Chapter 27
A New Challenger
Most of the people watching, including Erin and Arkay, didn’t have all that much confidence in Ryle coming out on top with the current group of challengers that were looking to beat her. Even professional athletes needed some form of a break after putting their everything in whatever sport they were competing in, but Ryle at best had a couple of minutes to catch her breath before the next fight came up. In all honesty, this was just a glorified execution that Erin hoped her friend would be able to survive.
However, much to the surprise of everyone watching, Ryle hadn’t just managed to survive, but she was dominating her competition. No matter what her opponents threw at her, the blonde was able to maneuver around it and defeat whoever she was facing in just a few hits.
Her firs opponent had obviously been the man with the ax that had decided to turn to crowd against her. He had expected to win by simply cutting down his opponent, but Ryle had surprised him by not just jumping over the swing. She had actually landed on the weapon and used it as a foothold to kick her opponent in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him out as a result.
The next opponent had been a female catfolk, the same race that Arkay was. She was armed with a whip that left large gashes on the floor of the ring with each swing. The cat woman tried to keep her distance by swinging wildly with all her strength, hoping to land one successful blow that could then be followed by a storm of similar attacks. This, however, was put to a stop when Ryle grabbed the whip with her bare hand and then used it to pull her opponent closer. The cat woman barely had time to react, before the blonde had wrapped her own whip around her neck and used it to choke her out. The cat woman soon fell to the floor unconscious.
From there on, Ryle simply kept beating all the challengers that came to face her. It seemed like nothing could beat her. Whether physical prowess or magical abilities, all of her opponents ended up knocked out on the floor. The latest three opponents had even tried to take her on together, but it simply ended with the trio getting beaten down instead.
“OH YEAH! WHO’S BAD!? WHO’S BAD!?” Ryle cheered as she did a victory lap around the ring. “I’M TOO FAST! TOO TOUGH! AND TOO BUSY LOOKING GOOD TO BE TAKEN DOWN BY YOU! WOO!”
On the side, Erin and Arkay were watching their friend with mixed emotions. Arkay was mostly overjoyed by seeing Ryle do as well as she was, with a small bit of awkwardness creeping in due to how the blonde was behaving. Erin was relieved that Ryle had been able to handle all of her opponents with relative ease, but that feeling had some time ago been replaced with a feeling of exasperation. The way the blonde didn’t seem to be taking this seriously at all was honestly concerning to the redhead.
“That idiot… Doesn’t she have any survival instinct or something?” Erin said with a sigh as she watched Ryle do a silly dance now. “Even if she has won all her matches so far, she is slowly getting drained of stamina. If this keeps up, it won’t take long until someone who can beat her comes up. And I fear what they will do to her.”
“We might not have to worry about that,” Arkay said. “It seems like her overwhelming victories have put doubt in the minds of the other fighters. While they know Ms. Ryle is starting to tire out, none of them can say for sure that she is completely out of energy yet. They’re afraid that they’ll just get added to her list of victories, like the others before them.”
Erin looked around at the gladiators that were gathered there in the hopes of getting to fight and defeat Ryle, and saw that the cat boy was right. Fear and doubt could be seen on their faces, as they were weighing their chances at victory against the blonde. It seemed like no one was willing to take the risk anymore.
“I see what you mean… It seems that those guys have lost the will to fight. Guess we can call for Ryle to step out of the ring now,” the redhead said before turning her attention to her friend in the ring. “Ryle, it’s over! No need to keep this up anymore! Let’s just leave already!”
“Awww… And I was starting to have fun!” Ryle said in a mock whining tone, before looking at the fighters gathered around the ring. “Guess you suckers missed your chance! Too bad you decided to turn tail and run, but I guess that was smart on your part!”
“Okay, enough already!” Erin yelled, noticing that the blonde’s taunting was starting to get the fighters riled up again. “We already have what we came for! Let’s get out of here before things take a turn for the worse!”
Ryle turned around and began to walk up to her friends, when a sudden voice stopped her.
“WAIT JUST A MOMENT!” someone yelled, causing the blonde to stop and turn around as a new person was entering the ring. “I would like to take my chance in beating her.”
Erin, Ryle and Arkay couldn’t believe their eyes at the sight of this new challenger. They were expecting some sort of powerful-looking warrior that was armed up to the teeth. Instead, what they got was a tiny kobold.
Kobolds were a race in the world of Five Realms that mostly lived in underground cave systems. They were incredibly small reptilian humanoids that even at their largest could barely reach the knees of an adult human, if even that. In the lore of the game, they mostly took part in mining activities, selling rare minerals to those willing to buy. In combat, they mostly used their small size to their advantage by specializing in quick movements and stealth, which made them good spies and thieves. Some were also skilled in engineering and magic.
However, this type of physical combat was far beyond the abilities of your typical kobolds and the one that had stepped into the ring didn’t seem to be any kind of an exception to that. Much like others in his race, he was very small, at best reaching up to Erin’s knees in height. His scales were colored red for the most part with some of them black on top of his head and the back of his neck, most likely continuing down his back. His outfit didn’t give the impression of a fighter either, as he looked more like a wannabe detective or businessman. The kobold’s outfit was made of a dark gray vest that was over a white shirt with a red tie around his neck. Over the vest he had a long, light brown coat that almost reached the floor, and he was wearing simple black pants with a brown belt. To top off his outfit, he had a dark gray fedora on his head and no shoes on his feet, leaving his clawed feet exposed.
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Complete silence fell over the room, as everyone from the regular audience members to the fighters were staring at the kobold with completely dumbstruck looks on their faces. No one could comprehend how this tiny person could ever think of himself as being capable of taking down Ryle, who had just defeated every skilled fighter so far.
Said blonde woman was finally the one who ended up breaking the silence as well, as she burts out laughing like a mad hyena.
“A-ARE YOU FREAKING SERIOUS!? IS THIS SOME SORT OF A JOKE!?” Ryle said while laughing madly. “YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT THE ONLY OPPONENT LEFT FOR ME IS A KOBOLD DRESSED UP IN FANCY CLOTHING!? BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
“Well, seeing as no one else is willing, I felt I might as well take the challenge,” the kobold said with a shrug and a smug smirk on his face. “What’s the problem with that? Were you hoping for something else?”
“Oh you bet your ass I was expecting something else! I was expecting someone that could at least reach above my waistline! Not someone the size of a freaking toddler!” the blonde said while still laughing. “Seriously, if this was supposed to be a joke, it was a good one! Now why don’t you go back to the baby carriage you crawled out of!? I’m pretty sure you need to have your diapers changed soon!”
“How the ignorant are the eternal burden of our world… You seriously think that I came here without some method of defeating you?” the kobold said with an overly dramatic sigh, like he was acting in a play. “You must be dumber than you look, if you’re convinced beating me is easy. And I already considered you to have less intelligence than an ape.”
“Hey now, I don’t like that tone of yours,” Ryle said while there was still a smile on her face, but you could tell from her tone that she hadn’t taken the insult well. “You better watch your mouth or else I might end up kicking you out of this ring like a football. You get me?”
“Oh, no worries! I completely understand!” the kobold said mockingly as a smirk came to his face. “After all, you’re scared of being beaten by a little kobold that’s obviously better than you. Of course you’d want to run away.”
The smile on Ryle’s face immediately disappeared right then. She had never been one to take insults lightly, which had gotten her into numerous troubles in the past. Now she had someone that couldn’t even reach her shoulders without a ladder picking a fight with her and throwing insults at her way. There was no way she was about to let it end without wiping the floor with his face.
“Ryle, don’t listen to him. It’s not worth it,” Erin said trying to talk some sense to her friend. “We have what we came for, so let’s end this here and get going already.”
“The hell are you trying to say!? You actually think I might lose to this shrimp!?” the blonde asked angrily.
“No! I’m just-”
“Just you watch! I’m going to teach that punk a quick and painful lesson!” Ryle said as she began to make her way to the middle of the ring. “It’s called ‘Picking a fight with the wrong person 101’! And we’ll be dealing with how you get your ass kicked by doing exactly that.”
“This is NOT the time to act all macho!” Erin yelled, but was ignored by the blonde. “For the love of… Even if the outcome of this match is obvious, there’s no point to this fight! So he said a couple of insults, big deal! Is it really worth beating up someone!?”
“Someone is going to get beat up, but I don’t think it’s who you think it is,” Arkay said, getting the redhead’s attention. “There might be a good reason as to why that kobold is willing to take the risk of facing Ms. Ryle.”
“Hang on, are you serious?” Erin asked. “I don’t mean to doubt you or anything, but I can’t see how this is even a fair fight. Ryle can just step on that guy and win! How is she in any danger?”
“Due to being born with magical abilities, I have certain special abilities of my own. One of them is my ability to use magical energy to manipulate machinery,” the cat boy began to explain. “Another one is my ability to sense magical energy.”
“You can sense magic?” the redhead asked to which she got a nod as an answer. “Are you saying that kobold has magical abilities?”
“I’m not sure. He himself doesn’t seem to have much in terms of magic, but I sense a lot of magical energy on him,” Arkay answered. “This most likely comes from magical tools he is carrying on himself. Whatever those are, I can’t tell. I just know that they are powerful.”
“...Guess we just have to wait and see, huh?” Erin said as she turned her attention back to the fight.
Back in the ring, both fighters were now in the middle with the referee standing by them. Despite having witnessed countless battles to the death that were nothing but one-sided slaughters, the referee couldn’t help but give a somewhat worried look at the kobold. It just felt too unfair to have such an obvious difference in physical abilities between two combatants.
Even the audience was mostly quiet with some of them voicing small murmurs of disapproval for letting a fight with an obvious outcome happen in the ring. The other fighters that were gathered had hoped for someone to teach the cocky blonde upstart a lesson, but it seemed like that wasn’t going to happen.
Ryle herself was glaring at the kobold, who was like a toddler compared to her. But while she was obviously angry, the blonde martial artist wasn’t actually going to give a full beating to her opponent. All she was going to really do was slap him around a bit to teach him a lesson. She wasn’t some schoolyard bully looking to use violence on someone who was smaller and weaker than her.
While most of the spectators had expected the kobold to show at least some hints of fear or regret by now through his body trembling or his facial expression twitching, nothing of the sort was happening at all. In fact, he still had a cocky smirk on his face, like everything was going according to plan for him. This only served to further infuriate Ryle.
image [https://i.ibb.co/DCkJybv/Ch-27-Pic-1.jpg]
Seeing as both combatants were ready, the referee called for the match to start and stepped back to allow them room to move around. Everyone had expected Ryle to simply start pounding her enemy into the ground, but nothing of the sort happened. Both fighters just stood in the middle of the ring, staring at each other.
“So you’re really gonna go through with this, huh?” Ryle asked while glaring down at her opponent. “I was kind of expecting you to start pissing your pants by now. I don’t know if you’re brave or insane, but it’s not gonna help you.”
“Oh, I’m not all that brave. In fact, I’d consider myself more of a coward,” the kobold said. “It’s just that I don’t really need to be all that brave in this situation. After all, who would be scared when they’re going to obviously win?”
“Okay, that freaking does it!” the blonde woman yelled angrily, as the last remnants of her patience had run out by now. “Why don’t you go and show me what you’ve got huh!? Come on! I’ll give you the first shot for free! After that, your ass is grass!”
“How generous of you! I’ll gladly take that offer of yours,” the kobold said happily as he began to rummage through the insides of his coat. “Just wait a second, would you? I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”
Before Ryle could ask her opponent what he was doing, the kobold pulled out a small vial with a dark gray liquid inside of it. He then took off the cork and poured the liquid on the ground.
“The hell is this shit!? It freaking stinks!” Ryle complained as she held her nose in disgust. “I told you to take your best shot at me, not make this place smell like an outhouse!”
“If you think the smell is bad, wait until you see what it does,” the kobold said as he took a step back. “You see, I’m not your typical fighter. I’m something a bit more special”
“Really now? So just what are you supposed to be?” the blonde asked in a sarcastic tone, before noticing that the gray liquid had suddenly started to bubble violently and seemed to be growing. “What the hell!?”
“That’s simple. I am an alchemist,” the kobold answered as the small puddle of liquid had now grown in a tall figure made of the murky substance. “And this is how I fight.”
Everyone in the room was stunned into complete silence over what they were seeing. Even Ryle could only stare with wide eyes at the creature that had suddenly appeared before her, as all of her previous bravado was now completely gone.
In the middle of the ring now stood a third figure. It’s body was made completely of a dark gray liquid that slowly dripped onto the floor. A long, round mouth was hanging loosely from the spot that apparently held its face, with two red glowing orbs as eyes shone above its maw. It also had two large arms on its sides, but no legs at all. Instead, the lower half of its body was made of a single mass that dragged across the ground, leaving a dark trail behind.
“The name is Lexton Gibber. I run a store called Lex’s Alchemist Wonders,” the kobold said with a grin. “And I thank you for helping me market my products.”
image [https://i.ibb.co/Mg74Gq1/Ch-27-Pic-2.jpg]