It was like trying to bench press a parked car. Derek smiled, a small patronizing curl of the lips. He wasn’t sweating.

He took his time, methodically isolating her right arm. Sarah bridged hard, trying to buck him off, but he floated over her hips, pinning her flat.

“Too slow,” he muttered. He slid his knee onto her stomach. The pain was immediate and sharp.

Sarah gasped, her core muscles burning as she tried to defend her ribs. As soon as her hands dropped to deal with the knee, Derek’s thick forearm slid across her throat.

His other hand grabbed the collar of her GI, setting up a cross collar choke. He didn’t ease into it. He snapped it tight with a violent jerking motion.

The pressure crushed her trachea and clamped down on her carotid arteries. The panic was instantaneous.

It wasn’t the slow, methodical squeeze of a partner practicing a move. It was mean. It was a punishment. Sarah’s hand slammed against the mat.

Tap, tap, tap.

Derek didn’t let go. She tapped again, harder, frantically slapping his shoulder. Tap, tap, tap. He adjusted his grip, pulling tighter.

He drove his forehead into the mat, locking his arms out.

The room began to narrow. The hum of the fluorescent lights faded into a loud, rushing static in Sarah’s ears.

Her lungs screamed for air, but her throat was crushed shut. She kicked her legs, no longer doing jiu-jitsu, just a human animal thrashing in pure, unadulterated terror.

The edges of her vision turned dark gray, then black.

A strange, terrifying warmth flooded the back of her neck. He’s going to kill me. That was her last coherent thought before her limbs went slack. A second later, the pressure vanished. Air rushed back into Sarah’s lungs with a harsh, ragged wheeze.

She curled onto her side, coughing violently, her chest heaving. Tears pricked her eyes, not from sadness, but from the raw, physiological shock of oxygen deprivation.

Her throat felt bruised, a deep, throbbing ache radiating down to her collarbones. Derek stood up, tying his belt with practiced nonchalance. He looked down at her.

“You got to tap earlier, Sarah. Don’t let your ego get in the way. In a real fight, nobody stops. ” He said it loudly, ensuring the two adjacent pairs of grapplers heard him. Sarah pushed herself up onto her elbows, still coughing. She felt humiliated, stripped bare.

She had tapped. She had tapped immediately. He knew it. She knew it. But in the tribal hierarchy of the gym, no one had seen a thing.

The adjacent pairs kept their heads down, pretending they hadn’t heard her frantic slapping on the mat.

Derek turned away, looking around the room for his next victim. “Who’s next? ” he called out, cracking his knuckles. “I am. ” The voice came from the edge of the mats. It wasn’t loud.