*Chapter Two*

"You are going to Droidkatraz for this if this tape ever gets out." "How would anyone ever prove this was anything more than video game footage?" The luchador Booyah and his old friend, Professor Hazard, sat at a desk in a cramped room inside the Labship Shinigami Omega, a wood-paneled retrofitted nightmare of airship technology from the Eighties that the Prof had gotten for a decent price in an estate sale. The innards were cramped and the top speed wasn't anywhere near the last ship the two had cruised the world in, but the two weren't unaccustomed to making home out of strange places. "We're watching the robot equivalent of a snuff film," said Booyah as he reached into a large bowl of popcorn for a large bowl of popcorn-sized handful of popcorn. The screen showed a cylindrical droid on small wheels in pixellated 8-bit glory, rolling down the streets of a busy side-scrolling city. People were running away from something happening in the distance, and through the speakers the pair heard the sounds of battle. As the sounds grow louder and the people grow fewer, the droid finds itself coming across large piles of coins, strewn about broken buildings and outright corrupted architecture. The Prof took a look at his bare right arm as if he were checking a watch. "T Minus forty seconds until contact, then ten to Exhibit A." "Not the money shot?" "We can joke all we want to deflect from the fact we're watching a robot snuff film, but Designated Heroine didn't deserve to go out like this." CRASH. A man in a red Japanese school uniform went flying over the droid, bursting into coins in midair. "You named the sacrificial robot Designated Heroine?" "They're naming an entire circle of Robot Hell after me, you know." The droid known as Designated Heroine arrived at its final destination, the front of a massive high school. Another man in a blue school uniform stood looking the other way at another red uniform and swatted him effortlessly through the sky with one chunky fist. Several more combatants came rushing in, only to find themselves jump-kicked and hit with a three-punch combo, a three-kick combo, and the last was knocked down with the swing of a quickly-pilfered baseball bat. Raising his hand in triumph, he smiled and yelled "VICTOLY!", though yelling wouldn't be quite what to call it, since no sound was made; the words that came out of his mouth were printed on the bottom of the screen in similarly blocky text. "BEPE-" It seemed that the bot had made a noise; the one in the blue uniform turned around and raised his fist and then the footage was no more. "And this was when your Heroine got vaporized?" Hazard nodded and coughed, clearing his throat of stray popcorn. "Sorry, haven't eaten in a while. Yeah, we don't have a good security camera system but I was right there, I saw it flash into nonexistence like it'd been punched by a thermo-nuke. Judging by the angle it couldn't have been anything but that blue guy. Any idea who he might be?" Booyah rewound the video a bit and played back the footage of the blue guy. "Not sure, but his colors and basic strikes remind me of a 'young lion' that we had at El Teatro for a time on pilgrimage." The Prof raised an eyebrow. "Is that a luchador thing or like, a religious thing?" "Neither, actually! Many Japanese wrestling promotions send their wrestlers out on pilgrimages to other countries for a while as part of their training, before becoming main eventers proper. The pendejo I'm thinking of came out here around the same time as Akodo Rokku, one of the current big champs of Emperor's Road style pro wrestling." "Oh yeah, I remember him! Didn't he suplex one of my Labships?" "Into the ocean, yeah." The two looked away from one another for a moment. "That poor detective..." "Both he and the ship are still down there," added the Prof, with a sigh. "The shuttering of the Fictive Anthropology Department was a bit of a killer, huh?" "Even you don't know the half of it." Professor Hazard had ejected the tape and put it in a dust sleeve labelled Designated Heroine before putting it on a shelf next to a handful of similar sleeves. The label was reversed as with all the other ones, as if trying to symbolically hide a long string of dreadful occurances. "So your other wrestler, has he always been able to punch a robot into nonexistence?" The burly wrestle man shook his head. "Not at all! This joker was a humorista for his time at El Teatro." "You know I love the comedy wrasslers, bud. Think we can get seats for his next fight?"

"Making his way to the ring, weighting one hundred and ninety pounds, it's everyone's favorite Magikarp Fighter, the man they call Byakko, the Tiger God of Ice!"

"ICE! ICE! ICE!" chanted the crowd in the open air Gensou-Nippon Arena in Iida-machi, one of the most land-locked areas of Japan. Somewhere in that teeming throng sat Professor Hazard and Senor Booyah alongside a young blond-haired lady who shouted excitedly as an energetic eurobeat song blared over the PA. A long-haired figure in a blue outfit the same color as the man from the earlier video came sauntering out with his hands in his pockets. Booyah whistled as he caught sight of the wrestler. "Is that a championship belt he's got around his neck?" "Yeah!" exclaimed the blonde-haired girl to his left. "He's trying to work his way up to FJPW's Cruiserweight Championship; that's the Iida-machi Heavyweight Championship!" "Way nicer than the prayer beads, don't you think?" The Tiger God of Ice raised one fist, eyes closed, as a line of pyrotechnics fired off behind him. The crowd surged, and Ice's eyes shot open. With a grin he dashed to the ring, and then around the ring, shaking his fist and high-fiving random fans. He did a full lap and then another, leaping up onto he ring apron and then again up and over the ropes. Once again he raised a fist and once again the crowd cheered; he went to raise one more fist and fell forward onto elbows and knees in a sudden fit of exhaustion. The crowd continued to cheer as Ice held up his fist again, weakly crawling to his corner of the ring where a young lion, a journeyman wrestler, handed him a glass of water that was greedily downed. "His opponent, already in the ring, weighing two hundred and eighty-" The bell rang suddenly as the man's barrel-chested opponent ran in and started peppering the fighter in the blue outfit with overhead blows. He shouted angrily as the crowd booed, apparently feeling left out of the adoration, then grabbed Ice by his wild mane and smashing his head against the turnbuckles. The referee pushed the big man away and freed the belt from the neck of its champion, handing it to the young lion at ringside. "His opponent, the Violent Brawler, Bruiser Bagoon!" The man called Bruiser Bagoon beat his chest and howled to the sky to a smattering of cheers and echoed howls. The girl with Booyah and Prof howled as well. "I thought you were rooting for the IceTyger guy," shouted the Prof when the howls died down. "Oh I am!" In the ring, Bruiser Bagoon went back to pick up Ice and grabbed him by the neck. With a swipe of a finger across his neck he clinched and fell to the ground; in one impossible motion, the blue fighter twisted free of the man's meaty grip and popped to his feet, watching a walking, talking, wrestling tree of a man fall on his behind in mild bemusement. "Matches like this are always such a great back and forth; Bagoon is the number one contender, so anything could happen!" Senor Booyah sat back and crossed his arms and studied the man's style with a trained eye. Ice followed up his escape with three rapid kicks to the chest of the opponent, each one heavier than the last. The Bruiser stood his ground and came back with a hard chop, sending the smaller man reeling back hard but regaining his composure, though with a notably pronounced bright red stripe showing on bare flesh underneath the gi. "You fucking bastard!" shouted Ice. He grabbed the flaps of his gi and tried to fan the burning slap mark. "I thought we agreed on no slappers!" "Eat shit, Byakko!" Bruiser Bagoon drove his explosive mouth home with an equally explosive kick to Ice's chest, knocking him back up against the ropes. "You're giving that belt back to the Iida-machi Abare Killers to-night, blue man!" Bagoon drove another weighty chop into Ice's unprotected chest and the champion shouted wordlessly in unspeakable pain. He reached back once more, eager to eradicate the crooked smile that the beaten man had fixed upon his face. His knife hand chop whipped forward... ...and found dead air; Ice had pulled the rope so far down that the shot aimed for his face missed completely! He dived forwards from his crouch and Bruiser Bagoon's arm found itself intercepted by the slingshot rope. Not enough to do serious damage, but he recoiled far enough to find his arm in the waiting hands of his opponent, who whipped him to the ground by said arm and began to wrench it out of its socket behind his back. The trio up in the stands leaned in close to block out the noise of the surrounding crowd. "Are you sure this is the guy?" asked Hazard. "He doesn't seem much like the guy in River City, and he's not all that much of a funny boy wrassler any more so I'm double disappointed." Booyah nodded. "His style has changed but there's no doubt about it. You'll see when he hits the finisher!" The girl with them squealed. "The Hyper Mach Punch!" Prof scoffed. "Annie, aren't punches like, illegal in wrassling or something?" "Not if they're finishers or you're a rude asshole. That's the rules!" "That's kayfabe," said Booyah. "Respect to kayfabe but this is looking like a shoot fight to me." The man had dragged Ice with him all the way to the rope and got the break by the literal, actual skin of his teeth. Ice held on for a few seconds longer as the ref counted to five, then rolled off the Bruiser's back to the mat. He stood up with a shout and regained his footing as Bruiser Bagoon staggered. Pulling off a pose reminiscent of a Kamen Riding Power Ranger, the Tiger God of Ice shouted. "Hyper!" Crack! One, two, and three rapidfire punches hit the opponent square in the chest. "Ma-HAH!" Ice cocked back and let loose with a wild cross, dropping Bruiser Bagoon to the ground on his back. Wasting little time, Ice rolled in and pulled his legs over his head in a jackknife pinning predicament... "One! Two! THREE!" The crowd exploded in cheers. Streamers erupted over the ring as the ref came and lifted Ice's hand in triumph. With his belt once again over his shoulders, he erupted in a weary, teary expression of unbridled joy. "VICTOLY!" The two men looked at one another over the cheering girl between them. "That's him," they shouted in unison.