The Rising Sea

22

The horn blew and round 4 began. Joe noticed a new tactic from his opponent. The man was no longer charging forth, trying to land a deadly blow. Instead, he was hanging back, waiting for Joe to move first. Perhaps he was tiring. Or maybe it was a new tactic born out of Joe’s ability to evade him.

Joe looked his opponent in the eye. The man waved Joe forward, daring him to move closer. Joe shook his head. The big man repeated his gesture, swinging the remaining stick in the air as if to challenge him. Still, Joe held his ground and the fight turned into a stalemate.

With the combatants circling each other instead of attacking, the crowd began to whistle. Soon a chant began. Joe didn’t understand the words, but he felt the intensity growing.

The ground began to move under his feet. Not side to side but vertically. The outside edge of the circular ring was rising up, the planks being lifted by a hydraulic jack. A small section in the middle remained flat, but that was it. What had been a large circular arena — with plenty of room to move about in — began transforming into a funnel that would force the warriors into close combat.

The big guy smiled at this development and walked calmly down to the center of the funnel.

Joe held his position, crouching as the angle of the floor grew steeper. He dropped lower to keep his center of gravity down, put a hand on the floor to keep himself balanced, but as the angle passed forty-five degrees, his feet began to slip.

The crowd was chanting deliriously now. Anticipating the moment Joe would fall and tumble into the arms of the giant.

Joe knew he couldn’t hold on much longer. At any moment, the friction holding him in place would be overcome by the force of gravity.

Instead of remaining still and trying to hold off the inevitable, he leapt up and ran. But he didn’t run straight at his opponent, he ran at an angle, cutting across the funnel and down. Picking up momentum, he was able to curve back up the opposite slope like a speeding car on a banked turn.

The big man swept at his feet, but Joe leapt over the attack and then whacked his oversized opponent in the back of the head as he passed him.

The big man fell with a heavy thud as Joe ran up the far side of the banked platform. He was about to make another high-speed attack when the bottom dropped out. Literally.

The pneumatic hiss told the story, but Joe heard it too late. Large valves had been opened and the pent-up pressure holding the floor panels up released. The floorboards fell back to their original state and Joe fell with them, slamming against the solid ground.

Stunned, he rolled over. “That’s just not fair.”

He looked up to see his opponent rushing in. The muscle-bound specimen of a man grabbed the staff and pulled it out of Joe’s hand. Almost immediately, it came swinging back Joe’s way with deadly force.

Joe covered up. His natural instinct as a boxer was to bring his left arm up and protect his head. The stick crashed against Joe’s flexed bicep and forearm but still caught the side of his head with a glancing blow.

His legs felt like jelly. A voice in his head told him to get up and run, but it was drowned out by the ringing sound in his ears.

He tried for a crawling position, before falling to his side and then rolling over on his back. He lay that way, staring straight up. There was no ref to count him out, only the blinding glare of the lights up above. A perfect square of incandescence with an impenetrably dark section in the center.

For a second, the giant stood over Joe, blocking the light. But the horn sounded and the big man walked off rather than attempting to finish Joe.

“Chivalry isn’t dead after all,” Joe said to himself.

As he lay there waiting for the feeling to return to his legs, something fell toward him from up above. At first, Joe thought it was his imagination, but it hit the deck next to him, bounced and then rolled in a curved path until it bumped against his ribs.

He turned on his side, innate curiosity driving him to see what had fallen from the rafters. Grasping it with his fingers, he plucked the object from the floor. It was a five-yen coin, with its brassy color and hole in the middle. A token of good luck.

Joe’s spirits soared. He looked back up to the rafters just as the bank of overhead lights went out.