Life Isn’t So Simple Anymore.

The corner stool was cold through her shorts.

Yuki sat down and her corner came to her immediately. Coach Reyes with the water bottle, her cutman with the enswell already out, her training partner Daisuke talking to her in a calm directed voice he used when he needed her to actually hear something. They were all there. All doing their jobs. All trying to reach her.

She wasn't entirely reachable right now.

I'm afraid?

The thought sat in the middle of everything else her corner was saying and wouldn't move.

Me?

She'd never gone for a clinch in a fight before. Not once. Not in regionals, not in nationals, not in any of the thirty-plus bouts she'd had since she started competing. She was a pressure fighter. She went forward. That was the whole thing. That was who she was.

But I went for a clinch.

Why did I go for a clinch?

Coach Reyes was saying something about footwork, about pressure, about not letting herself get backed into the corners. Daisuke was nodding along, adding something. She could hear the sounds of the words without the words themselves landing at all.

I had to have been afraid.

There's no other explanation.

Her punches scared me. Her punches made me not want to take any more. Her punches made me want to fight differently.

The water bottle touched her lips and she drank without tasting it.

Can I really win this?

Can I really delude myself into thinking I can win against this... monster?

She looked up.

Across the ring, in the opposite corner, The Devil was sitting on her stool. Not talking to her coach. Not looking at her gloves or her corner or the crowd. She was looking directly at Yuki with that smile on her face. The same smile that had been there in round one when the punches were landing. The smile that said she was enjoying this. That this was the version of tonight she'd wanted.

That she could see Yuki's fear from across the ring and found it flavorful.

Yuki felt something cold move through her that had nothing to do with the corner stool.

"YUKI."

Coach Reyes's voice cut through. He was crouching in front of her now, his hands on her knees, his face in her line of sight, blocking out The Devil and her smile. "Eyes on me. Right now."

She looked at him.

"She rattled you. That's fine. It happens to everyone. It's never happened to you before so you don't know what to do with it. That's what I'm for." He held up two fingers. "Two things. Keep moving. Don't let her set her feet. And-"

The bell rang.

Yuki stood up before she'd finished processing the second thing. Her corner stepped back automatically. Coach Reyes's mouth was still moving, finishing the sentence, but the words were lost under the crowd noise that had swelled back up the moment the break ended.

She picked up her mouthguard. Put it in.

Walked toward the center of the ring.

Her feet felt different than usual. Heavier. It was like the way you became aware of your own breathing when someone pointed it out. She was walking toward The Devil and she could see The Devil walking toward her and the smile was still there and her feet kept feeling like lead.

The Devil stopped at the center and held out her glove.

A gesture of respect between rounds. It happened in boxing. Fighters touched gloves at the start of rounds sometimes. A sportsmanlike thing, an acknowledgment that whatever was happening between them was happening within the frame of a sport and not something else.

Yuki hesitated for half a second.

Then she remembered. It's just a sport. That was all this was. Two people in a ring in a building with rules and a referee and judges and a crowd. There was nothing to be afraid of. She'd been fighting since she was eleven years old. She'd been afraid of nothing in a ring her entire career. The Devil was very good. The Devil was very fast. But she was a fighter. Just another fighter.

She reached out to touch gloves.

The hook came from nowhere.

Or not from nowhere, it came from The Devil's left hand, faster than anything Yuki had seen in the round one exchanges, so fast that her brain registered the impact before it registered the punch. The world tilted. The lights in the ceiling did something strange. Her legs crumpled and she went down.

The canvas came up to meet her.

She was on the ground.

She couldn't quite hear correctly. A wall of sound that was split down the middle, two different sounds at the same frequency, half the building expressing one feeling and half expressing something completely opposite.

"WHAT?! WHAT DID SHE JUST DO?!"

"A FAKE GLOVE TOUCH! THE DEVIL USED A FAKE GLOVE TOUCH ON TANAKA!"

"THAT IS DEPLORABLE! THIS IS THE OLYMPIC TRIALS! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT AMERIKAN BOXING TO THE WORLD!"

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! THAT'S OUR DEVIL! SEND HER STRAIGHT TO HELL, BABY!"

The referee was counting. She could see his legs. White and black. Moving. The count was happening but she wasn't sure which number they were on because everything was slightly muffled and slightly too loud at the same time.

Her vision was blurry at the edges.

She didn't know exactly what had happened. She knew she was on the ground. She knew the fight was continuing around her somehow even though she wasn't standing up yet. She knew the count was a number she needed to respond to.

She looked up.

The referee. Right there. Right in front of her, counting with his hand.

Six.

She got her feet under her.

Seven.

She was up.

The referee stepped in front of her immediately, his hands up, his eyes on her face. He moved a hand in front of her eyes. "Can you see me?"

"Yeah." Her voice came out steady. She didn't know how.

"How many fingers?"

"Two."

He looked at her for another second. Then he stepped back and waved them together.

Yuki shook her head once to clear the last of it. Brought her guard up. Found The Devil across the ring.

She had exactly one moment to focus her eyes properly on that smiling face before The Devil was already inside her guard and the uppercut was already coming.

The impact went through her jaw and up through the top of her skull and rattled her brain. Her chin held. She had a strong chin. But her brain and her heart were suddenly somewhere behind the rest of her body, trying to catch up, and everything she did from that point forward was one beat too slow.

She blocked. The block landed wrong and the punch got through anyway.

She moved her head. The move was half a second late and the hook caught her on the side of the head.

She tried to clinch. The Devil slipped out of it and the short right to her ribs was already landing before Yuki had processed the slip.

"Come on Yuki! FOCUS!"

"Snap out of it!"

"GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME!"

Her people in the crowd. She could hear them. She knew their voices. She'd heard those voices at every fight she'd ever had.

She tried.

She threw a jab. It landed on air because The Devil wasn’t there anymore and the counter to the body came back immediately, finding the exact same rib that had already been hit twice, and Yuki heard herself squeak.

"Your fear is tasty." The Devil said, not loudly, just close enough.

Yuki fired back. A hook that she put everything into, her whole body behind it.

It landed on The Devil's guard and The Devil didn't move.

Didn't step back. Didn't even shift her weight. Just absorbed it and smiled.

"Yummy."

The second round became a matter of survival. Not winning rounds on the judges' cards. Not executing the game plan Coach Reyes had been building for months. Just staying upright and staying in it and trying to find one moment. One moment, where the answer to what was happening to her became clear.

It never did.

The guard that she had never really used was getting bypassed in ways she didn't understand in the moment. Punches came from angles she'd closed. Punches came through openings she hadn't left. The clinch that had been a refuge in round one stopped being a refuge when short body shots started arriving in there too, Zoey's arms working in the narrow space with a power that the clinch wasn't supposed to allow.

Everyone watching could see it.

The first round had been two fighters meeting each other equally and going at it. This round was one fighter and a punching bag.

Yuki's corner was screaming. She could hear them. The words didn't mean much anymore, the processing part of her brain was entirely occupied with surviving the next three seconds, and then the three seconds after that, and then the three seconds after that.

Not a single punch landed.

Just before the bell, Zoey loaded up a straight punch. A finale to this match. The punch to end all punches type of finisher.

Yuki brought her guard up. Both arms, everything she had, the last line.

The bell rang.

The punch stopped.

An inch from her guard. Maybe less. Close enough that she felt the displaced air against her gloves.

She lowered her arms slowly.

The Devil was right there, smiling that smile, and she didn't say anything this time. She didn't need to. The smile said everything that needed saying. You survived a little longer.

The referee stepped between them and walked Zoey back toward her corner with a hand on her shoulder.

Yuki stood in the center of the ring for a moment.

Then she turned and walked back to her corner.

Her legs felt like jelly.