Cameron stopped laughing.
Greg lowered his beer.
Bradley’s brow furrowed in genuine confusion.
“Excuse me?”
“Your kick,” Chloe continued, taking one measured step forward.
“Your planting foot was completely flat. Your hips were locked. If you threw that roundhouse at a heavy bag instead of empty air, you would have blown out your own ACL. You don’t have power. You just have momentum.”
Bradley’s face turned crimson.
The absolute clinical disrespect in her tone was something he had never encountered, especially not from a waitress in a cheap diner.
The fact that thousands of people were currently watching this on a live stream only poured gasoline on his ego.
“You crazy bitch,” Bradley growled, stepping forward.
“I’m going to teach you how to talk to a champion.”
He lunged forward, reaching out with a massive right hand to grab her by the throat, fully intending to throw her across the room.
He never even touched her collar.
As Bradley’s hand shot forward, Chloe moved.
It wasn’t the bouncy, erratic movement of modern sport fighting.
It was zero to 60 explosion.
She stepped inside his reach, slipping her head off the center line by a fraction of an inch.
Simultaneously, her left forearm snapped up in a rigid, bone-shattering parry, striking the inside of Bradley’s extending wrist.
A loud crack echoed through the diner.
Not the sound of a slap, but the sickening sound of dense bone colliding with fragile cartilage.
Bradley gasped, his arm deadening instantly from the nerve strike.
Before his brain could even process the pain, Chloe’s right hand, held in a tight, flat-knuckled fist, buried itself directly into his solar plexus.
She didn’t swing her arm.
She drove the strike from the floor, rotating her hips, transferring her entire body weight through the two flat knuckles of her right hand.
It was the legendary shita tsuki, an inverted short punch utilized in full contact Kyokushin karate.
Bradley’s eyes bulged wide.
All the oxygen in his lungs evacuated in a wet, wheezing hiss.
His gold belt clattered to the floor.
But Chloe wasn’t done.
As Bradley folded forward, gasping desperately for air, Chloe pivoted on her lead foot.
With a fluid, terrifying grace, she swept her right leg through the back of Bradley’s calves, a textbook ashi barai.
Because she had destroyed his structural base, Bradley had no way to catch himself.
His 200-lb frame launched into the air, completely horizontal, before crashing down onto the hard linoleum floor with a force that rattled the coffee mugs on the counters.
The entire exchange took less than 1.5 seconds.
Bradley Jenkins, the reigning state champion, was writhing on the ground, clutching his stomach, his face purple as he desperately tried to force air back into his paralyzed diaphragm.
He sounded like a suffocating fish.
