SMASH: Paragons

TONIGHT ON GALAXY OF SPORTS

Good day, viewers!

Tonight we are delighted to return to our special broadcast from Earth, featuring the Paragon Games Finale!

For those of you joining us from humanity's former colonies, rest assured that tonight marks the turning point for everything! Our contenders are down to the final three, and the arena is an absolute mess, but rest assured that whoever comes out on top, humanity's beloved champion will triumph for the first time in the next cycle's Warsport!

*

I hate humanity...

Arin's uncharitable thought rose up out of pure frustration as she stared across the ruined stone of the circular arena.

All around her, everyone was cheering not for her, but for the two purebreds she was fighting all by her lonesome.

One of them was a mountain of muscle with black hair, wearing sunglasses indoors and showing off his bare chest with pecs like paving slabs. He was at least three meters tall and therefore over four times her mass, had she been Earth-born. As a Jupiter-born cait sith, she was 1.25 meters tall but only 145 kg soaking wet, which she currently was.

The other was a psyjock like herself, a reasonably tall, spindly man with a bowl-shaped haircut and the annoying smirk of someone who thought he was smarter than everyone else in the room... probably the whole arena and the galaxy, too. He was the reason she was currently wet, because his psy power gave him a high degree of control over water.

I am so going to kill you if we meet outside the arena... Arin thought. She hated being wet. Hated it because her instincts as a cait sith told her that water would ruin her luscious white fur and interfere with her sensitive hearing.

As one of the hundreds of species of demi-human, a cait sith would not even have been allowed to get to this point if not for the fact that humanity was now desperate enough to fully recognize demi-humans as members of their race. So by that logic, Arin was human.

Maybe.

Muscles-Glasses made the first move, tearing up a large chunk of the already destroyed concrete and tossing it straight at Arin.

Idiot.

The damn thing was full of rebar, and as a magneto-psyjock, that meant he was effectively arming her.

Arin took the offering and spun it away from herself towards Waterboy. She noticed halfway through her move that there were six bits of rebar sticking out of the concrete, all of them long enough to make the whole rock look like a bug.

That suited her purposes just fine as she bent the metal toward capturing Waterboy, but at the last second the whole thing fell in two as he stared through the splitting concrete at her with a merciless grin.

Muscles-Glasses didn't waste the opportunity though. As soon as the concrete had left his grasp, he charged not at her but at Waterboy, his motorcycle-sized arms pistoning for a double-fist punch worthy of some of the last millennium's most cheesy sci-fi fights.

Only he stopped mid-air as Waterboy raised a hand.

Goddamit...

"Fool. Don't you know the human body is mostly made of water? As long as you have blood, you're under my control," Waterboy laughed haughtily.

Yeah, like that'll fly against a lithoid species. Arin internally scoffed at the man. Were either of these bozos looking ahead to what this was all really for? This wasn't even an appetizer compared to Warsport, even if all the rules were the same.

Muscles-Glasses chose that moment to spit on Waterboy's face. "Control that."

The entire crowd "Ooed" at the insult.

With a disdainful chuff, Waterboy wiped the spittle from his face, a growing rage in the grinding of his teeth. He seemed to forget all about Arin as his psychic energy began to spike before, with a gesture born of pure rage, he slashed his arm through the air in a motion that sent Muscles-Glasses tumbling out of the arena.

A massive surge of light announced the opening of the portal that caught the man, landing him roughly onto a padded mat reserved for that purpose.

Muscles-Glasses seemed oddly at peace with the event, and simply crunched to a seat before standing to join the other knocked-out opponents who'd lost all their respawns.

That left only Arin and Waterboy.

They were both down on all respawns.

Both exhausted...

And both still determined to win at any cost.

Arin made her move before Waterboy could turn to face her.

She charged, magnetically tearing up as much of the arena behind her as she could while conserving enough of her psychic energy for emergencies. She wound up feeling she had a dozen or so chunks with enough mass to make a difference, and one by one she sent them after Waterboy, only to watch as he cut them down or dodged.

She was counting on his having just used a lot of power to give her an opening, and that seemed reflected in the fact that he was using less water - gathered from the pouches at his hips - for each time he sliced at the metal she sent his way.

Ten steps away she committed, launching everything she had left at him in a flurry of concrete and steel.

Five steps away she felt as if her entire body was becoming a bubble. A familiar feeling from when she had the safety to use her magnetism to fly. But she wasn't doing that now.

One step away, her body stopped mid-stride.

Waterboy held a hand up, his fingers compressing around his palm in a holding gesture. It was a purely somatic thing. Master psyjocks like the both of them didn't need such movements to control their powers, but as they grew more tired, little things like that helped keep them focused, even though by some arguments it also wasted energy.

"You should listen when I teach someone a lesson, kitty." Waterboy snarled, though judging by the blood leaking out of his eyes, he couldn't afford the confidence he was putting on display.

Arin's eye twitched. Her cat-like ears both tried to tilt back in hostility. Her tail lashed in frustration.

But this was all according to plan.

"Here's two lessons for you, asshole. One: Blood has iron in it." Arin's voice came with a powerful Donegal Irish accent.

Turning her power against herself, Arin stomped into her final step, sending her power through the ground to lift many the metal-containing fragments all around them.

Distracted by the sudden rise of these objects, Waterboy failed to notice that Arin was still using her power on herself, forcing her body to behave in ways it shouldn't have been able to under his control.

She lifted her back leg.

"Two: Don't you dare call me 'Kitty!'"

With a crunching sound that sent half the arena flinching and holding their junk, Arin kicked Waterboy in the crotch so hard he landed on his knees.

Breaking his concentration released her from his hold, and a moment later she grabbed him by the head and began to spin, using her magnetism and the arena floor as leverage to gain enough speed that when she let go, she sent Waterboy flying completely sideways, beyond the arena limit and into a portal.

Only after hearing the DING DING DING! of Earth's preferred use of the bell did she let herself collapse, spread-eagled as the realization hit her that she'd won.

The announcer's voice was a big blur compared to her thoughts as she realized the only thing she'd won was a bigger chance at getting the shit kicked out of her on the galactic stage.

A sudden surge of tiredness filled Arin, making her fail to notice that all around her were sponsors and medics and the arena's hostess approaching for photos and victory poses and all the usual crap that came after a fight in the Paragon Games.

A normal human would have forced themself to stand, maybe pumped their fist and smiled and waved...

But Arin was cait sith. When she felt tired, she did what all cats had done since well before felis catus had enthralled humanity through the internet, a primitive precursor to the netsphere.

She curled into a ball, yawned, and fell asleep.