Chapter 123: Stomp Them Out
Most adults would freeze up if a guy came at them with a blade. Even trained fighters sometimes got tunnel vision, eyes locked on the weapon, brain scrambling to calculate every move. That’s just human nature.
So seeing Max handle the situation the way he did? That caught the Rejected Corps off guard. All of them.
He was just a high schooler. No military background. No combat history.
But the way he moved, quick, focused, deliberate, wasn’t just good. It was professional. He’d disarmed the attacker and dropped him with a single, clean blow. Efficient. No wasted movement.
What really shook them, though, was how he did it.
The technique Max used? It wasn’t random. It mirrored some of the exact methods they used. Stuff they were trained in. Moves they’d picked up through years of hard, ugly experience.
And Max had done it after seeing it once.
There was no way he’d learned that from some self-defense YouTube tutorial. Watching a move on video and pulling it off in a life-or-death moment? Completely different ball game. And the kind of stuff they trained in? It wasn’t the kind of thing civilians were ever supposed to learn.
So the only logical conclusion? Max had been watching. Studying. Processing. And in a high-pressure moment, he’d replicated it near perfectly.
That wasn’t luck. That was instinct and skill. And anyone with real experience would’ve been impressed.
"Will you look at that," one of the Rejected Corps muttered, ducking just as a meat cleaver sailed past his head. Without missing a beat, he caught the attacker’s wrist, twisted it, and forced the guy to stab the blade into his own shoulder before dropping him with a heavy kick. "Guess there’s a reason the boss wants to meet him after all."