“You had enough yet,” said Aleku, raising his thick brown eyebrows and still wearing that stupid, albeit strained, smug smile which spoke evil. His eyes flickered to and fro as each punch and kick connected inches away from his face, a thin membrane of protons protecting him from pulverisation.
“I am sick of you saying that I am weak!” thought Rod angrily, his eyes trained on the man he had called friend for over half his life. His face was beet red and sweaty, and hard. He continued to strike with a whip-like motion against the invisible wall, beating it purple and blue. “She left me; she fucking left me. You don’t have to remind me of that! You don’t have to take joy in my pain! You fucking monster! AH-”
And so, it went on for a good while; one friend beating the other.
“Impossible...” thought Aleku wondrously. “If our powers relied on mana, I think that even with my min-maxed out attributes I would have to fight back.” His eyes instantly darted to the right just before Rod’s shin crashed into it, sending shockwaves throughout the entire forcefield. “What power...” marveled Aleku secretly.
“He thinks that he is stronger than he actually is,” said Jam.
Alek’s dismissive attitude returned, and his face hardened. “Yes,” he grunted; but he was surprised that the barrier was on the verge of depletion already. He was sure that it was quicker than last time; it was definitely quicker than the first time. What was going on? He waved once again: “Forcefield; Activate!”
There could only be one instance of Forcefield projected by a Warrior at any given time, and so every time Aleku’s current one was near depletion, he had to be ready to cast another one. Ordinarily, this would be a problem given the incredible and unreal speed at which Rod’s fists and shins flew at him, but because of his increased attribute of intelligence, this problem was mitigated somewhat since it did not take very long for him to cast his unlocked spells. However, despite all his maxed attributes, his face was crimson and creased, and his arms ached like they were on fire. “Give it up,” he cried over the jackhammer of his foe’s punches, “‘Forcefield’ is the most powerful spell in the game: it’s indestructible. You’re only wasting your precious energy.”
“Energy?” thought Rod, his sweat-drenched eyebrows raised in surprise. “So, there is a cap on this power, after all. It might be indescribable, but it isn’t permanent!”
Rod’s fist came down like a comet and lit the invisible wall in a spectacular birth of purple colour upon impact. His body turned, spun, whirled, rolled and flipped of its own accord like an acrobat at the circus, and all he could manage to think about was if it could ever return to normal after this display of flexibility and uncanniness. He felt powerful; on top of the world. He would have to stop at some point, he reasoned, and so he waited for the opportune moment; he waited patiently, burning with anticipation, with excitement as his extremities flogged the barrier. Would he be able to stop? Did he want to? “Wait for it,” he told himself, furrowing his brows in concentration.
The barrier was already near zero. Aleku watched wearily, and frustratedly, and awesomely under dark, shadowy eyebrows, which allowed sweat droplets into his eyeballs... Yes, Jam was right: this man was seriously dangerous. It was a mistake to give him a second chance. He must be put down like the dog that he is. It was a mistake, too, to implement actual powers into the game because the man might actually be able to defeat the NPC enemies he had instituted to torment him. Moreover, Rod might even be able to defeat the avatars in the game. Aleku’s mind raced for a way out, an answer to his new logical problem. He was a man of action; he was a man of logic. Then why was he so puzzled?
The heat from Rod’s punches began to reach inside the forcefield; droplets of sweat layered themselves atop Aleku’s eyeball, and he looked like he was crying. It was the sort of heat that he had felt when his mother pressured him to perform in his A-levels, and to which had caused his subsequent hatred for academia – especially for anything that required intense study, where the sensation of his brain being cooked had to transpire. He could not stand intellectual work, and he resorted to his unconscious habits, his comfort zone. He knew that perhaps Rod had a plan; he knew that perhaps he should have ended it at the beginning, that perhaps he should have conjured up a great sword or some other offensive spell to end him once and for all. But he did not, for a reason he could not quite admit to himself, and he simply wore the mask that he was comfortable with, the mask which he had known for the longest time, the mask which he almost never took off. And then Rod saw right through it, and made him feel a funny emotion no one else, not even his first girlfriend, made him feel.
“You know, the problem with you, Aleku, is that you are too proud; you look down on people like me.”
“Is that right?” muttered Aleku, distracted by the jab to the right. His watery eyes continued to flit around the wall even though it was illuminated in blotches of distracting neon colour; now instead of concerning himself with the health of his forcefield, and erecting a new one, he was caught up in the sudden increase of attacks on all sides, and how disconnected it all seemed. It should have been impossible, for Aleku had not programmed Rod’s character to be as powerful as it was.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Good,” muttered Rod, a slight smirk appearing on his face, “he’s distracted.” In truth, Rod had no idea about ‘feral child’ or what it entailed. He didn’t even know how he had managed to activate it; nor did he remember the exact moment he had cast it. All he was consciously aware of, in that present moment, was the flurry of punches and kicks raining down upon Aleku’s invisible barrier. He did not know how long it had been since the attack started. There was no indication whatsoever of how long he had left in the tank, so to speak. But he did not want to wait to find out. “Almost,” he told himself, watching carefully the minute eye movements of his foe. “Just turn your head enough to the left...”
There! Aleku had turned his head almost 180 degrees to Rod’s left. There was no mistaking it, now was the time for Rod to strike, to capitalise on his chance to hurt Aleku. Now, his face hardened considerably. Now was the time for his face to become stone, to become one with nature. Now was his chance to show Aleku what he was made of. He pulled with all his might his body like a spring backwards, out of its automatic acrobatic trajectory, to the left, drawing back his right elbow, dragging along with it the entire arm attached like the drawing of the bowstring of a crossbow; he released it without hesitation. And it flew hot and fast towards its target: the groin – the second weakest part of the masculine anatomy next to the heart; Rod was too empathetic to even consider such a ruthless devastation like that and he watched, his own heart in his throat, at it soared.
Of course, Aleku saw the incoming projectile from a mile away and figured that he was safe behind his forcefield; he thought that he had enough time to check the status of it in the top left of his vision.
“You’ve changed your pattern?” he said, almost betraying a sense of surprise in the tone of his voice as he began repositioning his head from right to left. “No matter,” he added, “my forcefield will hol-”
Rod’s fist shot past the line where all his other attacks had come to a momentous crash and soared like a blazing meteorite towards Aleku’s pelvis. It gathered orange flames around the knuckles, wrapping around it like cloth. The bully looked down quickly and watched helplessly as it charged at him. His eyes could see it come at him in slow motion, and his heart leapt with terror into his throat and his eyes seemed to bulge out of their socket cartoonishly when he had thought that it was near. “How could this be?” he remembered thinking, for the thought was such a passing, flittering thought that he was not acutely aware of ever thinking it in the present moment, but only ever conscious that he had once thought it, and that the thought was of grave importance for it was accompanied by the powerful emotion of dread and grief. He began smacking his lips, trying to form the words: “For-”
That glowing fist intensified, smoke and sparks spitting from its whitened surface like a firework gone mad, lit by stupid, thrill-seeking teenagers in an abandoned scrapyard on bonfire night, piercing the air with courage and passion and fury; it seemed that the space had turned dark in its honour, encapsulating it like the night does the moon and holding it up so that he may see its glory. Aleku’s head worked. His intellect grieved. Well, he had tried. Had he not?
The Pole stood there thinking, his mind scattering like a firecracker. Still, he could not decide between spending the brief, albeit relatively significant, time casting a new forcefield to replace the disintegrating one, or whether he should attempt to move out of the way of the fiery punch. What was it, anyway? Was he using a special ability? But if so, how? How had he been able to cast it so quickly, so evasively, so... how had he even known about it? Of course, how stupid of him! He would have to cast an evasive spell. “Damn it,” he thought with anger, “I should have anticipated this... No matter; no time to think; I have to act.” His thick, heavy, overgrown brows furrowed. “What am I going to do?” he asked himself, his heart throbbing with the cold venom of anxiety, “Do I let him take the hit? No, I can’t let the pretentious asshole have the victory. He’ll lord it over me for the rest of my life.”
Still, all this thinking had no effect on the outcome of the inevitable: still, the raging white fist, with its billowing smoke rising upwards like a factory chimney, approached like a bullet. Pop; pop; pop! The air around it crackled like thunder, and Aleku’s ears popped more than once. “Is this woman that important to you? That you would do this to me?”
Then his face lit up with an idea, like the grim face of a sentenced man finding out that his execution date has been set back. “Oh, that’s right, Jam is here; maybe I can move just slightly out of the way for him to take the attack.”
Then his eyes fell deeply upon the flesh of Rod’s burning fist, and he saw that it was crawling and quivering and rippling like an arrow cutting through the air to the mountainous horizon, serious in its destination.
He then thought of his mother.
On the other hand, Rod thought of nothing else but the pulverisation of his enemy, the embarrassment of the man who had mocked him for years, the toppling of a system rooted in prejudice against him. He knew that if this attack did not reach, did not meet its intended target, he would not get the same opportunity again. “I know you,” he said to himself. “I’ve reasoned beforehand that you will undoubtedly rub it in my face for time immemorial if I miss this straight shot. This is for causing my misery all these years... We could have been partners, you and I, but you cheated me out of my own business idea; you were always the intellectual thief, huh? Well, attempt to steal this!”
“Wha...What is this power?” stuttered Aleku, bright crimson from the scorching heat.
“This,” muttered Rod, “this is what being in love is like!”
“How explosive!”
The entire room, which was once grey and endless and foggy, erupted into a flash of bright white supernova, like the glowing moon had grown too big and had taken over the entirety of space. A perceptible stillness registered like an afterglow, and yet the white remained. The swooping fist had scarcely touched the flesh of the Polish boy, and yet the revolting smell of all decomposing flesh had started in its creep. It was strange, knowing what was about to happen as though inevitability existed; like the growth of a child into an adult. Now, one could be definite as to the source of the light in this empty room.