Overview Nkosi Dlamini is 24 years old, an extraordinary natural athlete, and arrogant enough that crowds can't quite forgive him. Privately, he is uncertain whether he would be this good if the early competition had been harder. That last line is what the arc is really about. The feud is not Nkosi vs. one person. It is Nkosi running his mouth across the locker room, getting humbled by several different veterans over the course of months, and finding out match by match what the difference is between fluency and correctness. Crucible factor: Nkosi is among the handful of roster members who arrived fluent with the hex. His aerial background translates naturally to the dual-tensioned-rope system, and his ego prevents him from being intimidated by non-standard geometry. He treats the cage as a feature of a room that was, in his self-estimation, built for him. This becomes part of his arrogance in his public voice. The question the arc keeps asking is whether being fluent in the room is the same as being correct in it. Veterans with traditional-ring pattern recognition — Kuramoto chief among them — believe it is not. Nkosi believes it is. The matches will resolve the question one humbling at a time.
