58. Fighting My Former Coach

Fighting My Former Coach

Over the past week and a half, I had been shot, stabbed, clawed, and bitten by mutated magical zombies.

I had been splattered with acid, burned, submerged in molten asphalt and metal, cursed, blasted by magic, and even struck by lightning.

The old man’s punch hit harder than all of that.

It sent me flying through several trailers, snapped a power pole, and finally scraped me face-first across thirty meters of asphalt.

I stood, spat out asphalt and a little blood, and tried to shake the dizziness loose.

“See, that’s always been your problem,” I growled as my jaw reset itself with a sound like chalk breaking. “You never acted like an adult. You only ever knew how to talk with your fists.”

I flew upward and approached him cautiously.

That punch had been far beyond anything he had thrown in years.

“Violence is part of life, little girl,” he shot back, wearing a smug smile that almost made me lose my temper completely.

“Conflict and hardship separate people from cowards. They help people grow into the best versions of themselves.”

He stared at me, his narrowed eyes almost piglike in that fleshy face.

“I taught you boxing for years. What do you have to complain about?”

“No.” I spat the word and immediately released an invisible spike of kinetic force. “Everything I accomplished, I accomplished because of me. Not you.”

I accelerated downward, waited until he braced for the impact, then instantly jumped behind him and kicked him with both feet between the shoulder blades, throwing him off balance.

“Dressing abuse up as training does not make you a teacher.”

He recovered quickly.

Faster than I expected.

In the blink of an eye, his enormous hands caught my legs and smashed me into the ground.

Then a brutally powerful kick drove agony through my abdomen and launched me bouncing and skidding a hundred meters across the ground.

The lingering pain and the sound of bones grinding as my regeneration repaired them meant at least a few ribs were broken. Possibly worse.

A giant fist came down like a bullet.

I barely got my arms up in time to block. They creaked and scraped under the force.

I tried to counter, but the moment I moved, his other hand seized the back of my head and slammed my face into his rising knee, flattening my nose and blurring my vision.

“If you had actually learned the martial arts I taught you during those lessons,” he said, looking down at me, “you wouldn’t charge at a target like a lunatic and get exactly this predictable result.”

The bastard actually had the nerve to sound disappointed.

Before his next attack landed, I jumped away through space and flew upward.

Higher and higher, until he looked like an especially disgusting ant.

Then I dove.

Proximal Manipulation, Force Adjustment, Forced Acceleration, and Earth’s gravity combined to make me more lethal than a heavy artillery shell.

To make sure he could not block, dodge, or pull some last-second martial-arts trick, I used Instant Action and punched his fat, useless face during normal time.

The impact blasted a crater into the ground, covering everything within a hundred meters in dirt, dust, and shattered bedrock.

Then came pain.

Disorienting, mind-numbing agony erupted from my left arm.

What had once been my left arm.

The collision had turned it into a mangled, bleeding limb that hung uselessly while my regeneration slowly struggled to heal it.

Worse, when the dust cleared, the old man appeared with only a broken nose and a little blood on his face.

Aside from that, my effort had barely done him any obvious harm.

“Lesson two for today, little girl,” he told me, smiling wider now, revealing a chipped tooth.

“The human skull is one of the hardest parts of the body. Sure, the reward is good if you can break it, but if all you’ve got is your hand, chances are your hand breaks before the other person’s head does.”

“How the hell are you this strong?” I asked while dodging several casual swings, staying…