Page 54 of Dangerous Rhythm

Curtis watched—with what he was sure was a dumbstruck expression—as Lina flipped the dagger in her hand and attacked him again, this time in a slicing motion. She was so fast that the only way for him to avoid the knife was to drop to his back and crab-walk away from her. It wasn’t a graceful move, but it distanced him from her.

This time, Lina didn’t stop. She went after him, and once again, flipped the dagger into a stabbing grip. She leapt to gut him right in the midsection.

“Shit!” Curtis rolled away, barely missing the tip of the dagger. He scrambled up to his feet and quickly faced Lina in a defensive stance. “You’re fucking crazy!”

“Get me to drop the knife or try taking it from me this time,” Lina ordered.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” Curtis said.

Lina looked at him with a bemused smile. “Let’s go.” She dropped to the ground and rolled toward him, slicing at his shin.

Curtis instinctively jumped over her flying arm, and again just barely missed her next slicing movement in the opposite direction, toward his thighs, which made contact.

“Fuck!”

“You’re not dead yet,” Lina warned as she lifted the dagger up to drive toward his gut.

Curtis caught her wrist in both of his hands at his chest level. But before he could twist her arm, she dropped the knife, caught it with her left hand, and planted it in his stomach.

“You’re dead,” she announced.

His heart was running a mile a minute. Sweat dripped over his wide eyes as he stared at the fucking fake knife. He dropped her arm a little forcefully. “Motherfucker!”

He had to walk around calming his heart as he warily watched the not-even-winded Lina. “Holy shit, you’re fast.”

“You have pretty fast reflexes, too,” Lina said, standing at ease in the middle of the ring with her arms at rest behind her. “You’re too tense—”

“I had a ninja lady trying to kill me, of course I was fucking tense!” Curtis pointed at her with an are-you-kidding-me outrage face.

She laughed. “In an actual situation, it will be ten times worse. We need to train to stay cool and not panic.”

“How do you not panic when there’s someone coming at you with a knife? Or worse, a gun?”

“Well, if guns are involved, I recommend you find cover and duck,” Lina said. “But if you’re in a close-contact combat, you have to trust your mind and body to do what it’s trained to do. You said you’ve been training. Tell me more.”

Curtis scratched his head and shrugged. “Obviously, it didn’t do me squat.”

“I think you did well.”

“You killed me!”

Lina chuckled. “You evaded the first two and blocked the third strike.”

“Just to be killed by the fourth.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here.” She asked again, “So, mixed martial arts fighting. A little boxing, jiujitsu, Taekwondo?”

“Yeah. I learned some kickboxing and judo techniques, too.”

“So, a lot of close-contact fighting during training?”

Curtis nodded.

“Okay. Now, you’ll need to learn to fight an opponent with a weapon. You don’t want to be rolling on the ground with an armed assailant unless you have control of the weapon.”

That makes sense,Curtis thought. They did roll around on the floor a lot during a fight, trying to pin the opponent.

“We need to improve your dodging game.” Lina brought out her hand with the knife again. “Let’s practice. You game?”

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