Nathan Weed vs. Kozue Kaburagi - First Strike: Standard Match

This wasn't the end. Kozue could recover from this. She could get back in the fight. Far from done.

That's what she was telling herself, at least. On the outside, though, it was a little less believable.

One botched move shouldn't spell the end for her, but if there was a way to recoup, it wasn't showing itself at the moment. Nathan was no dummy - the man knew how to capitalize on an opportunity when it presented itself. As soon as she was up, he was on her again, pushing her in the corner and slamming her home.

At the moment, all she could do was drape on the ropes, hang on, and get ready for whatever Nathan was gearing up for. But she'd keep her eyes open. An opportunity had to pop up, sooner or later, and when it did, she'd snatch it quick.

Kozue’s body, arms draped as they were over the ropes in the corner, read “vulnerable.” Her eyes, though, carried more than enough life in them to make up for the rest of her; the fight was far from over. Nathan reared back his hand.

Truth be told, he still felt a little brutal unloading like this. Oh, his trainer had thoroughly beaten that initial hesitation out of him, so he wasn’t underequipped to fight. But a tiny sector of the furthest reaches of his brain was still afraid that this was all an elaborate test of his character, and that he’d failed. It’s something he thought about every once in a while, in between chapters, maybe, or during loading screens. Or sometimes at night before he fell asleep.

During fights, though, Nathan had learned to suppress these types of thoughts. If he hadn’t, then Nathan might have hesitated to twist at the waist and drive another uppercut into the same spot on her stomach. But he did learn, and he didn’t hesitate; best to work a boulder at its cracks.

Sometimes Kozue wondered if guys were taking it easy on her. If, on the rare occasions they did manage to land a solid blow, she was getting the real product and not a watered down substitue. It was impossible to say for sure, either way, but she often suspected there was a part of them that didn't want to bash in the skull of the lithe girl in hot pants.

Nathan, however, didn't seem to have any such hangup. If he did and he was just hiding it well, Kozue was eternally greatful he was doing it, because she didn't want to take a harder blow than that last punch.

He knew where to place it, too. Her stomach was still reddened and ripe for abuse, and when his punch landed she immediately folded over, grasping her gut as if she needed to stop her intestines from falling spilling out.

Kozue leaned back against the turnbuckle, and if it wasn't there, she would've certainly fallen on her ass. As it was, she was still standing. Even if her body didn't feel like it.

"Hey." Kozue spit off to the side and smirked. "That as hard as you can go?"

A good belly punch, besides hurting real good, made targets double over, become incapacitated, and become open to all sorts of things that they didn’t want to be open to. As a result, people tended to work very hard to not get hit there. Luckily for most, it’s in an easy enough location to defend; the stomach sits square in the middle of the body, and a quick lift of the knee or drop of the arm is usually enough to redirect the energy of the blow.

Nathan’s uppercut, though, landed full-force and uncontested. Kozue ate the whole unadulterated thing, and Nathan could see that she suffered for it, too, curling in around his punch like giftwrap. But, instead of falling to the floor, Kozue leaned back against the turnbuckle, defiantly remaining on her feet. What’s more, she was taunting him. Goading him. Smiling.

Nathan was impressed. It might not have been Nathan’s hardest punch, but he sure hadn’t been holding back. Nathan put one hand on Kozue’s shoulder and cocked his fist again. “Maybe.” He let fly with an encore. “Are you disappointed?”

Kozue survived that one. Somehow.

She would give Nathan credit - the man knew how to work an advantage when he had one, and now was definitely a classic example. Kozue was cornered, reeling, hurting bad in her stomach, and he had the forethought to make sure she stayed that way. The way his hand was pushing her back, her mobility options were supremely limited. So, the first priority waas going to be getting out of the goddamn corner. Easy to say, hard to do.

She braced herself as the second punch slammed into her stomach, and this time it was enough to knock her off her feet. Kozue's legs buckled and turned to jelly for a moment, more than enough time to fall down to her knees while she went into a coughing fit. Her arms came up around her stomach as she bent over, trying to control her breathing.

"No," She managed to get the words out while she wheezed. "Not really."

On the one hand, Kozue could do little but splutter and gasp for breath from down on her knees. That part was expected; Nathan knew how to throw a punch.  

On the other, Kozue was still talking, still joking around. It made for a confusing duality- how beat up was she, really? Had Kozue kept quiet, Nathan would have gone for a pin attempt. But as things stood...

“Good,” he replied. As the crowd booed, Nathan reached for Kozue’s shoulders so that he could pull her back up to her feet and push her into the turnbuckles again. One more punch, he decided, then I’ll end it.

Kozue had gotten used to the crowd being on her side in these matches - nine times out of ten, they always sided with the girl by default, rooting for her even when the guy hadn't done a single thing wrong. Not fair, but that was the way of things.

They seemed a lot louder tonight, though, and she was still taken aback by the energy. People were seriously pulling for her to win, and she wasn't about to disappoint.

"Yeah..." She started to get up slow as Nathan tried to pull her up and force her to stand, more than content to break her apart in the corner. "Very good."

Kozue suddenly reached up with both hands, grabbed Nathan's hair, forced his chin against the top of her skull and dropped flat on her ass, trying to take him off his guard with a sit-out jawbreaker.  It wasn't the most elegant move, but she was more concerned about getting the element of surprise than anything else. If it worked, it worked.

Until he was already flat on his back and staring up at the arena lights, Nathan still thought he was in complete command of this fight. Kozue wasn’t about to mount a counter with her breath scattered all about the ring, after all. But slowly he processed how the last few seconds went down; how completely cooperative Kozue seemed as he pulled her to her feet; how suddenly there were hands on either side of his face, then fingers with a death grip on his hair; how there was an instant, just before somebody set off fireworks in his skull, when he was simply resting his jaw on her head.

Then Kozue kicked the stool out from beneath his feet, and everything turned white. He took a step backwards and meant to take another, but his other foot was already a foot off the ground in front of him. He stood suspended like that for a second before he toppled over, the crowd roaring, and his head buzzing.

Nathan groaned and squeezed his eyes shut as the room spun, his hands over his face; he didn’t think he was much in control of the fight any more.

There were a lot of great things about the jawbreaker. It was easy to do, it was a great comeback move, and the sitting variation left her in a perfect position to watch her opponent falling on their asses. Kozue had a smile on her face as Nathan stumbled over and landed on his back, relieved that she'd managed to turn things back to her side. "Gotcha."

On the negative side, it meant that she had to get her ass back up so she could take advantage of the situation. That kind of sucked, since her stomach was still aching like crazy.

Kozue managed it, though, by leaning up against ropes for support as she rose. She took a quick step forward and grabbed Nathan's wrist, pulling his body around so it would be perpendicular to the turnbuckle. She needed him in just the right position for what she had in mind.

Once he was lined up, Kozue took a deep breath, then spun around and hopped right up to the top of the turnbuckle. She jumped over at the top and shot her legs out as she came down, so the back of her knees wound up hitting the ropes.

It flipped her around with a sharp spin and sent her hurtling onto Nathan's prone body. A split-leg moonsault. Something she'd practiced, but never had the opportunity to bust out in a match before. This was fun.

Nathan groaned when Kozue took his wrist and moved him around the ring. A simple repositioning? A migration across the whole ring? It didn’t matter, he couldn’t tell the difference right now. What he could tell, however, was that, by the time Kozue let go, he hadn’t taken any new hits. That meant that she was climbing some ropes somewhere, and that Nathan had to move.

And he would have, too, if he wasn’t suffering from severe vertigo from the jawbreaker; he couldn’t even roll to his hands and knees because, despite consciously realizing that the notion was ridiculous, his brain and body were convinced that rolling to his belly would drop him off the side of his bed. It was fine, though, because moving at all right now really pissed off the hornets in his brain.

So, eyes screwed shut and body tensed, Nathan could do little but wait helplessly for whatever fresh hell Kozue was conjuring for him. Kozue’s split-leg moonsault took all of maybe three seconds to execute; to Nathan, the uncertain space between when she disappeared and when she landed seemed to stretch for an anxiety-riddled eternity, a little like the climb and the subsequent hang at the top of a rollercoaster’s highest drop.

So, yes, when Kozue splashed onto Nathan’s body, it hurt- Nathan’s eyes and mouth were both forced wide open, and Nathan’s legs and head both folded in from the impact. But, even as his chest heaved with labored breath, there was also an incongruous sense of relief. Weird.