Chapter Thirty-Six:

The Final Trials

Meggy had it all in the bag.

For her challenge, she found herself going up against Princess Peach in a foot race. As the former Inkling was athletic, she felt confident that she could take the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom.

She and Peach stood at the starting line in the Mushroom Stadium, all ready to go. A purple Toad held up a starting gun, finger on the trigger, and the girls took their starting positions.

Three, two, one.

GO!

The shot was fired and Meggy took off running with Peach running too, the ex-Inkling ran and ran fast. Making a dash across the track, even with Peach racing to keep up. With all of her Splatfest training and all of her Splatfest experience, Meggy grinned confidently and kept running.

Up ahead, a pair of hurdle bars formed along their side of the track just feet away from Meggy and Peach. The princess seemed to pick up speed and the Splatfest champion made a mad dash, she came towards the small fences ahead and leaped over the first, followed by the second, the third and the fourth.

The final stretch was ahead, one last dash to the finish.

Meggy ran, making sure Peach didn't keep up, and with one more burst of athleticism, she made it across the finishing marker as her opponent caught up, gasping for breath.

"A VICTORY FOR MEGGY SPLETZER!" The Toad cried.

'SMG4, we did it.' Meggy thought, she still had it and she was confident in herself throughout the race, her ex-rival Desti was likely watching with pride from the afterlife.

Miles off, Swag and Chris stood guard in front of a vault, their guns ready. The challenge; Defend the money bank from the Wario Brothers. And since they had a long history of serving as guards, both men knew they were not going to fail this one. If Greg and Sergeant Mark were here, they would most certainly be on their side.

"WAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!"

"Here they come." Chris readied his gun, "Swag, get ready!"

"LOL! They're gonna have their guts vaporized by the fun stick!" Swag cried, bringing out a bazooka and smelling it, "Oh yeah, baby, kids are gonna bite tonight!"

"You have some real serious issues there..."

"Ha, you just don't like my confidence and sense of humor!"

The Wario Brothers made their appearance, making a beeline for the vault, right in Swag and Chris' direction. Waluigi had managed to escape Hal Monitor's custody thanks to Wario, who was in the vicinity after running out on Bob telling his adult story.

The yellow-clad Mario double had body-slammed Hal's car and punched out the law-abiding cop by cracking his computer face. Now, unaware that the challenges were still going on, the Wario Bros were running around and stealing money from people, trying to avoid Lawyer Kong and the WoTFI insanity.

But unfortunately for them, there was no escaping the law or the challenges.

"GRAB THE MONEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY!" Wario screamed, "WAH-HA-HA-HA!"

"Oh yeah, we're number WAH!" Waluigi sneered.

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! The guards fired on the Wario Bros, stopping them in their tracks before they could get any closer to the vaults. Both Wario and Waluigi ducked out of the way as Chris and Swag concentrated their fire on them, Swag brought up his bazooka again and fired on Wario's hiding spot.

"OH MY G… AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Wario was sent hurtling into a wall by the explosion he tried to doge and fell to the ground. Waluigi ducked for cover before Swag fired another bazooka shot at him, the two criminals cried in shock and looked up at the two guards with fear in their eyes.

"Well, well..." Lawyer Kong entered the room with a pair of Nintendo Ninjas and some handcuffs in hand, "...Looks like you two managed to stop these guys from stealin' the money in the vault."

"Not so fast."

Hal Monitor, fully-repaired, entered the room and handcuffed the Wario Bros. "I'll be taking these illegal ingrates to jail and I'll make sure they do nothing illegal again." The robotic justice-enforcer declared.

"Ah, for the love of... WHY DO I HAVE TO BE UPSTAGED BY A MONITOR?!" Lawyer Kong yelled.

"Thanks, boys!" Hal waved to Swag and Chris before walking away with Wario and Waluigi in his custody. Chris shrugged and offered his fist to Swag, who was doing a victory dance of sorts.

The guard rolled his eyes, some things just never changed no matter the situation, but at least they had another victory in the bag for the SMG4 Team.

Over at the Twitter theater, Bob and SMG4 engaged in their challenge, which involved making Twitter angry. Usually, making Twitter angry was not a good idea, making the place happy was a much better idea than that.

"OkAy!" Bob declared, holding up his phone to show the audience a Tweet he just typed up as he thought of how to anger Twitter, "SMG4, bAd, LOL!"

Unexpectedly (or rather, expectedly), the audience started laughing. SMG4 felt hurt by the roast, also by the fact that the crowd was laughing at him no thanks to Bob.

He thought of what to do and brought up his phone with Twitter on screen, having figured it out. SMG4 tapped the screen and a video of himself dancing appeared with the words "when your friend needs motivation" on screen.

He hoped it would make the Twitter people happy, but instead, the crowd booed angrily and a mob rose up with furious eyes on SMG4.

The meme man shrieked and ran for his life just as a Nintendo Ninja declared him the victor of the challenge over the megaphone, but SMG4 didn't care as he was fearing for his continued existence.

Just how could he anger Twitter like that, this wasn't right, did Lawyer Kong tell the people of Twitter how much of "a disease" the meme man was?

It likely didn't matter, SMG4 had beaten Bob at the price of an angry mob, but at least the score was worth it and his team was ahead of Nintendo. The meme man ran like the wind until he found himself in Inkopolis Square, having run through a random portal.

SMG4 looked around, seeing he was safe at the moment, and began to dance just like in the video.

"HEY!"

Inkopolis Police Department officers were onto SMG4 in seconds, the blue-white clad YouTuber yelped and made another run for it right as the angry Twitter people arrived on the scene, the meme man did not stop running and kept moving until he'd managed to get somewhere safe.

On the other side of Inkopolis at Blackbelly Skatepark, Saiko faced her challenge that involved a skateboard contest with Mario, the both of them had their skateboards ready and were all set.

However, Saiko had some precautions to take care of and slapped on a helmet along with some kneepads. Once she'd taken care of that, it was go time.

Saiko looked at Mario. "Good luck..." She said and jumped off the edge, placing the skateboard under her feet. She rolled down the large ramp in front of them, feeling the wind as the board picked up speed and it shot up the other side of the ramp ahead. Saiko did a backflip, followed by a spin and a handstand while twirling on the board.

With precise grace and perfect coordination, Saiko landed safely back on the ground and rode her skateboard back to Mario's position. A scoreboard on the wall lit up, showing Saiko's score; a perfect 554,170.

"Let's-a go!" Mario hollered.

The dim-witted plumber hopped on his board and rolled down the ramp slowly before he tapped a button secretly installed on the skateboard, the board emitted a beep and rocket thrusters materialized on the back, roaring to life in seconds.

Mario prepared to execute his tricks as his new rocket skateboard roared up the ramp, all the way into the sky...

However, due to the immense force of the rockets and the way the skateboard was positioned as it went up, Mario fell off the board in seconds and landed down on the ground face-first.

Saiko watched the scoreboard tally Mario's score with a minus one thousand appearing near the M symbol, the anime girl grinned triumphantly and flashed the peace sign, knowing that this meant an absolute victory for the SMG4 team!

Back in the Mushroom Kingdom, Saiko's partner Kaizo found himself going up against Bowser with the challenge revolving around seeing who could cause the ground to rumble the hardest.

The two foes stood in the canyon across from each other, staring intensely at one another in a Western showdown sort of way. Bowser had already lost to Whimpu, he was not about to lose to this guy.

Kaizo hopped on his drum set, ready to make a rumble. Bowser roared loudly and his bellow shook the canyon, causing rocks to fall. Kaizo grinned and began banging on his drums as hard as he can, the demon musician banged so hard, the ground quaked.

He picked up the pace on his drumbeats and began yelling, a wall of fire erupting behind him, until the whole terrain was shaking.

"WHOA!" Bowser yelled, it didn't take long for the ground to start cracking and Kaizo intensified until the floor of the canyon cracked wide open beneath Bowser's feet and the Koopa King fell through.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!" Bowser cried.

Kaizo hollered in triumph and banged on the cymbals, standing up with his arms in the air. If Saiko were here, this would have been an amazing time to rejoice... had they not been so worried about Lawyer Kong and that trial they were facing.

Back in Mushroom City, Mario and Meggy wound up facing off against each other… in a classroom challenge.

And their challenge was to see who could finish an entire school term's worth of homework, a challenge... that proved to be too easy for Meggy, who'd been studying hard at Omnia Academy and she had her homework all in the bag.

Mario, despite his limited brain power, attempted to give it all a go, but as soon as he opened his school book, the fat Italian freaked out and threw in the towel.

Another victory for the SMG4 team!

Further away in Mushroom City, Tari and Belle were put to the test as they were pitted up against none other than Donkey Kong in a video game contest where they had to play Mario Kart Wii. With their cybernetic gaming technology, both Belle and Tari knew what they were doing right from the start of the contest.

"Ok!" Donkey Kong said, "Let's do this!"

"GO!" Lawyer Kong cried, he was (reluctantly) overseeing the match.

The selected stage was Rainbow Road, the most challenging of Mario Kart courses. But with their years of experience and after playing several Smash Bros matches, Tari and Belle knew they had it all in the bag, mostly thanks to their cyborg enhancements.

Both girls, who were playing as Mario and Luigi with DK playing as Bowser, got a well-timed head start of their opponent and navigated their way through Rainbow Road, watching out for the edge and the other opponents even with Donkey Kong pulling out all the stops he could.

Tari and Belle activated advanced player mode, their eyes glowing, and they started getting further ahead in the race.

"WH-WHA...?" Lawyer Kong exclaimed, seeing that Tari was in first with Belle in second.

Despite the challenging nature of the Mario Kart challenge, the two girls pulled ahead, keeping DK from getting ahead of them, and made it to the finish in first place at the end of the final lap with Mario and Luigi victorious and Bowser near last position.

DK hooted in shock and Lawyer Kong wailed, "NO, NO, NO! HOW CAN YOU LOSE, DK?!"

Tari and Belle high-fived, having enjoyed the game, and shook Donkey Kong's hand, much to the big gorilla's surprise while Lawyer Kong growled in frustration. Another victory for the SMG4 Team; sixteen to Nintendo's one.

A horn sounded, and a light enveloped every player on both teams, sending them back to the courtroom with Judge Kirby...