Roughly, he took the mouthguard and put it in his mouth again. Now that it was all silvery, he could not distinguish well the distances except through the nuances of color, while in his mind reappeared something he did not remember before. He stood in guard and stretched his gloves toward Alice.
«She's going to cut him to pieces... Second round ... huh ... DING?» said the doctor, then he went around the ring and, after noticing the boy's eyes, began to take notes frantically. Alice frowned in puzzlement as she watched his guard, then she saw the silver and smiled as she hit her gloves against his.
When the two beat the gloves, between the silver of the surface and the shades of gray, like a spring, words appeared from Alice's right shoulder: "jab". In a little time, the girl repeated the same movement of just before, but the boy dodged it promptly, lowering himself and skirting to the side. Floored, she saw her opponent's move and, after realigning herself, she tried again with a jab, this time from the left. A new word originated from her left shoulder; As soon as it was completely deployed, Alice moved her attack, dodged again by the boy, who skirted to her uncovered side and tried a hook to the girl's hip. He was sure he would hit her but, at the last moment, Alice stepped back with a sudden movement.
She hit her gloves together and moved her head to the side to stretch her neck. Silver looked at her with his silvery eyes: the more he watched the girl's movements, the more notions came to his mind from his memory. When she stated to attack again, chaos burst into his vision.
"Jerk", "jab feint", "left hook", "side jerk", "jab", words that followed one another suddenly and that he struggled to follow due to Alice's speed, who proved to be anything but slow in her movements. He stayed en guard and pretended to fall into the girl's tricks, and when he opposed his arm to block the hook, she jerked to the side, at that moment, the word "jab" dissolved and became "uppercut." Floored, he could not figure out the distances and the girl's uppercut took him into the pit of his stomach, taking his breath away.
He took two side steps and caught his breath, while Alice came close to him, fierce. Again a string of words followed one another and once again a term changed during the clash. This time the boy managed to save himself in extremis. Alice looked at him with satisfaction and she broke the guard after taking two steps back, rested the glove on her chignon and loosened it. The blood-colored hair spread out in waves over her shoulders.
In the silver river of his vision, those hairs were the only bright color that caused a sharp contrast with the environment. She smiled, he was instead cautious. He knew that long hair were a problem in hand-to-hand combat; He didn’t know since when he was aware of this notion, but it was like an alarm bell in his mind. This worried him, more than a little.
She motioned for him to approach, caught by the challenge of the battle. He saw on her silvery face those beads of sweat, and even more that competition fire in her eyes that contrasted with the green; Then from her hair something like red smoke lifted and shone, translucent, glittering in the silver. Silver, perplexed, stepped in toward the girl, trying out an uncertain right hook. Alice dodged him in a moment, and when his hand passed through that red cloud, the boy felt a mixture of fear and ecstasy inside him.
Alice resumed the attack, but this time the words that appeared in the boy's vision were faded, uncertain and even more changeable than the previous ones. He felt confused and couldn’t understand why this was happening. He just wanted to run away, close himself under the covers of his own brand and never wake up.
She smiled at seeing his expression change and she was ready to send him KO with a hook to his chin. She was already foretasting her ninetieth victory, but it was in that moment that he, with astonishing speed, embraced her.
Alice felt that pulse deep inside her again, with a reverberation that shook her whole body. In the core of that pulsation, she felt a pain like she had never felt before, a stabbing pain that seemed to pierce her from side to side. The boy dropped the mouthguard: «Don’t do that... I don’t want you to die» he said with tears on his face, then slipped without force in Alice's arms until he fell on his knee on the ring. He coughed once, dirtying the rug with blood and, just like in his dream, he started to drip vital lymph from his mouth, falling on his side and creating a puddle in no time.
Alice was upset, staring at an indistinct point in front of herself with her eyes still open wide. She felt the reverberation of that pain throughout her body, and as Dr. Preston and some agents attended Silver, she could not move, petrified by the anguish of those words.
