UNLEASHED #102 - Pro Championship Wrestling UNLEASHED

Standing just outside of her locker room is “It Girl” Taylor Landry in her black and gold New Orleans Saints inspired wrestling gear and Amethyst Caldwell is ominously standing behind Taylor.

“IT GIRL” TAYLOR LANDRY: With Iron Gauntlet now in our rearview mirror now it is time for not only VilaroFit but myself to really get going here in PCW. You’ll see Mari do the damn thing later on tonight when she has her first PCW Billion Dollar Challenge but first I’m stepping into a PCW ring for the first time in a singles match against Alyssa Knight-Kekoa…

Taylor smugly smiles as she shoots a quick glance at Amethyst.

“IT GIRL” TAYLOR LANDRY: We all know that Alyssa and her husband Aleki think they’re hot shots and you know it must be bad if someone like me thinks they’re a bit extra. But I’ll digress because who am I to look down on someone for thinking highly of themselves…

Taylor pauses as she holds her right index finger up.

“IT GIRL” TAYLOR LANDRY: I have to say Alyssa, what you’ve been able to do is quite impressive! You’re a black belt in E3 Krav Maga and a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine…

Taylor slowly claps.

“IT GIRL” TAYLOR LANDRY: That is just remarkable, Alyssa. When reading up on you I must say you’re a robot, a high caliber piece of machinery that is truly second to none. Not even your own husband. You’re smart, beautiful, a kick ass fighter. What can’t you do?

Taylor throws her hands in the air.

“IT GIRL” TAYLOR LANDRY: Like seriously girl…What can’t you do?

Taylor looks back at Amethyst.

“IT GIRL” TAYLOR LANDRY: Well, it looks like the one thing you can’t do is be mentally strong because when one little thing didn’t go your way you had a mental break and even took on a new persona. That just reeks of mental weakness. No wonder you and Aleki over compensate for so much. Which is why tonight you’ll beg for me to throw another fireball in your face so you can forget who you are and hide under a mask because as talented as you might be you are equally as mentally weak. And the world will see that once again tonight.

An over confident Taylor winks at the camera as she and Amethyst walk away.

SEGMENT

ALYSSA KNIGHT-KEKOA

The PCW camera cuts on backstage near gorilla position. The noise from the crowd bleeds through the walls, restless, alive, building.

Crew members move with purpose. Energy hums through the hallway.

Alyssa Knight-Kekoa stands near the curtain.

Hands taped. Gear on. Rolling her neck slow, shaking out her fingers. She’s not pacing. Not talking. Just locked in, eyes fixed on the curtain like she’s been waiting for this exact moment.

Maybe she has.

A staff member approaches, clipboard in hand, barely slowing down.

STAFF MEMBER: Next match. Taylor Landry. You’re up.

Alyssa doesn’t look at him.

ALYSSA: Yeah.

He walks off. She stands alone in the noise.

ALYSSA: (to herself) I don’t know much about her.

A beat. She doesn’t let it sit long.

ALYSSA: Doesn’t matter. I don’t underestimate people I don’t know. Ever. Not anymore.

The crowd surges suddenly, louder, electric. Something happening inside.

Alyssa’s eyes cut back to the curtain.

ALYSSA: She’s in there right now thinking she’s walking into an easy debut match.

A pause. Something settles behind her eyes.

ALYSSA: She’s not wrong to think that. I’d think the same thing.

She exhales through her nose.

ALYSSA: Nervous. But I’m ready.

She pulls the tape tighter on her wrist. Deliberate. Like a ritual.

ALYSSA: I’ve been nervous before. I’ve been hurt before. I’ve been counted out before.

Her jaw tightens.

ALYSSA: And I’m still here.

A stagehand blows past.

STAGEHAND: Thirty seconds!

Alyssa doesn’t blink.

ALYSSA: I’m not walking through that curtain thinking I’ve already won.

One last adjustment. One last breath.

ALYSSA: I’m walking through it thinking I’ve earned the right to find out.

She stands there for a moment. Alone. Completely still inside the noise.

No one to tell her she’s ready. She already knows.

Her music hits.

The crowd erupts.

Alyssa doesn’t celebrate. Doesn’t smile. She pulls in one slow breath through her nose and walks.

Quiet, under the roar:

ALYSSA: Let’s see what you’ve got, Taylor Landry.

The curtain splits. The crowd detonates.

SHOW OPENING

Lights dart around the arena. Fans screaming. Closeupes. Wide shots. etc.

CUT TO the announce table. RENO NEVADA sits behind the desk with a headset on.

RENO: Six hours ago, Helena Handbasket and Aleki Kekoa stepped into an isolation hell.

Clips play of both wrestlers, split frame, entering their own individual anechoic chambers. Clips are then shown of them sitting in their rooms, captured in grainy nightvision. Time lapse. Both become more and more agitated.

Back at ringside, Reno shakes his head.

RENO: Why? Because tonight, Helena and Aleki will face off in an ASYLUM RULES match. But in case you thought the isolation was the worst part of it… here’s the other fun bit. They don’t even know the match stipulation! Neither do I! And believe me, I asked!

MATCH 1

ALYSSA KNIGHT-KEKOA
versus
TAYLOR LANDRY
w/AMETHYST CALDWELL

The bell hasn’t finished echoing when Taylor Landry spreads her arms wide, soaking in the hate rolling down from the rafters. She turns a slow circle, chin up, grinning at a crowd that has already decided how they feel about her. Amethyst Caldwell plants herself at ringside like a bouncer who doesn’t need a velvet rope to make her point.

Across the ring, Alyssa Knight-Kekoa stands still.

Hands loose at her sides. Head level. Eyes tracking every inch of Taylor’s movement. She doesn’t perform readiness. She just is it. The crowd feels the difference immediately, and the noise shifts—the heat directed at Taylor sharpens when it bumps up against the quiet that Alyssa brings into the room.

Taylor finally stops showboating and moves in. They tie up—collar and elbow, standard enough—but the standard part ends there. Alyssa doesn’t push or shove. She turns the grip, rotating Taylor’s wrist inward with precise, ugly leverage until the joint has nowhere comfortable to go. Taylor’s knees bend on instinct. She’s on the mat before she’s made a conscious decision to get there, and Alyssa is already repositioned above her, keeping the wrist torqued at an angle that makes standing back up a complicated problem.

Taylor lunges for the bottom rope. Gets it.

REFEREE: “Break! Break it clean!”

Alyssa releases. Steps back. No flourish, no acknowledgment of the crowd. She just gives Taylor the space the rulebook requires and nothing else.

Taylor bounces up fast, shaking feeling back into her fingers. She switches gears—footwork now, lateral movement, trying to use the four inches of height she’s given up to her advantage by staying outside Alyssa’s reach. She flicks a quick kick at the knee. Alyssa reads the trajectory before the foot leaves the ground, steps offline, catches Taylor’s leg at the calf.

Snapmare.

Taylor tumbles forward and hits the mat face-up—and before she can process the ceiling, a forearm drops across the back of her neck like a closing argument. Taylor makes a sound she probably didn’t intend anyone to hear.

She scrambles upright faster than the damage warrants. Pride or instinct. Either way, she’s moving—and when she moves, her hand shoots toward Alyssa’s face, fingers spread, going for the eyes.

Alyssa’s head turns aside. A small, practiced rotation. The fingertips catch nothing but air.

A half-second of confused momentum from Taylor. She’s leaning in, weight forward, nothing connecting—

HER VERDICT (Jumping Knee Strike)!

The knee comes off the floor with everything behind it, driving into Taylor’s jaw with a crack that carries to the back row. Taylor’s head snaps back. Her legs go somewhere her brain didn’t send them. She collapses.

Alyssa drops into the cover.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—Taylor gets a shoulder up, barely, on pure reflex.

The crowd groans. Then buzzes. They know what they’re watching.

Taylor rolls under the bottom rope and lands on the floor in a heap. Amethyst is already there, crouching beside her, one thick hand on Taylor’s shoulder. She says something close to Taylor’s ear. Taylor nods slowly, jaw tight, eyes refocusing. She lets Amethyst pull her upright and leans on the barricade while American Moderator’s count climbs.

One. Two. Three. Four.

Alyssa doesn’t move toward the ropes. Doesn’t lean. Doesn’t taunt. She stands at center ring and watches Amethyst work, the same way she watches everything—cataloguing, filing, already three moves ahead.

Five. Six. Seven.

Taylor shrugs Amethyst off, rolls under the bottom rope at eight.

She comes up directly into a Saito suplex.

The landing is brutal—shoulders and upper back folding into the mat at an angle that makes the second row wince. Taylor lies there for a full beat, blinking at the lights. Alyssa brings her vertical. Another Saito. Same result, harder impact. Taylor bounces once on the canvas and goes still, arms spread, breathing in shallow, ragged pulls.

The crowd builds. Not a roar yet. A swell—the noise of people watching something they can feel.

Taylor moves on survival instinct, dragging herself to the ropes, spilling through them and back to the floor. Amethyst steps directly between Taylor and the ring, arms wide, a wall that doesn’t need to be asked twice.

Alyssa stands at center ring.

Hands at her sides. Chin up. Eyes down at both of them. The arena is loud and she is quiet inside it, and that contrast does more damage to Taylor’s composure than either Saito suplex did.

Taylor doesn’t come back in like someone who just ate two Saito suplexes. She comes back in like someone who tripped on the stairs—slow crawl under the bottom rope, one arm draped over the canvas, the other pressed to her ribs. Her eyes are glassy. Her breathing is visible from the third row.

Alyssa steps toward her.

That’s all Taylor needed.

KNIFE IN THE BACK (Backstabber)

Taylor explodes off the mat, jumps onto Alyssa’s back, hooks the neck, and drops—driving Alyssa’s spine across her raised knees like snapping a board. The impact is sharp and ugly. Alyssa arches forward, hands flying back to her lower back on pure reflex. Taylor scrambles over her, hooks the leg.

ONE…

TWO…

Alyssa kicks out hard. Taylor smirks anyway.

She’s up immediately, and the exhaustion is gone. Every labored breath, every glassy stare—theater. She plants a stomp between Alyssa’s shoulder blades and pauses to let the crowd react. They give her exactly what she wants: noise, anger, full attention. She drinks it in, arms spread, turning slowly to make sure nobody in the building misses her face.

Another stomp. Another pause. Another turn.

She climbs the second rope, measures the distance, and hits a slingshot leg drop directly across Alyssa’s lower spine. The impact drives Alyssa flat into the canvas. Taylor lands on her feet, bounces once, and brushes invisible dust off her hands.

CROWD: “FUCK YOU, TAYLOR!”

Taylor cups a hand to her ear. Perfect.

Alyssa has made it to one knee. Slowly. Deliberately. Her jaw is set and her eyes are already finding Taylor—not with anger. With information. Taylor doesn’t notice the difference.

She whips Alyssa hard into the ropes. Alyssa crosses the ring and hits the opposite side—

—and stops.

Amethyst’s hand shoots out from under the bottom rope and closes around Alyssa’s ankle like a trap. The momentum dies. Alyssa stumbles, one foot locked, the other scrambling for purchase. She doesn’t go down—but she spins toward the floor, toward Amethyst, jaw tight.

American Moderator is already at the ropes.

REFEREE: Get back! GET BACK!

Taylor is already moving.

She hits Alyssa across the back of the skull—a running forearm with full sprint behind it, the kind that doesn’t need a name to do damage. Alyssa staggers forward, chest dropping onto the middle rope, arms draped over it like she’s leaning out a window.

Taylor grabs Alyssa by the hair and yanks her violently backward, sending her back first to the canvas. The It Girl then turns, hits the ropes, then leaps in the air.

TWICE AS NICE (Double Knee Drop/Backflip Combo)

Double knees drive into Alyssa’s ribs—thud—Taylor backflips, lands on her feet, comes down with the second set of knees in the same spot. Alyssa folds around the impact, rolling to her side, one arm pressed hard into her ribcage.

Taylor drops over her. Hooks both legs.

ONE…

TWO…

Alyssa gets a shoulder up.

Taylor doesn’t argue the count. She’s already measuring. She gets Alyssa vertical—hooks her up for a suplex, snaps it over clean. One. Hauls her back up. Second suplex, same result. TAYTAY. She reaches for a third—locks the grip, starts the pull—

Alyssa’s feet stay on the ground.

The block is quiet and total. Taylor pulls again. Nothing. And then a forearm lands across her jaw with a sound like a bat connecting, and Taylor’s grip evaporates. She stumbles backward, hitting the ropes, and by the time she bounces back Alyssa is already moving forward.

Knee to the midsection. Taylor doubles.

Elbow to the temple. Sharp, direct, Krav Maga efficient. Taylor’s head snaps sideways.

Alyssa measures the distance across the ring—takes two steps and launches both feet into Taylor’s chest from elevation.

HER DIAGNOSIS (Diving Shotgun Dropkick)

Taylor doesn’t stumble. She flies—crashing spine-first into the turnbuckles, crumpling in the corner. Alyssa is already crossing the ring. She hooks Taylor from behind, arms locking at the waist, and drives her up and over with the corner German.

HER RECKONING (Corner German Suplex)

Taylor lands on the back of her neck and shoulders with a sickening thud and lies still, limbs scattered. The building erupts.

Alyssa covers for the pin. The referee takes a step away from the ropes to go for the count by that devious Amethyst Caldwell grabs his ankle. He spins around as she walks away, feigning obliviousness. He starts to toss her out, but Alyssa is screaming for the count. He leaps to the canvas, sliding next to the two women and starts hitting the mat.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

KICKOUT!

Alyssa immediately rolls Taylor over, hooks the arm, and starts to wrench the crossface into place—

Taylor’s foot finds the bottom rope before it’s even fully locked.

REFEREE: Rope break! Let her go!

In the heat of the moment, Alyssa forgot her ring awareness. One second. Maybe less. The hold never had her—and Taylor knows it, scrambling to put distance between herself and those arms before Alyssa can reassemble the grip. She curls against the ropes, one hand cradling her neck, eyes wet at the corners. The near-miss is written all over her face. She felt where that was going.

ALYSSA: GET UP!

The self-proclaimed Goddess grabs Taylor by the hair and drags her to her feet.

But Taylor buys herself a breath with a raking drag across Alyssa’s eyes. Then a stomp directly onto the instep. Dirty, precise, petty. She creates just enough space to get her back against the corner and her hands up.

Fifteen seconds. That’s all it bought.

Alyssa rolls her neck once and closes the distance again. Taylor throws a kick—wild, desperate—and Alyssa slips it, rotates, and the roundhouse comes back the other direction. Her shin connects flush with Taylor’s temple.

Taylor doesn’t fall so much as unplug. She drops sideways into the ropes, held up only by the middle cable. Alyssa hauls her off them and covers.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

Taylor kicks out. Barely. Her arm drops back to the mat the moment it does.

Alyssa sits back. Looks at her. The Read—that quiet physician’s inventory, cataloguing what’s left. She sees the answer and stands up.

She moves toward Taylor slowly. Taylor reads the body language from the canvas—the set of Alyssa’s hips, the way her arms are already starting to position—and something animal fires behind her eyes. She scrambles. Hands and knees to the corner, pulling herself up the turnbuckles, putting steel behind her back.

It doesn’t matter.

Alyssa peels her off the corner like paint. Gets the waist. Starts to set the position for the KEKOA DRIVER (Samoan Driver)—and Taylor knows. She knows exactly what comes next and her body fights it with everything that’s left. She grabs the top rope. Grabs the turnbuckle. Claws at the padding.

Alyssa strips the grip, one hand at a time, and takes her to center ring.

She hooks the arm. Drops.

HER SENTENCE (Crossface).

This time there are no ropes within reach. Taylor’s legs kick uselessly at open canvas. Alyssa cinches the forearm hard across her face and wrenches back, and the angle is wrong for everything—neck, shoulder, spine, all of it screaming at once. Taylor’s free hand claws at Alyssa’s wrist, at the mat, at nothing.

Her palm hovers over the canvas.

The building holds its breath.

Then the yank.

Amethyst’s hand shoots under the bottom rope, closes around Taylor’s ankle, and pulls—not a tug, not a nudge, a full-body haul that drags both women across the canvas like they weigh nothing. Taylor’s foot clears the bottom rope. The referee’s eyes follow the motion, snapping to see the foot under the rope a millisecond after Amethyst jumped back.

He calls it.

REFEREE: Ropebreak!

Alyssa feels the pull before she sees it. She releases, spins toward the floor—

The kick goes through the ropes and connects with Amethyst’s face flush and hard. Amethyst crashes backward into the barricade, hits it shoulder-first, and crumples against it.

The crowd comes apart.

CROWD: “HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT!”

Taylor is on her feet. Barely. She’s facing the hard camera’s blind side, shoulders hunched, one hand moving to the band of her trunks. Her back is to the ring. Her back is to the camera.

Then she turns around.

Amethyst pulls herself off the barricade, jaw set, and charges the ring. She hits the apron and climbs—and American Moderator steps directly into her path at the ropes, arms wide, blocking her from entering.

Alyssa has Taylor in the corner.

She’s positioning her. Setting the hooks for something with finality in it. She turns to face the ring—

The brass knuckles catch her just above the hairline.

The sound is wrong. Too sharp. Too small for the damage it does. Alyssa doesn’t stumble backward—she lists, like a building with its foundation kicked out. Her legs are moving but they’re getting bad information. She reaches for the ropes and finds Taylor instead.

Taylor flicks the knuckles out of the ring. They skitter under the apron and vanish.

She hooks the standing headscissors. Drags Alyssa’s dead weight to center ring. Looks out at the crowd once—one single, vicious second of eye contact with a building that already knows what just happened and can’t stop it.

CALIFORNIA VACATION (Panama Sunrise).

The rotation is ugly and total. Alyssa’s head drives into the canvas and she slumps onto her back, arms spread, completely still. The VilaroFit brand is pressed into her forehead in red.

Amethyst steps off the apron.

American Moderator turns.

He looks at Taylor. He looks at Alyssa. He drops.

ONE…

TWO…

THREE!

WINNER VIA PINFALL
TAYLOR LANDRY

The bell rings and the building turns. Not boos—something uglier than that. The sound of people who watched something get stolen in front of them and couldn’t do anything about it. A cup hits the floor near the barricade. Then another. Amethyst throws herself between Taylor and the crowd, arms wide, moving her up the ramp at speed. Taylor lets herself be moved, but she looks back once—back at the ring, back at the damage—and she’s smiling.

American Moderator doesn’t raise anyone’s hand.

He’s already kneeling beside Alyssa, calling for someone from the back. Her husband, Aleki, is locked inside a sensory deprivation room, unable to come assist.

The serif imprint of VF, representing VilaroFIT, is pressed into her forehead like a receipt.

SEGMENT

Aleki Part One

The corridor is empty except for him.

Aleki Kekoa stands before the chamber door and does not move. Not yet. A PCW production assistant holds the door handle of the door of one of the anechoic chambers set for the Asylum Rules Match, poised to open for Aleki.

The PWE Prestige Championship is not on Aleki’s shoulder tonight—this is not that kind of night. He wears ring gear and nothing else. There’s no grand entrance. No theme music. No live crowd. Yet. Just a man and a door and the specific quality of quiet that exists in a building before it fills with people who have come to watch something happen.

The door is matte black. Reinforced. Unmarked. It does not look like the entrance to anything meaningful. It looks like a utility door, the kind that leads to a boiler room or a service corridor. The kind of door nobody notices.

He notices it.

His jaw is set. Shoulders squared. The posture of a man who has walked into hard rooms his entire life and knows how to carry himself through a threshold—the tunnel before a title match, the hospital corridor after Alyssa’s surgery, the gym in Long Beach where Tasi sat him down and told him it was time to come back to himself. He has stood before difficult doors. He knows how to open them.

He does not open this one immediately.

Because here—in the last moment before six hours of nothing—there is something in his eyes that is not quite fear and is not quite doubt but lives in the same neighborhood as both. A man who has studied human behavior long enough to study his own cannot pretend otherwise. He knows what the chamber does. He has read about it. Subjects reporting auditory hallucinations within the first hour. Visual disturbances by the second. The psychological architecture that most people spend their entire lives constructing—the internal noise, the constant low-level distraction, the thousand small inputs that keep a person tethered to the present—stripped away layer by layer until what remains is not a person but a core. Whatever is most essentially true about a human being, left alone with itself in the dark.

Aleki Kekoa is about to find out what his core is made of.

He already suspects he knows. He is not entirely certain he is ready for the confirmation.

One breath. Slow. In through the nose.

His right hand rises—briefly, privately—to the infinity pendant at his collarbone. Not his. Alyssa’s. She pressed it into his hand this morning without a word, the way she does the things that matter most to her. He held it for a moment before fastening it around his own neck. Tasi’s pendant. Tasi’s infinity. Carried now by the man Tasi spent his life building.

INNER VOICE: Set it down. Walk forward. That’s all I ever asked of you.

His hand drops.

The production assistant opens the door and Aleki steps inside.

The door closes behind him.

The sound it makes—solid, final, the mechanical engagement of a seal designed to exclude everything—is the last external sound Aleki will hear for six hours.

He stands at the center of the chamber and listens to the silence.

Except it is not silence.

That is the first thing the chamber teaches. There is no such thing as silence. Not for a living body. Not for a mind that has never once in thirty-six years been asked to exist without input. The absence of external sound doesn’t produce quiet. It produces exposure. Every system the body runs continuously and invisibly—the rush of blood through the ears, the low mechanical hum of the nervous system, the breath moving through the lungs—becomes audible. Becomes enormous. Becomes the only thing in the world.

His heartbeat fills the room.

Slow. Controlled. The heartbeat of a man who knows the first rule:

INNER VOICE: Don’t fight it.

T-00:47:22

The darkness, at some point, stops being a condition and starts being a presence.

This is not metaphor. This is what the chamber does to the human perceptual system when deprived of the external stimulation it was designed to process. The brain, receiving nothing from outside, begins generating. Filling the void with what it has. Patterns in the black. Shapes at the periphery that dissolve the moment attention finds them. The visual cortex, starved, begins to improvise.

Aleki watches the darkness move.

He knows it isn’t moving. He knows what is happening to him with the forensic precision of a man trained to study human behavior from the outside in.

Knowing does not make it stop.

T-01:33:08

Time is the next thing the chamber takes.

Without light there is no day. Without sound there is no rhythm. Without rhythm the mind loses its primary mechanism for tracking duration and what remains is a formless elastic present tense that stretches and compresses without warning. A minute feels like ten. An hour feels like a held breath.

Aleki reaches for the internal clock every competitor carries—the one that tells you how long you’ve been in the match, how much gas is left, when to shift—and finds it gone.

He does not know how long he has been in this room.

He does not know how long he has left.

He knows only this breath. This heartbeat. This darkness moving at the edge of his vision.

His hands find each other at his sides. One fist pressing against the opposite palm. Something more private than the Chest Press. Something closer to a man holding himself together while the chamber continues its work.

T-02:51:44

The body, deprived long enough, begins to speak.

Not in words. In sensation. The knee—the old football injury, the one that took him off the road and brought him back to Long Beach and back to Alyssa and back to everything that followed—begins to ache with a specificity that has nothing to do with physical stress. He is standing still. The knee should not hurt.

The knee hurts.

Then the shoulder. The one Teguchi targeted in their third match in Puroresu Championship Wrestling. The one Jace Parker Davidson hit with a crowbar in One Wrestle Movement. Then the ribs—the ones Donovan Basch cracked at Prestige Wrestling Empire’s Glory and Valor II, the ones that still catch on a deep breath if he isn’t paying attention. Every scar. Every repaired thing. Every body part that carries the record of what this life has cost him—awake simultaneously, as though the chamber has run a diagnostic and is presenting the results all at once.

INNER VOICE: This is what you are made of. This is what it took.

T-04:12:19

At some point Aleki stops trying to manage the experience.

He lets it have him.

The darkness. The sound of his own blood. The formless time. The ache of every healed wound speaking at once. He stops standing against it and simply stands in it. The way Tasi taught him to stand in a match that was going wrong—not forcing, not fighting the current, but reading it. Letting the information come.

The information comes.

Not in words. In something older than words. A pressure at the base of the skull. A warmth in the chest that has nothing to do with temperature. The sense—undeniable, the kind of thing his forensic psychology background has no framework for—that the room has changed.

That he is no longer alone in it.

His heartbeat slows.

The darkness stops moving.

Something is coming.

T-04:44:51

He closes his eyes.

A meaningless gesture in total darkness.

The most natural thing he has ever done.

The vision begins.

MATCH 2

EVAN CARMINE
versus
MARK KELLY

The bell cracks.

Evan Carmine explodes out of his corner. He meets Mark Kelly in the center with a sharp forearm, then another, then drives a front jawbreaker that snaps Mark’s head back. Mark stumbles two steps. Evan stays on him, plants his feet, and snaps him over with a Northern Lights suplex. He pops the hips and follows with a running knee that crashes into Mark’s jaw and drops him to a knee.

Evan doesn’t slow down. He hits the ropes, comes back, and launches into a split-legged moonsault that crashes across Mark’s chest.

ONE…

TWO…

Mark kicks out hard and rolls to his side.

Evan stays on the attack. He pulls Mark up, cracks him with a Shining Wizard that sends sweat flying, then snaps him vertical and dumps him into the corner with a suplex. Mark’s back hits the turnbuckles. Evan follows him in, lifts him onto the top rope for snake eyes, and lets him drop throat-first across the top turnbuckle. Mark coughs once and staggers out. Evan meets him with a bottom rope guillotine that folds him over the middle rope.

Evan steps back, measures, and drops Mark with a DDT. He hooks the far leg.

ONE…

TWO…

Mark kicks out at one and a half and shoves Evan off him.

Mark surges up angry. He fires a pair of European uppercuts that rock Evan backward, then chops the leg out from under him with a calf kick. Evan drops to one knee. Mark steps in to follow up—

Evan explodes upward with a Judo throw that sends Mark sprawling across the mat. Before Mark can get his bearings, Evan is already on the ropes. He springboards, twists, and crashes down across Mark’s body with a crossbody.

Evan floats over into the cover and bridges.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

Mark kicks out just before the three and shoves Evan away. He sits up, chest heaving, jaw tight. Evan rises to his feet, already moving again, eyes locked on his opponent. The crowd swells behind him. Mark wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and glares across the ring, breathing heavier now, irritation plain on his face.

Evan Carmine keeps coming but Mark isn’t so easily put down.

In a rush of aggression, Mark lunges in during Evan’s next approach and rakes the eyes hard. Evan reels, hands up, and Mark immediately yanks him into the ropes, draping his throat across the top strand and leaning all his weight down. The choke is ugly and deliberate. American Moderator counts hard. Mark releases at four, steps back half a step, then spikes Evan with the PINNACLE TWIST. He rolls through the neckbreaker and keeps moving, springing off the ropes into a tornado DDT that plants Evan’s head into the mat.

Mark climbs. He slingshots over the top rope and crashes down with a senton across Evan’s chest.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

Evan kicks out at the last fraction of a second. The crowd roars in relief. Mark sits up slow, jaw clenched, and stares at the referee like he wants to take his head off next.

He stays on the neck.

European uppercuts crack against Evan’s jaw, one after another. A running neck snap folds him forward. Mark hooks the arms for THUNDER STRUCK, yanking Evan’s head between his legs, but Evan plants his feet and fights upright, shoving Mark off before the lift can finish. Mark answers by marching him into the corner and unloading stiff European uppercuts, each one snapping Evan’s head back against the turnbuckle. American Moderator wedges in at four, forcing the break with sharp commands.

Mark doesn’t argue. He just steps out, measures, and drives Evan into the buckles with a buckle bomb variation. He drops into the cover, forearm across the face.

ONE…

TWO…

Evan kicks out at two and rolls to his side, breathing ragged.

Mark keeps coming. He targets the joints now—short, chopping kicks to the legs, then a stiff forearm across the lower back when Evan tries to rise. He yanks Evan up, lifts him high, and drops him with GREETINGS FROM KINGS PARK. Evan’s head and neck absorb the impact. Mark covers with a lateral press, pressing his forearm into Evan’s face for good measure.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

Evan’s shoulder jerks up at two and a half. The crowd noise spikes. Mark stays on top of him for a second longer than necessary, glaring down, chest rising and falling. Evan’s movements have slowed. His neck is tight. He pushes up to an elbow, eyes glassy for a moment, then forces himself to keep moving.

Mark stands over him, already hunting the next opening. He stalks after Evan as he crawls toward the ropes. Evan drags himself forward, reaches the bottom rope, and uses it to pull himself up one rung at a time. His shoulders rise and fall. Mark closes in behind him, confident now, reaching for the back of Evan’s neck.

Evan turns and buries a short, vicious shot into Mark’s liver.

Mark folds forward with a sharp grunt, arms dropping. Evan grabs him, plants his feet, and spikes him with a DDT that drives Mark’s head into the mat. Evan hits the ropes, comes back, and crashes down across Mark’s chest with the springboard attack.

Mark absorbs it. He shakes it off, surges up, and answers with stiff European uppercuts that drive Evan backward. A hard running neck snap folds Evan forward. Mark stays on him.

Evan catches Mark flush with a Shining Wizard. He drops into the cover.

ONE…

TWO…

Mark kicks out and rolls through.

Mark fights back mean. He hooks Evan and spikes him with the SOUTHERN CROSS DROP. Evan’s body jolts on impact. Mark covers deep.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

Evan kicks out at the last possible second. His shoulder barely clears the mat.

Mark stalks to the corner. He posts up, hunched, eyes locked on Evan like he’s measuring a kill shot. Evan pushes to his feet. Mark explodes out of the corner for SUCH IS LIFE. Evan barely twists out of the way. He turns to reset—

Mark levels him with a lariat that turns Evan inside out.

Mark drops on top.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

Evan kicks out so late the crowd thinks it’s over. The roar dies for half a second before American Moderator throws up two fingers. The noise comes back twice as loud. Mark stays on his knees a moment, breathing through his teeth.

Evan rallies on pure will. He cracks Mark with quick strikes until Mark drops to a knee. Evan hits the ropes, comes back, and lands another Shining Wizard. He covers again.

ONE…

TWO…

Mark powers out.

Both men stand on tired legs. Evan swings. Mark blocks it and fires back with a punch that sends Evan stumbling toward the corner. Mark follows, kicks him in the gut, and yanks him into a standing head scissors. He lifts Evan onto his shoulders, setting up the BURSWOOD BOMB, and turns toward the top turnbuckle to drive him in.

Evan squirms free at the last moment and lands on his feet. He grabs Mark, spins, and launches him with EVANESCENCE. Mark sails over Evan’s head.

Mark adjusts in the air and lands on the narrow strip of canvas between Evan and the corner. He immediately locks in an inverted DDT position, loading up for another SOUTHERN CROSS DROP.

Evan drives backward with his legs, forcing Mark’s back into the turnbuckles. He fires a knee up into Mark’s forehead. Then he twists, hooks Mark across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and walks him out to the center of the ring. Evan stares straight into the hard camera for a beat—

Then he drops Mark with the CARMINE DRIVER.

Evan doesn’t cover.

He turns immediately and heads for the corner. He climbs the ropes, reaches the top, and launches with MOONLIGHT SONATA. The high-altitude frog splash crashes down across Mark’s chest and folds him.

ONE…

TWO…

THREE!

The bell rings.

WINNER VIA PINFALL
EVAN CARMINE

Evan Carmine stays on his knees for a second, chest heaving, then pushes to his feet. American Moderator raises his arm. Evan’s legs are unsteady. Sweat runs down his face and neck. Across the ring, Mark Kelly lies on his back, one arm draped across his ribs, staring at the lights.

Evan Carmine wins via pinfall.

SEGMENT

Marilyn Matthews

Backstage of the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium, the cameras have found new signee, and returning to wrestling, Marilyn Matthews. Not being booked, she is dressed casually in Daisy Duke shorts, her new NES Game shirt, socks, and Converse. She smiles at the camera and waves.

MARILYN MATTHEWS: Hey, everyone! I’m sure you all know who I am. If not, I can remind you. Let me introduce myself; I’m Marilyn Matthews. Three-time World Champion and multi-time Hardcore champion.

She pauses and shrugs.

MARILYN MATTHEWS: I’m here to have some fun and face some damn amazing people. A few interactions on Social media made some new friends…

Mary rolls her eyes.

MARILYN MATTHEWS: But that’s par for the course. Can’t wait to see where things shake out and what kind of groove I can cut out for myself. I’ll be seein y’all soon enough.

Mary gives a wink and a wave. She then walks off out of frame.

SEGMENT

Aleki Part Two

He is no longer in the chamber.

He knows he is in the chamber. Some part of him—the forensic mind, the part that never fully surrenders control—maintains that awareness the way a dreamer sometimes knows they are dreaming. It does not matter. The vision does not require his belief to proceed. It simply is, the way the darkness was, the way the heartbeat was. Present. Undeniable. Already happening.

He is somewhere older.

The ground beneath him is not a floor. It is earth. Red and packed and ancient, the kind of soil that has absorbed generations of labor and ceremony and knows the difference between the two. The air is salt and heat. The Pacific, close and enormous, just beyond what he can see.

And there are people.

Not a crowd. Not an audience. A lineage. Arranged not in rows but in the organic formation of a family that has always known where it stands relative to itself. Men and women whose faces carry the specific geography of the Kekoa bloodline—the broad architecture of the jaw, the weight behind the eyes, the particular stillness that Aleki has always worn without knowing where he learned it.

He learned it here.

At the front of them—closest to him, separated from the others by the gravity of what he was—stands High Chief Afualo Kekoa. Broad-shouldered. Traditional dress. The man who built rings with his own hands and understood that wrestling was not entertainment but theater, commerce, legacy. He does not speak. He looks at Aleki the way a man looks at the conclusion of something he began a very long time ago.

Behind him, Leiataua. Twelve world championships and the understanding that none of it meant anything without something to pass it forward to. Beside him, Fata—not a great wrestler, the greatest promoter the family produced, the man who turned everything his father built into an institution. The house. UPW. The family business given walls and a roof.

They do not perform for him. They do not give speeches. They simply stand in the red earth under the Pacific sky and witness him the way ancestors witness—across time, across death, across every version of the man he has been and failed to be and fought his way back to.

Aleki feels the weight of them not as pressure but as foundation. The thing beneath his feet. The reason the ground holds.

High Chief Afualo raises one hand. One finger. Not a gesture of farewell.

A designation.

And then they are gone.

The red earth dissolves.

What replaces it comes fast and without mercy—the way real memory does, the way the things we have not finished processing arrive when the defenses are down.

He sees her face.

Not as it is now. As it was in the moment after—the moment he has replayed ten thousand times in the years since, the one that lives behind everything else regardless of what he is doing or where he is or how many championships are on his shoulder. Alyssa. The fire meant for him. The fraction of a second in which she made a decision that he did not ask for and could not take back and has never fully forgiven himself for.

She pushed him out of the way.

He watches it happen again in the vision the way he has watched it happen in his mind every day since—but here, in the chamber, stripped of every defense he normally brings to the memory, he cannot look away. Cannot fast-forward through it. Cannot reach for the next moment or the next chapter or the redemption arc that came later.

He has to stand in it.

The fire. Her burning face. The sound she made.

Then the temperature changes.

Not the air. Something underneath the air. The warmth that had been in his chest since the ancestors recedes and what replaces it is something that knows exactly how to wear the shape of warmth without being it.

He has felt this before.

Kai’roth. The sea demon forever imprisoned in the 1WM Tidebreaker Championship belt.

It does not arrive as a monster. Of course it doesn’t. Kai’roth has never been a monster. It is subtler and more dangerous than that—it is the part of Aleki that is not wrong, exactly, but is incomplete. The ambition without the code. The power without the purpose. The truth about what he is capable of, separated from every reason that capability is supposed to serve.

It speaks in his own voice.

KAI’ROTH: You saw what they did to her. You have been carrying that for years. You built a standard and called it redemption and told yourself the weight of it was strength. But I was there, Aleki. I know what the weight actually is. It is punishment. You have been punishing yourself since the night of the fireball and dressing the punishment up as excellence. The Kekoa Standard. Excellence. Grit. Legacy. Noble. Safe. Small. You know what you looked like when you stopped being small? You looked like the thing this industry has never seen before and will never see again. Wrestling Divinity was not your failure. It was your ceiling. And you walked away from it because a woman and a dead man told you to. She is still here. He is gone. And you are standing in the dark arguing with yourself about whether you deserve to be great. Come back. Not to the persona. Not to the sledgehammer. To the version of you that stopped apologizing for what you are. The championships. The presence. The absolute certainty that there is no one on this earth in your category. You felt it. You know you felt it. One decision. Right here. In the dark where no one is watching. Come back.

The darkness presses close. The warmth that is not warmth wraps around him with the specific intimacy of something that has known him a long time. That has always known him. That has been patient.

Aleki does not speak.

Then he sees it—the version of himself that came after.

The sledgehammer he declared his scepter. The persona. The championship and the audacity and the preaching about gods in human form, the worst version of himself given a spotlight and a crowd and enough accolades to mistake for meaning. Wrestling Divinity. Built not from strength but from the inability to metabolize guilt. A man who did not know how to carry what he had done so he buried himself underneath something louder. A coward.

He watches himself become it.

He watches the man he was supposed to be recede underneath the performance.

He has never watched it from the outside before.

It is the most honest thing the chamber has shown him and it is excruciating.

He stands in it the way he stood in the chamber—not fighting the current, letting the information arrive. Feeling the full weight of what is being offered. Not dismissing it cheaply. Not pretending the temptation isn’t real or that it doesn’t know exactly where to find him.

It knows exactly where to find him.

It always has.

The voice arrives without announcement.

Not loud. Not dramatic. The voice of a man who never needed volume because the people who needed to hear him were always paying attention.

VOICE: You already know the answer.

Tasi.

Not a vision of him. Not a reconstruction. Something closer to presence—the specific gravity of a man who knew Aleki better than Aleki knew himself and loved him anyway and asked only one thing in return.

TASI: The darkness knows your name. It has always known your name. That is not the same thing as being right. Wrestling Divinity was not your ceiling. It was what you built when you couldn’t face the floor. You have faced the floor now. You have stood in it. That is what I always wanted for you. Not the championships. Not the persona. This. A man who knows what he is made of because he has seen the worst of it and chosen differently. That is the standard. That has always been the standard. Set it down. Walk forward.

The warmth that is not warmth begins to recede.

Kai’roth does not leave dramatically. It does not rage or threaten or make a final appeal. It simply becomes less—the way a tide goes out, the way a fever breaks, the way the things we carry that were never ours to carry eventually find their way back to the ground.

It will return. Aleki knows it will return. It is part of him and it will be part of him until the last match of his life and possibly beyond. That is not a defeat. That is the truth. The Standard is not the absence of darkness. It is the choice made in the presence of it.

He makes the choice.

And then she is there.

Not Mystique. Not the gold mask. Not the fractured version of her that emerged from the fire and the abandonment and the years of rebuilding in public.

Alyssa.

Fully herself. The woman who pushed him out of the way not because she was reckless but because she had already decided, somewhere beneath conscious thought, that his life was worth more than the cost of saving it. The woman who rebuilt herself from the wreckage of everything they had both survived and came out the other side still standing, still his, still the only person who has ever seen every version of him and chosen to stay.

She does not speak.

She takes his hand.

That is all.

That is everything.

The red earth returns briefly—just a glimpse, just enough—and the lineage is there again, watching. High Chief Afualo. Leiataua. Fata. And Tasi now, standing with them, in the place he has always belonged.

The Kekoa Standard made flesh.

Four generations of it.

Witnessing the fifth.

The vision does not end so much as complete—the way a piece of music resolves, the way a match ends when both competitors have given everything available to them and one remains standing. Not a conclusion. A fulfillment.

The warmth in his chest returns.

Real this time.

His own.

SEGMENT

THE BILLION DOLLAR CHALLENGE

The arena is dripping with vitriol when the show returns to the squared circle. Fan faces are contorted in anger and hatred, boos reigning down so loud it rattles the hard camera—all because of who stands center ring beneath the spotlights.

VilaroFIT.

Marisol Vilaro, decked out in gold and crimson ring gear, stands with a cocked hip and a disgusted look on her face. Next to her is the It Girl Taylor Landry. Fresh off her controversial win earlier in the night, she stands in a crop-top referee shirt and designer jeans. Flanking the two women are their mammoth bodyguards. Amethyst Caldwell looms behind Taylor like a monolith of feminine power, and behind Marisol, the strong-jawed, crew-cut Hans Richtershofen stands like a towering statues with the Billion Dollar Championship protected in his hands.

Marisol scans the crowd one last time and raises the microphone.

MARISOL: Last show, was a disgrace a complete and utter disgrace first of all I was put in the position of being at the biggest disadvantage in the match when the lottery was RIGGED against me to make sure I got the number one entrance and I outlasted many competitors until Gina Neon had to cheap shot me just to eliminate me, had I been given a proper number I’d be the one in the Terrordome, but despite the injustice I am still holding the most valuable belt in this entire industry The Billion Dollar Championship.

The fans boo as Marisol gestures to the title that Hans holds high for her. This elicits even more vitriol as a slight smirk crosses the Fitness Queen’s face.

MARISOL: Typical! You just don’t get it, but that isn’t any of your fault. No, see when you are at my level, you see the world differently than everyone else. Others try to bring you down, but in the end, they can’t, so they sit and throw their tiny-brained insults at you. But for all of you tonight I am feeling quite generous, that I want to give you another aspirational moment courtesy of VilaroGLOBAL, VilaroFIT and the VilaroSystem. And that moment is one of you lucky, lucky people in this arena tonight are going to end up with a shot at my Billion Dollar Championship!

The fans are shocked and some begin to cheer mostly out of the desire to see Marisol dethroned. However, the confidence is radiating off of the Fitness Queen.

MARISOL: You all can embrace your destiny as one lucky person will get to fall before La Marvilosa tonight.

TAYLOR: Don’t give them any false hope, Mari. You know anyone who steps up to you isn’t lucky but rather a fool. You’ll successfully defeat any potential challenger. Because soon enough VilaroFit will rule over PCW since that’s the way it is supposed to be!

Marisol lowers the microphone just enough to scan the crowd with theatrical deliberation, like she’s choosing which peasant gets to kiss the ring. Her eyes move past the front rows, past the signs, until they land on a target near the middle of the section. She points with the mic.

MARISOL: You. Yes, you, sweetheart. The one in the… what is that, a muumuu? Come on down here. Don’t be shy. This is your big moment.

Security parts the crowd. A heavyset older woman in her late forties is helped over the barricade. She’s wearing a faded Saints shirt that’s seen better decades, stretchy black pants, and white sneakers that have clearly done some miles. Her hair is pulled back in a practical ponytail. She grins bright as the sun as Hans Richtershofen personally escorts her to the ring steps with surprising gentleness for a man his size.

The crowd realizes what’s happening and erupts. Loud, genuine cheers. Someone starts chanting O-DETTE! O-DETTE! and it catches on fast.

Odette climbs through the ropes with some help from the bottom one. She’s breathing a little heavy already. Marisol hands her the microphone like she’s doing charity work.

MARISOL: Go ahead. Tell these nice people your name.

Odette takes the mic with both hands like it might bite her. Her accent is thick, warm, and unmistakably Cajun.

ODETTE: Uh… my name Odette. Odette from Lockport. I work down at the plant, me. I don’t… I don’t know what I’m doin’ here, but my grandbabies watchin’ at home so I guess I better not embarrass myself too bad.

The crowd pops huge for her. Marisol smiles the smile of a woman who just found the perfect prop.

MARISOL: Odette from Lockport. How wonderful. And how brave of you to come down here in front of all these people. Tell me, Odette… have you ever been in a wrestling ring before?

ODETTE: No ma’am. I ain’t never even been to a show before tonight.

MARISOL: That’s okay, honey. I’ll go easy on you.

Marisol takes the mic back and hands it off to Taylor. She circles Odette slowly, looking her up and down with open amusement. She reaches out and flicks the fabric of Odette’s shirt.

MARISOL: This is cute. Very… comfortable. Did you come straight from the couch?

Odette doesn’t answer. She just stands there, hands at her sides, trying to look brave.

Marisol suddenly drops into a wrestler’s stance and starts circling faster, forcing Odette to turn with her. Every time Odette tries to square up, Marisol dances away with a little laugh, making her chase. The crowd starts booing the disrespect. Marisol waves them off like they’re children.

She grabs Odette’s arm and Irish-whips her into the ropes. Odette hits them at half speed and comes back wobbling. Marisol meets her with a light forearm that barely touches her, more of a shove than a strike. Odette staggers but stays up. Marisol does it again. And again. Each time a little harder, playing to the hard camera with an exaggerated “oops” face.

On the fourth one, Odette swings back wildly with her right arm—not a punch, more of a panicked, roundhouse slap born of pure instinct. Her open hand cracks across Marisol’s cheek with a loud, ugly sound.

CRACK.

Marisol’s head snaps to the side. For half a second, the polished Fitness Queen mask slips. Her eyes go cold. The smirk vanishes.

She turns back slowly, touching her cheek with two fingers like she can’t believe it happened.

The crowd explodes.

Marisol doesn’t say a word. She just steps in and buries a stiff knee into Odette’s midsection. Odette folds forward with a wheeze. Marisol grabs her by the hair, yanks her upright, and drives another knee up under her chin. Odette’s legs go rubbery.

Marisol shoves her into the corner, climbs to the second rope, and rains down forearms across the older woman’s chest and shoulders—short, vicious, and precise. Each one lands with a meaty thud. After the fifth, she hops down, grabs Odette by the wrist, and yanks her out into a short-arm clothesline that drops her flat on her back.

Odette stays down, one hand clutching her chest, trying to catch her breath.

Marisol doesn’t go for the pin right away. She walks over to Taylor, takes the Billion Dollar Championship from Hans, and holds it up for the crowd to see while she stands over Odette. Then she drops the title on Odette’s stomach like it’s trash and finally covers her with one boot on her chest, leaning forward with all her weight.

Taylor drops down and counts.

ONE…

TWO…

THREE!

The bell rings. Marisol doesn’t even bother to move her foot.

WINNER VIA PINFALL
MARISOL VILARO

Taylor slides into the ring and throws her arms around Marisol from behind, both women laughing as the crowd rains down boos. Marisol steps off Odette like she’s stepping over a puddle and raises both arms, soaking in the hatred while Taylor claps and points at her like she just won the Super Bowl.

Security helps Odette roll out of the ring. She’s holding her ribs but manages a small wave to the crowd as she’s escorted up the aisle. They cheer her the whole way.

Marisol takes the microphone again, still breathing a little harder than she was five minutes ago. The smile is back, but there’s an edge to it now.

MARISOL: See? That’s what happens when you reach for things that don’t belong to you. But I’m nothing if not generous. So in two weeks… I’m doing it again. One more lucky person gets the chance to step in this ring with me. One more person gets to find out what it feels like to be worth a billion dollars.

She lowers the mic, looks straight into the hard camera, and mouths one last word before the show cuts away.

MARISOL: Next.

SONG: MANIAC BY MICHAEL SEMBELLO

Marisol and Taylor’s eyes snap to the stage as the high beat 80s jam crashes the party. However, when the owner of the song comes out, she is not her usual blinding blur of brightly-patterned synthetics; instead, she presents a more down-to-Earth side of herself, in a simple pink tank top, stonewashed denim overalls and pink Converse high-tops with purple laces. Similarly, her usual kinetic, nearly hyperactive energy and infectious smile are, on this occasion, replaced with a frown and pursed lips, as she shakes her head at the controversial superstar in the ring.

GINA NEON: You lookin’ for someone to beat on next week? Well, how ‘bout you fight a real wrestler for a change?

Gina runs her hands down her sides, as if to signify ‘here I am’, before speaking up again, her tone somewhere between anger and disgust, a far cry from her usual positivity:

GINA: Man, I ain’t had a single match all year that’s gone longer than ten minutes, and I LOST most of ‘em, an’ you still don’t see ME goin’ ‘round beatin’ on regular people just so I can feel good about myself. You know why? ‘Cause beatin’ on someone who can’t defend themselves just ain’t right. So how ‘bout you quit pickin’ on people who have to PAY to be here, and take on someone who GETS PAID to be here, same as you? I mean, if you’re that good, then a li’l waitress from Jersey that’s got all of two wins since comin’ back is a piece of cake for ya, right? And at least you can say you beat someone who can fight back…

The fans react with mild shock at Gina’s statement, not only for the bold audacity it entailed, but also for the dry, sarcastic edge behind the Neon Princess’s words, which is still present as she once again speaks up:

GINA: An’ ya know what? I don’t even care about bein’ worth a million dollars or whatever. I’m blue collar an’ proud of it. I just wanna teach you a lesson ‘bout playing fair. So put up or shut up, Miss Spraycan-to-the-Face!

Her piece said, Gina stands defiant on the entrance platform, arms folded, head cocked slightly to the side and one eyebrow raised, waiting to see how Marisol will react.

Marisol’s face is pure venom. Her jaw is clenched so tight it looks painful. She takes one aggressive step forward, the Billion Dollar Championship swinging in her hand like she might throw it. Her mouth opens—nothing comes out. Just a sharp, furious breath.

Taylor is right beside her, eyes wide with rage, shaking her head in disbelief. She lifts her microphone halfway, then immediately drops it again like she can’t even form the words. She gestures wildly at the stage, then at Marisol, then back at the stage, her face getting redder by the second. She looks like she’s about to explode, but no sound comes out.

Marisol’s chest is heaving. She points a finger up the ramp, then lowers it. She starts to raise the mic, stops, and instead just glares daggers at Gina with pure, seething hatred. Her free hand balls into a fist at her side, knuckles white.

Neither of them can speak.

SONG: BITCH’S BREW BY CROSSES

Emilia Glazkov, Manager General of Pro Championship Wrestling, steps out onto the stage beside Gina.

She is sex made corporate. The vinyl catsuit clings like a second skin, gleaming under the lights, while a black leather military jacket hangs open over it. A crisp military cap with the PCW insignia sits low on her head, her undercut sharp and product-slicked. She moves with that same deliberate, snake-like grace. She stops next to Gina and stares down at the ring, letting the silence stretch before she finally speaks.

EMILIA: You want match with Marisol.

Her voice is low, flat, and heavy with that distinct Moldovan accent. She doesn’t look at Gina when she says it.

EMILIA: You will have it. But it will not be for Billion Dollar Championship.

She finally turns her head slightly toward Gina, ice-blue eyes steady.

EMILIA: First you must earn right to fight for it. In two weeks, you will face Marisol. If you really are… Winnah… then you will challenge for title at… TERRORDOME.

The crowd erupts.

In the ring, Marisol’s expression shifts. The anger drains away. A slow, satisfied smirk creeps across her face as she looks up at Emilia. She nods once, small and deliberate, like she approves of the decision. Taylor stands beside her, arms crossed, also looking noticeably more relaxed.

Gina stays on the stage for a moment, arms still folded. She glances at Emilia, then down at Marisol in the ring. After a few seconds, she nods.

GINA: Fine. Whatever. You line up your hoops and I’ll jump through every single one of ‘em. So long as in the end, I get to kick her ass!

Gina points at the ring, dead at Marisol as the crowd roars with cheers. Then she turns, looking back at the GM.

GINA: I’ll be there.

Gina turns and walks off the stage without another word.

Emilia remains where she is, staring down at the ring. Marisol meets her eyes from below, still wearing that small, knowing smirk.

SEGMENT

Aleki Part Three

T-06:00:00

The timestamp stops.

The handle moves.

Not forcefully. Not with the energy of a man who has been waiting six hours to get out of a room. With the deliberate, unhurried motion of a man who has finished something and is ready to move to what comes next. The door swings open.

Aleki steps into the light.

He stops just outside the threshold.

The corridor is the same corridor he left six hours ago. Same walls. Same floor. Same utility lighting, clinical and indifferent. Nothing has changed out here. Everything has changed in there. The world did not pause while he was inside it. The building filled with people. Somewhere beyond these walls a crowd is waiting, a card is running, a match has been made with a stipulation nobody knows yet.

None of that is the first thing he registers.

The first thing he registers is the air.

He breathes it the way a man breathes after surfacing from deep water—not gasping, not dramatic, just the profound and involuntary recognition of something the body needed and is now receiving. Sound returns in layers. The distant noise of the crowd. The hum of the building’s infrastructure. The small anonymous sounds of a facility doing what facilities do. Each one arriving separately, each one extraordinary in its ordinariness.

He stood in a room where there was nothing.

Now there is everything.

He is not ready to move yet. He stands in the threshold—one foot in the corridor, one foot still at the edge of the chamber—and he lets the world come back to him at its own pace. His eyes adjust. He does not rush them.

He looks the way a man looks after something he cannot fully name and would not try to. Not broken—the word that will occur to people when they see the footage, when they see the state of him. Broken is the wrong word entirely. What Aleki Kekoa looks like, standing in this corridor with six hours of silence and vision and reckoning written across him, is resolved. The way a mathematical proof is resolved. The way a long argument finally reaches its conclusion.

The answer has been found.

It cost something to find it.

He begins to walk.

Not the measured, deliberate entrance walk—the one designed to fill a ramp and command a crowd. This is something different. This is a man in a corridor putting one foot in front of the other because that is what walking forward requires. The gait of someone who has spent six hours standing still and is relearning motion. The gait of someone carrying less than they were carrying when they walked in.

He passes a monitor mounted to the corridor wall.

On it, the PCW ring. The crowd filling every seat. The Asylum Rules match graphic burning in the corner of the screen—ALEKI KEKOA vs. HELENA HANDBASKET—MAIN EVENT—STIPULATION TBD.

He stops.

Looks at it.

His face does not change. His jaw does not tighten. There is no visible calculation, no visible concern, no visible anything except the same settled certainty that has been on him since he stepped through the chamber door. He looks at the graphic the way a man looks at a weather report for a city he has already decided to travel to regardless of what it says.

Helena Handbasket is good. The people in that building know it. The people watching at home know it. Aleki Kekoa knows it with the specific precision of a man who studies opponents the way a physician studies symptoms—patterns, tendencies, pressure points, the place where confidence shades into exposure. He has done his homework. He has always done his homework.

But homework is preparation for the unknown.

He just spent six hours alone with the worst unknown available to him—the interior of his own mind, stripped of every defense, every distraction, every carefully constructed layer of identity and standard and legacy—and he did not break.

He resolved.

Whatever stipulation the promotion leadership choose tonight is a footnote.

He has already fought the hardest match of his life.

Nobody saw it.

He looks at the monitor for one more moment.

Then—quietly, to no one, to the corridor, to the camera that has been tracking him since the chamber door opened—he speaks. The first words he has said in six hours. Not a promo. Not a declaration. Just the plain, unhurried truth of a man who has been to the bottom of himself and found solid ground.

ALEKI: Helena. I don’t know what stipulation will be chosen tonight. Neither do you. It’s going to suck and hurt regardless. The difference between us is I stopped needing to know. Six hours ago. See you out there.

He walks.

He does not make it far before they come.

Not loud. Not all at once. The way they came in the chamber—layered, patient, arriving the way the drumming arrived, so gradually the moment of their presence cannot be identified until it is simply there.

The voices of the dead and the living.

High Chief Afualo. Leiataua. Fata. Tasi.

And Alyssa—her voice threaded through the others, of this world and somehow also of that one, the woman who took his hand in the vision and said nothing because nothing needed to be said.

Together. One register. Ancient and present simultaneously.

Not speaking to him.

Speaking about him.

The way families speak about the ones they have always known were destined for something—not with surprise, not with fanfare, but with the quiet, certain recognition of people who have been waiting a long time for the world to catch up to what they already knew.

VOICES: He is the One.

Aleki does not stop walking.

He does not look back.

He simply walks forward.

Because Tasi told him to.

Because Alyssa is waiting.

Because four generations of Kekoas built the foundation and the foundation holds and the only thing left to do—the only thing that has ever been left to do—is walk forward into whatever comes next and be exactly what the name has always demanded.

The corridor stretches ahead of him.

He walks its full length.

And disappears into the light.

MATCH 3

UNCLE SINISTER
versus
SELENE PYRE

The bell rings and the crowd settles into an uneasy quiet.

Stephanie Marshall stands center ring, rolling her sleeves. She gives both competitors a final look. Sinister doesn’t acknowledge her. Selene stares straight through him.

They meet in the middle.

The lockup lasts maybe two seconds.

He gets underneath her arms, wraps both hands around her midsection, and just lifts. Not a throw. Not a slam. A casual repositioning—like moving furniture—that plants her against the ropes and pins her there while he leans his full weight into her sternum. Selene shoves at his forearms. He doesn’t budge. Stephanie steps in.

REFEREE: Back it up. Back it up, Kevin.

He takes a single step back with a grin spread across his jaw. Open hands. The picture of innocence.

The crowd doesn’t buy it. Neither does Selene.

She shakes out her arms and circles. He lets her. He’s in no hurry.

Second lockup. Same result. He twists her into a side headlock like he’s wringing out a towel, grinding the forearm across her temple, and she has to burn energy just to keep her knees from folding. She drives an elbow into his ribs—once, twice—and finally shoots him off into the ropes. He comes back and runs through her. A shoulder that sends her stumbling sideways, nearly off her feet. He keeps walking. Doesn’t even look back.

She steadies herself. Recalibrates.

He’s not just bigger. He’s a wall with intentions.

So she stops trying to run through the wall.

She times his next approach and drops—a basement dropkick that clips his kneecap and sends him lurching forward. He catches himself on the ropes. She’s already up. A running pump kick catches him across the jaw before he can reset, and the crowd wakes up for the first time—a sharp burst of noise at the unexpected contact. She hits the ropes, springboards off the second strand, and drills the back of her elbow into his collarbone on the return.

He stumbles back a step. One step.

She goes for a waistlock. He clamps down on her wrists before she can lock her hands, peels her grip apart like she’s made of paper, and spins her around into a tilt-a-whirl backbreaker that drops her spine across his knee. The impact bounces her off and onto the canvas. Selene rolls immediately, gets her hands under her—pure reflex—but she’s blowing air. Hard.

That’s the truth of it. Right there.

She can sting him. She can move around him. But the moment he gets his hands on her, the physics of this fight stop working in her favor.

She fires back anyway.

A rolling elbow catches him across the jaw as he stalks forward—sharp enough to rock his head to the side. She wrenches him into a short-arm lariat that actually pivots him sideways. Quick lateral press.

ONE…

TWO—

He kicks out like he’s swatting at something annoying. Not desperation. Not urgency. Annoyance.

The crowd groans.

Sinister sits up. Rolls his neck. And for the first time, the grin is gone.

He doesn’t rush. He stands up slowly, watching her find her feet. His eyes track every movement. There’s something worse than rage in his expression—something patient. Systematic.

He’s done playing.

She reads it. Her jaw tightens. She charges first—a high-angle yakuza kick aimed at his chin—and he sidesteps it, catches her by the back of the neck on the way past, and steers her headfirst into the top turnbuckle. Her forehead bounces off the steel cap inside the pad. She staggers backward into his arms. He hauls her overhead in a suplex, holds her vertical—holds her long enough for the blood to rush to her head, long enough for the crowd to react to the sheer display of it—and then drops her.

CRACK.

She hits flat and doesn’t move for a beat.

CROWD: “THIS IS AWESOME!”

Stephanie moves in, drops to a knee. Counting. Selene rolls to her side at four.

He’s already there.

He hauls her upright by the wrist and walks her toward the ropes—not toward a move, just steering her, reducing her to cargo—and when he reaches the apron he shoves her through the ropes. She grabs the top cable to slow herself, half-hanging over the side, and he drives a forearm into the base of her skull that sends her the rest of the way. She drops to the floor and collides shoulder-first with the steel ringpost.

Then her face finds it.

The sound is ugly. Hollow and immediate.

She crumples at the base of the post and doesn’t move.

The crowd goes quiet.

Then a thin red line appears at her hairline. Then another. Then the whole left side of her face is red, and it’s moving, and the woman in the front row covers her mouth with both hands.

Stephanie is out of the ring in an instant, checking, hands hovering.

REFEREE: “Selene—Selene, do you want to continue?”

Sinister leans against the ropes from inside, watching. Arms folded. He looks like a man watching a documentary about something he already knows the ending to.

She moves.

One hand. Then both hands. She presses her palm flat against the floor and pushes herself upright, using the apron for support. Blood slides down over her cheekbone and drips off her jaw. She wipes at it with the back of her wrist—not frantically, not in panic, just functionally—and pulls herself back up onto the apron.

He steps aside. An almost gentlemanly gesture.

She steps through the ropes.

He looks her over—the blood, the hard breathing, the set of her jaw—and something shifts behind his eyes. Not respect, exactly. Something closer to interest.

The crowd buzzes with dread.

He drives his boot down. The first stomp lands on her ankle before she’s fully upright—a deliberate, grinding heel that pins her in place. Then he circles. The GRAVEN STOMPS fall in a slow, methodical loop around her body. Shoulder. Ribs. The meat of her thigh. He’s not trying to end it. He’s cataloguing damage. Every landing measured, every target chosen. Selene curls, tries to protect herself, tries to roll away—and he just adjusts his circle. Patient as weather.

She takes six before she gets her arms under her.

He grabs both of her wrists, pulls her upright, kicks her in the midsection hard enough to fold her forward, and catches her on the way down into the powerbomb position—hoisting her high—before abandoning the full rotation and slamming her. Not a powerbomb.

DECEIVER (Powerbomb into Slam)!

The crowd’s anticipation cuts short as she hits canvas at an angle, no air left in her lungs, arms flopped wide.

Stephanie drops.

ONE…

TWO—

Selene’s shoulder claws off the mat.

He pulls her up by the hair before Stephanie can even finish resetting. The referee steps in, hand on his forearm.

STEPHANIE: Back off the hair, Sinister. Back off.

He releases it. Grabs the wrist instead.

She answers with a spinning backfist off the Irish whip return that catches him across the bridge of the nose. He stops moving. Not from pain—from surprise. She follows with a yakuza kick that snaps his jaw to the side and the crowd ignites for the first time in minutes, a desperate, ragged surge of noise.

She hits the ropes. Rolling elbow. Running pump kick. He backs up a step. Then another. She’s got him against the ropes now and she knows it and the crowd knows it and the arena is loud and she grabs both of his arms, ducks underneath, hooks the double underhook—

WINTER SOLSTICE (Double Underhook Brainbuster)

She tries to hoist him.

He doesn’t move.

235 pounds of dead refusal. She strains, teeth locked, boots grinding into the canvas. For a moment she has him—almost—and the crowd rises with her. Then he straightens. Breaks the grip. Catches her on the way out with an underhook suplex of his own that sends her up and over and down hard onto the back of her neck.

The crowd drops with her.

She lies there, chest heaving, the left side of her face a mask of drying red. She gets up anyway. Slower this time.

He meets her halfway and she drops her weight, snares his arm, swings her leg over his head and falls forward into the LUNA LOCK—Fujiwara armbar, forearm grinding down across his jaw and cheek, shoulder wrenched backward at the joint. The crowd erupts because it’s locked. It’s locked. Stephanie is right there.

STEPHANIE: Kevin—do you want to quit?

He doesn’t answer.

She cranks it harder. Grinds his face into the canvas. He grunts—the first sound of pain out of him all match—and the grunt sends the arena into a frenzy.

Then he starts to move.

Not tapping. Moving. He pushes himself to one knee. Then both knees. She’s hanging off his arm, bodyweight fully committed, and he stands up with her anyway—just rises beneath her like something geological—and when he reaches full height he torques the arm free with a violence that sends her skidding across the mat.

She catches herself on the ropes. Turns around.

He’s already moving.

He draws her forward by the wrist, lets her momentum carry her past him, swings her back the opposite way and down—the SISTER SINISTER drops her flush onto the back of her skull with a sickening whip of motion. She bounces once and goes still.

Stephanie slides in.

ONE…

TWO…

THR—

The shoulder comes up. Barely. It barely comes up. It looks like a twitch more than a kickout, like her body is operating on something below conscious thought.

The crowd loses its mind.

CROWD: THIS IS AWESOME!

Sinister stares down at her. The patience has cracked. Something harder underneath it now. He grabs her face in one hand, squeezes her jaw—blood smearing across his palm—and hauls her upright. She’s swaying. Eyes glassy. Legs doing the bare minimum.

He slides his fingers in.

The MANDIBLE CLAW clamps shut. Middle and ring fingers hooking under her tongue, palm forcing her jaw up. Selene’s hands fly to his wrist immediately—clawing, pulling, twisting—and she can’t move it. He walks her backward into the corner and she’s trapped there, spine against the turnbuckle, the hold locked and his full bodyweight leaning in.

Stephanie is in his face.

STEPHANIE: Selene—Selene, do you want to quit?

Her arms slow. Her knees bend. The lights are going somewhere. The crowd feels it and the noise shifts from excitement into something low and urgent, a collective dread settling over the arena.

She stops pulling at his wrist.

Her right hand drops.

Then comes back up.

Her thumb drives straight into his left eye socket.

He roars. Not a grunt. A roar—raw and ugly—and the claw breaks as he recoils, pressing the back of his hand to his eye. Selene folds at the waist, hands on her knees, pulling air in great ragged heaves. Blood is dripping off her chin in a thin, steady line. Her boots are trembling.

Stephanie looks between them. Says nothing. Lets it breathe.

Sinister blinks through the eye. Tests it. Rolls his neck.

And then he looks at her.

She looks back.

Two wrecked people standing in a ring deciding whether they have anything left. The crowd holds its breath.

He straightens to his full height.

She straightens to hers.

He’s pissed. Not the theatrical kind. The quiet, compressed kind—the kind that doesn’t posture, doesn’t gesture. Just stares across the ring with both fists loose at his sides and eyes that have gone somewhere very cold.

The referee steps back to a neutral corner, giving both wrestlers the room to work.

Selene wipes blood from her face then lunges for Sinister’s arm. She grabs him by the elbow and wrist and turns, trying to whip in across the ring. Full bodyweight committed to the motion—and he doesn’t move. Not even a lean. He absorbs it like a post sunk in concrete, lets her pull, then turns the momentum around in one fluid reversal and throws her.

Not whips. Not sends.

Throws.

She crosses the ring like a missile and hits the opposite corner with a crash that shakes the turnbuckle pads—and Stephanie Marshall, who had drifted there to stay out of the action, takes the full impact. The referee folds sideways and rolls through the ropes. She hits the floor below and doesn’t get up.

The crowd goes still.

Sinister doesn’t look at her.

He crosses the ring at a walk. No urgency. No change in expression. The referee being down is not a problem or an opportunity—it simply doesn’t register. He picks Selene up off the canvas by the throat with one hand, straightens his arm, and lifts her off the mat.

She hangs there. Boots kicking at the air. Both hands wrapped around his forearm, doing nothing.

The crowd is screaming.

Then footsteps on the ramp.

A woman—moving fast, no music, no announcement—hits the floor and slides under the bottom rope before half the arena even registers who she is. She’s got a steel chair in both hands and she doesn’t hesitate. She swings.

CRACK.

Across the spine.

CRACK.

Again. He lurches forward.

CRACK.

A third, and Selene drops from his grip and crumples to the canvas. The woman stands behind him, chair raised, chest heaving. It takes a moment—a ripple moving through the crowd as recognition sets in.

Lily Briar.

The arena erupts in confused noise, half-cheer, half-question.

Sinister drops Selene. He turns around slowly—the way a mountain turns, the way something large and dangerous reorients itself without alarm. His hand reaches for Lily’s throat. The chair clatters to the ring floor as she needs both hands if there’s a hope of breaking free.

The lights go out.

Not a flicker. Not a fade. Out. Completely. Total darkness swallowing the arena whole.

A bell tolls.

Not the timekeeper’s bell. Something older. Deeper. A coppery resonance that moves through the chest rather than the ears, hanging in the black like smoke.

Then the LIGHTS RISE.

In the far corner. Upside down, ankles hooked over the top rope, body hanging inverted in the dark. Both arms extended. Two fingers pointing toward the canvas. One pointing up. The position of The Devil—Major Arcana XV—rendered in flesh and held with impossible stillness.

IT’S… DATURA!

The arena detonates.

CROWD: HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT!

Sinister sees her. Something moves across his face—not fear, not quite—but he goes still in a way he hasn’t gone still all night. He drops Lily where she stands. Takes one step toward the corner.

The lights go out.

The bell tolls again.

The lights come back on.

He is in the center of the ring.

All three of them are around him.

Selene. Lily. Datura.

He turns his head and picks the nearest target and charges—and Datura hits him from behind with a dropkick that staggers him forward into Selene’s rolling elbow. He grabs for her wrist and Lily cracks a kick into his ribs from the side. He spins toward Lily and Datura is already there—a forearm across the jaw. He catches Datura by the collar and Selene drives a pump kick into his kidneys.

He can’t hold any of them long enough.

Every time he fights through one, another is already moving.

He’s bleeding energy. Not going down—never going down—but spending something he can’t get back.

Lily reads the opening. She drops to a knee and swings the chair low and hard into the back of his knee. The joint buckles. He drops to one knee for the first time all match.

The crowd comes off its feet.

Datura hits the ropes.

She comes back fast and low, knee rising like a blade, and drives the DELIRIUM (Crash Rabbit Heat Knee Strike)!

Flush into his jaw!

He wobbles.

Then he roars.

The sound of it fills the building. Raw. Animal. He plants his hands on the canvas and starts to push himself back up—and Datura takes one step back. She straightens. Turns toward Selene.

And bows.

Slow. Deliberate. A theater usher presenting the stage.

Lily picks up the chair and flips it end over end to Selene.

She catches it with both hands.

Blood is still moving down her face. Her boots are unsteady. Her left eye is swollen half-shut. She looks like she’s been dragged through something she shouldn’t have survived.

She raises the chair above her head.

He’s on one knee. Looking up at her.

She brings it down.

WAM.

The steel folds around his skull with a sound that cuts through everything—through the screaming, through the music, through every other noise in the building. He stiffens. Every muscle locking at once. Then he lists sideways, slow as timber, and hits the canvas with his full weight.

The mangled chair clatters away.

Nobody moves for a half-second.

Lily is already outside the ring. She finds Stephanie Marshall still on the floor, grabs her by both arms and hauls her upright, shoving her toward the apron. Stephanie blinks. Looks at her hands. Looks at the ring.

She gets in anyway.

Datura is waiting. She takes the referee by the wrist—not roughly, almost gently—and walks her across the canvas to where Selene has fallen across Sinister’s chest.

Stephanie looks down.

Blood. Bodies. A ruined chair. Two women standing over a scene that looks like the aftermath of something terrible.

She raises her hand.

ONE…

TWO…

THREE!

The bell rings and the crowd comes completely apart.

Stephanie Marshall raises Selene’s hand.

WINNER VIA PINFALL
SELENE PYRE

The blood hasn’t stopped. It runs down her forearm and drips off the referee’s wrist as she holds it up. Selene doesn’t raise her other hand. Doesn’t point at the crowd. She just stands there—chest rising and falling, eyes open, face painted red—and exists in the moment the way she exists in all moments. Without ceremony.

Datura drifts to the center of the ring.

Lily leans against the ropes, one arm hooked over the top cable, watching.

Three women. Three corners of something that just became real.

Below them, Uncle Sinister lies motionless on his back. One arm out to the side. Eyes closed. The biggest man in the room, and the quietest.

The Black Rainbow stands over him.

SEGMENT

Helena Handbasket

Helena grins at the camera and in the dark her bright blonde hair whites her face and out almost entirely. She does a happy flip and lands on the ground, a mock collapse with a laugh, none of her movements echoing or making a sound. Her laughter small and contained. Her voice huffy and restrained, she throws an arm up and does a muffled mouth trumpet of the opening of Jericho and…

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!

HELENA HANDBASKET: Normally, I’d do this sort thing in the ring, but weird match prep is a thing I really DIG, so I’m here. You know what’s swiftly turnin’ into a good decision on my part? Havin’ taken psychoactives before comin’ in here. Perfectly LEGAL phsycoactives for the area I’m currently in, the gentle, commercially available types. Before any of the nanny cams tunin’ in get all buzzy. So like, in sixish-something hours, I have a match, and they want me to spend the night in here…Where’s here? An anti-sound chamber, it has a proper name but I have definitely forgotten it. The acoustics suck, like, straight up dog dicks…It’s all foam, that’s why I’m layin’ down, it’s kinda comfy really. The gist is, no sound bounces.

Here Helena can be seen waving a hand around as she lays in frame, bouncing her arm off the floor makes no sound as the green glow of her arm in the dark settles.

HELENA HANDBASKET: Not anything I do, not anything I say, makes a dent. I COULDN’T SHOUT IN HERE IF I WANTED….And I’m a trained singer, so that was all the breath control I had. Not hearin’ background noise is STRANGE, even the phsycoactives feel relatively tame without the suggestion of other life. Of course, that connection I have with the universe is as present as ever, harder to ignore, currently but you lot don’t care about that. If you didn’t get this gist, this is goin’ to be RA-AMBA-LY…Still can’t shout. No, what you lot want to hear about is what I think about Leaky Krakoa, that’s his name, I’m pretty sure. That was such a good arc for the X-Men. Lorna Dane showin’ up and just usin’ her powers and Knowhere to annihilate earth station? Epic. Kinda like what I’m goin’ to do to that Washed up Somoane at….This PPE had a name, and it’s old bongo for all I know, look. I gotta climb a ladder, in this state, after I annihilate a big guy with that ladder, grab a key. Mission statements, I have them.

Helena kips herself up with a giddy giggle and can be seen in the low light glancin’ around the room, mouth splitting into an almost manic grin.

HELENA HANDBASKET: There’s no earthly way of knowing. Which direction we are going. There’s no knowing where we’re rowing. Or which way the river’s flowing…I’m just sayin’ it’s probably not haunted, I can see ghosts a lot of the time, none here. Wait, hang on, the Defective Islander, that’s what I was talkin’ about. You know, if you’re goin’ to show up HELEN and stare at me, you can at least like, provide something of entertainment…Yeah, still mad at me, fine. I get it. I’m an arsehole and I didn’t WANT to talk to you for two years because I felt abandoned, and now you decide to show up when I’m actually healin’ and doin’ well and we’re just tradin’ bein’ the arsehole….Feck. Back on tasks, this is why generally I like noise, Bali is hell for some, constant light and noise, not me. I’d kill for a casino right now, I like my liminal spaces LOUD.

Helena bounces up from the floor, and twirls a chair into frame, looking still unsettled by the lack of noise, tapping her foot also results in nothing. So she whistles, starting ‘Sexotheque’ by La Roux, before it slows and stretches, seemingly without Helena noticing.

HELENA HANDBASKET: Did you know that if you mute a sense, the others will begin to compensate, it’s not so much a super power as your brain just as a lot less sensory information to get through, so it’s faster at processin’ what it has access to. It’s part of the reason human hates darkness and silence, it’s harder to ignore the everything else of it all…YES, I know I’m an avoidant and you’re an arsehole…Ah feck, you’re UP to something, aren’t you?…All that–…That whistlin…Is that me or you-…

Helena looks up, and around, standing up, agitated.

HELENA HANDBASKET: WHAT I’M GOIN’ TO DO IS MAKE AN EXAMPLE OF ALEKI…You don’t get to torment me with this bullshite!…STOP WHISTLIN-Not even the same song! WHAT SONG IS THAT?!

Helena crashes out of chair, barely making a muffled sound and when she springs back to feet angrily, she grabs the chair, and tosses it as the camera cuts out, no crash is heard.

MATCH 4

VANCE ISAAC PARKER
versus
CHRIS MOSH

The heavy atmosphere of the arena is suddenly pierced by the smooth, luxurious brass intro of Jack Harlow’s “First Class.” The arena lights wash the entrance ramp in deep purple and shimmering gold as Chris “The V.I.P.” Mosh steps through the curtain. Draped in a sleeveless, gold-trimmed purple hooded vest, his face is twisted into a look of absolute, unadulterated smugness. The crowd showers him with boos, but Mosh saunters down the aisle, completely ignoring them. He stops only once in front of a beautiful brunette in the front row, takes her hand, softly kisses the knuckles with an arrogant smirk, and elegantly slides under the bottom rope.

The disdain of the crowd hasn’t even begun to fade before the opening riff of Limp Bizkit’s “My Way” blasts through the PA system. Vance Isaac Parker steps out wearing a pair of frayed denim jorts and a custom-printed bootleg Taco Bell t-shirt. Pausing halfway down the aisle, Vance reaches into a crinkled brown paper bag, slowly pulls out a steaming Beef Baja Chalupa, holds it up for the hard camera, and takes a massive bite. Chewing with a self-satisfied grin, he tosses the bag aside then pie-faces a kid at ringside with the rest of the chalupa. The mother freaks out, screams. Someone else has to stop her from climbing over the barricade in a dangerously underequipped tube top.

Vance laughs at her and her dumb kid’s face, until finally turning to march down to the ring and slide right in right as Mosh is taking off his vest.

Standing between these two monumental egos is tonight’s official: American Moderator. Scrawny, pale, and sporting wire-rimmed glasses and a thin mustache that makes him look like a dead ringer for Kip from Napoleon Dynamite.

Moderator signals the timekeeper. DING! DING! DING!

The bell rings, and the two self-proclaimed V.I.P.s slowly circle one another, meeting dead in the center of the canvas. Mosh stops, looks Vance up and down, and extends his right hand for a sportsmanlike shake.

Vance stares at the hand. He shifts his weight, subtly curling his left hand into a tight fist behind his back, winding up to strike as he slowly extends his right hand toward Mosh’s.

Just as their fingers are about to touch, Mosh abruptly whips his hand back. In one fluid, cocky motion, he runs both hands through his perfectly styled hair, tossing his head back with a loud, obnoxious laugh. The crowd bursts into laughter at the sheer disrespect.

Vance pauses, his hidden fist unclenching. He lets out a dry chuckle and nods his head.

VANCE: Okay, okay. You got me. Good one.

Vance then steps forward and extends his own hand, offering a seemingly genuine olive branch.

Mosh stops laughing. He looks down at Vance’s hand. He looks to his left. He looks to his right. He looks back at Vance, an expression of genuine, touched emotion washing over his face. He reaches out, opening his palm to accept the handshake.

THWACK!

Vance’s left fist rockets from his side, connecting flush with Mosh’s jaw in a devastating sucker punch! Mosh crumbles to his knees, clutching his face.

Before Mosh can process the betrayal, Vance grabs him by the hair and ruthlessly rakes his fingers right across Mosh’s eyes. American Moderator leaps between them, violently waving his spindly arms.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: Hey! HEY! Gosh dangit, no! This is a nation of laws! I will disqualify you, I swear to George Washington!

Vance throws his hands up in mock innocence, backing into the corner.

VANCE: I was checking his vision! It’s protocol!

While Vance is distracted arguing, Mosh struggles to his feet. Enraged and half-blind, Mosh charges out of the corner. Vance turns his head just in time for Mosh to blindly jab his thumb directly into Vance’s left eye socket. Vance lets out a yelp of pain, stumbling backward.

Moderator jumps straight up in the air, his face turning a shade of angry crimson as he tries to physically push Mosh back.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: HEY! I will disqualify you!

The crowd is raining down a chorus of boos as the pace quickens. Mosh ducks under a wild clothesline attempt from Vance, drops low, and executes a flawless single-leg takedown. He floats over for the lateral press and hooks Vance’s far leg tightly. As American Moderator dives into position to make the count, Mosh reaches down and blatantly grabs a massive handful of Vance’s frayed denim jorts to anchor his shoulders to the mat.

Moderator’s hand comes down for the one, but he stops dead in his tracks, his eyes locking onto Mosh’s clenched fist gripping the denim.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: Hold on! You’re pulling his pants! Break it up!

CHRIS MOSH: I’m just securing the hold, ref! It’s technical wrestling!

Moderator kicks Mosh’s hand away, waving off the pinfall. Mosh throws his hands up, arguing the call. Vance scrambles to his feet, incensed. He charges Mosh, who spins around and misses with a wild right hook. Vance capitalizes on the opening, leaping up and driving a stiff running high knee right under Mosh’s jaw.

Mosh collapses near the edge of the ring. Vance immediately dives on top for the cover. Just as Moderator drops to the canvas to count, Vance blatantly throws both of his feet onto the middle rope, pressing his body weight down for maximum illegal leverage.

Moderator doesn’t even start the count. He pops to his knees, furiously waving his arms over his head to stop the match.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: Are you kidding me right now?! Get your feet off the ropes!

VANCE PARKER: My legs slipped! It’s a physiological reflex!

Vance angrily breaks the pin, getting right in Moderator’s face to argue the biomechanics of his leg placement. Mosh uses the distraction to recover, sneaking up behind Vance and clubbing him forcefully in the back of the neck. Mosh grabs Vance by the hair and drives him backward into the corner turnbuckle.

With a sadistic grin, Mosh presses his forearm ruthlessly against Vance’s throat, illegally choking him against the turnbuckle pads. Moderator immediately steps in and begins the mandatory five-count.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: One! Two! Three! Four!

Mosh stares directly into Moderator’s eyes, holding the choke with a smug smirk until the absolute limit of the 4.9 count. At the last possible millisecond, he steps back and throws his hands up in mock compliance.

CHRIS MOSH: I have until five! Read the rulebook, nerd!

Moderator physically shoves Mosh back, his wire-rimmed glasses going crooked on his face. Vance, gasping for air, explodes out of the corner with a burst of furious energy. He grabs Mosh by the arm and hurls him across the ring with a violent Irish whip. Mosh crashes hard into the opposite corner, the impact shaking the ring post.

Vance charges in right behind him, mounts the second turnbuckle, and begins raining down closed-fist punches onto Mosh’s forehead. Moderator steps in, starting another five-count.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: One! Two! Three! Four! Five! I said break!

Vance completely ignores the referee, continuing to pummel Mosh while loudly counting his own punches to draw maximum heat from the crowd. Moderator’s pale face turns bright red. Utterly fed up and exhausted by the constant rule-breaking, the scrawny referee steps in, grabs Vance by the waistband of his jorts, and throws his entire meager body weight backward. He violently yanks Vance off the turnbuckle, sending the self-proclaimed “Solution” crashing back-first onto the canvas.

Vance hits the mat hard after Moderator pulls him down from the turnbuckle. He scrambles to his feet, absolutely livid. Across the ring, Mosh staggers out of the corner. They lock eyes, both breathing heavily, both completely fed up with each other and the official.

They charge forward, hit the opposite ropes, rebound, and meet dead in the center of the ring with a massive, synchronized double clothesline! Both men crash to the canvas like felled trees.

However, neither man is actually unconscious. They both lie entirely motionless, staring blankly at the ceiling, each choosing to play possum to bait the other into a careless pinfall attempt.

American Moderator, adjusting his crooked wire-rimmed glasses, drops to his knees and begins the mandatory ten-count for a double down.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six!

As Moderator’s hand comes down for the seven-count, both Mosh and Vance subtly peel one eye open to check on their opponent. Across the canvas, their eyes meet. They both realize in the exact same millisecond that the other is faking it.

In perfect unison, both men pop up to their feet. They stand face-to-face and aggressively thrust their index fingers at one another in a flawless, real-life recreation of the Spider-Man pointing meme.

CHRIS MOSH: You were faking! You dirty son of a bitch!

VANCE PARKER: You were baiting me! That is a blatant breach of good faith negotiations!

American Moderator finally reaches his absolute breaking point. His pale face is a mask of pure, unadulterated fury. He physically wedges his scrawny frame directly between the two towering heavyweights. Reaching into the breast pocket of his striped referee shirt, Moderator whips out a dog-eared, miniature pocket Constitution and starts violently wagging it in their faces.

AMERICAN MODERATOR: That is it! I have had it up to gosh-darn here with you two hooligans! There are rules! There is integrity! The Founding Fathers will NOT stand for this tomfoolery! You are making a mockery of this squared circle!

Mosh and Vance slowly lower their pointing fingers. They stare down at the screeching, red-faced official waving the historical document at them.

Mosh looks over at Vance.

Vance looks over at Mosh.

Without exchanging a single word, they both give a synchronized, indifferent shrug.

In perfect unison, both men wind up and unleash two massive haymakers, walloping American Moderator squarely in the jaw!

Moderator’s eyes roll back into his head, and he collapses to the canvas like a dropped sack of potatoes, his pocket Constitution fluttering down softly beside him. The crowd erupts into a massive, unexpected pop at the sheer absurdity of the moment as the timekeeper frantically hammers the bell.

DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!

The ring announcer’s voice echoes over the PA system, officially declaring the bout a No Contest due to a double assault on the official.

NO CONTEST

Mosh casually brushes a speck of dirt off his shoulder, while Vance casually fixes the collar of his bootleg Taco Bell shirt. Rather than turning on one another, the two men offer each other an approving nod. They roll out of the ring side-by-side and begin walking up the entrance ramp together, completely ignoring the officials rushing down to check on Moderator.

CHRIS MOSH: Honestly, that ropes-leverage spot on the pin? Brilliant execution.

VANCE PARKER: Game recognizes game. You had a lot of torque on that choke!

CHRIS MOSH: Let’s talk merchandising splits on the way back to catering. I know a guy.

The camera fades to black as the two biggest egos in Pro Championship Wrestling disappear through the curtain, actively patting each other on the back.

SEGMENT

BIA

The lights in the arena dim as the gravely, bitter voice of Rorschach from the Watchman can be heard reciting from one of his journal entries.

RORSCHACH: The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists. And all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save Us!’, and I’ll look down and whisper…’No.’.

SONG: BUILT TO LAST by TWISTED F8

The nu-metal guitar riff of Twisted F8’s ‘Built to Last’ can be heard signaling the impending arrival of the Australian powerhouse known as Bia. The lights to the entryway pulse red, a blanket of smoke spilling out onto the stage as the song picks up pace.

ANNOUNCER: “Making her way to the ring… the WINNER of the Iron Gauntlet and #1 Contender to the PCW Unleashed Championship…she is “The West Australian War Goddess” BIA!”

The crowd voice their displeasure as Bia comes sauntering slowly out onto the entryway down to the ring. Clad in flare legged black leather lace up pants, chonky black shit kicker boots with various silver accouterments and a red and black backless zip up halter top…Bia stares out at the sea of humanity, a playfully smirk on her face. She walks slowly, purposefully down to the ring, ignoring the frenzied fans.

She climbs the steps onto the apron before wiping her boots and stepping through the ropes. Bia quickly climbs onto the turnbuckles of the nearest post, shaking out her freshly cut hair and poses, arms outstretched. She lets out a war cry as the three remaining ringposts let off a blast of red fire pyro. After a few moments she hops down, pacing in the ring before being handed a mic from a ringside tech.

The crowd continue to boo the Iron Gauntlet winner as she stands in the middle of the ring. Her music dies down as she looks out at the disapproving crowd and just chuckles.

BIA: You guys seem…disappointed?

She asks to test the water.

BIA: Lemme guess…you guys were probably hopin’ it was gonna be Sam Tolson right?

The crowd give a more mixed reaction.

BIA: Welp, I unceremoniously dumped her arse out in about ten seconds flat. But once the show’s over youse all can go down the road to the 7-11 yeah? Ask Apu to check the spank mags behind the counter and pick up a copy of the new Playboy. Take it home, flip to the centrefold and give ol’ Silicone Sam and that wizard’s sleeve she’s got a standing O-vation. She’s used to takin’ shots to the face…

Bia laughs, pointing at a few of the male audience members who’d no doubt grabbed a copy.

BIA: Or maybe…maybe you’d hoped it’d be that Neon Nightmare, Gina?

The crows give a decidedly loud and positive reaction to the newcomer.

BIA: Yeah, I bet you would’ve. The plucky little underdog that could, right? Comin’ out here lookin’ like she was right out of 1992 with her Trapper Keeper, side pony tail, and her Teen Beat magazine. She probably has vintage Lisa Frank posters on her bedroom wall still for fucks sake.

Bia rolls her eyes.

BIA: She thought she could, she thought she could, she thought she could. But then that little engine of hers ran into a freight train called REALITY. Derailed her peppy little arse right over that top rope quick smart.

Bia chuckles again and holds up a finger.

BIA: Ah! I know. Aleki Kekoa right?

The crowd gives its biggest cheer yet as Bia just shakes her head.

BIA: Figures. You numpty twats would cheer for that clown wouldn’t ya? Talked all that shit, like he always does. Got all you idiots to believe he would do it and got turfed out by the woman who’ll be very shortly pinnin’ his arse right here in the middle of the ring.

The crowd let out another chorus of boos at the mention of Ms. Handbasket.

BIA: I told that useless tit to stay the hell away from PCW. We don’t want him here. We don’t need him here. But he just wouldn’t listen! Him or that stupid bitch who continues to prop up that giant ego of his. God forbid, if he didn’t have her holdin’ him up he’d weeble wobble his Samoan arse right on out the door. But it’s fine…he’ll learn quick, fast, and in a hurry…this ain’t PWE and his surname doesn’t mean shit around here.

Bia prowls around the ring, the bad blood between her and Kekoa obviously not going away any time soon. She gestures out to the crowd as she continues.

BIA: It wasn’t Sam Tolson youse guys really want to win. Or Gina Neon. Or Aleki Cuckoa. No…you all were hopin’ and prayin’ it’d be Thais Empristiki weren’t yeah?

The crowd explodes at the mention of the Fire Bringer as Bia just glares out at them. The hatred on her face is as evident as the War Goddess’ body language.

BIA: Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news…but they didn’t win. They fell at my hands, as they were always destined to do! Because they know, just like you all know, that they’re so far out of my league we aren’t even playin’ the same game! Thais…you tried your pitiful enby heart out, can’t fault ya for it. But youse were always on hidin’ to nothin’. There was only ever one person who was winnin’ the Iron Gauntlet and that…was…ME!

Bia shakes her head as the crowd gives it to her deluxe.

BIA: Like it or lump it you areseholes, because you’re lookin’ at the next PCW Unleashed Champion! People like Thais Empristiki don’t have what it takes to hold a title like that. They lack the stomach for it. They lack the hunger. The will to do whatever it takes to make sure it stays where it belongs. And more importantly than all of that…they lack the conviction necessary to finish the job! You faced me when I was act my weakest Thais. I had been in that bloody mess of a match fightin’ tooth and nail for over a half hour before your boney arse even bloody entered that gauntlet! But it wasn’t enough. You brought every toy your could find to try and tear me down. Why? Because what you got in that ring was never gonna be enough to keep me down for that ten count sunshine.

Bia smirks.

BIA: And what did I do? I turned them around on you. Each and every bloody one of’em and made sure your own hatred of me had a hand in your own undoin’. And still, bein’ the stubborn bitch you are, you have the balls to actually say that whomever wins the Terrordome is losin’ that strap to you?!

Bia looks bemused.

BIA: Listen to me very, very closely, Thais. You better hope that Yelena Gorgo is able to finally put me down for good this time. You better pray, that she makes sure my heart stops completely this time. Because if she doesn’t? If I’m the one who walks out of the TerrorDome the Unleashed Champion and you’re arrogant enough to come back for me? I will BURY YOU! Do you understand me? I will choke the life out of you with my bare fuckin’ hands Empristiki! I will watch the light fade from the eyes of the Flame Bringer with a god damn smile on my face so fuckin’ big they’ll see it from space!

Bia walks over to the ropes, leaning over them.

BIA: And that dear fans…brings me to the woman herself…Yel-

The house lights don’t just die. They cut out with a harsh, audible CRACK, like a circuit breaker violently failing. The arena plunges into a total, suffocating B L A C K.

Silence hangs in the dead air. Too long. Uncomfortable. A held breath before the world DETONATES.

SONG: BLACK RAINBOW by SPIRIT BOX

♫ YOUR HEART ♫
♫ IS A HOLE ♫

Violent STROBES shatter the dark—a disorienting, epileptic stutter. Words flash in rapid, subliminal bursts.

Sickly, bruising purple and red haze bleeds out across the stage floor. The camera sweeps the crowd, catching the frenetic, almost nervous energy. The arena plunges to black again. The music builds, an ugly, grinding upward spiral.

♫ EX-IT! ♫

The house lights rise. Bia, in the ring, has turned her stare towards the stage. She isn’t surprised but that doesn’t stop her jaw from clenching.

Yelena Gorgo emerges from the tunnel. Jeans. Black Rainbow t-shirt shredded into a sleeveless crop-top. Makeup violently smeared into dark, jagged streaks as if she’d been clawing at her own eyes.

And most importantly—the PCW UNLEASHED Championship over her shoulder.

Her descent to the ring is an erratic, twitchy gait. Drags her feet. Then lunges forward in sharp lunges. A stop-motion stalk. In the ring, Bia crosses her arms, even glances at an invisible watch.

Yelena lobs the championship over the top rope. It lands like a deflated accordion at Bia’s feet. The War Goddess stares down at it, then up as Yelena leaps onto the apron before climbing through the ropes.

The owner of PCW holds her hand out. An official responds, scurrying into the ring to hand her a microphone before hurrying back out like a broadway stagehand.

The mic rises. The music fades.

YELENA: Everyone in this building knew I was gonna walk out here. It was only a matter of time. Me? (shrugs) I was having a cocktail, my feet were up on the console. I’m having the time of my life, watching you tear into Thais.

She kisses at the air with drops her face to stare down at the War Goddess.

YELENA: Then you had to go and turn into a blatherin’ fucking pussy.

Quick cuts.

BIA: fuming, glaring upward.

YELENA: Staring down, jaw unhinged in a gaping grin, like a hyena.

WIDE SHOT: A sea of screaming fans in the background of the tense stare down.

YELENA: (mocking falsetto) ‘You better hope Yelena puts me down!’… ‘If I’m the one who walks out champion.’

She turns and spits on the mat, as if the words were poison.

YELENA: What’s wrong with you? Where is the War Goddess, hm? There ain’t no one on this planet that I wouldn’t stare dead in the eye and tell them that I’m going to win. No question. No hesitation.

She leans forward.

YELENA: I’m going to beat you, Bia. Again.

Ten thousand people explode in a burst of screams.

YELENA: Because I don’t think you got it in ya to do what it will take to win. To hurt me so much that you got time to climb that ladder, to reach to the top of the cage and take this belt—

She bends down, grabs the strap and rises, slowly, with it held over head.

YELENA: You think I carried this fuckin’ thing for two years while that other company died on a shelf, just so you can walk in here and take it from me? You think coming out here and waxin’ poetic-like about Thais is going to prepare you for Apocalypse Gorgo? MMMMH-MMPH! There is no way… NO WAY… you got any shot at beating me in MY FATHER’S MATCH on MY FUCKIN’ SHOW for MY. UNLEASHED. CHAMPIONSHIP.

Bia smirks slightly, her head tilting from looking Yelena dead in her eyes…to up, casting her attention back to the Unleashed championship that Gorgo held firmly in her grasp. There’s a few moments of silence between them before Bia speaks.

BIA: I don’t think you carried that fuckin’ thing for two years while that other company died on a shelf, just so I can walk in here and take it from you Yelena. I know you carried that fuckin’ thing for two years while that other company died on a shelf, just so I could walk in here and take it from you!

Bia’s eyes fall back and once again meet Yelena’s.

BIA: You think I haven’t been watchin’? You think I haven’t been payin’ attention? You’ve been cryin’, beggin’, prayin’ to the almighty that someone, anyone would come to you and take that title. You’ve been offerin’ up open challenges anywhere and everywhere mate. And that’s why I know that there was one person, and one person only that you were hopin’ would get thru that gauntlet…

Bia takes a few steps forward, beginning to close the distance.

BIA: Only one person you were silently willin’ to get thru that Last Man Standin’. You had your fingers, toes, arms, legs, hands, feet…hell, you’d have crossed your tits if youse were able. And Yel, sweetie…your prayers, they were answered. Because here I stand, big as life and twice as dangerous.

Bia smiles devilishly towards Yelena, wide and toothy.

BIA: You want me to beat you so badly you can barely stand it. And why? Because you have to believe there’s another sheila out there in this big ol’ world who’s just as dangerous, just as deadly, just as willin’, and just as able as you. You can’t chance tarnishin’ the legacy of that belt by accidentally losin’ it to some schmuck. Not in your father’s match on your fuckin’ show.

Bia walks closer, the space between them minimal now. Despite the size and height difference, if there was any lingering doubts in the challenger after their last match…she was doing an excellent job at hiding them.

BIA: You better than anyone around here knows, I’m anythin’ but a disappointment. I always deliver on me promises darl’. And I know you’ve wondered what would’ve happened had Thais not interfered in that Voltage Vengeance match. Well, inside the TerrorDome? We’re gonna find out aren’t we? Fuck yeah we are, because I’m not fixin’ to let anythin, not even a dodgy ticker, stop me…

Yelena pats the belt, now draped on her shoulder, then pushes a finger like a bullet in slow motion straight into Bia’s chest, to the side of the sternum, right above that busted heart. Bia’s eyes cast downward, then back up at Yelena’s hacksaw grin.

YELENA: I don’t wanna hear one more word about your heart. I don’t want to hear about Thais costing you the match against me. No more excuses. No more shoulda-coulda-woulda’s, kiddo. You and me? We got unfinished business.

Bia snarls.

BIA: You got that right, mate!

Both women push in, chest to chest.

YELENA: But… (grin widens) I still don’t know if you’re ready for it. I want nothing more than to go walkin’ in the moonlight with you. But first?

Her head twists in an avian tilt.

YELENA: I need you to prove that you’re not afraid of things that go BUMP in the NIGHT.

L I G H T S O U T…

Yelena’s cackling laugh carries throughout an arena hanging on suspense.

Until the music hits.

SONG: SWEET DREAMS by MARILYN MANSON

Straight into the breakdown. Ripping guitars. Thudding drums. But the arena is still pitch black. Dots of lights—cell phone screens—pop up across the curtain of black that is the wide shot.

Then… CRASH.

Music cuts. Lights rise.

Yelena is gone.

In her place?

ROXIE RIPPER.

The 5’2” Lil Manace stands in a lacy dress in her signature facepaint. And Bia? She’s on her back, laid out. Next to her is a severely dented trash can.

The crowd reacts with a strange bloodlust, even if the violence was hidden in the dark.

Roxie steps around and kneels next to Bia. She picks up one of the microphones and giggles.

ROXIE: Sooo hi! I’m Roxie Rippah. Da Boss’s Lil Menace! Recently I ditched the Carnival and joined up with the Black Rainbow and things are OH so much more fun over heeya! DRAT!

She smacks the side of her head.

ROXIE: I nearly fo’got! Da Boss said you an’ me got a match! Two weeks! This ring! But it ain’t jus’ any jinda match. It’s a DEATH MATCH!

The arena implodes with screaming, throating-ripping cheers.

ROXIE: Oh, one mo’ thing. She didn’t tell me ta deliver the message so emphatic like. I jus’ wanted to say a proper hello!

She pats Bia on the tummy.

ROXIE: Okay, dollface! See ya in two weeks! I’ll bring the stop signs!!!

She blows Bia a kiss, hops to her feet, then skips on out of the ring as Sweet Dreams hits again.

Bia is in the ring, prone. The music continues.

And then she sits up.

Not slow and erratic. It is a sudden, undeniable rise.

She stares at Roxie dancing her way up the ramp. Eyes filled with wrath. Body tense.

But then… she smiles.

THE MAIN EVENT

The camera cuts to the squared circle.

RENO: Six hours in a blacked-out anechoic chamber. Six hours of total sensory starvation! Both only to be released when their music hits!

SONG: INIKO BY INOKO

The lights go down as the driving drums of Jericho by Iniko kick on, and an androgynous voice rings out.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!

RENO: Helena Handbasket!

The lights come back to reveal Helena Handbasket standing backwards—but something is off. She’s not lowering her arms in that slow, deliberate showboat. She’s holding them rigid at her sides, fists clenched. A beat too long passes before she moves.

RENO: Six hours. Man. Total darkness. The only sound is the interior plumping of your own body. I can’t imagine WHAT Helena and Aleki went through. And clearly it has had an affect on Helena Handbasket.

She starts down the ramp backward, the signature strut technically there, but the rhythm is wrong—too stiff, like she’s counting the steps consciously instead of just feeling them. Her head swivels in short, sharp twitches.

WHEN I MOVE IS AN EARTHQUAKE RUMBLE
I WILL NEVER EVER FALL
NEVER STUMBLE
AND I DON’T NEED TO BE HUMBLE

Halfway down the ramp, someone in the front row whistles—the kind of shrill, two-fingered cheer that a normal crowd sound would swallow whole. Helena stops dead. Her hand shoots up and clamps over both ears as she wheels toward the section.

HELENA: STOP WHISTLING!

It rips out of her raw and too loud, like something frayed.

RENO: Ohhhkay. Ya know, Helena is reminding me of that time Jerry O’Connel—not the actor—made me lick a toad.

Helena finishes the walk with exaggerated control—the swagger performative now, like she’s reminding herself how to do it.

RENO: I woke up five days later on the side of the Muddy River. I was 9 years old. Parents didn’t even notice I was gone. Ahhh… the 90s. The last free generation.

Coming to a stop at the foot of the ramp, Helena does the about-face, coat sweeping out—but she overshoots it, catching her footing with a small stagger she covers by immediately leaping to the apron.

The Witch Hands go up for the camera. She holds them there a second too long, staring into the lens with an intensity that stops being cool pretty quickly.

She slides into the ring. The coat-spin flourish happens—but she fumbles the pass to the tech, has to reach back and shove it at them without looking, because she’s already staring into the middle distance at nothing in particular.

Helena walks to the first ring post and climbs it. Witch Hands up. The crowd noise hits her full and she visibly tightens her jaw before spreading the grin back across her face. She does each post the same way—the icon, the pose, the mugging—but by the fourth, she’s gripping the turnbuckle a half-second longer than needed, knuckles white, like she’s steadying herself.

She drops to the mat and rolls her shoulders. Ready. Probably.

SONG: BORN TO RULE BY VO WILLIAMS & UNSECRET

The house lights drop. Not to black—just enough to signal a shift in the atmosphere. The crowd stirs.

Then the opening of Born to Rule moves through the speakers. Sparse. Intentional. Building.

“You are now witnessing the rise of a titan

The time is arriving

This is how it feels when the gods in alignment…”

The curtain parts.

ALEKI KEKOA steps through. Head down. Shoulders squared. A single spotlight finds him. The rest of the arena stays dim.

He doesn’t move immediately. He lets the music breathe. But his stillness isn’t patient—it’s coiled. His chest rises and falls like something working to slow itself down. The championship hangs from his grip, not worn, not displayed. Just held. Like he forgot it was there.

“Lost to the purpose and blind to my assignment

I crawled to surface from gutters I should have died in

Deep pain—I’m covered in scars you could dive in

Reborn, something kept me on, letting life in…”

He begins to walk. Not slow and measured—slow and deliberate, the way a large animal moves when it isn’t rushing because it doesn’t need to. Each step lands with weight. Halfway down the ramp, he lifts his head.

The eyes tell the story.

He finds the ring and doesn’t let go of it, like it owes him something. The crowd noise washes over him and he doesn’t acknowledge it—not performing indifference, just genuinely somewhere else. Focused. Hungry.

“I was born to rule

Let the reign commence

No escaping this I was chosen,

I was made for this…”

RENO: He’s the PWE Prestige Champion! ALEKI KEKOA!

“This is in the blood

I’ma let it run free

I was born to rule

I’ma be me

Anybody try to rise and defeat me

I shut ’em down easy—king me…”

Aleki doesn’t climb the steps so much as take them—no pause, no performance, just forward momentum barely contained in a straight line. He steps through the ropes and the ring seems smaller for it.

He walks to the center.

Stops.

One fist pressed firmly against his chest—not a salute. A hand keeping something in.

His eyes on the hard camera. Not intense the way a performer is intense. Intense the way something starving stares at the source of food.

Completely still. But not calm.

The music fades. The lights come up.

He is not home. Home is where you rest.

This is where he feeds.

RENO: THIS IS ASYLUM RULES! Six hours ago, Helena Handbasket and Aleki Kekoa entered anechoic isolation rooms. They come to the ring now with no idea what kind of match they’re even walking into! I don’t even know! And this is one of those rare times where me being ignorant is actually the standard! Because there are ten thousand people all around me that are hanging on the edge like me, waiting to find out!

Aleki Kekoa stands in the center of the ring. Perfectly still. A monolithic presence. But the foundation is cracked. His chest heaves. A violent, uncontrollable tremor vibrates through his heavy right hand. He stares straight ahead, his pupils blown wide from the hours of absolute darkness. The Samoan God of War looks less like a wrestling dynasty’s standard-bearer and more like a caged animal seconds away from snapping.

Helena Handbasket is the opposite. She cannot stop moving. Boxer footwork. Shuffling, bouncing, vibrating. Her usual theatricality is warped into a manic, desperate need to create friction. She shadowboxes wildly, snapping quick jabs at empty air, grinning a wide, unhinged smile. She survived the void by letting her mind slip right off the edge.

The arena plunges into darkness.

A collective gasp from the crowd.

Blood-red light washes over the ring.

A mechanical grind. A heavy, motorized hum drones from the ceiling. Aleki visibly flinches, his jaw clenching as the sudden, grating noise tears through his sensitive eardrums. Above the center of the ring, a thick steel cable begins its slow descent. At the bottom of the wire hangs an archaic, heavy wrought-iron key. It spins slowly in the crimson light.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen… the stipulations for this bout have been finalized! This match is… A LADDER MATCH!

A frantic buzz ripples through the arena.

RENO: A LADDER MATCH! Oh MAN we are in for a treat… but wait! If it’s a ladder match what’s on the—

ANNOUNCER: Suspended above the ring is a key. The owner of this key will fight for the Asylum Championship… at THE TERRORDOME!

A visceral, bloodthirsty roar washes over the barricades. The audience smells blood in the water.

Aleki closes his eyes. He slowly rolls his shoulders. The tremors in his hand stop. His forensic psychology background kicks in, overriding the sensory panic. He calculates the distance. The geometry of the violence required. He doesn’t look at Helena. He just stares at the iron key.

Helena Handbasket laughs. A raspy, dry sound. A ladder match. Weapons. Chaos. Her domain. The Ace of Diamonds stops her pacing, drops into a low, predatory crouch, and locks her eyes dead on Aleki’s kneecaps.

RENO: Fans I am being told that the key you see hanging above the ring is part of a set. The other key will be up for grabs in two weeks. The owners of the keys will battle it out for the PCW ASYLUM CHAMPIONSHIP at THE TERRORDOME! Why keys? Well, I guess you’re gonna just have to tune in next UNLEASHED to FIND OUT!… They ain’t telling me nothin!

DING. DING. DING.

Helena darts in. A stinging kick to the shin. A sharp forearm across the elbow joint. She retreats, sticking and moving, weaponizing her pure velocity to chop down the foundation.

Aleki Kekoa stalks her across the ring. He accumulates the pressure. He absorbs a wild flurry of overhand chops. Bare skin slapping against a massive chest. He waits, reading her momentum. Helena steps in for another strike. Aleki shoots his hands out. A brutal power catch. He hooks her waist, hoisting her entirely off her feet. He pivots. An Exploder Suplex sends her flying across the canvas. She crashes shoulder-first into the mat.

Aleki rises to his feet. Methodical. He rolls his broad shoulders. He turns his back on the wreckage, steps through the ropes, and drops to the concrete floor. He reaches under the apron, wrapping his heavy hands around the cold steel of a ladder.

Inside the ring, survival instincts kick in. Helena scrambles to her feet. Aleki shoves the top of the steel ladder under the bottom rope. Helena hits the opposite ropes. Full sprint. She launches herself up and over the top cable. A high-risk Slingshot Splash. She crashes down onto the powerhouse. Flesh meets steel. The ladder jams into Aleki’s ribs as Helena’s momentum flattens him against the arena floor.

RENO: Helena scrambles up. She grabs the rungs of the ladder, desperately trying to haul the heavy steel back into the ring! The sheer weight and length of metal contraption is anchoring her to the ground. But Helena Handbasket is made of sterner stuff! She’s dragging it. Inch by inch!

Aleki surges up, cutting off her angle. He shoves her backward, trapping her against the steel ring post. He unleashes a barrage of heavy, loaded forearms across her jawline, driving his entire frame behind every single strike. Bone rattles against bone. He rips the ladder from her grip, tosses it under the bottom rope, and slides in after it.

Aleki hoists the steel upright, pulling the legs apart. He sets the ladder up dead in the center of the ring, glaring up at the iron key.

RENO: The steel ladder stands dead center in the ring! Aleki climbs. Not racing. No, he’s taking rung by rung with slow, methodical steps! Gah! I can hear the rungs groanin’!

Helena Handbasket scrambles up the opposite side. Frantic. She meets him near the top. She wraps her limbs around his frame, hooking a leg and wrenching his arm backward to lock in an Octopus Clutch high above the canvas. Joint-straining torque.

Aleki finds his base on the rungs. Pure physical dominance. He pries her leg off his neck, shifts his center of gravity, and violently shrugs her off. Helena plummets. She crashes throat-first across the top rope. The tension snaps back. She tumbles over the apron and crashes onto the arena floor.

Aleki looks down at the wreckage. He looks up at the Asylum Key. The only logical choice. He reaches up, resuming his climb. One rung higher.

On the outside, panic sets in. The match is seconds from slipping away. Helena scrambles blindly under the ring skirt. She rips out a solid wooden cricket bat.

The darkness under the apron swallows her arms. For a split second, she feels fingers brush her wrist. Small. Familiar. She jerks back, cracking her elbow against the steel frame. Nothing there. Just black canvas and dust. She snarls, yanks the bat free, but her grip is trembling.

RENO: Helena seems to be experiencing some sort of disturbances. Take it from me. I’ve done every psychedelic substance known to man. I can spot The Fear from a mile away. Not that I’m, ya know, condoning such behavior!

She slides under the bottom rope just as Aleki stretches for the key.

She swings wildly. CRACK. The thick wood connects flush with the back of Aleki’s knee. The joint buckles. THWACK. A second full-force swing directly into the ribs. The powerhouse loses his footing. He drops heavily from the ladder to the mat, clutching his midsection. He rolls out to the arena floor, staggering, gasping for oxygen.

Helena stays on the offensive. She hops out of the ring, cricket bat in hand, crackling like a mad woman. Aleki is trying to stand as she cocks back her weapon, ready to knock Aleki’s brains out of the grounds.

But two hands seize the bat from behind! Helena wheels around to see American Moderator!

RENO: It appears the Canvas Commander has taken offense to Helena’s use of any weapon that does not come runged and with a weight limit! He might be feeling a bit sore from what the VIPs did to him earlier. Maybe this is his way or reasserting whatever it is he calls dominance. Ima guess Patriotism.

The referee takes control of the cricket bat while wearing a white padded donut around his neck from his assault by the VIP’s. Helena is seething.

HELENA: Oi! What are you goin’ on about?!?!? It’s a FECKIN’ LADDER MATCH, YOU MUPPET!

American Moderator blows a whistle.

AM: Exactly. a LADDER match! And watch that aggressive language, missy!

RENO: I think someone needs to explain to Moderator that just because it’s a ladder match don’t mean you can’t pummel your opponent with foreign wood.

AM: Secondly? This is AH-MER-REE-CA! Not jolly old England! Here we use BASEBALL BATS. Now… PLAY BALL!

RENO: Yeah. Patriotism. I was right.

The referee blows his whistle again, then points his fingers at his eyes, then at Helena.

RENO: American Moderator has confiscated another foreign object to add to his contraband closet. You can prolly imagine what it looks like but here’s a clue. Imagine what a Phys Ed teacher’s BDSM dungeon with a big American flag on the ceiling.

Helena shoves him out of the way and drops down beneath the apron to drag out a second steel ladder from beneath the apron. She hoists it up, laying it flat to create a metal bridge between the ring apron and the steel barricade. She grabs Aleki in a front facelock. She pulls, attempting to hoist him up for a suplex onto the bridged steel.

Dead weight. Aleki plants his boots. He reaches down and lifts her high into the air. He bypasses the metal bridge entirely, driving her down with a massive scoop slam directly onto the unforgiving concrete floor. Flesh slaps against cement.

Helena gags. Blood spills from a split lip. She coughs red onto the floor mats.

To Helena, the arena roar compresses into a high, whining ring. Then, cutting through it clear as glass: a whistle. Froggy Goes A’Courtin’. A melody that feels familiar, like a thread leading to a memory she had long forgotten. She snaps her head toward the barricade. No one. Just a sea of blurred faces.

She spits blood and forces a grin. Her mind is still in the chamber. Playing tricks.

RENO: Helena is off her game. Whatever is going on in that head right now, I bet it’d give a sleeping bag full of cats a run for the money on the crazy meter.

Aleki hauls her up by her hair and hurls her violently under the bottom rope. He slides into the ring. His face tightens. A flat, dead-eyed stare.

He stalks her. He steps deliberately, driving his heavy boot down for MY RECKONING (Deliberate Boot Strike) aimed straight at the base of her skull.

Helena rolls. The boot stomps the canvas. She uses the middle rope to propel herself forward, rotating her body in mid-air. SCREW U (Leaping Spinning Knee Strike). Her kneecap collides flush under Aleki’s jawline.

RENO: The impact rattles his skull! He staggers backward, dead on his feet! AND HE CRASHES BLINDLY INTO THE STEEL LADDER IN THE CENTER OF THE RING!

The sharp metal edge of a rung clips his head. Skin tears open. Hot, crimson blood pours down the Samoan’s forehead.

He slumps against the steel. Helena pushes up to her hands and knees, spitting blood onto the canvas. Their eyes lock. Neither refuses to stay down.

He pushes himself off the steel ladder. Helena pushes up from the mat, spitting red. Pure grit. The raw mechanics of survival.

Aleki stops. He goes completely still in the center of the ring. He presses one heavy fist to his chest. He locks his dark eyes dead on Helena. It looks like absolute calm. It functions as a lethal threat.

He surges forward. A massive, swinging clothesline aimed to take her head off. Helena ducks underneath the thick arm. She hits the ropes, building desperate speed. She launches herself, wrapping her limbs around his torso. The sheer mass is too much to lift. She shifts her weight mid-air, modifying the attack. A desperate Tilt-a-Whirl DDT. She drives his bleeding skull violently down into the canvas.

THUD.

RENO: Aleki’s head drives into the mat… but he rises! No stagger. Look at that grim, terrifying focus! He’s the goddamn Terminator marching forward!

Helena hits the ropes again, desperate to maintain the offensive. She rebounds. Aleki steps into the pocket. He intercepts her with a brutal, crushing lariat. The sheer force flips her a full 360 degrees before she crashes hard onto the mat.

The pace flatlines. The frantic chaos is over. It is Aleki’s world now.

He drags a ladder into the corner, shoving it violently between the middle and top turnbuckles. Wedged tight. Unforgiving steel.

Helena gasps on the mat, throwing weak, blind strikes at his shins. Aleki reaches down, clamping a massive hand around her throat. He hauls her up, completely ignoring the frantic fists bouncing off his ribs. He turns. A brutal lawn dart toss. He hurls her face-first into the wedged ladder.

RENO: Flesh meets metal. Helena crumples to the canvas.

Aleki takes his time. He stalks her. He steps through the ropes, grabbing a steel folding chair from the outside. He steps back in. Without breaking stride, he rips the wedged ladder from the corner and slams it flat on the mat beside her limp body. He steps right over her and violently jams the chair between the rungs of the now-horizontal ladder. A jagged, metal trap.

Helena drags herself across the canvas. A desperate, blind crawl to escape. Aleki stalks from behind. He hooks her. He lifts her high, shifting her weight. A massive Uranage. He plants her spine-first directly onto the steel ladder and the wedged chair.

CRASH.

Helena arches in absolute agony. A violent cough racks her chest. She is completely flattened. Dead to rights. Aleki Kekoa stands tall over her broken form. His broad chest heaves. He tilts his chin up, casting his cold gaze back to the Asylum Key.

Aleki steps away from the wreckage. He centers the tall steel ladder directly beneath the iron key. He climbs. Every step is a physical negotiation. The accumulated damage of the match bleeds into the lingering psychological terror of the anechoic chamber. The rungs groan. He reaches the apex. He stretches his heavy arm upward. His thick fingers brush the cold iron.

Helena stirs. Pure, unadulterated survival instinct. She drags herself from the broken steel on the mat. She lunges at the base of the standing ladder. She grabs the bottom rungs, planting her boots, and heaves with everything she has left.

RENO: Aleki plummets from the top rungs! He drops wildly through the air, crashing throat-first across the top cable! The tension violently snaps his neck back. He tumbles to the canvas, gagging, frantically clutching his crushed… his crushed… TRACHEA! YEAH!

Helena surges to her feet. The chaotic velocity returns.

She grabs the ladder, but her eyes catch the ringside crew. A blonde head behind a camera. Same lazy posture. She freezes, staring. The operator shifts, revealing a headset and a neck tattoo. Helena barks a laugh at her own broken head and hoists the steel upright.

She jukes around his massive frame as he gasps for oxygen. A blistering, open-handed slap to the back of his bleeding skull. A stiff, snapping kick to the back of his already buckled knee. She refuses to let him find his base.

Aleki forces himself to his hands and knees, trying to muscle through the sheer volume of strikes. Helena snatches a folded step-ladder from the apron. She grips it with both hands like a battering ram. She drives the blunt steel edge violently into his injured ribs. Once. Twice. The powerhouse collapses flat on his stomach.

She grabs his heavy leg, forcefully wedging his shin between the folded metal rungs. She raises her boot and stomps directly onto the steel cage. The metal bites down. The knee hyperextends awkwardly. Aleki roars in sheer agony, his face pressing into the canvas.

Helena feeds on the violence. She turns, flashing a manic, theatrical bow to the audience, drinking in the chaotic noise.

RENO: Oh no. I’ seen that look before. She grabs Aleki by the hair, dragging his massive frame into the drop zone then leaves him there like a sack of potatoes.

She scales the corner turnbuckles. She launches herself backward. A massive Swanton Bomb. Her back crashes flush across his sternum. Ribs forcefully compress. The remaining wind violently evacuates his lungs.

Helena rolls off the wreckage. She retreats to the near corner. She crouches low, manic eyes locked on the grounded powerhouse. She waves her hands, goading him. Demanding he stand.

Aleki stirs. Blind grit. He drags himself up to his hands and knees. Blood pours from his open forehead. He forces himself upright, staggering, completely dead on his feet.

HELENA: Is this the God of War?! Is this your feckin’ legacy?!

On the final syllable, she explodes out of the corner. Full sprint. She leaps. FECK OFF (Bullhammer Elbow Strike). The point of her elbow collides flush against Aleki’s temple. A sickening, wet crack. The brain shuts off. The massive Samoan folds instantly, crashing unconscious into the canvas.

RENO: ALEKI IS KNOCKED OUT! Helena just cleaned his clock! And now she has her chance!… but wait!

The momentum carries her forward. The adrenaline immediately evaporates. Helena’s knees buckle. She collapses onto her side, chest heaving violently, limbs entirely dead.

RENO: Both wrestlers are down!

Two bodies sprawled in the wreckage. Motionless. Bleeding out on the canvas.

American Moderator stands outside the ring, unable to do anything except watch like everyone else in the building.

The arena loses its collective mind. A chaotic, deafening roar washes over the barricades. There is no clear favorite left. No sides. Just a feral, desperate appreciation for the absolute physical toll of the violence. The noise swells into a massive, echoing rumble. Thousands of people screaming, desperately willing someone—anyone—to drag themselves up off the mat.

RENO: Time TICKS BY! Seconds. Agonizingly slow!

Oxygen slowly filters back into shattered lungs. A twitch in Helena’s fingers. A shift of her weight.

RENO: HELENA HANBASKET IS UP! THIS IS HER OPPORTUNITY! While the Samoan Cyborg is down and out.

Helena pushes herself up, wiping her own blood from her mouth. She turns her eyes up toward the dangling Asylum Key before sliding out of the ring on a hunt. She finds a new ladder in the ringside wreckage. She drags the heavier, longer steel under the bottom rope, hoisting it up parallel to the first. Dead center. Directly under the wrought-iron key.

RENO: CLIMB, HELENA!… Aleki is moving!

On the mat, Aleki Kekoa stirs. Pure grit overriding a rebooting brain. He drags himself toward the first ladder. He pulls his massive frame up the rungs.

A grueling, agonizing ascent. Two completely compromised fighters climbing into the rafters. They meet in the airspace. Exhausted. Bleeding. Running on pure fumes. They trade bare-knuckle shots suspended fifteen feet above the canvas. Heavy, wet impacts. Bone against bone.

They reach the apex simultaneously. Aleki winds up. A sickening forearm flush across Helena’s jaw. She teeters backward, arms pinwheeling. The void pulls at her. She catches the top step at the absolute last microsecond, arresting her fall. She snaps back forward, launching a pointed elbow directly into the same bruised temple she battered moments ago.

CRACK. Aleki rocks backward, gripping the steel desperately to keep from tumbling.

RENO: Helena stretches! Perched on the top step, reaching dangerously high! One shift in balance and it’s all over! Her fingertips graze the Asylum Key!

Movement on the apron. A ringside camera operator drops their heavy broadcast rig onto the canvas. The operator climbs through the ropes, stepping into the ring. They rip off a headset. Tear away black wig to release a blonde mop. Peel off a fake mustache.

RENO: HELEN BECK!!!!

Helena looks down. Blonde hair. Crooked smile. Of course. She barks a manic laugh, pointing at the ghost. Another one. The anechoic chamber’s final gift.

RENO: She don’t realize it’s her twin popping out that disguise like this is an impossible mission!

Helena’s about to look back up at the key when the operator tears off the mustache.

But before she can react, Aleki shakes off the elbow. He drives a heavy, loaded punch deep into Helena’s gut. The breath violently evacuates her lungs. She folds over the top of the ladder, gasping, her wild eyes still locked on the ghost below.

Helen Beck reaches inside their jacket. They pull out a high-voltage stun gun. A press of the trigger. Sizzling, blue electricity arcs violently through the air.

RENO: Don’t you do it!

Helen steps forward and drives the live nodes directly into the steel frame of Helena’s ladder.

The voltage surges up the conductive metal. Helena seizes instantly. Muscles locking up in absolute rigidity as the current rips through her nervous system.

The two ladders grind together. The electricity jumps the gap. Aleki roars, taking the residual shock. He violently rips his hand away from the electrified steel, clutching his arm against his chest.

Helen grabs the base of the tall ladder and yanks hard.

The metal tips outward, teetering like a fell tree into the top rope. Helena plummets. Fifteen feet of limp body dropping directly toward the arena floor. She crashes spine-first through the horizontal ladder bridged between the apron and the barricade.

CRASH. The steel bridge snaps entirely in half under the catastrophic impact.

RENO: SWEET FEATHERY JESUS! HELENA HANDBASKET IS BROKEN IN HALF!

The crowd goes feral. A chaotic, horrified roar washing over the barricades.

CROWD: HO-LY SHIT! HO-LY SHIT! HO-LY SHIT!

Aleki Kekoa holds onto his rungs, his broad chest heaving. He looks down at the absolute wreckage of Helena Handbasket, twisted and motionless in the jagged, broken steel on the outside. He turns his head. He watches Helen Beck casually roll under the bottom rope, whistling a tune—Froggy Goes A’Courtin’—into the cavernous arena as they stroll leisurely up the entrance ramp.

The powerhouse breathes. The chaos washes off him. His face tightens into that signature, unshakeable composure. The Samoan God of War presses one heavy fist firmly against his chest. He looks up. He reaches out and unhooks the heavy iron key.

DING. DING. DING.

WINNER
ALEKI KEKOA

The bell rings wildly. The red lights fade back to normal arena lighting.

RENO: Forget about Helen Beck. Aleki Kekoa won this match. He and Helena Handbasket went to WAR and Wrestling Divinity is holding the key. And in four weeks, he will carry it back into this ring and fight to decide who will have the honor of being crowned the FIRST EVER PCW Asylum Champion!

The physical toll is absolute. Aleki slowly descends the ladder, clutching his ribs, his forehead caked in dried and fresh blood, his eyes fixed on the Asylum Key in his hand, and the chain hooked to it. As the crowd roars, he lowers the chain around his neck, letting the large iron key to sink down to center chest.

On the outside, medical personnel rush down the ramp, swarming the broken barricade. Helena Handbasket does not move. Buried under the snapped steel, completely unconscious, as the camera fades to black.

RENO: I am Reno Nevada, the best goddamn solo announcer in the business. And yeah, maybe I’m the only one! But that don’t make it any less true! See you in two weeks on the next episode of PCW UNLEASHED!

SEGMENT

TAYLOR LANDRY

SEGMENT

ALYSSA KNIGHT-KEKOA

SHOW OPENING

MATCH 1

ALYSSA KNIGHT-KEKOAversusTAYLOR LANDRYw/AMETHYST CALDWELL

SEGMENT

Aleki Part One

MATCH 2

EVAN CARMINEversusMARK KELLY

SEGMENT

Marilyn Matthews

SEGMENT

Aleki Part Two

SEGMENT

THE BILLION DOLLAR CHALLENGE

SEGMENT

Aleki Part Three

MATCH 3

UNCLE SINISTERversusSELENE PYRE

SEGMENT

Helena Handbasket

MATCH 4

VANCE ISAAC PARKERversusCHRIS MOSH

SEGMENT

BIA

THE MAIN EVENT

ALYSSA KNIGHT-KEKOA
versus
TAYLOR LANDRY
w/AMETHYST CALDWELL

EVAN CARMINE
versus
MARK KELLY

UNCLE SINISTER
versus
SELENE PYRE

VANCE ISAAC PARKER
versus
CHRIS MOSH