And Unjust Alike
Part 5 of 7 of my martial arts tournament series.
The tournaments had never been Soma's favorite time of the year.
It wasn't that the healer had anything against martial artists, but every time the tournaments came around, more of them would get hurt. The more of them got hurt, the more of them he kept having to patch up every time. Wasn't it enough that people would get hurt on their own time, he'd ask himself, shaking his serpentine head to himself?
Still, Mandrake seemed to get a lot out of it, and was even bringing a client to it this time, at that. Soma may have felt stuck guarding the grove that he considered it his responsibility to protect, but he wasn't about to discourage the therapist from one of his favorite forms of stress relief. If it could double as a form of therapy, so much the better - the dryad would simply have to air out his own frustrations with the otter more informally, he'd think.
Mandrake often wished he could've taken the spider-taur to it, as his shifting and web-vines would've made him a force to be reckoned with, but hadn't been able to talk him into it, at least not this time. Instead, the therapist had made it a point to spend the day leading up to the tournament in Soma's grove with him. The otter knew the combination of reptilian basking and plant photosynthesis made the hybrid much more energized at day than night.
As the sun had been setting, Mandrake had left his favorite witch doctor collapsed on the ground in a heap, sleeping like a log with a contented expression on his face, his parting kiss leaving a dewdrop on his partner's forehead.
These were the thoughts that lingered in the therapist's mind as semi-finals and his second battle that night were upon him. He hoped that not too many of the contestants would get hurt, so that they wouldn't give Soma too much work to do at the same time. He was also anticipating that, after how the previous fight had gone, Diaz's next therapy session was going to be one of his most intense ones yet, one upon which the otter would have to bring all of his professional training to bear.
There would have to be time to think of that later, Mandrake tried to tell himself. He remembered very well how the rabbit magician had used his propensity to turn over issues in his head against him, almost costing him the first fight. He had no intention of repeating the same mistake.
Klein held onto the rope as he leapt over it, his feet going over himself to land back on the ring in front of the rope as he did, hoping the orixas would side with him again. A dense raincloud hovered over the opposite side of the ring in front of the skunk. The localized puddle that formed under it rose while the drops fell, successively becoming Mandrake's feet, legs, torso and head as they did.
In addition to his obvious advantage, and in spite of whichever concerns may have been on his mind at the time, the otter looked absolutely imperturbable. Klein began to grow uneasy. "So, what's your thing?" the therapist tilted his head to the side inquisitively. "It didn't show."
Trying to make the most of the last that would be left of confusion he hadn't dared hope for, the skunk ran up to and leapt at the otter into a flying side kick by way of an answer. He was crossing his fingers that, expecting him to use some kind of supernatural power, his opponent would be surprised enough by the straightforwardness of his attack to be taken off guard by it. Unfortunately for him, Mandrake saw him coming a mile away, and grabbed his leg in midair while moving out of his way to throw him to the ground behind him.
Standing up from a twirling kip up, Klein strove not to look as embarrassed as he felt. "Uh, that's pretty much it," he sheepishly punctuated that with. "That's all?" The therapist seemed almost too dismayed, for someone whose chances of winning looked better by the second.
Forfeiting his more telegraphed opening approach, the skunk tried to break out of his adversary's comfort zone, closing in for a hand chop to the neck which the otter parried and grabbed. "Then you will lose," Mandrake assessed with apparent emotional neutrality, his other hand joining the first as his turning shoulder found Klein's armpit to pull the skunk's arm down over his shoulder, flipping him forward on his back on the ground in front of him. "That's all there is to it."
The otter flipped onto his own back with one leg extended, his heel narrowly missing Klein's upper body as the skunk sat up into an away-facing crouch from having been taken down. "You know, for a therapist, you're not very motivational," he retorted tongue-in-cheek as a half-turning cartwheel brought one of his own feet down on the prone shifter's form. His expectations were regrettably broken when the unpleasant feeling that greeted his landfall turned out to be more like getting your feet soaked by stepping into a puddle by a sidewalk than anything else.
"That's cheating!" Klein stuck his tongue out as the therapist flowed back into his humanoid shape in front of him. "If that's how you think," Mandrake answered while going down on his back with the skunk's wrists in his hands, "you really shouldn't have joined," he finished while pushing Klein over him to the ground behind him with his foot. Rolling forward to break his fall as the otter rolled back and half-turned to face him, the skunk bent over to grab the therapist's ankles between his legs behind him, hoping to pull them off the ground to make the otter fall on his back.
"I was able to win the first time, wasn't I?" Before Klein's plan could come to fruition, Mandrake had already used the fact that the skunk had had to bend to attempt his takedown to jump on Klein's back, removing his feet from the ground as targets while forcing the skunk to hold him up. "Ah yes, so if you do beat me, you'll either end up against your first opponent's favorite friend with benefits," the otter responded as the skunk jumped back on his own back hoping to squash the therapist between his back and the ground behind him, "or against my most devoted client after having beaten me," he continued, reforming sitting on Klein's chest after the skunk's back had painfully splashed against the ground without resistance instead.
"I'm sure neither of them would take out any resentment on you for it, aren't you?" the shifter grinned wickedly as he punched Klein's face a few times from his dominating hold. The impact of Mandrake's words wasn't lost on the skunk. The chimera and Diaz had been terrifying to watch, and the thought of ending up against either of them was already frightening enough without having thought about the fact that either of them would be trying to avenge their favorite person's defeat at his hands.
"Not that you should be worrying about what'll happen if you win," the otter chuckled while rolling back to his feet as Klein pried him off from on top of him by crossing his shins in front of Mandrake's neck and pulling them back down, "at the rate at which things are going right now." The skunk barely rolled aside to his feet out of the path of the therapist's leaping elbow drop, trying to use the fact that the shifter's arm was already on the ground to bring his knee down on it so as to pin the otter down.
"Devoted is right," Klein growled, looking up from his kneel as Mandrake dissolved under his drenched knee to return to a solid state standing in front of him yet again. Not giving the otter time to counter-attack that time, the skunk went from his kneel onto his hands, sending his legs forward over him around the therapist's shoulders. As Klein pushed himself up to sit on the shifter's shoulders with his shins behind Mandrake's back, he cursed aloud when his fist went right through the already fluid head of the mass of water he was now resting on.
But he *really* swore up and down when, his support having vanished, he fell flat on his ass to the ground with his striped tail soaking wet. "And why shouldn't he be?" the re-coalescing otter asked defiantly while slapping the sitting skunk across the face with his brown-furred tail, confident that he could counter any criticism that could be sent his way. The therapist had sent him skittering across the ring so far that Klein had to grab onto the rope with his arms on his way out of it to flip himself forward over the rope back onto the ring to avoid sliding out of it.
How in the world was he ever possibly going to be able to beat someone like that, the skunk asked himself dejectedly? The shifter went through a blurry series of unstable drunken fist stances before him, his tail and arms half-turning to watery tendrils as traces of mist trailed behind them in their path. Mandrake was keeping the fight on the ground and at close range.
He could keep Klein trapped in throws, holds and ground attacks at will for as long as he wanted to, whereas the skunk had no chance of getting a lasting grip on him at all. The cold wetness from stepping in all those puddles was sending pain shooting through the arches of his feet. More than anything, he was tired of being told by everyone that he was going to lose because of his misunderstanding of what cheating and fairness meant in a place like the Bolgia.
His striped head gestured at Diaz in the audience watching them. "You mean you know he's in love with you?" The otter's jaw dropped. "WHAT?"
Klein went down into a one-handed handstand and, with his legs joined, side-kicked Mandrake out of the ring with both feet.