The headache was there before Mido touched me.
Not when his jab caught the side of my face. Not when the straight right clipped my temple hard enough to make the room tilt. Before any of that — three weeks back, sitting behind my eyes like someone had pressed their thumbs into my skull and simply forgot to let go.
I fought anyway.
Because I was Anthony Jarrett. Twenty-three. Undefeated. Heavyweight champion of the world. Men like me don't pull out over headaches. You say that in camp and the trainers start talking about *protecting your future*, and my future had always been exactly one thing: a ring, a belt, a crowd screaming my name while some other man tries not to drown under the pace.
Round six. Tokyo. Cameras everywhere, heat heavy under the lights, sweat running cold down my ribs. Mido — the Japanese kid — had faster footwork than the tape showed. His jab snapped clean out of nowhere. Smaller frame. Wrong weight class. Wrong night, according to every analyst with a Twitter account and an opinion they'd never been punched out of.
The plan was dying.
He touched me again. Pop. Just a jab. Shouldn't have registered. But the sound it made inside my head was wrong — wet and deep and ugly, like something tearing slowly in the dark behind my eye.
I reset my feet. Watched his shoulder. Started to cut the angle.
He didn't throw big. That's what did it. No pride, no hero punch. Just another straight shot down the middle while I was still planting. My legs were there. My balance wasn't.
The canvas rushed up like it meant something personal.
Cheek first. Then shoulder. My arms stopped answering when I told them to get under me. The ref was yelling somewhere far above. My mouth tasted like blood and old plastic. Delroy was screaming from the corner in a language I understood but couldn't parse. The bell might've rung. Might've been ringing the whole time. I couldn't tell, and that scared me worse than the fall itself.
I tried to push up.
Couldn't feel my right hand.
Couldn't feel my face.
The lights went out. Not the arena lights. Mine.
-----
When I came back there was gray.
No pain. No weight. No floor, no ceiling. Just gray, flat and absolute, like someone had deleted the world and left me standing in the center by accident.
I looked for the ring. Nothing. My gloves were still on — or something that looked like gloves, until I tried to focus, at which point they blurred at the edges like they hadn't committed to existing. I turned around. Same gray every direction.
"That part always throws people off."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once. A man stood somewhere in front of me — or behind. Direction didn't work here. Older than forty, younger than ancient. Black hair pulled back neat. White gi. Bare feet. Hands tucked into his sleeves like he had somewhere to be around never.
I looked at him, then around, then back. "No tunnel? No dead grandma? No choir?"
He held my gaze. "You disappoint cleanly."
"Meaning?"
"You're not crying yet."
That irritated me enough to steady me. I tried to step toward him. No ground, but I moved anyway. "Am I dead?"
He just looked at me.
"Nah," I said. The laugh that came out was short and ugly — the kind that happens when the alternative is something worse. "Nah. That's actually wild."
He waited.
I thought about my mum first, which surprised me. Then Delroy, and the way he wrapped hands like it was prayer — slow, talking the whole time. Then my flat in Vegas. The mail I'd never opened. The running shoes by the door I'd never lace up again. The phone full of numbers I was done calling.
Then the anger came. Not fear. Anger.
"Six rounds and a headache. That's my whole run."
"You had more than six rounds."
"You know what I mean, man."
He unfolded one hand from his sleeve. "I can send you somewhere else."
I stared at him. "That's the pitch."
"Yes."
"Reincarnation. New world. Monsters, martial arts, all that."
"Yes."
"You serious."
"Very."
I sat with it. The thing was — after about ten seconds, it wasn't even the strangest item on the current list. Already dead, already standing in nothing, already talking to a man in white with nowhere feet. At some point you just go with it.
"What world?" I asked.
He opened his palm. An image moved inside it — not quite a vision, not quite a memory. Mountains that went too high. Forests thick enough to swallow towns whole. Creatures with teeth like farm equipment. Men in gis training in courtyards beaten flat by blood and bare feet. A bald old man on an island. A sky too wide for reason.
My pulse jumped. Even without a pulse.
Then I saw the child.
Small. Really small. Brown copper skin. Dark eyes. A little cloud of wild black hair. Maybe five or six years old, standing in tall grass with bare feet and his face tilted up at something I couldn't see. Even through the vision I could see it — the shoulders too wide, the neck too thick, the build carrying more density than six years of anything should account for. Like something was packed into those small bones that hadn't fully decided what it was yet.
"That's the body?" I said.
"Yes."
"He's a baby."
"He's healthy."
"He's *six years old*. I was a grown man."
"You were," the being agreed, like that settled something.
I looked at the kid again. Little fists. Little feet. The jaw was too squared for his age. Something in the brow too set, too serious. Like a much older thing had been mapped onto a child's face and left marks.
"There's a catch," the being said.
"Course there is."
"The world is dangerous. The body is exceptional — but it must be earned. You will start small. Literally."
I looked at those tiny hands. Six years old. I knew grown. I knew reach and mass and a man's stride. Going back to that — small and slow and starting from absolute zero in a world that could probably kill me with the local wildlife — sounded like punishment.
Then I thought about a world full of monsters and men who could split mountains.
I grinned before I meant to.
"Send me," I said.
The gray tore open. Cold hit me so hard I lost everything else.
-----
I came back choking.
Water in my nose, water down my throat, my whole body convulsing on instincts I didn't own yet. I rolled sideways and coughed until my ribs hurt.
Small. The ribs were so small.
I pushed up too fast and nearly went face-first into wet stone. My hands caught me. Tiny hands — slim fingers, tough little palms, brown copper skin a different shade than anything Anthony Jarrett had worn.
No mirror. Just a puddle gathered in the rock nearby.
I crawled to it.
The face looking back was a little kid's face. Couldn't have been more than six. Big dark eyes too serious for what they were sitting in. Wild black hair gone flat and matted from whatever water I'd landed in. Features broad in a way that didn't fit the years — jaw too squared, brow already set like a much older thing. He looked like a child who'd been carved from a description of something bigger that hadn't finished deciding what it was.
The neck was wrong. Too thick for six. The shoulders, even through wet cloth, already too wide. Not sick wrong. Just more than expected. Dense in a way that didn't photograph cleanly.
"Nah," I said. My voice came out small and high and completely alien to me. I hated it immediately.
I stood. Let the body show me its center of gravity — lower than expected, lighter, loaded strangely. My legs wanted to spring before I gave permission. Soles sensitive on the wet stone. Tendons coiled tight.
Stronger than this size should be. I could feel that just standing still.
I took four careful steps. Stopped trying to move like Anthony Jarrett and started letting the body tell me what it already knew.
That helped. Everything still felt wrong, but a different kind of wrong.
At the cave mouth: blue. Ocean. Sun bright enough to make me squint hard.
One sun. Thank God for that much.
The wind hit my face and the full weight of it settled in — quiet and total. Nobody on Earth knew where I was. Not because I was lost. Because Earth was gone. My mum was going to grieve an empty version of me. Delroy would tell journalists I died doing what I loved, because that's what you say when the truth is just an ugly accident in round six.
I sat on the stone and let that breathe inside me for a minute. Didn't cry. Almost laughed — because even dead, even in the wrong body, even in a world I didn't recognise, my first real thought was practical.
*Water. Food. A way down.*
Old habits.
I stood. Tested a jab in the air. Tiny arm, tiny fist. It snapped out faster than this size should allow — the shoulder rolling clean, the hip turning automatically underneath. I threw a cross and the torque nearly sent me over my front knee.
Hips quicker than expected. Good to know.
I started down the cliff face. Then loose gravel shifted under my foot and the rock went with it and the cold water hit me like a wall. Salt in my mouth, spinning, then I kicked on instinct and shot upward and broke the surface already coughing, already completely done with this island.
I swam to shore faster than I had any right to and lay on the wet sand looking up at a sky that didn't belong to me yet.
Then I heard the hiss.
Not wind. Not surf. Something low and dry, right behind my left ear.
I rolled.
The snake hit sand where my throat had been. Long body, wedge head bigger than my fist, thick mottled coils already resetting. It struck again. I scrambled back on wet sand — a six-year-old body in a world that wanted to kill it — and felt the air from the fangs brush my hip.
*Okay.*
I watched the coil. The head can fake. The coil commits.
When it lunged again I dropped my weight and drove my heel down onto the neck. My heel. A little kid's heel. The body whipped under my foot so hard my teeth clicked. The tail cracked across my calf. I drove the heel harder. Felt the give. One more time.
Still.
I stepped back, breathing through my mouth, staring down at it. Tiny hands shaking — adrenaline with nowhere to go. I checked my ankle. No puncture. The strike had missed.
"Twice today," I said. My voice still sounded like a stranger's child. "Wagwan."
Footsteps behind me in sand. I turned, fists half-up — embarrassingly small fists, honestly — and found a skinny bald man in sunglasses and a loud pink flower shirt standing twenty yards off. Wooden staff in one hand. An enormous tortoise at his side like this was a normal morning.
He looked from me to the dead snake. Back to me. He took his sunglasses off, cleaned them slowly on his shirt, put them back on.
"Kid," he said. Long pause. "How old are you?"
"Six," I said.
Another pause.
"You always stomp kanaba vipers before breakfast?"
"First one," I said. "Today specifically."
The tortoise turned its ancient head. "Master Roshi," it said, with the composed resignation of a creature that had long since made peace with impossible things, "I did tell you his energy felt unusual."
The bald man — Roshi, confirmed — looked at the snake one more time. Then back at me. Then he laughed — long and genuine and slightly helpless, the laugh of a man who thought he'd seen everything.
For the first time since I woke up in that cave, I smiled without forcing it.