My life changed forever when I met Rei again during a midnight snack run. I thought it would go the same as any other. I’d vibe to some music during the quaint little walk over to Sakamoto’s on Tori street, grab a pineapple-flavored Moon Juice and a hot dog, pay for my stuff, try to make some small talk if that one cute girl is there, then vibe to some music on the way back home, then get back to arguing about powerscaling on whichever parasocial online hangout spot is most active this time of night.
The walk went like any other, with me playing the same music I’ve been listening to since middle school, trying not to think about how Eighth Grade was 7 years ago, or how the album I was listening to was brand new back then, and trying especially hard not to remember the crazy lies my friend Rei and I would tell ourselves and the world about what we were “destined” to become someday.
Without warning, Destructive Wave by Special Beam Cannon started to play, leaving me no choice but to remember what I told Rei the first time we heard this song. We were playing that year’s new GML All-Stars game, ignoring how creatively bankrupt the series has(had?) become since its tenth installment in favor of enjoying the sugary drinks, showing each other memes during the loading screens, and talking about the things 14-year-olds talk about. That goosebumpingly sick electric guitar riff yanks me away from the entrance to the Sakamoto’s on Tori street and shoves me into my room, seven years ago.
“This song is definitely gonna be my channel intro!” I tell Rei as I complete my team consisting of Star 17, The Rumbler, and Amon-Ra.
“This would totally work as an intro!” Rei agrees as he picks Soshintsu Taiga, Freddy Fenghuang (2nd Form), and his custom character, Ichi Nakano.
“Just wait, man. Gimme just a few years and I’m gonna be the biggest powerscaling streamer out there!” The words, “READY TO FIGHT?!” pop up on screen in the space between our six combatants.
“Hell yeah,” says Rei, as the game prompts him to select the stage. He picks “Random”, and the game decides this match is going to be in the Rocky Field. The loading screen comes on, showing cool art of each of our fighters looking fiercely at the player and striking a fearsome pose. Rei’s smile fades a little as he gazes at them. His eyes darken some, and his eyebrows drop and draw each other close.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized that was The Look. All the best Metafighters have it. That special glistening in the eyes of a passionate metamartial artist is unmistakable, once you’ve seen it in press conference footage, or on the front of a Metafighting mag, or on a meme, or– best of all– live in the ring. I always look back at this day in disbelief at myself for not realizing that I got to see The Look up close that day.
“I wanna be like them,” Rei dramatically declares in a hushed voice. His eyes stayed trained on the metamartial arts legends on screen.
“Well keep dreaming, dumbass!” I say with a chuckle. I want to smack my past self in the face for that. “There’s no way you’re getting anywhere near that.”
“You don’t know that!” Rei protests. “I’ve been training, and my grandpa says I could go pro if I keep it up for a year!”
“Man, you set your goals too high.”
The game finishes loading, taking us to the Rocky Field, where red spires of stone clawed at the sweltering air and powdery dirt around them. Taiga urges Star 17 to give up, as he has no chance against his blade. Star 17, in classic fashion, says nothing to this and just assumes his fighter’s stance and narrows his eyes, which are nearly illegible due to his mask.
“The graphics this year are pretty good,” I mused. “You can really see The Look on Star 17.”
I yanked my headphones out of my ears and scrambled to get them back on the charger and into my pocket. Getting cringy memories of high school was definitely not part of the plan. I shook my head and opened the door, rerouting my steps back to the planned course.
The next detour came in the form of a cheerful “Hello!” from the worker at the counter. At first, I didn’t look, since the voice didn’t belong to the cute girl. But there was something familiar in this voice. Something distinctly…lame. Oh, no. I did know that voice. With a twinge of a certain type of dread, I looked up to the right at the register and holy shit, there he was. The long, messy dark blue hair was a little bit longer and messier than before, the corny smile had a hint of weariness that wasn’t there before, but it was definitely him. Looking really out of place in the Sakamoto’s employee uniform–a green apron and yellow collared shirt–there he stood at the register: Rei Nakano, my best friend from middle school.
“TARO?!” Rei’s tired smile flushes away at the sight of my face, with a look of shock and astonishment taking its place.
“H-hey, Rei,” I say with a little more shyness in my voice than I would’ve expected. “Been a while, huh?”
“Yeah! It’s been- what?” He looked up for a second, scrunching his face and counting the years on his hand. His eyes widened back at me when he realized how long it had been.
“Seven years?!?!” He then quickly fixed his composure and shifted back into that sapped half-smile.
“Then again, so much has happened since then, too.” He looked off and tightened his lips when he said that, then sighed like life was a night shift at a minimum wage job.
It made me think about my own job at Gokurakuyaki. Every day for the last three years, I’d had to wake up early, even though work wasn’t till 4 PM. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to get anything done. Problem was, I hardly ever got up early, ‘cuz I’d always have to work till 12 AM. And when I got home, all I’d wanna do is argue about Powerscaling or play video games to relax and let off some steam. And before I did any of that, I’d need my snack and drink from Sakamoto’s on Tori street.
I walked over to the wall of glass doors with all the drinks, scanning each one for the pineapple Moon Juice. “Yeah…a lot has happened. I guess,” I agree with a shrug.
“So…how’s your…progress?”
“Uhh…” There it was–the plastic bottle containing that familiar yellow liquid that practically glows in the light of the LED strips on the inside of the fridge. Goes perfect with a hot dog and/or a good powerscaling debate on voice chat. I grabbed the Moon Juice, but then spun around to face Rei, just now realizing how little sense his question made. “...Progress..?”
“Yeah. Like…” I walked over to the grills, upon which lay the glistening, delicious hot dogs, invitingly rolling in place on rotating heated metal rods. “...How many subscribers do you have now?”
“Well…” I put the Moon Juice down for a second to get a hot dog. “None, I guess. I never actually started streaming.”
“What?! Why?!”
Rei’s surprise surprised me. “I mean…It was kind of a dumb dream to begin with. Becoming a big streamer is hard. It’s pretty much impossible nowadays to get big. Even back then, it was tough as hell.”
Rei slammed his hands on his counter. “But that’s what made it so cool!” His sudden yell made me whip back around, tongs in hand, dog in tongs, to face him.
“Yeah, but it was childish.” I drop the hot dog into the bun, pressing it into the fold of bread so that it stays there, nice and snug. “I had to get a real job, and so, like…I guess I just kinda put all my childish dreams away.”
Rei looked down at his apron, apparently brushing a speck of dust or something I couldn’t see from halfway across the store. “...Ah. I see.” He looked strangely disappointed.
Next to the grill, there was a little island with condiments, a microwave, and some napkins. I grabbed a bottle of sweet relish and squirted a healthy mess of it onto my dog. The only sound in the little store was of my sweet pickle goo queefing onto the sausage. My lips wrestled with each other for a second, itching to say something to break this awkward silence.
“So…How are you doing?” I asked as I walked back over to the register.
Rei scanned my Moon Juice, then started tapping away at something on a little computer screen. There was something missing in his eyes. Something he used to have. He looked at me with a smile that looked like it was struggling to stay there. “I’m doing pretty good. I guess.” He paused and looked back at the little computer screen. “It’ll be 426 maru, by the way.”
“Heh. If only it was 6 maru cheaper.” Rei didn't laugh at that. I guess he doesn't find weed jokes funny anymore.
I got out my card and jammed it into the chip reader. “So…How’s your progress?” I ask as the little PIN pad beeped.
Rei’s smile melted away and his eyes darkened. His hands tried to grip the smoothness of the counter’s surface. He lowered his head in shame. “I haven’t made any.”
“What?! Why?!”
Rei raised his head slightly to look me back in the eye. The smile coagulated a little and we shared a small chuckle over how I just reacted to him the same way he’d reacted to me. But then he went back to staring at the little black blocks and dots on the nisemono granite countertop.
“You always seemed so determined to become a pro.” What happened? I almost asked that, but I was thankfully not stupid enough to.
“Yeah. I even trained for a while with my grandpa, too.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“And then…”
“...And then he died.” His shoulders sorrowfully float up, then drop down as his gaze fixes itself back onto the counter.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Do you need a bag or a receipt?”
“I’ll just take a bag, thanks.”
Rei reaches down to grab something from behind the counter. It rustles and crinkles and when he brings it up onto the fake granite surface, it’s a plastic bag. He gingerly places my two items into it and hands it to me. “There you go, sir,” he says, as if from muscle memory.
“So what do you do now?”
Rei spreads his arms out from his sides and raises them slightly to gesture at the store around us. “I do this now. I guess.” He purses his lips and peers at me, looking drained of emotion. “This is my fifth day.”
“Is this what you wanna do?”
“I mean…” He shrugs and looks at the counter again, twirling his finger around in his ponytail. “...No, but…I don’t really wanna do anything.” His face seemed to become transfixed by that fact, as though he just realized it himself.
That made me freeze. Suddenly, I was no longer looking at my best friend. Over these seven years, the kid I knew as Rei Nakano had grown up into a stranger.
“IS THAT A REAL KATANA?!?!” Our kindergarten teacher asked the Rei I always knew.
“S-s-sure is!” The old Rei proudly shouted up at our teacher. His big, innocent grin struggled to push his furrowed eyebrows, squinted eyes, and bullets of sweat off his face.
“That’s what you’re bringing for show-and-tell?!” The thing was strapped to his backpack, and was almost as tall as him. He stood–if you can call it that–doubled over from the weight of the sword, but also so that the end of the scabbard didn’t scrape against the ground.
“Y-y-yep!” Despite the clear strain seen on his body and heard in the shakiness of his voice, he didn’t seem tired at all.
“That’s too dangerous!! I am calling your parents, and they are going to come here and take that thing away!”
“Nah, it’s all good,” was what Rei later told me his grandpa told our teacher over the phone. The way Rei drooped his eyes and stuck his jaw out when he told the story made him look exactly like the old dude, too. It had me cracking up. I remember choking on my pineapple Moon Juice and thinking that I was gonna freaking die for half a second.
“Oh, so it’s not a real katana after all?” Mrs. Jackson patted her chest and puffed a huge sigh.
“It is a real katana,” Rei said his grandpa said. The way this kid, whose balls hadn’t dropped yet, was trying to sound like this old fart whose balls were probably more like used plastic bags sent me directly from a coughing fit into another laughing fit.
“WHAT?!” All of us kindergarteners heard Mrs. Jackson shout from her little corner of the room where her desk and phone sat.
“My boy knows what he’s doing. Just make sure he keeps all the other kids’ hands off it, got it?” When Rei said those last two words, he tried to imitate this sleazy kind of scowl his grandpa had on the poster promoting his first metamartial arts match.
All the other kids’ eyes turned back away from Mrs. Jackson, fixing themselves right back onto the ground, upon which lay the katana, fully unsheathed. Rei was also on the floor, sitting on his knees and carefully stroking the length of the old, yet pristine blade with his finger. His face seemed so entranced by the thing. He must've been seeing something we weren’t.
“See, guys?!” Rei looked up at us, apparently expecting us to be as mesmerized as he was. “There’s still some of his Metaki coming off the blade! That’s ‘cuz he trained with it so much.”
We all tilted our heads in confusion.
“I don’t see anything,” I said, bending down to feel the blade with my finger too.
Rei just smugly giggled at that, like he’d just heard a secret he couldn’t tell the rest of the class. That got us all a whole lot more curious about the sword than before. Eduardo knelt down to feel the blade after me. Then came Bridgette. Then DelMonte. Then Kozi. Soon the whole class of about 20 kids was taking turns rubbing our fingers against the potentially deadly weapon.
Rei shuffled over to the side of the sword with the handle. He picks it up off the ground slowly and dramatically. It required practically his whole body to hold it up even a little.
“W-when I get older…” As Rei began his speech, his voice was still shaky, but now, so were his knees.
“...My grandpa said I could use this sword to be a pro metamartial artist! Just like him!” The sword started to wobble.
“But…I’m gonna be…even better than he was! I’ll be…the best Metafighter ever!” This time, he had the sword pointing high above his head, looking like the poster of that one shitty movie about Kenken-Ken.
“PFFFFFFF!” I laughed, pointing at Rei. “You can’t even hold up the katana! No way you’ll be the best metafighter!”
The whole class started to laugh.
Mrs. Jackson, having finally finished her call with Mr. Nakano, stood up and clapped the Attention Clap. Clap, clap, cla-cla-clap! Nineteen of us clapped back. Clap, clap, cla-cla-clap!
Mrs. Jackson’s eyes popped out of her head at the sight of the six-year-old she’s responsible for holding a real katana, charged with Metaki. “REEEEIIIIII!!!!!! PUT THAT THING DOWN NOW!!!”
Rei started to lose his grip on the katana and it fell in the direction of Eduardo’s head.
“Don’t you still wanna be a metamartial artist?” I asked the new Rei, fifteen years later at Sakamoto’s.
“What’s the point if my whole reason for doing it is gone? What will I be doing it for?”
“Yourself!! You’re never happier than when you’re talking about metamartial arts!”
Rei side-eyed me, with a twinge of hurt in his eyes. “You always made fun of me when I talked about metamartial arts. Always told me I’d never make it. That my dreams were too big.” Tears started to well up into his eyes.
“...Damn. Did I?”
“YES!” Rei slammed his hands onto the counter. Tears started streaming from his ocean-colored eyes. “Eventually, you joked about it so much that you started to convince me.”
Guilt starts to pour into my stomach and fill my insides.
“...I’m so sorry.” That’s all I could think of saying.
“Why did you do it, though?” Rei asked weakly as he wiped his tears.
That’s a real good question. It’s not like he was the same way to me or anything. In fact, he was the one holding the camera when I posted my first video.
“I think…I’ve always been jealous. I was always a metamartial arts fan, but you were…More. It was one way you were just…Better than me.”
Rei’s eyes, still wet with tears, widened in surprise. “You were insecure???”
“Hell yes, I was insecure! I wanted to be a streamer, and talk about metamartial artists, and you wanted to be one! How the hell was I supposed to compete?!”
Rei wipes his tears, then raises his eyebrow and scratches an itch on his face. “Couldn’t you…Try metamartial arts..?”
“Well, I’ve never been able to sense Metaki before. I don’t think I’ve got it in me. Plus, I’ve seen the crazy training you have to do to become a Metafighter! I’m not doin’ all that shit!”
Rei closes his eyes and shrugs his shoulders. “Guess I’ll always be better than you, then.”
“I….S-shut up!!” For the first time ever, Rei was the one roasting me and I was the one sputtering out a whiny ass response. Wait a minute. “You’re not even doing metamartial arts anymore!! You’re just as lame as me now! HA!”
“Hell no, I’m not! I can still use Metaki!”
“Cap,” I scoffed.
“No cap!”
I crossed my arms and raised an eyebrow. “You don’t practice Metafighting anymore, but you still use Metaki?”
Rei chuckled, looked to the side, and started scratching his arm. “Well, yeah. I like to charge it and make cool aura formations in the mirror.”
I burst out laughing, accidentally queefing with my lips like the relish. Rei tried his best to switch back to that tired, soulless expression that comes required with his uniform, but before long, he was doubled over, slapping the table, and filling the air with his goofy ass guffaws. All of a sudden, we were both stupid middle schoolers again, laughing about the dumbest shit ever.
I wiped a weird bit of moisture out of my eyes, feeling my cheeks ache for a second for the first time in a third of my life. Three of the corniest words started stewing in my stomach. Before I could stop them, they came gently erupting out of my mouth.
“I needed that.”
Rei started chuckling again, covering his hands like a little kid before pointing prosecutorily at me. “You know what you need? To hurry up and make a Tweak account, and start streaming, loser!!”
“You know what?! Maybe I will, cuz then I’ll be back to being better than you since you don’t give a shit about Metafighting anymore!”
“Hey!” Rei balled his hands into fists and raised them up to his shoulders. “Who said–” He did this weird little half-sigh, half-grunt as he tightened his fists and tensed up every muscle in his arms. “...I…didn’t…RRRRRR…” Through clenched teeth, he growled, breathing heavily and laboriously. “...Give…” Now every muscle in his body was tensed up. “A….Shit…?!”
A look of horror found its way onto my face. “Are you about to fucking shit yourself?!”
“NO, DUMBASS!!!” Rei then closed his eyes, inhaled, and raised his arms, crossing them for a split second. “HAAAAAAAHH!!!!” He balled his fists back in, dropped his arms down to waist level, and let out the loudest goddamn scream this dude has ever scrum. Even if it weren’t for the burst of Metaki billowing out from him, I still would’ve been knocked on my ass just from the shock of the sudden shout.
“I LOVE METAMARTIAL ARTS!!!” Rei hollered. He took another deep breath and flared up his energy again, flexing his arms as he did so.
“BITCH!!!!!!!” His ponytail swished around passionately. He took a second to breathe again, and the ponytail dropped docile back onto the nape of his neck.
“I WILL NEVER STOP LOVING METAMARTIAL ARTS!!!!” As he shat out his real manly squeal, his ponytail helicoptered up and around before his hair tie snapped, turning his wispy waterfall of hair into a rippling dark blue flame.
”…BIIIIIIIITCH!!!!!”
Fighting against the tempest of the invisible, intangible wind Rei’s Metaki blew, I hobbled back up and trudged over to the counter. I slammed my hands onto it, partially for dramatic effect, partially to stop myself from getting blown back on my ass again. Even though I didn’t have any Metaki of my own, I took a deep breath and gathered everything I had to say what I should’ve been saying for fifteen years:
“THEN DO IT, REI!!! BECOME THE BEST METAFIGHTER EVER!!!!”