Nobody in that gym understood what they were looking at.
Nobody except one man.

Derek Collins had been leaning in the office doorway, arms crossed, watching in silence. Thirty years in martial arts. He’d studied every fighting style. But this stance — he knew it. He’d seen it in competition footage from the ’80s. In a Sports Illustrated photograph he never forgot.

The Phantom.

He sprinted across the gym.
“Stop! Brock, stop! You don’t know who she is!”

Derek’s voice echoed off the walls. Every student heard it. Brock heard it too. He didn’t care.

But for Wanda, something strange happened in that half-second between Derek’s scream and Brock’s first step forward.

Time didn’t slow down the way people describe in movies. It compressed. Like 34 years folded into a single breath.

She saw her husband’s face. Not dying. Smiling. Standing in the doorway of their apartment in 1988, holding the Sports Illustrated issue, shaking it in the air, laughing.
“That’s my girl. That’s my Phantom.”

She saw Elijah’s face three hours ago. Concrete. Hollow. A boy who walked into a gym full of dreams and walked out carrying something he’d carry for the rest of his life.

She saw her sensei’s hands adjusting her stance when she was 14. Heard his voice like it was yesterday.
“You do not fight with anger, Wanda. You fight with memory. Your body already knows. Trust it.”

She hadn’t trusted it in 34 years.
Her knee ached. Her knuckles were stiff. Her shoulders carried 62 years of gravity.
But her feet — her feet remembered everything.

Left foot back. Right foot forward. Weight low. Hands open. Breath steady.

She wasn’t the Phantom anymore.
She was a grandmother who came here for one reason.
But if this man put his hands on her, God help him.

—

Brock charged.
Right cross. Full power. The kind of punch designed to end a conversation, not start one. He expected it to land.

It didn’t.

Wanda shifted her weight half an inch to the left — no more — and the fist sailed past her ear so close she could feel the wind off his knuckles. Brock’s momentum carried him forward, off balance for just a fraction of a second.