Martial Arts Adventure

Escaping a traumatic childhood, Sasha finds peace, sanctuary, and purpose in a martial arts dojo whose sensei teaches her the ways of the samurai warrior. An accomplished black-belt fighter, she now happily dwells in the dojo, tucked away from the streets of Manhattan, until a midnight call sets her on a path into an underground world. Struggling to pay off a gambling debt, her brother Danilo is severely injured in a no-rules club fight run by unscrupulous Russian mafiosi. To settle the debt, Sasha volunteers to perform in one of these “dark fights”....

Mike Hagen, an American nicknamed "Crybaby", became one of those chosen to be given an augmented reality interface. However, his favorite game was an MMA fighter - possibly, for the reason that he'd never fought in real life, and the interface adapted itself to him.

In each life the wheel of karma turns. Asian scholar and martial artist Connor Burke, who continues to labor under the stern tutelage of the master warrior Yamashita Sensei, is drawn once again into a murder investigation when the police discover a link between the victim and a mysterious martial arts sensei named Kita Takanobu. Kita has created a powerful New Age synthesis of Tibetan mysticism and the lethal heritage of the samurai.

My childhood had been cool enough. Horses and four-wheelers to ride, farmland to explore, good friends. The one blemish: a school bus bully. A year older and always bigger, this guy we'll call "Larry" started picking on me around kindergarten - flipping my ear, frogging my leg, reminding me how much of a wimp I was - and I let him get away with it. With literally hundreds of chances (every miserable ride to and from school), I never fought back. And while I’d done a stint in the military, earned a fancy degree, and started a family, I was always haunted by the lingering shame.