Chapter 3: The Ghost on the Screen

“What the hell is that?” Derek muttered, the sheer absurdity of the audio momentarily short-circuiting his rage.

On the dropped screen, a five-sided steel cage bathed in blinding, surgical white light was visible to anyone standing near the steps. Inside that cage, a younger, harder version of me—hair braided tight against my scalp, wearing black four-ounce leather gloves—stood entirely motionless over the crumpled, unconscious body of a former Olympic judoka.

Derek’s wife, Jessica, had rushed down the steps. She looked at the iPad, looked at my face, and the blood drained entirely from her cheeks, leaving her the color of bleached parchment.

“Derek…” Jessica breathed, her voice trembling violently. “Derek, let go of her. Let go of her right now.”

“Shut up, Jess!” Derek spat, his grip tightening on my wrist, his ego refusing to yield in front of his father and his cousins. “It’s a viral marketing gimmick! You think this phony internet garbage means anything in the real world? Look at her. Mass moves mass. I could snap her arm before she even blinks.”

I slowly lifted my chin.

The soft, accommodating tilt of my head evaporated completely. My posture shifted by half an inch: hips aligning under my shoulders, core engaged, feet rooting into the damp turf beneath my leather sandals like iron anchors. The eyes that looked into Derek’s were no longer those of a family guest.

“You should have listened to your wife, Derek,” I said softly.

My voice possessed a lethal, flat weight that caused the fine hairs on the back of Derek’s sunburnt neck to instantly stand erect. A flicker of primal panic flared in his bloodshot eyes.

“Try it, little girl—” he began.

He never finished the sentence.

From the iPad on the grass, the commentator’s voice reached a fever pitch: “Watch her leverage! The transition is invisible!”

Force does not oppose force; force redirects mass.

Before the electrical signal from Derek’s brain could translate into a muscle contraction, my right forearm executed a crisp, microscopic rotation. I drove my radius bone in a violent, clockwise arc directly against the weakest structural point of human anatomy: the small seam between his thumb and index finger.

POP.

The mechanical leverage broke his crushing hold as easily as peeling dry scotch tape from glass. Derek’s eyes dilated in sudden, disoriented shock as his thick fingers slipped through empty air.

Step. Pivot. Fulcrum.

I drove my right foot forward, planting my sandal deep between his heavy work boots, sealing off his ability to step back. In the very same kinetic burst, my hip loaded flush against his pelvic bone, dropping my center of gravity four inches below his beltline. My left hand whipped behind his thick neck, establishing a deep collar tie, while my right leg swept backward against his shins like an iron scythe.

It was a textbook, world-class Harai Goshi—the sweeping hip throw.

Two hundred and thirty pounds of bone, muscle, and inflated ego became completely weightless across the axis of my hip. Derek’s boots left the turf. His heavy barbecue tongs flew into the bushes. His massive frame traced a clean, parabolic arc through the air above my shoulder.

BOOM.

The impact was concussive. Derek slammed back-first into the pine deck boards with a bone-rattling crash that rattled the legs of the smoker and knocked every single cubic inch of oxygen out of his lungs in a wet, hollow wheeze.

But a king does not fall without his knights.

Before I could even transition to the ground, a roar of misplaced masculine pride erupted from the right. Two of Derek’s cousins—Brad and Kyle, both built like amateur rugby players—lunged off the deck stairs, rushing me simultaneously. They thought they were rescuing their alpha. They thought they were jumping a defenseless woman.

They were stepping into a woodchipper.

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