Hiro approached the edge of the bridge. It was easily a hundred feet to the otherside, and while there was a chance he could climb to the top of the metal structure and make it across with a running leap, he knew his horizontal jump wasn’t the same as his vertical.
“You really think this will work?” Bianca asked as she shifted a bit over his shoulder, as if she were gauging the leap.
“I do, and it will allow us to surprise attack the—” Hiro never finished his sentence as he saw a great force appear on the other side of the bridge. Clad in armor accented with gold filigree and a tiger mask covering the lower half of his face, the Revenant sat astride a massive warhorse. His helmet, crowned with enormous, curved horns that jutted outward like branches of a demonic tree, intensified his silhouette. His warhorse was equally menacing, its face obscured by a matching gilded tiger mask that traced the contours of its snout with eerie precision.
Description: The employees of a plastic factory in eastern Tennessee by way of Japan never knew what hit them. The hurricane didn’t come suddenly—warnings had been plentiful, and they even asked their employer if they could leave. But the boss said no, insisting productivity could outpace even nature’s wrath.
Braving the storm to continue producing plastic objects, the workers stayed until the hurricane swallowed the factory whole, drowning most of the staff in knee-deep water laced with microplastics.
An internal company document later revealed that leave denial had come from Chief Execution Officer Takeda Shingen, a ruthless 16th-century daimyo infamous for mass executions, sieges, and his destructive love of plastic, who had recently hired during a restructuring.
The memo detailed Takeda’s plan to distribute McDonald’s gift cards—valid only for a six-piece nugget or small fries—to the workers’ families, confident this would repair his image. Like all egomaniacs, CEO Takeda craved acceptance, not just from his legions of online followers but from the masses he openly despised.
“Let them eat burgers!” he declared in a garish meme posted to his social media page featuring a Disneyfied Marie Antoinette giggling over golden patties. When that flopped, he tried the Oprah meme—‘You get a burger! You get a burger!’—only to be greeted with even darker disdain.
The more Takeda tried, the more he realized he would never successfully slip into the DMs of his favorite OnlyFans models. It didn’t matter how rich or clever he was, or his global renown for brutality, cost cutting measures, and military genius.
All he wanted was acceptance.
Why don’t they like me? he wondered as he marched around his room trying out Roman Salutes. Should I change my profile picture? Round them all up? Start a podcast? Force them to follow me? Another meme, perhaps?
Then, the darker thoughts came:
If they don’t like me, I will destroy them all. The plastic factories of Tennessee are fertile fields of despair, their souls ripe for harvest on my path to domination. Let them eat burgers!
Hiro scanned the Doom System’s bloated description and any hints it may hold.
Takeda is vain, he thought as he watch the daimyo curse him from the other side of the bridge. He clearly has power. He is, at least in the Doom System’s jilted historically inaccurate mind, a heartless capitalist. All I can point to is his narcissistic vanity. Appealing to that in some way, his ego. But how? Aside from offering him my followers, or acknowledging his power, which could cause problems, there’s not much I will be able to do…
“Why are you holding Mishka?” Bianca asked, interrupting his train of thought. “Wait, that’s what you want to do?”
“It’s exactly what I want to do. It’s not like using {Kiss or Slap} on the Pilgrim in Central Park.”
“Do what?”
“I mean some way to deal with Takeda using strategy, something against his narcissism. I don’t see in my current list of skills something that would help.That was right before I met you. It was a strategy that I picked up on using the description.” Hiro shook his head. “But I’m not seeing something like that here. I am seeing the potential for an ambush, however.”
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“How? Your new skill?”
“I don’t want to waste A La Mode if I don’t have to.”
“Are you hoarding skills, bro?”
Hiro thought about the One Hit Wonders he currently possessed, including {GoFundMerc}, {Scania the Piss Disc Mimic},{North Korean Fece Balloons}, and {A La Mode}, his newest.
While Incognito Mode would allow him to get a sneak attack in, and he’d be able to protect himself with Safe Mode, he had a feeling using Chronokuma would cover at least one of those bases.
“I wouldn’t say I am hoarding them, I’m just trying to use them smartly. Although, the North {Korean Fece Balloons} might be helpful.” He recalled their explanation, which came to him so quickly that it surprised him: Call upon the troubled past and likely troubled future of North Korea by summoning red balloons filled with toxic feces to destroy your opponents. But be warned. You are not immune from their effects…
“You sure?” Bianca asked after he quieted for a moment.
Hiro looked to the other side of the bridge, where Takeda had drawn his sword, the blade glinting like liquid fire in the dim light. The mounted daimyo shouted in archaic Japanese, his voice echoing over the collapsed bridge like a warlord’s battle cry. His horse reared onto its hind legs, hooves pawing at the air in a menacing display of power and defiance.
“You speak Japanese, right?” Bianca asked. “What’s he saying?”
“He’s just threatening us.”
“Clearly, but what is he actually saying?”
Hiro tuned back into the daimyo’s cries of anger:
“Face me, coward!” Takeda bellowed. “Meet the judgment of the Tiger of Kai! I shall carve my name upon thy broken flesh! The water below shall cradle thy corpse as the fish feast upon their wretched remains. Even they will spit thee out in disgust, you cur!”
“Well?” Bianca asked as Hachi anxiously moved along the edge of the bridge, the dog clearly ready to engage.
“He’s basically saying that he wants me to face him,” Hiro translated, “and that he’s going to carve his name into my skin. After he kills me, the fish below will eat my remains, but they will spit me out in disgust.”
Bianca roared with laughter. “Dang, he straight up roasted you.”
“I would say something about sticks and stones, but we are far beyond that point. Let’s get this over with. And once we are back in the past, you are in charge of Hachi.”
“Okay,” Bianca said, yet again displaying her usual confidence.
Hiro squeezed the teddy bear to his chest and flashed away. The gloom dissolved, replaced by the sharp brightness of a sunny winter day. There were bicyclists on the bridge now, some delivery drivers, others joy riders. A couple walked in front of them holding hands, swinging their arms, and a woman jogged past in tight exercise clothing. The sudden chill in the air bit at his skin as he focused on the timer again:
01:30
01:29
01:28
Hiro exhaled quickly, his breath puffing in the cold.
“To the other side,” Hiro told Bianca, who was already looking down at her hands, mesmerized by her own being. “We have to hurry!” He took off, still with Mishka clutched to his chest.
Bianca quickly caught up with him, Hachi following behind. “How far do we have to go?” she asked as she passed him quickly. “Hey, I’m faster than you! Ha!”
“Focus,” he called after her, but by this point Bianca had surged off, the teenager easily able to catch up with the woman who was jogging.
“Don’t go too far—!” Hiro started to say as Hachi happily chased after Bianca, her laughter echoing in the crisp air. It was still hard to wrap his head around the sensation, the rare, fleeting miracle of being in a time and place that felt safe. There was no sense of being hunted here, no unfiltered carnage spawned by a force he could hardly understand. She turned back to him, grinned, her joy infectious.
The lightness, the freedom, letting the tension in his chest loosen almost caused him to slow, yet Hiro knew the stakes, he knew where he needed to go.
I need to keep going, he thought as he passed a guy talking louding on his earbuds in a different language, Spanish or maybe Portuguese. It was also so New York for no one to really question what Hiro wore or what he was doing, which included duct taped forearms as he clutched a teddy bear to his chest. No one seemed to pay any attention to Bianca either, who was in a fuzzy pink suit as she had been the last time they came to the past. It was all so normal, pedestrian even.
And then, it wasn’t.
Then, Hiro slowed his jog, got into position, and motioned for Bianca to join him.
00:15
00:14
00:13
“Are we ready to do this?”
“I think,” she said, slightly out of breath. “That was fun. We have to come back to the past.”
Hiro released his hold on the teddy bear. He stood behind Takeda, who continued to scan the other side of the bridge, prepared to lodge an attack.
Without a word, and with a casual nod to Hachi to let the dog know what was about to happen, Hiro drew his enormous odachi from thin air and prepared to attack.