The night passed uneventfully; Luke took until the next morning to wake up, and the other three teens were, frankly, too tired (and too high) to really do much beyond the activities they’d already performed.
In the morning, when the four of them filed out for breakfast in the ship’s dining room, Isla Refugia was in full view of the boat’s windows; the Parasite Tournament was nearly upon them.
Sam poked at his bacon and eggs awkwardly, unable to make himself eat anything. He looked up at Ava, who was fiddling with her phone.
“Hey, Ava,” he said.
“What’s up?” she answered, not looking up.
“You were saying yesterday we needed to talk about… I guess Grandpa Zangief is what we’re calling him now?” Sam asked. “Something about needing to call an audible on the plan.” Ava turned red with embarrassment.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I forgot about that,” she said, putting her phone in her pocket and looking up. She looked at the other two meaningfully, as if to bring them into the conversation, and caught their attention. “So, long story short, me and this Maxim guy had a little sparring match in the gym. He showed me his Code, and I think he’s pretty well figured out what mine is, too,” she explained, catching everyone else up.
“That’s a problem,” Sam said. “What’s his deal, though? Might be able to figure out a strategy.”
“That’s the thing,” Ava said. “He told me to go straight for a full-on punch against him. Didn’t block, dodge, anything. Just left his torso wide open for a hit. I figured, hey, easy ten million bucks.”
“So what happened?” Luke asked.
“Turns out, dude’s secret? The whole reason he’s won ten of these damn things? Dude’s made of fucking titanium or something and barely anything can hurt the guy. The same kind of punch that sprayed that cannibal guy all over the school and punched Rubberman’s organs out just… kinda sounded like a gong and hurt my hand,” Ava explained.
Scott had a moment of brief realization as he looked up from his steak and eggs.
“Oh, that’s what that fucking noise was!” he said, beaming. “Christ on a bike, that was just you guys?”
Ava looked dismayed.
“Beside the point,” she said. “What I’m getting at here is, unless either I’ve got some bullshit I didn’t know about or he’s got a weakness we don’t know about, he hard counters me. There is absolutely no way in hell I’m winning, no matter what he seems to think.”
“Wait, back up, what he seems to think?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, dude was acting kind of weird. He went back on his whole not-killing-me-because-I’m-not-worthy thing, and he seems to think I have some shot at taking him down. No idea what he’s on,” she said.
Sam scratched his chin, which had grown a bit of stubble on it since they departed.
“Maybe you do have some bullshit you don’t know about,” he said.
“Or maybe we’re better off calling an audible and switching sides, and saying fuck the money, just so we come back home in one piece,” Ava said, devouring a piece of French toast. “Heh. One piece, and I killed a rubber guy yesterday. I’m funny.”
“Let’s see how things go,” Scott said. “We might not end up getting to that point. Seems like some nasty characters on the competitor’s deck with us.”
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When the boat pulled into port on Isla Refugia, the competitors were allowed off first, and quickly met by a blonde-haired girl appearing to be in her early twenties.
“Hi, I’m Lisa,” the girl said to the group, carefully making sure to look at nobody in particular and avoid eye contact. “I’ll be giving you your orientation for this year’s Parasite Tournament. This will involve showing you to your accommodations while on the grounds of Isla Refugia, and showing you the general procedure for the tournament.” Carefully rehearsed; Lisa had presumably never done this before, but she was well-trained, and the group of competitors followed her as instructed, while the rich and powerful audience members scattered through the arena.
The main concourse of the arena, occupying the space under the expanse of stadium seating that encircled the ring itself, was filled with all sorts of fast food brands, food trucks, merchandise stands, and beer carts. There were several carts selling assorted drugs and paraphernalia, as well, presumably for any audience members who hadn’t loaded themselves up from the on-ship dispensary; something about this told Ava it was going to be an event with a rowdy crowd.
“You know what’d be funny?” Ava said. “If I got one of those Konstantinov shirts and wore it to go fuck the dude up.”
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“Didn’t you say you didn’t have a chance against that dude?” Luke said. “Maybe you should let me play that joke.” Ava raised an eyebrow.
“You think you’re gonna do better?” she asked.
“Hey, just because blunt force doesn’t work, doesn’t mean he can’t be cut,” Luke said, gloating.
“He… pretty strongly implied that he can’t be cut, either,” Ava said. “I’m pretty sure you’re not any less fucked than I am, if I’m fucked. But honestly, I’m looking on the bright side, I’m on Team I’ve Got Some Bullshit.”
“That’s good to hear,” Sam said as the group followed Lisa through the giant hallway that circled around. Eventually, they came to an elevator with a sign that indicated it led to a hotel, and Lisa, cross-referencing with a sheet on a clipboard, handed out a card key to every competitor (making sure plus-ones were accounted for as well).
“All of you have luxury suites on the eighth floor,” Lisa said. “Before I send you off to them, here’s a quick explanation of the tournament procedure. Each room has a red light in it, near the television, that indicates that it’s your time to fight; when the light blinks, exit your room and proceed directly to the ring through the labeled entrance,” she explained. “The tournament has… thirty-one participants, due to the tragic loss of Wayne ‘Rubberman’ Davis on the way here, and is single-elimination. Elimination will occur on either death or knockout, with the latter judged as remaining on the ground or outside the ring for a full count of ten from the referee.” As perfectly-rehearsed as ever, aside from the small audible forced by Rubberman’s death.
Everyone in the small crowd of competitors seemed to understand this, muttering their comprehension, so Lisa let them begin filing into the elevator in groups as big as it would allow. Eventually, this included Sam, Ava, Luke and Scott, and they, too, separated from the group to see what Mr. Johnson’s money had paid for.
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The suites had, in fact, been assigned separately; Ava and Sam stayed in one, while Scott and Luke stayed in the other.
On one end, Sam appreciated this, as he’d developed a crush on Ava not long after they’d met, and he didn’t mind having the time alone with her. On the other end, he knew that the shit he was going to get from Scott and Luke was going to be relentless over it.
When Ava opened the door to theirs, the two of them were shocked; it looked less like a hotel suite and more like the world’s most expensive luxury apartment. The thirty-two-inch television of the cruise was replaced by an eighty-inch curved LED screen with a leather sectional couch in front of it, and a PlayStation 5 to match; the suite also held a full kitchen with a fridge full of luxury meal kits, a bar stocked with expensive liquor bottles, a home gym (with a punching bag that Ava was fairly sure wouldn’t stand up to much from her), and a bag of marijuana “moon rocks” that held down a note. Ava shuffled the note from under the bag and unfolded it.
“What’s it say?” Sam said, looking over our shoulder.
“It’s from our benefactor,” Ava said, rolling her eyes a little. “Apparently he did a little stalking and had this room made up specifically for me, that’s why there’s the punching bag and the PS5 and the weed. Cute.”
“Creepy, more like,” Sam said.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Ava said. “Wonder how much marketing data he had to buy up to figure out what I like.”
“God, I know, right?” Sam asked.
As promised, there was a red light next to the television, though it wasn’t flashing or blinking yet. There was also a smaller screen, next to the television, that appeared almost like a picture frame and was showing a live bracket of the tournament, with a hastily-typed note taped underneath it reading “LIVE FEED ON CHANNEL 01.” As promised, Luke and Ava seemed to be on opposite sides of the bracket, and would only face each other if both reached the finals; however, Maxim had been seeded against Rubberman in the first round, meaning that if Luke won his first round, he was guaranteed to face the champion as his next opponent.
“So, what do we do now?” Ava asked. “I’m kinda on edge.”
Sam glanced meaningfully at the bag of weed and the gigantic television.
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Scott and Luke had a similar amazed reaction to their own suite; though it was not quite as specific to their own tastes, they still shared most of the amenities that Sam and Ava had received, and they were, to put it mildly, hyped.
Unfortunately, their joy was short-lived, as their red light began flashing, with a horrible buzzing noise (presumably to wake up anyone who was asleep); Luke’s number was up, and he was the first one to see combat. His opponent was referred to by the bracket simply as “Dissolve;” neither of the teenagers had any real idea what to make of this, as they exited the suite and took the elevator down to the main concourse.
When they entered the arena proper and saw the ring for the first time, its size stunned them. It seemed like they would look like tiny dots to any but the absolute closest seats in the stadium, and Scott could faintly make out some people using binoculars to see the action.
“That’s why they’ve got the live feed, I guess,” he muttered to himself.
The ring, as it was, had no ropes and seemed to be made up of reflective tile; it felt hot to the touch from the sunlight as Luke hoisted himself up onto it.
The referee and ring announcer, who was already standing on the ring in the center and holding a wireless microphone, was, much like Lisa, a young, attractive woman, this time dark-skinned and curly-haired.
“Are you sons of bitches ready for some bloodshed!?” she shouted, to roars of applause from the raging crowd. “On the concourse side, our competitor for Lockheed Martin from Houston, Texas… Luke Albright!”
Crickets. Not a soul knew who he was. Luke felt deeply offended, and reached to grab the microphone; the referee wrestled it back into her own possession, preventing him from saying his own piece. No matter; he would show the crowd what was really up in just a few moments.
“I see, not much of a reaction there,” the referee said, awkwardly. “And on the entrance side, we have the betting favorite, the competitor for JBS from São Paulo, Brazil, Desidério Teixeira, better known to you all from the previous tournament as Dissolve!”
For Dissolve, the audience cheered, and the Brazilian fighter basked in the adulation of the crowd. Luke beheld his opponent; he was a muscular, tanned man wearing a neon green wrestling singlet, covered in body hair and with a long brown mane running down his back. An eye-mask matching his singlet muddied his age, but to Luke’s eyes, he appeared to be maybe in his late twenties.
The two fighters raised their fists and braced their legs, showing their readiness for the battle to come.
With a flourish, the referee raised her microphone to the sky, and a bell rang, beginning the duel of the two parasite hosts.