Adisa scrawled away on his little notepad.

His head snapped up at the short and quick sound of the game over screen. He fixed on Mayumi seated on the other side of the table as she held up the handheld in her hand with her eyes on the edge of the table.

She relented from smashing the game system, lowering her hand, calming herself down with steady breaths, and then got back to mashing buttons.

He looked around the third-rate, but homely restaurant and then back down at his notepad, it didn’t take long for his concentration to waver again, this time the culprit being the delicious, peanutty aroma of the local cuisine as the waitress approached their table, holding up a tray with two plates of food—matoke, sweet potato, and chicken with groundnut sauce. The waitress wished them a happy meal and walked off.

Mayumi’s eyes stayed on the handheld’s screen as if her life depended on it.

Adisa smiled, watching her, and was almost reluctant to interrupt her. He stored the pencil back into his cast and closed the notepad. “Maybe we should avoid working when we’re at the table together?”

“Huh?” Mayumi exclaimed, tilting her body to the side and sticking out her tongue. “What is this? A date?”

“No, just because we went out to eat doesn’t make it a date.” He thought for a moment. “Or does it?”

Mayumi looked up from her screen and at Adisa. “Does this mean I should’ve dressed better?”

Adisa checked his short-sleeved, floral print shirt, making middle-aged dads proud everywhere, paired with sweats and vibrant floppy sandals in contrast to Mayumi’s usual grungy outfit, a denim jacket over plaid and dark ripped jeans. They couldn’t look any more out of sync.

“Does this mean I have to say romantic things?”

Mayumi snickered, “When’s the last time you were romantic with me?”

“It hasn’t been that long. I got you that premium knife shiner for your birthday.”

Mayumi’s face lit up. “Right! You did! That was sweet of you. It did wonders for my kunai. How could I forget?” She grabbed her utensils and cut a piece of chicken. “Mmm! This is great!” she said after one bite and then shot a look at Adisa’s notepad.

“It’s crap,” he said.

Mayumi frowned. “But I thought the twins helped with inspiration.”

“I thought so,” he said dejectedly, and then circled the rim of his cup of lemonade with his finger. “I decided to write From the Cradle to the Grave as a poem and now I’m convinced I’ve made it worse.”

“Are you going to let me see?”

Adisa put his hand over the notepad and quickly slid it off view, pocketing it. “No!” he said and pouted off to the side.

“Aww, Addyyy, let me seeee…”

“I said ‘no’! It’s… not good.” said Adisa, continuing his tantrum.

Mayumi leaned forward, cupping her face in her hands as she gazed at Adisa. “You say that about everything you make.”

“Art is stressful.”

“I can imagine, but I think your petulance is because of what happened when we reached the second Tombstone Checkpoint.” She took a sip of her fruity soda. “I told you we should’ve waited…”

“When I first decided to take things slow, Tayte and Chris took out Ayo and Melissa all before reaching the first checkpoint, So I thought taking a more speedy approach was for the best, but now I missed a chance to fight her again.”

“We could’ve always just continued to wait at the checkpoint.”

Adisa grabbed a fork and picked at this food. “No, that would’ve gotten boring real fast.” He let out a sigh. “She’s probably going to run into another Fighter and I am going to miss it.”

“To be honest, Addy, Tayte does seem fun and all, but don’t get your hopes up. She could let you down. She had trouble keeping up with you at the pits and her track record isn’t really all that impressive. Ayo and Melissa don’t specialize in combat. One is good at driving fast without crashing and the other is good at hiding and spying on people like the wimpy bitch she was.”

Adisa whimpered softly.

“Ah! Sorry! Addy, look, next we’re going to Japan! There is plenty to look forward to there. We can go for a night stroll at Aokigahara; I know that will get your creative juices flowing.”

Adisa perked up. Fantasizing about wandering the famed Suicide Forest. If an environment like that can’t serve as a muse, then his artistic aspirations were truly hopeless.

“We haven’t done anything like that in a while,” Mayumi said. “Imagine us under the moonlight surrounded by those dark trees, haunting noises of the dead as we hold hands—”

A lump of flesh fell from under her chin, splattering the groundnut sauce everywhere.

Adisa became alert and examined his partner. Her neck swelled, and her skin folded over each other, making layers of lumps. Her face followed suit, bloating and melting, covering her mouth with globby flesh.

Adisa tried to scream, but his lips wouldn’t move. It was fixed under a mass of his skin.

Unable to hold up the weight of the excessive amount of fatty lumps oozing down their faces; their heads slammed into their plates—drowning the food with their blobs for cheeks.

The waitress dropped her tray, allowing plates and cups to crash onto the floor to scream and point in terror, stirring up a fracas in seconds. People jumped out of their chairs to panic as they stared. The screams elevated, pulling the chefs from out of the kitchen to join the mass panic.

A muscular man in a polka-dot shirt rushed into the place, happily beaming at Adisa and Mayumi’s table. He held up a thumb at them. “Eyo, how’s it going?” He allowed for his face to go stern as he looked over at the disorderly crowd. “Get out.”

They all ran out of the place.

The man walked up to the pair of lumpy faces, pinned down by their own fat. “This is to show you I can end your lives at any time I wish.” He leaned down to Adisa, whose eyes focused on him calmly. “Such a pitiful sight, leader, really.” And then looked over at Mayumi. “It must suck to see her like this, huh? Talk about a boner-killer.”

Mayumi lifted her hand, which was just a pillar of fat folded over each other as she scowled at him.

Adisa let out a muffled laugh, imagining Mayumi giving Domingos the finger under all that flesh.

Domingos cleared his throat and stood up straight as if he was going to deliver a speech he had prepared since he was a child. “Since your mouths are covered, you can’t summon your Relics and I don’t care how strong you are. Moving with all that added weight is almost impossible. You can’t fight like that. It’s checkmate. Adisa, a part of me wants to leave your mouth normal so that I can hear you beg for your life or maybe just cut off your one good arm, so that you’ll be unable to wipe your own ass.” He pulled up a chair from a nearby table, turned it around, and sat with his arms over the top rail. He looked over at Mayumi. “Mayumi, this is really about you, you know.”

A long muffled curse came from Mayumi. Adisa laughed again, and the two exchanged looks.

Domingos gave each of them a glare, and continued. “I’ve got my hands some cool information about the infamous Aragami. Reading up on you is like reading a comic book. You were brought up by a defunct ninja clan that used to hunt down cursed items for the Japanese government all the way back since the Sengoku period.” He gave Adisa a quick look. “How the hell did you end up with this weirdo?”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Mayumi raised her arm again. Domingos made a fist and scoffed.

“Hearing about past winners of the Trials is nothing crazy. If you’re lucky, you can even meet some of them and the stories are all the same. People who’ve reached enlightenment. Going to that other realm for a certain amount of time and getting what they wished for turned them into a person who’s on nirvana 24/7. Crazy stuff, but you never hear about the losers.” Domingos gave Mayumi a sardonic smile. “The wimps who chickened out and forfeited their Relics. You were one of them, Mayumi, and I want your help.”

Mayumi stayed silent, eyeing him, and then looked over at Adisa again.

“Whaddya say? Dump this loser and help me get to the end. I know you know some shit that can help and we’re both on the same side. It makes much more sense for us to be paired up than with Handicap over here,” he proposed. “Two blinks for ‘yes’ and I’ll let you live.”

Adisa remained calm, knowing he had less than nothing to worry about as Domingos concentrated on Mayumi.

Domingos was hopeful, but her eyelids didn’t move an inch. His hopes were crushed, like men becoming aware of their midlife crisis.

“Okay, die then!” He barked, swinging his arm to the side. “The both of you! Enjoy Hell!”

Adisa stood up, almost giving Domingos a heart attack, and then sprinted on stumpy legs.

“Whoa, where are you going?” He went after Adisa with one hand over his heart.

It was like trying to run while submerged in mud with weights attached to both legs, but Adisa felt the excited neurons firing off in his head and the palpitations from his heart driving him to go faster and endure the excessive poundage. Most of his vision was obstructed by the fat. He slammed into a counter as he reached the kitchen, knocking things over with his heaving mass of a body, and reached the gas stove, which the chefs left on. Every spot on the stovetop was taken and Adisa locked his eyes on a burning frying pan with a pillar of flames rising from it.

Domingos stumbled into the area and stopped at Adisa’s side. “What’re you doing, leader?”

Adisa pushed his face into the fire, setting his globby flesh ablaze.

The lumps boiled and blistered under the heat, with fire substituting the flesh that obstructed his vision. He swung his arm blindly until he felt the blaze. He smacked the frying pan off the stovetop and dropped his heavy arm over the burner head set to the max. Once a couple of burnt fingers were freed, he snatched a rag off a hook nearby and dumped it into the fire; it jumped up.

Adisa’s globby body was ignited.

He lacked the need to let out a scream and allowed for his body to bathe in the flames, tolerating the searing pain as blisters popped all over. The charred masses of flesh began to peel off, freeing Adisa’s body from underneath. He looked over at Domingos, who watched him literally burn off the calories from his body.

Domingos stood, flummoxed, with a face saying, I should’ve just brought a damn gun instead.

Blackened gobs circled Adisa’s feet. He was liberated from the mass but at the cost of his having parts of his arms and face burned and his lovely shirt. Adisa looked down at his burnt shirt and sighed—as if he were more disappointed by the loss of clothing than his skin.

“In Thus Spoke Zarasthura, Nietzche talked about dying at the right time,” Adisa said, ignoring the remnants of flames flickering off his body and arm cast. “Now, with the way you attacked us. It’s safe to say that you don’t feel as though you’ve lived too little or too much, but just the right amount that led you to this courageous moment, correct, Benson—?”

“It’s Domingos to you, curly!” he snapped, but with a shaky voice.

“Right, sorry,” he apologized courteously, and then continued. “You are prepared to die, are you not? Is that not the resolve that brought you here to challenge us? To die a beautiful death in case things go wrong?”

Adisa read the look on his face and could tell that his old muscular companion was no more prepared for death than a child who just learned about the concept. He heaved a sigh of disappointment. “Who goes on a suicide run without the resolve to die?” Then, he grabbed the frying pan off the floor and swiped it across Domingo’s face.

Domingos staggered back, disoriented in disbelief that he was actually hit that quickly.

As the big man tried to recover, Adisa pulled out the knife on the rack over the stove that looked the sharpest to him and jabbed Domingos in the right eye with it.

He yowled as a dark line of blood squirted from the wound and failed to evade the second attack.

Adisa inserted the knife into the same eye, deeper this time, the blood that jumped at him had a soothing effect for the scalding pain on his skin—not that it mattered.

Domingo was down on his back with Adisa over him.

“Your goal in life is to find the best time for it to end.” Adisa pulled out the knife and then pressed it into Domingo’s throat, dragged it down, cutting it open. “It’s sad that this isn’t the right time for you, and honestly, this isn’t how I pictured for your story to end, but I—”

Domingos pushed Adisa back with a kick, uninterested in hearing more mad ramblings, and scrambled back to his feet. He cupped his leaking throat, and they shared a look.

“Fight or flight, Domingos?”

Domingo chose flight. Dashing away, leaving a trail of blood across the kitchen floor.

Adisa chased him back to the restaurant and stopped as Domingos rushed out the door. The urge to continue to chase him died in Adisa and he turned back to his table where Mayumi remained seated calmly, watching the extra mass slip off her body and conjoin into a giant lump under her seat. He returned to the table.

“Why’d you take so long to do something about it?” Mayumi asked. “Hearing that idiot go on and on was insufferable.”

“Why didn’t you do anything first?” Adisa replied, holding out his hand. “I gave you the signal.”

Mayumi took his hand and got up. “No, I gave you the signal.”

Adisa thought for a moment. “Ohhh, I thought you were giving me the signal that you got the signal.”

They stared at each other in silence and then laughed. Their hands interlocked, and they walked towards the door, swinging them back and forth.

“We gotta do something about those burns,” Mayumi said, “so did this encounter help your writing?”

Adisa frowned and looked through his empty mind. “Nope.”

###

Chris barged into the hotel room and found Tayte brushing her dark gray hair as she stood before a mirror. He was clothed in a blue rain jacket overcompensated with pockets and gray zip-off pants, and black mountaineering boots.

Tayte gave him a look. She wore a dusky pink fleece jacket coupled with black tights and grippy sneakers. “Barging into a girl’s room like that is super weird. I’m going to have to assume you’re some kind of pervert from now on, Chris.”

“How the hell do you know Tatsunori?” Chris asked with a dead serious look. “Were you a grave-robber at some point?”

Tayte stopped brushing and turned to him. “What? No.”

“Would you stop lying?” He moved up closer to her. “There’s no point in lying now.”

“And that’s exactly why I’m not. I didn’t even know it was an actual title people gave themselves until you explained it to me.” Tayte walked over to her bed where her stuffed bag and a brimmed hat rested and sat down by them.

“Then how do you know her, dammit?”

Tayte stared and thought for a moment. “I think… we trained in the same dojo together.”

Chris raised his hand. “Wait, do you mean… the dojo you went to in Japan?”

Tayte nodded. “But that’s about all that I remember. I can’t even remember her first name. What is it, by the way?”

Chris opened his mouth immediately and became lost for words just as quickly. “What the…? I can’t remember…”

“I want to ask for a favor, Chris.”

“What?”

“Please… if we run into her again at the second Tombstone Checkpoint area. Let me fight her. Alone.”

“Why?”

“I just… need to,” she mumbled. “I’m asking you as your partner in the Trials.”

“And I’m asking you as your partner in Trials: Why? What aren’t you telling me, Tayte?”

“Wouldn’t you have liked to deal with Melissa on your own?”

Chris took a step back, wrinkling his forehead.

“Maybe things would have turned out differently for you. It was personal, and I got greedy, taking away that potential moment from you. Even though I took that away from you, I’m asking you to let me have that moment with her.”

Chris looked back into her eyes, seeing emotions he never did before on her—a mix of regret and eagerness, but he had to pry. He needed to know.

“You’re leaving something out, Tayte,” he said, “and we’re not leaving until you tell me what the hell that—”

“I almost killed her,” she said coldly.

Silence filled the air.

Melissa was right about her. Chris said to himself in his head and wondered if saying it aloud was a good move or not. He stood in silence, staring back at her for almost an entire minute.

“If you’ve got something to say, Chris, then say it.”

For someone with trouble picking up on emotional cues, she was great at detecting fear, Chris thought to himself. “Why did you almost kill her? For fun?”

“Is that what you think?”

“Would it be wrong to?”

Tayte placed her hands over her lap. “No, it wouldn’t be wrong to think that.” She let out a sigh. “The reason why, I really can’t remember, but fighting her made the memories come back, so I need to fight her again to get the full picture.”

“What makes you care so much, though?”

Tayte trembled. “I’m not sure.” She looked up at him. “That’s everything. Are you happy, partner?”

Chris folded his arms and turned to the door. “Meet us downstairs to grab a bite and then we’ll be on our way to the next checkpoint.”

“Okay… thank you,” Tayte said. “Chris, are you afraid of me?”

Chris stopped before the door and his hand on the handle. “Yes.”

“Do you think I’m actually capable of killing somebody for fun?”

Chris gave her a sad look. “Yes, including me.”

He walked out.