“You Call That Karate?” Champion Laughed at a Waitress — Until She Untied Her Apron
Chapter 3
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Behind him, Chloe looked down at the scattered silverware. She looked at Toby, who was shaking in the corner, tears of humiliation welling in his eyes. She looked at the smartphone in Cameron's hand, broadcasting the cruelty to thousands.Slowly, Chloe reached around to the small of her back and took hold of the strings of her apron. The diner was suffused with a suffocating tension; the only sound was the rhythmic thrum-thrum of the rain hitting the large glass windows, and the tinny, distorted audio of Cameron's livestream echoing from his phone.Chloe's hands pulled the knot free. She slipped the white loop over her head, folded the apron with methodical, agonizingly slow precision—once in half, then again—and placed it gently on the counter next to the cash register.When she turned back around, the exhausted, subservient waitress was gone. Her posture had completely transformed: her spine was perfectly straight; her shoulders dropped, releasing the tension she'd carried all day; her feet shifted subtly on the linoleum, her left foot sliding slightly forward, her right heel lifting a millimeter off the ground. It was an ancient, deeply rooted stance. The air around her seemed to drop by ten degrees."Hey," Chloe said. Her voice cut through the diner like a blade drawn from a sheath.Bradley paused mid-laugh and turned around, looking at her irritated. "Are you deaf? I told you to get my—""You have terrible hip mobility," Chloe interrupted, her voice deadpan.Cameron stopped laughing. Greg lowered his beer. Bradley's brow furrowed in genuine confusion. "Excuse me?""Your kick," Chloe continued, taking one measured step forward. "Your planting foot was completely flat. Your hips were locked. If you threw that roundhouse at a heavy bag instead of empty air, you would have blown out your own ACL. You don't have power—you just have momentum."Bradley's face turned crimson. The absolute, clinical disrespect in her tone was something he had never encountered, especially not from a waitress in a cheap diner. The fact that thousands of people were currently watching this on a livestream only poured gasoline on his ego."You crazy bitch," Bradley growled, stepping forward. "I'm going to teach you how to talk to a champion."He lunged forward, reaching out with a massive right hand to grab her by the throat, fully intending to throw her across the room.He never even touched her collar.As Bradley's hand shot forward, Chloe moved. It wasn't the bouncy, erratic movement of modern sport fighting—it was zero-to-60 explosion. She stepped inside his reach, slipping her head off the centerline by a fraction of an inch. Simultaneously, her left forearm snapped up in a rigid, bone-shattering parry, striking the inside of Bradley's extending wrist. A loud crack echoed through the diner—not the sound of a slap, but the sickening sound of dense bone colliding with fragile cartilage. Bradley gasped, his arm deadening instantly from the nerve strike.Before his brain could even process the pain, Chloe's right hand, held in a tight, flat-knuckled fist, buried itself directly into his solar plexus. She didn't swing her arm; she drove the strike from the floor, rotating her hips, transferring her entire body weight through the two flat knuckles of her right hand. It was the legendary shita-tsuki—an inverted short punch utilized in full-contact Kyokushin karate.Bradley's eyes bulged wide. All the oxygen in his lungs evacuated in a wet, wheezing hiss. His gold belt clattered to the floor.