Page 33 of Reaper
“You think they’ll come at me?”I asked.
“You’re the newest Tier Four.They’ve seen you a little, but I’d put good money on there being at least three or four mid-level guys willing to try themselves against you.”
“Great.”I didn’t feel much like a fight, but knew I’d need to keep my reputation intact or I’d never figure out what the fuck was going on in this place.So far, I’d found a fight club and seen that there was money being wagered, but hadn’t figured out why they were kidnapping people to fight and how they stayed under the radar.With audiences the size they were drawing, how had I not heard about this place sooner?No, I needed to stay in at least a couple more days.Now that I was among the top tier of fighters, I hoped I could get more intel.And to get more intel, I needed to stay at the top of the rankings.
Which meant that whoever wanted to dance with the Reaper in the playground was about to get a serious ass whooping.
25
When I stepped into the arena, all eyes were on me.The alpha dogs I’d been having breakfast with all peeled off to their own corners of the yard, selecting weight benches or pull-up bars with a good view of the crowd.I just walked over to a nearby wall and leaned against it, waiting.I figured it wouldn’t take long for someone to feel frisky and want to test themselves against the new guy.I didn’t expect it to be the shifter I’d pummeled into oblivion less than twelve hours before.
Bobcat looked none the worse for wear after me almost giving him a traumatic brain injury the night before, and he held up both hands as he walked up.“I don’t want no shit, man,” he said.
I didn’t reply.He stepped to me, it was on him to make the first move, either by throwing down or saying what he wanted.He shuffled his feet a little and looked slightly embarrassed, like he didn’t know how to spit it out.How this guy ended up in a fight club I couldn’t fathom.After a moment almost as awkward as a teen rom-com, he spoke again.
“I just wanted to say good fight, man.No hard feelings or nothing.”He still didn’t meet my eyes, but he stepped closer and held out his right hand.I took it and gave it a shake.
Which was when he clamped down on my hand with his shifter strength and threw a punch for my throat.So much for no hard feelings.I slid my left foot back, shifting my body sideways and feeling his fist rush by my neck, then I shot forward, ramming my elbow into the bridge of his nose, shattering it and causing blood to gush down his face like a crimson waterfall.He tried to let go of my hand, but I wasn’t quite ready to give him an escape.I slammed three more quick lefts into his face, then released his right hand.He took a couple of shaky steps backward, putting him at the perfect distance for me to lay him out cold with a big roundhouse kick.
I don’t do too many flashy kicks, because most of the time it’s better if I either stay close to my opponent and beat the fuck out of them, or stay very far away from my opponent and blast them with fireballs.But I was surrounded by a dozen or so lower-tier fighters who wanted to move up by stepping on my carcass, so I figured a little razzle-dazzle would deter the more sensible among them.
Three.I managed to deter three.Apparently “sensible” isn’t a word often used to describe paranormals and cryptids who volunteer to participate in unregulated fight clubs.Although it’s probably not used to describe human cage fighters very often, either.There’s nothing sensible about voluntarily getting your head kicked in on the regular.
There’s even less that’s sensible about standing in the middle of a dirt-floored arena and letting a bunch of cage fighters jump you, so I retreated to put my back to a wall, hoping to limit the number of idiots I had to tangle with to a reasonable number.
“I got next!”called a voice from the back of the pack, and a skinny Black man with narrow features and long dreadlocks charged at me.I braced myself to meet his attack, but he dropped into a baseball slide a couple feet in front of me and kicked up a plume of sand into my face.I coughed and wiped my eyes, but he was on me, raining down punches and kicks like the second coming of Bruce Lee.He even did the weird vocal noises Lee used to make in his movies, which defeated the whole purpose of kicking dirt in my eyes.What good is it to blind somebody when you’re just going to announce your location a second later?
I dropped to one knee to cover my head and vital organs, and called power to wrap a shield around myself.My power was still at full flow, as strong as it had been ever since I woke up, so I was able to use some of that energy to heal my bruises, and the rest to keep from getting any new ones.After a couple seconds of rapid blinking, my vision cleared, and the next time Dreadlocks came in, aiming a kick at my skull, I stood up and grabbed him by the ankle.
He was not a large man, maybe five-eight and a hundred fifty pounds, so I wrapped both hands around his ankle and snatched him up into the air.I turned around in a circle twice, then released him like I was at a Highland Games, sending his scrawny ass flying across the arena and taking down three spectators like I was picking up a spare at my bowling league.
I channeled a little power into my eyes, making them glow purple, and looked at the gathered morons who wanted to step to me.“Next,” I growled, kinda hoping no one would want a piece of me.
I shoulda known better.This time they didn’t bother trying to play King of the Mountain and take me down one by one.This time four of the assholes rushed me all at once.A big hairy motherfucker with biker tats and a beard you could hide a family of mice in came at me from the left.Next to him was a wiry little Asian dude with a shaved head, twirling a pair of long knives and grinning like he knew the punchline to a joke no one had told yet.Then there was a milquetoast-looking ginger with freckles on his freckles, a hairstyle right out of Riverdale High, and a feral grin like he wondered what my liver would taste like.A pair of long fangs poking out of his smile told me that the first vampire had entered the chat.And finally, rounding out the Four Horsemen of the Assholepocalypse, came a spectacularly obese man with stringy black hair, a patchy beard that looked like a shag carpet with mange, and fists the size of softballs.He didn’t look like he could fight worth a fuck, but he definitely looked like it would be work to get any damage to his vital organs, on account of all the lard armor he was coated in.
“Okay, fuckers,” I said, letting a wild grin dance across my face.“Let’s dance.”
I bent my legs slightly and sprang straight up, shoving power through my feet to give me extra lift.I’d been magically handcuffed for days, so I might have overdone it, shooting better than ten feet straight up.I spun around in the air and cut a flip that I hoped looked as cool in real life as it did in my head, and dropped behind the Asian guy with the Ginsu fetish.I punched him in the center of his back, adding a little extra magicaloomphto it, and heard the matchstick sound of ribs breaking under my knuckles.I grinned as he dropped to the dirt with a shriek.One down.
Archie the Vampire whirled around and leapt for me, but I flung up a shield and he slammed into it like something out of aTom & Jerrycartoon.He actually slid straight down my shield, and I shoved my magically shielded right hand into his mouth as he lay gasping in pain.A pair of quick snaps of my wrist, a shriek from the writhing vampire, and I dropped his fangs onto the ground next to him.Two down.
Biker Tats was almost on me by then, and I held up my blood-streaked fist, calling power to wrap it in purple magic.“You really want to?”I asked, letting more power flow through my eyes.He decided that Tier Two (or Three, I neither knew nor gave a shit where he fought) was good enough for him and backed away, holding both hands up in surrender.Three down.
That’s when the meat bulldozer hit me from behind.The problem with fighting fat guys isn’t that they’re fast, because they usually aren’t.It’s not that they’re strong, although when somebody deadlifts four hundred pounds just getting off the shitter, there’s gonna be some muscle under all the flab.No, the problem in fighting lardasses like the one that bowled me over into the dirt is that once they start moving in any direction, they’re almost impossible to stop.And when you’ve got a body that could generously be called skinny, and used to raise money for undernourished children at worst, you just don’t have enough mass to stop an object that size once it gets moving.
So I didn’t.Lardass ran into me, then over me, and all I could do about it was groan and swear.Now I’mverygood at swearing, but I’ve practically never won a fight on the basis of my profanity alone.I usually have to hit somebody, and I have to hit them in a vulnerable place.And when the guy I’ve got to hit is wreathed in a couple hundred pounds of personal insulation, there aren’t very many vulnerable places.And I certainly can’t reach them when I’m lying face down on the floor.
I’ve fought massive opponents before, human and otherwise, and they usually have similar fighting styles.Their plan usually goes something like this: knock me down, step on my back, step on my back again, and if I’m still breathing, belly flop on top of me until I die.Fortunately, I’ve managed to thwart the latter parts of this plan for a lot of years.Unfortunately, I end up getting knocked down and stepped on a lot.And this time I’d already spent a good bit of my magical reserves kicking the shit out of half a dozen other assholes.So I didn’t have all that much left in the tank for this dipshit.
But I had some juice left.Not a lot, but some.And I’d be goddamned if I was going to go out squashed in the dirt like an overzealous grasshopper.So I took a gamble that he’d reflexively try to stomp on me with his right foot and rolled to my left.That put his foot slamming down right beside my elbow, with me wedged in between his ankles looking up.Not exactly where I wanted to be, but definitely in a spot where I could lock on a vital target barely needing to aim.I raised my arms up straight in the air and pointed my palms at his balls, then shouted, “Fuego!” at the top of my lungs.
Yeah, I threw a fireball at Fat Boy’s taint.Not my proudest moment, but goddamned effective.Purple flame streamed from my palms into his crotch, and his shrieks sounded like someone was slaughtering an entire farm of pigs right over top of me.As this giant piggy wentwee-wee-weeand started running around in circles, I rolled to my feet and looked around the room.
The gathered fighters were staring at me with their mouths hanging open, and silence fell across the crowd.Well, silence except for the whimpering of a corpulent asshole trying to put out the purple flames dancing across his nutsack.Every eye was on me as I looked from face to face, trying to see who wanted the next piece of me.
Turned out who wanted the next piece of me were the guards, because the door slammed open and four guys in body armor sprinted in to surround me.Pete followed them, looking disappointed and more than a little disgusted.“What the literal fuck, Murray?They just wanted a little scrap.”
“I don’t do little scraps.I either fight, or I don’t fight.And if I fight, I win.Got a problem with that?”I snarled.
