BROKEN KNIGHT

His eyes scanned across the gym. The weights, the grappling dummy, the Olympic rings...the empty mat. They were close at hand and at the same time, an unbridgeable distance away. So many nights he'd spent with them as his only company. So many nights they'd given him the solace that a man such as him could only find in blood, sweat and steel. Now they might be forever estranged from one another.

"Was it worth it?" he silently asked himself.

KnightMask leaned back in the wheelchair. His mind drifted back to the battle that had left him so confined. The images were so vivid, it was as if he'd swam back on the waves of time itself, to relive those fateful moments.

Crimson Cobra had grasped KnightMask's head and wrenched his chin into his chest, cranking on the masked man's neck. Underneath him, KnightMask had secured Cobra's leg betwixt his in a figure-four grip and tucked Cobra's toes beneath his armpit while he cupped his heel in his hands. And with every ounce of his swiftly ebbing strength, he'd twisted Crimson Cobra's leg with a heel-hook.

In one, violent, convulsive wrench, both men simultaneously brought about their mutual destruction. The ligaments in Crimson Cobra's knee were taken to the shredder, while KnightMask's neck popped loud enough to make some in the audience think a gun had been fired.

Certainly, they had felt the pain. And they knew of the imminent doom looming weightily over them, about to fall down upon them like an avalanche. But in those fleeting seconds, the iron chains of pain and fear and been broken.

An instant of freedom, a flash of transcendence...bought at the price of a lifetime sentenced to the wheel chair he now sat upon?

"Was it worth it?"

The question now seemed more absurd, more obvious, than the most elementary of propositions.

In that fleeting moment of mutually destructive combat, an exorcism had occurred. All the lonely, untold hours he'd spent toiling to make himself the best wrestler he could had been purged, now and forever, of any element of futility.

It was indeed worth it.


THE SERPENT THAT DID NOT STRIKE

As if a ghost, he suddenly saw Crimson Cobra standing before him, as he had stood before him the locker room, following their battle. Again, he asked him the same question he had then.

"Why'd you do it, Cobra? You knew my neck was shot. Why didn't you finish me?"

The specter dissolved away before his eyes without a word, offering no more of an answer than the real Crimson Cobra had. He'd simply turned and walked away from KnightMask, leaving the wheelchair bound grappler to ponder the answer.

They say that there is something of both the animal and the divine in all men. And thus there is also within all men there is a struggle between those two ever opposing forces, the beast and the angel.

The jaws of the serpent had been closed about KnightMask's throat. And yet, they did not close. Perhaps he would never know the reason why.

Did Crimson Cobra, in the same moment he rose above his bodily limitations, also rise above moral ones as well? Could it be, that on whatever plane it was they fleetingly ascended to in their battle, not only cowardice but also cruelty was left behind?

Or was it that he'd already found what he was after...and, having found it, didn't need, therefore, to cripple or kill his opponent or even to be designated as the winner of the match?

Maybe the answer was a simpler one. Maybe it was simply that, in the confines of an eight-sided steel cage, in pitched battle...two loners...had found a friend.

Wheeling towards the door of the Slam Master's dojo, KnightMask gave one last glance at the empty gym. Then he switched off the lights and headed off into the night.