Cameron’s smartphone slipped from his trembling hands, clattering onto the table.
The live stream was now pointing at the ceiling, though the microphone was picking up everything.
Greg backed away, his hands raised in shock.
Chloe stood over the fallen champion.
She hadn’t even broken a sweat.
Her breathing was perfectly measured, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
She looked down at him with eyes devoid of any pity.
“You rely on rules, mats, and referees to save you when you make a mistake,” Chloe said quietly, her voice echoing in the dead silence of the diner.
“Out here, there are no points. There are only consequences.”
She stepped over his convulsing body, picking up his gold belt from the floor.
She tossed it onto the table in front of a pale, trembling Cameron.
“Take your trash and leave,” Chloe ordered.
Cameron couldn’t speak.
His eyes were wide behind his expensive designer glasses, darting from the gasping behemoth on the floor to the unassuming waitress standing before him.
He looked at her hands.
He looked at the flat, calcified knuckles.
He replayed the blur of violence he had just witnessed in his mind.
The short, inverted punch.
The perfectly timed inner sweep.
The complete lack of telegraphing.
Suddenly, the blood drained from Cameron’s face.
He knew the martial arts world inside and out.
He knew the histories, the legends, and the ghosts.
“Wait,” Cameron whispered, his voice cracking.
He pointed a shaking finger at her.
“That punch. That stance. I saw that in 2018 at the underground kumite in Tokyo. You’re Thomas Jennings’ daughter. You’re the prodigy who shattered the Russian champion’s sternum. You… You’re Chloe Jennings, the ghost of Kyokushin.”
Chloe didn’t confirm or deny it.
She just stared at him with eyes as cold as a frozen lake.
“Get him out of my diner,” she whispered, “before I decide to show you what real karate looks like.”
Cameron Hayes stood frozen in the sickly fluorescent light of the Copper Kettle, his expensive designer loafers suddenly feeling glued to the sticky linoleum floor.
The silence in the diner was absolute, broken only by the pathetic, ragged gasping of Bradley Jenkins as he curled into a fetal position on the ground.
