I ran, jogged, and walked on the side of the highway from the very beginning of the evening, when the sun turns orange and its color leaks into the rest of the sky as it dips into the horizon, all the way till the sun came climbing back up over the horizon. Just as the red morning sun began to come up, clouds were obscuring some of its shine. As for me on the ground, I had finally come across the first building I’d seen since I left Kenken-Ken. It was a gas station convenience store.
I’m not gonna lie; I was dog tired by the time I got there. I was hobbling forward with slumped-over shoulders, heaving in breath after parched, bone-dry breath. I’d given up on trying to keep my eyelids from drooping, or my tongue from hanging out of my mouth.
I accidentally broke the glass door by pushing it open instead of pulling it. At hearing the sound of the door shattering, a stern voice hollered something in a language I didn’t understand from the back of the store.
“WHAT DA FUCK?!” The owner of the voice, a brown-skinned, balding Midenite man finally said something I could understand. He was speaking Librish, but based on his accent, I figured maybe he wasn’t very fluent. That meant him and I were in the same boat.
“I’m very sorry, sir!” I said in Librish. I could only explain myself in Higanese. “I wasn’t looking carefully ‘cuz I’m really fucking tired–”
“WHY??? WHY YOU DO THIS???” He demanded in Librish, cutting off my chance to explain myself. Did he not speak Higanese at all?
“Uhhhh…” I couldn’t think of any Librish words to describe what happened. I never learned to really speak it beyond a few basic phrases and song lyrics. That's how most people in Kenken-Ken were. Sakejima is probably the closest to being bilingual. He sometimes gets so drunk that he forgets which language he’s speaking, mixing his words up so bad that it can take a while to decipher him.
Anyway, I couldn’t remember the Librish word for “Accident”, or any word close to it, but I did know a gesture that’d probably do a decent job at illustrating that I didn’t mean to do hundreds of thousands of maru worth of property damage.
I knocked on my forehead with a fist and shrugged. “Oopsie~!” I said with a forced giggle. I stuck out my tongue, too, which felt like maybe I was overdoing it.
The Midenite man froze, as if he noticed something really weird about me, then screamed and ran to the back of the store.
I looked at myself. Sure, I was dirty, and I probably didn’t smell so good either, I couldn’t really tell. Oh, maybe it was the huge fucking sword I had strapped to my back. I realized that I probably looked like I was about to rob the place.
I went over to the counter, hopped over it, and opened the door to the back. The door led to a little hallway, with a bathroom on the left, a little office on the right, and an outdoor exit directly across from the entrance. I opened the door to the office to see the man sitting at his desk, tapping something on his phone. When he looked up and saw me, he screamed, dropped his phone to the floor, got up from his chair and scrambled to the farthest side of the room.
“Hey, bro!” I said in Librish.
“PLEASE!! SPARE ME!! TAKE EVERYTHING!!”
“But…” I bit my lip and tried to think of what to say. “I’m not…I’m not…”
“PLEASE GO!! TAKE EVERYTHING YOU WANT!!” He begged.
“C’MON, MAN! CAN’T YOU JUST TELL I’M NOT DANGEROUS?!” I yelled at him in Higanese. All that did was make him curl up into a ball in the corner of the room. I just couldn’t figure out a way to communicate with him effectively. I sighed in frustration and sat in the office chair. Then I came up with an idea.
I sprung up from the chair and marched into the storefront. Then I grabbed as many honey buns, beef jerky thingies, and chips as I could fit in my arms and went back to the office.
When I got there, the Midenite man was staring at me incredulously. I plopped everything onto the table, sat down, opened up a bag of chips, and started eating.
“You say, ‘take everything I want’? Okay,” I told him, unable to hide my horrendous accent.
The man nervously approached me and took out his cell phone. I took a handful of chips and shoveled them into my mouth. He started tapping at something on his phone, then apprehensively handed it to me.
On the screen were mainly two boxes. One had a line of text in Middish, while the other had some text in Higanese, which said, “you're not here to hurt me?” This must've been a translator app.
“Iya, iya!” I laughed and shook my head, making a slashing gesture with my hand next to my neck. A look of horror returned to his face and he started to back away. I realized that I probably looked like I just confirmed what he was afraid of.
I stuck my hand out, trying to get him to hand me the phone so maybe I could type something. He actually understood. He tapped something on it before giving it to me.
The little keyboard had only Librish letters on it. I stared at the phone for a second, confused on how the hell was I supposed to type in Higanese with this. Then I sighed in relief when I saw the microphone. I tapped on it, smirking and thinking it was so cool to do something I'd only ever seen on phone commercials.
“I didn't mean to scare you,” I said to the phone. “Sumimasen. (I'm sorry.)”
I faced the phone's screen toward the man and bowed. He slowly nodded as he deciphered the pretty curlicues of Middish text in his head. He gingerly took the phone back from me and began tapping up his next message:
“What do you want from me?”
I took the phone back. “I'm just a hungry traveler,” I said to it, quoting Asa Astra in Rugged Fist Prefecture Story, during that scene where he first meets Tsuki. While he typed up his next response, I poured the rest of the bag of chips into my mouth.
“You're not with the DOOMLAYERZ?”
“Eh? No. I'm a Metafighter from Kenken-Ken.”
The man handed the phone back to me with just three characters in the Higanese translation box: “本当に?” (Really?) I nodded. He took the phone back from me and started tapping at it again.
“I haven't heard of a Metafighter from Kenken-Ken in a very long time.”
“Well,” I said into the mic with a sly grin. “I'm the only one I know.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Meshi dake da,” I said as the man held the phone while I opened up a honey bun and took a huge bite. “Den I godda fin’ Shoshinshu Daiga,” I finished with my mouth full.
The man looked at the screen, made a confused face, then passed it back to me. “Don't talk with your mouth full,” he said to me in Librish, shaking his head and miming the way I’d just stuffed my face and swallowed the honey bun in two bites.
“I'm looking for Soshintsu Taiga,” I told the phone again.
The man widened his eyes and laughed. He said something in Middish to the phone.
“Then you're going the wrong way, friend,” said the phone in Higanese. The Midenite man then said some other stuff, which the phone promptly translated: “The way you came from will take you to a Midenite reserve, and then into Liberty Moon. Taiga lives in Toramori.”
“How do I get to Toramori?”
For a split second, the Midenite shot me an incredulous glance, but then when I looked him in the eyes, he looked down and started walking out of the room. Then he popped his head back into the office and beckoned me to come with him.
We went back into the storefront and he grabbed a little folded-up piece of paper that was kept in a clear plastic case thingy by the door. On the front of the paper was a picture of a hexagon with a curved line near the middle, representing Higashima and Liberty Moon. Below it were two lines of text: The first being “Welcome to Liberty Moon!!” and below it: “日ヶ島へようこそ !!”
He walked me to the counter, went around to the cashier's side, and unfolded the paper to reveal a map of the two countries. He pointed at a tiny area just over the Liberty Moon border. He spoke some more Middish into the phone for it to translate.
“This is where we are. The Kansach’tii Midenite Reservation.”
He drew a line with his finger up to an area on the upper right, which was dotted with tiny green triangles on top of skinny dark brown lines, and tapped on the text labelling the area: “虎森 (Toramori)”
“But how do I get there?” I asked.
The man gave a long-ass speech to the phone. It took a while for the translation to load.
“Go back in the other direction you came from. Then go on Highway 56 North for a lot of miles. Eventually, you should see an exit to Highway 42 East. You’ll have to ask others along the way for more specific help.”
The man, whose name was Klekih, gave me a huge backpack full of food and water and a bike. I’d never ridden one before, so he had to show me a few of the basics before sending me off. As I left, the sky was clear and blue, and the sun was leisurely making its way up to its place in the noontime sky. I thanked him for everything and he told me to watch out for the DOOMLAYERZ. Apparently, they were coming to places like Midenite reserves and raiding them, claiming them as their “territories”. While he described it all with a look of concern and fear in his voice, I couldn’t help but feel a spark of excitement at hearing it. The DOOMLAYERZ sounded exactly like the sorta people that Asa Astra would’ve fought against!
“Need me to fight ‘em off?” I’d asked him, punching my palm and cracking my knuckles.
“Well, they’re not here in Kansach’tii yet,” the phone said that Klekih said. “But the news keeps warning us that they could be here someday soon.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I wanted to help them out, but I also had somewhere to be. They weren’t in immediate danger, but they weren’t safe either. I rode off into the cloudless blue horizon with a twinge of guilt in my stomach. I told him that I’d be back the moment I heard that the DOOMLAYERZ were on their reservation, but that didn’t feel like enough.
It took me five whole days’ worth of riding to get to Toramori. It probably would’ve taken less time, but reading a map is a lot trickier than it seems. On top of that, at every place I stopped at–mostly gas stations and general stores–no one had any really specific instructions about how to get where I was going. On the last stop before I finally got there, the person printed out instructions for me to follow, but even those weren’t all that helpful, because they kept telling me to make turns and stuff after a certain number of kilometers, and I have no fucking clue how to tell how far a kilometer is from just looking at the road and riding the bike.
Once I finally got to the forest, a whole nother challenge awaited me. No one bothered to tell me that Toramori is a giant fucking hill. Nor did anyone mention that it’s fucking cold there. It slipped everyone’s mind to talk about the ginormous, moose-sized forest tigers, or their profound distaste for humans traversing up the spiraling road that takes them to the metamartial arts legend at the top.
So after 5 days on the road, turning my legs into flaming pillars of pain from pumping the pedals, I spent the entire sixth day fighting off and fleeing from tigers who stood higher than me on all fours. I didn’t wanna use my sword to kill them, so I shot Metaki blasts at them, trying to make sure they were weak enough not to seriously hurt the animals. But everytime I blasted one, I had to take my hand off the handlebars, making it hard to control my direction. Combined with the fact that I had to take my eyes off the road to defend myself, as well as the fact that parts of the road were slick with ice and slush, I found myself crashing–a lot. I collided with trees, slid off the road, and fell face-first into many bushes, pits of dirt, and piles of snow.
Night had fallen by the time I got near the top. I could tell I was getting close because I started to feel someone’s Metaki up ahead. That had to be Taiga. His energy was way more potent than the energy of the sword. The closer I got, the more I could feel his aura tensing up and sharpening. I wasn’t doing anything to hide my own Metaki, which I’d been shooting globs of all over the place the entire way. That meant he was feeling me. He had to be.
A forest tiger, taking shelter under a shadowy gathering of trees, spotted me speeding past her on my bike. Her instincts instantly overcame her, her curiosity widening her pupils and her hunger shooting a paw out at me. When she missed, she pounced out of her hiding place at me, and before she landed, I whipped my head and right hand around to her and shot some Metaki at her face, which should’ve punched and temporarily blinded her. As she collapsed to the ground, my bike swerved right and started to topple. I jumped off before it could fall, and at the same time, the tiger pounced snout-first onto my bike, sinking her teeth into its thin metal framework. Still half-blind, she tore at my ride for a few more seconds while I sprinted uphill toward the clearing up ahead, which framed Soshintsu Taiga’s mansion elegantly.
The moment I heard growling behind me, I turned around again, doing these awkward backwards hops away from the animal, because I saw something in a book or a movie that said that turning your back on a big cat will make them activate their predator instincts or something.
She started to approach me, but as soon as she got to the clearing, she stopped. She refused to step into the open, and I instantly knew why. As soon as I stepped into the clearing, Taiga’s energy bolstered. No tigers dared to step out here because this was his territory, his domain. When I turned around, I saw that some of Taiga’s aura was coming off the mansion itself.
I took a deep breath and charged my Metaki, sparking it as brightly and loudly as I could, screaming at the top of my lungs all the while.
“SOSHINTSU TAIGA!!!!” I called, cracking my voice a little. “GET YOUR ASS OUT HERE!!!! I CHALLENGE YOU!!!!”
The door of the mansion, which stood at the top of a flight of a hundred or so stairs, cracked open slowly. Then it quickly shut for a second before flying open again. Spikes of indigo-colored Metaki wafted off of him and his green silk pajamas. In his left hand was his infamous 2-meter ōdachi–the huge curved blade that had killed every Metafighter stupid enough to sign a Deathmatch Consent Form with him.
“Who the hell are you?” Demanded the Metafighting legend, Soshintsu Taiga. “And what’s the name of your blade?”
I grabbed the hilt of my sword from above my right shoulder, yanked it out of the sheath, and pointed it to the sky.
“MY NAME IS KEN!!!!!” I declared. “I HAIL FROM KENKEN-KEN!!!” I gripped my blade with both hands and sent a fuckton of Metaki into it, making my sword light up with a hostile blink. “AND THIS IS THE KENKEN-KEN KEN!!!” I couldn’t help but laugh as I saw Taiga’s dark, silently aggressive Look melt from his face in disbelief. The grass around me swayed away.
“No fucking way.” Taiga said as he ripped the scabbard off his sword and sent a massive horizontal wave of pale blue Metaki my way.
I was ready for it, though. I twisted the sword so that the sharp edge faced my opponent, then brought it down with everything in my body, sending out a vertical wave of night-illuminating yellow Metaki his way.
When the two waves clashed, mine sliced right through Taiga’s, disintegrating it. Simultaneously, Taiga let out a rather unmanly yelp and I shouted in surprise and joy as my attack jetted to my target.
“‘Sha!!!”
Taiga sliced the Metaki wave with his sword, disintegrating it without much trouble. Both of us sighed a little at the same time. Taiga’s sigh was in relief, while mine was in disappointment.
I started charging up the stairs, hopping up five at a time and swinging my sword every time I landed, sending Taiga a barrage of Metaki slashes. Then, when I got to the top step, I jumped way above his head and spun around, pouring Metaki through my sword, sending a huge whorl of energy in every direction. I had to wonder whether Taiga was shitting his pants at that moment. After all, I had just copied one of his attacks: the Spiral Slash.
When I stopped spinning and started to land, I looked down, tried to ignore my dizziness, and focused on Taiga, who had managed to parry all the attacks I'd flung at him on the way up. He gritted his teeth and braced himself, holding his sword up, ready to block my stolen super move.
He was only able to protect himself from my Spiral Slash. His house behind him took the brunt of the attack, which left a huge gash jutting diagonally from just below one of the windows beside the door to a part of the roof toward the back. The door itself, along with Soshintsu in front of it, was unscathed.
“You've got some nerve, boy,” he said with a ferocious grin.
I charged at him, wrapping my sword in the flames of my Metaki, hoping that he couldn't tell I was close to running out. I didn't have enough to be using projectile blasts anymore.
I struck, but Taiga blocked with relative ease, coating his blade with so much Metaki that mine couldn't even touch his.
“You come to my house,–” He began with a grimace.
The Metaki on the master's ōdachi violently sparked in a controlled explosion, sending me stumbling back. I barely dodged the vertical wave of Metaki that hotly blew through the space I’d just sidestepped from.
“–steal my move–” Taiga continued as he violently started swinging his own barrage of slashes at me. I took a deep breath and tried to harden my sword with that last bunch of Metaki I still had, and before I could fully brace myself, the first wave crashed fiercely against my blade. I pushed at it desperately to deflect the move, redirecting the curved projectile of light into a group of trees far off on my right, all of which fell as the attack passed through them.
Immediately after, the second wave came right for my stomach. In the tiniest piece of a second I saved myself from getting sliced in half like those trees. Without even enough time to swing my sword and redirect the attack, a third Metaki slash hurtled for my eyes, turning my vision all white and knocking me off my feet. Then, a searing strip of agonizing energy erupted across my chest. Then I felt another across both my legs. The pain practically blocked out all my other senses. Suddenly, wedges of concrete slammed themselves into my back, then slid up and around to abuse my face. I let go of my sword and started thrashing around, forgetting how to think about what the fuck I was doing as I fell down the stairs.
“–WITH THAT SWORD?!?!?! THAT SWORD SHOULD BE MINE!!!!!!!!” Soshintsu screamed at the top of his lungs from the top of the stairs.
Hearing that made me stop myself mid-fall. “FUCK! THAT!” I hollered and struggled to stand.
My vision was slowly returning. My jacket and shirt were ripped across the chest where I caught Taiga’s attack. My pants had also turned to shorts because of the attack to my legs. He must’ve been going easy on me, because I was in a lot of pain, but there wasn’t any blood. I looked around for my sword and saw it flying over to me, gracefully slowing to a hover over my hand. As soon as I grabbed it, I became ensurged with new energy. The Kenken-Ken Ken seems to have a reserve of its own energy, which I assume came from all the Metafighters in the past who wanted the sword for themselves.
“THIS SWORD IS MINE, OLD MAN! I TOOK IT OUT FROM THE CRATER OF THE BABEL BLAST! IF IT SHOULD BE YOURS, MAKE IT FLOAT TO YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!!!”
The glow of Taiga’s ōdachi immediately turned off as he stopped his next attack mid-swing. He sheathed his blade, which made me raise an eyebrow. Then he threw his hand out in front of him and gritted his teeth. I stared at him incredulously for a good few seconds before realizing he was actually trying to levitate the sword to him.
I then took a deep breath, exhaling the air with a fierce roar. I channeled all the energy my sword had just given me back into it and swung. The swing started at my feet as I took my left foot and planted it two steps above my right. The momentum traveled up my leg, across my torso and into my arms. Taking advantage of the split second Taiga spent wide open, I sent a massive horizontal slash of Metaki at my opponent.
As I watched the S-tier Metafighter get knocked back into his house, I smiled and clenched a fist. That was the first attack I ever landed on an S-tier Metafighter! I thought to myself. It will not be the last.
With a bit of childlike joy, I hopped up the stairs, thinking maybe I could actually kick this guy’s ass. As soon as I got to the top, Soshintsu Taiga brought me back to reality by flying past me in a blur. I was gonna turn around to see what the fuck that huge bluish-purple bolt of light that just blew past me was, but before I could even make much effort in doing so, blood spurted out from below my left rib. I felt my aura fluttering in the aftershock of the attack like a candle’s flame that won’t go out the first time you blow on it. The pain from this wound made all the pain in my body that I’d been accumulating over these last several days impossible to ignore. Once again, rational thought left my mind, unable to make room for itself amongst the chorus of “AAAAAAUUUUUGGHGGHHHH HOLY FUUUUUUUCCCCCK” going on in my brain. I dropped my sword, clutched my wound with both hands, and crumpled to the ground.
Soshintsu Taiga appeared above me, poking the end of his sword a centimeter from my face. Metaki steadily rose off the blade, glowing dully.
“Who taught you the Spiral Slash?” He asked me. Was he thinking of killing me if he didn’t approve of my master or something? The idea made me chuckle a bit.
I told him the truth: “I taught myself.”
“Yeah, that explains a lot. Your technique is shit. The Spiral Slash is supposed to go straight, not fucking diagonally.”
“I am not taking advice from a guy who left himself wide open.”
“I was just trying to take your sword, which, by the way…” Taiga dropped his scabbard and reached down for the Kenken-Ken Ken, still pointing his own sword at me. “I thank you very much for bringing to me.” He raised it into the air, admiring its glint in the moonlight. “I’ve been trying to prove myself worthy of the Kenken-Ken Ken my whole life. You know how pissed I was when Asa Astra got it? I was just entering middle school when it happened. While that guy was making Metafighter history, I was stuck in fuckin’ math class, sensing his energy the whole time!”
Taiga then looked side-eyed, down at me. “Alright, lemme not bore you with old man stories.” He stuck my sword into the ground, picked up his scabbard and sheathed his ōdachi. Then he knelt down to undo the buckle of my sword’s strap. “You did alright, kid,” he said, almost sounding genuine. “The powerscalers’ll probably have you at B-tier. That’s a good start for a rookie.” He took the Kenken-Ken Ken out of the ground and sheathed it. “Now hurry on down the mountain. You don’t wanna bleed out before you get to the nearest hospital.” My vision started to blur more and more as he walked back into his house with a sword in each hand.