not jumping

She was cheating, this wasn’t regulation, this wasn’t fair.

So why should he be?

Mac charged in. The dragon arm was still pulling back and the noodle arm pushed in. Mac intercepted it; He didn’t block, he didn’t dodge, he punched it out of the air. It sailed over the dragon arm and landed on the other side, as both tried to retract the coils got tangled. Min Min had to lift them both to get them clean of each other.

This was, if he was going to do this, Mac’s opportunity. Grab the arms and tie them in knots, go after the fighter only once she could do nothing in return. His mind raced to find another method to get past her impenetrable defense, but came up blank. No matter how fast he was, no matter how much he could see her obvious patterns, so long as she controlled so much horizontal space, he simply couldn’t get in.

Horizontal space. That thing Robin said at lunch hit him at a weird time.

Mac didn’t slow or stop, he didn’t give her tangled arms a second thought, not even as she recovered and pulled them back in. Despite his heavy advantage, Min Min recovered both her Arms with plenty of time to still counter. She fell back on habit, launched the noodle arm out first, which Mac swerved to the side to avoid. Then came the dragon arm.

And this was the point where things would go different.

Instead of swerving, instead of dodging, instead of punching, Mac tensed his powerful leg muscles. Up to this point only used to help him glide along the ground and propel his punches. And he launched himself into the air.

Mac did not jump. Jumping was bad in boxing, you lost all the leverage from your hips and the only thing you gained was gravity. Gravity did not do much for Mac’s frame, especially against larger opponents.

Min Min was not larger, at least not significantly. The space she controlled was narrow, and once she launched an attack, it was not easy to redirect it. She had no defense up close, her only defensive measures were to outbox her opponent.

Mac flew over the outstretched Arms, over her effective fighting space and right inside her range. He landed with one fist forward, coming down into a full force haymaker that crashed all the way across her face.

She staggered. He was in.