Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

The crowd gasped. The sound of the impacts was sickening, the kind of heavy, wet thuds that broke ribs and ruptured organs. Any normal man, even a trained fighter, would have dropped to their knees in agony.

Elias simply exhaled a short, quiet breath. He hadn't moved an inch. His feet were seemingly glued to the asphalt. His posture remained unchanged—the slight hunch, the relaxed arms.

Jaxson stepped back, his eyes wide with disbelief. He looked at his gloved knuckles. They were stinging. It felt as though he had just spent thirty seconds punching a solid brick wall hidden beneath a denim jacket. He looked up at Elias's face, expecting to see a grimace of pain, a bead of sweat, a tear. There was nothing. Just that calm, dead-eyed stare, like a mountain looking at a thunderstorm.

"One minute down!" Marcus called out, his voice noticeably lacking its previous bravado.

Jaxson swallowed hard. The cameras were rolling. Millions of people would eventually see this. He was the undisputed champion, and he was failing to move a frail, sixty-eight-year-old farmer. Panic, cold and sharp, began to creep into the edges of Jaxson's mind. The illusion of his absolute power was beginning to crack.

"Stop holding back, Jaxson! Knock him down!" Marcus screamed, panic bleeding into his tone. The crowd had gone entirely silent. The festive, mocking atmosphere had evaporated, replaced by a dense, suffocating tension.

Jaxson gritted his teeth, his face flushing dark red with rage and humiliation. He abandoned all pretense of technique and showmanship. He bit down on his mouthpiece and charged forward with the pure, unadulterated violence that had won him world titles.

He threw a spinning back kick, his heel driving with thousands of pounds of force directly into Elias's midsection. The impact echoed across the square like a rifle shot. Dust exploded from Elias's old jacket.

Elias slid back exactly two inches. His boots left dark black skid marks on the hot asphalt. But he didn't fall. He didn't even bend. He just took another slow, measured breath, settling his weight back into his center.

Jaxson let out a roar of frustration and closed the distance, turning the encounter into a brutal, close-quarters brawl. He unleashed a horrifying barrage of knees, driving his kneecaps repeatedly into the farmer’s thighs and ribs. He rained down elbow strikes to the collarbones. He threw hooks so hard he was throwing his own shoulders out of alignment.

Inside Elias’s mind, the world had gone entirely quiet. The roar of the crowd, Jaxson’s frustrated grunts, the blaring heat of the sun—it all faded away. He was transported back forty years, standing in a flooded rice paddy, his grandmaster striking his body with bamboo poles wrapped in iron wire from sunrise to sunset. “Root like the ancient pine,” the old voice echoed in his memory. “Let the wind howl. Let the storm rage. The branches may snap, but the trunk remains.”

Elias was a master of Iron Shirt Qigong, a forgotten art of conditioning the fascia, muscles, and bones to withstand catastrophic trauma. More than that, his life of backbreaking labor had forged his body into something harder than steel. Jaxson was fighting a ghost, trying to break a man who had already been broken and reforged by time and tragedy.