Mortal Kombat: The Movie

by Martin Delrio

  Then the monk stood aside, and Johnny could see who his opponent was to be.

  Shang’s ninja, Scorpion.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The ninja Scorpion was dressed as always in yellow and black. A mask covered his face.

  “I remember you,” Johnny said.

  The actor bowed briefly to his opponent – always keeping his eyes raised, however. He recalled all too well Sonya’s victory over Jade only a few moments before, and had no intention of following in the path of her unfortunate opponent.

  Scorpion began to circle in the arena between the trees, his hands weaving in front of him. Johnny approached, keeping his center of gravity low. When he got within striking range, he spun, a kick launched high at Scorpion’s head.

  The ninja blocked up and out with his left forearm and responded with a counterpunch, low, toward Johnny’s head.

  Johnny blocked, redirecting the force of the blow down, but found that the ninja had countered his block, taking his arm into a bone-breaker. Johnny’s only hope was to accept the throw.

  He hit the ground hard, but rolled to his feet and resumed his stance. The ground was rocky, and sharp spikes of flint protruded between the mossy hummocks.

  “One thing movie work will teach a guy,” Johnny muttered, “and that’s how to fall.”

  He moved to the attack again, but more cautiously. He knew that he would have to keep Scorpion busy. If the ninja was able to bring his special talent to bear, things might go hard with Johnny indeed.

  Johnny ducked a high kick, grabbing Scorpion’s leg as it came over him. He pulled, and Scorpion hit the ground. Johnny leapt to deliver a crushing blow, but the ninja rolled out of the way and sprang at Johnny.

  The two fighters met in midair. Johnny blocked a side-hand strike to his throat, and Scorpion blocked Johnny’s punch to his breastbone. They landed again with neither man having an advantage.

  I have to win, Johnny thought. Against Scorpion, there is no such thing as a minor defeat.

  A monk stood before Liu. The hooded man bowed to Liu, then turned and walked away. Liu followed.

  The monk paced slowly along a gravel path. Liu stayed close behind. The path twisted among the fighting rings, then went past a stone gate to a courtyard full of flowers.

  “Where are you taking me?” Liu asked after the monk had gone beyond the rings where other combats were taking place.

  The monk didn’t reply. Soon enough, though, Liu found out the answer. They emerged from a small grove to stand before the Great Hall. The hall’s golden roof glistened in the morning sun.

  In full daylight, Liu could see that the Great Hall was set halfway into the side of the mountain. As Liu watched, a coolie carrying a pair of wooden buckets on a shoulder yoke entered the Great Hall from one side, his back bent under the heavy load.

  Liu followed the monk along the path, then up the stone steps which led into the Great Hall. The coolie had vanished, but Liu saw that his buckets remained – left there probably for the cleanup crew that would be scrubbing the hall after last night’s feast. The tables and benches had already been removed, taken apart, and stacked along the sides of the hall like high wooden walls. The central area was larger than Liu had thought it would’ve been, now that he was alone in it – alone, that is, except for the silent monk.

  “My match is here?” Liu asked.

  In answer the monk bowed and stepped back. Liu stood for a moment, then turned to look around the hall.

  At first he saw no one. Then he heard a sound, a rising and falling sound like the deepest note of a vast organ playing almost too softly to be heard. Liu turned toward the sound. A stairway was set into the wall, where it led back into the hillside. A figure was standing at the top of the stairs, a silhouette against the flaring torches behind him. The figure moved forward slowly. Down the steps it came. The light struck its face.

  Then Liu recognized him: one of Shang’s ninjas.

  “Sub-Zero,” Liu said.

  The ninja approached. Liu took his stance. And the fight began.

  Liu began it with a leg sweep, which the ninja blocked. But the leg sweep was only the first in a combination of hand and foot movements. The block that stopped Liu’s sweep distracted the ninja, leaving him open to the double-handed strike Liu threw at him. The double blow stopped the ninja and rocked him back.

  Liu controlled his breathing and focused all his mental and physical energies on the situation at hand. He forgot about the tournament, about Shang Tsung, about the hall, about Kitana. While he concentrated on Sub-Zero, he even forgot about Chan.

  The fight ranged up and down the length of the Great Hall. Liu used all of his skill and strength. He was faster than the ninja. Just a little faster. The battle was going his way. Every time he threw Sub-Zero, the ninja recovered more slowly.

  Then a series of low kicks drove Liu back, blocking. None of the kicks had hurt him, none had even come close, but he noticed that he was slowing down. The question why? entered his relaxed state of nomindedness, breaking his concentration.

  Liu stopped in a defensive stance. Why was he slowing? He shivered and shivered again, as from a sudden blast of cold. A glowing blue aura surrounded Sub-Zero. The answer came to Liu all at once, in a mental picture of the frozen guard the night before and the way it had shattered.

  The unnatural cold was sapping my strength Liu thought. And any moment now, Sub-Zero would use his power to freeze me solid.

  Johnny Cage was fighting hard for his life on the rocky ground amid the trees. Scorpion had nailed him with some good shots, but Johnny had tagged him back, returning each blow with interest. Now they stood eyeing each other, both breathing hard.

  “You’re worse than an assistant director on a deadline,” Johnny said, panting. “What does it take to make you fall down?”

  The ninja just hissed at him and raised his right hand, the open palm facing toward Johnny.

  “Oh hell,” Johnny said. He had a pretty good idea of what was coming next.

  Sure enough, Scorpion thrust his hand forward. The skin of his palm split in a vertical line, and a long, wicked creature in the shape of a spike emerged from his hand. The creature’s jaw snapped open and shut. Again the ninja hissed.

  “I don’t suppose Rayden’ll pull my buns out of the fire this time,” Johnny muttered and brought his hands up before him in a cross-blocking position.

  In the blink of an eye the creature flew from the ninja’s palm, straight toward Johnny. The spike was attached to a long umbilical cord, glistening brownish-pink like wet leather, leading back to Scorpion. The creature’s jaws opened, and its teeth glistened as it drove inward.

  As fast as the spike-creature was, Johnny’s reflexes were faster. At the last moment, Johnny ducked, and the creature hurtled past him.

  But before Johnny could use the opportunity to launch his own attack on Scorpion, the spike-creature turned and streaked back toward him. This time Johnny leapt straight up. Again the creature missed, but its leathery umbilical cord went between the actor’s legs, tangling them.

  The living spike shot fifty feet into the air. The cord around Johnny’s legs yanked his feet out from under him. He hit the ground hard and lay on his back momentarily stunned.

  The spike was a faint dot high above him, almost lost in the branches of the trees. For an instant it seemed to hang there, then it flipped over and arrowed downward, straight at Johnny.

  Johnny rolled to his left. A second later the spike hit the ground where his body had been. It drove into the turf and buried itself completely out of sight.

  “Missed me,” Johnny said, sitting up.

  Then the creature and its cord exploded out of the ground, clods of dirt flying in every direction. Johnny didn’t waste a moment. He flung himself at the creature, gripping it just behind the spike in both hands. His palms burned as the fast-moving cord slid through his grip, but he hung on. He rolled toward a tree, and threw a round turn on a thick branch. The spike stopped and swung back
toward Johnny, but it was caught, trapped by the entangling branch.

  Johnny looked down. A stone protruded from the ground. A long shard of flint – with sharp edges.

  He grabbed the spike-creature’s umbilical cord between the branch and the point where it emerged from the ground. Being careful to avoid the creature’s snapping teeth, he pulled the cord against the flint. He pulled harder, sawing the tough material with the sharp edge of the stone.

  Then all at once the cord broke. A thin, purple fluid oozed from the cut ends. The spike-creature hung limp, mouth open, eyes staring, long reptilian tongue hanging down. A drop of clear fluid fell from its open mouth.

  Scorpion howled in rage or pain – Johnny couldn’t be sure which. Then the yellow-clad ninja raised his left hand to shoot another spike.

  “Hey,” Johnny said. “I’ve already seen your rope trick. Show me something new, something…”

  He ran toward Scorpion. As soon as he was close enough, he leapt into the air and delivered his shadow kick, the move that had made him a star in his first action film.

  To an observer, the shadow kick looked as if Johnny had elongated and faded, as if he were a blur of motion caught in a strobe light. The only sound was the rushing of wind and the loud crack as Johnny’s foot contacted the ninja’s head.

  Scorpion fell unconscious.

  “…like that,” Johnny finished, as he pulled out his dark glasses and slipped them on. Only then did he notice that Art Lean was watching from the edge of the arena.

  “Hey, man,” Art said. “I saw it but I still don’t believe it. How did you do that?”

  “Just a little trick I know,” Johnny said. “After this is all over, I’ll teach it to you, if you like.”

  “You’ve done that one in the movies,” Art said, “but I always figured that it was the special effects guys doing their thing. Man, no one had ever better call you a fake again where I can hear it.”

  Johnny Cage just grinned, and the monk marked the victory on his scroll.

  In the Great Hall, Liu Kang regarded Sub-Zero with dismay.

  Liu already knew how fast the blast of cold could reach him. There wasn’t time for him to get to Sub-Zero from where he was standing, in order to attack first. Liu took a step back. As he did so, he accidentally kicked over one of the buckets of water the coolie had left behind in the Great Hall.

  The water froze as it spilled across the floor. Far across the hall, Liu could see Kitana standing at the top of a set of stairs, watching him. The princess’s words came back to him.

  “Use the force which brings life…” Liu whispered. Suddenly the answer came to him. “Water!”

  Liu picked up the second pail of water, still attached to the carrying yoke. He swung it around and around his head, faster and faster. The centrifugal force grew. He could hardly hold the bucket. He let go, and the bucket flew toward Sub-Zero, spilling a trail of water as it tumbled through the air.

  The ninja loosed his cold blast. When the blast struck the water, all the trailing droplets coalesced, absorbing the freezing attack the ninja had meant for Liu. Their motion through the air continued, but now the droplets were frozen into a long spear of solid ice, flying point-first toward the blue-clad fighter.

  Before the ninja could move out of the way, the icicle struck, piercing his chest and pinning him to one of the columns of the Great Hall. Sub-Zero looked down with disbelief at the icy shaft transfixing his body. Slowly, from the center out, he himself froze into a glittering sculpture of solid ice. His head was the last part to freeze, a look of rage and disbelief still caught in his open eyes.

  Liu looked away from the frozen ninja, and saw that Princess Kitana was still watching. She turned and vanished through a doorway, deep into the side of the mountain.

  The monk marked down the victory on his scroll.

  Torches flared in Goro’s underground throne room. The Shokan prince sat in his throne, wrapped in his cape, a golden cup of wine in one of his four hands. From somewhere outside of the room he could hear the beat of a massive drum.

  A long shadow fell across the room, followed a moment later by a figure dressed in long silk robes: the demon sorcerer Shang Tsung. This time the sorcerer was alone.

  Goro looked up. He noted the absence of the two ninjas, Sub-Zero and Scorpion, and drew his own conclusions.

  “Is it time?” the prince asked. “So soon?”

  “Yes,” Shang replied. His dark eyes flared with bottomless flames. “We’ve let these humans win enough.”

  Goro rose slowly from his throne. His long hair was bound behind him in a ponytail that hung past his shoulders. His eyes flashed with expectation.

  “At last,” he said to Shang Tsung. “Now you will have yet another realm with which to play.” The half-dragon champion didn’t bother waiting for an answer, but swept past the sorcerer on his way into the maze of the cavern realm of Shokan.

  Behind him, Shang Tsung merely smiled.

  On the surface of the island night was falling fast. Only a day had passed since the Feast of Heroes, but to Sonya Blade the time seemed far longer. The whole day had been filled with fighting. So far, Sonya thought, she’d been a better – or a luckier – fighter than her opponents.

  She looked around. Both Johnny and Liu seem to have made it this far, too, but the Great Hall was far less crowded than it had been the night before. That didn’t look good.

  “Think they’re going to feed us again?” Johnny asked.

  Liu shook his head. “I don’t see any tables set up.”

  Up on a balcony, Sonya saw Shang Tsung sitting in a place of honor, a fan in his hands. As she looked up, Shang looked down. For a moment their eyes met. He smiled chillingly, and Sonya felt a shiver run up her spine. Shang held her with his eyes for a moment more before she was able to look away.

  Drums began to beat in the hall, and a weird skirl of flutes pulsed above them. From the outer doors a group of guards pressed inside, using their lances to rudely push the crowd aside, clearing the central area of the Great Hall.

  The huge drums beat in slow cadence as a massive shape darkened the door of the hall. From outside, his head nearly touching the top of the portal, Goro entered the Great Hall. His crimson cape ruffled in the breeze as he strode down the length of the hall. At last he stopped in front of Shang Tsung. The giant bowed to the sorcerer, then turned and removed his cape. The crowd gasped as he stood there, muscular body revealed, his four arms stretching out to the ceiling.

  On the balcony above, Shang Tsung stood.

  “The first day of Mortal Kombat has ended,” the sorcerer said into the sudden quiet. “Or nearly so. One fighter from the Realm of Earth has won more bouts than any other. Here, he will have the opportunity to face the champion of Outworld for the prize. Should the champion of Earth win, then the Realm of Earth is safe. Should he lose…” Here Shang Tsung paused to sweep his eyes over the assembled fighters. “…then Mortal Kombat will continue tomorrow.”

  “Who’s the champion?” Johnny whispered to Liu.

  “It isn’t me, that’s all I know,” Liu whispered back. “At least, not yet.”

  The drums beat again. A monk paced through the hall. A solitary human fighter walked behind him.

  Art Lean followed the silent, black-hooded monk to the cleared area in the center of the Great Hall. Art caught Johnny’s eye, and walked over to where the actor stood among the circle of fighters waiting outside the ring.

  “Hey, Johnny, any advice?” Art said. His tone was light and bantering, but his face was serious.

  Johnny looked over to where the huge Outworld champion was stretching, preparing himself for the bout, and tried not to show the dismay he felt.

  “Get a note from your mom and call in sick?” he suggested.

  “Too late for that, I’m afraid,” Art said. “I’ll just have to give it my best.”

  “Your best is damned good,” Johnny said. “You take him, and we can all go home.”

  “You got it,
my man,” Art said, laughing. He turned back to face Goro.

  A silent monk paced into the center of the cleared circle and held up his hand. Art and Goro bowed to one another. Then the monk withdrew and the fight began.

  Art and Goro circled one another slowly and cautiously at first, each sizing the other up. Then, without warning, Art gave a cry and launched a full attack, kicking and punching. The huge Shokan warrior didn’t bother to block or respond, taking the punishment. Art dropped back and resumed a defensive stance, breathing heavily.

  “Art Lean! Art Lean!” Johnny shouted. The crowd picked up the chant, cheering Art on.

  “It isn’t fair,” Sonya whispered under cover of the noise. “Art’s been fighting all day; Goro is fresh and rested.”

  “When demons are involved,” Liu whispered back, “‘fair’ just isn’t in it.”

  Again Art moved to the attack. He leapt, spinning into the air and lashed his leg out in a terrific kick. His foot took Goro in the center of his chest, staggering him, driving him back a step, making him bend over.

  “Art Lean!” the crowd cheered. “Art Lean!”

  Goro bellowed with rage, his voice shaking the rafters. Then he crouched, and moved to the attack.

  Art was hard-pressed to block the quadruple attack of the Outworld champion’s four fists. They seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. He attacked again, but Goro’s massive arms and legs blocked him. The four arms, moving almost too fast to see, were all around him. Art took one step back, then another.

  Now Goro was stalking Art, following him as he gave ground. The crowd grew silent, watching fascinated as Goro moved, huge yet graceful, not hurrying, yet not letting Art get a moment to rest or to regain his stance.

  Art seemed to hesitate, then launched another kick like the one which had staggered Goro before. But Johnny could see that his friend was tiring.

  “Art!” Johnny shouted. “Keep your distance!”

  But it was too late. Fast – blindingly fast – Goro’s lower arms snaked out and caught Art Lean in midair. Art struck out with his own arms, trying for Goro’s eyes, but his reach was too short. Goro held him suspended.