James Path is adapting to his opponents attack patterns
In his fight with Seongji and Tom, both of them thought that fighting him was turning harder and harder by the minute. I think James always had the "learning his opponents" thing working in passive but perfected it after fighting Seongji. Against Taesoo he managed to land an attack on James initially but later he was completely fodderised and similar thing happened against Tom as well.
How i think his Path works is he has to fight his opponent for sometime so that he can get a read on their attack patterns where initially they think it's close but eventually the fight goes more and more into James' favour to the point where all his opponents attacks are useless. Kind of Mahoraga who has completely adapted to his opponents kit. He also probably has some type of counterattack which he can develop based on his opponent but the time it requires to make is different based on the level of his opponent.