Chapter 13 - The Public Challenge
The crowd heard the challenge.
A murmur of excitement rippled through the spectators, rapidly building into a rhythmic chant. These were not martial arts purists; they were gamblers who smelled blood and drama.
"Fight! Fight! Fight!" someone shouted from the front row.
"Let 'em scrap!" a heavy-set bookmaker in a leather jacket roared, slamming his roll of hundreds against the steel cage. "We paid for a main event, Marcus! Put him in or refund the pot!"
"Refund! Refund! Refund!" the chant shifted violently.
Marcus looked around frantically. Two hundred thousand dollars in cash liabilities was staring him in the face. If he refunded the crowd, his credit with the syndicate was dead. If he called the police, he exposed his own illegal venue. He was trapped in a cage of his own making.
Marcus turned his head slowly toward Derek.
"Derek," Marcus whispered, his eyes wide with desperate malice. "Get in there."
Derek’s eyes went wild with panic. "Marcus, are you crazy?! You saw what this guy did on the mat! He broke Braden’s ribs with one hit!"
"That was with mats and rules!" Marcus hissed, grabbing Derek by the shoulder of his rash guard. "Out here, there are no taps! No sport rules! You outweigh him by twenty pounds! Use your elbows, gouge his eyes, bite his throat if you have to! If you don't fight him, we lose everything! You hear me? Everything!"
Derek swallowed hard. He looked at the crowd. He saw men who had revered him as a local enforcer for five years, all holding up their phones, waiting to see if the Apex champion was a real killer or a fraud. The weight of his own toxic ego closed around his neck like an iron collar.
Derek descended the stairs slowly, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white.
"No time limits," Derek rasped, his voice trembling despite his best efforts to sound menacing. "No submissions. Last man standing."
Cole didn't even respond with words. He simply turned, unlatched the chain-link door of the cage, and stepped inside.
The crowd erupted into a deafening roar.
I stood near the entrance, flanked safely between Nate and Jackson, my fingers digging into my palms so hard the nails drew blood. "Jackson, is Cole going to be okay?"
Jackson looked down at me, a faint, reassuring smirk touching the corner of his mouth. "Sarah, your brother spent eight years hunting armed insurgents in the mountains of Kandahar. A gym bully in an unlicensed ring isn't a fight for Cole. It’s an administrative cleanup."
Derek stepped through the cage door. The iron latch clanged shut behind him with the permanence of a tomb.
Inside the cage, the contrast between the two men was staggering. Derek was massive, vascular, and thick-necked, pacing along his side of the chain-link like an agitated silverback gorilla, snorting and slapping his own chest to pump adrenaline through his veins.
Cole stood perfectly still in the opposite corner.
His feet were shoulder-width apart, his chin tucked slightly, hands held open at chest level. He didn't pace. He didn't beat his chest. His breathing was so steady his ribcage barely expanded. He looked less like a fighter and more like an executioner waiting for the clock to strike midnight.
In the center of the ring stood an older, scarred bouncer acting as the informal referee. He held up his hand, looked at both men, and shouted above the noise:
"Bare knuckle! No biting, no eye-gouging! Everything else goes! Fight until one man can't continue!"
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He dropped his hand. "GET IT ON!"
Derek didn't hesitate. He let out a primal scream, lowered his head, and charged across the canvas with terrifying speed, his massive fists cocked to tear Cole’s head from his shoulders.
