Chapter 3
"You still want this challenge?" he said. He had stepped close again, with the specific proximity of someone who wants their height and their frame to function as the first argument before anything else is said.
"I already accepted," I said.
I said it at the register I used for information that did not require emphasis. The quietness of it reached the first several rows of the bleachers before Briggs's volume did, and the crowd settled slightly around it, because quiet in a loud moment always draws more attention than loud.
He came in fast.
His right hand was quick and committed, the kind of strike that has worked for a long time against opponents who receive it at face value. I did not receive it at face value. I slipped left at the moment of commitment, the technique I had been drilling for six years producing the movement before the decision did, and his fist crossed through the space where my head had been and continued past it with the momentum of a thing that has found nothing to stop it.
I had his arm at the forearm before his brain had processed the miss.
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The pivot came from my hips, not my arms, because the arms are expensive and the hips are efficient, and the geometry of the technique was designed for exactly this — using the incoming force as the engine rather than opposing it. I turned under his shoulder, directed his momentum toward the ground, and assisted its completion with the specific application of leverage that is not dramatic and does not require strength and works with complete reliability when the timing is correct.
Briggs hit the field.
