Henke

Everything was scrambled. Hurting all over. Noise battered against him, distorted and jarring.

It hurt so bad. He’d never felt pain like this. Not even when he’d died in a vehicular accident, squeezed nearly in half at the waist by a twisted mass of metal and plastic.

What had happened to him? What was going on? The world around him played as a choppy slideshow of still frames. People were moving above. Gesturing. Chanting. Yelling. They didn’t sound very happy.

It was the rat’s fault. Because of him, the fans weren’t having a good time.

He reconnected little snatches of memory as he sat slumped against something hard and secure behind him. The rat had done something. Something impossible. He was standing there now, looking so smug.

He had cheated. That had to be it. Maybe a bystander had helped him somehow.

As he worked his jaw, popping his eardrums right again, he could hear that many in the audience were arguing the same conclusion he had just arrived at with the organizer, yelling up at the ridiculous little man.

“VALOR SURGES ARE A PERMITTED TECHNIQUE,” Golden Boy announced after some deliberation. “THE MATCH WILL PROCEED AS NORMAL.”

What?

There was a lot of vocal disagreement in response to the decision, but there was really nothing anyone could do to overwrite Golden Boy’s final authority.

The match would proceed.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. FUCK!

Henke didn’t even think he could stand. His legs were two clumsy, doughy masses of pain, floppy as though there were no bones left in them.

Meanwhile, the valor surge, whatever it was, had restored all his opponent’s AP. The rat started to shuffle toward Henke, the entire right sleeve of his shirt ripped away by the power he had unleashed.

He had to move. Supporting himself against the wall behind him, Henke tried to stand. His feet slipped in the sand, and he slid back down. His shirt was dragged up in the fall, and the raw skin of his back rubbing on the rough-barked logs made him yell out.

The rat had made him bleed. Made him hurt.

Unacceptable.

Unforgivable.

I can’t lose here. Not to trash like him. This is not how my story ends.

His opponent rolled his ankle, staggered, and fell on his knees. His eyelids fluttered, and he looked almost as though he would flop on his face right then. Henke felt a surge of hope. The strange ability might have restored Ratcatcher’s AP, but at least it hadn’t taken away his skill fatigue.

And the rat had used a lot of skills up to this point. It was clearly catching up to him.

Henke tried again to stand; failed, slid back down. Damn it all. The rat was making him look like a fool in front of the fans. Even after he'd won, what would they think of him?

The match had devolved into a farcical battle of invalids, ten feet apart but neither one having the strength to close the distance.

Ratcatcher rallied first. After one unsuccessful attempt, he got to his feet on the second try—and stayed there, despite swaying drunkenly. That triggered a fresh wave of fury from the fans, who began to throw things into the arena.

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The rat lumbered on, ignoring it all. One step. Two. Three.

Henke tried once more to stand, and failed just as badly as before. A cold wash of fear set into his bones then, made his lips tremble.

Am I going to lose?

The rat was only two strides away when an empty glass bottle came spinning and struck the side of his head, bounced off him with a hollow thunk. The enemy staggered off-balance, catching himself with a hand against the ground to avoid falling.

Henke saw his chance. With a surge of adrenaline, he bared his teeth in a fighting snarl and reached for the fallen bottle, which had landed between them. He hurled it, and Ratcatcher batted it aside, already up again, but it gave Henke enough time to get one wobbly foot beneath him, then another.

He lunged, leading with his right. Ratcatcher, despite his accumulated fatigue, was faster, and moved his hands to deflect the strike so that Henke could not bring his Devil’s Eye to bear.

But the attack was a feint. Henke’s last gambit. At the last moment, he exerted his Soul Summoning passive to demanifest the ring from his right hand, then make it appear on the forefinger of his left. Reversing his stance, he swung at his opponent, who was now focused on the wrong hand.

It connected.

He felt that glorious, orgasmic ripple go up his arm as a dull boom sounded, and a good third of Ratcatcher’s stomach was blown clear, leaving a messy, gaping hole for perforated intestines to sag out of, glistening and bloody.

His opponent’s face, with that annoyingly determined set to it, went slack with shock. He looked down at himself, fumbled at the guts spilling from him as though to stuff them back inside, then fell away. He landed limp on his back, arms thrown wide.

“Not so fucking smug now, are you?” Henke snarled through clenched teeth, stray spittle flecking his bottom lip. “You’re not the only one with tricks.”

* * *

Sam

The cheer died in Sam’s throat, watching her friend lie sprawled out with his life leaking out of him. Henke the Hero stood over him, chest heaving, clothes gone to burned tatters, face twitching with rage.

Next to her, Serene had gone very still. She made a strange sort of croaking noise, like a frog being stepped on, and her hands fell slack off the railing she had been holding to hang limp at her sides.

Magnified on the screen, Sam saw Catcher’s hand close into a fist, then he extended his pointer finger. Toward her and Serene, she realized.

“I… softened him up a bit…” he chuckled tiredly, his voice barely loud enough to be picked up by the amplifier. “The rest is up to you.” There was a serenity over his features, pain washed away by traumatic shock. The thin little Artisan looked up at his opponent and let out a long, slow sigh. “To… To the death. That’s what we said, r—”

Henke let his fist drop, half-slipping with the lunge, and Catcher’s skull splattered like an overripe melon from the detonation that followed.

Henke didn’t stop.

On his knees, holding onto a piece of Catcher’s clothing to keep himself from tipping over, he hit him again, making a hollow crater of his chest cavity with broken ribs jutting. Hit him again, blowing off an arm that went sailing end over end before landing some six feet off, finger pointing at nothing now.

Again, again, again.

Boom, boom, boom, went the ring.

Meat squelched, beaten to a messy pulp. Inside a minute, the body was so mangled that it was only recognizable as human because of the relatively unscathed legs, the body to which they were attached reduced to a sickening, formless heap, like the dregs one might scrape off a butcher’s cutting board.

The horn had already blown some time ago. The match was over, and the people cheered for their hero. Especially, she imagined, those who had stood to lose money if Henke happened to lose, which was most of them.

Oh, how they cheered.

They’d gotten the slaughter they wanted to see, after all.

A pair of men from Henke’s team hurried out of the doors in his corner. When he refused to come away from Catcher’s mutilated corpse, they dragged him off by force. His entire front, knees to hairline, was soaked with blood and punctuated by star-bright shards of bone clinging to the sticky wet. His face was completely dyed red except for the whites of his eyes, making him look more a demon by half than either of the ones Sam had seen.

He couldn’t stand, so the men carried him out between them on a stretcher. Even once he was gone, the crowd continued their revelry, and there was quite a bit of impromptu dancing and drinking and cavorting about the place.

“That was unfortunate,” Serene said in a calm, neutral tone. “I should go and collect intel for your next fight.”

By the time Sam broke out of her stupor to reach out, Serene had already turned from the pit and hurried off, instantly swallowed by the press of sweaty bodies.

A hand on the railing to steady herself, Sam looked back out over the fighting ground, at the gory mess that could hardly be called a corpse anymore.

He’d deserved to win. If that bottle hadn’t hit him, would the outcome have been different?

“You did so well,” she whispered, her voice drowned under the incredible volume of noise around her. “Be proud, my friend. You died a warrior.”