Anne Sachman vs. Lorenza Saldano

Judging by the look on her annoying young face, Anne was pretty proud of coming right up to the line of blatantly cheating in order to gain an advantage over her more-experienced, more-skilled opponent. Call her crazy, but even in her most brutal fights Lorenza was generally used to following a set of rules. Maybe Anne wasn't. Her sport was significantly less lawful than boxing, after all. She was probably pretty smug inside that big, thick, whackable skull of hers, snickering about how she had tricked the greatest women's boxer of all time.

Never mind that she hadn't played fair to do it. All that mattered was she had the advantage in the boxing round over the greatest of all time. All she had to do was ignore the very code of boxing itself.

Lorenza backed up, turtling up with her gloves in front of her face, as Anne advanced on her, obviously wanting to press her advantage. Lorenza wiggled her jaw and felt it throb, but the sheer numbing shock of the punch was going away. It hadn't been so terribly impressive, in the end, and Lorenza could rally and still wipe the floor with her foe. Anne came at her again, aiming for her belly. Lorenza bent and took another step back and to the side, before Anne suddenly switched it up and aimed for the head.

Lorenza brought her gloves up and let the blow slam into her guard, forcing her another half-step to the side. But she didn't let that glove hit her face. She was not going down that easily. She bent her knees a bit and twisted back at Anne, aiming to drive a hard right hook into her foe's side while she was still glowing with confidence, aiming to dim her a little!

Lorenza had this special ability to both her rising spirit and her momentum in one fell swoop. Everytime she found a little triumph, everytime she found a little bit of an edge, Lorenza shut it back down. Sometimes it happened between rounds, sometimes within the same round. It sure as hell happened in HER muay thai round. Her confidence itself had been a roller coaster: Unsure to start, steadily rising, with small fluctuations as the tide ebbed and flowed.

And with Lorenza's punch, it flowed...and she absolutely refused to back away this time. She could have waited out the round, backpedalled and weaved for the god-knows how many seconds this round had, but that slut had promised to punch her face in, and she was oh so keen to return the blood favour. And though her assault proved futile, though all she got in return was a thundering hook to the side that sent a ripple of pain to her increasing battered body-

She soldiered on. She would fuckin' trade

Despite the years of on-and-off boxing spectatorship, Anne had never grasped the dubious legality of clinch fighting in boxing. What was one of the greatest pivot tools in muay thai was warped into a refuge of the tired and the desperate. It was such a limited sport. The traditional boxer's clinch was foreign to her..but then again, she wasn't exactly using it traditionally.

She would come in for the clinch and...

Swing. No throw, no sweep, just a bodily swing in an attempt to throw Lorenza off her momentum.

Lorenza's hook smashed into Anne's flank, pounding a momentary crater in the younger woman's flesh, which lasted only for a millisecond before skin and muscle rebounded and pushed Lorenza's fist back. Anne was obviously hurt, but she did not back down. Despite her lack of boxing experience, she stayed close, standing tall, obviously aiming to go blow-for-blow with the former world champion. If she wanted to, then so be it!

Of course, she couldn't do that without playing unfairly. Maybe she wasn't actively cheating by moving in for a clinch, but it sure as hell wasn't sporting. It was the last resort for a desperate boxer. Maybe that boded well for Lorenza's chances of finishing off Anne before they moved on to the next muay thai round—or, God forbid, the next round of fricking chess.

Anne hugged her, then threw her weight to the side, causing Lorenza to stumble as Anne used that momentum to make the boxer lose focus. It was effective, to a degree, but Lorenza did not fall, and she did not open up her guard for an easy punch or two from Anne. Instead, Lorenza would bend down lower, trying to bring down her center of gravity and make it more difficult for Anne to move her. Then, with one glove guarding, the other glove would strike, trying to hammer Anne's midsection repeatedly and force her to back up!

Every instinct in her body told her to go for the knee, drive one of her signature curved spikes into Lorenza's belly again and again and again until she spluttered and faded, shove her back with a front kick, and sent her to the shadow realm with a flying knee: slick, spectacular, savage. Alas, time and again, those instincts had to be reminded that not only was it the wrong type of round, it wasn't even the right type of clinch. In its own utterly infuriating way, this kind of constant second-guessing of what was and wasn't legal was even worse than playing chess. Lorenza had 6 extra limbs she couldn't capitalise on in the muay thai rounds.

But Anne? Anne was an octopus who had to learn how to crawl on 2 legs. 2 legs that tried to do everything else the other 6 legs were responsible for.

The brutal battle between the two champions was taking its toll....Or at least Anne was hoping Lorenza was feeling the same kind of pain and fatigue she was trying and failing to hide. Her nose was busted, an early injury that had become a permanent liability for the rest of the fight - one that Lorenza had already capitalised on multiple times. A dozen other lesser injuries littered her body, the constant ab punches being chief amongst them. And sooner or later, as it was wont, all those injuries -every bruise, every nick, every cut, every bleeding orifice- would come crashing down on her at one go like a massive tidal wave.

But not before Lorenza DIED.

If only her mental bravado matched her boxing success.

She took the first thundering punch to her abs. The second almost made her heave, and by god's grace, the third never had a chance to land...Anne didn't so much break the clinch as she shoved Lorenza off her as she sank to one knee, a glove over her battered, bruised belly, her eyes closed in agony.

The count began.

No matter what Anne managed to do, she was still on Lorenza's turf so long as they were boxing. And so help her, Lorenza was going to teach Anne a thing or two about this sport of champions. As Anne threw her, or at least threw her weight to the side, Lorenza rode it out, let her foe make use of the borderline-illegal tactic, and then made her move. She brought one glove up into Anne's stomach, hammering away at it, slamming her fist into it one time, then again.

She didn't have to hit any more. Anne fell to her knees, one arm covering up her bruised belly. Lorenza would take a couple of steps back, shaking out her arms, taking a deep breath and then releasing it slowly, keeping her eyes on Anne. She stared at her downed opponent, not taunting, just watching. The Mexican champion stood tall on her feet while her foe, pathetic, fell to one knee. Lorenza was not the type to start bragging. But the image was a poignant one.

Lorenza shook her arms out again, then did a little shadowboxing, keeping herself loose and ready for when Anne got up. She didn't really listen to the count past "two." She knew that Anne was going to get up off of that knee.

And when she did, Lorenza intended to knock her right back down.

The count didn't reach 3.

Humiliated, dominated, and thrown around like a ragdoll, Anne was desperate not to add on to the abundance of weakness and inadequacy she had displayed through the last... it had to be at least 2 minutes. God, she hoped it was at least 2 minutes. It felt like an hour by now. Pushing herself up by her gloves so effortlessly she had to be hiding the pain she was feeling, Anne stood up... and stepped towards Lorenza. Before the referee could split them apart, she was in her face, foreheads pressed together once again, their heaving chests smashed against each other.

"You're not winning this," Anne said, so closed to the Tiger that she could see the reflection in her eyes. "You're not winning this."

The bell rang. In the heat of their staredown, she didn't seem to notice or care.

Lorenza waited patiently for her opponent, letting her body language do the talking, as she stood tall and Anne had been forced down onto one knee, humbled by the older woman. There really was not a more poignant scene in the entire fighting world than one woman at her full height, arms casually held up to show her readiness to continue, while her foe was on her knees, one arm shoving against the canvas, trying to force her back up onto her feet, her body trembling as she struggled to breathe, struggled to deal with her inferiority.

Anne was not trembling so much right now, admittedly, and she shoved herself up onto her feet before three seconds had passed. That was to be expected. Lorenza had her green gloves up, ready for a wild, dirty attack from her young foe, but the girl did not go after her right away. Not in that way. She led with her face, shoving her forehead up against Lorenza's again, her tits following as their chests mashed together, as well. Lorenza's gloves dropped to her hips as she shoved back against Anne, their bodies slamming tightly together as they both stared into each other's eyes and tried to intimidate each other.

Lorenza laughed as Anne declared she wasn't winning this. "Please, what the fuck else will happen? You can't compete with me, chica." The bell rang to signal the end of a very productive boxing round for Lorenza, but she didn't notice it any more than her opponent. "Maybe you should try to suck up to me instead of bitching, yeah? The bitch stuff gets old." She brought her gloves up and shoved Anne's shoulders, intending to separate them and go back to punching her lights out. Though the ref, who was already moving in, might have something to say about that.

All the noise in the world was filtered out as Anne matched the fury in Lorenza's eyes. The loud cheers of the crowd fell to the wayside, the referee's urgent warnings to back away from each other, and the ring of the bell that she couldn't hear because even if, intellectually, she understood she was at a severe disadvantage in a boxing round, she would rather throw herself in there again and again for as many minutes as she could until she inched out a result that she could be proud of.

Wasn't about the score; she wasn't paying attention to it anyway. She was winning. Just a little, but one thing both Anne and Lorenza agreed on was that this contest was not going to end on the board or the judging table.

"Not as old as you." Anne spat back. "You're a relic of a sport. A fossil. You're the dinosaurs from Jurassic park; and they should have never brought you back into a world you no longer fit in." The shove came and Anne responded in a manner that the Tiger deserved. Eyes not leaving Lorenza's, she calmly took out her mouthguard-

And spat a glob of thick, reddish saliva straight into her opponent's face.

Once again, Anne tried taking a few shots at Lorenza's age, and Lorenza would scoff and shake her head at the girl's repetitive trash talk, which she had heard plenty of times before. "Now that is old, that trash talk. You ever have an original thought in that ugly skull, chica? Come on, I try to be nice, you know, because fighting over here, in Japan, in AFW, it's not what I call a comeback. I do this for me, and I try not to be a bitch, and putas like you piss me off."

Little did she know just how pissed off she was going to be, as Anne took her mouthguard out, tilted her head up slightly, and spat at her, blood-stained saliva smacking into Lorenza's left cheek, just underneath her eye. As the spit dribbled down her face, Lorenza was frozen for a moment, eyes staring hard into Anne's...

...before she would go to tear her gloves off of her hands, trying to get down to just her taped fists before she started swinging at Anne, trying to land a bare-fisted punch or two as the referee dove in to shove the two of them away from each other, the crowd roaring as things were very nearly breaking down into a full-on brawl between the two champions between rounds!

The next few seconds that followed was a little object lesson in why referees were encouraged to be big enough and tough enough to stop the worst two pissed off fighters could throw at each other.

Matching her actions move by move, second by second, Anne ripped off her gloves too, her taped hands exposed. The satisfied smile on her face quickly gave way to a vicious snarl as she pushed forward, throwing jabs and wild hooks. The referee, a blonde girl a head shorter and half their weight, had placed herself between them, shouting words she could barely make out. Something about 'stop' and 'disqualification' and 'corners. She couldn't quite make it out admidst the blood haze in her head that drove her forward, that seemed to cloud a bit more for every second she saw Lorenza's sickening face.

They didn't know who was the one who knocked out the Ref. They hit her almost at the same time. One of Anne's many hasty jabs, intended to take Lorenza on the shoulder, instead found itself buried into the Ref's cheek. The ref crumbled between them... and Anne didn't care. She seized the unconscious official, shoved her into Lorenza. What followed next was a quick run that propelled her up onto the referee, lifting her high, and a sharp downward jumping elbow aimed at Lorenza's temple.