The third day of training consisted on a crude battle of wills, of man vs beast, of reason vs whatever Kalon embodied. It consisted on giving Jagger a bath. The unwinding of this day cannot be described on any book of undubious legality: it’s too crass, too real, too bloody. Let it be known that it made Brunhilda cower in a corner, that Kalon was pushed to the edge of a new breakthrough just from mustering the strength and vital energy necessary to fit Jagger inside the tub, and that Jagger invented a new, now dead, language whose minimal unit with a sense was not the word, but the slur. Even its alphabet was composed in its entirety of slurs.
The fourth day of training was unproductive: Kalon bit Jagger out of frustration and Brunhilda followed the protocol, calling the local reverse pound. German Shepherds cornered the boy and took him away while a Rough Collie checked on Jagger’s bite wound. Jagger was told to get rabies and tetanus shots as soon as possible, and so he was taken to the pack of local Golden Retrievers, that promptly administered the vaccines to their new friend, because they were Golden Retrievers. He reached the local terrier puppy mill just in time to call off Kalon’s scheduled euthanasia in the clandestine fighting ring.
The fifth day of training was almost uneventful, with Kalon fighting Brunhilda and trying to hit her in vain. The God of the Seas, that had decided to watch them, got bored after Kalon’s 47th failure to land a blow upon Brunhilda and blessed birds and fish with extra fertility, causing a drop in the prices of caviar and balut internationally, situation that would eventually lead to the town of Sodomized Sturgeon to become a den of debauchery and gambling where people lost so much money in the casinos that most of the prostitutes reached their three decades of age with their virginity intact.
In the sixth day something probably happened, but I wasn’t paying attention. Law-mandated omniscient narrator holiday.
In the seventh day, they rested, and Kalon pondered about Brunhilda’s heart. Was it full of demons? had she suffered a Tanbi (the vital energy) deviation? They went to Big Jay’s house and, after the protocolar salutations and a commedt by the man about how utterly bruised Kalon was, the boy asked.
“So, Big Jay, do you believe Brunhilda has heart demons?”
He dismissed that accusation with a sway of his hand. “No, she takes her Ivermectin and Pyrantel pills religiously.”
“And why is she a psychopathic ass then?”
He shrugged. “Because she can.” The plump man then turned to Jagger and saw the bandage on his leg. “What happened to you?”
“The hand that feeds me retaliated,” Jagger said shaking his head in a defeated gesture.
----------------------------------------
The fanfare with which the tournament arrived could only be compared to the canonfare. A lone tumbleweed had crossed the sea in a sailboat owned by a bunch of mutinous rats just to be present at the event. For the first hour of the event, before even the first of organizers arrived, it was the only one in the bamboo bleachers.
Eventually the neighbors started arriving, some by their own volition, some by accident pursuing an escapist chicken or a mischievous cat. After an hour had elapsed, the Patriarch, with his hair uncombed and face unwashed, arrived to the stand in front of the woodplanked ring where the battles would be held.
“People of Valelike Vale and tumbleweed from mysterious, mystical lands far away!” he began his announcement, displaying an absolutely orientalist attitude towards the foreign plant. “Today, we are congregated here to honor an ancient tradition of our people: Unabridged, unneeded violence!”
The crowd didn’t cheer at usual, some men and women even yawned.
“Violence is when people hit each other,” The patriarch explained, and the mood did a 180, the people exploding in shouts and whistles.
“What a masterful display of dramaturgy and rhetoric!” A blond man ex claimed.
“Give me a child, Patriarch!” Her niece asked yet once again.
The patriarch pretended she didn’t exist. He had given her children in the past; never his, of course. She always ended up losing them in the woods, the clumsy moron. A serial adoptstolen-child-loser, she was.
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“First, we will have the children tournament, because the adults tend to destroy the arena and kill several bystanders!”
The public cheered and raised their hands and recreational pitchforks.
“Anyway, the first fight is…” the patriarch shuffled through his papers. Damn, I wish I knew how to read cursive. He tried to remember two participants off the top of his head. “ Eridano vs Culmino!
The Participants walked away from the files of awaiting children and up to the stage. Well, Eridano Walked, Culmino more like, crawled.
Culmino licked his eye like a gecko. He absolutely lustered it. We are talking Humbert Humbert levels of eye licking.
“You are a deformed little thing,” said Eridano, a tanned boy with a fit psyche, a disdain for everything that is worn but a loincloth, and a couple of batons as his weapon of choice.
The Patriarch gave the signal to start by shooting his revolver, which made Jagger come up with the idea of, maybe, sneaking up to the patriarch, climb on his revolver and hope he didn’t notice the puppy biting the cannon on his next shot. Then he discarded it, because assuming kiloKalon levels of stupidity when making plans used to backfire often.
Eridano channeled his Onica (You… you know what this is. Don’t make me say it. I need to settle on a name someday. I am a very indecisive boy… girl… boy… girl… boy… girl… boy… let’s leave it at incorporeal nearly-omniscient narrator whose lack of genitalia can get pretty confusing.) into the batons, holding one facing outwards from his body with each hand, as if they were daggers. Electricity, coursed through them, creating arcs that coursed the air to die in the ground sometimes. Culmino remained in place doing quite reptilian things, like breathing through his ass and privates.
The truncheon cultivator charged, his weapons crossed in front of him , ready to repel any attempt from Culmino at defense. The village idiot dodged to the side with a lizard’s agility, turned to slap his opponent in the face with his long scarf that he imagined as his tail, and then, using his four extremities, jumped high into the air. Culmino landed on the Boy’s shoulders and, unhinging his jaw, he bit off his peer’s head with a single chomp, the skull bulging out in his neck as he swallowed it down.
Eridano’s lifeless body fell upon the arena like a bag of potatoes, his severed neck bleeding upon the clear wood planks. Culmino jumped out of the stage and looked for a patch of sun to bathe and recover body heat.
“Okay… Culmino left the arena so… Eridano wins!” The Patriarch declared. “And then gets disqualified for fucking dying.” He cleared his throat and continued. “Remember combats are until knock out, ring out or surrender. Death is not contemplated; you don’t lose if you die. An oversight, so please don’t kill your opponents.” He shuffled his papers, pretending to be able to read. “Next battle… Kalon against The Childender!”
Kalon stepped up to the plate with a fool’s absolute determination and trust in his abilities. He had trained for almost a whole week. He had this in the bag. He held Jagger aloft, shaking the puppy to salute his adoring public.
From the other side of the ring a behemoth climbed the steps. The guy either cultivated creatinine or spent every waking hour as the child, for the Childender, three heads taller than Kalon, stood bare fisted in front of the boy, cracking his knuckles.
Jagger struggled a bit to fall from Kalon’s hand, and landed in all fours, his antics granting him a sort of a feline agility unbecoming of such a fat pup.
“A second there! How old are you?”
“Sixteen winters old.”
“There’s no winter in these latitudes,” Jagger reminded him.
“Sixteen rain seasons old.”
“WE have three of those a year!”
The Childender scratched the back of his head. “Sixteen years old.”
Jagger pinched his fingers in a way that looked terror inducing when a dog without opposable thumbs did it. “Don’t you think you are a tiny bit old for this category of the tournament?”
“I have girlfriends younger than your owner here, pup.”
“You fucking pedoph—“
The Childender smiled and extended his open, shaking hand to forestall the accusation.
“They are all over the age of consent: eighteen.”
Jagger breathed in and out. “Oh… I think you are confused about Kalon’s age, then, you see—”
“Eighteen days old,” he clarified while cracking his knuckles once again.
“You fucking disgusting pedophi—“
Once again, the hand gesture. “Worry not, I personally am into MILFS.”
“Oh, sorry for jumping to conclusions, we should not judge you for your people’s retrograde standards. So, as I was saying, Kalon is—“
“Older than my girlfriends. Some are just starting to walk.”
The mental Short circuit induced by the conversation made the puppy’s eyes glaze over, and, making the Windows XP shutting-off sound, Jagger fell stiff on his side. Kalon kneeled to try to reanimate his weapon, and the gun shot was heart. The Childender lost no time: He raised his hands, gathered his vital energy to conjure a hollow tropical tree, and used it to, in a single wide swing, bat Kalon against the bleachers, where he landed on her mother’s wide and soft stomach.
“You lost, you disgrace!” she said, disembarrassing herself form her mistake and leaving a pained Kalon lying amidst the pogoing maniacs.
“The Childender wins! Kalon will now have to fight in the loser’s tournament if he wants to remain in the town!” The Patriarch announced, and Kalon felt a little part of himself die. It wasn’t, surprisingly, his last brain cell.