His Pillar of Strength

On the third deck of the ship, inside a big cage fighting ring, two fighters were already battling.

Wearing only fight shorts and mixed martial arts gloves, they punched, grappled and kicked each other until one of them was beaten into submission and fell to the floor unconscious.

That was the first cage fighting scene that Zach had ever seen live. They did the pre-fight protocol, warm up, and then they just went in there and fought.

The fight ended after a quarter of an hour, when one of the fighters went down hard, his head thudding into the ground. His face was swollen and bloody.

Underground fights were brutal and gritty. It's as foul as it could get when you put a bunch of testosterone-loaded alpha men together in one enclosed space with nowhere else to go.

The winner was Sting, the man who had approached him in an offensive manner a few days earlier. The man who he believed was always high on illegal use of drugs.