I sprang at him, using my left hand to chop down on his guard while I looped my right up and over and down with a smashing palm-heel. He was fast. My lord, was he fast. I had him cold, and he still managed to twist and contort his body to empty the space where he’d just been. A matador would weep for such an evasion; a danseur would kill for that grace.

His evasion turned into a counterattack as—with his back briefly toward me—he kicked up backward in a deer kick that caught me high on the inner thigh with his heel.

I was not wearing underwear, and my balls were right there, directly in the path of the kick.

It hurt. Real fucking bad.

Here’s the thing about pain, though. Unless the pain is coupled with debilitating damage, it’s just sensation. It can be dealt with. It can be endured and even disregarded. Every boxer knows this, every soldier injured in combat while still a hundred yards from cover knows it. Marathon runners know it, and so do teenagers playing soccer on a Sunday morning. Getting hit in the balls hurts. In a civilized moment, you tend to curl up into a fetal position and pray for death. In action, though, when it’s not only your life but the lives of everyone who needs you, counts on you, depends on you … it becomes something else. It becomes fuel.

The pain galvanized me, and I hurled myself at Santoro, trying to drive him against the wall. But he was already turning, having seen or sensed my jump. He slapped his arm around my waist, turned away, bent over, and used his hip as a fulcrum and my mass and momentum to throw me onto the floor.

But I grew up in jujitsu schools. Throws and counter-throws, or counters to counters … that’s my thing. If I’d fed him that technique, it could not have been more ideal. As I landed, I turned like an axle and made him the wheel. The new torque whipped him around me, and then he was on the floor and I was on top.

Last year in Oslo, he’d had a dominant moment like that and, instead of ending it right there, decided to beat me to death. He’d knocked out teeth, fractured an eye socket, and busted bones in my face. He could have used that time to kill me, and it gave me a chance to turn the tables on him. And … damn if I hadn’t done the same thing. I’d wanted to punish him for the deaths of the helpless and innocent people on the islands where the Rage pathogen was released.