stamina and will

a little help

The monster charged forward jumping up to stomp on the ex-athlete but Dean rolled out of the way just in time leaving only the postal box to be flattened. Dean is able to get back to his feet and meet Better Me’s sharp eyes before looking back to his gym to see that the students are now standing at the destroyed doorway watching the battle. When Dean looks back he sees Better Me walking towards him, only fixated on him, good. Kenny’s monster is tunnel visioned now and that means Dean can better protect the students by doing what he’s good at, running.

“You ruined your own life ‘Better Me’. I don’t care what happens to you though, Kenny, but no matter what you could never and won’t ever be able to catch me,” Dean says in a snarky tone to hide his pain.

After talking Dean turns sharply and starts running. The monsterized form of an ex-friend screams as he charges towards the instigator but is caught off guard by the fact he can’t catch up with him. He’s supposed to be better than him now, why can’t he keep up. What Better Me didn’t know was that despite Dean being retired he only grew stronger. Better Me’s monsterization was based off of his own desires for strength, which in turn was based off of the strength of those around him, but he hasn’t seen Dean run in 8 years so he was not aware of his growth. Better Me was stronger than Dean was 8 years ago not stronger than Dean is now.

If anything this made Better Me sorta excited as he yelled out, “I see retirement hasn’t affected you too much. Outside of your face that is, it's hard to believe we’re the same age. No matter, I CAN HIT YOU FROM HERE.”

Better Me unraveled his arm tentacles and swung them at the ultramarathoner. Dean heard the whistling of the air as the tentacles approached, rolling under the first one, side stepping the second, and jumping over the third. Better Me, whom I will now refer to as BM cause I’m finally tired of writing the whole name, angrily strikes more and more at the man in front of him yet he keeps on dodging them. Now you might be wondering how he continues to dodge them since I’ve made it very clear that Dean ain’t a fighter, well the answer is simple, BM is predictable. He attacks high horizontally then vertically then low horizontally in that same cycle so it became pretty easy for Dean to dodge even in pain.

Dean continues to run eventually exiting X City and into Y City to run about for a long while until he exits that city and into the edge of Z City. They've been running for hours at this point, the students are well on their way to being safe but Dean still needs to do something about this monster following him and he knows of only one person who could hopefully kill it, no offense to Fuji ofcourse, which is why Z City was his destination.
Dean is running through Z City by a large hill with a huge set of stairs going up it when he sees an old man in the distance walking towards, exactly who he was looking for.

Dean stops right as BM swings a high swipe towards him and rolls under the legs of the still running monster and starts running behind him towards a wall. BM, stilled tunnel visioned onto his prey, twists around quickly and once again starts giving chase. Dean approaches a nearby building and leaps as high as he can before climbing up the wall and launching himself off of it shooting towards the nearly 9 foot monster crashing his forehead against the still most human face of the monster behind him. The monster staggers a little bit holding onto his bleeding and broken nose, oily black blood dripping from his hand. Despite how this looks this attack was simply an attempt to distract the monster and Dean even took more damage from this leaving his frontal skull a spider web of cracks and breaks. Dean's willpower, and the copious amount of adrenaline coursing through his veins, kept him standing even after that as he glares up to his former friend.

“If I were you I would be more worried about what’s behind you then the broken nose, I just did that so we’d be even,” Dean says, alluding to his own shattered nose from when the fight first started that still has dried blood covering it.

“Oh please, you really think I’m going to fall for that. I’m gonna tortue you now that even you won’t have the stamina for,” BM nasily says, voice much more affected by the broken nose than Dean’s is.

“You might want to listen to him,” an unknown voice says from behind the large monster, a voice that sounds calm and wise.

BM whips around and looks down at the shorter old man that spoke to him. He was hunched over, clearly old, had snow white hair, and a matching mustache, hell even his eyes looked old. What would this geezer do, doesn’t he know that Kenny was born to win. Of course this new Kenny didn’t know who he was looking at but Dean, and probably you now, know who this was and that this should be no issue for him.

“What do you want, geezer?,” BM snarls at him, annoyed by the interference, “did you decide that you were too old and wanted to die already? Yeah, I can help with that, just wait for me to finish with this guy first.”

“How disrespectful, a young man like you should respect his elders not chase them around cities bloodying them up,” Dean yells out an insulted ‘hey’ but the old man doesn’t pay it any mind and continues, “I should teach you a listen.”

BM just snarls and sends a monsterous fist towards the old man but before he even knows what happens his fist is aimed somewhere else and he is hit. He can’t tell if he was hit once or many times, all he knows is that he’s been hit and that he can feel it everywhere. Along his entire body he can feel the reverberation of a hit, a hit that has clearly been trained for decades. He nearly falls from just this one or possibly many hits but he stops himself and unravels his tentacles and starts violently striking towards the old man, blinded by rage. Even so, not a single one of those strikes hit and with each whip-like strike he lost another tentacle. He keeps this up for a while until he is once again hit the same way before, once again not seeing the true movements of the fighter before him and only just now noticing his torn apart tentacles.

“So you’re pretty strong but I’m BETTER ME and I was born TO WIN,” BM yells out quickly regenerating his tentacles and launching them towards the martial artist before him.

As the tentacles approach with the intent to ensnare the old man he uses his own hands and with water like flowiness in his movements he parries each tentacle away from him. A crack that was in BM’s gradually grew larger and larger, pried open by the old man in front of him as eventually a straight path was formed going straight into the vitals of the monster. With his experience the old man abused this straight shot as he charged forward with a punch that pierced through BM’s scale like flesh, crashing through his hardened ribcage, tearing apart his lungs and piercing through his heart. The old man rips his hand out of the star struck monster and looks down at his hand.

“Better Me? Guess that makes me better than me,” the old man jokes as he wipes off the blood from his hand.

“You.. you..,” Better Me gargles out approaching the old man slowly.

“Hmm, still alive. Impressive,” the old man says.

“YOU WILL DIE,” The monster screams as he makes a last ditch effort throwing one more punch.

Surprisingly the hit connects with the fighter's face but he twists with it and brings up his own hands to counter attack. This counter attack was aimed towards the elbow of the monstrous arm and quickly broke it harshly stabbing the bone out of the scaly flesh and flinging more oily blood everywhere. Before anyone was able to fully react to the horrible break the old man even more swiftly tore the arm off from the elbow dropping it to his side as it leaked more blood.

“You certainly are a lively one aren’t you,” the martial artist says, massaging his jaw, “you're the strongest monster I’ve fought yet.”

BM walks over to his detached arm and picks it up to stare at it for a while. Eventually he looks back up to the man who removed it from him but slowly shifts his attention back to Dean who has been watching this whole altercation go down. BM yells something about it being his fault and tries to rush towards him but before he could even make one full step his body goes limp and he face plants into the ground, finally dead.