Knock Out

Knock Out is a boxing gym in Ellensburg whose importance lies in what it offers Jungkook that Ares Garden cannot: a legitimate, comparatively calm space where physical exertion does not require an opponent, illicit fights, or submission to Chen’s violent organization. Across repeated visits, the gym becomes both a practical training facility and a measure of Jungkook’s difficult movement from destructive rage toward more controlled forms of self-regulation.

Definition and Setting

Knock Out is presented as a fully equipped boxing and fitness club in Ellensburg. Its facilities include punching bags, speed bags, weights, dumbbells, pull-up bars, exercise bars, and a training ring approximately the same size as the ring at Ares Garden. The contrast is immediate: the visual and physical language of a boxing venue remains familiar to Jungkook, but the institution itself is not an underground fighting operation. He pays a monthly membership of twenty-five dollars, completes the necessary paperwork, and enters as a student seeking change rather than as an underground boxer preparing for a bout.

The gym also contains changing rooms and individual shower stalls. After training, Jungkook can remove his gloves and bandages, shower in hot water, change into clean clothes, and leave through an ordinary public facility rather than through the backstage world of illegal combat. These mundane arrangements matter because they give his body a routine not organized around injury, spectacle, or criminal control. Even when he stays so long that he nearly forgets the gym is about to close, the setting functions as a place of bodily release rather than entrapment.

Jungkook’s First Use of the Gym

Jungkook first goes to Knock Out while deliberately avoiding Namjoon after the incident of the previous Saturday. He walks with his head lowered, headphones in his ears, and a sports bag over his left shoulder, moving quickly and refusing to attend to his surroundings. The visit is therefore motivated by both anger and isolation: he needs somewhere to go, but he also wants distance from his closest friend.

He is initially skeptical that an ordinary gym can provide the release he needs. After entering, he changes quickly and begins with pull-ups, completing a series of twenty before moving to a barbell. He loads the weights, lies on the exercise bench, and repeatedly lifts and lowers the bar above his chest. The effort produces a tingling in his muscles, but it does not exhaust him or fully discharge the thoughts overwhelming him. The first session consequently reveals the limits of simple exercise while also establishing that Knock Out can calm him in ways Ares Garden has not.

Once he removes his gloves and bandages, Jungkook lies flat on the floor, sweating and out of breath. His anger subsides into an unusual calm. He is not euphoric and does not feel that the problem has ended, but he is relaxed, a condition he has not experienced at Ares Garden. The gym has allowed him to strike, strain, and tire himself without striking another person. That distinction becomes the facility’s central narrative function.

Rage, Control, and Namjoon’s Intervention

Knock Out later becomes the scene of a more dangerous emotional crisis. Jungkook repeatedly hammers a punching bag while other customers watch in admiration. The admiration recalls the attention he received at Ares Garden, but the atmosphere is different: music encloses him in a private sphere of destructive rage, and the force of his blows becomes so extreme that Namjoon fears what might happen if anyone interrupts him.

Namjoon observes Jungkook carefully, stops his own activity, and approaches the bag. Jungkook notices him but refuses to acknowledge him. He does not want to hit his best friend, yet his refusal to engage only makes his blows more aggressive and intense. Namjoon eventually withdraws, recognizing that he cannot bring Jungkook out of the rage himself, and calls Shelby for help. He tells her to come to Knock Out because Jungkook has been trapped in that state for more than an hour.

When Shelby arrives, the contrast between Jungkook and the other customers makes him immediately visible: he is the only person hitting the bag with such force, and his tattoos stand out beneath his white shirt. Shelby approaches carefully and places her left hand on his right shoulder. Jungkook turns as if ready to shout at whoever has disturbed him, but he stops when he sees her. He exhales heavily, passes her, and heads toward the changing rooms with Shelby following. The gym thus becomes a place where rage can be witnessed, but also a place where trusted contact can interrupt its momentum.

A Legitimate Alternative to Ares Garden

Jungkook’s relationship with Knock Out is defined by comparison with Ares Garden. At Ares Garden, Chen operates an illegal boxing venue concealed behind a bar, supported by corrupt police officers who attend the fights and remain silent. The organization’s apparent hospitality masks danger and institutional complicity. Knock Out offers no equivalent underground hierarchy in the evidence: it is a public gym, staffed through ordinary membership, and used by other customers for training.

The difference does not erase Jungkook’s history. Even after exercising at Knock Out, he questions whether the facility can truly channel his anger and admits that a simple gym may not be enough. Later, when Ares Garden changes rapidly and he can no longer train there, he keeps his Knock Out membership. The decision is practical, but it also confirms that the gym has become a necessary substitute after his access to the underground venue is lost.

At Knock Out, Jungkook’s training gradually changes in emotional quality. During one later session, he listens to Metallica’s "Enter Sandman" through his headphones while striking the bag. The exercise is no longer described as rage or sadness, and he does not feel an urge to hit someone merely for the sake of hitting them. Instead, the gym provides a controlled outlet: exertion without an opponent, discipline without an illegal ring, and physical intensity without the immediate production of violence.

Relationships and Everyday Rituals

Knock Out also becomes a recurring meeting point in Jungkook and Shelby’s developing relationship. Shelby visits unexpectedly, knowing that her appearance can destabilize him and sometimes taking mischievous pleasure in that effect. Her teasing is evidence of a relationship becoming more intimate and reciprocal: she is learning how he behaves in the gym, while he discovers that the woman he loves has a playful, even slightly sadistic side. He is pleased that they are learning more about one another each day.

On another occasion, Shelby sits and watches Jungkook train before leaving the room. He looks at her with amused envy, gathers his belongings, showers, and changes into an oversized white shirt and black cargo trousers. The repeated black-and-white clothing reinforces the continuity of his personal style even as his habits begin to change. The gym is therefore not only a site of crisis management; it is part of the couple’s ordinary intimacy, a place where Shelby can observe him without the danger of an underground fight and where Jungkook can share an activity without surrendering control of his body to violence.

The physical traces of training remain visible outside the gym. Shelby later notices red marks across Jungkook’s knuckles, recognizing that he spent more than an hour at Knock Out the previous night. She gently runs her index finger over the minor injuries, and the touch sends a shiver across his skin. The marks carry two meanings at once: they testify to the persistence of his anger and physical compulsion, but they also belong to a safer routine in which his exertion has not required another person’s injury.

Narrative Significance

Knock Out functions as a transitional space between Jungkook’s violent past and his attempts at recovery. It retains the equipment, vocabulary, and bodily discipline of boxing, yet removes the criminal structure that made Ares Garden so destructive. Jungkook can still wear gloves, strike a bag, lift weights, and feel his muscles ache, but the value of those actions changes according to whether they lead to calm or to an urge to attack.

The gym also makes recovery visible without presenting it as complete. At first, exercise does not fully relieve Jungkook’s mental pressure. At another point, his rage becomes so intense that Namjoon must seek Shelby’s assistance. Later, however, the same setting supports a more controlled form of release, one explicitly separated from the desire to hurt another person. Knock Out’s significance lies in that gradual distinction. It does not cure Jungkook, and he himself recognizes that it cannot solve everything, but it gives him a legitimate environment in which anger can be contained, observed, and slowly redirected.