Yujiro Hanma vs Thragg

The Arena

Thragg came to Earth looking for someone worth killing. The Viltrumite Grand Regent had heard of a planet where one native had been declared the strongest creature alive by its own governments, and pride would not let that title stand on a world he meant to conquer.

He found Yujiro Hanma waiting in a flooded quarry outside Tokyo, barefoot on the rocks, grinning like a man who had been promised dessert. No army, no weapons, no witnesses. Just a red sky, black water, and two predators who had never once been told no.

Round One

Thragg opened the way Viltrumites always do: a straight line across the water, fast enough to tear the air. Yujiro was not where he landed. The Ogre had read a twitch in the alien’s shoulder half a second earlier and stepped aside like a matador, and as Thragg passed he hooked two fingers into his collar and hurled him into the cliff face.

Rock exploded. Thragg climbed out of the crater without a scratch, brushing dust from his armor, and for the first time in a century he looked mildly interested.

They met in the middle of the quarry. Thragg’s punches came faster than human eyes could follow; Yujiro’s eyes had never been entirely human. He slipped, parried and answered with an uppercut that lifted the Grand Regent three metres into the air. The sound rolled over the hills like artillery, and somewhere in the city car alarms began to wail.

The Turn

Thragg stopped holding back. He rose out of reach and dropped like a meteor. Yujiro caught the first dive on crossed forearms and was driven knee-deep into the bedrock. The second dive cracked his ribs. The third should have ended it.

Instead Yujiro tore himself out of the stone, and the muscles across his back rose into the snarling face that has made soldiers lower their rifles. When Thragg came down a fourth time, Yujiro did not block. He met the dive with one punch thrown from the floor of the earth upward, everything his body had ever learned packed into a single fist.

It caught Thragg flush on the jaw. Purple blood sprayed across the water, and the Grand Regent spun out of the sky and skipped across the quarry lake like a stone.

The Finish

Thragg stood up slowly. He touched his split lip, studied his fingers and laughed for the first time in many years. “Remarkable,” he said. “On my world, you would have been a soldier.”

Then he took the fight where Yujiro could not follow. He flew, and he came in from angles no ground-bound fighter could cover, faster with every pass, never staying in reach long enough for the Ogre’s technique to matter. Yujiro landed two more counters, and each one cracked Thragg’s armor. It was not enough. On the eleventh pass a Viltrumite fist struck the back of his head at a speed no human body was built to absorb, and the strongest creature on Earth went to one knee, then face-first into the water.

Thragg hovered above the quarry for a long moment. Then he dragged the unconscious man onto the rocks rather than let him drown, and flew away without a word. Yujiro woke at dawn, laughing, with blood in his teeth. For the first time in his life, he had found something to train for.