The class was already running when she got there.
She pushed the door open and stood for a moment at the edge of the room.
The new class was small. Eight kids, maybe nine, ranging from what looked like eleven to fourteen, and they had the look of kids who wanted nothing more than to learn, have fun, and fight.
She watched him move between kids.
'It's good that the classes haven't gone to shit since we've been gone.' Inner Zoey said.
'The students we teach can be good teachers too. Do you think the skill does that or if its a natural thing? Since we teach like cheaters, our students are also a level above when teaching themselves?'
'How the fuck would I know, you crazy bitch?'
'I was just asking, bitch!'
'And I was just responding, bitch!'
She kept watching.
The girl at the second bag was working on her left hook. She watched her throw it twice. The third time it was different, a little tighter in the shoulder, better angle. Nobody had said anything. She'd adjusted on her own from the feel of the previous two.
The kid on the rope had quick legs that he didn't trip himself over.
She took another step inside.
Dylan was in the middle of demonstrating a slip for the kid in front of him, guiding the motion with his hand on the kid's shoulder. The class was locked on him. They watched him with stars in their eyes. There was a boy near the back who looked like he'd been waiting for this specific lesson his entire life. A girl in the second row was mouthing the steps along with the demonstration.
It was a good class. Dylan had taken over well while she'd been gone.
She was about to take a seat on the bench at the side and just watch the rest of the session when the kid nearest the door glanced over. He looked back down at his wraps. Then he looked back up. His brain realized who he was looking at.
He grabbed the arm of the kid next to him.
"Yo," he said.
"What?"
"Turn around."
"I'm listening to Mr. Wrath-"
"Turn. Around."
The kid turned around. His face did something complicated. Then his mouth opened.
"WAIT."
Dylan stopped mid-demonstration.
Every head in the room turned toward the door.
Nine children looked at Zoey. There was one full second of absolute silence where nobody moved and the whole class was just processing what their eyes were telling them. Then it broke.
"OH MY GOD."
"Is that… that's… THAT'S MISS DEVIL!"
"SHE'S REAL. I TOLD YOU SHE WAS REAL."
"I KNOW SHE'S REAL, I JUST DIDN'T THINK WE'D EVER-"
"Mr. Wrath told us she trained HERE but we never saw her!"
"He said she trained here all the time! You never listen!"
"MISS DEVIL IS IN THE GYM RIGHT NOW!"
Zoey looked at Dylan over the top of nine completely broken children. He was standing there with his demonstration pad still raised. He lowered it slowly. Knowing Zoey's fame, he isn't too surprised. This batch of students who came here to learn haven't even seen her yet. Just heard about her. Most of them signed up just because she originated from this gym and their parents were loaded enough to sign them up.
And now nine kids were crossing the gym toward her at a speed that said every thought about gloves and bags and drills had been completely erased.
"We watch all your fights," he said. "All of them. Mr. Wrath showed us the Birch match on the first day as like a warm-up introduction thing and I've seen it like eight times since then-"
"You're so much smaller than I thought," said a different kid, without any apparent awareness that this might be a thing not to say.
"Timmy."
"What? She is. She's like five-two."
"She can hear you saying that."
"I am shorter than the average girl." Zoey nodded. She wasn't really hung up about her height or anything. As a girl, less height was seen as a positive as far as she knew.
Timmy looked at her directly. He was maybe twelve and apparently had no fear whatsoever. "I can still think it though. You fight people who are way bigger than you. It's insane."
"That's kind of the whole thing," said the girl who had been in the second row. Her name was Amara, Zoey would learn later. "That's what makes it amazing to watch. Every fight you're the smaller one."
"I can't control my height." Zoey said.
"Right…"
The mob had fully surrounded her by now, questions coming from multiple directions at once. How did she get started. How long did it take to get good. Did Dylan ever give her trouble when he was in the class. What did it feel like to be in the ring with people twice your size. Did she remember the fight where she dropped Cassandra Hewitt in the second round because Timmy had memorized the exact round number and wanted to know if she remembered it.
Dylan had drifted to the edge of the room. He was watching with his arms crossed while giggling to himself.
She answered all of them.
They went back to work. Slightly more electrified than before, maybe, but they went. And for the next forty minutes she moved around while teaching here and there. One lesson or correction was all it really took with her teaching skill mastered. They never made the same mistake and they did even better than before, fixing a problem or doing something else that was good without her even mentioning it.
Dylan materialized at her shoulder during a water break. He had the gym bag she'd set down earlier.
"You've been here an hour," he said.
She took the bag. "I know."
"I'm not complaining."
"I know." She looked at the class. Maya was working on the hook again, patient and focused, throwing it and then pausing and thinking before throwing it again. "They're cute kids."
"Yeah." He sounded like he was trying not to sound proud of that. He didn't fully succeed. "You staying for the second half?"
She looked toward the hallway. Through the door she could see, just barely, the edge of someone's sneaker extended onto the floor.
"I've got people waiting," she said.
He followed her gaze. He nodded. "Go. I've got them."
She shouldered her bag. On her way out she stopped at the door and looked back at the class for a moment. They were moving through the drill Dylan had restarted, getting back into the rhythm they'd had before she walked in.
She walked to the hallway.
…
Jack was on the bench.
He was sitting with his phone in both hands. He'd grown again. He was going to be tall eventually, not quite there yet, but the direction was clear. The boy who had been round and large had been replaced by someone lean and serious-eyed with the kind of body that came from several months of real training. He still had the same face underneath it. The same calm.
He looked up when she came around the corner.
"Hey, Miss Devil."
"Hey, Jack."
"I saw you had the class going." He nodded toward the main room. "I didn't want to interrupt."
"You could've come in."
"I know." He wasn't embarrassed about it, just honest. "But I figured Cindy would show up any second and then it wouldn't really be your class anymore."
She looked at him.
He said, "Cindy wanted the kids to spar against her."
"Oh."
"They come at her one by one and she corrects their mistakes."
"Oh, that wouldn't be good."
"She thought it would help the kids learn to really fight."
"It would but no. These kids don't need to be taught like you two were."
"I told her, but Cindy is Cindy."
"Where is she?"
He lifted one hand and pointed. Down the hallway. Which meant Cindy had come in through the back door, found the class running, and decided to watch.
Zoey went down the hall and pushed the back door open.
Cindy was leaning against the outside wall with her arms crossed. She was in a training jacket and had her hair pulled back tight and there was a gym bag at her feet that she definitely did not need if she was just passing by to say hello.
"You came in through the back," Zoey said.
"The front was busy."
"Yeah, I was there."
"I saw you."
"Cindy."
Cindy's jaw shifted. She was quiet for a second. Then she looked at Zoey directly, really looked, and the irritation under her expression was just Cindy being Cindy but the thing under the irritation was just the actual girl, the one who had shown up at Zoey's gym at twelve years old and refused to be told no until someone listened. She wasn't twelve anymore. She also had not gotten significantly less stubborn.
"You're back," she said.
"I'm back."
A beat.
"Okay," she said.
Jack appeared in the doorway.
"Did she tell you about the training lesson?" he asked.
"These kids are nothing like our training class."
"Mr. Wrath teaches boxing. Miss Devil teaches five different styles of boxing and wrestling."
"I guess that makes sense. Plus there's what she taught us that fighting style that was never taught in class."
"Victorious Boxing. I call it Zoey's Victorious Boxing, but it feels a little embarrassing putting my name in front of it even if I did invent it."
"Zoey's Victorious Boxing..." Jack slowly mouthed it, finally having a name for the fighting style he's nearly died using.
"Zoey's Victorious Boxing!" Cindy liked the name.
"That fighting style isn't the safest…"
"Oh trust me, we know." Cindy grinned. She's had to bust more than a couple heads with it. Neither gender, nor size, or weapons really made much of a difference against Diablo!
"The only reason I taught you two was because you proved that you wouldn't misuse it. It's dangerous especially if put into the wrong hands."
"Thank you for your trust in us Miss Devil..." Jack couldn't help but feel gratitude.
"You two earned it. I wouldn't do this for just anyone." Zoey said.
'Not to mention they basically wrenched our hands behind our back getting involved in crime and shit. What were we supposed to do, just let them die while trying to follow their impossible dreams? Stupid fucking kids. Get a little power in them and they wanna be fucking superheroes. They're lucky we are who we are or they'd probably be dead already.' Inner Zoey grumbled.
Both of them stopped.
"Come inside," she said. "Tell me what's been going on."
They found the small office off the back hallway, barely a room, two chairs and a bench and the little whiteboard Coach used for fight planning and a mini-fridge in the corner that he'd insisted was for recovery purposes. Zoey sat on the bench. Jack took one of the chairs. Cindy didn't sit.
She started talking before Zoey was fully settled.
"Four major crimes stopped since you left," Cindy said. "Glutton wanted to stop at three."
"We agreed on three," Jack said. Just for the record. Not defensively.
"And then the fourth one came up. And I was right."
"The fourth one went sideways."
"We handled it."
"Mr. Theo had to send backup."
"We mostly handled it, and then backup arrived to finish handling it, which is a completely normal thing that happens in operations of that size when you're operating short-handed."
"That's a lot of excuses," Jack said.
"I'll give you an excuse if you keep pushing it." Cindy cracked her knuckles.
Zoey looked at Cindy. "Tell me the fourth one."
Cindy told her. All of it. Start to the part where it went sideways to the part where Prometheus's people showed up to clean up the rest.
Jack added things when Cindy moved past them too fast. She listened to all of it.
Poison's leftover people had tried to find the edges of Krey's new normal while she was gone. Small stuff first, testing whether her absence meant anything. It had not. Two operations to make that point clearly. A third to dismantle the last stubborn piece of it. And the fourth, which Jack had been cautious about and Cindy had pushed for, which had gone sideways in the middle when unexpected backup for the other side showed up.
They'd lived. Prometheus's people had handled the rest.
Krey was clean. Cleaner than it had been in a long time. The crime rate had dropped to something that made the city paper run articles about it. Leftovers from Ethan's gang was unable to sling their weight around Krey with Diablo and Glutton around. There were kids in Krey who dressed up as Glutton and Diablo. There were people who wrote to the city paper to say these kids were heroes. There were also people who wrote to say someone needed to stop these children from risking their lives, regardless of the results. That second group was also not wrong.
Cindy pulled out her phone and showed Zoey a photo. A hand-drawn card on yellow paper from what had to have been a seven-year-old, spelling aggressive and confident. It said something that was probably "THANK YOU DIABLO." The D was backwards.
"It's my lock screen," Cindy said with a rare soft smile on her face.
"It's cute."
"It's awesome."
"I understand." Zoey had Tink on her lock screen. If anyone asked about it, she'd just say it was AI.
Jack was smiling. He too had received some nice gifts from the people they protected and saved every once in a while.
There were also people writing angry letters. She'd seen some of them circulating on social media. Adults with reasonable concerns about children doing unreasonable things, however successfully. Jack, she could tell, had read every letter.
She didn't add anything to the letters. There was nothing useful she could say. She couldn't tell them to stop. You could not stop these two from doing what they'd decided to do. The best she could do was make sure they were ready.
"You both did good," she said.
Cindy's chin came up just slightly. "Obviously."
Jack said, "Thank you, Miss Devil."
She stood up. "Alright. Show me where you're at."
Cindy glanced at Jack. Jack glanced at Cindy. Then they both looked at her.
"Right now?" Cindy asked.
Zoey looked at the gym bag at Cindy's feet.
Cindy picked up the bag and slung it over her shoulder like that had been her plan the whole time. "I'm always prepared," she said.
…
They cleared the back room. Pushed the chairs aside, rolled the thin mat out from the corner, gave themselves space. Jack wrapped his hands. Cindy tightened her hair and bounced on her heels twice.
Zoey didn't tell them what she was looking for. She never did. You say what you want and you get a performance instead of just the person moving. She stepped into the space, looked at both of them, and waited.
One look between them. Then they came.
Not one at a time. They split. Cindy went to her left, Jack went to her right, and they moved in together.
Zoey rushed to Cindy, knowing aggression was her bread and butter. A grin was on her face, resembling Zoey's own Devil smile. She threw everything behind the right hand. Hips, legs, shoulder, all of it turning over into one committed shot aimed straight at Zoey's face.
Zoey matched it. Stepped in with her own right like she was going to meet Cindy head on, fist already turning over, and for a split second it looked like two people about to destroy each other at the same time.
Cindy bought it.
Zoey's fist never landed. The punch opened into a grab halfway through, catching Cindy's extended arm at the wrist while her other hand found the girl's waist. Cindy's weight was already forward from the punch. Zoey used every bit of it. She pulled and lifted and turned her hips and took them both off the mat, Cindy's feet leaving the ground before she understood what was happening, and then Zoey drove her down.
Cindy hit the mat back-first. The sound was flat and heavy. Her mouth opened but nothing came out because there was nothing left in her lungs to make noise with. Her eyes went wide, staring up at the ceiling, body locked in that half-second where the brain is still catching up to what just happened.
Zoey looked up.
Jack was already there. Already committed, fist coming down to catch her while she was still low over Cindy's body, still tangled in the aftermath of the slam. He'd waited for the exact moment she'd be hardest to move.
She rolled off Cindy to the side of Jack.
His fist stopped. Not because he couldn't finish the strike, but because Cindy was right there, gasping on the mat directly below where the punch was going. He pulled back. It cost him less than a second.
It cost him enough.
Zoey was already moving. She drove forward low, shoulder aimed at Jack's hips, arms reaching for the backs of his knees. A takedown.
Jack sprawled. His hips dropped, his legs kicked back, and his weight came down on top of her like a door slamming shut. His hands found her shoulders and pressed, flattening her against the mat, chest pinned, arms caught underneath his body. A perfect sprawl.
Zoey's face was against the mat. She could feel his weight across her back, his breathing above her, everything compressed and close. The position was bad. She smiled against the mat where neither of them could see it.
She let him have it for two seconds. Two full seconds where Jack's weight was on her back and his hands were on her head and everything about the position said he'd won this exchange. Two seconds was long enough for him to believe it. Long enough for his weight to settle, for his breathing to even out, for his body to commit to holding what he had.
Then she moved.
Her right hand found his wrist. Not a grab, just contact, fingers wrapping around the bone and pulling it offline by an inch. That inch shifted his base. His left hand pressed harder to compensate, which put more weight on that side, which was exactly what she wanted. She bumped her hips up once, fast, not trying to escape, just making him react. He drove his hips back down to keep her flat.
His hips came down. His chest came forward. For a quarter of a second his weight was high instead of spread.
She sat out.
Her legs kicked through, her hips turned, her free arm posted on the mat, and she spun out from underneath him so fast that his hands were still pressing down on a space she was no longer at. She didn't stop at the escape. The sit-out carried her around his side, her arm hooking across his waist on the way past, and by the time Jack realized she was gone from underneath him she was already behind him with her chest against his back and both arms locked around his midsection.
Jack tried to turn. She let him start it. Let him get halfway through the rotation before she loaded her hips and arched and threw him.
It wasn't a big slam. Didn't need to be. She just took his momentum, married it to hers, and redirected both into the mat. Jack hit on his side with a grunt, one arm still trying to post, and before he could figure out where she'd gone she'd already transitioned. One knee across his hip, one hand controlling his wrist, her weight settled on him the way a stone settles into water.
Mounted. Clean.
Jack stared up at her with a shocked look.
"I thought it was perfect, I had you…"
"You didn't follow-up like you should have and made sure I couldn't fight back." Then Zoey heard the nose of feet slapping.
She tried to roll off of Jack, but Jack held her tight. Zoey raised her head before smashing it against Jack's forehead, avoiding Cindy who was attempting to drop kick her in the back of the head, flying straight over her. They locked eyes when she caught herself. And Jack nearly snuck an elbow across her face if she didn't dodge in time.
'Should we punch him out like we would anyone else?' Inner Zoey asked.
'We can't. This is just a test to see their progress and to help them further.'
'But it doesn't make sense! Anyone would ground pound in a situation like this. By avoiding it, that won't help them learn!'
Zoey raised her fist, the motion that said she was about to punch the shit out of you. Jack instinctively felt the danger and put up his guard, giving Zoey the opportunity to get back onto her feet. After noticing her trick, Jack butt-scooted forward, nearly tripping Zoey when she tried to make distance. Giving Cindy the perfect opportunity to land a blow.
Zoey raised her guard.
Cindy didn't wait. She came forward like something had been let off a leash, fists crashing into Zoey's forearms one after the other, no pause between them, no breath wasted. She worked the arms to open the body, worked the body to bring the guard down, then came upstairs looking for the chin. When Zoey closed one door, Cindy was already knocking on the next one. When that door closed she kicked in a window. Every shot had teeth behind it.
Zoey watched with pride. The combinations were built from her. The rhythm was founded by her. The way Cindy loaded up on the left hook and let the right follow like it owed the left something, that was straight out of Zoey's own playbook, written into this girl's fists through years of repetition until it stopped being imitation and became real.
White and blonde and built nothing like her, and it didn't matter. That hunger behind every punch, that refusal to let the other person breathe, the look in her eyes that said she wasn't going to stop until something broke or someone made her? That was Zoey's. She'd given that to Cindy and she built off of it and made it her own.
Jack was up. She saw him moving in from the right, shaking out his wrists, already reading where to slot in. Cindy knew it too. She stepped closer, cutting the distance, refusing to give Zoey room to breathe or reposition.
Jack came in and suddenly it was four fists instead of two, and Zoey stopped blocking and started something else entirely.
The shift was small enough that most people wouldn't have seen it. Her stance changed by inches. Weight moved to the balls of her feet. Her hands came up but looser now, not the tight guard she'd been holding against Cindy's barrage, something more open, more alive. Her head started moving.
Cindy threw a straight right. Zoey's head wasn't there. It had gone left, just enough, the punch sliding past her ear close enough to feel the wind. Jack followed with a hook from the other side. Her head went the other direction. Not far. Never far. Just enough that the fist kissed air instead of skin.
Cindy came again. Left hook, right straight, left to the body. Zoey caught the hook on her forearm, let the straight slip past her shoulder, and the body shot she just took. Ate it clean on the ribs, let Cindy's knuckles sink in, and used the contact to read where the next punch was coming from. Cindy loaded up the follow-up and Zoey was already gone, rolling off the impact into a position neither of them expected.
Jack tried to cut her off. He threw a jab to pin her down, then a cross behind it. The jab hit her guard and she tilted it, deflecting the force sideways so the cross had nothing to build on. He reset and tried again. Same result. Third time he committed harder on the cross and Zoey let it land on her shoulder, absorbing the impact through the rotation of her body so by the time the force reached anything important it had nothing left.
Then she cracked him with a right. Short, sharp, right on the nose. His head snapped back and blood started before he could blink. His eyes watered and his guard came up on instinct, which left his body wide open. She buried a hook into his liver before he finished flinching from the first one. He folded sideways, caught himself, kept standing. Barely.
Cindy came in harder.
Zoey's head was moving again. Not the same pattern. Never the same pattern. It rolled and dipped and shifted in sequences that didn't repeat, that didn't give either of them a rhythm to time. Cindy threw three punches in a row and every single one found empty space. She cursed under her breath and threw a fourth. Zoey weaved under it and drove a hook deep into Cindy's ribs on the way back up. Something shifted under the impact. Cindy's breath came out in a sound that wasn't a word and her knees almost went but she caught herself and kept coming because she was Cindy and quitting wasn't something her body knew how to do.
They were working. Both of them throwing real combinations, cutting off angles, trying to box her in between them. Jack would come from one side and Cindy from the other and for a second it looked like they had her trapped. Then she'd move. Not far. A half step, a pivot, a shift in weight that put her somewhere the geometry of their attack couldn't reach.
She wasn't running. That was the thing. She wasn't covering distance or circling away or doing anything that looked like retreat. She was right there, close enough to touch, close enough that every punch either of them threw felt like it should land. And none of them did. Or the ones that did landed on her terms, on the parts of her body she chose, deflected or absorbed or turned into nothing.
Cindy was breathing harder. Jack was too, but Jack managed it better, kept his composure, kept his combinations short and smart. Cindy's were getting wider. More committed. She was pouring more into each shot because the lighter ones weren't getting through, and every ounce of extra effort she spent was energy she wasn't getting back.
Zoey came off a weave and caught Cindy with an uppercut that lifted her onto her toes. Her eyes went glassy for half a second before something behind them hardened again and she planted her feet and swung back.
Jack reset. He tried something different, a feint low followed by a quick overhand. It was well-disguised. Zoey didn't dodge it. She caught it on her forearm, angling the bone so the impact ran straight back into Jack's fist. His knuckles hit hard against a surface that didn't give, and the shock of it ran up his wrist into his arm. He pulled the hand back and shook it out without thinking.
She hit him with a counter while he was shaking it. A right hand square on the jaw that turned his whole head and put a sound in the room like a bag getting hit off the chain. His legs went stupid for a step. He recovered, reset his feet, and came back in because Jack didn't stop either.
Both of them were slower now. Not dramatically, not visibly to someone watching from outside, but Zoey could feel it in the timing of their punches, in the extra half-beat between combinations, in the way Cindy's feet were heavier on the mat than they'd been two minutes ago. They were spending energy and taking damage. She wasn't.
That was the whole point.
"Alright. That's enough." Zoey put a stop to it before she got too into it.
"That was Defensive Boxing form wasn't it?" Jack asked, already knowing the answer.
Zoey nodded.
"I never knew it was so cool! What the heck, Miss Devil!? You took on both of us at the same time without any problem! If I knew DB form could do that, I wouldn't have…
"I didn't know it was so effective either… I only used it when I was forced to or really hurt. I didn't think it could be so good at protecting you and dealing with opponents." Jack muttered, pulling out a small notebook and jotting something down.
"I can give you a refresher if you need on the different forms." Zoey offered as she went to get some medical supplies for their injuries.
"Yes, please!" Cindy offered for them. She was fighting without even knowing the full extent of her fighting style! That was totally embarrassing and unacceptable!
"Offensive. Defensive. Balanced. Playful. All-out." She looked between them. "You saw Defensive tonight. That's what I used when it was both of you on me at once. I wasn't trying to hurt you. I was trying to make you spend everything you had while I spent nothing, and then I hurt you when you were empty."
"It worked," Jack said quietly.
"Playful is the one that's going to piss you off when I show you," Zoey continued. "No stance. No structure. Looks like nothing. The whole point is the other person can't read you because there's nothing to read."
Cindy frowned. "That sounds like bullshit."
"It does until someone using it hits you three times while you're still trying to figure out where their hands are."
Cindy's frown deepened, which meant she was interested.
"All-out," Zoey said, and her voice changed just slightly. Not louder. Flatter. "That one's not for the ring. Headbutts, grabs, strikes to the knees, hitting someone when they're down, whatever it takes. No rules. Nothing off limits. It's the ugliest form and it's the one that keeps you alive when everything else falls apart."
The room was quiet for a second.
"You taught us pieces of that," Jack said. He wasn't writing anymore. "Back when things got bad in Krey. Some of the grabs, the dirty stuff. I didn't know it was a whole form."
"Now you do."
Cindy pushed off the wall. "When do we start?"
"Tomorrow. I'm going to run you through all five, one at a time, until you can switch between them without thinking about it." She looked at Cindy. "You're going to hate Defensive."
"Probably."
"And you're going to learn it anyway."
Cindy almost smiled. "Probably."
Zoey looked at Jack. "You're going to struggle with All-out. It's going to feel wrong to you."
Jack's pen stopped. He met her eyes. "I'll learn it."
"I know you will." She stood up and tossed the first aid kit back under the bench. "You're both better than when I left," Zoey said. "By a lot." She paused. "I'm proud of you."
Cindy looked at the wall.
Jack said, quietly, "Thank you, Miss Devil."
"Now go home."
Cindy smiled before she left. The back door swung shut behind her.
Jack was the last one out. He moved slowly. He got to the door and turned back to look at her.
"It's good to have you back," he said.
She nodded. "Get out of here. Tomorrow is gonna hurt."
He got out of there.
[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 Lv2]