Trent was twenty-four years old, aggressively and unnaturally tanned, and smelled violently of aerosol body spray and cheap cologne. He wore sleek black board shorts and intricately wrapped hand tape. He was bouncing lightly on his toes, throwing lightning-fast, snapping jabs at the empty air. A sharp snap-snap echoed audibly as his punches broke the stagnant, heavy air of the tavern.
Trent ran a modern, overpriced martial arts gym two towns over. He had acquired three amateur MMA belts, sported a thick tribal tattoo wrapping around his right bicep, and possessed the kind of loud, unearned, arrogant confidence that made Clayton’s stomach physically churn—not with fear, but with a deep, bone-weary exhaustion. Trent was a predator playing with herbivores. He came here on Fridays not for sport, but for ego. He preyed on drunken farm boys, beating them senseless to inflate his own sense of superiority.
"Three minutes!" Trent shouted to the raucous crowd, his voice cracking slightly with the high of adrenaline and vanity. "Anyone who can last just three minutes in here with me gets five hundred bucks cold, hard cash! Who wants it? Or are all you country boys just good at shoveling dirt?"
The crowd grumbled, a mix of drunken bravado and common sense keeping them glued to their stools. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money, but Trent had already sent two men to the local clinic with fractured orbitals and shattered noses. The price of admission was simply too high.
Clayton stared at the five hundred dollars. Trent held the crisp hundred-dollar bills up like a jagged, green flag. It wasn't a prize; it was bait. But to Clayton, it wasn't bait either. It was an alternator. It was a harvested crop. It was survival.
Clayton set his glass down on the bar. The click of the heavy bottom against the wood was soft, but to Clayton, it sounded like a hammer dropping. He turned and began walking toward the center of the room. The crowd parted around him, a silent ripple in a rowdy pond. They knew Clayton. They knew he was a quiet man who kept to his acres and minded his own business. They also knew he was a veteran, though the specifics of his service were shrouded in the polite, unspoken boundary line of small-town gossip.
"I'll take the three minutes," Clayton said, his voice cutting through the ambient noise not with volume, but with a chilling, absolute stillness.
Trent stopped bouncing. He turned to look at the man who had spoken, a condescending smirk spreading across his face. He took in Clayton’s greased-stained clothes, the heavy work boots, the graying hair at his temples, and the weary slope of his shoulders. To Trent, Clayton looked like a walking punching bag, a relic of a bygone era, an old man who had had one too many drinks and completely lost his mind.
"Old man," Trent laughed, turning to the crowd. "You sure you don't want to go back to your rocking chair? I don't want to be responsible for breaking a hip tonight. Insurance at my gym is high enough as it is."
The crowd chuckled, but the laughter was uneasy. There was something in Clayton's eyes that didn't match the joke. They were calm, vast, and hauntingly empty, resembling deep water flowing silently over jagged, ancient rocks. There was no anger, no bravado, no ego. Just a profound, terrifying emptiness.
"Five hundred," Clayton repeated, stepping onto the edge of the blue mats. "Three minutes. That's the deal."
Rusty pushed his way to the front of the crowd, looking deeply troubled. "Clayton, come on now. You don't need to do this. The boy is fast. He’s trained. You’re..."