The knife collided with the huge, bronze coloured gong and John’s heart skipped a beat.

  Wide eyed, he turned through the haze of his messed-up equilibrium to see the huge piece of circular metal swinging on its hinges, a foreboding, mocking sound ringing out.

  “Oh no,” he said as his ears rang in that high pitched whining sound that prevented him from properly hearing Baz’s whoops of joy.

  Looking up at the nearest spire, John’s heart leaped into his throat as arcing, blue lighting fired out from the top, cracking and flashing as sharp lines of death hurtled towards the glass floor.

  In less than a second he was going to be electrocuted, fried to a crisp, blackened and twitching just like Baz’s brother after the phosphorus incident.

  John had jokingly mentioned that he wanted a Viking funeral once to his wife after one too many glasses of merlot, but this wasn’t the burning he had in mind.

  Desperately, he turned back towards Baz’s platform, his head spinning much like it was after all those bottles of red wine.

  There was no way he was going to reach it in time.

  He charged anyway.

  ***

  Baz cackled from atop his platform as he gazed out over the battlefield. John looked so funny, stumbling around like a drunkard on the ground, a far cry from the fiercely capable man he’d met a few days ago.

  “Checkmate,” he said quietly, wishing he had a bottle of Jack to raise in toast to his soon-to-be fallen opponent.

  Truthfully, he had no quarrel with the gunslinger, if anything he actually kind of liked him. John had helped him and his brother; he’d rescued them from the Hob Koala and Baz couldn’t even find it in his heart to blame him for the phosphorus incident.

  Sure, John had fired the bullet that had ended up killing his brother, but if he hadn’t then they all would have died.

  It may have been the single worst moment of Baz’s life, but at least he still had a life afterwards.

  No, the only person there that day who deserved his ire was the blonde tramp with the psycho smile. She deserved no quarter, and he would be the one to end her life, painfully.

  Unfortunately, that meant that Baz needed to win this round, and that meant that he also needed to exterminate John Doe. It was that simple. The man was tenacious, he refused to back down. It really was nothing personal.

  The wannabe cowboy knew what he was getting into when he signed up for the tournament, no one forced him to come to an alien space arena to fight strangers to the death for a card. Baz had nothing to feel bad about. This was just how the world was now. Only the strongest survived. He’d had to learn that the hard way.

  He’d had a difficult couple of days since the incident, he’d fought countless creatures, he’d barely eaten, he hadn’t slept, and he’d scrambled and clawed his way into acquiring his card.

  Stumbling upon Joanna as she wandered into the stadium back in Perth was simply a stroke of luck and a chance that he refused to let go to waste.

  Lightening bolted and fell towards the glass floor below as John staggered closer towards Baz’s platform. He was never going to make it, how could he when he was still suffering the effects of Baz’s homebrew grenade.

  Some dinosaurs in a military supply store had helped him combine a frag with a flashbang to create something that was not only deadly at the point of explosion but carried repercussion for minutes afterwards as well.

  He’d called it the flashfrag, though the weird dino dude had preferred the name fragbang. That, however, sounded too close to a slur for Baz’s liking. He’d never been the politically correct kind of guy, growing up as he did, but he also didn’t want to tarnish the good name of his new explosive either.

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  His eye twitched as he watched John stumble towards him, it had been doing that ever since he lost his other one in a fight with an overly zealous kookaburra. That had been how he’d won his card, luckily for him the dino dude had a magic healing bed.

  As the lightening hit the ground he placed his hand over his heart for the dead, offering a minute’s silence for the man. John Doe was no more, and Baz was about to fight blondie to the death.

  “So long bro, I’ll make sure to kill that harlot for you,” he said graciously as he gazed out over the battlefield.

  “I think I’ll do it myself.”

  Baz gasped as John’s gritty voice startled him from behind, then he felt something hard impact his lower back and he tripped forwards.

  “What the fu-”

  ***

  Stumbling, staggering, and hopelessly pushing forwards towards the platform, John knew he didn’t have enough time to reach it.

  His head spun and he felt sick as he forced his way onwards on unsteady legs.

  Lightening cracked overhead and the magnificent blue bolt struck downwards. John tripped just as it hit sending out a ripple of lightening around the playing field.

  Something hard and bumpy stuck into his gut and he instinctively lifted his legs up, his head was still shaky, his world spinning but he didn’t feel any pain.

  Was death by lightening painless? He’d always assumed it would be agonising, like being tased but worse and he’d experienced the business end of a sparky stick more than once in his life.

  Scrunching his eyes closed, he realised that the ringing in his ears had begun to quieten down a little. As he reopened his eyelids, the world still swayed and was a little blurry, but it wasn’t spinning so much. It felt more akin to being on the deck of ship amidst choppy waves.

  Looking down he realised that he’d fallen onto one of the rubber stepping stones. There weren’t many scattered around the arena but it seemed that one was placed right in front of Baz’s platform, just out of his line of sight.

  His opponent couldn’t have known, John hadn’t seen him get close enough to the edge of his raised platform to see down at this angle.

  I can use this; he thought groggily as he pushed himself onto his hands and knees and watched the lightening ripples hit the barrier that surrounded the playing field and dissipate.

  Slowly he crawled on his hands and knees, hugging the platform and circling around to the other side. The back looked more like scaffolding which made it easier to climb as he hoisted himself up onto the reinforced rubber cross beams.

  Thankfully his grip wasn’t compromised even if his equilibrium was out of whack. He scrambled over the top and shakily stood up behind Baz.

  He had deep, angry scars on the back of his head and his leather jacket looked quite beaten up from such a close distance.

  “So long bro, I’ll make sure to kill that harlot for you,” he said wistfully as he thumped his fist into his chest.

  “I think I’ll do it myself,” John said, his hoarse voice barely a whisper.

  Then he lifted his unsteady leg and Sparta kicked the paramilitary wannabe sexual offender with all his might in the base of his spine.

  “What the fu-” Baz called out as he flew off the platform and landed face first onto the glass floor.

  Before he had even hit the ground, John drew one of his revolvers and, relying heavily on his marksmanship skill to guide his shaky hand, fired towards the gong.

  GONG.

  The deep sound of metal on metal rang out like a wave across the battlefield and John looked down at his foe as the crackling lightening sparked high above them.

  Baz landed heavily on his face and began trying to push himself off the ground, but John knew from experience that he didn’t have enough time to clamber back up onto the platform.

  Craning his neck around, Baz looked at him with his one good eye, blood pouring down his chin from a busted nose, and then the lightning struck.

  Blue sharpness smashed into the glass floor with a graceful eloquence and Baz convulsed violently as the lines of lightening jumped in and out of his body like electric eels playing in the water.

  His hand gripped like a claw and his arms got stuck in a T-Rex pose as his legs violently shuddered and his neck snapped back and forth.

  The overwhelming smell of charred flesh penetrated John’s nostril for the third time in as many days and he watched grimly as the man’s hair burned and his skin turned a chalky, dark colour.

  It stopped almost as quickly as it started and Baz continued to convulse even after the lightning hit the barrier and fizzled out. He was done for, but he wasn’t dead just yet.

  “Who’d have thought that you’d end up just like your brother,” John said as he gingerly hopped off the platform, landing next to the jolting man whose one eye hadn’t left his foes face the entire time.

  “I… guess… it was… fate,” he managed to force out as his body jerked with the aftereffects of the lightning.

  “Seems so,” John said sadly, “at least I can do for you what I didn’t get the change to do for him,” he pulled out his revolver with a sigh.

  “W-wait,” Baz stuttered, “promise me… kill her…”

  “I’ll do my best, one of us has to win this final and as you’ve seen, I don’t go down easy.”

  He could survive this if I left him...

  Baz laughed a little but it was an awkward, staggered sound that strained against his jittering throat. He reached towards his solar plexus in a jagged motion and sunk his hand inside.

  It passed through his clothes and skin like water, a faint light surrounding his wrist as it sank into his chest cavity. When he pulled it out there was a small metal card clutched precariously between his thumb and forefinger.

  …But he’s dangerous, and I need more cards.

  “Take… it,” he said with great difficulty as he struggled to let go of the card.

  John nodded, leant down and placed the barrel of his gun a mere inch from the man’s head. “I’ll put it to good use,” he said. Baz closed his eye and the last thing that ever went through his mind was lead in a metal casing.