(Note: Best if set to fast paced Irish folk music...)
The floor was covered in woodchips, dirt, and dried blood. It smelled like stale beer and filth, the sent crawling up the nostrils as she gasped for breath. The air was hot inside her mask. She tasted blood. She swallowed. All around her, disgusting angry men cheered, hyped up on alcohol and adrenaline. She grabbed the wall separating her from the crowd and waited a moment for the nausea to wear off. She felt a sharp pain in her hand as a large splinter tore away from the barrier, beaten and shattered from the weight of many fighters slamming against it. She ignored the pain. She had become good at ignoring pain after all these years. Regardless, it would soon fade.
More shouting from the crowd spurred her to move. She felt hands trying to pry her fingers from the wall’s ledge. She felt the urge to jab one of the crowd, but held it down. Lifting up her black mask to expose her lips, warping the strange skull pattern, she spat and wiped her mouth. She pushed off the wall and stood, turning to her opponent.
He was a bulky monster. Mid forties. Irish in decent. Boxer’s build. Right handed. Bad knees. Worse temper. Had seen his share of scrapes. His nose appeared to have been broken and reset multiple times. Tattoos covered a fair amount of his hairy mass. Sweat rolled down his chest, shimmering in the harsh lights from above. He grinned at her, revealing a cavernous mouth that was more gum than teeth. She could smell his breath all the way across the arena. It stank of putrid whiskey and rotten meat. He resumed a boxer’s stance and taunted her to make the first move.
She feigned a left jab and he countered. The woman took advantage and chopped at his rib cage. The man growled, swinging a wild left hook. Ducking under, she whirled around and landed a hard punch at his kidneys, in between the motorbike tattoo and “I love Mom”. She felt his hand grab her mid-drift. She had been too slow.
The brute heaved her over his shoulder and tackled her into the wall again, pressing his body against her’s. The woman felt the air rush out of her lungs and whacked the man in the back of the neck. He replied in kind with a brutal knee to the ribs. The woman snarled and tried to box the man’s ears multiple times, but she couldn’t find room to move her arms. Laughing, the man took her and tossed the masked woman to the ground.
The crowd showed their approval with an uproar of cheering.
The woman picked herself up and slowly applauded the man with mocking approval. The Irishman squinted his eyes and followed with a quick right jab. The woman knocked the blow away and hit a hard slap across the man’s neck. He staggered and then recovered, launching another flurry of jabs. She weaved out of the way of three before grabbing one and throwing the man to the wall behind her. He recovered too quickly and the masked girl mouthed a curse as a haymaker connected with her ribs, slamming her against the wall again.
The world spun again and she spat up blood. The boxer had definitely broken two ribs. Sighing, the woman shifted her waist forcing the bones back into place. The world went fuzzy for a few moments with pain. She ignored it once again. She looked up and saw the man trudging toward her. Rolled her eyes as the man picked her up once again, chuckling. She was getting annoyed. It was time to stop playing and end this.
First, she broke the man’s nose yet again as her forehead collided with his nasal bridge. He staggered back as his nose started to bleed profusely. Now angry, he tossed a savage right hook as the woman advanced. She blocked it with a loose elbow and returned by slamming her palm into his celiac plexus, causing his nerves to fire pain signals through the abdomen, cracking three ribs and laboring his breathing.
The man doubled over, but still swung at the woman’s ribs, hoping to exploit a weakness. She leaned back, grabbed his elbow on the follow through, and twisted. The man’s shoulder popped clear out of the joint and broke the rotator cuff. Before he could scream the woman kicked in the Irishman’s weak knee, causing it to buckle. Now on one knee, the woman slammed her fist into the man’s chin, fracturing the jaw. A chop to the jugular exposed the man’s neck. To finish, the woman grabbed the nape and crushed the man’s skull into the wall behind her.
Blood ran down the wall as the wall as the body fell to the ground. A dent was left in the hard oak. The crowd which had once been in a mad frenzy was now deathly silent. In summary, the burly Irishman was now in possession of three cracked ribs, a fractured jaw, traumatized celiac plexus, a broken rotator cuff, loss of use of his right arm, a caved in trachea, possible brain damage due to a depressed fracture of the frontal cranium, a shattered knee, and his familiar broken nose. Chances of physical recovery were slim. Chances of mental recovery were non-existent.
It had all happened in roughly seven seconds.
In the hush, the woman vaulted out of the ring, the crowd giving a wide berth. She marched over to the bookie, whom had given heavy odds for the Irishman, and swiped her share of the money off the table. Then she walked over to the bar and took a bottle of clear vodka by the neck. Rolling up her mask past her lips, she bit into the cork and yanked it out with a pop. She took a long swig and relished the burn as the alcohol rushed down her throat. She turned and headed for the door, raising the bottle to the men behind her as she left.
“Thanks for the fun, boys! Have a good night…” Then she disappeared through the doors.
The crowd of men was still. A few checked the Irishman for vitals and carried him off for immediate care. Someone coughed. Another wiped his nose on his sleeve and spat. Somewhere in the back of the room, someone shouted, “What the fuck was that?”
As the woman walked out of the building with the cool night air blowing on her mask, she sighed and picked up her things which had been left outside. She threw a beaten leather jacket over her black tank top and rolled her shoulders, getting comfortable. She cracked her wrapped knuckles and picked up her backpack. Slinging it over her shoulder, the woman heard a voice from the inside.
“Natasha, you didn’t have to maim the poor fellow,” said the voice in fluent Russian.
Natasha replied in her native language as she pulled a human skull from the pack. “He knew what he was getting into when he stepped in the arena Viktor.”
“Right,” replied the skull know as Viktor, “Immortal Russian women with hundreds of years of military experience are so common.”
“Who cares, Viktor? I didn’t kill him.”
“Because eating through a straw for the rest of his life is so much better.”
“Hey, beats chewing.”
“You’re hopeless… You know that?”
“Known for quite some time, Vik…”
With that, Natasha headed down the road a few hundred dollars richer. She re-adjusted the pack on her back and trudged past a beaten rusty road sign. Printed in blocky white letters, the sign read “Now Entering Sunny California!”
Subject: Finding What's Left 
