Teela folded her arms and glared at the phalanx of hopeful Palace Guards sweating in the afternoon sun.
“It’s not enough to be well-armed!” She shouted. Her voice reverberated through the training ground. “It’s not enough to be armored. It’s not enough to have the superior numbers. Strip those away, and what do you have left? No sword, no blaster, just muscle and bone. Whether you live or die will come down to you. There are dangers out there–” she pointed beyond the Eternos walls, “–that can and will kill you without blinking. You have to be ready for them.”
She stepped aside. “So I brought in some help, to teach you exactly what you’ll be up against. Recruits, meet Fisto.”
Fisto stepped from the shadows. He ran his left hand over his unkempt beard while his large — very large — right fist gleamed in the sunlight.
“You’re going to fight him,” Teela said. “All of you, all at once. And we’re going to see what you’re made of.”
The recruits, resplendent in the palace colors of green and orange, glanced at each other. One chuckled. “Just him? There’s five of us. We’ll kill him.”
Fisto burst out laughing. “Oh, I like this one,” Fisto said, bending over. Teela waited patiently for him to stop. Fisto brayed laughter and shook his head. The recruits were clearly annoyed and incredulous.
“Don’t worry,” Fisto said when he had calmed his laughter. “I’ll take it easy on you for your first day. Now then,” he raised his oversized fist. “Who’s going to be first?”
The fight did not last long.
The guards stumbled away with sore jaws and bruised egos. “Same time tomorrow,” Teela said, and the guards groaned.
Fisto swiped his palm over his face. Teela shook her head. “Lousy recruits these days.”
“They weren’t that bad, really,” Fisto said. “One of them actually managed to land a punch.”
“Yeah, but he missed you and hit another guard.”
“It’s a start,” Fisto said. “Besides, I didn’t become the great fighter I am in one sparring session. Took… oh, two or three days”
“Humble as ever. You know, I’ve never heard where you learned to fight. My father told me you disappeared for a few years, but that you never talk about what happened. When you came back, he said you were a changed man. In many ways,” she said, gesturing to his gleaming metal fist.
Fisto looked at the great weight that hung from his right arm. “Nobody really changes, Teela. We just acquire more life.”
“Where did you go when you disappeared?”
Fisto took a deep breath as if summoning the memory taxed him. “There’s a place in Eternia… where only the finest warriors can go and learn to fight. I was younger then, and headstrong. Not like the modest, humble creature that stands before you.”
“When I first arrived, I was like those recruits — arrogant and cocky, ready to fight the world. Most people spend their lives like that because they never had it beaten out of them, inch by inch. That’s the first lesson you learn there. I was stubborn, and the lesson had to be taught over and over.
For the first month, I thought I was going to die every single day: broken bones, ribs puncturing a lung — the whole thing. Every night I went to bed with blood in my mouth, not expecting to wake up. But I did, and the pain continued the next day. I don’t know why I didn’t just leave. Many did. Tough men with dead eyes left that place in the middle of the night, crying. But I stayed, and absorbed the punishment. Maybe I thought I deserved it, I don’t know.
I didn’t talk to anybody there for two months. I stayed to myself, bled, healed, bled more, tended to my injuries. And then, after months of solitude, I met another trainee who had been there for five months. We were matched up for a sparring session. I was slow and weak; he moved like shattering glass. Quick. Decisive. Deadly.
He was the best fighter I had ever seen. Others say he was moving up the ranks faster than anybody who had ever found this secret training ground. They were saying he may even become an instructor there. That never happened. You trained, and you left. Nobody stayed. The instructors never talked with you. They wore masks and made demands and barked orders and you obeyed. Once in a while they would spar with you to show you what they wanted of you. The way they moved, the way it seemed as if they could read your mind and know instinctively what your next attack was going to be… I’m not sure who or what they were, but I believed some of the other trainees when they said they were immortal.
There were no names there. No real names. Only nicknames. Our lives outside of the training were gone, the instructors said. They started calling me “Fisto” there because I punched wildly, yet lacked skill. I was just a barroom brawler.
They called my friend “Chopper” because he bragged that he could chop down a Skytree with one blow of his hand. I had seen him in action. I could almost believe him. For some reason Chopper saw something in me. So he helped me. He trained me while he himself fought and learned. I began to improve. The beatings became less severe — because I began to win. Not every fight, but I wasn’t losing every single one either.
After I had been there my own five months, I was as good as Chopper. He called me a quick study, and there was something behind his eyes when he said it. I began to get the idea he resented me, and that our friendship was growing sour. He was driven by something beyond what I could understand. Not then, at least.
Chopper’s tutelage strayed and then stopped altogether, but I kept improving. After a year of this, my body nothing but bruises and scar tissue, the instructors announced something unprecedented in the history of whatever this strange place was: a contest.
Many fought. Fought hard. Fought to near-death. And in the end, it came down to Chopper and me, as it had to. We were the best fighters there. The winner would be the recipient of the deadliest weapon in the world: The Hand of the Gods.”
Teela’s eyes strayed to Fisto’s fist.
“If the instructors were pleased by the battle and the outcome, The Hand of the Gods would be bonded to the winner permanently, marking them forever as the greatest fighter on Eternia, for all time.
I didn’t really care about titles, and I didn’t want to fight Chopper. I owed him. But there’s no choice there. You fight. And I had invested more than a year of my life in this place.
So we fought. We fought hard, and we fought for hours. I had never taken such pain in all my time there. It was clear to me as my blood stained the tournament floor that Chopper had been holding back. But I had improved so much that, once his attention left, I think he was surprised by me — even overconfident maybe. But that didn’t matter.
I don’t know how long the fight went on. We were barely coherent. But in the end I just wasn’t the fighter he was.
The instructors awarded him the Hand of the Gods. It was permanently attached right there. None of us knew what that meant. But they fused it directly to his arm. I remember his scream. I can still hear it resonating, long and high, the scream of an animal. Smoke curled from where the hand met flesh. I could smell his skin burning.
Chopper fell to his knees. Everyone was silent.
Minutes passed, and, finally, Chopper stood. But he wasn’t Chopper anymore. Whatever had driven him to this place, whatever kindness he had shown me — it was gone. Burned out of him. Chopper — the man I had called friend — was dead. Jitsu was born there. He took the Hand and left that training ground as one of the most dangerous men I know.”
“What?” Teela asked, and again looked at the shimmering metal hand on Fisto’s arm. “But…”
Fisto raised his oversized fist. “This? No, this is not the Hand of the Gods. How I got this is a story for another time,” Fisto said. “Same time tomorrow, then? We’ll make fine fighters out of these men yet.”
And with that, Fisto walked off, whistling to himself, his large metal fist gleaming in the afternoon sun.
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