twenty-dollar bills wrapped in a rubber band. He looked at Clayton with genuine pity, a
sadness that weighed heavy on his features. He thought he was about to watch a broken
man get utterly destroyed for the price of a tractor part.
"All right, listen up!" Rusty bellowed, silencing the raucous room. "Three minutes on the
clock! You go limp, you tap out, or you don't get up when you're knocked down, it's over! No
eye gouging, no biting, no fish-hooking, no groin strikes. Everything else goes."
"Easy money," Trent announced to the room, raising his taped hands high in the air,
basking in a smattering of cheers. He began bouncing from foot to foot again, his breathing
hissing through his clenched teeth in sharp, rhythmic, practiced bursts. *Ts-ts-ts.*
Rusty raised his meaty hand high in the air, held it for a agonizing second, and then
chopped it down violently. "Fight!"
Trent closed the distance instantly.
He didn't respect Clayton, which was his first tactical error. Because he viewed the man
in front of him as a slow, uncoordinated target, he didn't bother with a feeler jab to gauge
distance. He didn't circle to establish an angle. He simply planted his back foot and threw a
massive, heavy, looping overhand right, putting every ounce of his two hundred pounds
into the swing, aiming to end the spectacle in three flat seconds and cement his legend.
Clayton saw the punch coming before Trent even threw it. He saw the shift in Trent's
hips, the slight drop of the left shoulder, the widening of the eyes. To Clayton, who had
survived hand-to-hand engagements in darkened stairwells with men armed with trench
knives, Trent's movement seemed to happen in slow motion. It was telegraphed, arrogant,
and structurally flawed.
But Clayton didn't slip the punch with the graceful, fluid evasion of a trained boxer. He
didn't weave under it or pivot away. He didn't want to show his hand just yet. He needed the
five hundred dollars, and if he looked too dangerous too quickly, Trent might back off, call a
foul, or find a way to escape. Furthermore, Clayton was tired, and his body was stiff from
years of neglecting his own physical rehabilitation.
So, Clayton simply hunched his broad shoulders, tucked his chin tightly into his
collarbone, and slightly angled his head down. It was a brutal, incredibly pragmatic, and
highly advanced defensive movement disguised as clumsy flinching.
Trent's taped fist crashed squarely into the upper crest of Clayton's forehead—the
frontal bone, specifically the thickest, hardest, most structurally sound piece of bone in the
entire human skeletal system.
A sickening, audible *CRACK* echoed over the noise of the fans.
It wasn't Clayton's skull that gave way.
Trent gasped, wincing sharply. He stumbled back a half-step, his eyes widening in
sudden, panicked shock. He frantically shook his right hand, the momentum of his own
punch having jammed his knuckles agonizingly against Clayton's skull. He had aimed for
the soft, vulnerable hinge of the jaw to cause a concussive knockout; instead, he had
punched a biological brick wall.
Clayton, however, did not emerge entirely unscathed. He felt a blinding flash of white
light explode behind his retinas. A dull, sickening wave of nausea immediately rolled
through his empty stomach, threatening to send his club soda back up.
It hurt. It hurt badly. The illusion of the stoic, unfeeling warrior was just that—an
illusion. Clayton was not invincible. He was a thirty-eight-year-old man with miles of wear
and tear on his biological chassis. His knees ached chronically from the damp night air, his
lower back was a constant, burning knot of pain from deadlifting fifty-pound feed bags, and
his brain had already sustained enough concussions to last three lifetimes.
He tasted the sharp, bright, metallic tang of fresh blood flooding his mouth where the
sheer impact of the blow had caused him to bite deeply into the soft inside of his cheek. He
swallowed the blood.
*Stay small,* a voice whispered in the deepest, darkest corridor of his mind.
It was a cold, dead, utterly emotionless voice. It was the voice he hadn't heard, hadn't
allowed himself to hear, since the dusty, blood-stained streets of Al Anbar province. It was
the tactical computer in his brain booting up, overriding the pain receptors, analyzing the
threat matrix.
*Let him work. Watch his hips. Exploit the overextension. Survive.*
Trent, profoundly angered by his own mistake and the searing pain radiating up his
forearm, let out a frustrated snarl and unleashed a furious, wild flurry of strikes. He
abandoned his technical training in favor of overwhelming, brawling aggression.