Smoke's eyes snapped open at the sound of footsteps outside the door. By his estimate, he had been out cold for something in the realm of 12 hours. It was only a guess, but the fact that the soreness from the previous day had begun to set in, and that his legs were asleep, meant he could not be far from the truth.

Eliminate the impossible, and, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The assassin remembered reading Sherlock Holmes stories as a child. They taught him how to reason through situations, and he could remember almost any notable quote from any of the great detective's mysterious cases, not that this skill could in any way be useful now.

Now he silently wished for his entire body to be numb and void of feeling. It ached, it was worn out, and his high level of mental discipline he had attained did little to spare him the agony of defeat.

What was worse, the toll on your body when you are beaten, or the fact that you were bested by another?

The Grandmaster would beat him within an inch of his life just for pondering the question. Lin Kuei were never defeated in battle. If they were, death would come by a mercy kill from their better man, or a suicide to atone for their sins.

Smoke thought back to the other fighters at this tournament. The American was presumed dead after a brawl with Ermac, yet he dared to come back. Kitana and Jade were defeated, but still they breathed.

In fact the only two remaining warriors were Kenshi and Liu Kang. They had not dishonored themselves by being defeated, but then again the worst was yet to come for them in the final round.

Smoke took a surprisingly laid-back approach to getting beaten, at least when it came to a companion of his getting bested. They did not follow his strict and rigorous lifestyle, and they therefor were not bound by the same code of honor that he was. So defeat might not be so bitter, or so humiliating, for them as it was for Smoke himself.

Smoke winced as he shifted his weight from side to side, feeling the soreness and the ache of the day after getting pummeled by several dozen guards and Black Dragon.

But he had been in worse scrapes in his time. Whenever Lin Kuei were not training in new tactics or on assignment, the Grandmaster made a habit of pitting them against each other. It had always been Smoke against Kuai Liang, ever since they were very young. They had stolen each other's food, sabotaged equipment, and worse to prove themselves worthy of recognition.

But the rivalry that should have driven them apart in fact made them very close friends. Not the type of friends that talked about personal feelings or held intellectual conversations.

But the ones who had saved each other so many times they had a running tally of favors and close saves because of their team work. The friends who had trained together, fought together, and were prepared to die for each other in a moment's notice. They were warriors, kombat practitioners of the highest order.

He now wondered if his fellow fighter would even bother saving him now. He had been disgraced, and there was no coming back from that.

Smoke let the thoughts fall out of focus as the footsteps got louder, and stopped right in front of his door. What did Shang Tsung have in store for him? A torturer, a beast, another fight for his entertainment maybe?

Smoke heard the sound of a rusted bolt getting dragged laboriously out of place before the door swung open.

Smoke gasped. Kurtis Stryker, bruised and bloodied, was standing above him in the doorway. A checkmark-shaped gash ran along his cheek, and one of his eyes was severely swollen and puffy, but he was there nonetheless.

Stryker gave Smoke a look.

"What, too short for a storm trooper?" Stryker laughed.

Smoke stared back at him blankly.

"Okay then, we'll skip the banter and get right to the part where I break you out of here," he said, quickly producing a key and bending down to find the spot where Smoke had been shackled to the wall.

After a few seconds of fumbling, and a few seconds of Smoke hearing the cop humming some sort of marching anthem while they were practically ear-to-ear, the assassin was freed of his bonds.

Smoke rubbed his wrists. "Thank you, both of you. "

Sonya Blade peeked her head in the doorway. "How did you hear me?"

"He's a ninja," Stryker chuckled, choosing to laugh in the face of his overtly obvious agony rather than be immobilized by it.

"No," Smoke corrected him, accepting Stryker's hand and rising back up to his feet. "I am Lin Kuei."

"I don't get the distinction," Stryker said in a confused voice, casually walking towards the door with Smoke in tow.

"I will have to explain it to you some day, but I think that will have to be during a time when we aren't in the middle of a dungeon," Smoke pointed out.

"Fair enough," Stryker agreed, resting a hand on the door sill as he took a quick glance right and left before continuing into the hallway. Sonya was already ahead, with her upgraded gun in hand.

"Where are we?" Smoke wondered aloud. "This doesn't look like the place we were before."

"You're right," Stryker confirmed, unsnapping his holster and removing his Beretta. The tension in his shoulders seemed to vanish as he got reacquainted with his sidearm. The weight must have felt good in his hands.

"We are somewhere on the island right now," Stryker speculated, holding his pistol low and at the ready. "Quan Dickhead and company moved us back here, probably to use as hostages if Raiden and the others come close to winning."

"But why? Why leave us alive at all?" Sonya whispered without turning around from her position in front of them.

"Well the way I see it, each of us represents a group of people that could do a shit ton of damage to Shao Kahn's invasion forces. I'm NYPD; he was asking about the procedures for strategic response and rapid deployment and crap like that. He knew that I was the guy to ask. We don't actually run drills for surprise alien freak-wad invasions, but-"

"And I'm SF," Sonya added. "We would be at the head of any attack if Shao Kahn's men managed to gain a foothold. The tarkatan wanted to know how we fought, and what weapons and elements we had access to."

"And the Lin Kuei are… complicated," Smoke said. "That man that beat you, that Scorpion. I intend to have a word with him on what happened to Bi Han."

"Music to my ears. Let's move," Sonya said dryly, brandishing her weapon down the hallway in front of them. "I can see the end. Let's go, I've got a feeling something is about to go down."

MKMKMK

"So you have come here to witness the destruction of your world," Quan Chi laughed. "Very noble. Very admirable… Wait, you don't actually want to fight us, do you? Certainly you don't believe that you can come out on top of all this."

"I believe," Raiden started, looking into Quan Chi's dead, black eyes. "That humanity will not be put down so easily."

"I believe," Quan Chi retorted. "That you are mistaken."

I heard the muffled footfalls of combat boots a second before the others did. They sounded like a river rapids; all the different sounds forming a single, distorted rhythm as they approached. Cascading down the steps behind Shang Tsung's like a flood came over a dozen armed men, each wearing a loose flak vest and cradling a very modern machine gun.

Curtains and various tapestried were brushed aside, each bristling with another armed man. The pair of golden dragons that flanked the titular throne of the Sorcerer were used as cover, as were the curtains and tapestries that surrounded it.

An army out of nowhere.

My mind flashed to the moment we had entered. It only now occurred to me that there were plenty of places to hide behind. Plenty of ornate decorations that could conceal a man or fifteen while we approached.

Before, we had the Outworld fighters nearly outnumbered, and now that advantage had been squarely flipped on its head.

I drew my pistol, again enjoying the weight of the steel and carbon fiber in my hands. Having to do everything with your bare hands for three years is more difficult than it sounds, and having a little extra reach and killing power was nothing to take lightly.

But my enjoyment and brief rush from readying my sidearm were pretty short lived.

Turns out a dozen armed men approaching you with machine guns can be quite a buzz kill. Especially when the rifle barrel you are looking into is as black and empty as the eyes of the man holding it. Black Dragon, Kano's men. They were apparently still quite numerous, and I got a weird feeling that they knew I was the one who had personally killed a few of their own.

Kano stepped forward, drawing a pistol of his own from his waistband; a full sized semi-automatic. Big fricken thing, probably high caliber too. I turned my handgun so that the metallic strap that was slung across his chest was directly in my crosshairs.

He casually flipped off the safety and raised it in our direction. It hovered over all of us before settling on me.

Oh awesome, another crazy gunman with a vendetta against me.

"Drop it," he ordered, dipping his gun about a centimeter downward, indicating the direction he wanted my weapon to go.

I didn't move.

He flexed one of his massive thumbs and cranked back the hammer to further make his point. The hammer made that awful triple-clicking sound as he took it back until it was almost parallel to the barrel of his gun.

Now the only thing that stood between me and him was that quarter of an inch that our fingers would have to move to fire.

And goddammit if I did not want to let go of my weapon.

People in movies and TV shows love to throw their weapons all over the place to increase the tension and prove that they are macho enough to handle anyone without a gun. But I am not one of those people.

I heard Raiden's voice, a million miles away. It sounded like the most distant echo your ears can pick up after you yell in a canyon. Barely audible, hardly relevant, but I could hear it all the same.

"You think you can scare us!" Raiden laughed. "With guns!"

All of us turned to Raiden in various states of disbelief. Me because he had seriously underestimated the gravity of our situation, the Outworld kombatants because they thought he was mad, and the guys with guns because they knew that there would be no way to move fast enough to evade them.

Liu Kang and his friend might make it if we decided to run; they were certainly the fastest. But then again they were also the most naïve, and judging by my conversation with Liu Kang several days ago, they would be the ones who would believe that they could win this bout simply because they were skilled in kombat.

But in the real world, there was little you could do when faced with an attacker who brings a machine gun to the party when you yourself are unarmed. I had been in enough scrapes to understand the power that having a reliable weapon granted a man. But I feared that the Shaolin would not.

Raiden's tone deepened, somehow.

"You are not so fearsome, any of you. You believe that just because you are numerous that you have power over us?"

"That's about right," Kano whispered, still aiming at me.

"You," Quan Chi shook his head as if ashamed of Raiden. "You have finally gone mad then. Faced with defeat, you cannot accept that all your efforts are meaningless… by the gods that is hilarious. Live as long as I have and you can appreciate good irony.

"But in the end… damn it, I have started to ramble, what a foolish mistake." He cut himself off from the traditional "Why I am Better than You" rant and turned to Kano. "Have your men open fire, quickly. Kill them all."

"I don't think so!" Raiden cried, reaching toward the heavens. Power crackled around his body, and began to manifest itself in blinding bolts of electricity that swirled around his arms.

His conical hat was swept away by a sudden wind that nearly took me off my feet. Everyone in the room, save a stoic Nightwolf and an implacable Quan Chi, staggered and lowered their center of gravity to remain standing. I shut my right eye as the wind nearly blinded me from that side, and I braced myself on the floor with one hand and put a death grip on my gun with the other.

We all kneeled before the unprecedented display of power and godhood that Raiden had displayed. He was now the only thing in the room that wasn't either being swept about or struggling to stay their footing. The calm eye of the monstrous storm.

The curtains beside Shang Tsung's empty throne were literally ripped apart and swept up in the sudden typhoon. Any knick knacks or loose articles of wood or fabric that had previously been decorations in the room were promptly torn apart and swept up in the great wind.

The lamps and torches that were hung meticulously on the walls were ripped out of their housings and smashed on the floor. The throne itself shook and rattled like something out of a horror movie.

And tears from the biting wind streamed down one side of my face. I desperately pulled the safety catch on my gun to stop me from accidently shooting myself in the foot.

Jesus, how long was this going to last?

Suddenly, a large section of the wooden roof gave way. I briefly looked up, relieved to see that that section that was coming down was not directly above me, but closer to the gunmen and the Outworld fighters.

It was only then I realized that the raging storm was actually outside and being manipulated by Raiden. The rain pelting my face was not created by him, nor was the fierce wind; rather it was manipulated by the thunder god and magnified to bring everyone in the building into a state of submission.

The wood splintering overhead sounded more like gunfire as the oak and bamboo was broken and cast down by the elements. Nails and framework were quite literally ripped out and pulled apart with zero effort. Shrapnel rained down from above as a huge chunk of timber and support beams crashed to the floor, crushing a pair of Black Dragon goons.

Suddenly the monsoon died down. And by died down, I mean the wind was mostly gone and the rain was started pouring down in buckets through the gaping hole in the roof.

I looked up in amazement; half the roof was either on the floor or blown away, and the rain was a-comin' like none other. It was hot and torrential, just like the night I had almost been killed by Ermac.

Kano stood up, quite dazed from the ordeal, but not unaware of how the situation had changed. His red eye glowed even more brightly in the semi-darkness of the storm.

"What are you waiting for?" he turned and yelled over his shoulder at his men, who were in various states of disbelief, many still hunkered down on the floor. "SHOOT 'EM!"

At that moment a cloud of smoke engulfed the line of shooters. Clearly not by virtue of the inclement weather, but a tactic to blind and confuse. Who had done that?

The smoke was the color of the storm clouds; dark and ominous. And spread out like a carpet bomb across the back of the stage, saturating the air. A few of the men were still visible through the plume.

The rightmost Black Dragon man, who had climbed to his feet and readied his weapon, was suddenly pulled into the smoke.

I'll be damned, our Lin Kuei friend had escaped!

"NOW!" I heard out ninja scream through the deceptive fog.

Gunshots rang out from behind the stage, targeting the Black Dragon operatives.

Two fell immediately, collapsing in a heap on the floor.

Stryker and Sonya!

I couldn't see them, but the sound of a machine gun punctuated by a series of pistol shots identified the duo. They were very much alive, and wreaking havoc on Kano's garrison of mercenaries.

Suddenly our ragtag group of fighters surged forward. Raiden broke into a sprint, flanked by Liu Kang and Kung Lao, and quickly closed the gap between us and the Outworld kombatants.

Quan Chi made a noise that was somewhere between a foreign curse and a snarl before he and Scorpion led the group of assassins and killers headlong into ours. With the Black Dragon mercs confused and occupied fighting the former prisoners, our numbers were almost even.

I raised my pistol and started firing while I advanced behind the others. I saw the purple blur of Jade's staff pass me by as I pumped the trigger of my slim Beretta pistol.

The gun bucked four times in my hand as I engaged a Black Dragon operative who had turned his machine gun back at us. He jerked to the side as a bullet smacked his armored torso, throwing off a thunderous burst of gunfire and nearly turning him around in the process.

The man stumbled as the next 40 caliber round buried itself in his Kevlar harness just above the first, and his weapon quickly left his hands and clattered onto the floor.

My next two shots landed just below his heart, pushing him backward into a wooden pillar. His knees shook as his body registered the pain of the high caliber rounds.

I put the white dot that was my front sight on his neck and fired, burying a fifth round in his cheek. He finally collapsed and didn't get back up.

I turned on my heel as I spotted a man firing his weapon at Stryker and Sonya, who were ducking behind one of the stone dragons that flanked Shang Tsung's throne.

I could see his machine gun clearly, a German-manufactured G36, as is spit out suppressive fire at my allies.

I fired two rounds in rapid succession; the first missed entirely, and the second took him below the armpit, tearing a nasty-looking hole in his camouflage jacket. He fell, and I fired twice more for good measure.

I heard another pistol firing nonstop to my left. Kano. He was pumping rounds into the smoke cloud, trying to hit the ninja who was taking his men apart.

I turned and squeezed off two quick shots. Again, I missed the first one. But the second one smacked him center mass and knocked the hand cannon out of his meaty fingers.

I was going to fire again, but the slide of my gun was locked firmly in the rear position, showing me an empty chamber and a spent magazine.

Damn it.

He coughed and took several steps backward from the force of the bullet. After a second he turned to address the shooter.

You, I could see his lips move as he mouthed the single word like a curse. But I quickly became the least of his problems as the horde of Earthrealm fighters met his line in a flurry of fists and kicks.

Kano turned back from me to the fight at hand to find Johnny Cage bearing down on him like an over muscled freight train.

Johnny led with a quick jab with his right hand, which was surprisingly not-telegraphed and on a collision course with Kano's dome piece.

Until Kano ducked under it. He may have been big, but his reflexes and speed were even more frightening.

Johnny, now inches away from his opponent, threw a left hook at the merc's metal eyepiece. The overhanded blow formed a particularly blurry C as Kano dodged the overhanded swing and delivered a punch of his own straight to the actor's gut

In the same instant, he stomped on Johnny's leading foot, his combat boot winning out over Johnny's expensive leather. He pressed his body against the actor's center of gravity, and threw him over his shoulder like he weighed nothing.

Less than a second later Johnny smacked the ground hard, coming close to breaking the boards he had fallen onto with his shoulder.

But the actor had taken worse blows before, and rolled back to his feet to reengage the mercenary.

Kano wasn't afraid to fight dirty, and drew his knife in a flash, slashing Cage across the midsection and drawing blood.

Johnny Cage hastily backed up, and in doing so slammed into the cloaked Reptile that had been sneaking up on him. Reptile grabbed at Johnny's throat with his massive claws, but Johnny grabbed both of his wrists and took the two of them to the ground, using the beast as a cushion for his fall.

And by cushion, I mean he fell forward on top of Reptile and knee-dropped him square in the gut.

While the blow had been effective, it had also made the actor completely forget about the man behind him.

I was running after them now, nearly tripping as I ran over the slippery wooden flooring. The hot summer rain blinded me for a moment, but I kept going.

Kano took advantage of the sudden arrival of his ally, flipping the combat knife over in his hand and rushing the knot of limbs that was the struggling Cage and Reptile.

Shit! Too much distance and not enough time to reach them.

"KANO!" I screamed, charging in behind my allies.

I skirted to the left of the melee between my allies and the Outworld fighters, ducking as Jade's staff came around wide and nearly took my head off on its way to another enemy.

Kano turned, and was greeted by my empty gun smacking him on the teeth. I hadn't been close enough to hit him with it, so I had given the piece a toss and hoped for the best.

A thin line of blood dribbled down his chin, but he was somehow unfazed. It looked like my best had just pissed him off.

He wanted me dead, more than anything else. More than his body felt pain he wanted my head.

I ripped the steel baton out of my waistband, extending the collapsed rod out to its full length of 24 inches as I charged him.

He let out a war cry from between his yellowed teeth as my steel met his.

He kept his reversed grip on his butterfly knife with white knuckles as our weapons met above our heads with an ear-splitting clang. The desperate, enraged look on his face was probably a reflection my own expression as our rematch officially began.

He swung low and crosswise, and I literally jumped backward to avoid the hit. I threw my legs backward and my feet hit the ground two or three feet behind where they had initially been to avoid disembowelment. My entire body went into my counterattack; a blow that went from above my head straight downward at his metal eyepiece.

He weaved to the left, barely avoiding the blow that would have cracked his skull.

I parried a two-hit combo that targeted my gut and neck respectively, feeling the baton vibrate wildly between my fingers each time it was met by the more sturdy material of his combat knife.

He was unfettered and twisted his wrist back to deliver a slash to my temple. The blow was not wild like the previous two, but controlled and on a difficult-to-block, upward angle. Parrying it almost knocked the nightstick loose from my grasp.

He twisted the blade against the baton as I tried to disengage him, and ended up hooking my weapon so that it was closer to him than his own knife. But I had zero time to use this to my advantage.

The L-shape made by the knife held in a reversed grip in his hand made for the perfect hook as he ensnared my weapon and yanked his arm backward, dragging his own blade, and by extension my baton, and by further extension, me until we were extremely close together. We were closer, and one of us was horribly off-balance.

I was struggling to put my feet under me as he pulled me back with him another step before swinging his blade forward yet again.

But since there was only one logical maneuver from the trapping position he had me in I couldn't help but anticipate the next strike. Actually there were probably several things he could have done from where he was, but he was going for the quick kill. The fact that he is pissed off makes him hard to fight but pretty easy to predict.

Which is why I fell forward under his blow and did a controlled fall to evade his next swing.

I tucked my head in and rolled over my right shoulder to land safely.

The gloves were officially off. This shit was getting technical.

As I stood up I nearly ran face-first into a pillar. One of the few left in one piece ran all the way from floor to ceiling, and gave me a wicked idea.

I had my back turned to Kano, a fatal mistake in almost any fight. Almost any fight.

In a single moment, still using the forward momentum from my roll and threw a leg up at the pole like I was going to kick it.

Kano was a-comin' from behind. He stabbed at my exposed back, but suddenly I was no longer there.

I kicked off with my right leg and threw my entire body in the air, doing the trick I had been taught by a parkour enthusiast several years ago, and did a complete backflip off of the wall.

As my body rolled backward in the air, I found myself directly above Kano.

I deliberately ended the fancy maneuver early as I threw out a leg came down on top of him, neatly hooking one of my heels under his armpit and pinning the other across his throat. My hands grabbed at his arm, one securing his wrist and the other barely catching his forearm in time to execute the move.

I twisted, feeling the tight, painful strain as my abdominals as I pitched and took both of us to the ground.

We did half a roll as our combined weight crashed onto the floor. It was painful for me, but it must have been hell for him.

The way I had grabbed him wasn't arbitrary; I wanted us to roll over and land with my having him in an arm bar on the floor.

And so we were; me sideways against him with one foot pressing down on his throat and the other snug against his ribs. Both of my arms held his right one out as far as it would go without breaking something.

So naturally I cranked on it some more.

He squealed as I hyperextended his dominant arm, pinning his elbow between my knees and tugging with both hands in a sloppy but effective submission hold. Textbook? No, it should have been smoother. Practical? On a scale of one to ten: about a four. Unexpected: definitely.

"What the in the name of Christ was that?" he spat.

"That," I whispered. "Is very dangerous and kinda stupid. Never use it in a real fight, man. It'll never work."

I raised my baton and cracked it across his exposed elbow. He jolted as his right arm was immobilized and started to remember his ground game, undoing the hold I had him in with surprising speed, cursing under his breath at me the entire time.

As soon as he began to get free, I knew it would be pointless to try and hold him from that position.

I rolled backwards and out of reach as he climbed onto his feet.

He quickly switched hands with the blade and swung the knife in a roundhouse fashion.

I parried, expecting the same combo he had used earlier.

But he was all done with telegraphed swings and shit. No, he took that blade in a traditional saber grip and rammed it straight forward into my side.

The end of the knife seared my body as it pierced soft flesh and nicked a rib, making the cut jagged across an even larger section of my body. God that felt awful, like being mauled by a wild animal.

The fact that the cut had been relatively shallow didn't comfort me any.

He stabbed again, and I danced around it on the balls of my feet before doing a short and fast swing of my own. A little tap motion, like a drummer striking his instrument lightly with his drum stick.

Only the end of his drumstick was not metal and meant to shatter bones.

He stopped it hard with a flick of the knife and tried to twist the baton from my grasp, grunting and spitting like a wild man from the effort. He worked the move hard and fast, and for a moment I thought he had broken my wrist; for my right arm was jacked up until it was practically above my head, and he had no intention of stopping there.

He was skilled, but lacked focus from being winded and having an arm painfully taken out. I reversed the hold by letting his knife slide too far forward along the length of my weapon, and turned it back against him, forcing him into a deep squat to retain his grip on the knife.

I used my baton to keep his knife in check, and grabbed his wrist with my free hand.

His left hand was fully extended out and up while his body was crouched low, like that traditional martial arts hold where the practitioner threatens to dislocate the man's shoulder by holding one hand on his opponent's arm and the other near the ball-and-socket joint on the shoulder.

Yeah, that one. Only I had his wrist, and it worked almost the same way. And I was in no mood for playing around, not with this madman.

See it only takes a few pounds of pressure to break a human wrist. Something like opening a pop can.

Complete with the same noise.

He screamed again as I wrenched an inch too far. His knife buried itself into the wood underfoot as the pain overwhelmed the instinct to hold onto his weapon.

Then something kicked in, some survival instinct that had suddenly been awakened within Kano. I had hurt him before, but only now was he faced with death in kombat, and that changed everything. Nothing is scarier than a man who is willing to do anything to survive.

All it would take to end him is to move the steel baton up the length of his arm and crack the tip over the back of his head; the weakest part of the human skull. And he knew it, because that's what he would have done.

That instinct was his training, and while it had only taken me a few seconds to lock him up and break his wrist, he moved even faster in escaping.

His right foot lashed out and kicked me in the gut. I felt the rigid tracks of his steel-toed boot scratch and tear at my skin as the kick hit home, making holding him there unbearable.

He tucked into a ball and literally rolled to escape the hold, throwing me onto the ground and getting himself out of range.

I swung cross-wise with the weapon. He leaned back to avoid the blow, tilting everything from his waist up backward to escape the attack.

And then he rammed his head forward. He happened to lead the head butt with the side of his face with a steel plate in it.

Oh yeah, that sucked. Painful.

Especially when his forehead meets your own, and half of yours isn't made out of metal alloy. Talk about a headache.

Colors swam in my vision, and for a moment there were three or four Kano's in front of me.

Damn, he's tough. I never met a man who could resist pain like he did. Even with both arms disabled, he was still coming at me.

He tapped the side of his head with the plate in it with his index finger. Suddenly I started to piece together what that red eye was for.

I might have been disoriented like none other, but I couldn't let him take me down like that.

I finally let go; releasing the rubber grip of the collapsible weapon from my sweaty hand. I let it fly at the mercenary.

The baton spun completely around once before the end hit him in the side. Suddenly he was on the ground, and not so defiant.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Sonya. One side of her face was bloodied, and her machine gun was nowhere to be seen.

"I'll take it from here, I'll finish him," she assured me. "He's my responsibility, you get back into the fight!"

I nodded as she ran off in his direction.

Suddenly I felt a pair of eyes on me. Bright, green eyes.

I turned to see Ermac looking right at me, standing over an unconscious Kung Lao. He was little more than a silhouette in the semi-darkness, but I knew it was him. All the fighting around me faded into the background. The smacking of the rain against the building and Ermac's footsteps became the loudest things, the only things that mattered.

He started towards me, putting both hands on his tunic and adjusting it like a gentleman as he started towards me. He nonchalantly stepped over Kung Lao's body as he continued his slow, deliberate march towards his former opponent.

That confident, implacable swagger was unmistakable. Rainwater dripped down his black uniform, giving his black and crimson outfit an otherworldly sheen.

"Heya Ermac," I said, shaking my head and ignoring the splitting headache that was plaguing me from the bout with Kano. "It's been too long; we've got some catching up to do."

"We agree," the spirits in the single body whispered sweetly, unfettered by the fact that he believed me to be dead. "Let us resume where we left off."

"And where's that?"

"With my hands around your neck."

New stuff coming shortly! I hoped you liked that last bit; it was a little more technical than their first bout and I hope it's readable. Anyway, next chapter is focusing on the other characters in the midst of the fray as the battle for Earthrealm reaches its climax.

Stay tuned, and have a good one!