Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Day of the Rat (A 90s Movies Story)

Chapter 10: Shell Shock

Regrettable. The loss of Splinter was quite regrettable. The Rat King sat in silence for a moment.

He searched with his thoughts. He had his rats in the vicinity search. Wherever the sensei's body had landed, none of them were within range. That in itself was strange. In New York, no one was ever very far from one of the Rat King's servants.

He dismissed such concerns, and stood. There was no time to lose if he was to take the next steps in his plan. Not for nothing had he monitored the Turtles' fight with their master so closely.

***

If the Turtles had ever imagined what their reaction might be to an event like this, the reality was probably very different. They stood in silence for what seemed like an eternity. They walked to the edge, and looked down into the dimming street below. They could see no sign of Master Splinter anywhere down there, but that didn't mean he wasn't there.

They hung around on the rooftop for a few minutes longer. They didn't talk to each other. When it had finally gotten dark enough, Leonardo led the way back down the fire escape. They descended quickly, and began to search for Splinter's body.

***

His trap was baited - now Tatsu prepared to spring it. Out in the yard, he put the younger members of the Foot Clan through their paces as the older ones looked on in amusement. They drilled and trained endlessly. They fought each other in groups, and fought each other singly.

Now they would fight him.

Tatsu stood alone, stick at the ready. At his urging, the young ninja would come at him one at a time, some of them cautiously, nervously, some of them with bravado, and all of them would fall.

Some he tripped - the lucky ones. One he felled with a light blow to the stomach that drove the breath out of the young student's body. He swept the legs out from under another. Another, a light blow to the throat that left him fighting for breath. The only part of their bodies he spared from this punishment was their heads. He needed them alert. A lot of their best people had deserted after their last confrontation with the Turtles, and Tatsu was determined they would be ready for the next and final one.

At the end of this, Tatsu was the only one standing – his students lay or sat on the ground around him, looking up at their brutal teacher. Had they passed or failed? One day they would learn the lesson he sought to teach them. An appreciation of his single fundamental rule.

There are no rules.

***

Even inside the workshop, right at the back next to the bench grinder, the sounds of training could be heard. Jake and Matt, busy though they were sharpening one cutting edge after another, found themselves cringing at the sound of a body hitting the ground or the slap of Tatsu's stick on soft flesh. It was a relief to switch the machine on and drown the sounds out.

Jake strolled across the workshop carrying a bundle of freshly sharpened weapons, and deposited them into a re-purposed umbrella stand several feet behind April's chair. She was still tied up, and on Tatsu's cruel orders she was going to stay that way. The two dozen or so young men and boys who comprised what was left of the Foot Clan in New York weren't normally given to feelings of sympathy, but even some of them felt a little sorry for their very pretty and not remotely threatening prisoner.

Some more than others.

On his way back, Jake stopped uncertainly as a familiar qualm troubled him. As far as he was concerned, keeping April tied and gagged was pointlessly cruel, but then... That was kind of the Foot's MO... That had been OK, once... Or maybe it was just OK when-