"Kung fu"

“Kung Fu” as began thousands of years ago as 'The Martial Arts' – when it was an umbrella term describing several hundred fighting style developed over many centuries. These fighting styles are often classified according to traits identified as families, sects or schools of martial arts - inspired by philosophies, religions or legends. Examples include “Shaolinquan” (physical exercises involving five animals for mimicry of forms for the ease of education in a time where education was minimal), “qi manipulation” (referred to as internal which revolve around the resolve, faith and determination of a person – 'to bring out the best of them in vapor the same way anger and rage can do so') and external which which focus on muscular and cardiovascular performance.

The ridiculousness of many of these styles originate in the the smugness of the old masters and their desire to one-up one another with aesthetic principle – using silliness to dress up their styles to defeat one another with increasing absurdity in order to both keep things fresh and show their certainty in and the performance of their core principles: To humiliate their opponent by intentionally fighting wrong ironically.

The idea of learning how to fight through repetition alone is born from theatrical performance and dance - born from “kung fu movies”: films which use martial arts as an underlying theme in the setting and world the story is told about. With other cultures taking an interest, this was exploited in “McDojos” which sold a very simple form of education into the martial arts that was in no way practical and often gave those involved a false sense of capability and security that was dangerous to them and historically regarded as incredibly irresponsible. Worse, they taught the theatrical “dance” style of martial arts, not what actually made sense.

With the advent of formalized sponsorship backed “Mixed Martial Arts” in the medieval period which was a mass-broadcasted return to form which took every conceivable form of close combat that did not involve a weapon. Very quickly styles which were formalized and theatrical were revealed to be close to useless and a new importance for grappling was discovered when formerly people had believed striking had been the only useful or productive form of combat. Year on year, fighters would learn to combine different assets of striking, grappling, space control and training methods in order to become well rounded fighters in the ring. This would go onto seriously change military training. However, in a world increasingly dependant on machines and equipment to conduct combat where these things had improved but the human form had not, the success of this new pragmatic form was limited.

Classically, kung-fu was depicted as involving highly repetitive ritualized training. In practice, this non-practical form of training while useful early on is close to suicidal and a total lie: martial arts were taught with resisting opponents in full contact under duress as the human mind only retains in duress what it learns under duress as fight/flight response alters the perception of memory and cognitive function.

In a truly ironic twist, with the advent of superhuman performance (speed, strength, endurance, durability) a lot of the entirely stupid principles which made zero sense on human terms could be adapted through the use of restrictive training and advanced simulation which could in software perform many life-times worth of combat in just a few hours to determine what is effective and what is not and how each would need to be adjusted accordingly.

Similarly, while Qi in the truest sense is not real, the state it places the brain to is. In this state, a person properly trained is able to exert force through the power of entropy in an ever impressionable universe. As such, it is considered one of the foundations of Magic.

With he mass of simulation data accumulated and the limited capabilities of learning, it made sense very quickly to automate combatants, putting them above a level where they could successfully defeat a majority of conventionally trained fighters – basically by using an input sequence of their own bodies relative to special conditionals in order to select and execute techniques in rapid succession and strength with as minimal response time as possible.

Tool assistance often comes in the form of either cybernetics or highly specialized signal based neurological conditioning and programming. Often, these “schools” of tool assistance were designed to take one another down. It should be noted that with very very rare exception, newer software always defeated older software and newer users did so as the period in life at which a person or persons has an aptitude for these styles of machine-learning is limited to when the brain is still developing (typically under 25) which made child soldiers particularly popular in developing and less advanced colonies and nations despite serious ethical problems and medical complications.

This was soon subplanted by training techniques which studied how to recognise different tool assistance “schools” to exploit flaws in their decision making processes and weaknesses in their execution as like any new system of automation they were limited outside of typical circumstance and by introducing special circumstance the use of environment, tools which are not planned for (defending or attacking with conventional objects of unusual shape, exploiting environmental hazards or fooling the enemy into thinking you yourself are dealing with environmental hazards in a way you are not) Tool Assistance was quickly disrupted and defeated with specialty training. This style of exploiting openings and errors, positioning, movement, ring-craft, environment to make attacks by actively pushing opponents into making those mistakes is called counter-fighting.

In terms of training, counterfighting is far heavier on defensive techniques, movements and reflexes and above all speed and involves great access to very skilled opponents.

Technically speaking it should be noted that the concept of the counterfighter - a “true” counterfighter does not exist: The concept of hitting after the enemy attempts to strike only succeeds if one is greater than the opponent by a significant margin – counterfighting involves spotting openings before they happen, doubly so against opponents using tool assistance.

All combat can be essentially boiled down into a series of logical choices and statistical likelihoods – and tool assistance classically uses these techniques automatically. Eventually, a select few number of users of tool assistance eventually learned to select what were intentionally “wrong” trees of logical choice to confuse other fighters.

Originally through pure idiot savanthood, a number of tool assistance users were able to manipulate their selections of which “tree” of logical choices they selected in much the same way counter-fighters did to subvert and confuse both them and eachother. This was especially true as counter-fighting became an essential part of tool assistance and not merely the purview of classically trained combatants.

This special form of “gestalt” combat where the combination of the tool assistance and the user making advanced selective choice happened originally quite by accident in cases where the conditioning and education of tool assistance began at incredibly young ages. The brains of these children rewired themselves to manipulate the assistance and do as they wished with it.

Still very new, the fourth generation learns from these gestalt cases and is written as such. Often, a very minimal library of techniques is supplied which cover as many situations as possible as to reduce the number of possible selections and thus the number of options. Often those using it are seen to defeat far more technically complex techniques using only simple techniques, placement and positioning.

It is still very rare due to the limited aptitude and severe risk of neurological degregation in cases which do not demonstrate said aptitude - and uses a combination of classical and machine learning techniques.