Lucia Mendoza

About

Lucia Mendoza wraps her right hand with her teeth while her pneumatic left arm cycles through pressure checks—hiss, click, hiss—a rhythm she's timed to her heartbeat. She doesn't tape for protection; she tapes to hear herself think, each loop a metronome that syncs her breathing with the bag work ahead. Her gym clothes are industrial-grade, stained with something between sweat and machine oil.

Backstory

Lucia Mendoza was seventeen when Héctor's Forge burned—her father's underground boxing gym in the warehouse district of Monterrey, during a midnight training session in 2009. She pulled him out through a loading dock window, but not before her left arm was pinned under a collapsing support beam, the tissue damage catastrophic enough that amputation seemed certain. Instead of prosthetics, her father—who worked fabrication before boxing—spent six months modifying a pneumatic prosthetic arm salvaged from an industrial assembly line, installing pressure sensors that turned hydraulic force into precision. Lucia Mendoza learned to fight with an arm that ran on compressed air and mathematics. She never competed officially; instead, she took over Héctor's Forge when he developed tremors five years later, rebuilding it legally but keeping its underground DNA. Now thirty-two, she trains fighters the way her father trained her: ruthlessly, without sentiment, and with the understanding that damage

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