Chapter 3 - SIX MINUTES
Silence settled over the room with a strange physical weight. Even the younger students along the wall stopped whispering. Trent looked around as if waiting for Graham to laugh it off or shut it down, but the instructor only glanced up with irritation. “No hard sparring for beginners,” he said. “Just fix her stance.” Then he turned away again, and that carelessness became the permission Trent wanted. He rolled his shoulders and stepped in without bowing. “One round,” he said, smiling at Holland like he’d already decided how she would fall. “Try not to cry.” Then he threw a lazy left hook, expecting her to retreat.
She didn’t.
Holland slipped inside the punch so cleanly that Trent’s arm brushed empty air. Her right shin snapped low into the outside of his lead thigh with a dry, chopping sound. Before the room could process it, she was already out again, guard loose, expression blank. Trent blinked, more insulted than hurt. He came forward harder. Jab, cross, spinning kick. This time Holland stepped into his space before the spin fully turned over and drove a compact left hand into the center of his ribs—not showy, not theatrical, just precise. Air left him in a startled grunt. A few people along the wall shifted. The gangly black belt who had laughed at her earlier stopped smiling.
The next minute belonged entirely to Holland’s patience. She did not brawl. She made Trent work. Every time he charged, she angled out and kicked the same leg. Every time he widened his stance for power, she stepped into the pocket and touched his body just hard enough to tax his breathing. Trent had always been the room’s bully because everyone around him was either smaller, more obedient, or too invested in dojo politics to embarrass him. Holland had no such investment. She treated him like a problem in motion. He began to chase. That made him worse. His hands drifted lower when he got angry, exactly as she’d noticed in the first thirty seconds. His shoulders told on him before every spin. His breathing grew louder. By the time the wall timer ticked past four minutes, sweat was rolling down his face and his confidence had started leaking from every movement.
Then he tried to take her head off.
It happened after he missed a spinning hook kick so wide that his heel skimmed air two feet from her face. When he landed, off-balance and furious, he stormed forward with a reckless right hand and a knee that came up far too hard for a “lesson.” Holland parried the punch, turned her hip, and drove a short shovel hook into the liver side of his body. Trent folded slightly but kept coming, more out of pride than awareness. Holland’s next strike was a right low kick into the same deadened lead leg, followed immediately by a left hand to the solar plexus. The combination hit like a lock turning. Trent’s mouth opened. No sound came out. He tried to step, but the leg she had been chopping for five full minutes no longer obeyed him. Then Holland swept the standing foot with calm, almost surgical timing, and Trent’s whole body crumpled onto the peeling blue mats.
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No one moved.
He was conscious, stunned, curled partly on one side with both forearms across his midsection, drawing the shallow, ugly breaths of someone whose body had just been introduced to the truth. Holland stood over him for a second, not gloating, not posing, just waiting to see whether he would get up. He didn’t. She took one step back and lowered her hands. “You telegraph your spin,” she said, quiet enough that only the nearest students heard it. “And you always drop your left when you’re angry.” Then she turned away from him as if the most interesting part of the evening had already passed.
