Chapter 329: Trained by Marlon
The first thing Marlon did was nothing.
He just stood there, hands loose at his sides, watching me climb back to my feet like it was the most boring thing he’d witnessed all week. No stance, no guard, no visible preparation of any kind. Just a man standing in a park, waiting, faintly amused.
I steadied myself and rolled my shoulders. The collar sat against my throat irritatingly. My limbs were mine, technically. They just didn’t feel like it anymore. The usual current that ran beneath my skin, that low hum of something more than human, was almost completely gone. Stomped down to a flicker.
I exhaled slowly.
Then I moved.
I came at him straight the staring with a jab and Marlon leaned an inch to the right and it sailed past his cheek without him even lifting a hand. He looked at where my fist had gone, then looked back at me.
"That’s it?" he said.
I reset and threw a follow-up, a left cross with some real weight behind it and he simply stepped back, turned his hip, and my arm dragged through empty air. He hadn’t even properly moved. Just adjusted, small, like he’d read the punch before my shoulder had finished loading it.
"You telegraph everything," he said. "Every single thing you do, you announce it first. Your shoulder drops before you throw. Your weight shifts before you step. You are not fighting, boy, you are narrating."
Narrating he says...
I came at him again, faster this time, a combination of jab, cross, hook, trying to string them together before he could settle. He slipped the jab, rolled away from the cross, caught my hook arm at the wrist with one hand and redirected it so cleanly that my own momentum turned me sideways, stumbling half a step before I caught myself.
He hadn’t thrown a single strike yet.
"You’re relying on speed to cover the sloppiness," he continued. "Take away the speed and what do you have? This." He gestured at me generally. "A boy swinging his arms in a park."
My jaw tightened.
I pushed the exhaustion down, or tried to. The collar made it pool back up almost immediately, a constant low tide dragging at everything. Breathing was already costing more than it should. My legs felt like they were wrapped in wet cloth. But I reset my footing and came at him again, this time lower, trying to close the distance and get inside his reach where the longer limbs of a taller man mattered less.
Marlon sidestepped with a pivot so casual it looked like he’d simply decided to stand somewhere else. His elbow came down once across the back of my shoulder, not hard enough to damage, hard enough to send me stumbling forward two full steps into nothing.
"Better idea," he said behind me. "But your head goes first. You lean before your feet move. Any man worth fighting will see that and be waiting for you before you arrive."
I turned around, breathing heavier than I wanted to admit.
He still hadn’t broken a sweat. His hands were still loose at his sides. He looked, if anything, mildly disappointed.
°°°
Twenty minutes in, I was starting to understand what humiliation felt like on a structural level.
It wasn’t any single moment. It was the accumulation, every swing that found nothing, every attempt to read him that came up blank, every time his hands appeared from somewhere I hadn’t tracked to redirect or deflect or simply let my own failed momentum do the work for him. He wasn’t beating me. That would have been easier to take. He was just, not letting me touch him, and doing it with so little visible effort that it was starting to feel purposeful and precise in the worst possible way.
Which, of course, it was.
"You’re slowing down," he said.
"I’m aware," I said through my teeth.
"Don’t get angry. Anger makes you predictable." He tilted his head slightly. "You’re already predictable. Compound it with emotion and you become a liability."
I came at him with a low feint, trying to fake the leg shot before going high, and he checked the feint without reacting to it, didn’t bite even slightly, and when I came up he was already turned sideways presenting the smallest possible target and my strike glanced off his forearm like I’d hit a wall.
His palm caught the side of my head again with ease.
"Your feint has to be believable," he said. "You committed maybe thirty percent of your body to it. I felt nothing threatening. Why would I move?"
"Maybe because I was attacking you," I muttered.
"Attacking me means making me believe the threat is real. You didn’t. Try again."
Damn it.
°°°
An hour in, my shirt was soaked through and I’d long since stopped being embarrassed about the way I was breathing. Every movement cost double what it should have. The collar was not painful exactly, not constantly, but it sat there like a hand pressed firm against your chest, reminding you with every minute that passed that the thing you’d come to rely on wasn’t there anymore.
I’d been taken down to the ground couple times. Not slammed, not thrown, just redirected until gravity finished the job, each time a quiet lesson in exactly how little I understood about where my weight was and what it was doing.
Marlon crouched down to where I’d ended up on the grass the third time, hands on his knees, and looked at me.
"You fight like someone who has always been the strongest thing in the room," he said.
I stared up at him, catching my breath.
"That means you have never had to actually learn how to fight," he continued. "Strength masked technique. Speed masked timing. You never needed either because you could simply overpower whatever was in front of you." He straightened up. "Gaspar may have lived in that strength his entire life. Longer than you have. And thanks to years maybe he also has techniques. So he has both." He looked down at me. "You have one. Right now, courtesy of that collar, you don’t even have that."
I pulled myself up off the grass. Slowly. My arms shook slightly with the effort.
"So teach me," I said groaning.
Something in his expression shifted, barely, but it was there.
"Get your feet under you properly first," he said. "You stand like someone expecting to absorb hits rather than avoid them. Wider than you need, weight too far back, you’re always preparing to brace rather than to move." He stepped forward and without asking nudged my right foot with his own, adjusted my stance by maybe four inches. "There. You feel the difference?"
I did, actually. The balance was different, more forward, more alive, like the stance was already pointed at something rather than braced against it.
"Good. Hold that. Now your hands—" He reached up and adjusted my guard, pushing my lead hand out further, tucking my rear elbow tighter to my ribs. "You drop your right every time you jab. Every time. I could have put you down in the first minute just from that alone if I wanted to."
"Why didn’t you?" I asked.
"Because putting you down wasn’t the point," he said, stepping back and looking at my adjusted position. "Better. Now move around me. Don’t attack yet. Just move and keep that stance intact while you do."
°°°
Somewhere past the ninety minute mark the edges of things started going soft.
Not my focus, that I kept nailed down out of pure stubbornness, but the physical edges. The point where my legs reported their condition had gone from loud protest to a kind of low, constant static, the way pain sometimes shifts when your body accepts it’s not going anywhere. My hands felt thick. My shoulders ached in a way that went down into the joints.
But I was still standing.
That felt like the only thing that mattered right now.
Marlon came at me properly for the first time in the session, or the first time with some real intentionality behind it, a straight combination, readable on purpose I guessed, giving me something I was supposed to actually work with. I slipped the first, which surprised me, caught the second on my forearm where it was supposed to land, tried the pivot he’d shown me twenty minutes ago to redirect and counter—
And almost got it.
Almost. My timing was off by just enough that the counter missed, but the movement was right, the logic of it was right, and I felt it in my body as something different from everything that had come before. Not a flail. Not instinct covering for lack of skill. Something that was starting, just barely, to resemble actual technique.
Marlon stopped.
He looked at me for a moment.
"There," he said, and it was just one word but the tone was different. Not praise exactly but rather acknowledgment. "That’s what it’s supposed to feel like. Did you feel it?"
"Yeah," I said, breathing hard. "Yeah, I did."
"Good. Do it again. And again after that. Until it isn’t something you have to think about." He stepped back into his neutral stance, hands loose. "A technique you have to think about is a technique that will fail you when it counts. It has to live in your body, not your head."
I nodded, reset my feet, and brought my hands up.
°°°
The afternoon had slipped by.
Summer had fallen into her routine the way water finds a slope, naturally, without needing to think about it. She didn’t plan her days in any rigid sense, never had, even before everything fell apart. She preferred variety, moving from one thing to the next based on what was needed rather than what was scheduled.
So she helped where help was needed. Simple as that.
She’d spent part of the day on the practical things, checking supplies, moving things that needed moving, making herself generally useful in the quiet background way she’d gotten good at. Then, as the morning stretched into early afternoon, she’d drifted toward the water with a fishing line and patience her father had drilled into her when she was young enough that it hadn’t felt like a lesson yet.
Fishing was one of those things. She’d been maybe eight years old the first time he’d put the rod in her hands, and she’d complained about the stillness the entire morning, and then she’d caught something and understood completely and never complained about it again.
She was good at it. Better than most people here, which she didn’t say out loud because saying it out loud wasn’t how she worked. She just did it, and the results spoke well enough.
Despite everything, despite her age, despite the world being what it was now, people here had accepted her help without hesitation or condescension. That meant something to her, even if she never said that out loud either. She knew what was needed, she knew how to provide it, and she showed up consistently.
By late afternoon the tiredness had finally settled in. She cleaned her hands, set things where they belonged, and started moving through the community, eyes open, looking for familiar faces.
Her father, specifically. And Ryan.
Marlon had said something at lunch about taking Ryan for the afternoon, which had struck her as vaguely cryptic. She hadn’t pressed him. You learned quickly that pressing Marlon for information before he was ready to give it was an exercise in getting nowhere.
But she was curious. She’d be lying to herself if she said otherwise.
She moved through the familiar paths, glancing around, checking the spots where people usually gathered at this hour. No Marlon. No Ryan either. She tried the areas near the supply building, along the fence line where the two of them had sometimes talked before.
Nothing.
She stood for a moment, thinking.
Then she heard it.
Faint, muffled, from the direction of Brighton Park. A sound that took her brain a second to categorize properly. Not quite a voice, not quite a groan, somewhere in the territory between the two.
She raised an eyebrow and turned toward the park.
Obviously. She should have checked that first.
She followed the sound through the park entrance and saw other people also standing there watching something.
Then she stopped.
Her mouth opened slightly.
Marlon stood in the middle of the clearing, upright, composed, barely a hair out of place, his thick arms crossed.
Ryan was on the ground.
Not sitting but on the ground. Fully down, one hand pressed flat against the grass, the other trembling slightly as it tried to push him back up and wasn’t entirely succeeding. His shirt was dark with sweat and clinging to him in patches. His chest was heaving with deep labored breathing. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth, dripped once, hit the dirt below him in a small dark spot.
Marlon looked down at him sternly.
"Is that all you’ve got, boy?"
Summer stood very still at the edge behind speechless.
