The Morbidly Obese Ninja (2 page)

Basu slid a small coin-sized disc from the bottom of the handle of his iKatana. The disc read
iPet
. When he turned it on, a plump green holographic frog appeared in his hand. It flicked its webbed feet and blinked its buggy eyes.

Kero-kero
, croaked the cyber-frog.

Basu lifted the iPet to his face and frowned at it as if it were a fly that had landed on his cheeseburger. The cyber-frog stared back at Basu with a big cartoon smile.

Kero-kero
, croaked the cyber-frog.

On the iKatana, Basu entered in the specs of the piggy bank, and then set the frog on the ground. The cyber-frog
kero-keroed
, spun around, and then hopped as fast as lightning down the hall.

Basu flew after it. He passed through blood-splattered hallways, hopping over several dead ninjas. All of the bodies were ninja. No other employees were in the building. It was against corporate ninja code to kill the daytime employees, which was why the ninjas worked night shift.

The cyber-frog hopped against walls and against the ceiling as it went. It hopped into a stairwell, and spiraled down twenty flights of stairs. Basu hopped after it, jumping down each flight, cracking the concrete under his heels every landing.

They soared across a sky bridge and went into the next building over. On the bridge, Basu looked over the edge, down into the abyss below. It stretched dozens of miles down. He could not see the bottom.

The next building was empty. There were no dead bodies here. This section of building belonged to a company that did not have a ninja staff, and therefore all employees had gone home for the evening.

The cyber-frog stopped in a wide-open lobby with gray plastic couches and kidney-shaped coffee tables. It hopped slowly up and down, waiting for Basu to retrieve it. As he sucked the holographic frog back into its disc, he saw a familiar face. He slid the disc into a pocket and squinted his eyes to be sure.

Across the room, through a glass wall, in a conference room, there was a man in a black suit surrounded by six Gomen ninjas.

The Gomen ninjas were not dressed like Kakeras. They were in their usual Gomen uniforms: brown leather shoes, a tan face mask, and a grayish-blue collared business-casual polo shirt tucked into khaki pants.

The man in the black suit stood taller than the others. He was as thin as a stickbug and had the head of a black bird.

He went by the name of Crow, but Basu knew him by his true name.

Cosmetic surgery had reached the point where humans could alter their appearance to look like anything their imaginations desired. People could change their genders with 100% accuracy, they could change their race, and they could change their age, even to that of a child’s. Ten years ago, a trend popped up where people started getting cosmetic surgery to resemble animals. They altered their skin to look like snake scales, stretched their necks as long as those of giraffes, got extra limbs attached, and even got operations that turned them into actual swimming mermaids.

Crow had the operation to make himself look like a black bird. Although his entire body was human-shaped, he was covered in feathers. He had black beady eyes, a long hooked beak, and thin black claws at the ends of his fingers. Not a part of his operation, Crow also had a long scar running down the side of his face and through one of his eyes.

Basu and Crow had known each other for a long time. As he saw Crow blinking his black marble eyes, Basu wished he had permission to kill him. He squeezed his sausage fingers into a fist so hard the veins popped out of the back of his hand. There was nothing Basu wanted more on the planet than to kill this man, but it was something he could not do.

Two years ago, Crow had been promoted from ninja to an executive position in the Gomen Corporation. It was against ninja code to kill an executive of a company unless given explicit instructions from a CEO. No matter how much he wanted it, Basu could not kill Crow unless he was sent on an assassination mission explicitly calling for his head. Since there were fewer and fewer assassinations assigned, Basu had given up hope of ever getting a chance to kill him.

Crow was going to be a problem. When he was a ninja, he was the only man in the industry as deadly as Basu. But that was before Basu gained all the weight and before Crow became untouchable. Now, Crow would definitely have the upper hand in a fight.

Basu glared at his old rival. He watched his smug little crow head pacing the conference room, squawking at his men.

Crow dug his bird-like fingers into his suit and pulled out a small black sickle attached to a chain. He swung the sickle in a circle as he paced. Basu recognized the weapon. It was Crow’s weapon of choice. When he was a ninja, he used to fight with it in addition to his iKatana. Basu could see that Crow no longer had a need for an iKatana, though. He had implanted an iPalm into his left hand, a common implant among executives.

After Basu’s fingers eased out of his fist, he went in for a closer look.

Being morbidly obese made it difficult for Basu to use his stealth ability. He had to find shadows large enough to hide his size. The largest shadow in the room was only a few feet wide and only became thinner the closer it got to the conference room.

Only part of his body was concealed by shadow. His large round belly was sticking out in the light as he inched his way toward the conference room. The Gomen ninjas were too distracted by Crow’s intimidating chain sickle to notice him, and Crow was too absorbed in his own squawking. That’s what Basu was counting on. He hoped it would last.

Once he got a clear view of the conference room, Basu scanned the area for the piggy bank. He was looking for something made of iron, something that was about seventy pounds.

There wasn’t anything like that in the room. There was only Crow, his six ninjas, and the usual things one would find in a conference room. Basu examined more carefully. Then, as Crow paced away from the table, two new people came into view. There was another man in a suit. He had purple tentacles for hair and held a small device. There was also a little boy sitting next to him.

Basu wondered if the device the man held was the piggy bank. It was the size of a brick and had a small computer on its front. Then Basu realized what the device was. It wasn’t the piggy bank. It was a mechanism for opening the piggy bank.

He watched what the tentacle man was doing with the device. He was putting it on the boy’s chest, then taking it off of his chest and examining it, then typing on its keyboard.

Basu looked closer at the boy. He was about eight years old, wearing yellow shorts, tennis shoes, and a blue baseball cap. His Hawaiian shirt was pulled up and held in his teeth. The flesh underneath the boy’s shirt was exposed. It wasn’t flesh. It was iron. The boy was made of wrought iron. The little boy was the piggy bank.

Basu was close enough to turn the volume up on his iKatana so that he could hear inside of the conference room. He watched the man with the tentacles as he fidgeted desperately with the device.

“Is it ready yet?” squawked Crow, swinging the sickle over his head as though threatening the tentacled man with it.

“Almost,” Tentacles said.

Basu could hear a ticking noise. It was coming from the boy. After a minute, the ticking began to slow.

“I need a wind-up,” said the boy.

Tentacles slapped the boy across his cheek, then lowered his hand down to the metal section of his body and twisted the key on his hip until he was ticking at full pace again.

The boy sniffled. He did his best to stop himself from crying. His hands were tied behind his back. He wasn’t able to wipe the tear of snot about to drip out of his nose.

“Okay,” Tentacles said, smiling with razor teeth, “It’s ready.”

Crow put his sickle away.

“Good,” he said. “Open him up.”

Basu knew it was his only shot. He charged from the shadows and smashed through the glass wall of the conference room, then decapitated the tentacle-haired man before he got a chance to open the piggy bank.

Before the Gomen ninjas could react, Basu scooped up the machine boy and flew out of the room.

“What the . . .” Crow squawked, then he turned to his men, who had not even drawn their iKatanas yet. “Go after him!”

Basu flew through the building, the little boy dangling out of his flabby armpit. The boy stared up at him with wide eyes and a drooped open mouth.

Two ninjas quickly caught up to him, swinging their blades like reapers. Basu defended sloppily. Besides holding the boy, he was also preoccupied with trying to type an email on his iKatana. He needed to message for back up.

Before the email was sent, Basu’s sword began to flicker. He looked down at it. The monitor on the handle was showing dozens of programs opening and closing at once, spamming up the CPU usage so much that he couldn’t do anything with it.

Basu cursed the ninjas as he realized what they had done. Their iKatanas had been tipped with a computer virus that had broken through his firewall and infected his CPU. Basu stopped running and spun around, letting one of the ninjas charge right into his sword.

He wasn’t able to get his weapon out of the dead ninja in time to defend against the other attacker’s sword, so he caught the blade with his teeth and grabbed the ninja by the head. Basu’s belly jiggled as he snapped the man’s neck and tossed his corpse at the four ninjas flying toward him.

Basu turned and went for the elevator. He kicked a hole in the doors and then pried them open. Sweat as thick as engine grease oozed out of his flesh.

The machine boy raised his eyebrows as he looked over the edge. Then his blue cap fell off of his head and floated slowly down the elevator shaft. He couldn’t see the bottom. It went hundreds of stories down.

Crow glided into the room like a locust and landed thirty feet away from Basu. His chain sickle spiraled in the air as he pitched it. The chain on the sickle stretched out of Crow’s sleeve, making it all thirty feet to Basu.

But as the four ninjas arrived at the elevator, Basu tossed one of them in front of the chain sickle. It hooked into the man’s shoulder. As Crow pulled on the chain, the man flew backward like a fish being reeled out of the water. He went over Crow’s shoulder, smashed through the window behind him, and dropped into the abyss.