[Status]
[Name: Zoey]
[Sex: Female]
[Body: 0.9]
[Mental: 3.5]
[Magic: 1.0]
[Skills: 17]
[Zoey's Victorious Boxing Lv10]
[Focus Lv12]
[Teaching Maxed]
[Abnormal Conditions Maxed]
[Endurance Maxed]
[Fighting Aura Lv7]
[Gaming Lv20]
[Mahna Manipulation Lv34]
[Combo Magji Maxed]
[Twisting Force Maxed]
[Mahna Gathering Bomb Lv8]
[Overdraft Maxed]
[Dash Lv2]
[Flexibility Lv2]
[Friends of the Oppressed Maxed]
[Meditation Lv2]
[First-Aid Lv1]
Zoey walked to the gym with her bag over one shoulder.
It was early enough that the city was still stretching itself awake. Delivery trucks idling at loading docks. A few joggers. A woman in a coat rolling up the metal gate of a pharmacy while her breath made small clouds in the cold air.
Krey looked the same. Of course it did. Cities didn't change while you were gone even when enormous things happened while you were away. The buildings were the same buildings. The streets ran the same directions. The food cart on the corner near the bus stop was still exactly where it had always been, the same cheerful hand-painted menu board, the same smell of something fried that reached her from half a block away.
She was listening to music on her headphones. The type of music she would never admit to listening to. Nor give anyone the chance of hearing it. Let's just say the lyrics alone would get her classified as a certified freak. And not in the good way. If there even is a world where that can be said in a good way.
…
The gym was different.
She stopped at the end of the block and looked at it properly. The building was the same structure, same footprint, same brick face, same position on the block. But the building had been worked on. Real money spent. New signage, the entrance had been redone. Even through the windows she could see the interior had changed, better equipment, more floor space. Something that Zoey believes happened only thanks to her. Well, she can't get that crazy. Maybe Ben or someone else could've made it big in the gym too. But she doubted it. She was on another level.
Her name was attached to that building. Her fights. Dylan's fights. The other students she'd pointed at the world and told to go and enjoy themselves. All of it had landed somewhere, and part of where it landed was here, on this brick building with the new sign that she was standing outside of at six-forty-five in the morning.
'We fucking did that shit,' Inner Zoey said.
'We did that shit,' she felt a little pride before realizing that anyone with her box could've done the same.
She walked to the door and pushed it open.
The smell hit her before anything else did.
Rubber and leather and cleaning solution and sweat and effort. The smell of every populated gym. It smelled right.
She was two steps inside when someone's brain caught up with what their eyes were seeing.
"Yo, is that the Devil?!"
She didn't even catch who said it. It didn't matter, because the information moved through the gym in about four seconds, passed from one person to the next as news that everyone is really happy to hear, and by the time she'd gotten her bearings the room was already reorganizing itself in her direction.
Tony made it to her first. He spread his arms out wide and grinning and said, "My GIRL," which wasn't a sentence so much as an event. Steven was right behind him. The two of them together had the combined energy of a welcome committee that had been waiting three weeks for this particular opportunity.
Behind them came everyone else.
It wasn't every person in the gym, technically. Some people kept their heads down. A few of the newer regulars she didn't recognize held back, watching from their spots by the bags or the rope rack. But plenty of people came. More than she expected. More than she'd had to manage at once in a long time outside of post-fight crowds where there was a barrier between her and everyone trying to get to her.
"You're back!"
"Zoey, where have you been? We were worried!"
"Can I get a photo? Please, it'll take two seconds."
"Did you keep training while you were away? You look ready to fight."
"Sign this for my nephew, he's like your biggest fan, he's got your poster on his wall and everything."
Zoey stood in the middle of it and did what she'd gotten significantly better at over the past two years, which was exist in a crowd of people who wanted something from her without short-circuiting entirely. It was still not her natural setting. It was still the kind of situation where seventeen-year-old Zoey would have froze up and stuttered like crazy. But she wasn't seventeen anymore and she'd been in enough post-fight rooms and enough public situations that she'd built up a kind of functional social muscle for this specific thing.
'And we love acting like a normal bitch when we're anything but, don't we?' Inner Zoey laughed.
'Shut it. Let me feel normal for once.'
'We're famous bitch! That's like one of the farthest things from normal!'
'They still think of me as a person at least. I'll take what I can get.'
She did the photos. She signed the things that got put in front of her, a phone case and a glove and someone's breasts because apparently that was something someone wanted and she wasn't going to make it weird by pointing out that permanent ink on a human chest was crazy when it was a fighter you'd never met before. She answered the questions about where she'd been with the short version. Took some time off, traveled a little, didn't post anything because she wanted to actually disconnect for once and Coach had been telling her to rest between fights anyway.
She'd thought through the vacation story on the walk over. It wasn't even really a lie so much as a version of events that removed the parts that would require extensive follow-up questions and possible memory removal for the people hearing them. She had been away. She had not been posting on social media. Both of those things were completely true. The reasons behind them were simply not information that needed to live in the non-magji world.
"How long are you back for?" someone asked.
"For good, probably." she said.
The reaction to that was significantly louder than she expected.
"ALRIGHT! GET YOUR ASSES BACK TO WORK! Every single one of you! She didn't come home from vacation so you can swarm her like she's a piece of meat at the butcher shop! MOVE IT!" Coach Scott shouted.
The gym had been renovated but some things were unchanged.
The crowd dispersed. Not instantly, because people never dispersed instantly no matter how much authority the voice carried, but fast enough. One last attempt at a photo got cut short by a look from someone on their way back to a bag, someone who apparently knew the specific glare that meant Scott was about to get louder.
And then there he was.
Bald head, round belly, the same middleaged man who had once looked at a teenage girl on a punching bag and tried very hard not to show that he thought she was exceptional. He was wearing training clothes, same as always.
"Haha! There's my fucking star!" he smiled at her with a laugh.
He looked her over while he said it.
"Office," he said. "You, me, and Angelica. Five minutes."
"Good morning, Coach."
"Five minutes, Winters."
He was already walking.
She was already following.
Angelica was already in the office when they got there, sitting at the small table with her tablet out and a professional smile on her face. "Welcome back. You look good."
Coming from Angelica, that meant everything was presentable and nothing catastrophic had happened to Zoey's public image while she was gone. Zoey took it as the compliment it was.
The office was better than the one she remembered. A real desk. A whiteboard with a frame around it now. A mini-fridge in the corner that definitely had not existed before. The renovation had gotten in here too.
She sat down. Scott sat down behind his desk. Angelica had her tablet propped where they could both see it.
"So," Scott said. "You back for real or you back for a week and then you're going to disappear again."
"I'm back."
He looked at her.
"For real," she added.
He nodded like that settled something and leaned forward with his arms on the desk, which was the posture he used when he was about to talk business and meant it.
"Alright. Here's what's been building up while you were on vacation." He nodded to Angelica.
Angelica pulled up her screen. She had a list of names and she went through them. Fighters who had been calling Zoey out in the press while she was gone. Some in interviews, some on their social media, some through their camps reaching out officially to Scott's contact information. A few names Zoey recognized from the professional circuit. A few she didn't.
She listened to all of them.
And as she listened, something started happening in her chest that she hadn't expected to feel this morning. Something that felt almost like excitement. She was, at this exact moment in her life, carrying a Body stat that had dropped significantly from its peak. She knew that. The physical capability that had let her bully A-Grade magjistars and walk through daemon armies was not currently what it was. She was more human right now than she'd been in a long time.
She was also, apparently, very much looking forward to finding out exactly what she could do like this. She wanted to know. She wanted to know, really bad.
'Is it bad if I'm getting wet about this?' Inner Zoey noted. 'All of our fighting experience now but with like the body we had when we first started learning to fight!'
'We're excited about finding out what we can actually do.' Zoey thought back.
'Same thing.'
"You're not listening," Scott said.
"I am." She lied, thinking entirely about how fighting was going to feel like an entirely new experience to her.
He gave her a look that communicated he didn't entirely believe this but was willing to proceed.
Angelica kept going. The Olympics trials were the big one, the item on the list with the most weight and the most timeline attached to it. Women's Boxing. The trials had a structure and a schedule and a window that hadn't fully closed while she was gone because Angelica and Scott had been managing expectations with the relevant people with the specific skill of professionals who knew how to keep a door open without making promises they couldn't keep. The window was still there. It required being ready, which Scott looked at her and asked directly about.
"I'm ready," she said.
He looked at her for a half second longer than the answer required, then turned to his whiteboard and wrote something she couldn't quite read from where she was sitting.
"Advertising people want to do a new campaign around the Olympics push," Angelica said. "There are three different proposals. I'll send them to your phone."
"Sure."
"Two merchandise deals have been waiting for a decision. One is a boxing glove line. The other is a sportswear brand, midrange, good quality." A pause. "Both are real money."
"Send those too."
"A magazine wants to do a feature. Long form. They've been waiting patiently."
"What magazine?"
Angelica said the name. It was a real one.
"Send it," Zoey said.
Scott had been writing while Angelica ran through the list. She could see him doing his own version of planning, the informal whiteboard version that was basically his brain thinking out loud in marker. Lines and names and arrows between them that probably made sense to him and would look like chaos to anyone else.
He capped his marker and turned around.
"College," he said.
"Starlight University," she said. "Fall semester."
"Starlight." He said it like he was confirming he'd heard it correctly. Then he nodded, once. "That's a good school."
"I know."
"You got your schedule?"
She pulled out her phone and brought up the school's portal, the classes lined up, the track scholarship arrangements that had been in place for months, the housing confirmed. The whole picture of what September was going to look like when September arrived. She tilted the screen toward him.
He looked at it for a few seconds. She could see him doing the mental calendar math, working out how Starlight fit around training and fights and the Olympic push, building the schedule in his head.
"Don't let it eat your training time," he said finally.
"It won't."
He believed her. She could tell because he didn't say anything else about it.
Angelica was already making notes on her tablet about the Fall timeline. She asked if Zoey knew her class load yet, how many credits she was taking first semester, if she had any conflicts on the days she'd need for fights or qualifying events. Zoey answered what she knew. The stuff she didn't know yet she told Angelica she'd send over once she had it.
The meeting ended with Coach Scott waving a hand in the direction of the door to indicate he was done talking and whoever he'd been talking to should now go do something useful with their body rather than sitting in his office.
She went to go do something useful with her body.
She found a bag in the back row. A solid working bag with good give. She stood in front of it for a second. Let herself feel the space.
Then she threw a jab.
The form was perfect. She knew it was perfect because the form had been perfect since roughly the six-month mark of her training, when the fundamental movements had been drilled in enough times that they weren't something she did anymore but something she was. The angle of her shoulder, the rotation of her hip, the way her weight transferred, the snap of extension and the pull back that was already setting up the next punch, all of it came out exactly as it should.
The bag moved less than she was used to.
Not barely at all. She wasn't some kind of beginner. The bag moved. But the chain didn't rattle. The kind of pop that used to make people around her look up, that specific noise her punches made when she was at full capacity, wasn't there. The bag felt the difference even if it couldn't say so.
She threw the cross. Perfect. The hook. Perfect.
'So the skills are still here,' Inner Zoey said. Matter-of-fact.
'We love Boxy,' Zoey agreed, already into the next combination.
She worked through the bag, focusing on her foundations, Zoey's Victorious Boxing! Jab-cross-hook. Jab-cross-hook-uppercut. Every combination came out correctly. Every combination hit with less force than she'd been throwing six months ago.
It was the strangest feeling she'd had in a long time. She didn't feel disappointed. She was very much excited.
'New game plus!!!' Inner Zoey said with entirely too much satisfaction.
'Stop making me enjoy this so much.'
'We're starting over with all the experience and none of the grind already done. Explain to me how that isn't so fucking awesome.'
Zoey threw a hook that landed right and kept moving. 'It is a little fucking awesome,' she conceded.
She had been on the bag for maybe twenty minutes when she became aware of Coach Scott standing to the side of her station. She didn't stop working. He didn't speak. She kept throwing. Kept working. Round after round of the kind of focused bag work that was almost meditative when done right, the combinations coming out of somewhere deeper than conscious decision, the body doing what it had been trained to do.
Eventually Scott spoke.
"Your footwork's gotten slower."
She paused between combinations. Looked at him. What the hell was he talking about?
"No way," she disagreed immediately.
He looked at her for a moment.
"You're warming up or what?" he asked.
"You're seeing things."
"I better damn well be seeing things. My star pupil can't be having cheat vacations!" Coach Scott told her.
"You are."
"Good."
She hit the bag.
…
Dylan came through the side entrance around mid-morning.
She was between rounds when she heard the side door and looked up, and there he was. Taller than she remembered. He had his bag over one shoulder and his eyes looking around the gym, and then his eyes found her and he stopped scanning.
"Zoey, you're back." he said with a smile. She was the woman who changed his entire life pretty much.
"I'm back."
'Did Dylan always look this sexy?' Inner Zoey questioned. 'Who knew learning how to beat the shit out of other men and working out could transform a skinny geek into such a hunk?'
'Shut up. We're not getting sexually or romantically involved with one of our students. That's fucked up.'
'I didn't say we were you crazy bitch! I was just pointing out something!'
'Good. I don't think I'm that far gone yet…' Zoey wasn't entirely sure about that.
He came over to her. Up close he looked good.
"How'd the kids do while I was gone?" she asked.
"Better than I expected," he responded.
"Thanks for filling in for me."
"They're good kids." A beat. "I learned from you. Seemed like the thing to do."
"Get on the bag," she said. "I want to see you how you came so far."
Something shifted in his expression, a small thing, kept in check. He said, "Sure," and went to drop his bag and wrap his hands, and she went back to her own station, and for a few minutes they were just two fighters in a gym going through their prep in parallel.
When he got on the bag she watched from her peripheral vision while still working her own. She wasn't doing anything special, just watching. What she saw in Dylan was a picture of what the Teaching skill over time actually looked like in a normal person.
Her Perfect Jab she taught him was far better than the last time she'd seen him in a real fight. It looked like he made it his own and isn't just a copy of Zoey's. His footwork carried him around the bag with soul of an outboxer.
He was good. Real good.
Good enough to compete in the FTL for sure. He'd need to be touched up on a few things like denying wrestlers, how to handle fighting opponents with weapons, people who kicked, and if he does get taken to the ground how to respond. But that would be the same for anyone. Dylan would just have a much higher starting point than most because of his mastery of her boxing lessons.
"Come on then," she said.
He paused mid-combination. "Huh?"
"Get in the ring."
They got in the ring.
Three rounds. Dylan knew she'd been away. He was going to fight his fight and see what happened. He was right to.
He opened with his jab because his jab was the foundation everything else in his game was built on and starting with it was both an attack and a test. It landed. She slipped the follow-up cross and got out to her right and he adjusted with the footwork, already repositioning, keeping the range where he needed it.
He kept her at the end of his jab for most of the first round and there wasn't much she could do about it immediately. Dylan's footwork and reach was legitimate enough to punish her range and height difference. He hit her four times in the first two minutes. Four clean shots landing in places she would normally not have let anyone reach.
She paid attention to everything he was showing. What Dylan's patterns were at this level. The imaginary bell rang. She rolled her neck, rolled her shoulders. Dylan was breathing well, steady, the stamina she'd advised him to train on was doing its job.
In the second round she stopped moving the way she'd been moving. She came forward with pressure, staying low, staying inside the range where his jab had room to extend and do its best work. When he tried to reestablish the distance with movement she followed the movement, cutting the angles, taking away the space he needed to breathe.
He didn't panic. He pivoted, tried to circle out, and she followed the pivot. He threw the jab short because she was too close for the full extension and she walked through it, rolling her head away from it and already inside, and she landed the hook to his body that she'd been setting up since she changed the pressure.
He grunted. Reset. His eyes sharpened. He was smart enough to know what she was doing. He was too much of an outboxer to know instinctively how to stop it. Those were two different problems and he was only equipped to solve the first one.
She stayed on him. Not constantly, not without breathing room, but with the consistent threat of forward pressure that made the ring feel smaller than it was, that took his best attribute and made it a liability. Dylan's footwork was genius at range. At the range she was keeping, his feet were running on memory rather than advantage. He kept trying to reestablish the outside and she kept not letting him, and by the middle of the second round the fight had changed shape.
She struck him with a right punch that he didn't slip in time. His head moved back from it.
Third round she had him.
Not dominated. But she was in charge of the fight in the way that mattered. When Dylan tried to steal the round back in the last minute she let him try and then took it back again with combinations that were landing somewhere real. Every shot she threw landed correctly.
The final bell rang.
Dylan stood at his side of the ring and breathed and smiled at her.
"That style," he said. "I've never seen you fight like that."
"Most of the people I fight against aren't outboxers. I don't think I have an official match of me fighting one."
He processed that for a second. Then he nodded.
"My footwork's useless when someone gets inside that early," he said. "I couldn't reset."
"That's the point."
"What do I do against it?"
She leaned on the ropes. Considered. "You start working inside the way you work outside. Learn to be dangerous in close and pressure doesn't beat you. Right now someone who can take away your range and stay there has you."
He was already thinking about it, she could see it in his face, the internal revision beginning. "I can work on that."
"You should. Because I'm not the only one who'll figure out that your outside game is the whole game."
"I know. I fought in-fighters before, but none of them shut me down like you did. I couldn't even get a counter in or anything." He looked at her for a moment. Something in his face that was harder to read than his boxing, more personal and less practiced.
"We'll need to work on that then." She told him. "Go take a break," she said eventually. "We can work on it in a minute."
"Okay!" A bright smile propped up on his face and Zoey almost had to cover her eyes.
'He's so cute.' Inner Zoey thought.
'We haven't taught him in a while. I guess it makes sense.'
He was already climbing through the ropes, already planning, already gone into the version of himself that spent every available hour getting better. She watched him go with a teacher's pride.
…
She sat on the bench by the windows when they were done.
The gym went on around her in its afternoon sounds, the rhythm of impact and movement that was the same rhythm it had been when she first sat on a bench in a room like this at seventeen and tried to figure out if she could survive two magjistars with boxing. The sounds were right. The place was right.
She unwrapped her hands.
Tony dropped down on the bench beside her.
"You want to get food after? Bunch of the guys are coming. There's this new place down the block."
"Yeah," she said. "I'm in."