text: The concept of "free will". Wherein a creature can take an action that is so totally out of character that it would be all but impossible to predict has been a plague upon proper implementation of holistic predictive models. However, despite this stipulation, there are a finite number of things an opponent can do in any given situation, which can be broadly categorised. For example, you and your opponent are sat down to play a game of chess. Your opponent is playing white. You are playing black. There are eight pawns, each pawn can be moved one or two spaces, therefore you can categorise your opponent's next move between two possibilities: The one where your opponent moves a pawn one space. And one where your opponent moves a pawn two spaces. But you can always look "backwards" from any situation. Right now, we've gone down a path wherein your opponent is playing by the rules. Take a step back and you can broadly categorise things again: One category of reality where you play the game and one category of reality where you don't. By taking more and more of these steps backwards, you can therefore reach a level where anything your opponent can do has been broken down into a binary option of A or B. Do, or do not. And with those two options in mind, the concept of free will is made irrelevant; the prediction is so broad that simply reacting to your opponent's movements is sufficient. Those milliseconds between your absolute ability to deduce your opponent's attack and when that attack will land are *crucial*. Your ability to react being far more important than how far into the future you can be certain of, because the latter just gives you more subjective time to understand just how slow you are. However, when two such practitioners of this style engage against one another, the feedback loop is the closest thing to pure entropy as exists in this universe until, one second later, one is victorious, the other lies dead on the ground. The problem is that because there are an infinite number of steps forward you can take, there are also an infinite number of steps *backwards* too. Eventually, sheer muscle memory kicks in as the limited mind attempts to comprehend the unlimited, leading to a completely random, completely autonomous attack. It is under *this* scenario that a slower, but more long-term predictive practitioner, is preferred as you can more accurately deduce when entropy kicks in and the half-life of some random isotope in the enemy's right hand will cause it to vanish triggering a cascade reaction leading the opponent to making the first, easily counterable move. Of course, true masters of this art have the sheer force of will to enforce their very nervous system to switch between the two modes, meaning both practitioners of this art and non-practitioners alike are easy prey. They do have one fatal flaw, however. If you can deduce the septo-second moment the nervous system is switching from one type to the other, you can catch them in the only moment they are ever truly off-guard. You can catch them in the only moment you will ever have to kill them. Predict that moment, that singular slice of space/time, a chance so slight, that to express it as a number would require more time than exists before the heat death of the universe, that to explain the myriad hyper-subatomic coincidences that led to this particular incarnation of this existence in time would require words for concepts that don't even exist, a chance that will never come again. Kill them. In that one moment. Kill them. Or else nothing you've ever done in your life mattered. May fortune guide you. Make your prediction.