It was this time last year that Zayda Steel appeared to be one of the top prospects in WWE’s ID program, frequently in contention for the WWE ID Women’s Championship. By the fall, however, Steel had decided not to renew her contract with WWE, and soon after joined AEW/Ring of Honor, where she quickly became a member of the Sky Flight stable alongside Scorpio Sky, Christopher Daniels, and Dante and Darius Martin.

Appearing on “AEW Unrestricted,” Steel touched upon how she wound up under the Tony Khan umbrella, revealing that she hadn’t expected to get picked up by AEW or ROH when she first hit the open market.

“I chose to walk away from my previous employment,” Steel said. “My choice. You know, I’m on my own journey. I love wrestling. I just want to embrace it and be around people that love it just as much as I do. So I chose to walk away. My plans, at first, were to go to Japan. I was going to take the last two to three months of the year as a little mental break, financial break, and I was going to go overseas and do it the right way this time. And five days after I tweeted that tweet, Tony Khan texted me. So plans changed.”

As for what went wrong with WWE, Steel revealed she first started considering leaving last spring, worried her time there was killing her motivation.

“I love wrestling, like I said, and this is my escape from reality,” Steel said. “And once I started to feel like my only escape was work, and I started to not like it and not have fun…I want to always love this, so I chose to walk away. As well as my mental [state], personally, I was losing myself. I was losing the love for wrestling, the only thing I’ve only loved. So it was…I was like ‘Yeah, I need to do my own thing.'”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit “AEW Unrestricted” and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription

While working together in Legacy, Orton, Rhodes, and DiBiase often used dirty tactics to upend their opponents. In between that, Orton helped his mentees sharpen some legitimate skills, such as aggression, in-ring psychology, and storytelling. The former became apparent at King of the Ring when Rhodes targeted Orton’s bad back with ruthless intensity. That also wove into the match’s larger story: the battle of the student vs. master.

With nicknames like “The Legend Killer,” “The Viper,” and “Apex Predator,” exploiting the weaknesses of his adversaries is second nature to Orton. What happens when nature turns on him, though? An opening for Rhodes to steal his playbook.

A third of the way into the 20-minute affair, a superplex resulted in an immediate rush of pain to Orton’s back. In the style of Orton, Rhodes then seized the opportunity to exacerbate it with repeated strikes, a suplex, and that constricting wrap around the ring post (Kudos to Orton for selling the pain too. I almost felt it myself).

Beyond the poetic irony, Orton and Rhodes delivered a performance filled with a thrilling sense of familiarity. Yes, we as fans knew what moves to expect from each of them — Orton would unleash his powerslam, draping DDT, and RKO, while Rhodes would inevitably hit the Disaster Kick, Cody Cutter and Cross Rhodes. Orton and Rhodes even knew what to expect from the other. But that’s the beauty.

Through that familiarity, which extends back to the overarching match theme, Orton and Rhodes anticipated the other’s moves, leading to some explosive counters. I never thought I’d see an RKO reversed into a Cross Rhodes or a Disaster Kick turned into an RKO (and if by chance I had, it’d surely been over a decade since).

When it eventually became clear that Rhodes couldn’t be defeated as easily as he had before, Orton resorted to another chapter in his playbook, those dirty tactics. After introducing a chair to distract the referee, Orton untied the turnbuckle pad to expose the steel underneath, intending to launch Rhodes into it. Instead, Rhodes again turned the tables on Orton, with the former Legacy leader crashing into the steel and rebounding into a Cross Rhodes for the former mentee’s win.

On that day, Cody Rhodes proved that maybe, just maybe, the student had surpassed the master. Whether that will remain the case at WrestleMania 42, of course, has yet to be known.