Basu pulled debris out of his folds of fat. The windshield had broken open and filled the cockpit with decades-old trash. His nostrils quivered with the scent of salty mold and tangy copper. He stood up and examined his iKatana, making sure that it was still working adequately.

He saw Chiya laying in a mess of broken dinner plates and petrified diapers. She was crinkled like newspaper, bones broken in so many places that they looked saw-like. Her arms were twisted into a knot. Her chest was caved in.

In order to make animese people more lightweight, cosmetic surgeons reduced the density of their bones. This made them lighter and more flexible, but it also made them a lot more fragile.

Chiya only had a few minutes left. Basu put her ragdoll hand into his and kissed her on her forehead with his thick crusty lips.

“I always thought I could change you,” she said, her voice rough and whispery. It sounded like she had butterfly wings in her vocal chords. “I always thought I could cure you, get you back into shape. I always thought I could be with my Keigo again.”

Basu grunted at her.

“If only I had my Keigo back . . .” she said. “He would have been willing to make a change and leave this city with me.”

Basu grunted softly.

“But there’s no changing Basu,” she said. “There’s no changing this fat piece of shit.”

He held her crumpled hand and waited for her to die. As he stared into her big wet eyes, he wondered what she saw when she looked at him. They’d known each other for a long time, but they never really spoke to each other much. The rare occasions that they spent the night together, they mostly just sat in silence. It was as if Chiya had filled in her own conversations during those silent moments. It was as if Chiya had been in a serious relationship with him for years, but she was the only one who knew about it.

As consciousness dripped out of her anime eyes, all Basu could do to comfort her was grunt.

Outside the wrecked hover-bus, the air was thick. Basu looked above him. The buildings stretched so far up that he couldn’t see any sky beyond them. The lighting was very dim, but Basu was still able to see everything clearly. There were many lights in the buildings three hundred feet up, but the buildings close to the ground were dark and empty. Deserted. It had been decades since anyone had lived this close to the ground.

A wave of pressure rose inside of Basu’s guts, causing him to freeze in his tracks. He had to take a crap. Another major setback of eating so much food was that he had to shit constantly, and it almost always came on suddenly, when least expected.

“Not now,” Basu told himself.

But he knew he couldn’t hold it. It wasn’t the first time he had a bathroom emergency in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He thought about using the bathroom on the crashed hover-bus, but decided against it. The Gomen ninja would surely be surrounding the area at any moment. Nothing was more difficult than trying to defend attackers while glued to a toilet seat.

Basu hobbled between the garbage hills until he found a hidden cavern within a mountain of trash. He watched for Gomen ninjas as he pulled down his pants, making sure they hadn’t arrived on the scene yet, not that he would have been able to stop even if they were.

His bowels exploded across the ancient soda cans and broken electronics. When he looked back, he saw that half of what was coming out of him was blood. A thick bright red blood that splashed in such a way that it appeared to have been punched out of him. Although the blood was possibly from the stab wounds to his belly, bloody stool was not uncommon for Basu.

Because his diet consisted of large quantities of unhealthy fattening foods with hardly any fiber, his colon and intestines were in horrible shape. They were full of hemorrhoids and polyps, which were often torn open by all the stool passing through him, causing rectal bleeding.

As he finished shitting and wiped himself with an old dirt-caked hairpiece, he stood up and took a few steps, then had to go to the bathroom again. This time it wasn’t just shit and blood that came out of him; there was also a fishy yellow discharge oozing down the back of his thighs. The rancid slime was from an infection of the hemorrhoids, which he got from time to time. Open wounds in the intestines very easily became infected.

Basu wiped the thick fluid off of his legs with a half-melted Frisbee, and recoiled at the rotten smell when he brought it up to his nose. Whenever the fishy goop came out of him, Basu was forced to recognize what his horrible diet was doing to his body. Eventually, it was going to kill him.

As Basu came out of the cavern and examined his surroundings, he saw a pink cyber-chickadee fly past him with a big cartoon smile on its face. He grunted with confusion. Then he looked up and saw Crow in the sky, flying overhead on a hover-bike, chasing after the chickadee. Basu then realized the chickadee was an iPet that was going after Oki.

Basu leapt thirty feet into the air across a garbage ravine and went after the floppy pink chickadee. He landed knee-deep in refuse. Then he launched himself upward again, trying to ignore the pain within his intestines.

Crow sliced through the sky above him, his black tie rippling over his shoulder. He pointed his beak downward at Basu and squawked at him.

The obese ninja jumped into the air and swung his iKatana. Crow’s hover-bike tilted sideways to avoid it. As Basu fell back down, Crow tossed three mine-shuriken at him. The projectiles exploded at Basu’s feet. Rubbish burst into the air and a mountain of garbage avalanched on top of him.

By the time Basu pulled himself out of the refuse, the pink chickadee was too far away for him to see, and Crow was out of his range of attack. Four more Gomen ninja flew overhead on hover-bikes, catching up with their leader.

Basu got right back to his feet and jumped frantically through the garbage landscape after them. His breath was becoming heavy, his heart was feeling squeezed within his chest, and his intestines felt so rotten that he imagined they were ready to turn into mush and slide out of his rectum.

By the time he caught up to Crow and the Gomen ninja, Basu was ready to collapse. He was a powerful killing machine when fighting in quick bursts, but he didn’t have a lot of stamina. Running long distances took a lot out of him.

When Crow saw the state of Basu, he squawked a laugh. “You’re not the warrior you used to be, Keigo.”

When Basu looked up, he saw Oki was with Crow. The boy was backed against a wall of ancient washing machines. The wrecked hover-scooter he had used to make his escape was on the ground twenty feet away. He was holding Basu’s smiling cyber-frog in his arms like a teddybear, tears falling down his cheeks. When Oki saw the obese ninja, his face lit up.

“Bus!” Oki cried.

Crow held the struggling child still.

Basu stood up and held out his iKatana in one hand, his other hand holding the stab wound on his hip. Even after he developed his weight problem, he had never failed a mission before. He would not let Crow get away with the piggy bank.

“Kill him off before he catches his breath,” Crow told the four Gomen ninjas next to him.

The Gomen came at him quickly. The way they weaved through each other, flying like jets in formation, Basu could tell these were not ordinary ninjas. They were elite assassins. One of them wore a blue hood tucked into his polo shirt, one wore a red hood, another wore yellow, and the last wore purple.

Although he would have no trouble dispatching any elite assassin in single combat, Basu knew it would be suicide to fight a group of them while they were in formation. In any other circumstance he would have chosen to retreat and wait for backup to arrive, but this time he didn’t have any other option but to fight them head on. If he could kill just one of them, that would weaken their formation enough to give Basu a chance. This was the strategy he chose as they swooped in on him like vultures.

The lead assassin with the red hood broke away from the group and darted toward Basu as the others circled around him. Once he was in range, Basu took his hand from his hip wound and splashed blood into Red Hood’s eyes. Then he swung his iKatana.

As the iKatana was about to make contact with Red Hood, Basu’s heart began to pump hard in his chest, as if the organ was struggling to break free from his ribcage. The force of Basu’s attack weakened. It felt to Basu as if his arm had started moving in slow motion. His horrible blood pressure had finally caught up to him.

As the blade came down toward Red Hood, the assassin’s body exploded into black smoke and disappeared. Basu’s sword fell through the smoke without making contact. Then Red Hood reappeared on the right side of Basu and drove his iKatana through the obese man’s sword arm. Basu cried out, pulling his arm off of the blade. Then he sloppily swung his sword at the assassin, breathing rapidly as his heart pounded. Red Hood disappeared again.

Before Basu could see him reappearing on his left, the assassin knocked Basu’s iKatana out of his hand and then pierced the blade into his enormous belly.

“Bus!” cried Oki, struggling in Crow’s arms as the morbidly obese ninja fell to the ground.