Excursion 15: Sparring Match

Cage says, "I brought Stringbean here because I thought you three would work well together, as both of you were brought in through King Cat, and Stringbean here was brought in by Black Hawk, so your personalities should be similar," to Tortoise and Breadman.

"Really now, how do we know this guy's that strong?" Said Tortoise.

"Well why don't we go into the ring, and have a little match?" Suggested Cage.

"Haha perfect." Replied Tortoise.

* In the Sparring Room *

The three arrive in a large room, with a dark grey, perfectly even ground, and laid out in a grid-like manner, we're large light-grey platforms elevated above the ground slightly. Each stage was further subdivided into smaller light grey tiles.

"Alright Stringbean, this is the Sparring Room," said Tortoise, "standard rules, no going outside the stage, no killing and who ever states their withdrawal first loses."

"Got it." Said Fyky.

The two were in opposite corners of the stage. Cage, just outside the stage dropped a sheet onto the ground.

Suddenly, the soles of Tortoise's shoes became orange, and a split second after the sheet landed on the ground, Tortoise began running at Fyky with extreme speed.

Fyky noticed that Tortoise was moving strangely. He was gliding across the ground, as if he was skating. He was easily reaching maybe five to ten kilometers per hour. Before Fyky could make any guesses as to the details of what was happening, he was punched, straight in the gut, causing Fyky to spit out some saliva.

"Let me give you a second to recover," said Tortoise.

Five seconds were granted and Tortoise jumped up in the air and tried to kick Fyky right on the side of his head, but Fyky was a brawler. This was different than the super speedy movements of his approach, and Fyky grabbed his leg in midair, and swung him back to the other side of the room.

He wore a serious expression as he wondered what was happening. He deduced a few things from his approach and his jump.

One, it couldn't be a general acceleration boost because he wasn't using a standard running motion, instead he was gliding, suggesting that his speedy movements had something to do with the friction of the stage. Another dead giveaway was that the momentum of his kick was well within expectancy, so his bodily motion isn't sped up, suggesting his speed had to be gained while in contact with the ground.

Now, Fyky need to know the parameters of this truck, does it turn the floor frictionless, or does it only affect the soles of his shoes? He wondered how he could test these possibilities. One way could be to run in the same path that Tortoise ran up to him with.

Fyky decided to test that, instead of immediately using his gifts, he ran in the same path as Tortoise but there was no slipping. That meant Tortoise could only apply it to the soles of his shoes, and thus Tortoise couldn't do anything to stop him.

Fyky charging closer and closer, tried to land a hit, but Tortoise stopped it by stripping the floor two meters away from him of its friction.

"You made one mistake in your deduction Stringbean, my gift isn't the sole of my shoe. Try again," Tortoise taunted.

Fyky was deep in thought once again. "So he made his shoes frictionless, why not the floor as well? Why just one surface?"

From that thought, Fyky came to one possible conclusion, he can only use it on a singular surface, or the effort to make multiple surfaces frictionless was too strenuous. Either way, in his run up, we can count on the fact that his glid will make him susceptible to tripping.

Fyky then thought up a new technique, but he needed immense set up to pull it off. To plan the set up intensely wasn't in his favor, as soon Tortoise was running towards him already, winding up a punch aimed straight for his gut.

However that was a facade, Tortoise set a clear wind up for the gut as a feint, when he was really focusing his moment on a tackle, which would help him set up his own specialized combat technique, Double-Flip Piledriver, inspired by a legendary wrestler from the Mid-West Wrestling Federation called Rey de la Castro. However, Fyky knew it was a feint, and the resultant position was a huddle.

Fyky knowing the mechanism behind this speed, used it to spin Tortoise once more like a top, and threw him out of the stage.

Cage began the ten second countdown.

"One." Tortoise was sliding across the ground, still in the middle of reacting to these events.

"Two." Tortoise then began setting up a strategy to stop himself. The first step has pulling out his stop sign.

"Three." Tortoise then stabbed the sign onto the ground, it slew him down a bit, but both him and the sign continued moving for a second.

"Four." Tortoise is finally at a stop, he then Carrie's the stop sign overhead, ready to chuck it like a spear.

"Five." Tortoise chucks the sign, but it freezes just five centimeters away from his hand.

"Six." Tortoise stands on top of the stop sign's pole, and suddenly it begins to accelerate exponentially.

"Seven." Tortoise grabs onto the pole, steering it towards Fyky's torso.

"Eight." Tortoise successfully hits Fyky right in his core with the bottom of his stop sign. This causes Fyky to fly backwards out of the stage, crashing into the other stages like a stone skipping on a lake surface.

"Nine." Tortoise jumps down from the pole, yet still holding it in his right hand. He turned it ninety degrees and gripped the floor with both his remaining hand and his feet. The sign was dragging the man along.

"Ten." The edge of Tortoise's shoes almost went out of the stage, but behind all of the smoke generated by the friction. Tortoise comes to a full stop on the stage just as his countdown ended.

Eight seconds pass, and Fyky has not woken up.

… To be continued.