Chapter 6.2

On game day, I did a quick scan of the rat ogre. There's bad news and good news. The bad news is that his strength score was, as I expected, a 5. The good news is he's had several injuries that have affected his mobility and defence. So, if we all come at him together, there's a good chance of knocking him out with either a knockout or an injury.

The rest of the Skaven players surprised me only by drinking a lot of water and shivering as if they were cold. But judging by the sour look on the referee's face, they didn't use doping or any other banned substances.

The referee waves, and we take our places on the line. I'm up against rat ogre. Fucking stinks like a rat found in a rubbish bin and then kept in a vat of shit for hours.

I wait for the whistle and when I see the ball coming our way, I lower my body and get ready to make rough contact with the rat ogre. The guys on my sides have to hold off the skaven while I keep him busy.

Abruptly both teams begin to scramble. Rat Ogre tries to make a tackle, but I dodge, while preparing to elbow him as hard as I can, right in the jaw or nose if I'm lucky. The claws on his paw slip through my armour with an unpleasant scratching sound, and my elbow is already going for the big guy's nose with all my might. He jerks his head at the last moment and instead of a possible knockout, he gets a disorienting blow to the jaw.

It wasn't enough to knock him down, so I kicked him in the knee, forcing him lower. Trying not to breathe through my nose because of the stench from his mouth, I start punching his face like a boxer, building up the pace. I had to do two jabs and three hooks before he finally fell face first into the grass. I just started to help the guys on my sides, kicking one scaven and hitting the other with my fist right in his ear as I hear the ref's whistle and the crowd cheering. I turn around and see a gutter runner standing in our scoring area with his foot on the ball. And not far from him lies our thrower who is trying to strangle another ditch runner.

- Those are some nimble critters. - I was immediately reminded of the unpleasantness of the Skaven.

Skaven, of course, are weak and not particularly strong bastards, but quite agile and most importantly very fast creatures. And ditch runners are masters of quick dashes for or with the ball. It seems that while the rest of the team was busy beating up linemen and storm troopers, the two runners managed to get to the thrower and snatch the ball and bring it into the end zone.

Grim ran out to the edge of the field and started berating the other players for letting those two get around. Then he looked at me and sighed. He realises that until I deal with the rat ogre expect me to break into the enemy zone and the team will have to work the old fashioned way without their joker.

In a little while.

- Die already! - I put my fist in the rat-o-rag's face, but he stubbornly holds on.

It's only through luck and the fact that he's dumb as a cork that I manage to even out the difference in strength. The exchange of blows costs us equally badly, he is stronger but less protected and I am exactly the opposite. It's a stalemate, but it's actually worse. While I'm busy being a rat-ghost my team has already scored two goals, albeit at the cost of a Skaven player's crushed skull. It's not evenly matched, no matter how you look at it.

And so it goes on until the half-time whistle. The atmosphere in the locker room is sullen, the score is 3-0 and it's still not clear how we can get out of this shitty situation.

- Baha, I know I'm asking you to do the near impossible, to take on the rat-ghost alone, but without that we don't have much of a chance of winning. - Grim looks at me with hope in his eyes, though he must realise that I'm doing my best.

- Grim, if you're willing to take the risk, you can spare one of the guys to help me, and while the overgrown rats are smashing our defences I'll try to take out their main strongman. At the very least, I'll have to draw a hard foul and go to the bench for the rest of the game. - I'm briefly outlining options to break this stalemate and each of those options is not particularly pleasant.

- Shit, if we lose you, our chances of winning don't get much better than they are now. - Grim starts cursing, but then our attention is caught by a tail flickering round the corner.

We rushed there together, hoping to catch the enemy player before he could do something nasty or just catch him in a dirty game. But to our surprise, instead of an assassin or saboteur, we saw an enemy player trying to steal our food.

Grim stopped the little bastard from escaping by stepping on his tail, and I grabbed him by the neck. Instead of lashing out or trying to bite my hand, the skaven began to chew on the food. From the looks of it, the fear of death at our hands seemed weaker than hunger.

This left us in a kind of stupor, of course I had heard that food was not easy to come by and hunger was a common occurrence, but this was something out of the ordinary. While we were standing there not knowing what was going on, the skaven ate everything he had stolen, and he had stolen a lot, I could see at least a couple of hams and heads of cheese enough to feed a couple of people.

The scaven's stomach grew bigger and bigger, and he kept eating until he suddenly froze, and then he died with a thin squeak.

- Baha, did you break his neck? - Grim asked, looking at me and the dead skaven in my hand.

- No, then I would have heard a crunch, but here everything was silent. - I answered him. - Let's take him to our apothecary and call the referee. We'll have to prove that we didn't kill him, otherwise they'll accuse us of not paying a bribe for permission to kill an opposing player out of the game.

Muttering that these bastards in striped caps and shirts have gone completely nuts with their rates, we went to the apothecary. One of the referees arrived a little later and immediately started demanding money, but a quick examination of the apothecary proved that the cause of death was not us, but that the skaven had just eaten himself to death. And judging by the morbid thinness of the skaven it was surprising that his stomach didn't burst when he ate half of the stolen goods.

The disappointed referee left us rather than let Grim breathe a sigh of relief.

- Whew, that's a pass. If we'd had to pay him, then the team would have been munching on Waggy's snacks for the next week, no money for anything else. Baha? What are you shutting up about? - Grim looked at me worriedly.

I stared at the advert with the fat halfling on the infirmary wall and the dead skaven until an idea popped into my head.