"Brock..." Marcus whispered, scrambling up from his stool, his voice cracking horribly. "Brock... stop."
Brock didn’t hear him. He was basking in the camera lights, sneering down at the sixty-two-year-old grandmother. "Come on, Grandma! Show me what that backyard training got you! One punch!"
"BROCK! STOP!" Marcus screamed at the top of his lungs, kicking over his stool as he stumbled frantically across the mat. "STOP RIGHT NOW! GET AWAY FROM HER!"
The entire gym turned in shock at Marcus’s sudden, hysterical breakdown.
Brock frowned, glancing back over his shoulder. "Marcus, what the hell is wrong with you? Sit down before you have a heart attack—"
"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!" Marcus shrieked, tears of sheer terror springing to his eyes, his hands shaking violently as he pointed a trembling finger at Wanda. "That’s not... that’s not just an old woman! That’s Wanda Moore! The Phantom! YOU FOOL, SHE’S A THIRD-DEGREE BLACK BELT LEGEND!"
The name hung in the air like a drop of acid.
For a fraction of a second, Brock’s brain tried to process the words. Wanda Moore? The Phantom?
Before the name could fully register in his arrogant mind, time seemed to fracture.
Wanda Moore did not raise her voice. She did not yell.
In the exact millisecond Marcus screamed her name, the sixty-two-year-old grandmother vanished.
To the untrained eyes of the teenage students staring through their phone screens, it wasn’t movement; it was teleportation. One moment she was standing three feet away; the next, she had closed the distance with a terrifying, fluid explosion of kinetic energy that defied every law of physics and human aging.
Her left foot pivoted on the ball of her foot, driving power up from the cracked gym floor, through her knee, past her hip, and straight into her shoulder.
Brock Anderson’s eyes dilated in pure, unadulterated horror. His mouth stayed half-open in his mocking smirk, frozen in time as his survival instincts screamed a warning that came a full second too late.
He tried to raise his guard. His hands were nowhere near fast enough.
Wanda’s right fist didn’t just punch; it cracked through the air with a sound like a dry pine branch snapping under boots. Her fist struck Brock squarely beneath his ribs, right at the solar plexus, driving upward with terrifying precision.
CRACK.
The sound echoed off the mirrored walls like a pistol shot inside a concrete vault.
Brock’s breath left his lungs in a massive, explosive gasp that sounded like a deflating tire. Every single muscle in his six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame instantly seized up. His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed.
He didn't fly backward. He didn't stumble.
Instead, his knees completely buckled beneath him. The mighty champion, the undefeated king of Anderson Elite Combat Academy, folded inward like a broken accordion and collapsed hard onto the mat, right on top of the scattered hundred-dollar bills.
Silence fell over the gym—a heavy, suffocating silence so absolute you could hear the faint hum of the overhead fluorescent lights.
Not a single student moved. Not a single phone camera shook. Fourteen teenagers stood frozen in horror, staring down at their unconscious coach, whose face was pressed against the rubber mat, drool pooling on the floor.
Wanda Moore stood over him. Her breathing was completely even. Not a single hair had come loose from her tight iron-gray bun.