The arena hadn't cald down yet.
Zoey stood in her corner with the ropes against her back, her chest rising and falling in a relaxed state. Fighting against another fighter with regular human strength…
She loved it.
Coach Scott was in her face saying sothing she couldn't hear over the noise. Zack was behind him, clapping, his mouth moving.
'That was the funnest fight we've had since falling from space,' Inner Zoey said.
'It was aweso.'
'Just straight up boxing shits.'
The referee ca over and raised her hand. The crowd split down the middle like it always did. Half of them scread her na with a hunger that bordered on worship. The other half booed with venom.
Zoey kept the Devil's face on. The slight upward curl of her lips. The half-lidded eyes that made her look bored even when her heart was hamring.
Across the ring, Yuki was being helped to her corner by her team. Her girlfriend had climbed the barrier and was holding her glove with both hands, tears still on her face. Coach Reyes was checking Yuki's eyes with a small flashlight.
Zoey watched her for a mont.
Yuki Tanaka fought like soone who deserved better than what Zoey gave her in the second round. The fake glove touch, the head gas, the whispered taunts during the clinch. That was all Devil shit. Stage shit. But the third round, when Yuki ca out with those dead-set eyes and threw that wild straight right into Zoey's face, when she ate Zoey's left hook and stayed on her feet for as long as she did, when she scread and threw both hands with nothing left in her body but the refusal to quit...
'She gave us everything she had at the end there,' Inner Zoey admitted.
'Yeah, that was pretty cool.'
…
The post-fight interview setup at the Olympic Trials was nothing like the FTL. No elaborate stage, no dramatic lighting, no Angelica orchestrating every cara angle. Just a small area near the ring apron with a woman holding a microphone, a caraman, and a logo backdrop that said ARIKAN BOXING in red, white, and blue.
Zoey kept the Devil on. She sat on a provided stool because she was too short for the interviewer to hold the microphone at a comfortable angle while standing.
"Zoey, congratulations on advancing to the next round. You just defeated Yuki Tanaka by TKO in the third round in what many are calling the best fight of the entire trials so far. How are you feeling right now?"
"Pretty fun." One word. The Devil didn't ramble.
"Can you walk us through your mindset going into the third round? After the controversy in the second round with the glove touch, there were a lot of people questioning whether you were taking this tournant seriously or treating it as entertainnt."
"Every fight is entertainnt to ." Zoey's voice was flat. "Yuki Tanaka allowed
to enjoy our fight a little bit more."
"Speaking of Tanaka, she ca out in round three looking like a completely different fighter. Did that surprise you?"
"Yes." She could feel the caras hanging on the silence. "After her performance at the end of the first round and the entire second round, I thought of her as trash. A worthless fighter who should’ve never made it this far. Then she changed my mind in the third round."
A murmur went through the crowd still lingering near the interview area. Several people wearing Yuki Tanaka shirts who had been glaring at her since she sat down exchanged glances.
"You just said Yuki Tanaka changed your mind. Can you explain your words?"
"Before tonight, I thought she was prey." The words landed on the crowd like a cold splash of water. Several Yuki fans bristled. "I didn’t watch any of her previous fights. But in that first round I saw a pressure fighter who never had to deal with soone who could pressure her back. I figured she would break the mont things stopped going her way."
The interviewer's eyebrows rose, ready for the insult, the dismissal, the classic Devil cruelty.
"I was wrong."
Dead silence from the Tanaka fans.
"She broke in the second round and put herself back together in the third." Zoey's eyes found one of the caras. "Yuki Tanaka earned my respect tonight. She may not be the strongest fighter, but she certainly has a strong spirit."
The Devil's fans cheered because their girl was talking. The Tanaka fans, so of them, felt the tight knot in their chests loosen by a fraction. They'd braced themselves for humiliation. They'd watched Zoey mock opponents on live television before, watched her grin while people bled, watched her break a man's leg and laugh about it. They were ready for the worst.
They got sothing they didn't know what to do with.
"One more question, Zoey. After tonight's performance, where does your head go? What's next for you in these trials?"
Zoey leaned back on the stool and crossed her arms. The Devil's grin crept across her face slowly, like a crack spreading through glass.
"Overall? Gold, I guess." She shrugged.
The interviewer blinked. "Oh, you already see yourself at the Olympics finals?"
"Who else would I be seeing?" Zoey glared at her.
The interviewer looked at the caraman. The caraman looked at the interviewer. Neither of them had any idea what to do with that.
"That's, uh, that's certainly a bold statent, Zoey."
"If anyone wants to prove
wrong." Zoey hopped off the stool. "Be my guest." She flashed a smile.
She walked away from the interview area without being dismissed. Angelica was waiting for her near the tunnel with her phone already in her hand, typing furiously.
"Did you do that on purpose?" Angelica said without looking up from her phone.
"Did what?"
"Said sothing nice about Tanaka so the headline wouldn't be the glove touch and then imdiately followed it with sothing insane so the headline wouldn't be the nice thing either."
"Nah, it just fit the scene."
"You're trending in fourteen countries."
"Cool." Zoey kept walking toward the locker room.
Zoey pushed open the locker room door and sat down on the bench. Alone for the first ti since before the fight. The sounds of the arena were muffled through the walls, distant and unimportant. She peeled off her gloves with her teeth, one at a ti, and laid them beside her. Then she unwrapped her hands slowly, letting the tape fall in loose spirals onto the floor.
Her knuckles were red. She flexed her fingers and winced at the stiffness. It was a good pain. The kind of pain that ca from doing sothing well with everything you had.
Three days later, a notification from a sports journalism outlet popped up on Yuki Tanaka's phone.
She was on her couch with an ice pack pressed to the side of her face that still throbbed when she chewed too hard. Her girlfriend was asleep with her head in Yuki's lap, one hand still loosely gripping the remote. The television was playing so cooking competition show that neither of them were watching.
The notification was a ssage request from a reporter at ABS, one of the bigger sports networks. She opened it out of habit.
Ms. Tanaka, we'd love to get your response to Zoey Winters's post-fight comnts regarding your match. She made several notable statents about you that have been trending across social dia for the past 72 hours. Would you be available for a brief phone or video interview at your earliest convenience?
Yuki stared at the ssage.
She'd avoided watching the post-fight interview. She'd avoided social dia entirely since the fight, which was a first for her. Her girlfriend had taken both their phones for the first full day and hidden them sowhere Yuki still hadn't found. By the ti she got her phone back, the worst of the initial reactions had already cycled through and what remained was... different from what she expected.
She'd expected the usual post-loss noise. The sympathetic ssages from friends. The "you'll get her next ti" posts from fans who ant well but didn't really know what to say. The trolls who showed up like clockwork to kick you while you were down.
What she got instead was a flood of ssages about sothing Zoey Winters had said.
Yuki had pieced it together from context clues in her DMs without actually watching the clip. Zoey had apparently called her prey before the fight and then admitted she was wrong. Said Yuki earned her respect.
She hadn't been able to bring herself to watch it.
Not because she was upset. Well, she was upset. She lost. That was going to sting for a while. Reshaping how she trained and thought and approached everything for the next year. But she wasn't devastated. She wasn't broken.
She lost to the best fighter she'd ever faced. There was no sha in it. There was only the question of what ca next.
Yuki typed a reply to the reporter.
I can do a video call tomorrow afternoon. Send
the details.
She set her phone down and looked at the ceiling. Her girlfriend shifted in her sleep, murmuring sothing that wasn't words.
The fight replayed in her head for the thousandth ti. Round one, the excitent, the exchanges, the mont she realized this girl hit differently from anyone she'd ever faced. Round two, the fake glove touch, the fear, the sha of the clinch, the way her body had stopped listening to her brain. Round three, her girlfriend's voice cutting through everything. The snap. The decision. Coming out and throwing that straight right knowing it might be the last punch she threw in the fight and not caring because at least it would be honest.
Zoey hit her with a left hook that she still couldn't fully rember. The next thing she knew, she was on the canvas.
'I was up at seven,' Yuki reminded herself. It was a fact she needed to hold onto. She'd gotten up. Her legs crossed and her vision blurred, but she'd gotten up, and she'd kept fighting until the referee decided she couldn't anymore.
Yuki closed her eyes.
"I'll beat you," she said quietly to the ceiling. Her girlfriend didn't stir. "I don't know when. I don't know how long it'll take." Her ribs ached in response, as if reminding her of the work ahead. "And the next ti we're in a ring together, I won't be scared." She opened her eyes and reached for her phone again.
The next afternoon, Yuki sat in front of her laptop with the cara on. Her girlfriend was off-screen but close, sitting on the bed just out of fra because she refused to leave the room during anything that involved Zoey Winters, even if it was just talking about her. She hated her. The reporter's face filled the other half of the screen.
"Yuki, thank you so much for making ti for this. How are you recovering?"
"Good. Sore. My face looks worse than it feels." She managed a small laugh. The bruising under her left eye had turned a spectacular shade of purple that her girlfriend had described as "eggplant chic."
"I'm glad to hear it. So, I'm sure you've seen at least so of the coverage around Zoey Winters's post-fight comnts. She said, and I'm quoting, 'Yuki Tanaka earned my respect tonight.' She also said she initially thought you were, quote, 'prey,' but changed her mind after the third round. What's your reaction to all of that?"
Yuki took a breath. She'd thought about this. She'd had three days to think about it, which was probably too long, but she wanted to say the right thing. Not for Zoey. Not for the caras. For herself.
"Honestly? I'm mad." A pause. "Not at what she said. That was... surprisingly respectful, coming from her." Another pause. "I'm mad that I lost."
"Can you elaborate on that?"
"I trained for months for that fight. I studied her fights obsessively. I had a ga plan that I believed in, and my coaches believed in, and for about two minutes of round one, it was working. We were having a real fight. I was landing, she was landing, and I thought, okay. I can do this."
Yuki's hands were clasped in front of her on the desk. She looked down at them.
"And then she asked
if I was scared, and I realized I was. That's the part I'm mad about. Not that she hit . Not that she tricked
with the glove touch. Those are things fighters do. I'm mad that I let her get in my head so badly that I forgot I was a fighter for an entire round."
"What about the third round? A lot of people, including the Devil herself, have praised the way you ca back out."
"I don't want to be praised for doing what I should be doing as a fighter." Yuki's jaw tightened. "I ca out in the third round and threw everything I had, and it wasn't enough. It felt like enough. It felt like I was doing sothing real for the first ti in the fight. But she still got . She still hit
harder. And she still put
down."
"So what's next for you?"
"Training. More training. Different training." Yuki looked directly into the cara. "I'm twenty-two years old. My career isn't over because I lost one fight. The way I see it, Zoey Winters just showed
exactly how far I have to go and exactly what I need to work on. That's valuable. I'd rather lose to the best and learn from it than beat soone average and learn nothing."
"And if you faced the Devil again?"
Yuki didn't hesitate. "I'd win."
The reporter smiled. Yuki didn't.
"That's not bravado," Yuki clarified. "I'm not saying I could beat her tomorrow. I'm saying I will work until I can. She took my best in round three and she still knocked
out. That ans my best isn't good enough yet." She unclenched her hands. "Yet is the important word."
Off-screen, her girlfriend quietly pumped a fist. Yuki didn't see it, but she felt the shift in the bed from the movent and had to fight the small smile threatening to ruin her serious interview face.
"One last question, Yuki. Zoey also said during her interview that she wants gold. As soone who just fought her, what do you think about that?"
Yuki thought about it for longer than was comfortable on cara.
"I think," she said slowly, "she has the greatest shot out of any other woman in Arika."
Three thousand miles away, in a gym that slled like iron and rubber and old sweat, Zoey Winters watched the clip of Yuki's interview on her phone while sitting on a weight bench. Her hair was up. Her wraps were on. She'd been in the middle of shadowboxing when Angelica sent her the link with three words: watch this now.
She watched Yuki say "yet" and laughed.
'Haha, she’ll never beat us in this lifeti,' Inner Zoey thought.
'Maybe if we were blindfolded with one arm tied behind our back?' Zoey tried to guess.
'Still wouldn’t be enough.' Inner Zoey utterly refused the idea of losing to a normal human.
'Hah. Not in this lifeti, but it's cute that she thinks she can.'
Zoey smiled at her phone.
Then she put her phone away, stood up, and got back to work.
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