[CITY 1 - STRUGGLE]

“No… No!” he erupts as he rushes forward. “Again?!”

“I…” she coughs up blood, her blue eyes capturing his instantly. “Idiot… guy…”

Her sky blue eyes become icy with the glaze of death.

Masaru’s already consigned himself to the danger. He knows it’s in here, but he spends a moment more observing the signs of exhaustion on her face: the stress of a life lived purely.

Then… he hears singing, but it’s not Getouttahere-Kun this time…

“Come on over and visit Get Outta Here Travel!~ We’ve got the plans to make your worries unravel!~” sings a very familiar-looking person coming up from around the side of the conference room divider. “Catchy song, don’t you think?” the identical Masaru asks with a go-getter smile: less like a stable, conservative salaryman and more like a highly aggressive institutional investor for a massive bank: the kind of man who thinks the entire world is tied to his finger by a scarlet thread, and perhaps it truly is.

Masaru’s wide eyes breach ever wider as yet another dimension of incomprehensible evil introduces itself to him, and in the same suit as him, no less.

“What… are yo-”

“Abe Masaru,” the fake interrupts as he strikes a business card from his blazer in a move so smooth that the real Masaru can hardly comprehend that it’s his body making such an effortlessly confident movement. “Chief Operations Officer for Onomichi Suisan… and who might you be?” he asks, stepping forward with a friendly gait saying “let’s get some ice cream after this!”

Masaru’s eyes cannot stop glancing over his identical form: almost identical, at least.

He’s more handsome than Masaru, a little taller and, yes, even his smile lacks that unsightly tweak at the left corner of his mouth.

It’s a better Masaru.

In a state of shock, Masaru accepts the business card from the other Masaru, and takes a moment to appreciate the subtle gloss along its pale gray surface: brutally professional, and looks a hundred times better than his. It even smells like success.

“That’s a… very nice card,” Masaru says, actually tucking it away into his business card clip. “Did you kill her?” he asks, nodding over to the lady, her body disappearing by what seems to be some form of astral witchcraft.

The other Masaru gains a twinge of genuine-looking sympathy. “Her? No. Don’t worry about her. Worry about what you were supposed to do when you screwed up that merger!”

Masaru’s eyes widen.

For the first time in all of this madness he’s mentally somewhere else, pulled back a year and a half ago into a certain mid-December day.

And all at once, something wakes up in him.

“No, that’s bullshit!” he snaps, pushing his hand into the other Masaru’s chest. “That’s not fair!”

The other Masaru shakes his head, recovering easily and still with that smooth grin. “It wasn’t fair to your dad!” he says back.

Like the flux of sound at a bomb’s impact, Masaru takes a deep breath. “NO!”

All of a sudden, the smile disappears. “You let him down!”

Masaru, hyperventilating, inhales again. “NO!... NO!”

“You had one thing to do that day.”

“NONONONONONONONONONO!” Masaru swings at the perfect man in a perfect suit, who blocks the strike with his forearm: a practiced, economic move mastered by a respectful Karateka: someone who appreciates tradition as if it were the lifeblood of both the man and the nation.

Masaru sends an abrupt, ineffective punch that he’d seen in Alley Fighter 2: he always loved the way the American character, Stryker, ducks in with a cool boxing stance.

However, Masaru is not a classically trained boxer, whereas the other Masaru has been studying formal martial arts ever since his father first placed him in a dojo when he was eight years old.

The real Masaru complained that it was “too boring” and quit after half a year, but this Masaru held course, gave it his all, and as a result can meet any man as an equal, or more, in empty-handed combat.

“That’s right! Feel shame!” the better Masaru shouts, delivering a single, but decisive jab into his chest. “You’re pathetic, and you failed your father’s trust in the one moment he truly relied on you!”

Masaru’s thoughts are twisted alongside the curl of his collapsed ribcage.

He coughs up blood as he stumbles back through the room, eventually bumping up against the window to the outside.

All at once he thinks about how much better he could have been if he simply didn’t give up so many times throughout his life.

He feels an immaculate despair mixed into the agonizing pain radiating from that single spot his copy struck him in the chest.

Finally, he knows, by some miracle, that this is his punishment for a life lived wastefully, and this perfect version of himself is the same being that’s just now finished him off a third time.

“You’ll never be me, you wretch!” the other Masaru exclaims as he pulls in for another devastating strike. “I worked to get this life!”

The perfectly trained body of the businessman throws a perfect punch back in the exact spot of the previous hit, punching through the ribs and sending shards into Masaru’s heart while shattering the window behind him.

Ears ringing, Masaru sees the spinning shards of glass, the dark sky above, and in the bright room above him, the returning smile of the superior salaryman: a “him” that is better by every meaningful metric.

Hitting the pavement three stories down, Masaru’s thoughts cloud over with the insecurity of his own helplessness.

I can’t be you, he thinks to himself as the drowning returns to spirit him away to another nightmare.

Just as he fades away, his ears adjust to the noise coming from nearby.

Come on over and visit Get Outta Here Travel!~

“That stupid jingle…” takes up the last thought in his mind.