The Morbidly Obese Ninja

by Carlton Mellick III

  As Basu came out of the cavern and examined his surroundings, he saw a pink cyber-chickadee fly past him with a big cartoon smile on its face. He grunted with confusion. Then he looked up and saw Crow in the sky, flying overhead on a hover-bike, chasing after the chickadee. Basu then realized the chickadee was an iPet that was going after Oki.

  Basu leapt thirty feet into the air across a garbage ravine and went after the floppy pink chickadee. He landed knee-deep in refuse. Then he launched himself upward again, trying to ignore the pain within his intestines.

  Crow sliced through the sky above him, his black tie rippling over his shoulder. He pointed his beak downward at Basu and squawked at him.

  The obese ninja jumped into the air and swung his iKatana. Crow’s hover-bike tilted sideways to avoid it. As Basu fell back down, Crow tossed three mine-shuriken at him. The projectiles exploded at Basu’s feet. Rubbish burst into the air and a mountain of garbage avalanched on top of him.

  By the time Basu pulled himself out of the refuse, the pink chickadee was too far away for him to see, and Crow was out of his range of attack. Four more Gomen ninja flew overhead on hover-bikes, catching up with their leader.

  Basu got right back to his feet and jumped frantically through the garbage landscape after them. His breath was becoming heavy, his heart was feeling squeezed within his chest, and his intestines felt so rotten that he imagined they were ready to turn into mush and slide out of his rectum.

  By the time he caught up to Crow and the Gomen ninja, Basu was ready to collapse. He was a powerful killing machine when fighting in quick bursts, but he didn’t have a lot of stamina. Running long distances took a lot out of him.

  When Crow saw the state of Basu, he squawked a laugh. “You’re not the warrior you used to be, Keigo.”

  When Basu looked up, he saw Oki was with Crow. The boy was backed against a wall of ancient washing machines. The wrecked hover-scooter he had used to make his escape was on the ground twenty feet away. He was holding Basu’s smiling cyber-frog in his arms like a teddybear, tears falling down his cheeks. When Oki saw the obese ninja, his face lit up.

  “Bus!” Oki cried.

  Crow held the struggling child still.

  Basu stood up and held out his iKatana in one hand, his other hand holding the stab wound on his hip. Even after he developed his weight problem, he had never failed a mission before. He would not let Crow get away with the piggy bank.

  “Kill him off before he catches his breath,” Crow told the four Gomen ninjas next to him.

  The Gomen came at him quickly. The way they weaved through each other, flying like jets in formation, Basu could tell these were not ordinary ninjas. They were elite assassins. One of them wore a blue hood tucked into his polo shirt, one wore a red hood, another wore yellow, and the last wore purple.

  Although he would have no trouble dispatching any elite assassin in single combat, Basu knew it would be suicide to fight a group of them while they were in formation. In any other circumstance he would have chosen to retreat and wait for backup to arrive, but this time he didn’t have any other option but to fight them head on. If he could kill just one of them, that would weaken their formation enough to give Basu a chance. This was the strategy he chose as they swooped in on him like vultures.

  The lead assassin with the red hood broke away from the group and darted toward Basu as the others circled around him. Once he was in range, Basu took his hand from his hip wound and splashed blood into Red Hood’s eyes. Then he swung his iKatana.

  As the iKatana was about to make contact with Red Hood, Basu’s heart began to pump hard in his chest, as if the organ was struggling to break free from his ribcage. The force of Basu’s attack weakened. It felt to Basu as if his arm had started moving in slow motion. His horrible blood pressure had finally caught up to him.

  As the blade came down toward Red Hood, the assassin’s body exploded into black smoke and disappeared. Basu’s sword fell through the smoke without making contact. Then Red Hood reappeared on the right side of Basu and drove his iKatana through the obese man’s sword arm. Basu cried out, pulling his arm off of the blade. Then he sloppily swung his sword at the assassin, breathing rapidly as his heart pounded. Red Hood disappeared again.

  Before Basu could see him reappearing on his left, the assassin knocked Basu’s iKatana out of his hand and then pierced the blade into his enormous belly.

  “Bus!” cried Oki, struggling in Crow’s arms as the morbidly obese ninja fell to the ground.

  The assassins hovered over Basu as a pool of blood formed beneath his mountain of flesh. Once they agreed he was dead, they started back toward Crow. But Basu was not yet dead. He had so much fat on his body that even though the assassin’s sword went all the way into his body, the blade still wasn’t long enough to hit any major organs. The morbidly obese ninja pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.

  When Crow saw him struggling to stand, he found it amusing. “You still have fight in you, eh Keigo? How many times must I have you killed before you actually die, you fat piece of shit?”

  Basu grunted. It was a soft wheezing grunt. As his heart continued to pound, rivers of sweat poured down his mounds of flesh, mixing with his blood, drenching his clothing.

  Crow flicked his beak at his men and the elite assassins returned to finish the ninja.

  As the assassins closed in around him, Basu got to his feet, staggering like a fat drunk. Without a sword, he would have to fight them barehanded. The blue-hooded assassin whipped around him, crossing the yellow-hooded assassin who whipped around to the other side. They were spinning their swords like batons.

  It was Purple Hood who struck first. He went for a decapitation strike, aiming for his neck, but Basu bent his body all the way back in order to dodge it. As his head leaned back, Basu’s belly swung forward, slamming into the assassin’s chest, knocking him ten feet off the ground. When Purple Hood fell, he landed on his feet unfazed and charged back into action.

  Blue Hood spit glowing green sludge on the back of Basu’s head. Like acid, the radioactive spit melted through his hair, burning his flesh. Green smoke billowed out of the wound. Basu charged head-first into Yellow Hood, hoping to knock the assassin down and wipe the toxic sludge off on him at the same time. But just as he made impact, the yellow-hooded assassin’s skin turned a white color and became as hard as stone.

  When Basu’s head slammed into Yellow Hood’s rock flesh, blood sprayed from his forehead and he tottered backward, his vision spinning, his rolls of fat flopping and jiggling as he staggered. He wasn’t sure if his dizziness was due to concussion or because his heart was becoming tighter and tighter inside of his chest.

  Blue Hood slashed Basu across the back as he was falling. Then smoke exploded in front of him as Red Hood appeared, slashing Basu across the chest. The four assassins surrounded him, taking turns striking, slashing into his hundreds of pounds of blubber. They didn’t go for his head or heart, just for his rolls of fat, as if they were toying with him, making a game of it.

  Oki watched from the crow man’s clutches as gash after gash appeared on Basu’s body. The boy looked up at Crow, who was watching with wide-eyed pleasure, licking the edges of his black beak with his pink human tongue, savoring the demise of his old friend.

  As he was being sliced to shreds, Basu felt the fishy yellow discharge oozing out of his rectum into his pants. That was the final straw. He finally felt utterly hopelessly pathetic. He thought about how much of a wreck he had become, how much of a grotesque pile of shit he was.

  While staggering between the assassins, Basu grunted at himself. He wondered if he was just kidding himself when he thought he could still be a great ninja after gaining over five hundred excess pounds. Being that freakishly obese was a serious handicap for a human being. Of course he couldn’t take on the likes of the Gomen Corporation. He didn’t have the stamina or the agility of a ninja anymore. He was nothing but a blob with a sword.

  But as Red Hood stuck him in th
e ass with his sword, Basu snapped out of it. He stopped feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t an overweight pile of shit. He was Basu. He was seven hundred pounds of total destruction. Nobody could defeat Basu. Not Crow, not anyone.

  Once Basu became morbidly obese, he decided to turn his weakness into a strength. He understood putting seven hundred pounds behind an attack was an incredibly powerful blow. He understood that he could kill a man just by landing on top of him. There were things he could do that no other ninja could do. He refused to give up and die. He would not let the assassins defeat him, nor Crow, nor his lack of stamina or his pounding heart. He would not give up. He was ninja. He was Basu.

  At that moment, the four assassins dove forward to deal their final blows, but the morbidly obese ninja leapt high into the air. As their swords clacked together, the assassins looked up at the man-blimp in the air above them. Three of the assassins dodged out of the way as Basu came tumbling back toward the earth.

  The fourth assassin, Yellow Hood, didn’t notice Basu’s enormous body falling on him until the last second. Yellow Hood used his power to change his skin into rock, to protect him on impact. But as Basu landed on Yellow Hood, the rock skin was not enough. Basu’s massive weight crushed Yellow Hood’s rock body into the ground, his innards splattering out of cracks in his sides.

  When Basu stood, brushing guts and crumbles of rock skin from his belly, he stared down Crow. He wiped the green toxic sludge from the back of his head, pulling off a wad of his melted scalp and tossed it aside. The acid had burned all the way to the bone, exposing part of his skull. He paid it no mind.

  “Kill him,” Crow yelled.

  Red Hood hesitated. Without all four team members, the assassins felt lost, flawed.

  “I said kill him!

  Red Hood and Purple Hood charged the ninja. Blue Hood circled around his back. Red Hood disappeared into black smoke and then reappeared with his sword mere inches from Basu’s throat. But the sword stopped just before piercing the flesh. Red Hood was staring into Basu’s eyes. The morbidly obese ninja grunted at him. Seeing Basu’s hands resting on his waist, Red Hood wondered what had stopped his attack. He looked down to see that it was Basu’s flabby breasts that had caught the blade, reaching up like an extra set of limbs.

  Then, as if he had more sets of limbs, several rolls of fat launched like fists at Red Hood, punching him in the chest and stomach. The fat rolls pummeled him repeatedly until Basu’s breasts released the blade, wrapped around his throat, and snapped the assassin’s neck.

  As Blue Hood came up behind, Basu grabbed him by the mouth just as he was about to spit another glob of the green toxic sludge. With the acid trapped inside of Blue Hood’s mouth, it began eating through his cheeks and tongue. Basu glared at him, squeezed his face harder as the man struggled to break free. When the toxic fluid drained down the back of his mouth, Blue Hood’s throat melted open, releasing a river of blood down his chest. Basu left him writhing on the ground.

  The last assassin, Purple Hood, trembled beneath the mighty Basu. He used his secret assassin power. Purple Hood’s body multiplied into twelve different clones of himself that spread out and surrounded Basu. Only one of them was the real Purple Hood. The others were just illusions.

  But his illusions could not hide him from Basu. The obese ninja had grown an acute sense of smell ever since his brain became guided by his stomach. He could smell which one was the real purple-hooded assassin. Basu went straight up to him and picked him up in a bear hug.

  As Basu crushed the assassin’s ribcage, he smelled something appealing in the man’s sweat. Purple Hood, for some reason, smelled a bit like cheeseburgers to Basu. Realizing he was behind on his calorie intake for the day, Basu decided to indulge himself. He ripped open Purple Hood’s polo shirt and bit into the flesh on his arm.

  Purple Hood screamed as Basu began to eat him alive. Large round teeth ripped at the flesh on the assassin’s body, trying to find some delicious high calorie fats among the disgustingly lean meat. Basu had never resorted to cannibalism in the past, but now realized that it was a potential source of calories in an emergency situation.

  When the last elite assassin fell dead in the ninja’s arms, Basu retrieved his iKatana and stumbled toward Crow. Bloody sweat poured down his massive frame. A chunk of human fat dangled from his lips.

  Although he knew Basu had won the battle, Crow had already lost interest in the fight and had turned his attention to Oki. He had the unlocking mechanism in his hand and was about to put it to the boy’s chest

  Crow looked over his shoulder and blinked his beady eyes at his old friend.

  “Stop,” Basu told him, while chewing on the chunk of fat.

  Crow stood up.

  “Or what?” Crow said.

  Basu swallowed the meat, then ran forward a few steps and raised his sword.

  Crow let out a birdlike chuckle.

  “You can’t kill me,” Crow said. “I’m an executive.”

  Then Crow went back to the device.

  Basu lunged at Crow and sliced his arm off. The severed arm fell to the ground, still holding the unlocking mechanism. Crow shrieked. Bird blood sprayed down his suit and feathers.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Crow squawked. “You’ll be executed for this!”

  Basu twirled his iKatana at Crow.

  “Not if I don’t kill you,” Basu said.

  Crow let out a shrill squawk and whipped out his chain sickle. He swung it over his head and then launched it at Basu.

  The obese ninja just stood there as the chain sickle wrapped around his body and then hooked into his hip. Crow shrieked a laugh and then tugged on his chain.

  Nothing happened. Crow’s laughter came to a halt. He put all of his strength into jerking on the chain, but Basu wouldn’t budge. Crow looked at Basu with confused beady eyes.

  Crow had always had the strength to toss around men twice his size after hooking them with his chain, but what Crow hadn’t calculated was that Basu wasn’t twice his size. He was over five times his size.

  Basu glanced down at the chain and then grunted at him.

  Crow quickly tried to pull the spool of chain out of the sleeve of his suit, but Basu was already wrapping his fingers around it.

  There was a loud squawking cry as Basu tugged the chain as hard as he could, reeling the one-armed bird man toward him. Crow landed on the end of Basu’s iKatana. It went through his belly in the same spot that Crow had stabbed Keigo three years ago. He coughed blood out of his black beak as he slid off of the blade.

  It was a painful, incapacitating wound, but the bird man would survive it.

  As Basu untangled the chain from his flesh, Crow crawled with one arm back to the unlocking mechanism. Basu thought it was just like his old friend to never give up.

  Before Crow could get to his severed arm, Basu pried the device out of the fingers and curled it into his armpit.

  “Pathetic,” Basu said to Crow.

  Then he took Oki by the hand and walked him away from the wounded animal.

  “Pathetic?” Crow shrieked. “Look at you.”

  Basu kept walking.

  “All you can do is eat and destroy.” Crow’s beak leaned into a puddle of his blood as he yelled. “You’re the worst kind of human being there is. You act like you care. You pretend that you have honor. But the only thing you are good at is consuming and destroying everything around you.”

  The morbidly obese ninja grunted as he walked away.

  Then Basu was surrounded by two dozen ninjas. They stood silently like grim reapers, wearing all black clothing. They were from the Oekai Corporation. Oki looked up at Basu and the obese ninja took his hand, held it tight.

  They stepped toward the lead ninja of the unit. The ninja stepped forward and unfolded a document. He held it up so that Basu could read it. The document was clearance to execute the Gomen executive, Crow. Basu looked down at the ninja and nodded his head, then he shoved him out of his way.

  Th
e Oekai ninjas turned their attentions toward Crow, who squawked a whimper and tried to crawl to his feet with his single arm. They drew swords from their scabbards and closed in on him.

  Basu took Oki away from the scene. He held him close to his greasy flesh, and led him down a hill of garbage. They got far enough away that they didn’t hear Crow’s final screams.

  At the bottom of the hill, there was a patch of dirt twenty feet long. Basu let go of the boy’s hand so he could wander. He knew how much the boy wanted to see what the ground looked like.

  Oki stepped cautiously across the soil, the smiling holo-frog hopping casually behind him. Then he looked back at Basu.

  “This is it?” Oki said. “This is the ground?”

  Basu grunted.

  “It’s so boring,” Oki said.

  Basu approached the boy and knelt down to him.

  “I told you there was nothing special about it,” Basu said.

  Oki scanned the dirt, shaking his head. He was so unimpressed that he didn’t know what else to say about it. He looked up at the Oekai company ships hovering in the air above them and looked back at the ninjas coming down the hill from behind.

  “They are here to open you up,” said Basu.

  Oki nodded.

  “Are you going to allow them to do their duty?” Basu asked. “Will you die with dignity?”

  Oki nodded.

  Basu wiped a tear from the boy’s eye and grunted at him. Then he said, “I’m proud of you.”

  Oki nodded and took the unlocking mechanism from Basu. Then he grunted up at him.

  Basu took the boy by the hand and led him up the garbage hill to a group of executives heading toward them. The head executive, an old man with a tall wrinkled forehead, waved at his men to take the boy. Then he went to Basu.