Post by Zane on Apr 13, 2024 20:52:30 GMT -5
The sound echoes in his head. Then it repeats. And repeats. And repeats. After a while, it repeats with such speed that it sounds at first like thunder. Then it’s more like gunshots, reverberating one after the other with unrelenting speed. He can feel his stomach churning with each strike, rising and falling like waves crashing. It made his head spin, whirling and whirling until he felt like he was in a blender, or one of those puke carousels at the fair. He’d never liked those, and never understood how anyone did. Now he felt like he was chained to one as it spun over and over, faster and faster as it constantly changed direction. Accompanied by that damned sound.
Always that damned sound.
It suddenly occurred to him that his eyes were closed. Squeezed shut in fact. As if he was trying to protect himself from something. But what? What was the threat that he thought could, or for that matter would, go away by just closing his eyes and pretending it wasn’t there? He tried to open them, but they protested. They didn’t just protest. He fought against it, like they were sentient and knew that opening would induce nothing but suffering.
As that damned sound persisted.
He struggled against himself while every muscle in his body opposed his commands. Every time the sound repeated he’d felt like he was being stabbed. The sensation began in his chest and would jump to his stomach, then back again. It alternated back and forth, feeding into the sick feeling that had developed. He hated it, and he wanted nothing more than for it to stop. But it wouldn’t. It kept happening until its echoing in his head drowned everything else out.
The stabbing pain suddenly stopped.
Everything went quiet.
“Finally,” he thought to himself. “A reprieve.”
His eyes suddenly fly open, flooding them with light and momentarily blinding him. The stabbing pain shoots through his head until he turns his head and finds himself staring at its source.
Glenn Burke.
His face is engulfed by a twisted and pernicious grin. His eyes alternate between Zane and his hand as it hovers overhead like the messenger of doom.
Zane tries to reach for him but finds himself still trapped by a pressure that pushes down on him as if he’s anchored through the ground itself. He watches as the hand slowly goes down. It hits the mat with the force of a nuke going off.
“Three,” the warped visage of Glenn says, brimming with vicious glee.
Zane shoots up in bed, drenched in sweat as he feels a presence in his room. He looks around wildly until his eyes settle on an ethereal form hovering at the end of his bed. Both of his shepherds snore loudly at the end of his bed.
“Granma,” he asked.
It pointed a withered and accusatory finger at him, its face contorted by a baleful expression of ire and disgust.
“I find myself in a weird place,” Zane explains. “I’m stuck between alternating moods of anger and numbness.”
“We all find our ways to cope.”
“I'm going into one of the biggest matches of my career after one of the biggest losses of my career and I find myself a bit estranged from…well…”
There’s what feels like a long silence before he finishes.
“Myself.”
Although he sounds calm, there’s unmistakable sadness and frustration in his tone.
“I honestly don't know what to say.”
The first time he’d entered the woods they’d terrified him. It wasn’t because of what they were. He’d grown up in New York State, a place with so many heavily wooded areas that practically everyone could drive within half an hour of their home and find a forest to get lost in. It wasn’t that it was a forest that had intimidated people so deeply the first handful of times that he’d visited. It was that it was this forest. It was a forest that had experienced a lot. It had been the haven for a man’s descent into madness and out-of-control violence. It’d watched a hero fall to depths that no man descended to, falling from a lauded and respected hero and role model to something else. Something beyond sinister, and perhaps beyond even the banality of evil.
“The banality of evil.”
He wasn’t sure that he agreed with Hannah Arendt about that. He’d known a lot of genuinely evil men in his day and even the least intelligent among them were far from banal. He knew that Arendt had meant her now famous phrase in more than that very literal interpretation. The man who’d bathed this forest in blood certainly hadn’t been banal. Had he been, perhaps he’d have been easier to stop.
It’d taken the unbreakable brotherhood of a man who was equally horrifying to save him from himself. His savior had taken the cabin over and in so doing, protection over the forest. He’d purged it of the darkness that had overtaken it, replacing it with an almost unnatural peacefulness. It was that engulfing feeling of calm and serenity that had first unnerved him so greatly. It challenged the perpetually, all-engulfing chaos that had reigned inside of him at the time.
Whenever he felt that overwhelming chaos building and boiling he’d find himself back here.
He was feeling that chaos now.
“I have to give you credit, Donovan. You did it.”
He sighs in disappointment.
“You ended my reign,” he pauses and we can almost hear the grin in his voice. “How appropriate.”
“Our careers can’t seem to escape each other's respective gravitational pulls. Even when I focus on my goals and interests, and you focus on hiding from me as much as possible, we can’t escape each other.”
“This time wasn’t incidental, of course. You maneuvered things with Phrixus to make sure that you’d get a shot at the Cross-Hemisphere championship when you’d frankly done nothing to earn it.”
“I could descend into a bitter rant about your cynical machinations to end up with the championship match, but there’s one simple fact that puts us where we are now. I had to beat you at ‘Alchemy.’”
“I failed.”
“That’s entirely on me.”
“I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t feeling a bit lost without that goal to focus on. In the past, I know that would’ve been an end unto itself for you, but that’s not it now. Now you’re doing it to goad our current Creative Director into facing you, using the championship he’s obsessed with as the bait. In return, he’s put you in the match we find ourselves in on Monday. A match where he counter-baits you by waiving the Conquest Championship in your face because in a sense you’re nothing more than a mirror image of your mentor.”
“He’s obsessed with the Cross-Hemisphere Championship, while you’re obsessed with the World Championship. You win the Cross-Hemisphere Championship to bait him into facing you, and he books you in a match with me, one of your greatest rivals, and with the potential number one contender to the World Championship.”
“For a shot at the World Championship.”
“The very one that you obsess over.”
“But instead of handing you the next World Title shot, or even adding you to the next World Championship match he could…”
“He taunts you by positioning you to win the championship that forces you to win five more times to get a shot at the World Championship.”
“Never let it be said that our resident shrub spy doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
With every step, he felt himself growing calmer. This forest had that effect. It seemed to absorb tension, stress, misery, and various other types of internal discord. The stones crunched under his feet on the dirt path. That was the other thing about the place, it forced you out of your comfort zone by disallowing the ability to drive to it. One had to leave their car a couple of miles away and tread along a winding dirt path. Some parts force the person or people traversing it to concentrate on their steps, as misplacing one could have bad consequences. Potentially fatal in fact.
Zane had passed multiple locations along it where the ground still displayed the scars of its former inhabitant, an out-of-place trench, half-filled with leaves here, a randomly hanging frayed rope there, an old plate of sharpened branches leaned up, spike side down against a tree. The ambush spots. It created an unnerving feeling in anyone who didn’t know the final outcome of the tragedy that’d taken place there.
He looked up and to his surprise found himself standing a couple of steps from the door. He raised his hand to knock when the door silently swung open. Zane momentarily paused as the hair on the back of his neck stood up. He wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. As far as he knew, its normal inhabitant was in Yonkers. The massive figure engulfing the door frame showed otherwise.
“Kid,” it rumbled.
Zane smiled. “You’re the only person who calls me ‘kid.”
He thought he saw a slight smile flash. It was always so hard to tell with James Spyder.
“I figured you’d be showing up here after ‘Alchemy.’ I could see it in your body language when you walked out.”
Zane nods. “That loss hit me harder than they usually do.”
“It is Hastings,” Spyder remarks as he and Zane shake hands.
“Good ol’ Donovan,” Zane replies. “Always finding the perfect way to stick it to me, even when I’m not even the reason he’s doing what he’s doing.”
“Mmhm,” the Man Mountain acknowledges before taking a few steps into the small cabin. It looked like his head was going to scrape onto the ceiling.
“That’s not an answer, Spyder,” Zane chides.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Spyder answers tonelessly. Or at least it seemed that way. It was always hard to tell with Spyder.
“So what was it,” Zane asks, a bit confused.
“It was an acknowledgment,” the giant responds as he ducks slightly through an adjoining door.
Zane walks and runs his hands over one of the pitted frame sections. They looked like old railroad ties.
“Why do you think Colin chose these,” he asks.
“He didn’t,” Spyder replies, pausing to look at Zane as he steps back through with two drinks in hand. “He didn’t build this cabin. He occupied it.”
“He squatted,” Zane asks, confused. “What happened to the owner?”
“There wasn’t one,” Spyder says, sitting in a large chair. “It’d been abandoned by its previous inhabitant. The person had left his miasma of darkness behind. This place practically reeked of it. When Colin inhabited it in the state of mind he was in, it overwhelmed him.”
Zane blinks, surprised by the admission. “Um,” he stammers. “Ok.”
Spyder looks up at him in that way he has where he feels like he knows everything you’re thinking and feeling in that moment.
“That’s why you’re here, is it not,” he asks.
“To ask about Colin,” Zane replies. “No.”
“I’m aware,” Spyder states placidly.
“So why’d you ask,” Zane inquires.
“I didn’t,” Spyder smiles ever so slightly.
“Then what did you ask about,” Zane frowns.
“You,” Spyder answers. “You’re here because you lost to Donovan and now you don’t know what to do. You foolishly feel that your last run was a failure. This is partially due to not meeting your goals, and partially because those goals were thwarted by your old frenemy, Donovan Hastings. He once again conspired and contrived to satisfy his own base desires, as he his wont to do, and you were caught in the crossfire.”
Zane stares at him, then shakes his head and laughs.
“I hate it when you do that.”
“State the obvious,” Spyder queries and states simultaneously.
“Yes.”
“Do you not think that this reflects more on you than it does on him?”
“In what way?”
Spyder angles his head as if the answer is absurdly simple.
“Would you say that this cabin is all that Colin was and is,” he asks calmly.
Zane looks at him, almost glaring. “Of course not,” he replies crossly.
Spyder observes this silently, almost analytically.
“Why would you insult him like that?”
“Where did I insult him,” Spyder asks, amused.
“You asked if this place is who Colin is.”
“I didn’t,” he answers. “What did I ask?”
Zane goes to respond but stops, suddenly looking very confused. He stands and ponders the question for a few seconds, then facepalms.
“Right,” his hand drops. “I only answered a part of the question.”
Spyder nods. “No. You only heard part of the question, and then reacted. It remains one of your greatest flaws.”
“Thanks,” Zane grouses.
“That’s not meant as an insult,” Spyder answers. “But you need to learn how to listen, and not just to what’s stated.”
Zane’s brow furrows. “I’m not sure that I understand.”
“Once you do, your life will get a lot easier,” his mentor replies. “Now, how about dinner?”
“I’m sorry, Larry. I owe you an apology. I haven’t talked about you much thus far other than to make an obtuse reference to your current situation. Congratulations are in order. You’ve completed four of your necessary five defenses as Conquest Champion.”
“You have only one more to go.”
“To do so, our Creative Director has positioned you against a highly motivated Donovan Hastings.”
“And me.”
“The man who just experienced one of the most agonizing losses of his career and feels like he has something to prove because of it. That’s not an enviable situation. For anyone.”
“Don’t mistake my apparent silence toward you as disrespect, because nothing could be further from the truth. I have nothing but respect for you. I look at what you’ve done since arriving here and I’m genuinely impressed by it. Your resume before here speaks for itself. You have an impressive blend of power, speed, and technical acumen. You know how to pace yourself, and when to be aggressive. You’d be a great World Champion.”
“Unfortunately for you, there are three problems with that dream.”
“The first two are Donovan and I. You know that we’re not just going to lay down for you and let you win. Speaking for myself, I’m not the Zane Scott that so many people still seem to think I am, where I’m going to overly focus on Donovan and lose sight of you.”
“I’m not, and that’s not going to happen.”
“The third problem is our current World Champion, Alan Wallace.”
“As good as you are, he’s better.”
“That’s not an insult to you, Larry. At all. Alan is just that good.”
“All of that said, I can’t help but laugh at how well Phrixus has engineered all of this. He knows that Donovan is currently fixated on him and his legacy as the still longest reigning Cross-Hemisphere Champion of all time. His five hundred and ninety-two days over seven reigns have yet to be topped.”
“We all know who’s breathing down his neck.”
“Phrixus knows that he’ll eventually have to deal with Donovan directly, but before that, he’s going to go out of his way to soften him up and test him because that’s who Phrixus is. As much as I dislike the man, he’s a consummate mental chess player. He knows that placing Donovan in the ring with me a mere two weeks after he took the very same championship from me before I could complete my aim of surpassing Phrixus’ record in fewer reigns is going to see a more motivated and, he hopes, uncontrolled and dangerous Zane Scott in this match.”
“One outta two ain’t bad, Phrix, but yet again you’ve fallen into the trap that you always fall into about me by seeing the me you need to see.”
“Not the one who’s been here for the past few years.”
“You’re blinded by your disdain for me and it renders you incapable of addressing your self-inflicted weakness. Bravo.”
“Make no mistake, I want to win this match and it would be particularly special to pin Donovan to do it. Not only would doing so deprive him of another route to the World Championship that he lives for, but I’d pin the reigning Cross-Hemisphere Champion and place myself in a better position to reclaim it from him so that I can complete my mission. It would also keep him from becoming a double champion because if there’s any one person in this company who would be utterly unbearable to be around if he held two championships, it’s Donovan.”
“Especially when it’s two championships he doesn’t really want.”
“That said, I understand how big pinning you would be, Larry. You’ve been on one hell of a heater lately, and you got to be the special muscle for the World Champion at ‘Alchemy.’ It must’ve been extremely tempting to be so close to that championship when you’re so close to earning an opportunity for it. I know you said that you had Alan’s back, and you kept up your end of the bargain, but let's not kid ourselves here.”
“Deep down you’re a bad man, and you want what you want.”
“That’s fine. I appreciate how open you’ve been about yourself and your past. So few wrestlers are incapable of being honest these days. Especially with themselves. Your candor has been refreshing.”
“So let me return the favor, out of respect.”
“It will be a pleasure to face you on Monday night. I’m looking forward to the challenge of facing a wrestler with the resume that you have. I’m looking forward to showing you the respect of a good fight. I’m looking forward to giving you my best and hopefully getting the same from you.”
“What I look forward to the most is ending your run as Conquest Champion. Not because I have a grudge against you…”
“But because I need this for me.”
Always that damned sound.
It suddenly occurred to him that his eyes were closed. Squeezed shut in fact. As if he was trying to protect himself from something. But what? What was the threat that he thought could, or for that matter would, go away by just closing his eyes and pretending it wasn’t there? He tried to open them, but they protested. They didn’t just protest. He fought against it, like they were sentient and knew that opening would induce nothing but suffering.
As that damned sound persisted.
He struggled against himself while every muscle in his body opposed his commands. Every time the sound repeated he’d felt like he was being stabbed. The sensation began in his chest and would jump to his stomach, then back again. It alternated back and forth, feeding into the sick feeling that had developed. He hated it, and he wanted nothing more than for it to stop. But it wouldn’t. It kept happening until its echoing in his head drowned everything else out.
The stabbing pain suddenly stopped.
Everything went quiet.
“Finally,” he thought to himself. “A reprieve.”
His eyes suddenly fly open, flooding them with light and momentarily blinding him. The stabbing pain shoots through his head until he turns his head and finds himself staring at its source.
Glenn Burke.
His face is engulfed by a twisted and pernicious grin. His eyes alternate between Zane and his hand as it hovers overhead like the messenger of doom.
Zane tries to reach for him but finds himself still trapped by a pressure that pushes down on him as if he’s anchored through the ground itself. He watches as the hand slowly goes down. It hits the mat with the force of a nuke going off.
“Three,” the warped visage of Glenn says, brimming with vicious glee.
Zane shoots up in bed, drenched in sweat as he feels a presence in his room. He looks around wildly until his eyes settle on an ethereal form hovering at the end of his bed. Both of his shepherds snore loudly at the end of his bed.
“Granma,” he asked.
It pointed a withered and accusatory finger at him, its face contorted by a baleful expression of ire and disgust.
“I find myself in a weird place,” Zane explains. “I’m stuck between alternating moods of anger and numbness.”
“We all find our ways to cope.”
“I'm going into one of the biggest matches of my career after one of the biggest losses of my career and I find myself a bit estranged from…well…”
There’s what feels like a long silence before he finishes.
“Myself.”
Although he sounds calm, there’s unmistakable sadness and frustration in his tone.
“I honestly don't know what to say.”
The first time he’d entered the woods they’d terrified him. It wasn’t because of what they were. He’d grown up in New York State, a place with so many heavily wooded areas that practically everyone could drive within half an hour of their home and find a forest to get lost in. It wasn’t that it was a forest that had intimidated people so deeply the first handful of times that he’d visited. It was that it was this forest. It was a forest that had experienced a lot. It had been the haven for a man’s descent into madness and out-of-control violence. It’d watched a hero fall to depths that no man descended to, falling from a lauded and respected hero and role model to something else. Something beyond sinister, and perhaps beyond even the banality of evil.
“The banality of evil.”
He wasn’t sure that he agreed with Hannah Arendt about that. He’d known a lot of genuinely evil men in his day and even the least intelligent among them were far from banal. He knew that Arendt had meant her now famous phrase in more than that very literal interpretation. The man who’d bathed this forest in blood certainly hadn’t been banal. Had he been, perhaps he’d have been easier to stop.
It’d taken the unbreakable brotherhood of a man who was equally horrifying to save him from himself. His savior had taken the cabin over and in so doing, protection over the forest. He’d purged it of the darkness that had overtaken it, replacing it with an almost unnatural peacefulness. It was that engulfing feeling of calm and serenity that had first unnerved him so greatly. It challenged the perpetually, all-engulfing chaos that had reigned inside of him at the time.
Whenever he felt that overwhelming chaos building and boiling he’d find himself back here.
He was feeling that chaos now.
“I have to give you credit, Donovan. You did it.”
He sighs in disappointment.
“You ended my reign,” he pauses and we can almost hear the grin in his voice. “How appropriate.”
“Our careers can’t seem to escape each other's respective gravitational pulls. Even when I focus on my goals and interests, and you focus on hiding from me as much as possible, we can’t escape each other.”
“This time wasn’t incidental, of course. You maneuvered things with Phrixus to make sure that you’d get a shot at the Cross-Hemisphere championship when you’d frankly done nothing to earn it.”
“I could descend into a bitter rant about your cynical machinations to end up with the championship match, but there’s one simple fact that puts us where we are now. I had to beat you at ‘Alchemy.’”
“I failed.”
“That’s entirely on me.”
“I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t feeling a bit lost without that goal to focus on. In the past, I know that would’ve been an end unto itself for you, but that’s not it now. Now you’re doing it to goad our current Creative Director into facing you, using the championship he’s obsessed with as the bait. In return, he’s put you in the match we find ourselves in on Monday. A match where he counter-baits you by waiving the Conquest Championship in your face because in a sense you’re nothing more than a mirror image of your mentor.”
“He’s obsessed with the Cross-Hemisphere Championship, while you’re obsessed with the World Championship. You win the Cross-Hemisphere Championship to bait him into facing you, and he books you in a match with me, one of your greatest rivals, and with the potential number one contender to the World Championship.”
“For a shot at the World Championship.”
“The very one that you obsess over.”
“But instead of handing you the next World Title shot, or even adding you to the next World Championship match he could…”
“He taunts you by positioning you to win the championship that forces you to win five more times to get a shot at the World Championship.”
“Never let it be said that our resident shrub spy doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
With every step, he felt himself growing calmer. This forest had that effect. It seemed to absorb tension, stress, misery, and various other types of internal discord. The stones crunched under his feet on the dirt path. That was the other thing about the place, it forced you out of your comfort zone by disallowing the ability to drive to it. One had to leave their car a couple of miles away and tread along a winding dirt path. Some parts force the person or people traversing it to concentrate on their steps, as misplacing one could have bad consequences. Potentially fatal in fact.
Zane had passed multiple locations along it where the ground still displayed the scars of its former inhabitant, an out-of-place trench, half-filled with leaves here, a randomly hanging frayed rope there, an old plate of sharpened branches leaned up, spike side down against a tree. The ambush spots. It created an unnerving feeling in anyone who didn’t know the final outcome of the tragedy that’d taken place there.
He looked up and to his surprise found himself standing a couple of steps from the door. He raised his hand to knock when the door silently swung open. Zane momentarily paused as the hair on the back of his neck stood up. He wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. As far as he knew, its normal inhabitant was in Yonkers. The massive figure engulfing the door frame showed otherwise.
“Kid,” it rumbled.
Zane smiled. “You’re the only person who calls me ‘kid.”
He thought he saw a slight smile flash. It was always so hard to tell with James Spyder.
“I figured you’d be showing up here after ‘Alchemy.’ I could see it in your body language when you walked out.”
Zane nods. “That loss hit me harder than they usually do.”
“It is Hastings,” Spyder remarks as he and Zane shake hands.
“Good ol’ Donovan,” Zane replies. “Always finding the perfect way to stick it to me, even when I’m not even the reason he’s doing what he’s doing.”
“Mmhm,” the Man Mountain acknowledges before taking a few steps into the small cabin. It looked like his head was going to scrape onto the ceiling.
“That’s not an answer, Spyder,” Zane chides.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Spyder answers tonelessly. Or at least it seemed that way. It was always hard to tell with Spyder.
“So what was it,” Zane asks, a bit confused.
“It was an acknowledgment,” the giant responds as he ducks slightly through an adjoining door.
Zane walks and runs his hands over one of the pitted frame sections. They looked like old railroad ties.
“Why do you think Colin chose these,” he asks.
“He didn’t,” Spyder replies, pausing to look at Zane as he steps back through with two drinks in hand. “He didn’t build this cabin. He occupied it.”
“He squatted,” Zane asks, confused. “What happened to the owner?”
“There wasn’t one,” Spyder says, sitting in a large chair. “It’d been abandoned by its previous inhabitant. The person had left his miasma of darkness behind. This place practically reeked of it. When Colin inhabited it in the state of mind he was in, it overwhelmed him.”
Zane blinks, surprised by the admission. “Um,” he stammers. “Ok.”
Spyder looks up at him in that way he has where he feels like he knows everything you’re thinking and feeling in that moment.
“That’s why you’re here, is it not,” he asks.
“To ask about Colin,” Zane replies. “No.”
“I’m aware,” Spyder states placidly.
“So why’d you ask,” Zane inquires.
“I didn’t,” Spyder smiles ever so slightly.
“Then what did you ask about,” Zane frowns.
“You,” Spyder answers. “You’re here because you lost to Donovan and now you don’t know what to do. You foolishly feel that your last run was a failure. This is partially due to not meeting your goals, and partially because those goals were thwarted by your old frenemy, Donovan Hastings. He once again conspired and contrived to satisfy his own base desires, as he his wont to do, and you were caught in the crossfire.”
Zane stares at him, then shakes his head and laughs.
“I hate it when you do that.”
“State the obvious,” Spyder queries and states simultaneously.
“Yes.”
“Do you not think that this reflects more on you than it does on him?”
“In what way?”
Spyder angles his head as if the answer is absurdly simple.
“Would you say that this cabin is all that Colin was and is,” he asks calmly.
Zane looks at him, almost glaring. “Of course not,” he replies crossly.
Spyder observes this silently, almost analytically.
“Why would you insult him like that?”
“Where did I insult him,” Spyder asks, amused.
“You asked if this place is who Colin is.”
“I didn’t,” he answers. “What did I ask?”
Zane goes to respond but stops, suddenly looking very confused. He stands and ponders the question for a few seconds, then facepalms.
“Right,” his hand drops. “I only answered a part of the question.”
Spyder nods. “No. You only heard part of the question, and then reacted. It remains one of your greatest flaws.”
“Thanks,” Zane grouses.
“That’s not meant as an insult,” Spyder answers. “But you need to learn how to listen, and not just to what’s stated.”
Zane’s brow furrows. “I’m not sure that I understand.”
“Once you do, your life will get a lot easier,” his mentor replies. “Now, how about dinner?”
“I’m sorry, Larry. I owe you an apology. I haven’t talked about you much thus far other than to make an obtuse reference to your current situation. Congratulations are in order. You’ve completed four of your necessary five defenses as Conquest Champion.”
“You have only one more to go.”
“To do so, our Creative Director has positioned you against a highly motivated Donovan Hastings.”
“And me.”
“The man who just experienced one of the most agonizing losses of his career and feels like he has something to prove because of it. That’s not an enviable situation. For anyone.”
“Don’t mistake my apparent silence toward you as disrespect, because nothing could be further from the truth. I have nothing but respect for you. I look at what you’ve done since arriving here and I’m genuinely impressed by it. Your resume before here speaks for itself. You have an impressive blend of power, speed, and technical acumen. You know how to pace yourself, and when to be aggressive. You’d be a great World Champion.”
“Unfortunately for you, there are three problems with that dream.”
“The first two are Donovan and I. You know that we’re not just going to lay down for you and let you win. Speaking for myself, I’m not the Zane Scott that so many people still seem to think I am, where I’m going to overly focus on Donovan and lose sight of you.”
“I’m not, and that’s not going to happen.”
“The third problem is our current World Champion, Alan Wallace.”
“As good as you are, he’s better.”
“That’s not an insult to you, Larry. At all. Alan is just that good.”
“All of that said, I can’t help but laugh at how well Phrixus has engineered all of this. He knows that Donovan is currently fixated on him and his legacy as the still longest reigning Cross-Hemisphere Champion of all time. His five hundred and ninety-two days over seven reigns have yet to be topped.”
“We all know who’s breathing down his neck.”
“Phrixus knows that he’ll eventually have to deal with Donovan directly, but before that, he’s going to go out of his way to soften him up and test him because that’s who Phrixus is. As much as I dislike the man, he’s a consummate mental chess player. He knows that placing Donovan in the ring with me a mere two weeks after he took the very same championship from me before I could complete my aim of surpassing Phrixus’ record in fewer reigns is going to see a more motivated and, he hopes, uncontrolled and dangerous Zane Scott in this match.”
“One outta two ain’t bad, Phrix, but yet again you’ve fallen into the trap that you always fall into about me by seeing the me you need to see.”
“Not the one who’s been here for the past few years.”
“You’re blinded by your disdain for me and it renders you incapable of addressing your self-inflicted weakness. Bravo.”
“Make no mistake, I want to win this match and it would be particularly special to pin Donovan to do it. Not only would doing so deprive him of another route to the World Championship that he lives for, but I’d pin the reigning Cross-Hemisphere Champion and place myself in a better position to reclaim it from him so that I can complete my mission. It would also keep him from becoming a double champion because if there’s any one person in this company who would be utterly unbearable to be around if he held two championships, it’s Donovan.”
“Especially when it’s two championships he doesn’t really want.”
“That said, I understand how big pinning you would be, Larry. You’ve been on one hell of a heater lately, and you got to be the special muscle for the World Champion at ‘Alchemy.’ It must’ve been extremely tempting to be so close to that championship when you’re so close to earning an opportunity for it. I know you said that you had Alan’s back, and you kept up your end of the bargain, but let's not kid ourselves here.”
“Deep down you’re a bad man, and you want what you want.”
“That’s fine. I appreciate how open you’ve been about yourself and your past. So few wrestlers are incapable of being honest these days. Especially with themselves. Your candor has been refreshing.”
“So let me return the favor, out of respect.”
“It will be a pleasure to face you on Monday night. I’m looking forward to the challenge of facing a wrestler with the resume that you have. I’m looking forward to showing you the respect of a good fight. I’m looking forward to giving you my best and hopefully getting the same from you.”
“What I look forward to the most is ending your run as Conquest Champion. Not because I have a grudge against you…”
“But because I need this for me.”