The Street Toughs circled, jeered, chanted, a thrashing, clapping sea of potential energy funneled vicariously through their mayor. I would say they behaved like animals, but no animals would take this kind of glee in violence for its own sake. Maybe cats, but that’s it.
My mind raced. Mayor DuChamp would have to put on quite a show, and I wondered how he would make a convincing display of combat against a young human a fraction of his size. Chief among human emotions is pride; would the mayor’s allow him to admit defeat, even in a thrown match? Would he hold up his end of the bargain now that defection was foregone?
However it played out, I knew that it would never do for me to sit idly by and observe. This would surely clue the hooligans in that something was amiss, thick as they may be. In the end, we play our roles on stage, whether written or improvised. As Shakespeare said, “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts….”
Into the ring I dashed, hopping over the splintered and busted remains of City Hall, which were—I knew instinctively, even if I could not see it clearly in the evening light—themselves broken remains of some place else. The parking lot must have been it, I guessed, a small piece of DuChamp’s home spliced into a platformer landscape, perhaps for nostalgic purposes or for some further benefit. A “home turf advantage” is a truism with origins in the animal world.
I snipped and snapped at DuChamp’s ankles, showing that the dog would not stand for this treatment. Grrr! Release my human, knave! We both knew that my teeth could not break his skin, but he danced out of the way.
“Hit my head,” he whispered to Commander Zideo above him, then roared brutally. Sideways and uncomfortable, the message did not sink in immediately. He looked down and stopped waving his arms. “Hard as you can. If you cause pain, I’ll take damage.”
Zideo made a fist, but didn’t have the heart to truly put any power into his attack. He extended his arm to strike downward, but in the end, flicked the huge man’s ear. I will admit that I felt somewhat avenged.
It worked. DuChamp staggered back, and his entire body blinked like an eye, his hold on existence becoming tenuous for a moment. It reminded me of the pancaked Purple Prince that Zideo had crushed, at the moment when he exited reality.
His facial features squeezed, and a reactive fury came over him. He roared in anger, the roar of an animal, and threw Zideo none too lightly. My human snapped boards in two as he landed. “Ow,” he said, sitting up. “I thought…!” he began, but caught himself. I tended to him, and he pushed me out of the way of the stampeding DuChamp.
“Watch the pattern,” the mayor muttered out of the side of his mouth as he stomped past us, “accidentally” bowling over a gaggle of Street Toughs on the sidelines. I rolled over broken boards, whose corners poked me in the kidney and caused me to gasp with pain. “Read me. Dodge me!” He reared back and raised his watermelon-sized shoe into the air, an echo of his maneuver within City Hall. DuChamp plunged his leg down like a piston, and a wave of disturbed wooden debris radiated outward. It swept over (perhaps I should say under) Zideo, still seated on the ground, and shook him. I had the good sense to jump over the wave of force, owing to animal reflexes, but he, dazed,was unable to jump to his feet, and was snatched up by the mayor. DuChamp looked supremely annoyed, at the mercy of his own dark impulses now like his own Mr. Hyde, although whether he was angry at Zideo for flicking his ear, for not effecting his defection, or for getting caught, I could not say.
There was little time to ponder it, anyway. A pawful of Street Toughs had entered the detritus mound that I kept thinking of as “the ring.” They approached with brass knuckles and whips, brandishing long lead pipes like swords. A women with an extremely tousled hairstyle cracked a whip at me, slashing open my fur with searing pain. The bloodthirst in her eyes gave way as I reflexively ran at her. I am not entirely sure what I did, but it was loud, and she jumped backward and tripped up her accomplice, a squat man holding a knife as though it were a cruise missile. He flailed, and the knife embedded in a protruding two by four. Trying to regain his balance, he became a perfect ramp shape, and I helped myself. I ran straight up his back and launched myself from him to attack my assailant, who dropped her whip and disappeared into the crowd.
There was a familiar sound behind me, which I had only heard once before: Ba-doop!
I turned. The formerly knife-wielding man flashed, screamed, and vanished.
They say dog time is seven times faster than human time, and in a fraction of a second, visions played out before my eyes with barely any external time passing: The squashed prince and his trooper, the Blunderworlders that Nereus and Zideo had pounded out of existence with downward motion. The medium rectangle when he Did A Stream, upon which opponent lights withered beneath the feet of Zideo’s controlled avatar.
It was the head; or else, it was the downward motion. How exactly it worked was not as important to me as the fact that it worked. I threw myself at the nearest pair of Street Toughs, pouncing on an unprepared man with a mohawk, using his chest as he fell as a springboard to get above a pipe-wielding thug. My paws had barely made contact with the sheen of a bald head, eyes wide in confusion and terror, when he vanished from under me.
“W-what is that?” said the other thug with the mohawk from the ground. It was his last words. As an animal with built-in instincts to do heinous acts to my competitors—shred them, bleed them, bite them until they stop moving—this felt a little anticlimactic.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
But nature has instilled in me a desire to use whatever is to my advantage. I drew up the pipe that the the bald thug had dropped, gripping it firmly in my clenched teeth swerving my whole body so as to swing it like a human. It knocked over two more of the Street Toughs who were trying to decide what to do next, but always inching closer as they read us. Still, the force with which they were catapulted backward upon contact with the pipe surprised me. Imagine if I had arms.
Zideo was at that moment staggering backward from a close-handed assault by DuChamp.
This was no pulled punch, and his hands guarded his face. He nearly fell, and then he did fall.
I ran to him, sweeping the pipe at DuChamp. “Ah,” he boomed, leaping back a foot. “The greatest weapon of my world… the lead pipe. A wise choice against a grappling enemy.” His shoulders lowered, and he walked in a circle to continue gloating and showing off, or perhaps to buy my human a little time to stand and fight back. I dropped the pipe and found blood gushing from Zideo’s nose, his chin and chest slick with it.
Blood. Real, human blood in a digital world. He pinched his nose with one hand, and wiped at it with his other forearm, painting a red streak over all his tattoos.
He seemed to suddenly see me, and looked down at all the blood. “Well that’s not good.” He stood, with some trouble. “Cormac,” he whispered to me, while DuChamp amped up the crowd with his soliloquy, “this is usually where I tell you to stay safe, but… I don’t think he’s gonna give us the belt. We’re gonna have to take it.” He snorted wetly, and winced. “Ugh! Ew. Okay.” He turned to me to give me instruction, then was overcome with anger. He leaned forward, sprinting hard toward DuChamp’s back. He jumped, and the Air Dash’s burst of flame lit up the faces of the crowd like a pyrotechnics show, the flame swallowers and spitters that Lisa had filmed quite drunkenly at one event on her small pocket rectangle.
Zideo understood what had to happen. He was locked on, as it were, to DuChamp’s head. I was sure the bright light would alert the Boss, but he connected and kicked DuChamp two-footed in the back of the head. No sooner had he done so than DuChamp swatted him out of the air, bellowing with anger and flashing in and out of the world. The mayor’s golden belt flashed and he wheeled on the bloodied human, who twirled into a disheveled stack of boards with a crack. Zideo moaned and grabbed at his face, where a red-purple patch bloomed across his eye socket. He blinked, and something delicate fell from his face into his hands.
A wave of nausea flashed through my body. If DuChamp had knocked out my human’s eye, I myself would kill him—and I would not show him the mercy of a head-stomp. Zideo fingered a bloody contact lens, and flicked it into the wooden rubble. He looked at me with two matching hazel eyes, the eyes I had known before he ever Did his first Stream, before he ever took up his moniker. “Good thing that’s purely cosmetic, huh?” he said to me. Then he saw what lie beside my feet: the pipe. He took it up, and pointed it at DuChamp like a knight facing down an ogre.
The bear of a man hunched, and readied himself. His eyes shone red with fury, offended pride, and something darker—the hopeless disappointment of one who has betrayed.
The mayor circled, waiting for Zideo to make the first attack. It had been clear he would not make this easy, but now I doubted he would allow Zideo to best him at all. Now, it was a fight. And an unfair one at that.
Street Toughs closed in, tentatively.
“Some one-v-one,” said Zideo. He struck down a knife-wielding clone of my squat attacker, and I realized that there were a limited number of types in the crowd of Street Toughs, as though they were factory produced and not people at all. This was closer to the truth than I realized at the time.
DuChamp stood up straight. “He’s right. Get back! All of you!”
“But..” one spoke up, clearing his throat. “Not helping your Boss during a Boss Fight is a crime!”
“Crime! Crime!”
“Shut up!” said DuChamp. “That’s a mayoral order. Everyone get back and watch me smash this bug like a… bug!”
They stepped back, clearing just enough space for an execution if not a fight. DuChamp raised his massive knee up to his chest again, and stomped. This time, both Zideo managed to be airborne when the wave of force passed under us, but I lost my footing and was caught in its stunning freeze. Every inch of my body vibrated, my teeth rattling like a can of pennies. It was that awful feeling of a limb having gone to sleep, but it was through all my limbs. I felt I had just hit my funny bone (yes, dogs have those) and it was all of my bones.
Fire blazed in the air, and the lead pipe clattered to the ground atop broken boards. Zideo was a phoenix burning toward his foe. People forget that phoenixes do not simply rise; they also strike.
He was intercepted. The massive hand was at one moment resting at DuChamp’s side, and the next wrapped around Zideo’s neck. He held him up to the Street Toughs, whose cheers almost shattered my eardrums. He paraded my human before them, a trophy. The fight was over, and I had done nothing to save my human. Ludopolis, I knew, would suffer in darkness like a sputtering candle.
DuChamp raised him, I was certain, to cast him down into the rubble. Zideo gasped and clawed at the constricting fingers around his neck. He kicked and squirmed. Like a bad dream, the fuzzy tingling roiled through all my limbs and I was unable to run to intervene. I could move, but only just barely.
DuChamp smiled at him, and glanced down at the belt at his own waste. Then, wordlessly, he looked at Zideo’s leg, then his face again. A wordless message.
Zideo sputtered blood. He stopped squirming. He reached out and grabbed the mountainlike man by the mustache. I was not sure, but I seemed to observe a nod from DuChamp, subtle and proud. He closed his eyes, and Zideo both pulled the mustache and drove his knee into Mayor Bo “Da Champ” DuChamp’s face.
DuChamp dropped him and reeled. He flashed. He shouted, and vanished. The belt fell to the floor, or else it would have, had Zideo’s hand not shout out at the moment he landed on his feet.
He turned to the Street Toughs, their mouths uniformly gaping in silence. He raised the belt.
What is the opposite of a cheer? Not in anger, but in volume. Whatever that is, it fell across the stunned crowd of minions and hench-persons. A double silence, a manifold disbelief draped over them. They were more paralyzed than I was.