Chapter 4: Impact Protocol
The silence after the two women stepped off Lilly’s stomach was a dense, thick thing. It was broken by the sound of her trying to get air back into lungs that felt like crumpled paper. Maya was crying softly, the tears mixing with the sweat on her temples. Emely just stared at the ceiling, her mind a white blank of overload.
Ben didn’t let the moment settle. He clapped his hands once, a sharp, decisive sound that made several people in the line jump.
“Standing weight is one thing,” he announced, his voice cutting through the humid air. “But impact force is a different equation entirely. Physics.” He looked directly at Lilly as he said it. She met his gaze, her eyes glassy but alert. “You understand vectors. Impulse momentum.”
Lilly gave a tiny, pained nod.
Ben turned and gestured to a corner of the room. Behind a small cluster of onlookers was a wooden weightlifting platform, about a foot high, someone had dragged in from the communal gym. It looked absurd and ominous sitting on the linoleum.
“We’re changing the protocol,” Ben said. He pointed to a guy in the line, a sturdy-looking engineering student named Leo whom Lilly vaguely knew from a thermodynamics class. “You. You’re up first. You’re going to step up onto that platform, and then you’re going to step off. Straight down. Onto the target.”
Leo blinked. “Like… a drop step?”
“A controlled fall,” Ben corrected. “All your mass, accelerated by gravity, arrested by…” He gestured to the three women on the mats. “Them.”
A new, electric buzz went through the room. This was different. This was dynamic.
“Who’s first?” Ben asked, though his tone made it clear he wasn’t really asking.
Lilly tried to speak, but only a croak came out. She cleared her throat, wincing. “Me.”
“No,” Maya whispered from her mat, the word barely audible.
Ben ignored her. “Center mat. Assume the position.”
Lilly shifted, squaring her body, her arms at her sides. She focused on the ceiling pipe, using it as a datum line. Her entire midsection was a sprawling, deep ache, a topography of new pain. She felt raw. Open. Perfect.
Leo approached the platform nervously. He looked at Lilly, his expression apologetic. “You sure, Lilly?”
“Just do it,” she breathed.
He stepped up onto the foot-high block. He was maybe eighty kilos. From this new elevation, he looked towering. He hesitated, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Now,” Ben said, his voice devoid of patience. “Don’t jump. Just… let go.”
Leo stepped off the edge.
It wasn’t a jump. It was a simple transfer of weight from a higher potential energy state to a lower one. But the difference was profound.
The impact was a deep, percussive thud that seemed to vibrate through the floor. Lilly’s body jolted, a shockwave radiating out from the point of contact. All the air was blasted from her in a violent, unstoppable rush—whoosh. For a second, her abdomen disappeared, compressed to a impossible thinness beneath his shoe before rebounding as he settled his full weight.
A low, guttural moan tore from Lilly’s throat. It wasn’t a sound of pain, not purely. It was a sound of profound, shocking relief, like scratching an itch deep in the core of her being. Her back arched, her fingers clawed at the rubber mat, and her eyes rolled back. The sensation was catastrophic and exquisite. It was the pure, undistilled physics of it—the instantaneous force transfer, the elastic limit of her own flesh—that sent a spike of euphoria straight through the pain.
“Oh my god,” someone in the crowd mumbled.
Leo, now standing on her, frozen. “Are you—?”
“She’s fine,” Ben snapped. “Thirty seconds. Count it.”
On the neighboring mats, Emely and Maya watched, horrified and fascinated. Maya’s tears had stopped, replaced by a frozen, wide-eyed dread. This was a new level. This was getting hit.
Ben’s eyes were on Lilly’s face, studying the ripple of sensations crossing it. When the time was up, he pointed to a woman next. “You. Platform. The left mat.”
The left mat was Maya.
“No,” Maya said, the word a little stronger now. She tried to push herself up on her elbows.
“You agreed,” Ben said, his voice flat. “You’re in. Or you’re out. And if you’re out, the line forms behind her.” He jerked a thumb at Lilly. “She takes the rest. However many are left.”
Maya looked at Lilly, who was still lying prone, a beatific, dazed smile on her pale face. She looked wrecked and radiant. Maya’s loyalty, worn thin and frayed by fear, twisted inside her. She couldn’t dump it all on Lilly. Not this.
She lowered herself back down. “Fine,” she whispered.
The woman, eager, stepped up onto the platform. She was lighter than Leo, but the principle was the same. She stepped off.
The impact on Maya was entirely different. A sharp, piercing scream ripped from her lungs—a pure, animal sound of terror and violation. Her body convulsed, trying to recoil from the weight that was now firmly planted on her. It felt invasive, like being struck by a car in slow motion. The pressure was instant and total, a crushing settlement that pinned her breathless.
“Hold still,” Ben instructed, though Maya was shaking uncontrollably.
Emely watched, her analytical mind finally, completely quiet. She felt a strange, protective fury toward Maya, and a dizzying pull toward the madness on Lilly’s face. When Ben pointed to a third participant for the right mat—her mat—she didn’t protest. She just gave a tight, numb nod.
Her impact was a blunt, deep shock. It drove a hard oomph from her chest. It didn’t feel good. But it didn’t feel entirely bad, either. It felt decisive. It felt like something was being proved, something about her own capacity. She didn’t scream. She grunted, long and low, and accepted the settling weight, focusing on the burn in her diaphragm.
The room became a rhythmic symphony of impacts. Thud. Scream. Thud. Moan. Thud. Grunt. The line fed participants to the platform, and Ben orchestrated their drops with cold precision. He spared no one, but his selections were telling. The heavier, more solid participants were directed, more often than not, to the center mat.
Lilly’s world dissolved into a series of breathtaking concussions. Each drop was a supernova in her nervous system, a flash of agony so intense it crossed a threshold into something else. Her moans became continuous, a quiet, desperate soundtrack of ecstasy. Her belly, already bruised and swollen, accepted each new impact, compressing to a terrifying thinness before rebounding, over and over, a brutal test of its elastic limits.
Maya’s screams grew hoarse, then faded into choked sobs. She stopped fighting the weight. She just lay there, taking it, her mind somewhere far away, in a quiet place with no platforms.
Between participants, as the next in line toed off their shoes, Ben leaned over Lilly. The crowd was buzzing, a low rumble of excitement and unease. He spoke so only she could hear.
“You’re close to your limit,” he murmured. It wasn’t concern. It was an observation. “The next one might breach it.”
Lilly turned her head, her cheek against the cool, sweaty mat. She looked up at him, her pupils huge. “What’s on the other side of the limit?”
Ben almost smiled. It was a chilling sight. “You tell me,” he said. “You’re the engineer.”
He straightened up and addressed the room. The line was still ten people deep. “We’re moving to double drops. Two participants, simultaneous release. Synced impacts.” He pointed to the next two people, a man and a woman. “You. And you. Platform. One on center, one on left.”
The man looked at the sobbing Maya, then at the ecstatic Lilly. “Who gets who?”
Ben didn’t hesitate. “You take center.”
The woman headed for the platform by Maya. The man, larger, stepped up onto the platform looming over Lilly.
They stepped off together.
The synchronized thuds were not quite identical. The man’s impact on Lilly was a cataclysm. A sound like a damp sack of grain hitting concrete erupted from her body. For a moment, she saw nothing but white light, and a strange, peaceful silence swallowed everything. She was paper. She was nothing. She was everything.
The woman’s impact on Maya forced a final, ragged shriek from her raw throat before she fell utterly silent, her eyes open and unseeing.
Ben watched, his own breathing slightly elevated. He checked his phone. “Five-minute rest,” he called out, his voice slicing through the noise. “Hydrate. Then we finish the list.”
The participants on the mats did not move. They couldn’t. The crowd slowly began to chatter, the adrenaline seeking an outlet, their eyes glued to the three shattered forms on the rubber, awaiting the final act.