LINKED | Brothers Online Series | BK #1

Chapter 12: Piece Of Work

December 24, 2022 Floor 3 - A bar

Theodore (Cobalt) Aarons

'Thom? Karim? Is that really you?'

My slackened form and hunched shoulders revealed my confused state. The Mins' were never like that. At least I didn't think so. I knew Thom was a bit... different in his approaches, but I never expected such... sarcasm. I never expected such animosity.

Things have changed.

I guess I should start from the beginning. That would shed more light on this puzzling situation.

My name is Theodore Aarons. I was born in McRae, Georgia and later moved to Warner Robins. See, my mother and father are both in the military so the base at Robins was the ideal workplace. Sometimes though, it was a bit too strict for my liking. All of those soldiers and their families dried the area up.

Since McRae was the nearest town with any signs of normality, I often traveled the hour long trip with some friends. Those trips "countrified" me, transforming me into your typical redneck. I spoke with a gruff southern accent most befitting of Georgia. My mother taught me how to be a gentleman "worthy of the South." She basically groomed me and dictated how I should speak. Of course when she wasn't listening, I would revert back to the slang and jargon of the American teenager.

My father taught me how to live off the land. I learned how to track, trap, and prepare the food I had caught. I learned how to handle guns and shoot them with high accuracy (I hope I'm not bragging). My dad also taught me how to fight. Who wouldn't when your son is about five feet tall and shorter than most sixteen year olds? I'm even shorter than the fourteen year olds.

Now that's embarrassing.

Anyways, due to the amount of bullying that I faced as a kid, my mother taught me how to smile. She told me to laugh, to shrug off the verbal attacks and grin happily. That way, they wouldn't bother a kid who wasn't affected. Of course that was only for what those guys could say. It didn't help when they ganged up on me as I walked home.

It definitely didn't help when they pulled out baseball bats and threatened to remake my face. That was why my father taught me boxing. I learned it when I was ten. That was when the kids actually started to bother me. Before, they were too scared to do much more than swear at me.

I continued with my boxing up until high school. The wrestling coach saw me during a little sparring round at gym one day and invited me into the team. Wrestling kept me in shape along with shoving me into the higher niches of school life. You could say that I had become somewhat of a star, especially when I won a big tournament against a rival school.

Other than a few local victories, I didn't do so hot in any other major competitions. I did make it to third in states but that didn't count as a win in my book. After about two years of wrestling and maintaining my boxing, I went into MMA training. I learned Muay Thai and a bit of Judo even though I tended to focus more on the punches and kicks. It was about two months in when I was invited to the Eastern United States MMA tournament. One of my father's friends had seen me fight and thought I could experience something more spectacular.

He was definitely right about it being spectacular.

The tournament consisted of three hundred competitors and about a dozen different categories. There was the fighting of course and several performance acts. Basically, a person performs a pattern or technique in front of a panel of judges. He or she will then be scored on accuracy, skill and other things. The fighting was also pretty simple. First person to either knock their opponent out, knock him down for more than five seconds, get him to tap out or knock him out of the ring, wins. That was only for the preliminary rounds though. Once you got into break rounds, the fighting was based off points. You got points for ring-outs, for tap-outs and for the knockdowns. A K.O counted as an instant win.