2022 – Six Weeks Before the Drozd Fight)
Berlin was not a city of light. It was a city of iron. The gray skies pressed down on the cobblestones, and the chill in the air wasn't romantic; it was a promise of coming winter. Kyon Wilson had traded his gilded Detroit cage for a different kind of prison: a brutal, self-imposed lockdown of relentless work.
The sports science clinic was a joke. He fired the Germans and their machines after two weeks. All they saw were metrics. They didn't understand the forge. He found what he needed in a boxing gym in the industrial wasteland of Marzahn. Kampfclub Ost wasn't a gym; it was a bunker. Concrete floors, rusted iron beams, the air thick with the stink of sweat, leather, and old blood. The fighters here were not artists. They were survivors from the old Eastern bloc, men with flat eyes and chips on their shoulders the size of the Wall. They didn't care who he was. They saw a well-funded American and wanted to take his head off.
This was the grind.
His trainer was not a psychologist. He was a man named Gregor, a Belarusian ex-kickboxer with a face like a smashed plate and a voice like gravel in a tin can. Gregor spoke maybe ten words of English. It was enough.
"Run," Gregor would say at 5 AM, pointing at the door into the freezing Berlin dawn. Kyon would run for an hour, through abandoned lots and along desolate canals, his breath pluming, his legs burning, Gregor following on a clattering bicycle, shouting in Russian whenever his pace flagged.
The gym work was medieval. There was no VR. No biofeedback. There was a heavy bag so old and hard it felt like punching an oak tree. Gregor would stand beside it, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, barking corrections. "Hips! Twist! You hit like girl!" They drilled one thing for hours. The overhand right. Not as a counter. As a weapon of annihilation. "Drozd comes forward, head down," Gregor grunted, miming the charge. "You do not dance. You meet. You break." He made Kyon throw the overhand right from a dead stop, from off-balance, from his knees, with his eyes closed, until the pathway from brain to fist was a superhighway of pure, destructive impulse.
The sparring was a war of attrition. The Armenian wrestler, the Swede, the Cuban—they were gone. In their place were gigantic, shaved-headed Poles and stone-faced Russians who lived in the gym's back rooms. They didn't simulate Drozd; they embodied a primal, crushing aggression. They came forward behind high guards, eating his jabs to get inside, where they mauled him with short, thudding hooks and tried to slam him to the concrete floor. There was no "flow." There was survival. And then, there was punishment.
Kyon learned to stand in the pocket, to take a shot to give two harder back. He learned to use his forearms and elbows as clubs in the clinch, to gouge and lean and make every inch of space a bloody conquest. He stopped trying to be pretty. He stopped trying to be an artist. The artist was a luxury for men who hadn't been betrayed, who hadn't had their freedom stolen. The man in the Kampfclub Ost was something older, harder.
He changed. It wasn't subtle. The lean, elegant musculature of the Phantom thickened. His shoulders became slabs, his neck a column of tendon. His hands, always taped, grew raw and then calloused into leather. The hollows in his cheeks filled out, not with fat, but with a dense, hungry intensity. He ate mountains of plain meat, rice, and eggs. He drank water by the gallon. He slept a dead, dreamless sleep for exactly six hours a night.
And he began to feel it. A new current under his skin. Not just the Phantom Reflex, that lightning-fast twitch of avoidance. This was deeper. A thrumming, low-frequency power. It was in the way he could now shove the 250-pound Polish behemoth off him with a single, explosive shrug. It was in the way his overhand right, even on the heavy bag, sounded like a shotgun blast. It was a god-like strength not of finesse, but of sheer, terrifying force, honed in a crucible of pure, angry work.
One afternoon, after a sparring session where he'd stood toe-to-toe with a Russian tank for eight brutal rounds, trading hellacious shots until the Russian's nose was a crimson ruin and his own left eye was swelling shut, Gregor looked at him. A flicker of something that wasn't criticism passed over the Belarusian's ruined face. He grunted, a sound that might have been approval, and tossed Kyon a towel.
That night, in the bare, cold apartment he rented near the gym, Kyon stared at his reflection in the small bathroom mirror. His face was a battleground: fresh cuts, purple swelling, the old scars from a lifetime of war standing out like pale ridges. He didn't see the haunted orphan, the betrayed champion, the silent defendant. He saw a predator. And for the first time, he felt a hot, clean surge of emotion that wasn't pain, or loneliness, or cold calculation.
It was anger. A righteous, blazing fury. Not just at Thorne, or Solano, but at the world that had tried to break him. At the judges, the media, the doubters. At Viktor Drozd, the ignorant bull who thought he could walk through the wreckage of Kyon Wilson.
He smiled. It was a fierce, ugly thing, there in the mirror. A smile that didn't reach his eyes, which had gone as cold and hard as river stone.
The next day, during a scheduled phone interview with a major sports network, something broke in him. The reporter, following the usual script, asked, "Given the layoff and the trauma of the past year, do you worry that Drozd's relentless pressure will be too much?"
Kyon didn't give the quiet, philosophical answer Lena had prepped. His voice, rough from the gym and this new, hot emotion, cut through the line.
"Worry? No. I hope he brings pressure. I hope he comes forward like he always does. Because I'm not the man he was supposed to fight. That man got erased. I've been rebuilt in the dark. I'm stronger than I've ever been. I hit harder than I ever dreamed. Drozd thinks he's walking into a fight with a boxer. He's walking into a slaughterhouse. And I just finished sharpening the axe."
There was a stunned silence on the other end of the line. Then, the reporter, scrambling, asked, "That's a... very confident statement. Some would say arrogant."
"Call it what you want," Kyon shot back, the words coming easily, fueled by the furnace inside him. "They called me a phantom. A ghost. An artist. Now they'll call me something else. Tell Drozd to bring his lunch. It's gonna be a long night for him. And it's gonna hurt."
He hung up.
Lena called him ten seconds later. "What the hell was that? We had an agreement! Quiet dignity!"
"Quiet dignity got me framed and almost imprisoned," Kyon growled. "This is me now. Deal with it."
He could almost hear her recalibrating on the other end. After a moment, she said, a new respect in her tone, "Alright. It's a different angle. The Avenger. The monster from the lab. It'll sell. But you better back it up, Kyon. You just poured gasoline on this fire."
"Good," he said. "Let it burn."
The clip went viral. Phantom No More: Kyon Wilson Promises "Slaughterhouse." The boxing world, bored with his silence, erupted. This was the drama it craved. Drozd, enraged, responded in a video from his mountain camp, punching a hanging side of beef until it disintegrated. "He talks like coward! I break him in half! I send him back to prison where he belong!"
Kyon didn't respond. He went back to the Kampfclub Ost. He ran harder. He punched the oak-hard bag until his knuckles bled through the tape. He sparred with a new, chilling ferocity. He was no longer solving a puzzle. He was visualizing a destruction.
Alana saw the change when she visited from her studio. She stood at the edge of the gym, watching him work with Gregor. He was a different man in this place. All softness was gone, burned away in the furnace of his will. Afterward, walking back to his apartment, she was quiet.
"This place... it's changing you," she finally said.
"It's revealing me," he corrected, his voice still carrying the gym's gravel. "This was always there. Under the art. Under the philosophy. The kid from the cellar. He didn't have pretty moves. He had teeth."
She looked at him, her artist's eyes seeing the new layers, the dangerous contours. "I'm scared for you," she admitted.
"Don't be," he said, and for the first time, he put an arm around her, pulling her close. The gesture was possessive, strong, different. "I'm not scared anymore. For the first time, I'm not running, I'm not thinking, I'm not waiting. I'm coming. And I'm going to take what's mine and break anyone who stands in my way."
A week before they were to leave for Las Vegas, Gregor ended a final, brutal sparring session. Kyon had just finished dismantling a huge Lithuanian with a series of clubbing hooks that echoed through the concrete bunker. As Kyon drank water, Gregor walked up to him. He looked at Kyon's hands, his shoulders, his eyes. He nodded once.
"Goty v." Ready.
Then the Belarusian did something he'd never done. He extended a calloused, scarred hand. Kyon took it. Gregor's grip was iron.
"Ty zver." You are a beast.
It was the highest praise the man could give.
On the flight to Vegas, Kyon didn't review strategy. He watched the highlights of Drozd's last five fights on a tablet, not with analytical detachment, but with a hungry, predatory focus. He saw the openings, the lazy habit of dropping his right hand after a jab, the slight pause as he set his feet to unload. They weren't flaws to exploit. They were targets to obliterate.
Hayes met him at the airport, buzzing with nervous energy. "The buzz is insane! The trash talk, the new look... they're calling it the 'Reckoning!'"
Kyon just looked at him, his new, cold eyes silencing the smaller man. "It's not a reckoning," he said, his voice low. "It's an execution. Now get out of my way. I have work to do."
He walked past him, a force of nature contained in a fighter's body, for the first time in his life radiating an aura of not just confidence, but of impending, unstoppable violence. The Phantom was dead.
The Reforged had arrived.