Chapter 8 - THE BREAKING OF THE CHAMPION
Blake scrambled to his feet, his teeth bared, his eyes wild with unbridled rage.
All technical form vanished from the five-time state champion. He wasn't kickboxing anymore; he was a desperate, humiliated man trying to physically tear apart the person who had made him look like a child in front of his entire school.
He screamed, lunging forward with a wild, wide-open double-leg takedown, intending to tackle Damon onto the hard floor.
Damon didn't sprawl like a wrestler.
As Blake reached his waist, Damon simply lowered his hips six inches, caught Blake under both armpits with his calloused hands, and absorbed the entire forward momentum of the two-hundred-pound athlete.
Damon stopped him dead in his tracks.
The sudden deceleration was so violent that Blake’s breath left his body in a loud UHF! sound.
Damon held him lifted two inches off the floor by his armpits—holding him frozen in space through raw, terrifying core strength built over decades of military conditioning and heavy labor.
For three long seconds, Blake hung there, suspended in mid-air, his feet dangling helplessly above the blue mat.
Damon leaned in close, bringing his face just inches from Blake's ear.
"If this was fourteen years ago in Kandahar," Damon whispered, his voice so quiet only Blake could hear it, "you would already be dead three times over."
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Damon gently lowered Blake’s feet back onto the mat, released his grip, and took one step backward.
Blake collapsed to his knees, clutching his chest, trembling violently as cold sweat poured down his neck. The fight was completely gone from him. The arrogance, the bravado, the state-champion pride—all of it had been shattered, not by violence, but by absolute, terrifying superiority.
