Undercover Badge; Next Generation

Chapter Thirty

When I slammed into the ground in the Cavalier's back yard, I swore my ribs had shattered. I coughed from somewhere deep inside, my lungs feeling like they were filled with ice and I spent precious few seconds that felt like hours trying to breath in when my lungs wouldn't let me. The effect was startlingly like being asphyxiated. Drowning on dry land.

High pitched wheezes accompanied it, and I laid my forehead down on the dusty earth. Behind me, Matthew gave a disappointed "hurrumph", and I could feel his disapproval in burn my skin.

He hadn't been lying. That morning when Matthew woke me up, it wasn't the Matthew I was used to or liked that had climbed on top of be and began choking me first thing.

I turned onto my back, still wheezing, my extremities all shaking when I tried to sit up, my incessant coughing not having stopped. He stood over me, his feet in a widened stance and large arms crossed, disapproval coming off of him in waves.

In spite of him choking me this morning, we'd started off at a good place.

When I'd seen him on top of me, his hands on my throat, I'd somehow been able to keep myself calm and just stared at him, my eyebrow arching in question. He'd sighed at me, the first of many to come that Sunday, clearly unimpressed by my lack of an impressive move to get him off of me. By the time we'd left the house at seven thirty AM that morning, we had already gotten seven calls from community checking in on us, Tommy and the house. Walking past the destroyed front door reminded me of how serious the situation was.

"You need to get up faster. And you need to plant your feet. You're too light on them. You make yourself easy to throw over." He said, voice still toneless and aggravated, frustrated.

"No." I said, my tone filling with sarcasm and sounding like my vocal chords had been sandpapered. "What makes me easy to throw over is the two-hundred and fifty pound, seven foot tall dude that threw me over his shoulder. How the hell do you not get vertigo from up there?" I snapped. He grunted.

"Two ten and six foot three, actually." He muttered, sounding mildly offended. The slitted glare I sent him seemed to just fall off of him. When we'd gotten into the cold air this morning, I'd been freezing. Now I was sweating profusely and when I looked to the side, I could legitimately see steam coming off my skin in the cold air.

"You're a douche." I snapped, wiping my nose on the back of my wrist before getting into standing again. I had dirt on my back, side, in my hair and now on my front. My ribs were bruised to hell and I'd bashed my elbows and knees at least a dozen times.

Sparring wasn't much better.

The way fighters tend to deal with confrontation can be picked from about three ways.

Sparring was the act of trading blows; punches, kicks, knees, elbows, etcetera. Boxers tended to use this technique. Success in using the strategy, however, often revolved around some kind of trade off between the two opponents. For example, the opponents could be equal in power, speed and skill. Or one opponent could be powerful and the other fast, one could be skilled but the other with higher stamina. The point was that you needed to have something over your opponent and the ability to use that to your advantage; be it to incapacitate or till surrender or aid arrives, or until something else changes the nature of the confrontation. The problem here was that Matthew was bigger, stronger and had for more skill than me. He also had the advantage of being faster. My problem, I realised was that I thought too much. I took too long planning things out, trying to predict his movement. I wanted to bide my time, dancing away from him to give myself space and time to think. Matthew spotted that weakness and obliterated it, storming me like a tank on rocket fuel and taking away my only advantage- speed and light-footedness –and forcing me into the type of confrontation he was built to win.