"Ka-Bang!"

My rage burns with a righteous fury. I'd recognize Haruki’s voice anywhere. And if that driver named Yamashiro Yuki dared deprive him of something so important - nobody deserves such a punishment. From the grim expressions shown by the rest of the Lads, we’re all in agreement on that.

We head off in different directions to enact our plan. While Shirakawa and Gokiburi descend down a fire escape, Yosuke and I leap from rooftop to rooftop, arriving above the warehouse in record time. As I tie a rope to an exposed pipe, my heart thunders and my legs almost turn to jelly. I haven’t felt this way since those brawls with the Red Knives back in the day. Picking up litter just doesn’t have that same spice as a fight. In fights, you play for keeps, you play for honor and pride, you play to win. Victory or defeat. How often do we get that opportunity in everyday life?

I glance at Yosuke, who bears the same look of excitement tempered by nerves on his face. A fight gets the blood pumping. All five senses take on a primal aspect, one where you don’t need words to understand what’s going on. The time has come to either win or lose, and whether you win or lose depends on your skill, your talent, your luck. Yosuke understands this - both of us, all of the Lads, are gonna fight hard.

With a deep breath, we move with the wind and rappel inside the warehouse. Just as Sakura’s layout showed, when we burst through the glass windows, we arrive right onto a set of catwalks overlooking the ground floor. As shards fall around me, I unveil my sword which glows purple in the night. Yosuke notches his bow, while Shirakawa and Gokiburi burst in through the back wall a moment later.

All’s quiet and tense in the warehouse as the four different factions size each other up and brandish their weapons. Hantei, Senko, Reds, Yamashiro Yuki. The mind control must’ve worn off by now, since the Reds no longer have that glow in their eyes and seem quite hostile to Yuki.

Sharktooth Shigemoto, Ichiki the Itch, Sake Sakemoto, Gumball Toshiko, Hair-Trigger Haruki. I recognize all the faces of the Senko, though it’s been a while since I’ve seen them. They all look a bit older and a bit more rough around the edges. We used to ride around and shoot the shit all day. Why have they gotten themselves mixed up in all of this? 

I glance down at my sword glowing with purple haze and suppose I could ask myself the same question. I would love to hit the arcade at the San-Machi Mall with them one more time, but this is how it is.

With so much going on, the members of the Senko can only give me strained looks, saving their ruminations for later. Haruki notices me, but considering the amount of pain he’s currently in, he doesn’t seem to display any signs of long-winded internal monologues about how we ended up going down different paths. He wasn’t much for long-winded internal monologues, anyway-

Sake slips on a pool of blood, she fires, she’s killed. My stomach drops at the sight of the laser ripping through her body. It happened just like that.

I leap off the catwalk, swinging my sword on the way down. The purple haze peels off the katana, electricity and smoke trailing behind the cold fusion ball lightning strike as it slams into one of the hammer-wielding Reds. I hit the ground and want to charge Yuki, since she’s the most dangerous one here, but Yosuke’s already raining arrows on her, and more importantly, the college sophomore steps before me.

“Nakayoshi, lend me your strength!” he calls out, the little red book in his hands glowing. “Bear of a Thousand Red Octobers, come forth!”

Calling out your attacks is lame, but a brown bear twice the size of an average man now stands before me. He’s spectral and translucent with a hammer and sickle emblazoned across his stomach, and when Sharktooth bravely goes to stab him with his switchblade, the bear smacks him through the wall and out onto the street, where Sharktooth remains groaning for a long while.

The bear stares down at me with glowing red eyes.

I raise my sword. “Dance with me then.”

The bear growls and swipes at me with razor-sharp claws. I raise my wooden katana and brace myself for impact. My body shudders as the claws collide with sword, but a rush of steam pours from the cold fusion glove as the katana holds fast. The bear then unleashes a furious wave of attacks, but even with the smoke billowing, the cold fusion rushing through my body allows me to keep track of it all. The bear’s so much faster than Hashiguchi during our earlier fight, but I’m so much faster now, too.

With a great roar, the bear leans back and swipes down with all his might, intent on finishing things. I leap away - the warehouse shakes when the bear hits the ground hard enough to make a crater. I counterattack with a blast of purple ball lightning that takes the bear’s paw off. He roars and stumbles on his hind legs, giving me an opening to settle things. I deliver a purple slash across his stomach, slicing through the hammer and sickle in one fell swoop.

The bear stands for a moment as red energy spills out of him. Then he looks down at me and nods in approval. I nod back. The bear disappears.

The Senko have taken out the other Reds, but they’re now on the backfoot against my Hantei. The college sophomore, red numbers and letters floating from his book, bounds across the warehouse, towards the two people who got this whole thing started. Yuki, with several magic arrows planted in her, seeps dark green blood as Haruki rises and stands before her. She grimaces, and not from the pain - something’s different about Haruki. Maybe it’s the fact he’s glowing green now and speaks in a different, deeper voice.

“A body, yes, a body!” Haruki cries out. Something grows bright on his chest, burning away the clothes covering it up. My eyes widen - a blue amulet with a jade-colored gemstone in the center.

The Jade Magatama! If I can just take it-

Sakura in a sundress. Sakura feeding me pasta. Sakura at the movies!

I sprint over while Haruki - or whatever is currently wearing his skin - and Yuki confront each other.

“You monster,” Haruki spits out at Yuki. “Made from my flesh, just to serve the conglomerate who’s kept me imprisoned for so long. Don’t you want to join me? We are the one and the same, after all.”

Yuki’s face lacks any emotion or expression. “I don’t want anything. I wasn’t made to have wants.”

Haruki pinches the bridge of his nose. “Well, whatever. I just need to reunite the so-called Jade Magatama with my true body, and then this long farce will finally be over. Don’t get in my way. Otherwise, I won’t hesitate to destroy you. What did they build you out of, my rib or something? I can always regrow it-”

Yuki fires the finger gun. Haruki, his eyes burning green, nimbly dodges it. Perhaps it wasn’t meant for him - perhaps it was meant for the sophomore, who was casting a spell to take out both of them. The sophomore hastily erects a magic shield - when the laser hits it, the red wall of energy redirects it, right into the path of Gokiburi.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” I scream when Gokiburi’s torso is vaporized by the laser. He looks down at himself in surprise, then gives me one last grin. He collapses face-down on the ground.

“They killed Gokiburi, the bastards!” Yosuke’s fingers turn bloody as he rains down arrow after arrow on Yuki. She takes one to the eye, but the girl’s made of iron, since she ignores the pain as she advances on Haruki to steal the jade from him. Haruki simply decides to run away and leave the warehouse, but the sophomore catches him with a spell that immobilizes him mere feet from Yuki.

“What?” Haruki barks out as the sophomore's spell lifts him off his feet. “I see, I see, without my true body, the magic of this world can still overpower me. No matter-”

A shock of red lightning cuts him off. He struggles against the binds, but a red miasma swirls like a whirlpool around the Jade Magatama in the amulet, threatening to rip it loose, right into the waiting palm of the sophomore down below.

I don’t care. With berserker tears falling down my face, I charge Yuki. Haruki’s so close, she clearly just wants to grab the jade herself and get out of here, but not if I can help it. She sighs and targets me instead, raising her finger gun, but I raise my cold fusion sword. I don’t know if I can stop a laser, but I’m sure as hell gonna try.

“Bang,” Yuki says, but then Shirakawa slams his wooden staff into her elbow, bending it in a way arms shouldn’t bend. She still tries to fire the laser, but the beam gets caught along the way inside her arm. It never makes it out of her fingers - the broken elbow forms a dam that traps the energy until it bursts. The lower part of her arm explodes entirely, while sparking lasers hit the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The power of the escaping energy sends Haruki catapulting into the air right as the sophomore’s spell reaches its climax.

To the collective horror of everyone in the warehouse, the spell knocks the gemstone out of the amulet while the explosion sends it further upwards and upwards. The Jade Magatama careens through the warehouse ceiling, into the night sky, just a pale dot against the moonlight until it disappears entirely.

Haruki hits the ground hard. Yuki, heavily wounded, bolts from the warehouse. The college sophomore tries to do the same. The Senko are on their last legs, several just lying on the ground in the daze. Both Gokiburi and Sake Sakemoto lie dead in the warehouse.

I muster my strength.

“Get the Bolshevik!” I order. “The weapons were meant for him, after all!”

The sophomore tries to escape out one of the several holes in the wall, but Yosuke’s arrows keep him at bay. Shirakawa and I then approach him in a pincer movement - nowhere to go.

Sweat dripping down his face, anxiety in his eyes, the sophomore raises his arm. “Nakayoshi, I call upon you to teleport me out of here!”

Nothing interesting happens. The sophomore gasps, and then trembles as frustration mounts.

“Nakayoshi, I beseech you, get me out of here! Please!”

This Nakayoshi, whoever she is, doesn’t come to get him. He swallows, realizing he has to fight. Unfortunately, he makes his realization too late. I’m already swinging my sword at his head while Shirakawa is already swinging his staff at his legs. We make contact at the same time.

The little red book goes flying from the sophomore’s hands as he collapses unconscious to the floor.

I sigh and catch my breath as silence returns to the warehouse. Haruki’s gone, as are the rest of the Senko. But the unconscious Reds, both the sophomore and his goons, are still here, as are the illegal guns smuggled into the island.

All in all, this was a success. I deactivate the glove simply by thinking it, and then place the bloodstained katana on my hip. As matter of fact, there’s blood all over the warehouse. There’s a big pool beneath where Sake’s corpse was once - the Senko presumably took her with them. An equally big pool flows beneath the broken Gokiburi.

This was not a success at all. We lost Gokiburi. Sake Sakemoto died as well. My hands tremble. Death is a horrible, horrible thing.

I mentioned earlier that in fights, you play for keeps, you play for honor and pride, you play to win. But the thing is - we’re not playing anymore. 

This isn’t play-pretend battles at the schoolyard. This isn’t katana lessons with a drunken “master” who’s really just an actor. Life and death now hinges upon my way of the sword. I was thinking of Sakura in a sundress while people were dying around me.

“GOKIBURI!” I bellow to the heavens. “I SWEAR, I WILL NOT FORGET YOUR SACRIFICE. TO BETTER THIS CITY, TO BE WITH THE LOVE OF MY LIFE, IT’S MEANINGLESS IF MY FRIENDS ARE NOT THERE ALONGSIDE ME! THIS IS NO LONGER A GAME TO ME. I SWEAR, I WILL NOT FORGET TO THIS LESSON PAID FOR WITH BLOOD AND DEATH-”

“Hey,” Gokiburi says as he arrives next to us. His chest has fully healed, though he looks a bit dazed.

I bawl my eyes out. “Gokiburi!” I pull him into a bear hug. “How do you do it, man? How do you walk it off just like that?”

Gokiburi hugs me back. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”