"Three," Bruce said, his voice a low, gravelly murmur that seemed to vibrate the very floorboards.

He wasn’t looking at his men; instead, he was staring at the wreckage that remained of them. "Three of my best."

"Not a single one of them so much as grazed your skin."

"Four, if you count the man in the lane," Mike countered, his voice smooth, dripping with a casual, infuriating arrogance.

He didn’t even look winded; he looked like he was bored of the carnage.

Bruce’s eyes flickered to the broken heap of Reyes, then back to Mike. A grim, dark respect settled in the corners of his mouth.

"I count the lane."

The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. In the corner, Big G leaned against the wall, his eyes fixed on the floor. He hadn’t moved an inch.

There was a visible shift in the atmosphere around him, a sense of profound, almost spiritual relief. Seeing Mike dismantle his men wasn’t a blow to his ego; it was a vindication.

It proved that his own failure the night before wasn’t a lack of skill but a collision with a force of nature.

Bruce straightened his posture, the king reclaiming his throne. He locked eyes with Mike, the air between them thickening with a sudden, lethal tension.

"My terms," Bruce stated, his voice hardening into steel. "If I end this, you walk out of here and you never look back."

"You leave with your life, but you leave empty-handed."

Mike tilted his head, a predatory grin tugging at the corner of his lips. "Let’s refine that."

"If you end it, I leave... But if I end it... you listen."

"And you do exactly what the Phoenix tells you to do."

A ripple of shocked murmurs went through the enforcers. To dictate terms to Bruce was a death wish.

Bruce simply stared, his gaze unblinking. "You’re incredibly confident for a man who just walked into a lion’s den."

"I walked in because I wanted to," Mike said, his voice dropping an octave, becoming something much more dangerous. "That’s a very different thing from being confident, Bruce."

"Confidence is a feeling. This? This is a fact."

The tension snapped.

Bruce moved. He didn’t lunge like the others; he exploded.

He was a master of the economy of violence, a man who had spent twenty years stripping away every wasted motion until all that remained was pure, distilled lethality. He unleashed a terrifying combination: a right jab followed instantly by a left hook, a seamless, whip-like arc of motion designed to trap an opponent in a continuous loop of impact. It was a sequence that would have shattered the ribs of a lesser man.

But Mike was a ghost.

He didn’t duck or recoil in a panicked flinch. Instead, his body seemed to simply resolve itself into the gaps of the attack. The jab hissed past his left shoulder, the wind of it ruffling his shirt.

The hook swung through the empty space where his jaw had been a millisecond prior, the momentum of the blow carrying Bruce’s arm into the vacuum.

Bruce didn’t hesitate. He reset instantly, his feet dancing in a tight, controlled circle, and his eyes, once calculating, were now burning with a predatory focus.

"You didn’t move like the others," Bruce observed, his voice tight. "They flinched..."

"They reacted to the threat. You... you just weren’t there."

"I noticed," Mike said, his tone maddeningly casual.

Bruce shifted his strategy. He dropped his center of gravity, lunging low with a devastating body shot aimed at Mike’s solar plexus.

It was a calculated move to close the distance, to take away the luxury of Mike’s long-range evasion. He was forcing the fight into the trenches, where there was no room to dance.

Mike anticipated the shift. As the blow came, Mike didn’t retreat; he leaned into the danger.

He pivoted his hips with violent precision, catching the strike on the hard edge of his oblique muscle at an angle that robbed the punch of its power. In the same breath, Mike brought his elbow crashing down like a falling hammer across Bruce’s extended forearm, a jarring, bone-on-bone impact that forced Bruce to stagger.

Before Bruce could recover his balance, Mike spun, his shoulder brushing Bruce’s chest as he stepped through the man’s guard, reappearing behind him in a blur of motion.

They were back at a distance. The air in the room felt like it was vibrating from the sheer force of the exchange.

Bruce stopped. He stood perfectly still, his weight balanced, his hands held in a high, tight guard.

He looked at Mike with a terrifying, quiet intensity, the look of a man who has just encountered a glitch in the universe, a variable that his entire life’s experience had failed to account for. He was pausing to rewrite his entire understanding of combat.

"You’re not moving to avoid me," Bruce said, his voice low and realization heavy. "And you’re not watching my hands."

"You’re not even looking at my eyes."

"No," Mike said, his gaze steady and cold.

"Then what the hell are you watching?"

"Nothing specifically," Mike replied, a small, dangerous smirk playing on his lips. "My body just handles it."

Bruce’s eyes narrowed, his jaw tightening. "That’s not a technique..."

"There is no style in the world that works like that."

"No," Mike agreed, his presence expanding until he seemed to fill the entire room, a mountain of unstoppable power. "It’s not a technique."

"Then what is it?" Bruce demanded, his voice a low growl of frustration and awe.

"Something I acquired recently," Mike said, his eyes locking onto Bruce’s with a finality that felt like a death sentence. "And don’t bother trying to learn it."

"It isn’t something you can train for, and it isn’t something you can even comprehend."

The silence that followed was heavy, pregnant with the weight of a paradigm shift. Around the perimeter of the room, the men Bruce had unleashed—the brute, the specialist, the frantic striker, and the man from the lane—were rising slowly.

There was no frantic scrambling, no bruised egos shouting for a rematch. They moved with the solemnity of witnesses at a funeral, their eyes fixed on the center of the room.

They weren’t just watching a man; they were watching the demolition of everything they thought they knew about violence.

Bruce stood in the center of that wreckage, his chest heaving slightly, his eyes dark and unreadable. He was a man who had built an empire on the predictability of force, and he had just seen that force rendered obsolete.

"One more," Bruce whispered.

It wasn’t a command to Mike, and it wasn’t a shout to his men. It was a private vow, a desperate attempt to find the limit of the impossible.

This time, Bruce didn’t dance. He didn’t use the elegant, surgical combinations of a master. He abandoned the geometry of the ring and embraced the raw, terrifying intent of a killer.

He lunged forward with a single, monstrous right hand, a haymaker backed by twenty years of muscle memory and every ounce of his weight. It was a strike designed to be absolute; it was a blow that demanded the universe move out of its way or be shattered by its passing.

But Mike didn’t just move. He intercepted the very concept of the attack.

As the fist whistled toward him, Mike’s left hand shot out, not to parry or to slap the blow away, but to seize Bruce’s extended forearm with the crushing grip of a hydraulic press. He didn’t deflect the momentum; he captured it.

Using Bruce’s own forward surge as a lever, Mike stepped deep into the man’s personal space, his massive frame crowding Bruce’s vision. He drove his forearm upward, slamming it across Bruce’s sternum with a blunt, authoritative force that acted as both a shield and a piston.

With a predatory, rhythmic stride, Mike walked Bruce backward. He didn’t rush; he dictated the pace, forcing the king of the room to retreat step by step until the small of Bruce’s back hit the edge of the heavy industrial table.

Thud.

The sound of Bruce hitting the table was the final punctuation mark on the fight. Mike didn’t let go.

He held the position, his forearm pressed firmly against Bruce’s chest, their faces inches apart. The air between them was hot, electric, and thick with the scent of sweat and sudden, profound respect.

The room was so silent you could hear the hum of the overhead lights.