Chapter 2: Eun Ji takes Ashanti's bra as a trophy
Eun Ji’s thumbs pressed into the hollows of Ashanti’s jaw, the promise of a final, snapping twist hanging in the thick air between them. The crowd’s roar was a singular, vibrating note of expectation. Ashanti stared up, her vision cleared of blood but clouded with pain. The weight on her chest was immense, the punctured thigh a dull, throbbing anchor.
“You want a souvenir?” Ashanti rasped, her voice barely audible over the noise. A faint, blood-streaked smile touched her lips. “Take it.”
The confusion that flickered in Eun Ji’s eyes was all Ashanti needed. It was a split-second, a hesitation born of arrogance. Ashanti’s hands, which had been lying slack at her sides, shot up. Not to push Eun Ji away. To pull her closer.
She locked her arms around Eun Ji’s back, yanking her down into a brutal, intimate embrace. At the same time, she arched her own back and drove her good knee up, not with great force, but with precise, shocking impact into Eun Ji’s lower abdomen.
The actress’s breath left her in a pained whoosh. Her grip on Ashanti’s jaw loosened. Ashanti rolled, using the momentum and her last reserves of strength. They tumbled over, a whirl of limbs, ending with Ashanti on top, straddling Eun Ji’s waist now, her own blood slick between them.
THE FIGHT CONTINUES, AND BOTH WOMEN FIGHT LIKE animals stripped of everything but instinct and hatred. There were no more poses, no more clever quips. The lingerie was torn and smeared, the heels lethal, absurd attachments to their feet.
Eun Ji shrieked, clawing at Ashanti’s face. Ashanti took the scratches, leaning back just enough to avoid the worst of it. She focused her energy into her hands, wrapping them around the front of Eun Ji’s lace bra. With a harsh, ripping sound, the flimsy material gave way.
The crowd’s noise twisted, becoming something else—a mix of leering cheers and shocked gasps. Eun Ji’s eyes went wide with a new kind of violation. “You bitch!” she screamed, her hands flying to cover herself reflexively.
It was the distraction Ashanti had counted on. Not for modesty, but for that fraction of a second where instinct overrode fight-training. She didn’t go for a kill. She capitalized on the opening, driving a fist down into the side of Eun Ji’s head. Once. Twice. Dull, heavy impacts.
Eun Ji’s arms fell away, her body going slack beneath Ashanti. Her eyes rolled back, showing the whites.
Breathing in raw, burning gulps, Ashanti knelt over her. The red lights of the arena ring pulsed, staining Eun Ji’s pale skin the color of old wine. The crowd was on its feet, a deafening wall of sound. Some chanted for a finishing move. Others booed, unhappy with the turn.
Ashanti’s hands moved to Eun Ji’s throat again. This was it. The silence. The end of one more beautiful, cruel thing in this ugly world.
But the body beneath her stirred. A groan. Eun Ji’s black eyes fluttered open, focusing slowly. They were dazed, watery with pain and disorientation. She looked up at Ashanti, at the scarred, blood-streaked face haloed by the harsh lights. A tear, real and unscripted, traced a clean line through the grime on her cheek.
Ashanti’s fingers tightened. Then paused.
This wasn’t the begging of a Nazi guard, whimpering for a mercy he’d never shown. This was the raw, helpless vulnerability of a broken ego. It was different. It was almost disappointing.
Eun Ji’s lips moved. No sound came out. Another tear fell.
Ashanti leaned down, close enough to smell the perfume mixing with sweat and blood. “Crying won’t save you,” she whispered, her voice devoid of triumph, only a cold, weary certainty. “Nothing does.”
She adjusted her grip, one hand cradling the back of Eun Ji’s skull, the other pressing against her cheek. The classic setup. One motion away from a clean break.
Eun Ji’s hand twitched at her side, then shot up. Not to fight. Her fingers, trembling, hooked into the torn, blood-soaked cup of Ashanti’s own bra. She didn’t try to rip it. She just held on, a weak, desperate anchor to the woman about to kill her.
“Please,” Eun Ji breathed, the word barely audible. It wasn’t a command. It was a shattered fragment of a word.
Ashanti looked from the terror in Eun Ji’s eyes to the delicate, trembling hand clutching her lingerie. The crowd’s noise seemed to recede, replaced by a ringing in her ears. The cold fire in her veins sputtered, clashing with a sudden, overwhelming fatigue. The wound in her leg screamed. The scars on her body ached.
She had come for a certain kind of ending. This messy, pathetic thing wasn't it.
Her hands relaxed. Just a millimeter.
It was all the opening a creature like Eun Ji needed. The tears vanished, blinked away like a switch had been flipped. The desperation in her eyes hardened into a core of pure, venomous opportunity. The hand on Ashanti’s bra yanked hard, not for modesty, but for leverage.
With a snarling grunt of effort, Eun Ji bucked her hips and twisted, throwing Ashanti’s unbalanced weight to the side. Ashanti, her focus shattered, her body failing, couldn’t counter it. She spilled onto the chrome, landing hard on her wounded thigh. A white-hot sheet of agony blinded her.
Eun Ji scrambled up, lurching to her feet. She stood naked from the waist up, her chest heaving, one eye already swelling shut. She looked down at Ashanti, who was curled on the floor, clutching her leg, fighting to simply draw breath.
The actress wiped her bloody mouth with the back of her hand. She didn’t smile. The performance was over. What was left was something simple and voracious.
“Mine,” she said to the crowd, to the lights, to the broken woman at her feet.
She took a stumbling step, then another, her injured ankle threatening to give way with each movement. She didn’t go in for a strike. She lowered herself, her knees pressing into Ashanti’s sides. Her hands, relentless, pushed Ashanti’s shoulders flat against the cold floor.
Ashanti had nothing left. She could only watch as Eun Ji’s hands went to the back of her neck, fumbling with the clasp of her bra. The tiny click was louder than the crowd. The tension released, and the scrap of black lace was pulled away, tossed aside to land on the body pile like an offering.
Eun Ji then settled her weight fully onto Ashanti’s hips, pinning her. She raised her arms to the crowd, a victorious, brutal statue silhouetted against the lights. The cheers were deafening, fractured, insane.
She looked down, her sweaty hair sticking to her face. She leaned close, her breath hot in Ashanti’s ear.
“You should have twisted,” she whispered. Then she sat back, posed over Ashanti’s naked body like a hunter over a fresh kill, one hand resting possessively on her sternum, feeling the frantic, galloping heartbeat beneath. She waited for the crowd to drink it in, her own chest swelling with a dark, complete satisfaction.
Ashanti lay still, exposed, the cold chrome sucking the heat from her back. She stared past Eun Ji’s triumphant silhouette into the blinding lights above. The fire was out. For now, there was only the cold, the pain, and the deafening sound of someone else’s victory.
For now, there was only the cold, the pain, and the deafening sound of someone else’s victory. That sound cocooned them, a roaring validation that washed over Eun Ji’s skin like a warm bath. She drank it in, her head tilted back, before looking down at the woman trapped beneath her.
“They love a winner,” Eun Ji said, her voice conversational, almost friendly. Her hand slid from Ashanti’s sternum to roughly squeeze her breast. “And they love a loser even more.”
Ashanti flinched, a full-body tremor of revulsion that had nothing to do with the cold chrome. She turned her head away, eyes searching the floor for an anchor, finding only the discarded, bloodied strap of her own bra.
“Look at me.” Eun Ji’s voice lost its playful edge. When Ashanti didn’t comply, Eun Ji’s fingers dug into the flesh of her jaw, wrenching her face back toward the lights. “I said look. You wanted my attention, you got it.”
Ashanti’s black eyes finally focused, filled with a simmering hate so pure it was almost calming. Eun Ji smiled at the sight.
“There she is. The fierce little survivor.” She leaned closer, her sweat dripping onto Ashanti’s chest. “How many died so you could live? And for what? To end up here, under me?”
Each word was a needle, meticulously placed. Ashanti’s breath hitched, a tiny crack in the armor. Eun Ji saw it. She catalogued it like a director noting a perfect take.
“You thought this was about revenge? This is just business.” Eun Ji released her jaw and sat up straight again, addressing the crowd as much as her victim. “And business is good.”
With a sudden, vicious move, she grabbed a fistful of Ashanti’s long, dark hair and used it as a handle to drag her upward a few inches, then slammed her head back down onto the floor. The impact was a dull, sickening thud that briefly cut through the arena’s noise.
Stars burst behind Ashanti’s eyes. A low groan escaped her lips before she could bite it back.
“Hear that?” Eun Ji cooed to the spectators. “She’s starting to sing.”
She maintained the cruel grip on Ashanti’s hair, keeping her head immobilized. With her other hand, she traced the awful landscape of Ashanti’s torso—the ropey scars, the sharp ridges of ribs, the punctured, still-weeping wound on her thigh. Her touch was clinical, disrespectful.
“This one’s old,” she mused, tapping a silvery line on Ashanti’s abdomen. “Barbed wire? And this…” Her finger hovered over a clustered, pitted scar near her hip. “Burn. They branded the cattle, right?”
Ashanti squeezed her eyes shut. She could smell the acrid smoke, hear the screams that weren’t her own, feel the cold mud of the barracks floor. The memories, usually kept in a locked room, burst through the door Eun Ji was kicking down.
“Don’t,” Ashanti whispered, the word torn from somewhere deep and broken.
Eun Ji’s laugh was a bright, shocking sound. “’Don’t’? You were going to twist my neck. And now you say ‘don’t’?” She yanked the hair again. “Open your eyes. Look at the crowd. They paid to see you.”
Ashanti opened them. The blur of faces swirled above, a monstrous gallery. She felt laid bare in a way the missing bra could never accomplish. This was a different stripping.
“You’re nothing special,” Eun Ji said, her voice dropping to a deadly intimate murmur meant only for Ashanti. “You’re just another body for the pile. The only thing that made you interesting was your pain. And now it’s mine.”
She shifted her weight, grinding her knees into Ashanti’s ribs, and brought her free hand up. She wasn’t aiming for a killing blow. She pressed her thumb hard into the fresh, deep puncture wound on Ashanti’s thigh.
Agony, white and absolute, electrocuted Ashanti’s nervous system. Her back arched off the floor as a shattered scream ripped from her throat, raw and uncontained. It echoed in the pit, momentarily stunning the crowd into a strange, rapt silence.
Tears, hot and involuntary, flooded her eyes and streaked down her temples into her hairline. She couldn’t stop them. The pain was a totality, erasing thought, erasing history, erasing her.
Eun Ji watched the tears flow with the fascination of a geologist discovering a rare mineral. She removed her thumb, glossy with fresh blood, and showed it to Ashanti. “See? Just salt water and rust. No mystery here.”
The humiliation was complete. The physical breaking was one thing, but this was the core of her being, the resilient survivor, being made to scream and weep for an audience. Ashanti’s body went slack, the fight not just leaving her, but seeming to have never existed. The cold fire was doused, drowned in a sea of shame and agony.
Eun Ji knew it. She felt the last resistance melt away beneath her. She loosened her grip on Ashanti’s hair, letting her head loll to the side.
“Please,” Ashanti breathed, the word wet and broken. It wasn’t a plea for life. It was a plea for the moment to end, for the unbearable exposure to stop. It was the sound of a spirit snapping.
“Good,” Eun Ji said softly, almost tenderly. She rearranged herself, settling her knees on either side of Ashanti’s chest. She took Ashanti’s face in both hands, a grotesque parody of a lover’s caress, and turned it to face her directly.
Ashanti’s gaze was vacant, shattered, looking through her.
“This is for the photo op,” Eun Ji whispered. Then her hands slid back, fingers linking behind the base of Ashanti’s skull, palms cradling the jaw. The hold was professional, final.
She looked up at the crowd one last time, gave a small, victorious nod, and then dropped her gaze to her work.
There was a sharp, crisp crack that cut through the ambient noise like a bolt of lightning silencing a storm.
Ashanti’s body gave one last, faint twitch, then settled into absolute stillness. The vacant eyes remained open, staring past Eun Ji’s shoulder at nothing.
Eun Ji held the position for a three-count, letting the cameras drink it in, before releasing the now-limp head. It slumped to the side at an unnatural angle. She climbed off, stood on unsteady legs, and placed one bare, bloody foot on Ashanti’s still chest.
She raised her arms again, the conqueror standing on her kingdom. The crowd’s roar was pure now, undiluted by conflict, a wave of adulation for the only thing that ever really mattered in the Superior: the winner.