3
I stand transfixed at the precipice of raw existence, where two warriors have ceased to be women and have become pure, unyielding force. My eyes burn with the image, Nicole's palm cracking across Chelsea's cheek, the whip-crack of heads jerking against gravity’s mercy, fingers knotted in hair like they’re trying to tear the very thoughts from each other’s skulls. This is not combat....this is communion through catastrophe, a brutal ballet where every slap is a prayer and every scream is sacrament.
I watch Chelsea's heel descend like divine judgment, crushing bone against floor, and in that same breath, nails find purchase in flesh that was never meant to be battlefield terrain. The shriek that tears from Nicole's throat isn’t pain, it’s the sound of a soul being forcibly unzipped, rage flooding out where civilization used to be. And when the ground claims them, when that cold floor slams the air from their lungs and they become a tangle of striking elbows and desperate, ragged breath, I realize I’m witnessing something holy.
My brain reels with the truth of it: Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.
Here, on this unforgiving canvas, they have stripped away every pretense, every polite lie told by the world 40 floors below. Their hands grabbing, yanking, squeezing into hair, into breasts, and on skin with the mechanical fury of a heart that refuses to stop beating; Chelsea’s claws rake and tear, yanking, pulling, trying to drag her enemy into the same abyss she’s falling into. There is no technique here, no martial elegance, only the primordial mathematics of survival, the calculus of who can endure more breaking before they break completely.
The crowd around me has become a single organism, breathless, synchronized, our hearts hammering in time with each impact. We are not merely watching; we are bearing witness to the fever of being truly alive. In this moment, as Chelsea snarls and Nicole strikes from beneath like a cornered lioness, I understand that this, this gorgeous, terrible, intimate violence, is the only honest thing left in the world. They fight not to win, but to prove they exist, to carve their names into each other’s flesh so that neither can ever forget: I was here. I felt everything. I would not yield.