"Donahue, John - Sensei" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donahue John)

for error. For the killing blow.

These two opponents knew more about unarmed fighting than most people
alive. It wasn't just that the blows uncoiled like a viper's strike.
The reflexes at this level are so accelerated that feints and counter
feints occur with a subtle speed that means most people wouldn't even
notice them taking place. There was some minor lividity on the
victim's hands and feet, but they were so callused that it doesn't
really tell us much. Ikagi was a karateka,

though, and he probably unleashed the arsenal of kicks and punches that
formed the heart of his art.

He got as good as he gave: his forearms and shins were bruised from
parrying attacks. He had scuff marks on the shoulder from rolling on
the hard floor, which means that they used everything they could think
of, from strikes to throws. Ikagi must have tried a choke hold at one
point, "You can tell, because he had the telltale bruise on the top of
his hand between the thumb and first finger. He tried to slide in the
choke and the opponent defended by lowering the jaw, using the bone to
protect the potentially vulnerable artery in the neck.

The cops dusted the floor of the training hall to get a sense of how
things went. The two fighters ranged all over the surface, lunging,
tumbling, breathing hard in a feral type of ballet. Ultimately, they
ended up near the weapons rack. I think the attacker panicked. Maybe
it was doubt, rising like smoke in the heat of the contest. Maybe the
jet lag. Ikagi was not just good, he was one of the best, and the
whole thing was probably not turning out as planned. So when they
tumbled into the corner, there were all those wooden staffs, stacked up
like spears in a medieval castle. It must have seemed to the attacker
like the answer to a prayer.

Ikagi probably smiled to himself when his opponent grabbed one of the
staffs. Only the master would know that these were the beginner's
weapons, made of inferior wood, which he could snap in two with little
effort. And we know that, at some point, he did. Tiny wood fragments
were found along the ridge of the palm exactly where you would expect
them if you broke something with a sword hand strike. The attacker,
wielding what he thought was a potent weapon, must have been
momentarily stunned when the power of Ikagi s attack snapped the staff
in two.

But the recovery was equally sudden. The staff became a spike.

The first strike must have been almost instinctual a straight thrust,
hard and quick, into the midsection. The pain must have been intense
for Ikagi, but the blood trail shows us he didn't collapse. After that
first, electric jolt, the gasp as the point was driven home, Ikagi
pressed the attacker for some time.