combat

combat flux

In literature there is no first; in martial arts there is no second.
文无第一，武无第二

There is no true first, in an objective, measurable sense—every fight is defined by much more than each combatant's pure skill, strength or speed. Each of these traits is impacted by day-of variance in cuts, cardio and mental state, tiny changes in diet, or subtler, yet significant, occurrences in mental state. Furthermore, a fight, in and of itself, is stochastic. This is due to the action-reaction delay between movement → prefrontal cortex computation → reaction. Consider a jab. A jab, from a skilled fighter, covers ~60cm in ~150ms. Human visual reaction time is ~200ms, rendering the opening phase of any strike physically unreactable. A combatant must therefore read and predict actions from observing peripheral tells—a front-foot shuffle, a twitch of the shoulder, a grind of the jaw. In this sense, every fight, at the peak of human ability, is a game of chess, except with infinitely more variance, in the dark and with far more at stake.