Moments later, we’d landed on the roof of that lame industrial warehouse, and Carl the Hunchback was leading me through a maze of equally lame hallways. No retina scans, no electronic keypads, not even a fucking Brinks security guard. I don’t even think the drywall was finished.
We went through one twist and turn after another. It felt like we had been walking for hours—and like they could’ve at least sent a golf cart to pick me up?—when finally we came to a big set of double doors.
And what was on the other side of those doors—that was pretty fucking cool.
I mean, not as cool as super-piranhas and impaled heads. But still, pretty fucking cool.
Spread out below me was a massive arena, twice the size of a football stadium, like Jerry Jones would see the size of this place and shit himself.
It was teeming with tens of thousands of spectators, packed as tight as they could get, shoulder to shoulder, practically on top of each other—definitely a pre-COVID situationII—all of them standing, screaming, pumping their fists, waving around money to place their bets, and straight-up crackling with ENERGY and FIRE and POWER and THUNDER and SMOKE and ENERGY.
We’re talking brown people, ochre people, taupe people, black people, white people, people from every country on the planet, sweating through their clothes and speaking every language you could imagine in a booming, echoing roar.
YAYAYAYA!
And I could see why they weren’t worried about security outside—each one of these spectators inside was armed to the teeth. Switchblades, throwing stars, nunchaku, lasers, swords, scythes—seriously, who brings a scythe?—and every kind of gun. Depending on your POV, it was either the safest place in the world or the scariest.
And the Doctor doesn’t do fear.
Carl the Hunchback led me down the longest, narrowest staircase I’d ever seen in my life. On each side of us, the hoodlums and riffraff screamed curses and threats.
“You’ll never leave here alive, Two-Time!”
“We’ll put your head on a pike!”
“What kind of conditioner do you use? Your mullet is vivacious!”
I laughed. This was my kind of crowd.
We reached the central arena, a giant bloodstained platform surrounded by a chain-link fence and rusty barbed wire. Inside was the latest in gaming technology—plasmas even bigger than mine, Xboxes even more advanced than mine, the next, unreleased generation of Halo—how the fuck did they get that??—even more experimentally prototyped than mine.
Packed in the center of it all were the other competitors, must’ve been twenty or thirty of them from all over the world wearing their various indigenous garbs: lederhosen, babushkas, keffiyehs, sandals with socks. Who even knows what country that last dude was from—probably Kiribati or something.
And way up above us all, a towering, massive, five-hundred-foot HD pixel display so the entire arena could watch the action.
The lights dimmed and the crowd grew quieter—meaning they sounded like a slightly less deafening tsunami. Then I spotted this balcony high above the central stage, hidden mostly in shadows, except for the outline of a golden throne in the middle.
On that throne there was this figure, almost entirely invisible in the dark except for his two hands. Except instead of two hands he had one normal left hand, and his right hand was—get this—nothing but an Xbox controller at the end of a stumpy amputated wrist.
I know, right? Fucking crazy!
“That,” Carl the Hunchback whispered, “is the mysterious leader of the Brotherhood, Lord Hannn.”
“So, like, the same as the dude from Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon?”
“No. This Hannn spells his name with three Ns. Very different!”
“Yeah, okay—hey, can we talk about that thing at the end of his right arm? Is that, like, an Xbox controller?”
“Yes, Lord Hannn takes gaming incredibly seriously. So he cut off his right hand and permanently replaced it with an Xbox controller.”
“So… there’s some kind of bionic circuitry that runs from the controller through his arm and into his brain or something so he can just think the inputs?”
“No, he still has to push all the buttons and everything. He pretty much just cut off his hand and added an Xbox controller.”
“But, like, now he has to push all the buttons with just one hand?”
“Obviously.”
“Is he at least, you know, left-handed?”
“No, he is right-handed. Why?”
“Bro, no one even LIKES the original Xbox controller! It’s clunky and awkward with HORRIBLE game play! And now your supreme leader cuts off his good hand just so he can attach it to his bloody stump and awkwardly play Xbox with his off hand for the rest of his life? What if he wants to play on a PlayStation sometime? Or a GameCube? Or even an OG Atari 2600? Hell, what if he wants to write a simple letter with a pen and paper and decent handwriting! IT MAKES NO SENSE!!!”
“I’m not following. But quiet! He’s going to speak!”
A big, booming voice echoed throughout the arena as the hands—or the one hand and the one Xbox controller—rose into the air.
“I wish to welcome you all—esteemed members of the Brotherhood, honored guests, cutthroat violent gangsters, and of course our handpicked elite gaming champions from across the globe—to this, the one thousand two hundred seventieth annual KEFVGAAIR!”
The crowd started chanting immediately.
“KEFVGAAIR! KEFVGAAIR! KEFVGAAIR!”
TBH, it sounded a lot like the Kumite chant in Bloodsport, except with a different word that was more awkward to pronounce.
“Every year for centuries,” Hannn boomed, “the Brotherhood has gathered here, in this nondescript, absolutely top secret, and totally secure warehouse, to choose the world’s greatest living gamer! The level of competition here is unparalleled, the violence is unmatched. The skill and dominance that this tournament has witnessed over the millennia—nothing can compare!”
“KEFVGAAIR! KEFVGAAIR! KEFVGAAIR!”
“And yet I, Lord Hannn, truly believe that the competition with us here today is the greatest we’ve ever had before. And I do
