Through a dim, semi-conscious haze, KnightMask saw his armored tag-team partner--who was wrestling, at least, under the name Big Bad Leroy--cover Ann Thraxx for the three count. KnightMask had no doubt that it was not Big Bad Leroy beneath the armor and so he felt a twinge of shame as the count completed.

However, the feeling was quickly forgotten as he noticed The Xtremist Bryce and his Hired Bodyguards swarming over Sebastian Duke outside the ring. And as evil as he knew Sebastian Duke to be, he unhesitatingly rushed to aid him, a surge of adrenaline shrugging of the pain and fatigue that wracked his body.

His sympathy lay not with the so-called Angel of Death, but with a man who had stepped into the ring on the heels of his father's murder.

He had no real concrete evidence to affirm the tabloid rumors he'd heard, but somehow, he just knew it was true. The lack of his so-called High Priest, the torch he carried to the ring...the way he seemed to fight like a man trying to vent raging emotions rather than the cold, cruel focus...and perhaps some raw empathy that links all human beings, even enemies, affirmed it for him.

He sprinted towards the ropes, ready to launch himself to the outside and join the fray. Suddenly, he saw a black clothed ninja standing in his path. Then there were two more, as if the first had somehow multiplied. They simultaneously drew kendo training swords (bokken) from sheaths that hung across their backs and charged for KnightMask.

The masked grappler took the foremost down with a flying scissor, quickly tying his legs up in the Gordian Leg Knot. Just as quickly, he layered the ninja's achilles tendon over the shin of his other leg and forced them together. The ninja screamed in pain. He wasn't injured severely, but the overwhelming pain would put him out for a good while.

The two ninjas left instantly swung their respective bokken downward before the prone KnightMask could disentangle himself; one from his left front, one from his back right. The wooden blades whistled, slicing the air.

No time to get away. No time to dodge. Even if he could, avoiding the strike of one would bring him directly into the path of the other.

This was it----

---his armored tag-team partner leveled the ninjas with a double clothesline!

"I might be nothin' but someone's hire-out punk," he blurted, "But I ain't no traitor! No ***** way!"

Before KnightMask knew what was happening, he and the armored man were standing back to back, surrounded by the entirety of Big Bad Leroy's arsenal of hired help. The Iron Valkyries, the mass of berserk muscle known as Ultra, Funky the Clown, Koda Han and what looked to be at least a dozen more ninjas. The Iron Valkyries--Jade and Vixen--exchanged troubled, guilty glances. The expressions of soldiers conscripted to a war they wanted no part of, but could not escape.

Outside the ring, at a safe distance, the man beneath the false beard, false wig and false identity of Good Little Roy Lee, the villainous professional wrestler who was the true Big Bad Leroy, seethed in anger. That moronic hired hand was ruining everything! The public was supposed to believe that it was him beneath the armor...thus sparing him the indignity of actually having to enter the ring with the inferior, asymmetrically muscled weaklings that populated the XWF. But how would it look for the man that was supposed to be Big Bad Leroy facing off against the rest of Leroy's hired help?

Unless...Leroy rubbed his hands together as the screws began to turn in his wicked mind. There was, he realized with evil delight, a way to spin all of this to his advantage. The intervention of Bryce and his hired bodyguards was truly fortuitous...almost miraculous. Who was to say the interference of those gathered in the ring was at the behest of Big Bad Leroy....? Who was to say that those now assailing KnightMask and his erstwhile stupid new friend were not in fact, simply an extension of Bryce's army of bodyguards...?

Certainly, the ignorant near-apes that comprised the XWF fan base would not find a coherent objection to such an account; they were ass-clowns and idiots who were regularly fooled by crooks far less adept than Leroy, who to his own mind was much less a crook than an artist using the lesser humans in his midst as his canvas in any case. And who amongst said gullible, idiotic ass-clowns would not be moved by Big Bad Leroy heroically coming to the aid of his one-time nemesis against a veritable army of Bryce's thugs...?

A chuckle escaped his lips. Nah, nah, Montana---- the world ain't yours---- the world is MINE, *******! Everything, he realized as he watched his minions bear down upon KnightMask and the armored man, would work out just fine.

Just fine indeed.