“Holy crap!” Wos’s heart sank, and he instinctively shielded Tom and Jerry.
“Hey, kid!” The bald thug at the front pulled out a folding knife.
“Hand over all the money you’ve got, and we’ll pretend nothing happened. Got it?!”
The other thugs pulled out all kinds of small knives too, gleaming coldly under the dim streetlight.
Wos’s legs began to shake, but he forced himself to stand in front of Tom and Jerry.
“You can have the money, but don’t you dare hurt my friends!”
“Friends?” one of the thugs burst out laughing.
“You mean these two little vermin?”
“Tom! Jerry! You two go home first!” Wos shouted with a trembling voice.
“I’ll hold them off! Don’t worry, if they want money, I’ll just give it to them. I’ll be fine.”
Although he was so scared his legs were knocking together, Wos firmly spread his arms and blocked the two little ones.
At this moment, he wasn’t thinking of anything else.
He only wanted to protect his partners.
Tom and Jerry looked at this guy trembling as he stood against five knife-wielding criminals just to protect them, and a wave of warmth rose in their hearts.
The two little ones looked at each other and saw firm resolve in each other’s eyes.
Suddenly, Tom and Jerry’s figures began to blur, as if some mysterious force were changing their appearance.
“What’s going on?” Wos’s eyes went wide.
In the blink of an eye, the two tiny figures had completely transformed.
Tom and Jerry both wore black tricorn hats, each with a long, slender feather swaying in the breeze.
Long black capes hung behind them, fluttering gracefully with their movements.
Most eye-catching of all were the two gleaming rapiers in their hands, with slender, elegant blades and exquisite, ornate hilts.
The whole look was like noble swordsmen who had stepped straight out of an 18th-century European court!
“Holy crap! Funny cartoon characters really don’t play by the rules!” Wos was completely dumbstruck.
“Is a costume change supposed to be this fast?”
Seeing an instant costume change for the first time was still a bit of a shock.
The thugs were startled by the sudden change too, but they quickly recovered.
“Hahaha! Putting on a show!” The bald thug laughed loudly.
“Two little animals think they can scare us? Guys, don’t fall for these tricks!”
“Yeah! It’s definitely some kind of magic prop!”
“What can a cat and a mouse do? I could make them squeal all by myself!”
The thugs jeered and walked forward, clearly not taking Tom and Jerry seriously at all.
However, they soon couldn’t laugh anymore.
What was walking toward the thugs now was one of the strongest forms of Tom and Jerry from *Tom and Jerry*: the European swordsmen!
Tom and Jerry moved at the same time. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
Two black shadows rushed into the group like lightning, their rapiers tracing graceful arcs in the air.
“Swish! Swish! Swish!” All that could be seen was the cold gleam of the rapiers flashing again and again in the moonlight.
“What?!” The bald thug hadn’t even reacted yet when he felt a chilly breeze all over his body.
He looked down and saw that his jacket, shirt, and pants had all been sliced away completely, leaving only a pair of gaudy, colorful underwear!
“Aaaah! Where did my clothes go?!”
The other thugs met the same fate.
Tom and Jerry’s swordsmanship was so exquisite it was astonishing.
Every slash was precisely right, cutting away the clothing without scratching the skin at all.
“This is impossible! This is impossible!” The tall, skinny thug looked at his body, left in nothing but underwear, and completely fell apart.
“They’re monsters! They’re monsters!”
Tom elegantly twirled his rapier, spinning it once in his hand before stopping it steadily.
Jerry performed a proper fencer’s salute to acknowledge his opponents.
The expressions on the two little ones’ faces seemed to say: “Come on, little guys, we haven’t even put in any effort and you already fell down. You’re so weak.”
“Mommy! Ghosts!” The bald thug was scared out of his wits.
“Run! Run!”
The five thugs in nothing but underwear scrambled away with their heads covered, screaming as they ran: “Monsters! Monsters! There really are monsters in this world!”
They ran faster than rabbits and vanished into the night in the blink of an eye, leaving only scraps of cloth scattered on the ground.
Wos stood where he was, completely dumbfounded.
What had just happened had utterly overturned his understanding.
“Tom… Jerry…” he stammered.
“Is your swordsman mode really that powerful?”
When he had watched the cartoon, he hadn’t sensed it, and he’d thought it was just ordinary swordsmen dueling.
It turned out he had been underestimating them.
The swordsman outfits on Tom and Jerry began to fade away like a receding tide, and soon they returned to their original appearance.
The two little ones scratched their heads a bit sheepishly, as if to say: It’s no big deal.
“That was so cool!” Wos suddenly jumped up excitedly.
“You two are total superheroes! That swordplay was even cooler than in the movies!”
Tom proudly patted his chest, and Jerry made a victory gesture.
“But…” Wos suddenly remembered something.
“You still shouldn’t expose your abilities in front of the public too often, or it’ll be bad if some Black Eggs set their sights on us.”
Tom and Jerry looked at each other, then walked up to Wos at the same time and hugged his legs, one on each side.
They were partners, they were family, so how could they abandon each other in a time of danger?
“You two little guys…” Wos’s eyes grew a little moist, and he crouched down and hugged them both.
“Thank you.”
The three huddled together in the alley, and at that moment, they truly felt what it meant to share hardship.
“Alright, alright, enough sappiness.” Wos stood up and brushed the dust off himself.
“Let’s go home and celebrate! Today was a huge haul!”
“But I have a question.” Wos asked curiously as he walked.
“Besides swordsman mode, do you two have other looks?”
Tom and Jerry smiled mysteriously and didn’t answer.
Some secrets were better left to be revealed slowly later on.
Not long after the three left, a blind man in black sunglasses, somewhere between thirty and forty years old, came to the spot with a white cane.
“An adult, a cat, and a mouse. Since when has such a strange combination appeared in Hell’s Kitchen? Interesting…”
Though he was clearly a blind man, he was able to accurately describe Wos’s trio, as if he weren’t blind at all.
Back at their home, Wos carefully hid the money he had earned that day, then took three cans of beer out of the fridge.
“Come on! Cheers to our friendship!” Wos raised his beer can.
Tom and Jerry raised their own little cans too, and the three clinked them together.
“Tomorrow Tom will go back to the restaurant to play, and I’ll go apply for the street performance permit,” Wos planned.
“Once we get the permit, we can perform in Times Square again. Then we’ll have two sources of income, and life will be even more secure.”
Tom nodded, full of anticipation for tomorrow’s performance.
Jerry had already started imagining their wonderful future life.
“By the way, those thugs shouldn’t come looking for trouble again, right?” Wos was a little worried.
Tom and Jerry made a “don’t worry” gesture at the same time.
After what had just happened, those guys would probably have nightmares about them.
As night deepened, the three each went back to their rooms to rest.
Lying in bed, Wos recalled everything that had happened that day, from the street performance being shut down, to Tom’s brilliant performance at the restaurant, to the thrilling encounter in the alley just now.
It was like a dream.
But what moved him most was that Tom and Jerry had chosen to protect him in a moment of danger.
This feeling of being trusted and protected was something he had never experienced before.
“Maybe coming to this world isn’t such a bad thing,” Wos thought, looking at the starry sky outside the window, a sense of security he’d never felt before rising in his heart.
With these two best partners, what was there left to be afraid of?