduced himself as Inoue-sensei. He was short and lean. He spoke English with a heavy accent but enough competence to instruct.

  He assessed them quickly. He watched how they stood, how they bowed, how they carried themselves, and nodded. He led them to change.

  The session lasted two hours. At first, William had practiced HEMA long enough that some things translated and some things flatly did not. Things like reading distance, edge alignment, and anticipating intention carried over. The footwork did not. Kenjutsu's kamae had a different geometry than the European forms he knew. Rather than the step-throughs and passing steps he was familiar with, Kenjutsu relied heavily on suri-ashi or sliding feet. Stances were also radically different from what he was used to. In HEMA, his stances were wider, which was essential for quick shifts, deep lunges, and rapid weight transfer between feet. Kenjutsu, on the other hand, required a lower and more grounded stance to generate more power from the hips, with the weight distributed towards the back foot.

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  It took him about twenty minutes to adjust completely. Eve, on the other hand, was a complete monster. She adjusted completely in ten minutes. She had more catastrophic mistakes than he did in the first three minutes, but she improved so quickly that he suspected that she had practiced somewhere else and was pretending. But clearly, the mistakes she made at the start couldn't be pretended, as they were that terrible.

  By the end of the first hour, they were proficient, as if they had been training for a week. Even though Inoue-sensei didn't say it, he could still see the shock on his face, which deeply satisfied him. By the end of the second hour, the sensei stopped them and paired them against each other.

  Eve settled into her kamae. She'd adapted to it quickly enough that it already looked as natural as himself. He set his grip and came forward with a clean men-uchi, a basic overhead strike down the centerline. She read it immediately, as he could see her weight shift, and raised to deflect.

  He let his wrists collapse mid-swing. The cut fell short and wide, which was wrong, textbook bad kenjutsu form, the kind of thing Inoue-sensei would have corrected immediately. But it pulled her deflection into empty space, and William drove forward with his shoulder, closing the distance entirely, his left hand coming off the grip to check her sword arm at the elbow, which was a move straight out of Jujutsu that had absolutely no business being in a kenjutsu exchange.

  With that single move, her balance broke. It was not broken badly, but just enough that he brought his shinai to rest against the side of her neck and stopped.

  Eve tsked, "Always with your tricks, huh?"

  "Heh. Yeah. Anything to win, right?"

  "Right."

  Inoue-sensei looked at him with disapproval, but didn't say anything, as the time was over. After bowing to each other, William and Eve changed back and said farewell to the old man.

  William and Eve sat in the taxi's backseat, Eve leaning on him.

  "You planned that, didn't you?" She asked.

  "Yep. About twenty minutes before our match."

  "Why?"

  "Because it wouldn't have been enough with just skill. You learn these things faster than I."

  "Hmm." She was quiet.

  Malaysia was two days. The Penang facility ran well enough with clean lines, reasonable documentation, and no red flags worth dwelling on. William had no serious complaints. That evening, they found a hawker center near the hotel, and he worked through four dishes without stopping while Eve consumed her char kway teow with the focused attention she usually reserved for quarterly projections. She stole one of his sotongs and didn't apologize for it. He was still fuming about it.

  Taiwan was three days away and needed work. The Tainan operation had good equipment and records that had clearly been maintained by whoever happened to remember to do it that week. Eve spent two hours with the operations director behind a closed conference room door. William sat in the lobby with a book. He'd read the memo when she wrote it. From the expression on her face when she came out, the operations director would not enjoy receiving it.

  On their last night in Taipei, they found a small restaurant two streets from the hotel. It had eight tables and a menu with no English translation, which William handled without difficulty. The food was good. The beer was cold.

  Eve rested her chin on her hand. "Ready to go home?"

  "More than."

  She stole a piece of his scallion pancake without asking. He let her, as she'd been doing it for years, and only ever took things she knew he didn't mind, which he had pointed out to her once, which had annoyed her considerably.

  "Malaysia had good food," he said.

  "There it is," she giggled.

  "I'm serious. That hawker center alone was worth the flight."

  "You would fly twelve hours for char kway teow."

  "I'm not ruling it out."

  She smiled into her wine. Then she looked out the window at the street. "Thank you for coming with me on this."

  He picked up his chopsticks.

  "The dojo was worth it," he said.

  "I know."

  "Malaysia too."

  "Also, the win."

  "Right."