Ilia's Epic Battle: A Tale of Courage and Wrestling

It was hard. I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d been practicing this art form for years, decades even, and I knew nothing about it. Sure, I’d seen people get hit in the head with brass knuckles before, but I don’t think that was supposed to happen. It was just supposed to be a friendly sparring match. Not even a real match! Just some light shoving. And now here we were. Him on the ground, me trying to stop the bleeding from his head with my sash.

I could have gone outside to fetch some water and some cloths to apply pressure, but they wouldn’t have helped anyhow. He probably had a concussion. Or worse, he might die.

And where would that leave me? It wasn’t like I could take his place in the tournament without him being dead or something. Besides, he *was* my friend! He wouldn’t want me to take his place if he could still be there himself! And I didn’t want that either! This whole thing was such a mess.

There was only one thing I could do - wait for him to wake up! I tried shaking him awake but it didn’t do anything so I just sat there with him until he woke up by himself.

When he finally came around again he seemed fine at first, but then he started screaming and flailing his arms around like crazy and speaking in tongues or something, so I knew he couldn’t be all right yet. But at least he stopped hitting me so that was good!

He spoke about things that didn’t make sense for a while but eventually calmed down enough to start making sense again. We talked a bit about what happened and why we had been fighting in the first place and after a while he said “hey, you know what? We should spar again! Nothing too heavy this time though, just a light warm-up match” like nothing had happened before that!

We went back into the ring together and started wrestling each other again like really hard, harder than we ever had before. When we were done we both struggled to our knees exhaustedly, looking at each other eye-to-eye as we wheezed for air with beads of sweat dripping off our faces like raindrops off of leaves in autumn.

I broke the silence by asking him “Do you think you can beat me next week at the tournament? If you win I won’t have to wrestle anyone else until the finals themselves so it would be great if you could do it for me” since that was his plan anyways anyways anyways anyways anyways anyways anyways anyways...