"Or what?" Derek says. "You're going to fight me, old-timer?"
"I'm asking you to leave," Walter says. "This is a place for learning, not for whatever it is you're doing."
Derek's friends have stopped laughing now. Even they seem to sense the air in the room shifting, tightening the way it does right before something breaks.
"Derek, man, let's just go," one friend says quietly, lowering the phone slightly. "This isn't worth it."
Derek shrugs him off without even turning around. Whatever is happening in his head has nothing to do with this room; it has more to do with his father, a man who never once told him he was proud, only that he was expected to win.
"You want to know something funny?" Derek says, his voice rising. "I have never lost a match in three years. Not one. And you're standing here telling me what to do in some dusty little gym my dad is about to bulldoze anyway."
"Then leave with some dignity," Arthur says. He steps forward now, too, placing a hand gently on Walter's shoulder. "Please."
Derek's jaw tightens. Something in him catches fire all at once—some old wound about being told no.
"Who dares challenge me?" he shouts. The words echo off the mirrored walls. "Any of you! Right now! Show me what thirty-eight years of this place actually taught you!"
Nobody moves. The seniors stand frozen—some out of fear, some simply unsure what a person is supposed to do in a moment like this.
Derek's eyes land back on Walter. Whatever restraint he had left burns away completely. His hand curls into a fist. He draws it back.
"You think you can talk to me like that?" Derek says.
He steps in close, his fist rising toward Walter's face. Walter does not flinch; he stands his ground, an old firefighter who has stared down worse than this. But at seventy-four, his reflexes are not what they used to be, and everyone in that room knows it.
This is the moment. Everything after this happens in less than a second, though it will feel to everyone in that room like much longer.
Derek's fist moves forward fast, aimed straight at Walter's face. Somewhere behind the counter, Vivian's body moves before her mind gives it permission. Five years of stillness disappear in an instant, replaced by something older—something trained so deep into her bones that no injury could erase it.
And out of nowhere, a hand closes around his wrist.
The mop clatters to the floor. Derek's fist stops exactly one inch from Walter's nose, held in place by a grip that does not shake, does not waver, does not so much as tremble.
The entire room turns to look.
Standing there, still in her gray sweatshirt, is Vivian Hale. Her ponytail is slightly loose from the morning's work. Nobody in that room, aside from her father, has ever seen her move like that. It happened faster than most of them could follow: one second, she was mopping in the corner; the next, she was standing between Derek and Walter, holding his fist in place like it weighed nothing at all.
Derek stares at her, his arm still frozen in her grip. Disbelief floods his face.
"You still have a chance to lower your hand," Vivian says quietly. Her voice does not shake. It does not rise. It is calm—the kind of calm earned in rooms far more dangerous than this one.
For a long moment, nobody breathes. Then Derek yanks his arm back. He stumbles half a step, his face reddening with something between shock and humiliation.
"What the hell was that?" Derek says. He cradles his wrist as if it had been burned.