Harem Quest: From Trash to King-Chapter 96: Kai VS Arthur.

They matched each other. Arthur’s boxing found spaces in Kai’s guard; Kai’s karate found openings when Arthur’s shoulders were mid-shift. When Arthur threw a combo, Kai met it with angled steps, parries, and a kick that cut space and momentum.

When Kai pushed with a shin or a spinning strike, Arthur absorbed it into his guard and cracked back with a punch that made the air go thin around the other man’s ribs.

It wasn’t just technique. It was two monsters who had decided emotions were a weakness and then used that decision to sharpen themselves. But underneath that blankness was a kind of joy — not the silly, laughing kind, but the deep, ancient pleasure fighters feel when the body is asked to do its honest work.

They were both smiling at times, small, almost involuntary, the way someone might smile during a terrifying cliff climb. It was respect delivered through pain.

The crowd’s noise dulled into a single pulse. The world reduced to breath and impact. Arthur’s feet moved like someone threading a needle. Kai’s hips wound like a spring. They brawled quickly, not sloppy but like two storms colliding — each burst of motion leaving a wake.

Arthur started to pull ahead. Not by brute force, but by the calculus of his combinations and the way he threaded his guard between Kai’s limbs. His punches built on one another, and Kai’s defenses began to stumble, the guard opening an instant too late, the step arriving an instant too slow. You could see it in Kai’s face: the squint, the tiny shift of weight that let a right hook push him back. Something that had been even was tipping.

Arthur’s strikes were clean, each one landing with a certainty that made the fight feel, for a moment, like a demonstration. Kai absorbed more than anyone expected. He didn’t scream.

He got cut and tasted blood and still found a way to breathe through it. But you could see him getting overwhelmed. Sweat beaded on his cheek and fell slow, like someone melting a small part of themselves.

Kai’s eyes flashed with something like admiration, then sharpened into defiance. He’d trained for nights that hollowed his bones.

He had a move he hadn’t shown before, a sequence that lived on the edge of his skill—his best Kyokushin expression, a burst he’d kept secret because it demanded everything to be given in one instant.

"Arthur," he said, voice strained to the edges of breath. "This is my best move. Be glad you get to take it."

There was both a threat and a blessing in it. He wound his hips, gathered breath, and launched.

The move hit like a machine you only used when you had no other plan. It started with a blast of step-in power, a heavy shin strike to test, followed by a sudden spinning heel that painted the air with speed. ’

The finish was a piston press—two hands into the chest, then a sweeping elbow that came around like a scythe. It was brutality turned into a rhythm that would break most people’s bones.

Arthur saw it coming and met it head-on. He raised his guard and let the force reach him. The impact folded through his arms into his ribs. For a moment, the room seemed to slow in on the two of them.

Arthur didn’t flinch. His face stayed unreadable, like a slate the world hadn’t had a chance to write on. The hit rang through him, but he absorbed it. He didn’t blink. He didn’t give Kai the satisfaction of a reaction.

Kai’s breath left him in a ragged exhale. He muttered under it, half-laugh, half-curse: "Fucking monster. You’ve grown since we last met."

The grin on Kai’s face was wide and strangely bright, an acceptance of defeat that looked almost happy.

Arthur caught Kai’s hand as it spun free and held it in a quiet, efficient grip. For a second, the two of them looked like old sparring partners who had just remembered how much they could hurt each other.

Arthur let that acknowledgment sit and then, with the same small cruelty of a craftsman finishing a piece, he launched his best sequence.

His boxing shifted into a longer, more fluid combo that used every inch of his new strength: a double jab into a pivoting body shot, a low hook to off-balance, then a straight that seemed to travel through the air like it had been given a map of Kai’s bones. His last punch was not the fastest, but it carried weight like a verdict.

Kai went down.

The floor hit him with a sound that made the watching men wince. He lay there for a breath, then another, the fight draining out of him as if gravity was finally allowed back into his limbs. Arthur stepped back, wiped a smear of sweat and a trickle of blood from his temple with the back of his hand, and said with a casual calm that hid the storm inside him, "That was a nice dance, Kai."

He didn’t move to finish Kai. He let the fall be the end. There was no crowing, no cruelty. Just that small, flat line of respect between two men who had pushed each other until the answer was clear.

On the other corner of the room, Sam and Leon were a different equation. Sam’s judo was built on close contact and throwing people off their center, on grabbing and using another man’s momentum against him.

He needed the grab. Leon’s kickboxing was built on footwork and power, on setting the rhythm and breaking it to create openings. At first glance, they felt mismatched. Leon looked bigger, thicker in the shoulders, a mountain that leaned into movement. Sam looked leaner, more agile, like a man built to slip and lock.

Sam tried to close distance. He needed to grab Leon and flip him, to land the judo move that would end the fight quick. "Stop running, you fucking insect," he snarled mid-fight, voice rough, breath cutting through the noise. His words were anger and frustration, the kind that comes from a man who feels his tools slipping away.

Leon laughed at that, an easy sound that held a little contempt. He danced back into range, almost enjoying the chase, almost baiting Sam with the sight of his back. He mocked him with movement, the kind of teasing that makes an opponent angrier and therefore sloppy.