I kept… uhh, training Alexia. If you could even call having twelve distinct colors of hell beaten out of my face training.
After a while, I was half-convinced she was just taking her revenge for the time I left her in the hedge maze.
She insisted that wasn't the case and I was simply being paranoid… before beating me into the ground all over again.
By the end of the week, I was squirming like a dying fish on the floor, clutching my neck in pain. "I— ghh! S-She… punched me in… the th-throat!"
"You're getting better," Michael nodded, stacking weights onto a bar with such nonchalance that it made me want to throw a plate at his head. "I'm not as good as Alexia in hand-to-hand, but even I can tell how much progress you've made. And so fast! A week ago, that punch would've crushed your trachea. But now, you managed to lessen the impact."
"Fuck you!" I wheezed, my voice as rough as a rusted gate scraping across gravel. "I'm dying here and you're giving me a performance review!?"
