Crimp clutched at Jenna’s arm. “He looked right at you!”

Once in the ring, the guys in the crowd yelled some boos and insults that meant they had basically come to watch the ogre make a mess of his pretty face. Ryatt did not seem to mind in the least as he pressed a few buttons on a machine strapped to his wrist like a watch and his put-together outfit vanished, showing tight black track shorts that were one step off boxer briefs.

Crimp screamed with laughter. “He wasn’t wearing clothes! Even his pants were holograms. Hilarious!”

That was when the perfectly fake physique of the Boneman was on full display. The bumps over his body were in the form of abs and pecs, biceps and triceps… they were all bones, grown to look that way. The muscles he had under those bones were a complete secret. That was what Excelyn had said.

It looked like the ogre was indeed strong enough that if he punched hard enough, he could break those thin curved bones as easily as a crab’s shell, but that wasn’t the only thing the Boneman’s body had to offer. Their bones grew too long and protruded through various parts of their body. Ryatt had bones protruding from each of his knuckles, from the back of his elbow, hard round bones grew through his skin on his knees, and who knew where else? As it was bare-knuckle boxing, the orge was going to get cut, and he might bleed badly if Ryatt got too many hits off him. Jenna hoped the ogre wasn’t a bleeder.

In the ring, Ryatt called the MC down from the light fixture above the ring and whispered something to him. 

The MC laughed and bounced back up in the air. “Our gambler says wants to make it more interesting. If he can make it through the fight without a cut on his mouth, he wants to kiss someone in the audience.”

“Why don’t you make it really interesting?” someone bellowed sardonically from the stands.

Ryatt smiled a grin like magic and laughed. “Ya gotta pay more for porn!” he shouted back.

The ogre came forward, but his voice was picked up by the MC's microphone when he spoke. “I wanna kiss someone too.”

They agreed and with a little more fanfare, they began the first round. Ryatt bounced on his covered feet and evaded the first few swipes the ogre made at him.

Jenna knew Ryatt was going to have to cut the ogre in order for him to have a chance at victory, but when it happened, she was appalled. He didn’t simply punch the ogre and pull his punch back. He punched him, twisting his hand so that the bones in his knuckles sunk into the orge’s skin and were ripped in a half-circle causing a cut for each of his four knuckles. It was a beautiful mark until the blood came.

The ogre didn’t act like the wounds affected him much on the first three hits, even though blood was dripping, but when the fourth hit came in his lower back, he wailed in pain.

Ryatt avoided the ogre’s strikes. Jenna understood that if he got hit, it probably wouldn’t be a cut, but a broken bone, which was a serious injury in a different way.

The more times Ryatt hit the ogre, the madder he got, the heavier his strikes became, and when he finally landed one on Ryatt, it was bad. The strike landed on the Boneman’s forearm leaving a web of internal bleeding under the skin, like glass had been broken, but not shattered.

Jenna gasped.

Ryatt looked right at her and the bell went off to signal the end of the first round. He turned to his corner.

“He looked at you again! He’s lucky the ogre didn’t clock him across the cheek right at that second. It might have killed him,” Crimp burst, confused, and worked up. 

In his corner, Ryatt didn’t look anything like the boxers Jenna had seen before. He didn’t have a manager stoking him or someone giving him advice about what he ought to do in the second round, though the ogre in the other corner had someone playing that role, spraying his injuries and stopping the bleeding. Instead, Ryatt sat with one foot out and the other crooked next to him and stared out at the ring like he was staring out across the ocean. He had a towel offered to him by the guy who had put the stool up for him to sit on. Ryatt took it, but like he was at the pool and he was dabbing at his face between laps.

That was the moment Jenna realized two things. The first thing was that even though the injury on his arm looked like something to her, it was nothing to him. The second thing was that he was playing with the ogre. He’d let him score that point off him to make the fight more interesting to the crowd. The fight had to look like a close call to entertain the spectators.

The problem Ryatt confronted as he stared out into nothing was that he had allowed himself to be distracted when Jenna gasped. The threat the ogre posed was not nothing. Crimp had been right when she said that he had left himself open for a second. Why should hearing Jenna gasp have that much of an effect on him?

He dropped the towel and went for round two.

Jenna bit her lips shut and didn’t make another sound as he started taking swipes at the ogre’s face. The boxing ring got wetter and redder with the ogre’s blood. 

By the third round, the ogre had given up trying to win and was solely concentrating on making Ryatt bleed from his mouth. He scored a few more hits, making another crack on Ryatt’s pec over his heart and scraping the side of his head with a punch. Otherwise, it was a punishing fight for the ogre, who went down in the fifth round.

The MC lowered himself down to speak to Ryatt while the ogre was removed from the ring by stretcher and little Octavians cleaned up the blood. “I declare Ryatt, the Gambler, the winner!”

There were cheers and there were boos, but Ryatt put his arm up like he was delighted with his triumph.

“Who did you have your eye on for your victory kiss, Gambler?” the MC asked.

“That little wild girl with the pink streak in her hair.”

Jenna looked down. “This was obviously planned.”

“Right… Obviously planned. Go kiss your boy. That’s why you came here,” Crimp encouraged with a push.

Yet, with all of Jenna’s heart and soul, she knew that this man was not Sardius. Though Sardius said he was a violent person, Jenna had never been given any evidence of it. Immediately, it was clear his voice was not Sardius’. Over the speaker, Sardius’ voice has been something that gave her a buzz and put her to sleep, not something that woke her adrenaline and opened her eyes to the size of the night moons. It was a dangerous attraction, not the safety of Sardius.

Whatever this was, with this boxer, it was not her thing. She was just different from all the other women there because of her pink streak. If Crimp had not been covering every last strand of her hair, Ryatt would have seen the pink and chosen her instead.

All the same, the crowd was chanting that they wanted more entertainment in the form of Ryatt kissing her and since she couldn’t remember the last time a man had kissed her, she found herself rising to her feet. She came to outer space to do wild things and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to take this chance whether it was a good idea or not. 

The people in her row moved their feet for her and she made her way up to the ring. Ryatt parted the ropes and let down a hand to help her. Jenna noticed he had kindly wiped off the ogre’s blood before helping her. He didn’t wait for her to get both her feet on the ground before he was parting her lips with his and giving her the most fervent kiss she’d ever experienced. He tasted good, like the sea brine and the sea breeze at the same time and she went for it feeling more than a little buzzed. 

He also completely grabbed her ass before letting her go. She had been about to slap him or scream at him, but her one hand was faster than her slapping hand or her scream. She touched the pocket in her pants and felt that he had jabbed something in her pocket. It was the exact size and shape of the earpiece she had in her ear that let her talk to Ixy.

“I’m glad I watched all that,” Ixy said in her ear. “That guy is super hot. Snog him some more. I haven’t seen a show like this in years.”

“Do you have access to what he gave me?” Jenna questioned fervently.

“Maybe,” Ixy replied.

“Hack it,” Jenna instructed.

Ixy came back with an explanation. “It doesn’t have that sort of information. It’s not a storage device. It’s a communication device.”

Jenna let herself out of the ring while Ryatt swung from the ropes and accepted the love of his audience. When he turned around, she was giving him a flirty little wave from the aisles, waving for Crimp to join her and heading out. She blew him a kiss and he licked his upper lip in a straight vertical line, letting his gray/brown eyes linger on her.

In a different world, she would have gone back to him, wrapped her arms around him, and seen where the night led, but Jenna was accustomed to squashing any sexual impulse she had. From experience, she knew that five minutes of conversation with him would kill any attraction she felt for him. 

Instead, she returned her attention to Ixy. “I want any metadata you can scrape from that device. Where has it been? How is it configured? Who is likely to be able to communicate with it and from where?”

“Sure,” Ixy said, getting to work.

Crimp’s satisfied smile as they headed back to their hotel room was entertainment on a whole other level for Jenna. Maybe it was the icing on the cake.

“That guy was a blessing from the creator. What did he taste like?” Crimp begged to know.

“It was better than dinner.”

“Good, 'cause we’re having tasteless sludge for dessert,” Crimp said, giving Jenna a smack on the shoulder as they stepped out into the rain.