There is the surface-level, the fact that the smiling, bespectacled 112-pound woman is one of the sport's meanest operators once the bell rings. That happy-go-lucky smile sits just in front of a sharp tongue that her elementary school teacher could allegedly hardly stop from chattering.

That grin vanishes somewhere around the time she’s hit with the first punch in a fight, at which point it crinkles along with the rest of her face into a menacing scowl.

There is also the yin and the yang of how dominant she has been in the ring — that is to say, how easy it’s looked for her — and how brutally difficult the journey has been every step of the way. Fundora was No. 1 in the nation as an amateur after just 36 (or so) fights, and by the age of 22 was already undisputed world champion at flyweight, the youngest of any gender or weight to have accomplished that feat.

Getting to the peak of the amateurs and pros was a product of quite literally living in the gym, in the Fundora family boxing compound, driving from fight-to-fight as a child in the backseat of The Intimidator, her father Freddy’s un-air conditioned white sprinter van.

After Fundora’s sixth-round knockout victory over Viviana Ruiz on Saturday night to retain her Ring title and all the others, she’s faced with another dichotomy, a fork in the road if you will, that all dominant fighters, but particularly women, wind up encountering. In seven world title fights, Fundora has scored knockouts in six of them, with the thoroughness and spitefulness of the victories seemingly increasing with every bout.

In Ruiz’s case, as with her previous opponent, Alexas Kubicki, only the referee’s mercy prevented them from an even more gruesome ending, both saved by the official while helpless on their feet at the mercy of Fundora’s onslaught. But dominance of this caliber tends to produce questions of whether the opposition is good enough to be challenging in a fighter’s chosen weight class, and whether a move up in weight is necessary in order to find a true test.

It’s the exact conundrum Claressa Shields has found herself in throughout her career, too good for her own good, so good that her competition is denigrated as a result. Already in the wake of Fundora’s win over Ruiz, there have been questions about moving up to 115 pounds to face reigning Ring “Female Fighter of the Year” and Ring junior bantamweight champion Mizuki Hiruta.

It is of course flattering to Fundora many have decided no true challenge exists in her weight class, but moving up in weight may not be physiologically possible for Fundora in the short term. Fundora (18-0, 10 KOs), ranked sixth on The Ring’ women’s pound-for-pound list, is still able to eat breakfast the morning of weigh-ins, much like her Golden Boy stablemate and fellow Ring champ Oscar Collazo, who finds himself in a similar quandary.

Fundora has described walking around essentially at her fight weight, and battling to keep poundage on, rather than taking it off. But unlike Collazo, who doesn’t have a weight class beneath him to move down to in search of competition, as no such place exists for men, Fundora does. While the natural order of things in boxing progression is to gradually move up in weight, as has been well-established both in this article and throughout her life, Fundora is not your typical fighter.

Amazingly, Fundora has suggested that it would be easier — maybe substantially so! — for her to make her towering 5-foot-9 frame 108 pounds than it would be to bulk it up right now. That, of course, may change as she gets older — a reminder that this is unprecedented territory she’s traversing as the youngest undisputed champion — but for the time being, this is where she’s at.

In a world, sporting and otherwise, that struggles with attention span, the slow-burning, long title reign may feel like a 400-page novel, when the marketplace wants a TikTok.

An eighth title defense against a heavy underdog is not as immediately intriguing as a fantasy matchup at a higher weight, nor is it a conversation as immediately conducive to engagement the way the latter would be. However, Fundora’s brand of dominance is precisely the kind that the boxing marketplace has always asked for, even before algorithms, and exactly the kind that’s made for our timelines.

Fundora is battering her opponents into either unconsciousness or forced mercy. She’s not languishing in a weight class and cruising to decision victories. Not that there would be anything inherently wrong with that, either, but it wouldn’t send the signals of “daring to be great” that the public likes to hear on their airwaves.

Instead, Fundora is perhaps the most singularly focused pursuer of knockouts at the elite levels of boxing. Once her face switches to that scowl, her objective in the fight is immediately evident. In addition, she’s willing to do something that is even rarer in an era in which the emerald quest of moving up in weight in pursuit of divisional belts is frankly expected. Moving down in weight to win more titles, something she could do in targeting 108-pound queen Evelyn Bermudez, is substantially less common.

Just five years into her pro career, Fundora already has the ingredients of a generational great in women’s boxing. It’s best that we let the “Sweet Poison” simmer and find out just how lethal it can be.