Just outside the school, stomping up the path, Tendo Akane stared with seething malice at the crowd awaiting her. “… I can’t believe this, they’re here again?”

Beside her Tendo Nabiki, her older sister, observed the gathering with lifted eyebrows. “I can almost admire that determination. There isn’t a boy at this school you’ve beaten unconscious now, and here they all are lining up to give it another go.”

Akane’s shoulders dropped as she let out a frustrated groan.

“Well, you can’t fault them for being determined.”

“Yes, I can, they’re just going to keep coming, and coming, until one of them actually beats me,” Akane shot back, not noticing the tall dark-haired girl who walked out in front of the crowd. “Not that any of them can… even holding back all it takes is a one-hitter-quitter and down they go.”

Nabiki, who totally did not resent her younger sister for turning the boys she once flirted with into short-sighted fools who won’t give her the time of day, debated that. “Hey, one could get a lucky shot in.”

Akane sniffed. “Oh yeah, and then what is he gonna do? Ask me out? The moment he does I will be thorough when I turn him into pulp!”

She groaned. “Why are they even obsessed with me? It’s not like someone’s selling pictures of me to give them something to work for.”

“Oh my, someone would have to be a stone-cold money-loving bitch with a jealous streak a mile wide to be so petty,” Nabiki replied.

She was selling pictures, but only to one guy; the rest just thought Akane was cute–in spite of everything she’d done to them.

Akane looked ahead, ready to take on the horde, and saw the situation brewing at the school’s gate. “Huh, who’s that?”

Up ahead, Katie was in the process of making her polite appeal to the futility of the boys’ situation. “It’s been three days of this and it’s pretty obvious you’re not gonna beat her, so why don’t y'all give it a rest?”

She was expecting a more hostile response–maybe someone calling her a filthy foreigner or telling her to mind her own business, maybe someone brusquely shoving her aside so they could get to the object of their desire. However, they all did neither; all she got from them was a slack-jawed stare that told her they were all having difficulty comprehending what she said.

At the front, a boy in a karate gi was the one to ask. “You want us to… stop?”

Katie stared at their confusion with some of her own.

Were they surprised someone was asking them to stop?

Had anyone just asked them to stop?

Had the girl they were after asked them to stop?!

She put those alarming questions out of mind as she addressed the matter in front of her. “Oh… bless your hearts, but that girl you're trying to cajole into dating you ain't gonna.”

“Not until we beat her!” One enterprising young man called out.

“Yeah!” A few others chorused.

“Y’all don’t understand, even if you could beat her–” Katie tried to emphasize, but an enterprising young boxer cut her off.

“Well, she has to, that’s what Kuno said!”

A fencer in the crowd corrected the young boxer. “No, no, no. If we beat her, then we have permission to ask her out, that’s what Kuno said.”

Now Katie needed a moment to process whatever the hell it was she just heard. “Hold on now… what?”

The karate gi boy explained. “You must understand, Kuno-senpai–who is way stronger than all of us combined–said if any of us tried to date Akane without his permission then he’d beat the crap out of us, and the only way we can get that permission is by beating her in a fight. Therefore, and thusly… here we are. It sucks, but… at least we have a chance against her.”

As the karate boy spoke, Katie’s expression began to darken, her pale face flushing and the darkness growing beneath her left-swept bangs and dog-ear tresses until her eyes looked damn near fluorescent in the pitch darkness the shadows created. When she let out the breath she’d been holding, it streamed from her mouth like it were three below rather than a comfortable seventy–around minus and plus twenty degrees respectively for the celsius minded.

“All right, lemme see if I can grasp what yer fixin’ to say, here,” she began, calmly, but with every word her enunciation slowed and became more forceful as her voice trembled. “The reason y’all are lining up like hogs to slaughter, is because you think you have better odds in beating up the girl y’all want to date than you do the guy tryna stop you from datin’ her?”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The group nodded collectively.

As it was said before, if there was one thing that Katie Izland didn’t like, it was a bully. Back in her hometown of Tillamook, Oregon, she’d seen enough of them at her old High School. They spread nasty rumors, carved words in their victims’ desks, dumped pencil shavings on heads, and if riled enough outright attacked the target of their ire.

But in all honesty, that almost paled compared to what she was looking at right here.

Kuno Tatewaki held a bokken to the throat of every young man in the school, sending them against their will to assault a single girl over and over, no matter how easily they were beaten.

He was the ace of this school, the shadow of his power cast long over its students.

Lowering her head, Katie clenched and unclenched her fists.

“HEY KUNO!”

Her shout filled the entire courtyard, making the boys in front of her jump with fright.

The crowd of boys parted like the Red Sea before Moses, revealing the tall and suave figure cut by one Kuno Tatewaki. He heard the woman call him out, in a tone befitting an uneducated lout seeking challenge, and when he saw that it was the new foreign girl who’d darkened the halls of his school just days before, his intense eyes narrowed intensely.

“Is there something that you request of the undisputed and undefeated champion of the High School Kendo circuit, I, Kuno Tatewaki?” He walked towards her; the wooden sword he carried in his right hand held low.

Katie nodded slowly. “As a matter of fact, I do have a request for ya: may I take your face and apply it vigorously, and with considerable force, to every flat surface in this here schoolyard until such a point in the future where I am satisfied with the result?”

Kuno paused midstep, struck by the woman's radiating contempt. “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, no, beggin’ my pardon,” she replied, the venom dripping off her polite apology. “Lemme say it a bit simpler so you can keep up hon:”

The force and fury returned to her voice at the flip of a switch. “I’m ‘bout ta whup yer ass so hard that they’re gonna hold prayers for your backside every year.”

Akane and Nabiki reached the edge of the foreigner’s escalating exchange with Kuno.

“Who is that?” The former asked of the dark-haired girl.

Watching with raised eyebrows, Nabiki recognized her. “That’s the transfer in my class.”

Akane frowned. “What is she doing?”

Pulling out a sleek little smartphone, Nabiki pointed its cameras at the confrontation. “Looks like she wants to fight him.”

The younder Tendo looked at the phone, and then her. “Wait, does she know who she’s up against?”

Nabiki shrugged as she hit record. “Dunno, but whatever’s about to happen is going up on the net.”

The other students couldn’t believe it either. All anyone knew about her was that she was tall, kept her head down, and was from America… and now she was challenging the ace of their school. Kuno himself puzzled over it as well, and even considered that same information. Where did such a presence come from?

Kuno had been listening in on the exchange at the back of the crowd, however, so he had an idea what she was so upset about. Such frivolities could be easily explained.

“I see… as you are an American visitor, I can understand your confusion.”

Katie tilted her head to one side slightly. “What’re you on about?”

Kuno lifted his free hand with the grace of a show presenter, and brought his open, upraised palm to bear on Akane. “I present to you, the fair Tendo Akane, the only woman to have bested me so thoroughly in combat, and the captor of my heart in the battlefield of love.”

Glancing back, all Katie saw was a thoroughly disgusted underclassman scowling back at Kuno like she was gonna haul off and kill him herself. She looked back at Kuno as he continued.

“Such a fair and noble maiden beyond myself is beyond any other man many times more! So, a challenge is issued!” He swept his arm out, indicating the other students. “May no man speak of dating her, lest they prove their strength and strike her down in battle as she has struck me!”

He clenched that hand into a fist. “It is a test of manhood, of resolve, of honor… of the warrior spirit! Such thinking is beyond the ken of the American, who lacks understanding of the esoterica of bushido.”

Shutting his eyes and shook his head. “There is no place for such uncouth language and threats of violence. To prove one’s honor is to prove one’s strength, and to prove one’s strength is to battle.”

He opened his eyes, meeting Katie’s as he brought his bokken up to point at her–the air swirling ominously around it from such a simple motion.

“If you wish to capture my heart as well… then you must battle me to take it!”

Katie’s face abruptly went blank, and she abruptly pitched forward as the sheer stupid of what he just said vacated her fury. “… Guh...?!"

She caught herself and stared at him in stunned disbelief. "I'm sorry, but WHAT?!”

“What?” Nabiki and Akane said in unison with similar expressions.

“Eh?!” The entire student body bearing witness to the confrontation sounded at once.

Letting out a truly sophisticated laugh, Kuno elaborated. “Though you are far from what many would call a fair maiden, your beauty and presence is not lost to me. Therefore, if you wish to date me, then you must defeat me!”

Nabiki heard this one before. “Oho! That two-timer, doing this right in front of you. Is this what they call NTR?”

Akane leaned forward slowly, and brought her hands up to cover her face, all murderous thoughts of her own evacuated in exchange for secondhand embarrassment. “I want to be struck by lightning right now.”

Fairly disheveled, in complete wonder of the sheer density of the man in front of her, Katie almost fell to her knees in defeat right there. This man… this was the man who held a bokken pointed to the necks of the entire male student body of this school? The mastermind behind the pitched and violent assaults on a single girl? The shadow that loomed over the school as its ace? This man?!

He was…

He was…!

“… Dumber than a buck tryna make sweet, magical love to a grizzly fresh outta hibernation’…”

Kuno let out a hum. “What was that?”

Her expression void of any life, Katie lifted her head to look at him properly and nodded. “You got yourself a deal, hon. Let’s do this… right now.”

Kuno smirked and took his sword in both hands. “Very well, but be prepared…”

He lifted the bokken above his head. “For you, I will be losing with all of my might!” He lunged forward at Katie. “I STRIKE!”

Still nodding as he came at her, Katie agreed. “Boy…? You have no idea.”