Sam
The semifinals match—singular, since Henke would not need to fight one—was being hosted in the much larger Hell-1 pit where the preliminaries had been held. Sam could still spot bits of red in the sand from one unfortunate fighter or another.
She reckoned the change in locale did not do her any favors, considering what she had caught of her opponent’s game plan from the demoness. He would want to keep his distance from her, and that was a good deal easier with an arena twice the size of the usual ones.
As they slowly approached one another from opposite sides of the pit, Sam found that Holden was a weathered-looking man with as much gray as brown in his beard, and a lined face that suggested a hard life. The dog that trotted beside him was much the same, a shaggy mutt with a wiry, rust-brown coat and a tired gait, head bowed low.
While the Explorer himself did not appear to have sustained much damage during the prior rounds, his familiar sported several bloody wounds around his muzzle, and there were bits of blood-matted fur along his flanks. One look into the dog’s weary, sad eyes, and she knew she was in trouble.
Fuck me. How am I going to beat on a little guy who’s looking at me like that?
Golden Boy soon came hovering down to thrust his scepter in his face, at this point fully assuming that she would want to make a statement before the fight started.
She did.
“I want to dedicate this fight to my friend, Ratcatcher,” she said. “He fought like a champ, and he went out too soon.” A round of booing at that—mostly because she was the one saying it, she figured. “So with that being said, there’s no way I’m losing this fight. The spirit of peace perseveres!” With that, she struck a pose that showed off her painted biceps, even though she was not in a particularly bombastic mood.
Holden appeared to be a man of few words, declining to make a comment when prompted by the organizer. Golden Boy sullenly resumed his position in the sky, having perhaps wished for a more cinematic rivalry between the two of them.
Sam and Holden were about twenty feet apart when the horn blew. As expected, the dog came loping straight at her while the Explorer hung back, hands outstretched in an odd, too-loose stance that did not seem to be intended for striking.
The dog closed the distance and went for her in a snapping leap. Sam threw up a guard, and its jaws clamped down around her forearm, yanking it low as the animal fell back down to the ground. Grunting at the vice grip, she got several fingers of her free hand around its lower jaw to prise open the grip, but struggled.
She was holding back, she knew, failing to put enough force behind her efforts to get free. She knew that a familiar would recover from any damage she wrought on it, and that there was no way around hurting the thing if she wanted to win the fight, but she still found it difficult to muster any kind of fighting spirit against an animal that was only doing as it was told.
At the edge of her vision, she caught a small bit of movement as Holden flicked his wrist. A moment later, a big tangle of sticky web wrapped itself around her free left arm, thick as rope and tacky as though it had been coated in glue. It pinned her arm down against her side, but she found with a grunt of effort that she was able to peel it back fairly easily with her superior strength, grayish wires snapping one by one as she lifted her arm up.
Another gob of webbing came flying her way, and would have caught her in the face if she hadn’t raised her arm in time. Her left arm was now unwieldy with webbing that kept sticking to itself and clumping at the elbow, but her opponent was already down 2 AP. If she could get rid of the familiar, she was confident she’d be able to avoid any other shots he threw her way.
The dog worried at her arm, snarling, and Sam renewed her grip on its jaw to pry herself free once and for all. She felt a dull thud go through her. Suddenly, there was a fist-sized ball of Web stuck to her chest. Based on how weighty the impact had felt, though, there had to be something inside it. A rock? A ball of sand? What—
Then everything was spinning. The world flipped and lurched, and she flailed awkwardly with arms and legs as she lost all concept of where she was. She ended up on her back, staring up at the white flares of too-bright limelights, and found that she was hardly able to breathe. There was a great weight on her chest, like five people were sitting on it and preventing her lungs from inflating.
What just happened? Sam thought numbly, head still spinning.
All the strength had gone out of her at once, and she felt like a ragdoll with half the stuffing removed, boneless and floppy. There was a lot of shouting going on, the grating screech of Golden Boy’s amplified voice, but she couldn’t make out any of it. Everything was a jumbled blur.
What was she even doing again? She’d been… fighting, hadn’t she? Yes, that was it. She had a fight to finish. But her body wouldn’t listen to her anymore, and she could only get small, hissing breaths in.
Her brain must have skipped a beat or two, because suddenly she found she was on her knees, without any idea of how she’d gotten there. She tried to cough up something caught in her throat, and vomited blood instead.
The front of her shirt was all torn to tatters, and her chest was black with soot, a handful of fresh cuts trickling red. Her ribcage looked sickeningly squished down, sort of bent in the wrong way like a wicker basket that had been stepped on. It looked like something you’d see in a photo from a fatal car crash, not the chest of a living person. Was that a bone sticking out? She thumbed at the little sliver of white protruding from her front. Yup, that was a bone all right.
I should be hurting right now, Sam thought, unable to feel much one way or another about her present situation. She wasn’t hurting, though. She didn’t feel much of anything at all, except a vague annoyance at not being able to breathe right. Is it a bad sign that I’m not hurting?
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The dog familiar lay on its side some six feet away, its body riddled with warped metal shards, one of its front legs torn clean off and thrown clear of the body. The head was badly mangled, most of the upper jaw and snout reduced to a ragged ruin of bone and flesh and fur.
Sam reached for a metal piece sticking out of the sand in front of her, turned it over in her fingers. It was hot to the touch.
Did that guy just… throw a fucking grenade at me? She tried to laugh, but found that her chest made a series of disconcerting clicking noises when she tried to inflate her lungs more than quarter capacity, and stuffed it down.
Her opponent, slowly coming toward her, looked pretty pleased with himself. He’d just cheated, of course—massively and blatantly—but the crowd was cheering for him, and that was all that mattered. Sam wasn’t going to get any help from the referee end of things, which meant that she still had a fight to win.
Only, she had no idea how she was going to accomplish that, with an upper torso that bore more than a little resemblance to a moon crater. She could hardly breathe, let alone stand, and she felt like someone had taken her brain and shaken it up like a snowglobe, sending all the thoughts inside rattling around uncontrollably so she couldn’t hold onto a single one for more than a second or two.
Fuck… She knew she needed to get up and fight, but all she wanted to do was lie down and shut her eyes.
Then a golden figure shot down between her and her opponent, poised on his tiptoes with the grace of a dancer despite his comically round form. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THIS FIGHT IS OVER!” Golden Boy cried, catching the recording sphere out of the air to speak directly into it. “HOLDEN HAS MADE USE OF AN ILLEGAL ITEM BY MEANS OF SMUGGLING IT IN THROUGH HIS INVENTORY, AND IS HEREBY DISQUALIFIED FROM THE COMPETITION! THE WINNER IS SAM DARLING, THE PEACEFUL FIST!”
Sam was as shocked as everybody else to hear that information. Holden in particular looked completely flabbergasted, stopping in his tracks with his arms hanging awkwardly at his sides, jaw slack with shock. He’d fully expected his cheating to slide under the radar.
The angry shouting from the crowd got louder and louder. They were not happy at all.
Sam slid sideways. The last thing she felt as she began to drift from her body was several pairs of strong, leathery hands grabbing onto her to lift her up, and coarse fur rubbing on her bare skin.
* * *
Mongrel
“Oh god, why have you got to fuck me in the ass every time something good comes my way? Haven’t I done enough to deserve just a tiny bit of happiness?”
His fighter lay sprawled on the tarp inside the care tent, unresponsive. The girl, who’d looked so solid and sure minutes before, now looked like a particularly well-trod piece of roadkill. Since the working girl was still nowhere in evidence, Nyx had assumed the job of checking Sam over, letting her gray fingers trail just above the young woman’s ruined torso without actually touching her.
“At least the match was ruled in her favor,” the demoness murmured without looking away from her charge.
“Fat lot of good that’ll do me!” Mongrel paced back and forth across the tent, arms folded behind his head. “At this rate, we’ll be dragging a carcass in to fight in the finals.”
“You’re exaggerating. Samantha still has some fight in her, and the organization has agreed to push the final fight back one additional hour to give both fighters time to recuperate.”
“Yeah, but—”
Mongrel turned as the tent flaps came open behind him, and perked up as he saw that it was a woman in a white coat, with the coiled-serpent mark of a Physician.
“The SPFL would like to extend its sincere apologies to your fighter and her team for her opponent’s conduct in the last match,” she said, hands folded before her. “I am here to assist with her recovery in any way I can. If you would give me access to the fighter, I can begin immediately.”
“Oh, yes, excellent!” Mongrel said, shaking the woman’s hand. “Please work your magic. Do you think she will be fit to fight in the finals?”
“I will do my best.”
“You will do no such thing!” Nyx hissed, and was on her feet in a moment. She was not a particularly tall woman—or being, anyway—but she seemed to loom over the Physician then as she glided gracefully over. “Leave immediately.”
“What?” Mongrel spluttered. “But we—”
Nyx silenced him by holding up a clawed finger over his mouth. “Not now, dearest. Let me handle this.”
“But—”
The smoldering look she gave him could have melted steel. “How would you like to end this night, Matthew? As a rich man, or a pauper?”
“Oh, so I’m allowed to talk now?”
“Yes. It was not a rhetorical question.”
“I’d like to end the night as a rich man, obviously.”
“Good. Then you will do as I say, when I say it. And right now, I’m telling you to be quiet and do nothing at all.”
Mongrel crossed his arms and jutted out his chin. Fine. I can dish out the silent treatment with the best of ‘em. Let’s see how she feels after five minutes without my biting wit, the needy sow.
The Physician was summarily hounded out of the tent, and Mongrel refused to ask a single question about it when Nyx came back inside. If she wanted to be in charge of things that badly, let her. He wasn’t the least bit interested in knowing how she planned to miraculously resurrect their half-dead fighter, especially without a Physician to actually work said miracle.
The demoness resumed her place at Sam’s side, hovering her delicate hands above the young woman’s broad frame, as though she could glean some prescient knowledge from those airy gestures alone.
“I… apologize,” she said after some time, looking pointedly ahead. “That was undignified of me.”
Mongrel blinked as he stared into the demon’s tapered back, her sharp shoulder blades working with the movements of her arms. “You’re… sorry?”
“Yes, Matthew. I am sorry. Did you hear me that time, or would you like me to say it again?”
“Actually, my hearing’s a little rusty. Once more?”
“I am sorry, Matthew. I shouldn’t have undermined you in front of that woman.”
Mongrel scratched at a persistent itch in his left ass cheek, unable to make heads or tails of what he was hearing. Was that a demon… apologizing? He’d never heard of such a thing. Demons were prideful to a fault, after all. That was their whole thing, aside from being generally vile, spiteful beings.
What was her game? Why was she saying this?
“Well, I… I reckon I forgive you,” Mongrel said, deciding to be the bigger man. “Just don’t do it again, y’hear?”
“I will try.” Mongrel thought he could detect a smile in her voice. “You do make it difficult sometimes, dearest.”
“How are you going to get Sam back on her feet?” Maybe he did want to know a little. He had to know if it was worth making his all-in bet for the finals, or if it was better to lug that money home with him in defeat, replace Will’s savings before he noticed.
“Any Physician sent by the league cannot be trusted,” Nyx replied calmly, not really answering his question. “I have no doubt that Golden Boy awarded Sam that victory by disqualification because he knew the audience would hate it. Sam has played her role as the people’s villain well, and now Golden Boy is leaning into it, setting up for her to lose spectacularly against Henke the Hero. Needless to say, pulling out is not an option at this point—the League would never allow it.”
“No doubt, a Physician sent by them would see her just well enough to get into the ring, but not to put up any more than token resistance against the favored champion.”
“Oh.”
“So I’ve pulled some strings, and an unaffiliated Physician we can trust will come along shortly to tend Samantha’s injuries.”
“That’s…”
“I believe the phrase you’re looking for is ‘thank you’.”
Mongrel cleared his throat. “Yes. Ahem. Thank… you.”
Nyx looked back over her shoulder and flashed him a devilish grin, pale cheeks dimpling. “Why, you’re so very welcome, dearest.”
Damn her, Mongrel thought, shaking his leg to unstick a burgeoning erection from the inside of his thigh. Why do the crazy ones always have to be so damn hot? When did god make up that rule?