Eye of Ra (23 page)

Casually he walked toward a broken Laurence, writhing in unimaginable pain from the beating he just took that would have killed most beings with the first hit. The Eye of Set balled his fists, cricking them as Awakening energy pulsated from his gauntlet hands.

“I retract my claim of you being a coward half-breed,” snorted Anubis. “But that is all that I shall retract. You are neither a warrior, nor are you worthy of that armor you wear. But for your efforts I shall grant you a warrior’s end before I remove it from your dead carcass and have it and your familiar given to someone both deserving and of a pure bloodline.”

Laurence groaned as he rolled to his hands and knees. He commanded his helm to retract his faceplate allowing him to spit up the blood in his throat into the alien dirt. At that moment, he decided how he wanted to die.

“You’re right, I ain’t no warrior,” Laurence shook his head in defeat, “I’m a ball player.”

With those words, Laurence lowered his helm again and rose to his feet. He sunk into a textbook football running stance squaring off against Anubis for one last gamble.

“Twenty-one! Thirty-two! Hut! Hut!”

Laurence charged him with freight train speed looking to slam right into him. The son of Set settled into a fighting stance, preparing to total him with kick or a punch once he got into striking distance, but at the last millisecond the descendant of Amun-Ra employed fancy footwork and spun to evade Anubis as if he were running a ball past a defender. Before Anubis could spin around to attack, Laurence switched to playing defense and hit him with a sack that would have broken a human quarterback in half. The hit took the mighty Annunaki warrior off his feet and into to the ground, rattling him for the first time during their battle. Laurence rose to his feet while shoving Anubis’ helm deep into the soft dirt.

“First down bitch.”

Laurence quickly trotted off and got into another stance, waiting for Anubis to get up. Stunned and furious, he rose to his feet with fists clenched, looking for blood.

“You shall not do that again,” he pointed a finger at Laurence.

Laurence sounded off again as he ignored Anubis’ threat, ready to square off with him again.

Anubis was the first to charge this time, creating a sonic boom as he rushed to total Laurence with a bone-crushing impact…had Laurence been there. A calm Laurence once again blitzed him at the last second. As Anubis slammed on the breaks, mystified at how he had missed his target, a roaring Laurence out of nowhere delivered another bone crushing sack, knocking his opponent off his feet and skull first into the ground. As Laurence rose to his feet again, the son of Set uttered a painful groan, clutching his ribcage.

“That’s second down,” he pointed at him. “I can do this all day.”

A now enraged Anubis slammed his fist into the ground and fought to his feet as Laurence got into a defensive stance again. Clutching his ribs, he stomped over to face off against him. Believing he was being bested by some form of Earth combat technique, the arrogant son of Set sunk into his own stance mirroring Laurence. Under his helm Laurence smirked, realizing that he had gotten a supposed god to fight his type of battle. He picked up some foreign dirt, rubbing it in his gauntlets and allowed it to fall between his fingers before bearing down again.

“Twenty-three! Forty-one! Hut! Hut!”

Anubis roared as the ground exploded from the force he unleashed as he rushed Laurence with fist cocked backwards to take his head off. The descendant of Amun-Ra had other plans as he calmly faded back as if to hurl a “Hail Mary”. At the last microsecond before possible contact he shuffled and spun around Anubis, evading him. The frustrated Annunaki once again slid to a halt, now beside himself. He howled, turning as Laurence once again on his blindside became the defender looking for a tackle.

Anubis awkwardly attempted to perform the same shuffle and spin to avoid the hit, but a more skilled Laurence capitalized on his amateurish attempt. He first delivered another bone crushing hit to his ribs lifting him off his feet. With his arms wrapped around his waist, he spun and viciously slammed Anubis to the ground, plowing his shoulder and neck into the dirt. The hit squeezed out another painful groan from the ancient warrior.

Laurence now on one knee looked down at Anubis moaning as he nursed both the back of his skull and battered midsection.

“And that’s what we call on my planet, 3
^rd
down.” 

As he walked away to set up again, a furious and now desperate Anubis latched onto his right leg, yanking him to the ground. He roared while pouncing on him as the two began to trade blows while wrestling on the ground.

“Oh! Now you want to cheat!” Laurence growled.

He managed to rifle Anubis’ battered midsection with three powerful strikes. This gave him the upper hand to roll, getting the Eye of Set on his back into a mounted position.

As he struggled to keep him pinned down, the son of Set slipped in a thunderous backhand stunning him, then followed up with a right cross to knock him off.

Laurence’s entire body trembled as his ears rang from the blow. With blurry vision he could make out Anubis on his hands and knees struggling to stand. The Earth-titled Egyptian god of the dead still had not recovered from Laurence’s three successful sacks. He also began to stagger as his elevated adrenaline, boosted by embarrassment and rage, made him succumb more quickly to the Samba Nectar.

Laurence shook off the cobwebs realizing that if he did not capitalize now, he was good as dead.

With a scream he leaped, jumping on Anubis’s lower back and wrapping his arms around his waist. He locked his hands at the forearms.

“Celestial mode now!” he roared.

The back of his armor once again shifted and opened up, revealing two halves of a large star disk that locked together on his back. It along with the rest of the Ember on his armor began to blaze brighter than ever as the molecules in the very air froze all around them.

   As the surprised Annunaki warrior finally shot to his feet, Laurence bellowed, popping his hips and slingshotting him backwards into an Earthshaking German suplex, cratering him skull first into the ground.

A stunned Anubis rolled to all fours again as Laurence held on for dear life. As he had come of age, he like everyone else came to realize that pro wrestling was fake, and the moves executed were staged. However, on this day, that move innovated by the legendary Frank Gotch was all that stood between him and certain death.

As Anubis struggled to his feet again, shaking off the first brutal hit, Laurence howled again, snapping him up and over and slamming his skull and upper back into the planet’s surface once more.

“Please stay down,” Laurence pleaded, continuing to grasp tightly around his waist. “Stay down.”

A stubborn Anubis, wobbling on glass legs, refused to submit to one he viewed as his inferior. He rose once more to his feet and grasped Laurence’s arms wrapped around his midsection, hoping to crush and break them apart. Laurence screamed at the tremendous pressure the stronger warrior, aided by superior armor, wrought upon his forearms. Even with his own armor protecting him, it felt as if his arms would shatter in a matter of seconds.

A defiant Laurence powered through the pain, summoning all of his enhanced strength quadrupled by the cosmic energies coursing through his own armor, to deliver the trifecta, a third suplex to the son of Set. Anubis, more focused on breaking Laurence’s arms, took the full brunt of the impact to the back of his skull. The ground quaked for miles from the bump, while more ancient buildings toppled into piles of the materials that made them.

 In the middle of the impact zone, both alien and alien descendant laid sprawled out, barely able to move. Anubis retracted his Menos helm and clutched the back of his neck and skull. Even he was no match for being flung around repeatedly like a ragdoll with the power that had birthed the universe. And although Laurence was the one dispensing the punishment, the power of Celestial mode had been too much for even him to control. 

“Armor,” Laurence quivered. “Power down.”

Being a total amateur to the art of professional wrestling himself, Laurence had also taken some damage as he had not known to properly tuck his head in during the maneuver, and there was no cushion within his own ancient helm. His armor went back to sentinel mode, and his eyes were blurry as his brain began to swim inside his skull. He battled through it and crawled, clawing dirt, to get back to Anubis, who was struggling to get to his feet. Laurence roared and threw himself on top of the Annunaki warrior once again. With one hand he gripped the back of his chest plate and with the other rifled the back of his now exposed skull with thunderous blow after blow.

A weakened Anubis attempted to knock him off with a spinning back elbow, but Laurence was able to evade it, dropping him on his back. Grabbing the front of his armor, he continued his one handed haymaker assault, pummeling Anubis’ face the same way he had imagined beating the face of Brick Bear.

After the twentieth blow he stayed his hand, having finally beaten the fight out of the god of the underworld. Anubis’ left eye was swollen shut, lip busted, and nose broken, along with other lacerations to his face.

“Do you yield?” Laurence roared praying for a yes. “Do you yield?”

He wasn’t trying to be cool or come up with some heroic line. In the middle of the battle to end all battles, thoughts of his father entered his mind, as he remembered the times he had read to him tales of heroism such as Beowulf, Samson, Moses, King Arthur, King David, and the Three Musketeers. He only prayed that his opponent would yield, in the hope that he might live to see his father again.

“Only when … the last breath …leaves my body,” mumbled a semi-conscious Anubis, “Shall I yield … to the likes of you.”

Laurence sadly shook his head. With his fist cocked back, he went supernova with enough power to shatter a planet. With the life of the human race in the balance, he struck true with all he had to keep his birth planet safe, bringing the battle between god and mortal …to an end.

CHAPTER 10

Laurence stepped out of a jump portal to stand in the middle of Atticala, the capital city of Anu, with the Staff of the Ancients in one hand, Anubis’s khopeshes in his other hand and the body of Anubis over his shoulder. Instantly he swayed a bit, taking in the air of Anu for the first time. It was much purer than anything he was used to; the plant life, which was heavily integrated into the city infrastructure, seemed sweeter and brighter than the vegetation on Earth. He also felt a bit heavier, likely due to increased gravity, he thought.

Looking around, he realized that a part of Earth’s history was not its own.

All around him were structures similar to those of Ancient Egypt as well as the Mayan and Incan empires. The clear difference he saw between those buildings from Earth’s history and the ones before him were that Anu’s ‘pyramids’ and ‘temples’ were constructed from either gold, silver, or clear diamond-like crystal materials. The rays from Anu’s blue star reflecting off the buildings made it hard for him to see at times.

Annunaki citizens going about their business stopped in their tracks at the sight of him, a visitor from another planet adorned in armor from their world, carrying one of their own over his shoulder.

The first thing he noticed was how tall everyone was. Full grown males ranged from six foot four to almost seven feet, while the females stood between six foot two and six foot eight. Despite their height, they had standard human proportions and not the skinny, lanky tallness the way aliens were often depicted in Earth movies and TV. Their skins had a weird shiny smoothness to them and varied in shades like pale white, light grey, dark grey, fox reddish brown, caramel bronze, and cocoa brown. Men and women both wore onyx black or platinum blonde hair either bone straight stopping at their shoulders, fully braided or braided with one side shaved off, or Bic bald. A few, mostly the younger generation, added streaks of colors to their hair. What crept him out a bit were their eyes; they were one size larger than normal human eyes with a bit of a slant.

What made him even more uncomfortable was the fashion of the planet. The styles they wore were straight out of the history books and movies he watched about ancient civilizations from his planet, except the materials were of higher quality, sheer and revealing. The Annunaki were obviously not a race that cared about modesty.

They all stared at him curious rather than afraid. Some smaller children attempted to get away from their parents to get a closer look at the strange foreigner from the other side of the universe.

“Definitely not in Kansas anymore,” was all he could say.

They would be his last words as portals opened up all around him. Stepping out of them were heavily armed Annunaki warriors, both men and women, ready to greet him in a hostile manner. Leading the charge was Bastet, the Eye of Osiris herself.

Already in sentinel mode, her familiar that took the shape of a cybernetic feline converted into its combat mode, an Awakening-powered version of the cat of nine tails. Her helm had a traditional design similar to Laurence’s covering the upper part of her face, but like Anubis’ helm, Menos covered her entire head underneath. Despite the gap between them, Laurence could feel the heat and power coming from each lash of her weapon. He however stood his ground. His battle with Anubis had exorcised whatever fear had been left lingering within.