Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ HOUNDS ❯ The Cage ( Chapter 3 )

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HOUNDS. The Cage.

~By Sweetdeily.


“A Wise Man can see more from the bottom of a well than a Fool can see from the top of a mountain.
~Unknown."


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The cage was a place where a young werewolf could make some money. It was a place where an old werewolf could commit soundless and noble suicide and a place where frequent anger vents were made. Sometimes it was good to go to the cage and rip a person to shreds, knowing that they’d probably survive and that you’d feel less like mauling the little wife back home.

Joey was frustrated. He was pissed off with Benny Bonky for doing something so stupid as to bring police crawling through the apartment complex. Fuming that he hadn’t done anything. Annoyed that the human police had been such dickheads. He was irritated because of a lot of things.

So when the sweet stench of blood and piss and sweat washed over him he breathed in big lungfulls.

The ring again. The pounding of a thousand hands. The beating of a thousand shins.

He could hardly focus past the blaring lights.

And then that skull-shattering sound and the lycanthrope at the other side of the cage lunged for him. It was the free-for-all round, where your opponent was a fully transformed wolf, and you were only allowed to transform one arm. Joey was known to participate in these fights in particular. He never went in full wolf form however, despite the fact that those that were fully transformed tended to win more often. It wasn’t a fair fight. It never was. But that’s what made the adrenaline rush that much sweeter.

The wolf that lunged at him was twice the size of a German Shepard. It was twice the size of Joey the Cat’s. A big grey thing with a set of teeth that seemed all too eager to rip the blonde’s throat out. Mean, cold eyes and a trail of spittle drooping from one jaw. Massive, dirty paws and claws full of black gooey stuff that might have been dirt or blood.

But it was clumsy and slow. Joey rolled under the wolf, claw extended to slice along the creature’s underbelly.

The roar of the ground was deafening. It had seemed quite subdued when he and Yami had first walked into the room, and then a few people had recognized Yami and the next half an hour had turned into peak hour. Every single bet had been made on Joey. The blonde had never been this popular, but when Yami had given him a ‘good luck kiss’ the bookies had been hard-pressed to take enough of the cash in time for the fight to start.

The room was swathed in noise and every single eye was focused on the ring.

Blood sprayed across the blonde’s face and he wiped it away absently, rolling to his feet with wolf-like ease. The fully changed wolf yipped and shuddered, but remained standing. They circled briefly, working up their individual game-plans. Joey the Cat’s jumped at the wolf, his one clawed hand held back behind his body, human part’s extended.

There was no sense of time in the following scuffle. All the noise in the room may as well have been white sound. The lycanthrope’s jaws shot out, catching Joey quickly and the blonde’s arm spurted blood everywhere. But the jaws were disabled and the blonde quickly drove his other arm into the exposed neck.

Claw punctured skin and muscle, grazed bone and organ, and drove in deeper.

A brief second passed where neither contestant moved. Finally Joey pulled his claws free. The jaw unhooked around his arm and the wolf collapsed to the ground, blood pooling around its head.

Joey the Cat’s had won. Again.

The crowd was this side of an atomic explosion. People screamed- they might have been screaming words, but it was a mindless blur to Joey’s ears. Drinks exploded and Joey was very glad that he was inside a cage, for the sides of his enclosure were bending in, and the medics had to literally claw their way through the crowd to get to the ring.

Joey had never seen the medics come into the little hexagram of a ring. Most of the matches weren’t high enough stakes to have them appear from their secluded back rooms. And most winning blows weren’t dangerous enough to need it.

Joey barely felt the announcer’s hand as it grabbed his arm and held it over his head. The man was saying something, yelling incoherent words into the microphone.

And then people were rushing into the ring and Yami was next to him, congratulating him.

Joey was probably the only person who was looking when the door opened. His dark russet eyes glazed over. It was probably something somewhere between pain and triumph.

A couple of men, looking to be in their late teens to yearly twenties, judging by the pimples and brand logos sprayed across their shirts and faces alike, stalked into the room. There were four in total. One, a shaggy, ratty haired blonde with the word ‘boner’ printed across his shirt and a pair of blue jean pants that danced the border of brown. The second and third were both brunettes, one with a sweat-soaked white singlet and the other with a red shirt that looked vaguely new. The fourth man was slightly better dressed, his shoes were probably about twenty dollars and he looked like he’d had a shower over the past week, black hair was tied behind his ears in a small pony-tail and he had a pair of wintry gray eyes. The first three were all carrying semi-automatic machine guns, black vinyl straps curving over their shoulders. The guns were expensive.

Joey was still watching when the nozzle of one of the guns went up into the air and a round burst from the chamber.

The result was a deafening silence that fell in the pit like a blanket. Joey’s heart was in his throat and the sickly scent of fear began to roll off a few of the lycanthropes that surrounded the blonde champion.

“We’re calling this turf as property of the Hot Fangs.” The dirty blonde growled out, his voice was young and cocky, bordering on breaking in for puberty to hit.

Jounouchi sucked in some air. The Hot Fangs were just a bunch of high-school dropout lycanthrope. The worst weapons they’d ever been given was a knife. But the semi-automatics the kids clutched in their hands now must have been a thousand a pop- there was no way they could afford those guns. That meant that they had to be sponsored by someone. Or they’d robbed a bank. And since there hadn’t been any recent bank-robbing activity, Jounouchi was going with the sponsoring theory. A bigger gang might have absorbed them, someone might have gotten a rich boy into their group–or even worse for Jounouchi to consider was the implication that they’d just gotten these guns off the street.

A few of the drunken, washed up werewolves in the crowd snorted and drew their own guns. The cage had always been located in Lock Jaw’s territory and while it hadn’t been flagged, most gangs didn’t try to take it from the older, bigger gang. Lock Jaws had been around the lycanthrope part of the city for the better part of three generations, they were the werewolf equivalent of the mob. Mostly men who’d run down on their luck and in need of quick cash, the gang did everything from drug-smuggling to bank robbery. Lock Jaw’s were ruled by a single family, the Mutoh clan, a bunch of drop-out yakuza that had started their own gang that shared their ‘unclean’ genetics.

The blonde therianthrope shifted uneasily and moved to the back of the crowd as unobtrusively as possible. He had a bad feeling.

The resident Lock Jaw’s were yelling at the Hot Fang punks, waving their guns around menacingly and most of the crowd was standing there like a bunch of sheep. Someone grabbed Jounouchi’s shoulder and the blonde jumped, whipping around to find Yami standing there. The weretiger touched a finger to his lips and held up a small backpack that was full of bills. His considerable prize money.

Who knows how the weretiger had gotten the cash so fast. But it was probably a good thing. The dangerous air in the room seemed to be escallating.

Jounouchi’s sweat-soaked eyes went wide at the sight of all that money and he barely had time to take another step before gunfire exploded.

A body fell to the ground among the crowd and complete and utter chaos erupted. People screamed, they yelled, they wet themselves and someone, somewhere died.

Yami caught Jounouchi’s bad arm and dug his claws in, dragging the injured blonde through the suddenly moving, crushing crowd, toward the back exit, where half a million others were trying to squeeze their way. It was a mass of frenzied, moving bodies, and while it had been close-quarters before, there was now little distance between people besides their clothing.

The sound of machine gun fire erupted through the air, like a wild conductor, the bullets enticed the sweet stench of blood to blossom into a flower, and the stench of fear and panic became like a musical backdrop to this sudden symphony.

An elbow caught Jounouchi in the jaw and he tasted blood, a foot pushed over his foot, a finger to his eyes, half blind and battered, he struggled not to be let go by Yami’s hand as the shorter therianthrope plunged through the crowd.

Panic is a strange feeling to humans; one they embrace ever-so-readily when they are faced with a situation that they feel is beyond their ability. The rush of adrenaline and blood through the system was worse for a lycanthrope. All around Jounouchi Katsuya, people’s screams became howls, shouts became growls and hands became paws. The panic of the crowd was almost a physical energy and the blonde therianthrope had to fight with his inner Beast to stop the change from getting to him as well, Yami’s hand on his was softer with a soft rush of fur, but the claws that now sliced into his wrist were not forgiving at all.

And then there was a heart-stopping moment in which Jounouchi caught sight of the exit door and how small it was before they were squeezing through. A thin, iron plated creation with a glowing, smeared sign over its mouth. It was a one-man door normally, and as therianthrope and lycanthropes alike tended to grow in size when they transformed, it was a very, very tight squeeze. Tight enough that someone’s elbow and another person’s back-foot broke a few of Jounouchi’s ribs, there was a crunch as a fist connected with his nose and blood exploding messily all over his face.

And then the crowd erupted and thinned and the Corbett tiger therianthrope had pulled Jounouchi out of the stream of human and wolf bodies.

People ran down the overcast street, screaming and changing and stuck halfway between wolf and man. The back alley was damp and stank of rotten vegetables and stale bread- the kind of things most people threw up back here. The cage shared the small space with the back of a run-down-once-convenience store that had been robbed so many times it had eventually just been shut down. The walls were grey, thick stone covered with mud and gunk where it met the ground. People wasted no time in pausing to stop like Jounouchi and Yami were; they kept running as far as they could. It was a sound idea.

Yami was leaning against a wall, his whole body covered in fur, eyes slitter and a striped tail standing out straight in the air behind him. The therianthrope gasped and released Jounouchi’s arm, shivering and panting, pulling what little of the beast that had emerged back inside his body. The fur faded into his skin as though it had never emerged and the tail shrank gradually. The last things to revert were his red cat eyes. Normal cats did not have those kinds of eyes during the daylight. There was always something unnatural about Yami’s eyes.

“You alright?” Jounouchi asked over the bleeding of his nose and the sharp burning of his body.

Yami nodded. The weretiger had somehow managed to get through the crush of the crowd without any outward sign of injury. Jounouchi looked at his arm. The bite mark had stopped bleeding, while the marks from Yami’s claws were still leaking blood down his wrist. Jounouchi didn’t want to look in a mirror; he could taste enough blood at the back of his throat to tell that his nose was cut, probably broken.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Yami spat out when he looked at Jounouchi’s face.

“That bad?” The blonde asked, he was fumbling around for his mobile, not sure if he’d taken it off or not.

“Aw, fuck… that better heal.” Yami groaned. The weretiger pulled Jounouchi’s phone from his back pocket and flipped it open. “Put some pressure on that thing… shit.”

Jounouchi nodded and sat down against the wall. This place was not the best place to stop, but his ribs were broken, it felt like two ribs, and he was starting to feel light-headed. Blood loss. And then there was the rest of his body.

“Hello? I need to be connected to the HOUNDS switch, this is an emergency.” Yami was speaking.

Through the still flooding crowds there was more shouting and shooting and screaming- as though the battle were riding on the back of the crowd.

Jounouchi was struggling to keep himself focused and aware. Someone shoved viciously through the crowd, a Hot Fang kid, he was shouting and screaming something, but his words were drowned out by the sound of his machine gun. A few men fell to the ground, clutching bullet wounds.

One was a little boy, probably only thirteen years old. The kid had copped a bullet to his left shoulder. He fell to the ground with a yell, his pony tail fell out and long black hair cascaded around his shoulders.

With a grunt, Jounouchi rushed forward to rescue the kid from being trampled.

“Are you okay?” The blonde yelled over the roar of the crowd and guns alike.

The kid was white as a ghost; he had the tell-tale Asian features of a Japanese boy, big round eyes and olive skin tone, which made Jounouchi think the boy was probably from one of the islands and massive sapphire eyes. The boy nodded his head bravely.

Jounouchi spared the kid a grin before picking him up quickly and dragging him out of the crush of body. He received another crack to his nose as a result.

The blow sent Jounouchi’s brain reeling and the second he could breathe again he’d let the kid down and propped himself up against a wall, throwing up everywhere.

“Shit, are you okay Jounouchi?” Yami asked, hanging up the phone.

“Ohmigod, I think I’m gonna’ be sick.” The blonde mumbled.

“You just blew chunks everywhere. Shit. You’re not going to need a doctor are you?” Yami asked. Therianthrope doctors were expensive.

Jounouchi shook his head before throwing up again.

The kid he’d rescued sat with his back against the alley wall, breathing in shallow gulps. “I’ve never been shot before.” The boy’s accent was thick, but he spoke well enough.

“Hurts?” Yami asked.

The kid nodded.

“Silver bullets. Probably.” Jounouchi groaned, sinking to his knees against the wall.

“Can… can you call my brother…please?” The boy asked.

“What are you doing here without a guardian?” Yami was flipping the phone open as he spoke.

“My brother was at work and… and I like to watch the fights. Everyone here is so strong. I want to be like Joey the Cat’s when I get older. Even though he’s lost most of his fights, he never loses control and he always comes back.”

Jounouchi groaned numbly. He was flattered.

Yami was rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Alright. What’s your brother’s number?”

The kid gave Yami a series of numbers. His coloring was improving as his young body worked on healing the damage the bullet had done. Children had the best healing abilities.

Jounouchi didn’t catch most of the conversation after that. He sat there, fingers gripping his nose in agony, trying to stem the blood-flow. He was pretty sure he must have dozed off, because he was startled very suddenly when the wail of sirens split the chaos and screaming inside the cage.

Yami was talking to the kid while leaning over Jounouchi’s wounds and examining them.

The blonde jumped so suddenly that the weretiger almost fell back onto his ass, a quick hand steadied him and Yami re-balanced himself. “Are you okay?”

Jounouchi shook his head. “No.”

“Need a doctor?”

The blonde nodded. He could taste bile still and everything kept going in and out of focus.

“You were sort of staring off in a daze for a while there. You’re not going to pass out?”

“No.” At least he didn’t think he was going to pass out. Everything hurt too much for that.

The alley was deserted and there were sirens blaring over the sound of gunfire and screaming from inside the cage. “Where is everyone?”

“Most of them have run away. But the two gangs are still… playing inside. It’s only been ten minutes since you closed your eyes.”

Jounouchi rubbed his eyes in pain and glanced at the kid, the boy had recovered a bit of his color, his body, like any child’s was quick to heal. The wonders of youth.

“What’s your name, kid?” Jounouchi asked.

“Mokuba Kaiba. And You’re Joey the Cat’s. Is it true that the Cat handpicked you to be his roommate? Are you really going to be the next president?”

“Actually his name is Jounouchi Katsuya. Everyone calls him Joey the Cat’s because Jounouchi is too long for them.” Yami cut in.

Jounouchi nodded and didn’t bother raising enough energy to even try and interrogate the weretiger.

The shooting inside suddenly stopped and raised voices carried out to the street.

“Sounds like the HOUNDS have got them under control.” Yami spoke in the silence.

“I hope my brother doesn’t see me before they take the bullet out. I’m going to be grounded for a month!” Mokuba whined.

Jounouchi examined the kid a bit more thoroughly now. Despite the fact that the shirt and pants were faded and old, the sneakers were shiny and new, three hundred dollar sneakers from the look of it. “Jesus Christ.” The therianthrope murmured aloud, head rolling back to rest against the wall.

Dimly, he had a sudden flash of recognition. Kaiba… Seto Kaiba had been the HOUNDS that had interviewed him the day before. “Jesus Christ.”

“Your nose has stopped bleeding, by the way.” Yami muttered.

Jounouchi just groaned.

“He doesn’t look too good.” Mokuba spoke.

“Thanks, kid.” Jounouchi groaned. He wanted to curl up and die he felt that great. “How’s the bullet coming out?”

“I can feel the muscle pushing it out. It hurts.”

That was an understatement, therianthropes and lycanthropes alike were allergic to silver. The kid would come up in hives for days after the wound had healed. In the worst cases, some lycanthropes went into anaphylactic shock when they had silver imbedded in their body. If they didn’t get it out fast enough… well, peanuts were deadly for some people too.

The kid was handling the pain well though, probably because he was pedigree or something.

“Are you alright?” Someone yelled, coming out of the back-door.

“We need an ambulance. The kid’s been shot and my friend is… uh, suffering broken bones, and scratches.”

“Oh shit, is that Mokuba Kaiba there?” The large HOUNDS officer had been walking, but was now running to help. He was a big, rounded man with a buzz cut.

He cursed again when he saw the bullet hole in the boy’s shoulder and pulled his walkie-talkie off his waist. “Upper Officer Kaiba, please respond.”

“This is Kaiba, what do you need?” The Radio crackled back.

“Your brother is out the back of the cage shoot-out area. He needs medical attention.”

There was silence for a while before the back door burst open and Seto Kaiba strolled out, cobalt eyes icy.

“Jesus Christ.” Jounouchi mumbled.

~Tsuzuku…

Sweet notes: Damn you Mokuba!!!

Moku: I don’t see why you’re complaining! Now you have a reason for Seto and Jou to get together other than the case.

Jou: Yeah.

Sweets: Still, you’re a nasty plot bunny and I shall destroy you!!! Mwuahahahahahahahahah!!!!

Seto: I think she’s snapped.

Malik: I’d go with wonky from the start.

Bakura: No, I’d say she’s just a little on edge. Wonder why?

Sweets: I had to rewrite some of the chapter because the computer shut down in the middle of a storm. >>><<<

Yugi: That sucks.

Sweets: Yeah.

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