“Who’d he call?” He had to yell so I could hear him. The crowd’s noise level had been going up all night, and at this point, we could barely hear the speakers over the roar. “What was the name?”
I shrugged and yelled back, “Kyle ‘the Hangman’ something? Or maybe Skylar ‘the Hangman’? Something like that.”
Down below, a long-legged Ylef girl swaggered out of the tunnel, clapping her green grappling gloves together. Short, seafoam-green hair bounced around her pointed ears. Dark green tattoos covered her arms, but I couldn’t see any healing script in them. Apparently, they were just for decoration.
Next to me, Warcry let out a string of curses.
“I bleedin’ knew it! Move, grav,” he snapped, shoving me toward the exit.
I shook him off. “What? No, I want to watch the match.”
“Fine, sod off then.” He shouldered past me.
Down in the octagon, another girl—this one on the shorter, muscly side—pounded her chest and pointed from the Ylef to the floor of the ring.
The Ylef smirked around her mouth guard, then let her head loll to the side like her neck was broken and dragged her glove up into the air. A glowing green noose of Spirit appeared around her throat.
The official dropped his hand. The girls hit the Ki-speed and shot toward each other like somebody had fired them out of cannons.
Halfway to the stairs, Warcry froze.
The smaller girl blinked invisible and visible again as she streaked toward the Ylef, disappearing for four- or five-foot stretches at a time. Or maybe she was actually teleporting; I couldn’t tell. The distance she could move was short, but I could see how it would disorient an opponent right off the bat.
The green-haired Ylef stopped dead. A net of green Spirit so thin it was barely there surrounded her like a spiderweb, covering the whole cage.
The short girl appeared ten feet away, then five feet, then the Ylef tipped her head and slipped a Ki-strengthened punch that appeared out of nowhere. Before the smaller girl had a chance to stop her forward momentum, the Ylef nailed her in the gut with a knee and the back of the head with an elbow at the same time.
The smaller girl blinked out and reappeared behind the Ylef, throwing another massive haymaker. She must’ve been used to the teleportation making her unstoppable, because she threw all her power into every shot like she was never going to get countered.
But the Ylef ducked under the punch and spun into her. Somehow in the heartbeat it took the smaller girl to recover, the Ylef wrapped her arms around the smaller girl’s neck and her long legs around the smaller girl’s thighs. As they went down, the Ylef tucked herself into her opponent’s back and arched like her spine was made out of bendy straws.
The crowd went ballistic, as if everybody had been waiting to see her pull that exact move. Somebody crammed onto the walkway behind me screamed, “Hang ’er, Hyla!”
On the floor of the ring, the smaller girl’s eyes bugged out with the pain, but she didn’t tap out. She strobed, leaving the Ylef empty-handed again.
The Ylef popped to her feet, seemingly alone in the center of the octagon. That microwire green Spirit web flashed around her. Her shoulders shuddered like she’d just gotten a chill down her spine, and she whipped her head around to look behind her.
This time the smaller girl popped back into existence above and behind the Ylef with her axe kick already falling. The Ylef stepped into its trajectory, her long leg flashing out. Her straight kick beat the axe by a mile, heel catching the smaller girl on the chin. The smaller girl’s head snapped backward on her shoulders like she’d been hit with a sledgehammer instead of a foot. She dropped, out cold.
The kokugikan lost its mind, the whole building shaking with the noise. The Jumbotron replayed the kick in super slow motion while, down below in the ring, the Ylef leapt up onto the octagon’s black chain link and punched the air with one bright seafoam glove. People started chanting “Hang-MAN! Hang-MAN! Hang-MAN!”
I stuck my fingers in my mouth and whistled. That had been awesome.
The whistle seemed to snap Warcry out of his paralyzation. He headed for the exit again. Red fire flared down his shoulders. Spectators and a food vendor cleared out of his way.
I shoved my way through screaming fight fans to catch up with him.
Burning Hatred vs. the Hangman
I FELL IN BESIDE WARCRY out in the carpeted lobby, speed walking to keep up.
“What’s your hurry?” I asked him. “Trying to beat traffic?”
Either he didn’t hear me or he wasn’t interested in answering the question. He took a sharp turn away from the doors to the street.
Off in the far corner, a rope barrier had been set up across a dimly lit hallway with a sign that said Staff Only hanging from it. Warcry smacked the stanchion out of his way and stalked through. I checked to make sure we weren’t going to get yelled at, then followed him, setting the stanchion back up behind me.
Around a sharp corner, we hit an intersection. Warcry took the hallway leading downward.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Our footsteps echoed off the bare concrete floors and cinderblock walls.
“Locker rooms.” Warcry jammed his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and glared at the doors along the walls. “One of these is hers.”
I stopped. “Whose? That Ylef fighter with the green hair?”
Instead of answering, he dropped against the wall and crossed his arms, then pushed off and started pacing again.
A door clunked and squealed somewhere, letting in a fraction of the noise from the arena.
Warcry stopped in his tracks.
“Dude, why are we lying in wait down here like psychos?”
“Shut it,” he snapped. “Someone’s coming.”
The sound of footsteps drifted down the sloped hall toward us, playing backbeat to a pair of voices.
A girl asked, “Did I win? When do I get
