by Scott Sigler
He beat Canwolf in thirty-nine seconds of the very first round. The previously undefeated champion tried to tie him up so he couldn’t unleash his hands, but Chai simply tossed Canwolf on his head and smashed him with his knees until “The Wolf” was reduced to a whimpering puppy.
The noise from the grandstand was deafening. Bishops filled the ring, fighting with each other to congratulate and have their image captured alongside the new champion. And oh, the after-party. Black market liquor flowed, choral rock music blared, and they treated Chai like the High One himself. He was the best fighter in the galaxy, he had the title, and his father had lined up a trio of blue-skinned beauties to rub them both down back at the hotel. He had arrived.
But first, Chai wanted one last drink.
He picked the bar at random, mostly because it was frothing over with alien races, still a new sight for Chai. The place erupted when he walked in. They’d all watched the Crusaders event holocast live, and everyone, it seemed, wanted to congratulate the champ with back slaps and free drinks.
But not the Quyth Warriors.
There were three of them, all over 6 feet tall, their tough carapaces decorated with engravings and painted enamel designs — their species’ equivalent of tattoos. Their pedipalps extended from either side of their vertical mouths knotted with muscle. Chai didn’t recognize Brocka the Razor-Barbed. Why would he? At that point in his life, Chai had no conception of fighting outside the Purist Nation, and like all other organized sports within the church, no non-Humans were allowed to compete.
Brocka said something in the Quyth language that Chai immediately assumed was complimenting his fight.
Until everyone in the bar who spoke Quyth started laughing.
“What’d he say about me?” Chai asked the bartender, who seemed to be able to take drink orders in every tongue spoken in the place.
“Don’t translate from Quyth real well,” the gruff man told him. “I guess the closest thing would be schoolyard bully.”
Chai had received the same training as other children in school, or a version of it at least. They were all taught how to kill the so-called “satanic” races. But those classes were conducted strictly in the abstract, no more than basic anatomy lessons. None of that training could possibly have prepared Chai for starting a bar brawl, not just with a Quyth Warrior, but with a Quyth professional fighter.
Chai could never have guessed how strong a Quyth’s pedipalps really were until those two pinchers clamped down on the corners of his mouth and Chai couldn’t break free. He tried to come over the top with punches, but Brocka merely bent his pedipalps out and up and laughed as Chai’s blows bounced off the thickly muscled appendages. Brocka used the massive arms just above his waist to bash Chai’s midsection, racking what felt like his entire being with beautiful, lightning-fast combinations that made Chai’s knees buckle and his eyes roll back.
When Chai dropped his hands to try and defend his rib cage, Brocka closed the thick, leathery lid over his single apple-sized eye and rammed the gravelly ridges of chitin surrounding it into Chai’s face. Chai’s nose would require two rounds of surgery before it would resemble something even vaguely Human again, but that was nothing compared to Brocka’s pinchers tearing huge gashes up his cheeks, to the pain as those cheeks split clean through to leave Chai a grotesque clown smile.
The Quyth Warrior left him a crimson-masked half-corpse on the barroom floor. Until that night, Chai had never even been hurt in a fight, barely been tagged, let alone maimed. Brocka wasn’t laughing when he walked away. Despite the pain, all the blood, the fear, Chai remembered that distinctly. Brocka was no longer amused. He was disgusted.
As Chai suffered through weeks of healing in a rejuve tank, that bar fight consumed his every thought. Not because he was stripped of his newly won title for brawling outside the ring. Not because he’d been humiliated before the whole of the Purist Nation. Not even because he craved revenge on the Quyth Warrior.
No. It was because on that night, before his run-in with Brocka, Chai had been convinced he was the best. But he was nothing. Worse than that. He was a pimple on the ass of nothing. He should’ve felt honored that a fighter of Brocka’s caliber would even take the time to pop him.
The decision was made in a microsecond. When reporter Yolanda Davenport broke the story of Chaiyal busting his contract with the Crusaders, the controversy shocked the Purist Nation system. The story also started a legend, a legend that quickly spread to every fringe colony in the outer rim. The religious leaders banished Chaiyal, but that was fine with him. He left the Purist Nation, never to return.
That was three years ago. Now, he found himself staring across the Octagon at Brocka the Razor-Barbed. A rematch of sorts, except this time the prize wasn’t walking out of a bar. This time, the prize was the GFA heavyweight championship. Not some Human-only worthless title like Crusaders, but the baddest sentient of all races, of the entire galaxy.
Baddest, save for one — Korak the Cutter, the heavyweight champion of the rival promotion, the IFA.
But first things first.
Chai would revel in this kill once he made it. He was prepared to take everything away from Brocka, to prove that he, Chaiyal North, had become the superior fighter. Though he would never admit it to another living being, Chai respected the Quyth Warrior more than anyone else he’d ever met. Brocka was his first teacher, and the lesson Chai learned from him in the bar that night forged a complete fighter and a complete man from the raw, ignorant child Chai had been. He would honor the alien silently for the rest of his life.
• • •
“The challenger is showing the champion no respect at all!”
Tony Baron, the silky-voiced senior commentator for the GFA, didn’t bother to hide either his admiration or his shock. “This is a massacre!”
“We are not yet out of the first round,” said Lessock the Saged, Baron’s Quyth Leader announcing partner. “No one could have anticipated what we are seeing here tonight.”
Brocka’s pedipalps dangled limply from either side of the Quyth Warrior’s vertical mouth, destroyed by vicious punches and torturous hand and arm locks before the first minute of the fight closed out. The swiftness of The Heretic’s attack was matched only by its brutality. Marcus had been right, they didn’t see him coming, and now the sudden, stark truth of the situation was being carved bloody and deep on their faces.
Brocka the Razor-Barbed, GFA heavyweight champion, was seconds away from losing his crown, perhaps his life, and everyone in the arena knew it.
His vertical base had been destroyed, leaving the Quyth Warrior wide open. Despite this, Brocka wouldn’t allow himself to be reduced to walking on all fours in front of his Human challenger, and that was the last mistake Brocka would ever make.
Chaiyal feinted with an overhand right, the weapon that had been rocking Brocka on his heels. The Quyth Warrior took the bait, rearing back as he tried to dodge the blow. The Heretic dropped almost to his knees, in one smooth motion changing levels and wrapping his arms around Brocka’s waist, bent his knees and launched both of them into the air. The Heretic and his 400-pound burden seemed to hang, suspended, 10 feet above the surface. Chaiyal spun their bodies around and around like a zero-G death roll. And just when time seemed to halt, just when they looked as though they could levitate there forever, gravity ran its course. Chai slammed Brocka down to the canvas.
The Quyth’s reinforced spine took the full brunt of the impact, shattering to the core and sending electric fire into the back of Brocka’s brain.
“The Heretic has broken Brocka the Razor-Barbed in half! This fight is over! THIS – FIGHT – IS – OVER! Chaiyal North is the new GFA heavyweight champion!”
Chai stared down at the former champion. The force of the final blow had split Brocka’s carapace down the center. A jagged crack opened no wider than a half-inch, but it was enough. Chai knelt and slid his fingers deep into the crack. He gripped each edge, then with all the force left in his arms, he
pulled his hands apart. The hard shell splintered and broke, splaying Brocka’s carapace wide open.
“What the ... ” Tony’s ring-commentator voice faded. His normal voice — a little whiney, a little thin — showed his disbelief. “What in High One’s name is he doing?”
Chai shucked Brocka’s chest plate, exposing the spongy topography of the now former champion’s innards. The organs within the blackish abscess were almost indistinguishable to Chai. Then he saw it, pumping clear and strong despite Brocka’s shattered spine. The Quyth’s heart looked like a blue worm with pulsing white veins. He watched its tight rings shrink at one end, then seem to slide all the way up the heart’s 12-inch length, then the cycle started anew.
The HeavyKi ref attempted to tackle Chai, but a stiff kick to the hexagonal mouth stopped him short. The ref’s five-eyed head snapped back, and he just stood there, stunned.
Tony’s panicked voice echoed throughout the arena. “Someone get in there!”
Chai reached inside and closed his gnarled fist around Brocka’s heart. He stared down into the Quyth Warrior’s single eye, and in that brief moment, Brocka looked up at him ... and nodded. Every hardened muscle in Chai’s hand and arm contracted as he ripped the worm-heart from Brocka’s ravaged chest.
The crowd roared with cries of outrage, cries of ecstasy, cries of revulsion. The Heretic held Brocka’s heart aloft, his face a demon mask of fury and vengeance. But inside Chaiyal was calm. This was his moment. With Brocka the Razor-Barbed crushed at his feet, with the championship won, with all eyes on him, this was his moment to introduce The Heretic to the galaxy.
Chai squeezed the heart of his enemy in his hand, feeling it continue to beat, the worm-rings coursing up its length, weaker and weaker each time. He let the last few pumped drops of blood run down his arm, staring at Brocka’s life force clutched between his knuckles.
He heard the bell ringing. He heard the Octagon door opening, the scrambling of many Ki feet as security rushed in. He had time for one more thing.
Chai bit into the still-pumping heart, taking its power, the past, taking its strength. Just before the security team dragged him down, he looked at one spot in the stands, one spot ringside, where he knew he’d see the single Quyth Warrior eye of Korak the Cutter.
• • •
“... and our TOP story tonight on Battleverse, Chaiyal North goes berserk, defeating Brocka the Razor-Barbed to win the GFA heavyweight title and then murdering Brocka in the middle of the ring. I was there, folks, I was there, and it was barbaric.”
“I have to disagree, Chick,” said Masara the Observant. “They are Warriors, prepared to die every time they step into the Octagon. Fighters get killed all the time.”
“Not like that, Masara, Brocka was down, defeated. It was over. That’s not a fight-related death, that’s murder.”
“He probably would have died anyway.”
“But we don’t know that,” Chick said. “Doctors were ringside. That’s not the way the GFA works.”
“Well, that’s how a Quyth Warrior works, Chick. Believe it or not, that’s how Brocka would have wanted it. He died in the ring.”
“It’s murder to kill a defeated fighter, it doesn’t matter what race it is.”
“Race completely matters,” Masara said. “I wouldn’t expect Humans to understand. Well, all of you except for The Heretic. There’s one Human who seems to know exactly how things should be.”
His massive 6-foot-9 frame reclining on the bio-rack, his neck and cranium tightly secured in a metallic harness, Chai watched the meaningless debate between Masara the Observant and Chick McGee play out. He all but ignored Jorgie Klar working on his head and Bennett Klar’s efforts to graft new skin on his knuckles.
A small split-screen was situated in the corner of the full-length diagnostic holo projected above the bio-rack. The rest of the holo was filled with a transparent image outlining every electrical system and hard augment in Chai’s body. The commentators, the diagnostics, he watched all of it with only moderate attention. What really held his focus was the black strip at the bottom of the holodisplay, the one that gave running commentary on a closed-door meeting of the GFA Commission.
That strip would tell him if he was still the champ or if the commissioners had stripped his title.
He flicked his eyes to the upper-left corner, changing the channel while leaving the black strip at the bottom. He scanned the news channels, ESPN, GNN. He was the talk of the universe. Many were saying that Chai was the undisputed champion of the galaxy, while others insisted that Brocka was over the hill, and the victory proved nothing. Some called for a permanent ban on both the Galactic Fighting Association and its rival promotion, the Intergalactic Fighting Association, calling the sport of unlimited mixed martial arts barbaric. Primitive.
As if they knew. Chai, Korak, Brocka, their brothers-in-arms. They were the real mark of civilization. Both MMA promotions made too damn much money to be shut down by anything other than the Creterakian overlords. As long as all fighter mods were accurately reported, and the fighters were tracked with embedded locators, the bats didn’t seem to care.
Above the head harness, Jorgie Klar peeled the protective sack that cradled Chai’s brain. Chai could hear the wet, static-cling sound of the membranous layer being stripped away, even though he couldn’t feel it. Jorgie had shut down his pain and pressure systems to do the maintenance.
“I told you to watch your hand speed,” Jorgie said. He wore a Medusa glove with thread-thin electrodes squirming from each fingertip. With a deft touch, Jorgie introduced the end of each snake-like ‘trode into Chai’s gray matter. “We spec’ed your hurricane attack at five-point-two before the fight. You were working your fists at a factor of nine-point-six at the end there. Even these digital axons can’t handle that kind of signal output. You fried three dozen of the things and burned one of the terminals. If it weren’t for your back-up system, you’d be a brain-dead, drooling rag doll right now. Not to mention the tissue damage that forced me to laze the top of your damn skull off to fix.”
Chai stopped at ESPN. They were replaying Chai’s hurricane hooks on Brocka’s extremities. The punching flurry was one of his trademark attacks, and the faster he worked his hands, the louder the crowd exploded.
“You gotta give the people what they want, Jorgie,” Chai said with his customary casualness. Stick a mic in his face or point a holorecorder at him, and he was electric. He was The Heretic. He mesmerized and infuriated with his words and his personality. But in private, Chai was a walking flatline. Nothing mattered to him other than the training, the fights and the crowds.
“Lay off the champ,” Bennett said. “Do you ever back off? Why don’t you climb off the rag and let the man bask in the glory for a minute or two?”
Bennett worked the flesh-melder along Chai’s adamantium-reinforced knuckles. The hurricane hooks had stripped much of the flesh away, another reason to go easy on the speed.
“You’re a jerk,” Jorgie said. “When you’ve got three separate neurological doctorates, you can tell me what to do. Until then you’re a shucking glorified orthopedic surgeon, and you should know your place.”
“Bite me,” Bennett said. “I’ve got to repair all the muscles he tore up in his shoulders with that last power bomb. That’s just what you do when your guy just won the belt, that’s why you don’t hear me bitching.”
The Klar brothers were the best tandem combat wetware techs in the League of Planets, but they argued like an old married couple. It never disturbed Chai, however. But then, very little did.
Another, much more ragged voice joined the conversation from across the room. “Just heard from Brocka’s people,” Marcus said as he entered the bio-chamber. “They congratulate you on your honorable defeat of their fighter and respectfully ask that you return the remains of his heart once they’ve passed through your system. Something about Quyth burial rituals.”
Brocka’s heart. The reaction from the crowd had been epic on every
level, really legendary right down to five Ki security guards dragging Chai down as Brocka’s blood spilled across the canvas ... but Chai almost regretted it now, just as he almost regretted Brocka’s death at his hands. Chai didn’t have the prejudices most Humans harbored against the so-called “satanic” races. Growing up with the father he had, Chai realized early in life that most of what a holy man said was bullcrap. And the Quyth fighter had earned more than his respect, he’d changed Chai’s life, made him better, made him a man.
“Shuck him,” Chai said. “It’s my trophy.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Marcus asked. “Pick the pieces out of your crap and have ‘em cast in gold?”
The corner of Chai’s mouth formed an almost imperceptible grin at the older man. It was from Marcus that Chai took The Heretic persona. Marcus Diablo, his longtime coach and trainer. Marcus Diablo, the greatest champion that never was. Marcus Diablo, who’d come close several times in his career, but just couldn’t seem to put it all together when the title was on the line. Chai liked him because he was a church outcast. He was banished from the Purist Nation like the devil, and he’d fought like one, too.
Marcus glanced briefly at the ESPN holocast. The image showed Brocka’s early first-round attempt at a wristlock submission. “I thought he had you with that. Looked like it was in deep.”
“Naw,” Chai said. “I was just playing with him.”
“Right,” Bennett said. “That why I just fused the three broken bones there?”
