Shujin Yama ain’t no mountain.
Of that, there can be no doubt.
Frank knows about mountains. He’d been born on the side of one, cut his teeth as a boy hunting its wildlife and running its trails. On the day that King Kong Frank stepped bare-footed into manhood, he’d done it at the crest of a rocky crag that no man alive had ever topped without a sturdy pair of boots.
No man, that is, until Frank.
As we ruminate on the apogee of an unnamed mountain where a shaggy-bearded young frontiersman once stood with nothing to his name but two left feet and a dream, King Kong Frank finds himself once again in competition with a force of nature. That is to say, an actual mountain.
Not Shujin Yama, who is clearly not a mountain.
This is where the inspirational music kicks up. Maybe it’s “Eye of the Tiger.” Maybe it’s “America the Beautiful.” Maybe Toby Keith and Kanye West went on a bender after that whole January 6th fiasco and barricaded themselves inside Ted Nugent’s personal bomb shelter until they somehow managed to regurgitate James Brown’s “Livin’ in America.”
Apollo Creed is rolling over in his grave, probably.
“…ninety-nine!”
King Kong Frank drops into what could almost be described as a cinder block burpee. Using actual cinder blocks. On top of a mountain.
“A-HUNNERD!”
Oh, you didn’t think we’d make it to Capital Clash without a MONTAGE, did you? Because if you did, you’d be wrong, and you’d look like a big dummy.
!~FLASH~!
Headband?
✔
Skynyrd t-shirt, cut off somewhere just above the belly button?
✔
Obscenely short cutoff jean shorts, complete with fringe?
You know what time it is…
Frank stomps through again, now with a length of angle-iron across his shoulders with assorted rusted and tireless rims attached through some unholy alliance of welding and hillbilly voodoo. He drops into a full squat. It would be impressive for a man of Frank’s frame even without the added weight. His knees pop like bubble wrap but the Smokey Mountain Mastadon is oblivious as he stands right back up.
And again.
And again.
!~FLASH~!
A wayward chicken hightails it through like a bat out hell with King Kong Frank hot on its… spurs. For whatever reason, he’s now got long johns on underneath the cutoff shirt and shorts and looks even more ridiculous if you can wrap your mind around that.
“C’MERE YOU LITTLE SONUVA-”
!~FLASH~!
What was once a trickling stream quickly gains momentum through gravity. King Kong Frank stands knee-deep in the burgeoning rapids, his attention locked on the mission at hand.
“Visualize…” he mutters. “AND ATTACK!”
Spearing the water with his shovel-sized hand, Frank goozles a catfish so fast it might as well already be scaled, boned, fried, and stuffed into a poboy bun and drowned in cocktail sauce!
!~FLASH~!
Curling full beer kegs, one in each hand!
!~FLASH~!
Bodyslamming a burned-out refrigerator!
!~FLASH~!
In a completely ludicrous display, dressed in nothing but the aforementioned blue jean ball-huggers, Frank takes a flying leap out of a tree, grabs onto a cleverly placed rope-swing and Tarzan’s himself clear across the back forty before letting go and dropping the gnarliest Mountain Top Knee Drop to have ever been dropped…
…clean into an industrial-sized dumpster full of half-crushed cans of Natty Light.
The ensuing ruckus could wake the dead.
!~FLASH~!
Later. Much later. Lightning flashes, silhouetting Frank against the darkened mountain. The outrageous outfits are gone, along with the rest of the hillbilly insanity. What’s left is King Kong Frank stripped down to his rawest form. What that is, quite frankly, is dangerous. If you know, you know.
“You call yerself a lot of things, big’un.”
Bushy eyebrows furrow.
“Champion.”
“Oni.”
“Mountain…”
Bile creeps up the back of his throat, a sure sign of disgust.
“If yer a mountain, then I’m the bah-gawd President of the Yoo-nited States! Now it might be my civic duty as an AMERICAN to whip yer hind-end, but that don’t make me no gyat’dang Commander-in-Chief!”
Intensity radiates out of Frank’s pores.
“Raise yer flag, big boy, an’ get ready to defend it with ever’thang you got! I done said my prayers an’ ate my vitavegameatamins! Now I’m comin’ after your flag and your belt, and there ain’t a DANG THANG YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!”
There isn’t.
“I got somethin’ for ya, big’un, an’ you can better believe you ain’t gonna like it, not one little bit!”
Frank’s grin curls frighteningly.
“HUSS!”