Hi there! Cool framing device with the rounds of boxing! Loved the action even though you wrote the in between parts. Great job!

For crit:

"without a trace of leather contact" I'm not sure what this means.

"I can feel something from when" this feels a little awkward.

"This is the round he dominates coming up." A little unclear. I take it to mean, the champ usually dominates round four, but there might be a clearer way to say it.

"beginning to react" is vague

"eight-count I took" so the champ scored a knock down and it took eight counts for our boxer to stand up? It's a little unclear. Perhaps, "still reeling after being down for an eight-count" or something like that?

"but they say" who? the coach and trainer and cut man all? or some other group?

"swelling up" I thought it was already swollen because the doctor looked at it earlier and you gave the detail of the boxer still being able to see through it.

>For the first time in his career, in his reign, and for the first time in this fight, I'm not facing the champ. I'm facing a boxer. And I can beat a boxer.

Great stuff there, I think it captures a lot of what's going on in your story. You do switch subjects, but being that they are boxing pitting them against each other in the sentence is cool.

Overall, I think you should lean into the framing even more. It's interesting having descriptions of in between the fighting so each round you have the boxer looking back with the wounds and then forward with the strategy. I really liked that split.

So much so that I missed some more of the forward looking element at the end or in what would have been round 9. Without it, the ending is abrupt and the frame broken, which could be what you were going after, but even then I think there might be a better way to tie it up for your character and story.

Then, some of the sentences repeated structure and subject, i.e. "the champ keeps", "he never took", "he kept on", "he gives" from your first paragraph. Now that's totally fine but it does give the flow a little bit of choppiness or kind of like a monotone at times.

I found it hard to see what the boxer was trying to set up or exactly how the champ was blocking or how the fighting progressed. That might be by design as the boxer wouldn't be thinking that, but I am wondering a bit about those details. I like boxing, though, so it could just be me.

Hopefully something I've said helps! Well done and excellent take on the theme.