---

Palms damp and clammy
Blushing and sweaty
Butterflies in your belly
Eye twitching nervously
For your life, you run hastily
He’s caught you, nearly.
Sense of dread, and suddenly
You’re dead, Jimmy.

---

Impending Doom – The feeling that the end is nigh, unavoidable.

---

You stand in the middle of the stage, looking out at the thousand or so of your fellow students seated in the auditorium. Your hand clutches at a microphone tightly, the harder you grip, the subtler your shivers, you tell yourself. Your vocals are doing great, bar a few shakes of nervousness here and there, nothing too noticeable, you tell yourself. You get more comfortable, smiling wider and moving about the stage more. You start getting into it, this is great, they love your voice. It’s hard to see faces from the stage, what with the bright lights in your eyes, helped keep you somewhat at ease, you tell yourself. As you move across the stage, you feel your foot catch on a cable. You wince a little, but manage to catch yourself in time, steadying yourself and flashing the crowd a brilliant smile. The chord yanks out regardless, the stage lights go off and you see the crowd for the first time. The backtrack playing over your voice fades away and you hear your voice clearly for the first time. They stare at you with mixed looks of confusion and annoyance, you hear yourself and feel much of the same. You impulsively stop singing, just as they drown out the sound of the voice in your head with resounding jeers. You’ll never live this down. That was a week ago, the scene flashing through your head like it was just yesterday. You had a foot dangling off the edge already. With a glimpse of the smile you flashed that day, you turn away from the edge and stood up. This was ridiculous, you weren’t going to kill yourself for them. You took a step to get off the edge, when a gust of wind hit you. You saw the sky envelope your sight, confusion spreading across your thoughts. Your stomach flipped into your throat, it felt like you were on stage again. That’s when your ribs went through your heart. At least the voices in your head stopped booing.

---

Your boots crunch against the pebbles and gravel underneath them, you’d figured out a rhythm to avoid the planks of wood by now. Or so you thought. The blaring of a horn was clear behind, deafeningly rattling through your eardrums. Just a few more feet to the service platform, man that was close. You saw it ahead of you, a little safety light hanging off the edge to signal the edge for anyone working on the tracks. You smile a smile of relief as you reach up to the platform to hoist your body onto the platform in one graceful swoop. The vibrations intensify under your feet just as you’re about to lift into the air. You turn to see how close you were to getting splattered against the front of a speeding train. The grin doesn’t even have time to register the signals of panic your brain shoots down at you. With a crunch your body explodes into just another one of the pebbles littered across the tracks.

---

You pulled at the water with all your strength. You could feel the adrenaline pumping through your veins, creating this tingling sensation all through your skin. Your eyes narrowed in determination as you exhaled into the water, bubbles bursting out from the cavity. The currents were strong, but the shore was just ahead of you, if you kept this up, you’d fine. The waves made you bob uncomfortably and you could feel the strength ebb away from your powerful strokes, bit by bit. You screamed silently into the water as you kept fighting. Something nudged against your ankle, but you paid it no attention, all you could think about was making it back to shore. What a fool you’d been to forget about the intense sea currents out here. Idiot. Thunder cracked above you and you prayed hard for the rain to wait just a little more. There it was again, another nudge. You kicked out hard, thinking some reeds must have caught on your ankles, but felt your foot hit something hard. Something hard that was moving. You glanced to the side, but you were too slow, the razor-sharp teeth came at your torso, ripping into your flesh. Your head burst out of the water as you screamed for the world to hear, only to have it drowned out by another crack of thunder.

---

Danny Imperial is seated on the platform of an abandoned train station. A page off a newspaper from the eighties flies past behind him, littered soda cans and a few syringes are littered across the platform. Danny has his legs dangling off the platform, swinging to and fro. A floating XWF camera drone hovers over the train tracks, capturing Danny in real-time. Danny is dressed in a well-fitting black suit, red tie and a perfectly white shirt. His hair is slicked back and tied into a tight ponytail, a little bruise over his eyebrow the only remaining injury from his match with Chaos. His eyes are wide and crazed, and the bags under his eyes seem to have only gotten thicker since we last saw him.

“Good day, Jimbo. Seems like the cat’s got your tongue these past few days. A little preoccupied with things… More important? We understand, we all have our priorities. No, no really, we understand. The great big lumberjack has opponents, and then he has Danny Imperial. We get it really, some of us aren’t good enough for your attention, are we? That’s okay. I sure hope it’s worth it.

You see, you’ve got your little head in the clouds, Jimmy boy. You’ve got your inbred cranium busy worrying about those you deem as proper opponents, don’t you? After your string of failures, a booking against a nobody like Danny Imperial must have made you feel exquisite. With the impending doom of failure and retirement inching closer to your ankles, we were a shining light of solace. We really do understand where you’re coming from. Who’ve we beat right? Has-beens and a whole lot of nobodies. What chance did we stand against a former Universal Champion, a current XWF Top 50 and possibly one of the most dangerous forces on the roster. Nil, zit, nada. Why bother coming out and giving us the time of day when I’m just going to be another little bitty hop in your career. Another W on that long list.

Well we can’t wait to break your face in Jimmy.

We can’t wait to show you just how past your prime you really are. We aren’t going to boast superiority in the roster no longer. Don’t worry, that was a Danny of the past you see. We’re going to work our way up the ranks, chewing through and feasting on ANYBODY that comes in our path. Be it some no name rookie or some established son of a bitch like Jim Caedus. When the time is right, we’d have obliterated every single man on this roster, because that’s what our end goal is. Are we strong enough to take on every son of a bitch here? Yes, but are we experienced enough? No. You, Caedus, are experience. We are your impending doom, not retirement, not just another loss on your record, we are your ending. When we’re done with you, you’re going to be shriveled up in a corner of the room wondering what went wrong, replaying Warfare in your head for years.

You see, you’re too busy looking ahead, that grin on your face is far too premature. You knew your failures were catching up to you at one point, but you forget about it only too quickly. The site of redemption ahead of you made you forget what you were running from, your own fucking inadequacies. Nothing but dropping down the ranks is going to make you seem any more formidable, Jimbo. Maybe you should have gone back to challenging for the TV Title, maybe that’s what you should have done. But it’s too late for you now HAHAHAHAHAHA, see no longer do you have the chance of escaping your failure. You’re stuck in a tunnel with only one way out, with a train hurtling towards you, your only solace will be death Jimmy. Your only release will be splitting into a million pieces, your brains becoming food for the rats.

Why do we waste our time talking to you anyways? Talking to a man who won’t give us the time of the day. Because the fans deserve it, we told ourselves. They deserve to hear this warning we’re giving you, even if you don’t choose to heed it. Fuck, even if you choose to not listen to it at all. We hope you’re preoccupied doing the things you want to do whilst you’re still able bodied and able to stand for more than two seconds. After Warfare, cowgirl might be the only position for you, Jimmy boy. Then again, after you’re nothing but a memory on the wall, you’ll have all the time in the world to amuse yourself. Perks of being unemployed hm? Most importantly…


I CAN’T WAIT TO BE THE ONE DOING IT JIMMY, I CAN’T FUCKING WAIT.”



A train charges past just then, slamming into the floating camera drone, cutting the feed immediately.