The Ranch

Tih & Friends (8)

The cylinders start turning faster as time progresses, but at the same time, some people have memorized the pattern for the area they're in and others have memorized it's entire circumference.

As another one of Tih's teammates, Basile also attracted a few enemies. He manages to do away with one after another, all while snacking on food. He gets the gist of the average fighting capability among the other teams. After fighting multiple people at similar levels, Basile relaxed, but that was his mistake.

A rapier scrapes Basile's shoulder as he barely manages to dodge. He's forced backward and his foot steps on new terrain. He wasn't taking note of the ground and didn't know where he stepped until it was too late.

His back foot slides further at a speed too fast to stop, forcing his legs into a split. A pain radiates from a certain region, but he doesn't have the time to let it heal. He pushes off with the foot in the previous terrain to slide away from the next attack.

He uses the distance to get back up, but now he's covered in the slippery material. The opponent with the rapier doesn't step into the slime area, so Basile is safe for now.

At the beginning of the match, Theodore one-sidedly decided to team up with Tih. After making it to his side, he has to start acting like his bodyguard. The reason is a combination of Tih not fighting but having way too many people trying to fight him.

Before Tih got there, Tih was walking around the spin-y thing with different land with interest. He seems to be having a lot of fun moving through the different and new types of terrain, meanwhile accumulating more and more enemies as he passes by. Some in-fighting drops a couple people from the herd every one in a while and some get stuck in the terrain, but the rate at which it grows is faster.

Of course Tih's walking is the normal man's running, so even when Theodore finally arrived, they hadn't caught up to him yet. But, there's also people Tih's pass by in front of him. If they see him beforehand and attack, Tih simply dodges, but they run after him, leaving a lot of people right after his tail.

Theodore arrives to see a mob of people chasing Tih across the sand. Ahead of Tih, the terrain turns into two others, ice and rock.

"Tih, head left!" Theodore indicates to head towards the rock region. Looking for Tih as his partner after knowing they were on the same cylinder, Theodore already had a plan in mind.

"It's the perfect chance to try out our moves!" Is what he's thinking. As the whole group started training together, Theodore swindled Tih into getting him alone to practice awesome double-team moves.

Theodore wanted to have cool attack moves and wanted the others to practice with him, but they were all smart and declined, so Theodore stuck with the obedient Tih. They've already put many hours into enhancing and perfecting these maneuvers.

"Helicopter!" Theodore spits out the name of the attack to let Tih prepare. Tih does a handstand right when Theodore arrives at the spot. He grabs Tih's ankles and starts turning, lifting Tih off the ground with centripetal force.

With the force of a battering ram and in the motion of a swinging bat, Theo starts spinning the boy around. Straight and solid as a metal pole, Tih starts knocking people down like bowling pins.

His face remains blank and his posture immovable as if, while his opponents are K.O.'d he takes -0 damage in return.

This lasts for quite a while, until Theodore arms can no longer hold up. Most of the people in the vicinity have evacuated with a few strays remaining.

"Liftoff!" Theodore says as he lets go of Tih's ankles. Tih's body flies through the air and rams into another person, thoroughly giving them a concussion.

Theodore takes a short break to recuperate while they move to a more populated section.

The other move Theodore tries out with Tih is one he's seen on a little program called WWE. The move has been appropriately named "the fall of man".

Theo sweeps the legs while Tih throws himself onto the upper body. The original move has someone take the neck into their arm and bring them down with them, but Tih cuts out the middleman. He doesn't have enough weight to proceed with the original move anyways.

In the new and improved method, Tih throws his body with enough force that when he kicks back of the opponent's shoulders, swings around their neck, or uses their head to swing over them, they head straight for the floor.

"Tih!" Theodore has a stupidly happy grin on his face as he offers his hand. Tih stretches his arm out to clap it. Alongside those two "power moves", Theo also train- taught Tih how to high-five.

Coincidentally, grudge-bearing Axel happened to be on Tih's side. He had started this round with the desire to personally knock Tih off early, but Theodore got to that monster before he could.

So he slowly bided his time. He waited for the perfect moment and it came. Theodore's strength is draining and his speed has slowed. They're also moving towards the edge and already standing at a thirty degree angle.

And that's when he uses a sneak attack, catching Theodore off guard. Tih saw Axel from a mile away and dodged back, but although he saw Axel, he didn't see where he was stepping.

See, Tih had already thoroughly inspected all the terrains when he was dragging around the mob of people and stopped paying attention once Theodore came as his interest had waned.

By sheer coincidence, and I mean the chances of this happening are abysmal unless there's some god-like figure that willed this into creation to forward some sort of agenda or plot, Tih stepped on slime.

Now, if this was the flat ground Tih had been in earlier when he walked in the slime terrain, he would have already been used to it, but he's on a slope, and when things are in a slope, physics change things.

Tih wasn't prepared and as physics can contend, slid at a speed too sudden to stop.

Author's note: I can smell my own sarcasm from afar. The depths of hell await me. The nebula will not pity me for I perish in front of them as an ant. (Idk how I make this bs up, I just wanted to talk about the sarcasm in part of the chapter and it's turned into an existential poem)