The First Volume
Disclaimer: The following is a fan-written parody. Ranma ½ is property of Rumiko Takahashi, Studio Deen, Shogakukan, Viz Media, and Madman Entertainment. Support the official release, okay?
Disclaimer: The following is a fan-written parody. Ranma ½ is property of Rumiko Takahashi, Studio Deen, Shogakukan, Viz Media, and Madman Entertainment. Support the official release, okay?
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. It wasn’t a good time for her–but don’t be mistaken.
While her experience wasn’t great, theirs was awful.
A lesson Katie took from that point in her life was that when you knowingly messed with and provoked someone stronger than you and you got your ass handed to you on a silver platter for it, it was no one else’s fault but your own. If you could learn your lesson and change your ways though, you had a chance at being a better person. If you kept doing it? You were too dumb to live. It was this lesson that brought Katie to the following conclusion:
96% of Furinkan High School’s male student population were irredeemable subhumans.
It was the fourth day in a row that the American transferee had to watch a sad display of lust and desperation take place in front of the school: a literal army of boys from first to third year armed with any weapon they could find was gathering in the front courtyard, waiting for a particular girl to show up so they could attack her.
There had to be nearly two hundred of them now, every club from the kendo and boxing to the non-athletic clubs that had no actual business being out on a battlefield. All of them were there to beat her into submission–so that one of them would take her out on a date.
Setting aside how abhorrent everything about that was, what made it worse was that in spite of their numbers, weapons, and lustful determination? These guys were going to get annihilated by this girl, like they had every time they went after her.
She obliterated them; not even taking so much as a graze as she ripped through them like a chainsaw through melting butter and went on her way to class–she wasn’t going to let something like a gang of would-be rapists get in her way of an education, especially if they couldn’t do jack to her. Yet in spite of that, these clowns were determined to beat that date out of her and on the fourth day of this embarrassment Katie was tired of it.
For as strong as she was, the wrecking ball of their affections was just too nice to beat them properly, and while Katie understood why she wouldn’t want to actually maim any of them. She also knew that if it didn’t get driven into the collective heads of these idiots, they would probably go at this for weeks until it just became some twisted tradition that would never stop.
She didn’t come all the way to Japan just to be stuck in another shitty school full of guys who thought beating the shit out of a girl was a great icebreaker.
So with that in mind, the tall, black-haired girl with striking green eyes rolled her shoulders and began to make her way through the crowd of spectating girls and somewhat smarter boys–the precious 4 percenters who knew better–towards the front of the group of malcontents. At 180cm she was taller than nearly all of the boys, and the moody, intimidating aura of her foreignness combined with the flat, disinterested look she had on her face most of the time parted the more timid and polite of the crowd without her having to ask.
Past the onlookers, she made a line straight for the front gate, walking along the wall. A glance to her left as she reached the gate allowed her to catch sight of the girl in question, a cute girl with long dark hair walking with her slightly taller, bob-cut sporting older sister. Even from this distance, she could see that the girl of the hour was looking pretty agitated.
A glance to her right saw the slavering crowd, of young men readying weapons and psyching themselves up. “Today was the day,” she could hear them reassuring themselves and each other, “One of them will do it! One of them will beat her and get to go on a date with her and maybe even get to win her heart entirely!”
Yeah right.
Katie sighed and stopped, turning to face the group of boys. Seeing her step forth, the horde grew confused and stared at her. It wasn’t like they didn’t know who she was, the foreign transfer student from America’s Pacific Northwest stood out like a sore thumb, being taller than a bunch of the boys and emanating an intimidating aura that put off even the boldest attempts to approach her. Why was she stepping up all of a sudden?
Speaking clearly, but with a rustic accent, she revealed her intentions.
“Howdy guys, don’t y’all think this has gone on long enough?”
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 Kuno. The rest just thought Akane was cute–in spite of three beatings in a row she laid on them that already had people questioning their collective manhood.
Akane looked ahead, ready to take on the horde, and saw the situation brewing at the school’s gate. “What’s going on there?”
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 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, and Akane and Nabiki behind her give pause.
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.”
As he roared his kiai and charged at Katie, closing the distance with her, Nabiki turned to Akane. “Hey… when he says he’s gonna lose with all his might, is he or is he not holding back?”
When he reached Katie, he swung down diagonally on his target–who abruptly moved to his right, outside of the slash and to safety. The gust of wind kicked up off the blade’s passage reached both sisters, standing some twenty yards away, causing their hair and the loose fabric of their dirndl uniforms to ruffle about in a strong but not lascivious manner.
“Nevermind,” Nabiki said.
Akane, face buried in her hands, wanted to go home.
The draft from that missed blow was much stronger near the wooden blade, and Katie looked at Kuno’s lowered weapon in surprise. Her eyes darted from the edge of the bokken to his face, hidden by his bangs save for his confident smirk.
“… Well, shit,” she muttered as she realized this man wasn’t the joke she thought he was.
“Again!” Kuno shouted and the bokken came up in a rising sweep aimed for Katie’s lower right side.
Katie moved with the blade, sidestepping ahead of it before ducking down beneath not only its arc, but the path of the leading edge of the shockwave that came off it. Just as quickly Kuno swung down, and Katie dodged to his left into a roll. Getting back on her feet, she jumped back from Kuno as he pursued, angling her body and her evasions of his strikes to get out the path of that blade even as the strikes came up short.
“Again! Again! Again! Again!” Kuno repeated with every blow. “Again!”
He swung downward diagonally left, she ducked to his right.
“Again!”
Rising vertically, she moved up and to his left.
“Again!”
Downward right, she went dropped straight down and rolled back from his reach.
Kuno Tatewaki was exactly as Katie said–not in the least bit smart. However, everything else that was said about him not woven into his flowery nonsense was true. He was the undisputed and undefeated champion of the High School Kendo circuit–so much so that he was summarily banned from the High School Kendo circuit at the end of the previous school year.
He was stronger than every other boy at the school.
And, most importantly, he was losing with all his might.
“Again!” He yelled and unleashed a horizontal sweep for Katie’s hips that she had no recourse but to hop straight up over, curling her legs for the wooden blade to pass beneath her knees.
He also knew how to fight. “Foolish!”
Like a viper the bokken’s tip was thrust straight forward, aimed for Katie’s heart. In the same instant Katie’s feet shot back to the ground and she sidestepped the thrust.
The blade missed, but the force of the blow crossed the open air between Kuno and the school’s wall, striking it and blasting a bowling ball-sized hole clean through it.
The loud crack of the wall simply breaking from the force of Kuno’s blow brought Akane’s head up from her hands, and she looked over. “What was that…?! What happened?!”
Nabiki’s eyes narrowed a bit as she focused her camera on Katie’s pale, wide-eyed face as she too beheld at the damage done.
“Our girl just learned she’s screwed.”
Katie jumped back from Kuno thrice, until she was halfway towards the corner, and stopping to rest her hand against the wall–her eyes not leaving the hole Kuno made in it until she came to rest. She looked at the wooden sword, then at the wooden head of the maniac wielding it.
Around her, students murmured in silence, the boys crowding closer to look at the hole in the wall he made.
“He didn’t even hit the wall, with a wooden sword…” The karate kid from earlier said in a shaking voice.
“The Captain… this is why he’s feared,” a kendoist among Akane’s opponents said grimly.
The boxer was shaking in his boxing shorts. “We’d never stand a chance against that… I’ll take getting beaten up for months by Akane before I take one hit from Kuno-senpai…”
Akane grimaced in disgust at the crowd, then looked back at Kuno and Katie. Her eyes narrowed as she sized up the two combatants, Katie still leaned against the wall while Kuno enjoyed the dramatic breeze funneled through the hole in the wall he just made.
He was wearing that insufferable, but richly deserved smirk as he brought his sword to his shoulder. “Mesmerized by the beauty of my strength, I see?”
Pulling her hand from the wall, Katie looked from the sword to his face, to his hands, to his face again. “I’ll fess up, yer the strongest martial artist I met in this town since I got here.”
In spite of her ashen expression moments before, she was calm as she let the tension flow from her body and relaxed back into a fighting stance. She brought her fists up high in front of her, her right leading her left, and when her stance lowered, she brought her right leading foot off the ground, her toes just touching the ground.
Akane’s focus tightened sharpened, her eyes widening as she locked onto Katie’s stance, then her face, and then most importantly her eyes. She leaned forward a bit, Nabiki edging up alongside her and trying to muscle in to get the best possible shot.
“That’s… Muay…” She murmured.
“Muay Thai?” Nabiki finished. “Oh man, she’s toast. Kuno-baby’s dumb, but he can at least bring a knife to a fist fight.”
Akane looked from Katie to Kuno and back, before she–to Nabiki’s surprise–just relaxed. Noticing no tension at all in her little sister, Nabiki looked up at her. “What?”
“It’s over,” Akane simply replied.
Kuno lowered his sword again, once again taking it in his mid-stance, the tip pointed at Katie. “Acknowledging an opponent’s strength in the face of defeat, perhaps you do understand the precepts of bushido. When I defeat you, I promise to make as much time as I can to date you.”
Katie didn’t waver from her stance. “Wait, I gotta date you if I lose, too?”
“This is a battle for the heart!” Kuno declared passionately. “Mine or yours, one can only take the other!”
At that, the boys all looked at one another, and the boxer spoke up. “Wait, so if he starts dating her… does this mean Akane’s free?”
“Absolutely not! For my heart belongs to Akane as much as this maiden’s will belong to I!” Kuno corrected them. “Unless you have proven your worth and captured her heart, then it is to no avail!”
A silence followed.
Karate kid spoke up. “Kuno-senpai, does this mean that Akane has all of our hearts?”
“Which means she's free to date us, technically?” Fencer-kun asked, filled with hope.
“NO!” Kuno, Katie, Akane, and Nabiki all said in unison.
“God no,” Katie added for emphasis. “Bless your hearts, though, you tried.”
Kuno began running towards Katie again, keeping his sword pointed at her. “But I shall succeed!”
Katie looked up, just as he raised his sword high again for another vertical strike.
“Prepare yourself, I strike!” And down the sword came again, nowhere near close to her–but it didn’t need to be. The shockwave of his swing surged at Katie, who sidestepped to her left.
“Again!” Kuno shouted as he swung straight up this time, sending another wave of air slicing at her. Katie moved the other direction, avoiding it even as the razor-sharp air lashed horizontal cuts across the sleeve of her uniform and unprotected forearm.
His return stroke was followed by another and another, sending slicing waves at Katie as she performed repeating side hops consecutively to avoid them. With each swing her closed the distance to Katie, shouting again with each unsuccessful attack.
Nabiki stepped even closer, catching every frame. “… You’re running out of wall…”
Akane, arms folded now, waited patiently.
As Katie evaded one more air blade, Kuno let out a victorious laugh. “Even to the end you stand defiant! That is the way of the warrior, yield nothing and stand to the last!”
Instead of vertical slashes, his wooden sword came up straight, a viper poised to strike again at Katie’s heart. The moment Kuno locked on, Katie’s retreat stopped, and she drew her fist to counterattack.
“It will do you, no good! This is your defeat at the hands of The Breaker of Furinkan High, but the beginning of…” Kuno launched himself forward. “OUR LOVE!”
Instead of evading, Katie lunged straight into Kuno’s stab, swinging a powerful haymaker aimed straight for the tip of Kuno’s lancing bokken.
Both fist and sword stopped barely an inch from one another, but there was a tremendous roar and crack as the wall beside them and the ground between them was split by a fine line the same width. The air trembled for a moment, as Kuno’s devastating attack dissipated with such speed that Nabiki’s camera caught the vapor ring of the expanding shockwave.
Nabiki’s eyebrows rose. “Wait.” She did a double take. “Wait, no, wait… what?”
Akane’s lips curled into a smile.
Kuno stared, transfixed on Katie’s fist. “Wait a moment, hold on… what did you–?”
Katie lashed her leg up in a high kick, catching the bokken and launching it up and out of Kuno’s hands.
The kendoist stared at his now vacant grip, then up at his weapon as it ascended skyward, then came tumbling end-over-end to land neatly in Katie’s upraised hand.
He blinked twice in the moment that passed, and followed the weapon with his gaze as Katie brought it down and examined it.
“Huh…” Katie said as weighed it one hand, then in two. “Ain’t nothin’ more than a wooden sword, not even HF… though fer the life of me why would anyone make an HF wooden sword…”
Kuno’s hands began trembling as Katie firmly gripped the weapon. “… M-Madam… you seem to have my weapon.”
Katie stopped and looked at him. “Mm, I sure do. Now… I got me a question; do you have another one on you?”
At that question, Kuno quietly shook his head.
In response, Katie let out another short hum and nodded. “All right. Now then… I believe I had a request I asked of you. Id est, it’s time I got to smashing your face on every flat surface in this here school yard.”
Kuno cleared his throat. “Madam, may I ask to have my blade back, before you proceed to engage in such activity. I… ahem… am a kendoist you see, and I need a blade in order to fight you to the fullest of my ability.”
Katie looked from Kuno to his bokken, and back again. When he smiled emphatically at the idea of his weapon being returned, she promptly threw it to her side–and with a crunch the bokken punched clean through the wall to get stuck halfway.
“My guy… if you come ‘round here picking a fight you can’t win without a stick? Then that is a YOU situation.”
Kuno stopped. “Madam, I beg your pardon, but I believe you challenged me–” Katie’s plowed a right cross into his face and followed it in quick succession with a left. Bruises immediately appearing on his cheeks, Kuno twirled away from her groaning in pain.
“There we go,” Akane said as Katie pressed the attack.
Tottering around to face her, Kuno weakly raised his hands to block. His world flashed white as she swung her left leg in a roundhouse into his ribs, kneed him in the stomach with her right leg, and rotated her body to elbow him in the side of his head. Each blow sounded like thunderclaps, both to him and to the spectators watching in stunned silence.
“Hurgh, huuh…!” Kuno groaned as he stumbled from side to side. “W-wait…!”
Katie turned and over and brought her knee up high to smash it flat against his nose. When he staggered back, she began to hop in place.
“I’m sorry, is this goin’ a bit too fast?” She asked, her eyes alight with malice. “Here, hon… let me make it easier fer ya! I STRIKE!”
She kneed him in his right side.
“Again!”
She kneed him in his left.
“Again!”
Kicking his right leg in, she dropped him to his knee.
“Again!”
She slammed a left low kick into his right arm.
“AGAIN!”
She kneed him across the face, sending him spinning around to land on his belly.
Katie adopted a low, strong stance, her left fist and foot pointed at Kuno as he lay there.
“Hey now, you ain’t tapped out already, are ya? That’s just the ground! I still gotta few walls I want you ta meet!”
Groaning in pain, Kuno tried to lift himself up onto his right arm, but a flash of pain made him think better of it and switched to his left. Trembling like a leaf, he slowly got up and staggered forward away from Katie and towards the students. Flecks of spittle and lines of drool cascaded from his mouth as he attempted to rise to full height, but once more stopped from his radiating injuries.
His blurry vision focused on the horde of boys normally laid out by Akane at this point in the morning, and he let out a mumble. “… Word…”
Behind him, Katie inched closer, her face a mask of wrath. “They can’t hear ya, buck.”
Kuno lowered his head, then raised it to yell. “A SWORD! SOMEONE PASS ME A SWORD!”
The boys who feared his wrath enough to attack the girl they admired, stared back in solidarity as they answered all at once.
“Nah.”
Katie’s right hand came to rest on his left shoulder, and she leaned close to his ear. “Sowin’ all that wind with that stick of yours, only to not have it when the whirlwind comes a knockin’. That’s a damn shame.”
Yanking Kuno around, she grabbed his right shoulder and drove her right elbow into his face a half dozen times before she spun in place to build up massive momentum and drove her right knee into his left arm, an audible snap filling the airbefore Kuno hobbled back from her.
Akane was positively radiant now, never in her wildest dreams did she think this morning would be so satisfying.
Nabiki, still filming, pondered where this video was even going to go now. “Is Worldstar still a thing, or will LiveLeak get more views?”
Despite his bruises and his broken bones, Kuno spaced his feet and kept standing. Heaving for breath, he looked up at Katie with his left eye–the right already swelling shut just like how his lips were starting to balloon–and began to blubber.
“… You… you have not…”
Katie lifted an eyebrow.
“… beaten me.
She turned and brought a hand up to her ear. “What was that bucky? Yer kinda mumblin’ there.”
“… You have not beaten me,” he said, gaining strength as he declared. “With no sword… with no arms… with naught but the spirit of the warrior, the honor of the Kuno bloodline… I will demonstrate my true power!”
In spite of his pain, he managed to stand upright and even partially open his swollen eye “You, an American… cannot understand the depths of power, that the bushido code provides me…! This is the moment, that I, Kuno Tatewaki… will strike you down with all my might…”
After a brief pause, Katie gestured for him to finish.
“… And you shall date me with all of yours!”
Katie nodded. “There ya go. Just wanted to make sure you’re still a denser than a devil’s food cake.”
She snapped back into her fighting stance. “But you know what? Let’s get that first date going right now.”
Kuno stopped. “… Wait, you shall?”
Spacing her feet, Katie got ready as she looked at Kuno and the school behind him. “Mm… the issue is… it’ll only last about eight seconds.”
And just like that, Kuno seemed to have forgotten he was injured at all. Closing his eyes, he began to speak as Katie shot towards him like a missile. “Even a date of one second is fine when it is with-”
The blow that followed didn't seem visually all that different, but where the others merely prompted desperate flailing, the knee that caught Kuno in the solar plexus forced his eyes to widen in sheer heightened panic.
Akane's joy cut a little as she felt something was very different from the other hits.
Nabiki, not a martial artist, could read the panic in his eyes. "What's with th–"
She was cut off when Kuno opened his mouth to speak and proceeded to spew out a mouthful of blood. “Oh… shit.”
“Let this be a lesson to ya, bucko.” Katie swept back, performed a full body rotation as she dropped low, then leaped and swung her knee up to collide full force with his chin shattering his jaw.
A blast of wind washed over the students behind Kuno, blowing back hair and flipping up skirts, before there was a loud bang behind them. Behind Katie, Akane gasped when she saw a huge dent appear in the face of the clock near the top of the school’s front. At that same moment, Katie ground her knee against Kuno’s ruined chin, her green eyes lit up with fury. The air was still–filled with incredible tension even after the strange impact.
“Don’t be the clown…”
All at once the suspended tension snapped, and she completed the motion of her knee to launch Kuno skyward.
“AT YER OWN RODEO”
The recoil of her blow caused her to perform a backflip, and Kuno–a trail of condensation rings radiating from him in his short flight–smashed into the clock at the center of the school’s tower and hitting the clock’s bell behind it with a loud, warped clang and an uncomfortable grinding of gears.
The schoolyard was quiet again, as Katie landed on her feet. Letting her hands hang limp at her sides, she looked at the group of students staring at the hole in the building where Kuno had gone–and waited. Sure enough, one by one all eyes returned to the foreign girl who just made an embarrassment out of who had been once the undisputed lord of the school. Quiet murmurs rose.
“She… she put him through the school’s clock.”
“So powerful…”
“Is he dead?”
Everyone waited and listened. Sure enough, they could hear a high-pitched whine of pain from a man too durable to avoid being knocked unconscious, but not durable enough for when it counted.
Katie let out a sigh and dusted off her knees. “Hoo… I needed that like a peacock needs a hen…”
Akane walked over to Katie, entering her field of view with care. The taller girl noticed and turned her head to greet her. “Howdy.”
“Hi,” Akane returned. “You are… way stronger than I expected.”
Katie shrugged her shoulders. “I’d better be, ‘else all that martial arts training was a huge waste of time and money.”
She looked back up at where Kuno’s legs dangled out of the school.
“Like with that dumb buck; he oughta look for a refund–at least to help with the medical bills.”
Akane let out a small laugh. “Yeah.”
Katie placed her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. “I mean, who in their right mind practices kendo, and don’t even know how to fight without a weapon?”
Akane shook her head. “The problem is right there… he practices kendo, and nothing else.”
It took a moment for Katie to process. “… Oh, he’s an over-tiered sport fighter.”
Akane closed her eyes and nodded once in confirmation. “Mm.”
Katie tsked. “Ya hate to see it.”
She brought a hand up to herself. “By the way, the name’s Katie. Katie Izland.”
Akane blinked. “Izurando? That’s a bit weird.”
Katie waved it off. “Ugh, yes, there’s a Z instead of an S. It ain’t my first choice in a name, but I can’t go helping it.”
Akane nodded, and then bowed to her. “I’m sorry you had to be bothered, but thank you for stepping in. I don’t think I could put up for his nonsense for another day.”
Katie waved it off. “Weren’t no thang. Been too long since I had me a real fight.”
Nabiki joined them. “A real fight? I’ve seen slaughterhouses that gave the cows better odds.”
She hadn’t, but the sheer one-sidedness of that beating warranted the comparison. Katie appreciated the reference.
“Even better, he won’t be bothering anyone none for a hot minute,” Katie said with confidence.
And with that, an epiphany struck one of the boys in the horde of Akane’s suitors. “Wait, hang on. Does this mean we can ask Akane out on dates like normal people now? We don’t have to do this fighting thing anymore?”
Akane went stiff where she stood, her eyes wide and glassing over as fury radiated from her.
Before any could ask what Katie had referred to… Akane’s sheer rage manifested as a visible blue glow, bright enough to make Katie hop back from her.
“… Uh oh,” she said as Akane began to twitch and ramble.
“Ask me… out? Still what think… you after… me did to…?”
Nabiki was impressed, never had she seen her little sister so angry that sentences were a challenge. Like a car with a popped clutch rolling down hill, though, Akane’s sputtering stopped.
It was the only warning anyone had, before she exploded.
“I’LL NEVER GO OUT WITH ANY OF YOU DISGUSTING PERVERTS!”
Just about every boy in the group went so pale they seemed titanium white except for a faint blue shade appearing on their foreheads and descending down their faces. Nabiki stepped back to catch everything on camera.
“YOU THINK THAT I’D GIVE YOU THE TIME OF DAY, WHEN I HAD TO PUT UP WITH YOU SHOUTING AT ME TO GO OUT WITH YOU WHILE YOU WERE SWINGING FOR MY FACE?! SCREW YOU! SCREW ALL OF YOU FOR EVEN THINKING IT!”
A dark cloud appeared over them, weighing down their shoulders and forcing their heads down in shame. The students not directly in the path of Akane’s verbal assault stood stock still, most of them–almost all girls–in awe of the unfathomable wrath that was pouring from the girl.
“YOU WEAKLINGS COULDN’T EVEN BEAT ME UP WHEN THERE WERE HUNDREDS OF YOU, WHY THE HELL WOULD I DATE ONE OF YOU?!”
Katie’s mouth dropped open, but no words came out.
On the other end of the verbal assault, what had once been a large percentage of the male student body were now extras for a zombie apocalypse film.
“SO GO AND FIND SOME OTHER GIRL TO BOTHER AND LEAVE ME ALONE–OH WAIT! YOU CAN’T! BECAUSE EVERY FREAKING GIRL HERE KNOWS YOU’RE DESPERATE ENOUGH TO BEAT UP A GIRL YOU CAN’T HAVE!”
It was the most powerful and devastating truth of her eruption: in their desperation to avoid Kuno’s wrath they hadn’t just poisoned the well–they contaminated the entire aquifer. All any girl saw for the last three days were hundreds of boys gathering up to beat up a girl and get beaten by that girl like she wasn’t trying.
Who would date a guy like that? Who would want to go near a guy like that? Who could call themselves a man after that?
Her long, ribbon-secured hair looking more disheveled than it ever did fighting the boys, her face red, and her body covered in sweat, Akane stood there gulping down a lungful of air and shaking as she growled out the last words she ever wanted to say to any boy.
“Get the hell out of my sight, and if I lock eyes with any of you, I will do so much worse than what happened to Kuno!”
Completely destroyed, the male students of Furinkan High School obeyed, and one by one began to disperse.
As they marched silently away, everyone could see it in their lifeless eyes: there was no hope for them, no light, not even a faint glimmer. All romantic aspirations for every single one of them were dashed with their irrational decisions. There would never be a springtime of their high school days, or real love and companionship to look forward to.
All that was lost forever, in lieu of a dark, lonely future surrounded by plastic figurines and posters of unattainable fictional representations of women, warmed only by the light of computer-generated wives programmed to worship them but feel nothing.
Akane couldn’t imagine a more fitting punishment.
Katie took a deep breath. “… Damn.”
Nabiki let out a whistle as Akane’s reactor scrammed and the meltdown ended. “Well, you didn’t throw a punch this time, but I think you neutered all of them.”
“They never had any balls to begin with,” Akane snapped back.
“Inclined to agree there,” Katie said as she dusted off her hands. “Iffin’ that’s all square, I’m gonna go to class.”
As she began to walk away, however, Akane called to her. “Wait, Izurando-san!”
Katie stopped and looked back at Akane. “Yeah?”
Akane bowed deep once more. “Seriously, thank you so much, and I am sorry you had to see that.”
Katie waved it off. “Don’t apologize fer doing the right thing; those boys had no business picking on a pretty lil’ thing like you.”
Katie’s compliment hit its mark with Akane. “Oh, um… thank you for that as well, uh…”
Akane brightened and seized the opportunity to learn more about the mysterious girl and that unusual attack of hers. “Do you want to have lunch together?”
Nabiki raised an eyebrow in curiosity, as Katie gave Akane a probing glance, and smiled herself.
“Sure, you don’t mind eating lunch outside, do you?
Akane shook her head. “No, that’s fine.”
Katie smiled a little broader and reached out to give Akane the V-sign. “Cool. I’ll see you out under the trees then.”
Katie turned and began walking back to the school along with the rest of the dispersing students. As they watched her go, Nabiki looked over to Akane, who was happier than she’d been over the last few days, despite having just gone off.
“She’s so nice,” she said.
Nabiki shrugged her shoulders. “Eh, she’s all right, I guess. Let me know when a hot guy comes along.”
Akane huffed noisily at that. “A hot guy? Here? If I ever meet a hot guy our age in this town, that’ll be the day I’m engaged to him!”
"ACHOO!"
The sneeze of a handsome Japanese young man dressed in a karate gi, with dark blue eyes and black hair ending in a tightly-braided pigtail, made his father and their tour guide–both middle aged, follically challenged men–jump.
Sniffling, Saotome Ranma brought his fingers to his nose. "Aw geez, I hope I'm not coming down with a cold."
"Don't you worry, son, these springs will cure all that ails you even as we train," his father, Saotome Genma, declared.
Ranma sniffled again and shivered. The air here was pretty chilly, for a place that was supposed to be a spring. "I hope so, it doesn't feel like no hot spring though, Pop."
Their tour guide, a stocky Chinese man wearing a green uniform and matching cap, looked back at them. In stilted but comprehensible Japanese he spoke urgently.
"It not hot-spring, honored guests, it cursed spring. Very dangerous, you no want to fall in."
Genma dismissed the tour guide's warning like he didn't understand it. "Whatever, even if they're not hot springs. There's nothing that a good workout won't cure!"
Ranma had been paying more attention. "Wait, what about not falling in?"
"Don't worry about it," Genma insisted. "Besides, that's the whole point of this training, you won't fall in."
The two of them looked ahead at the cursed pools of the Jusenkyo Springs before them. Thousands of wide pools spread out for as far as they could see in the mist-shrouded clearing in the hilly forest.
"Trust your old man, son. Nothing will go wrong."
Disclaimer: The following is a fan-written parody. Ranma ½ is property of Rumiko Takahashi, Studio Deen, Shogakukan, Viz Media, and Madman Entertainment. Support the official release, okay?
SENPAI
A story of Good Friends
|Right and Wrong Lessons|
A story of Good Friends
|Right and Wrong Lessons|
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. It wasn’t a good time for her–but don’t be mistaken.
While her experience wasn’t great, theirs was awful.
A lesson Katie took from that point in her life was that when you knowingly messed with and provoked someone stronger than you and you got your ass handed to you on a silver platter for it, it was no one else’s fault but your own. If you could learn your lesson and change your ways though, you had a chance at being a better person. If you kept doing it? You were too dumb to live. It was this lesson that brought Katie to the following conclusion:
96% of Furinkan High School’s male student population were irredeemable subhumans.
It was the fourth day in a row that the American transferee had to watch a sad display of lust and desperation take place in front of the school: a literal army of boys from first to third year armed with any weapon they could find was gathering in the front courtyard, waiting for a particular girl to show up so they could attack her.
There had to be nearly two hundred of them now, every club from the kendo and boxing to the non-athletic clubs that had no actual business being out on a battlefield. All of them were there to beat her into submission–so that one of them would take her out on a date.
Setting aside how abhorrent everything about that was, what made it worse was that in spite of their numbers, weapons, and lustful determination? These guys were going to get annihilated by this girl, like they had every time they went after her.
She obliterated them; not even taking so much as a graze as she ripped through them like a chainsaw through melting butter and went on her way to class–she wasn’t going to let something like a gang of would-be rapists get in her way of an education, especially if they couldn’t do jack to her. Yet in spite of that, these clowns were determined to beat that date out of her and on the fourth day of this embarrassment Katie was tired of it.
For as strong as she was, the wrecking ball of their affections was just too nice to beat them properly, and while Katie understood why she wouldn’t want to actually maim any of them. She also knew that if it didn’t get driven into the collective heads of these idiots, they would probably go at this for weeks until it just became some twisted tradition that would never stop.
She didn’t come all the way to Japan just to be stuck in another shitty school full of guys who thought beating the shit out of a girl was a great icebreaker.
So with that in mind, the tall, black-haired girl with striking green eyes rolled her shoulders and began to make her way through the crowd of spectating girls and somewhat smarter boys–the precious 4 percenters who knew better–towards the front of the group of malcontents. At 180cm she was taller than nearly all of the boys, and the moody, intimidating aura of her foreignness combined with the flat, disinterested look she had on her face most of the time parted the more timid and polite of the crowd without her having to ask.
Past the onlookers, she made a line straight for the front gate, walking along the wall. A glance to her left as she reached the gate allowed her to catch sight of the girl in question, a cute girl with long dark hair walking with her slightly taller, bob-cut sporting older sister. Even from this distance, she could see that the girl of the hour was looking pretty agitated.
A glance to her right saw the slavering crowd, of young men readying weapons and psyching themselves up. “Today was the day,” she could hear them reassuring themselves and each other, “One of them will do it! One of them will beat her and get to go on a date with her and maybe even get to win her heart entirely!”
Yeah right.
Katie sighed and stopped, turning to face the group of boys. Seeing her step forth, the horde grew confused and stared at her. It wasn’t like they didn’t know who she was, the foreign transfer student from America’s Pacific Northwest stood out like a sore thumb, being taller than a bunch of the boys and emanating an intimidating aura that put off even the boldest attempts to approach her. Why was she stepping up all of a sudden?
Speaking clearly, but with a rustic accent, she revealed her intentions.
“Howdy guys, don’t y’all think this has gone on long enough?”
|The Buck|
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 Kuno. The rest just thought Akane was cute–in spite of three beatings in a row she laid on them that already had people questioning their collective manhood.
Akane looked ahead, ready to take on the horde, and saw the situation brewing at the school’s gate. “What’s going on there?”
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 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, and Akane and Nabiki behind her give pause.
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.”
|The Breaker|
As he roared his kiai and charged at Katie, closing the distance with her, Nabiki turned to Akane. “Hey… when he says he’s gonna lose with all his might, is he or is he not holding back?”
When he reached Katie, he swung down diagonally on his target–who abruptly moved to his right, outside of the slash and to safety. The gust of wind kicked up off the blade’s passage reached both sisters, standing some twenty yards away, causing their hair and the loose fabric of their dirndl uniforms to ruffle about in a strong but not lascivious manner.
“Nevermind,” Nabiki said.
Akane, face buried in her hands, wanted to go home.
The draft from that missed blow was much stronger near the wooden blade, and Katie looked at Kuno’s lowered weapon in surprise. Her eyes darted from the edge of the bokken to his face, hidden by his bangs save for his confident smirk.
“… Well, shit,” she muttered as she realized this man wasn’t the joke she thought he was.
“Again!” Kuno shouted and the bokken came up in a rising sweep aimed for Katie’s lower right side.
Katie moved with the blade, sidestepping ahead of it before ducking down beneath not only its arc, but the path of the leading edge of the shockwave that came off it. Just as quickly Kuno swung down, and Katie dodged to his left into a roll. Getting back on her feet, she jumped back from Kuno as he pursued, angling her body and her evasions of his strikes to get out the path of that blade even as the strikes came up short.
“Again! Again! Again! Again!” Kuno repeated with every blow. “Again!”
He swung downward diagonally left, she ducked to his right.
“Again!”
Rising vertically, she moved up and to his left.
“Again!”
Downward right, she went dropped straight down and rolled back from his reach.
Kuno Tatewaki was exactly as Katie said–not in the least bit smart. However, everything else that was said about him not woven into his flowery nonsense was true. He was the undisputed and undefeated champion of the High School Kendo circuit–so much so that he was summarily banned from the High School Kendo circuit at the end of the previous school year.
He was stronger than every other boy at the school.
And, most importantly, he was losing with all his might.
“Again!” He yelled and unleashed a horizontal sweep for Katie’s hips that she had no recourse but to hop straight up over, curling her legs for the wooden blade to pass beneath her knees.
He also knew how to fight. “Foolish!”
Like a viper the bokken’s tip was thrust straight forward, aimed for Katie’s heart. In the same instant Katie’s feet shot back to the ground and she sidestepped the thrust.
The blade missed, but the force of the blow crossed the open air between Kuno and the school’s wall, striking it and blasting a bowling ball-sized hole clean through it.
The loud crack of the wall simply breaking from the force of Kuno’s blow brought Akane’s head up from her hands, and she looked over. “What was that…?! What happened?!”
Nabiki’s eyes narrowed a bit as she focused her camera on Katie’s pale, wide-eyed face as she too beheld at the damage done.
“Our girl just learned she’s screwed.”
Katie jumped back from Kuno thrice, until she was halfway towards the corner, and stopping to rest her hand against the wall–her eyes not leaving the hole Kuno made in it until she came to rest. She looked at the wooden sword, then at the wooden head of the maniac wielding it.
Around her, students murmured in silence, the boys crowding closer to look at the hole in the wall he made.
“He didn’t even hit the wall, with a wooden sword…” The karate kid from earlier said in a shaking voice.
“The Captain… this is why he’s feared,” a kendoist among Akane’s opponents said grimly.
The boxer was shaking in his boxing shorts. “We’d never stand a chance against that… I’ll take getting beaten up for months by Akane before I take one hit from Kuno-senpai…”
Akane grimaced in disgust at the crowd, then looked back at Kuno and Katie. Her eyes narrowed as she sized up the two combatants, Katie still leaned against the wall while Kuno enjoyed the dramatic breeze funneled through the hole in the wall he just made.
He was wearing that insufferable, but richly deserved smirk as he brought his sword to his shoulder. “Mesmerized by the beauty of my strength, I see?”
Pulling her hand from the wall, Katie looked from the sword to his face, to his hands, to his face again. “I’ll fess up, yer the strongest martial artist I met in this town since I got here.”
In spite of her ashen expression moments before, she was calm as she let the tension flow from her body and relaxed back into a fighting stance. She brought her fists up high in front of her, her right leading her left, and when her stance lowered, she brought her right leading foot off the ground, her toes just touching the ground.
Akane’s focus tightened sharpened, her eyes widening as she locked onto Katie’s stance, then her face, and then most importantly her eyes. She leaned forward a bit, Nabiki edging up alongside her and trying to muscle in to get the best possible shot.
“That’s… Muay…” She murmured.
“Muay Thai?” Nabiki finished. “Oh man, she’s toast. Kuno-baby’s dumb, but he can at least bring a knife to a fist fight.”
Akane looked from Katie to Kuno and back, before she–to Nabiki’s surprise–just relaxed. Noticing no tension at all in her little sister, Nabiki looked up at her. “What?”
“It’s over,” Akane simply replied.
Kuno lowered his sword again, once again taking it in his mid-stance, the tip pointed at Katie. “Acknowledging an opponent’s strength in the face of defeat, perhaps you do understand the precepts of bushido. When I defeat you, I promise to make as much time as I can to date you.”
Katie didn’t waver from her stance. “Wait, I gotta date you if I lose, too?”
“This is a battle for the heart!” Kuno declared passionately. “Mine or yours, one can only take the other!”
At that, the boys all looked at one another, and the boxer spoke up. “Wait, so if he starts dating her… does this mean Akane’s free?”
“Absolutely not! For my heart belongs to Akane as much as this maiden’s will belong to I!” Kuno corrected them. “Unless you have proven your worth and captured her heart, then it is to no avail!”
A silence followed.
Karate kid spoke up. “Kuno-senpai, does this mean that Akane has all of our hearts?”
“Which means she's free to date us, technically?” Fencer-kun asked, filled with hope.
“NO!” Kuno, Katie, Akane, and Nabiki all said in unison.
“God no,” Katie added for emphasis. “Bless your hearts, though, you tried.”
Kuno began running towards Katie again, keeping his sword pointed at her. “But I shall succeed!”
Katie looked up, just as he raised his sword high again for another vertical strike.
“Prepare yourself, I strike!” And down the sword came again, nowhere near close to her–but it didn’t need to be. The shockwave of his swing surged at Katie, who sidestepped to her left.
“Again!” Kuno shouted as he swung straight up this time, sending another wave of air slicing at her. Katie moved the other direction, avoiding it even as the razor-sharp air lashed horizontal cuts across the sleeve of her uniform and unprotected forearm.
His return stroke was followed by another and another, sending slicing waves at Katie as she performed repeating side hops consecutively to avoid them. With each swing her closed the distance to Katie, shouting again with each unsuccessful attack.
Nabiki stepped even closer, catching every frame. “… You’re running out of wall…”
Akane, arms folded now, waited patiently.
As Katie evaded one more air blade, Kuno let out a victorious laugh. “Even to the end you stand defiant! That is the way of the warrior, yield nothing and stand to the last!”
Instead of vertical slashes, his wooden sword came up straight, a viper poised to strike again at Katie’s heart. The moment Kuno locked on, Katie’s retreat stopped, and she drew her fist to counterattack.
“It will do you, no good! This is your defeat at the hands of The Breaker of Furinkan High, but the beginning of…” Kuno launched himself forward. “OUR LOVE!”
Instead of evading, Katie lunged straight into Kuno’s stab, swinging a powerful haymaker aimed straight for the tip of Kuno’s lancing bokken.
Both fist and sword stopped barely an inch from one another, but there was a tremendous roar and crack as the wall beside them and the ground between them was split by a fine line the same width. The air trembled for a moment, as Kuno’s devastating attack dissipated with such speed that Nabiki’s camera caught the vapor ring of the expanding shockwave.
Nabiki’s eyebrows rose. “Wait.” She did a double take. “Wait, no, wait… what?”
Akane’s lips curled into a smile.
Kuno stared, transfixed on Katie’s fist. “Wait a moment, hold on… what did you–?”
Katie lashed her leg up in a high kick, catching the bokken and launching it up and out of Kuno’s hands.
The kendoist stared at his now vacant grip, then up at his weapon as it ascended skyward, then came tumbling end-over-end to land neatly in Katie’s upraised hand.
He blinked twice in the moment that passed, and followed the weapon with his gaze as Katie brought it down and examined it.
“Huh…” Katie said as weighed it one hand, then in two. “Ain’t nothin’ more than a wooden sword, not even HF… though fer the life of me why would anyone make an HF wooden sword…”
Kuno’s hands began trembling as Katie firmly gripped the weapon. “… M-Madam… you seem to have my weapon.”
Katie stopped and looked at him. “Mm, I sure do. Now… I got me a question; do you have another one on you?”
At that question, Kuno quietly shook his head.
In response, Katie let out another short hum and nodded. “All right. Now then… I believe I had a request I asked of you. Id est, it’s time I got to smashing your face on every flat surface in this here school yard.”
Kuno cleared his throat. “Madam, may I ask to have my blade back, before you proceed to engage in such activity. I… ahem… am a kendoist you see, and I need a blade in order to fight you to the fullest of my ability.”
Katie looked from Kuno to his bokken, and back again. When he smiled emphatically at the idea of his weapon being returned, she promptly threw it to her side–and with a crunch the bokken punched clean through the wall to get stuck halfway.
“My guy… if you come ‘round here picking a fight you can’t win without a stick? Then that is a YOU situation.”
Kuno stopped. “Madam, I beg your pardon, but I believe you challenged me–” Katie’s plowed a right cross into his face and followed it in quick succession with a left. Bruises immediately appearing on his cheeks, Kuno twirled away from her groaning in pain.
“There we go,” Akane said as Katie pressed the attack.
Tottering around to face her, Kuno weakly raised his hands to block. His world flashed white as she swung her left leg in a roundhouse into his ribs, kneed him in the stomach with her right leg, and rotated her body to elbow him in the side of his head. Each blow sounded like thunderclaps, both to him and to the spectators watching in stunned silence.
“Hurgh, huuh…!” Kuno groaned as he stumbled from side to side. “W-wait…!”
Katie turned and over and brought her knee up high to smash it flat against his nose. When he staggered back, she began to hop in place.
“I’m sorry, is this goin’ a bit too fast?” She asked, her eyes alight with malice. “Here, hon… let me make it easier fer ya! I STRIKE!”
She kneed him in his right side.
“Again!”
She kneed him in his left.
“Again!”
Kicking his right leg in, she dropped him to his knee.
“Again!”
She slammed a left low kick into his right arm.
“AGAIN!”
She kneed him across the face, sending him spinning around to land on his belly.
Katie adopted a low, strong stance, her left fist and foot pointed at Kuno as he lay there.
“Hey now, you ain’t tapped out already, are ya? That’s just the ground! I still gotta few walls I want you ta meet!”
Groaning in pain, Kuno tried to lift himself up onto his right arm, but a flash of pain made him think better of it and switched to his left. Trembling like a leaf, he slowly got up and staggered forward away from Katie and towards the students. Flecks of spittle and lines of drool cascaded from his mouth as he attempted to rise to full height, but once more stopped from his radiating injuries.
His blurry vision focused on the horde of boys normally laid out by Akane at this point in the morning, and he let out a mumble. “… Word…”
Behind him, Katie inched closer, her face a mask of wrath. “They can’t hear ya, buck.”
Kuno lowered his head, then raised it to yell. “A SWORD! SOMEONE PASS ME A SWORD!”
The boys who feared his wrath enough to attack the girl they admired, stared back in solidarity as they answered all at once.
“Nah.”
Katie’s right hand came to rest on his left shoulder, and she leaned close to his ear. “Sowin’ all that wind with that stick of yours, only to not have it when the whirlwind comes a knockin’. That’s a damn shame.”
Yanking Kuno around, she grabbed his right shoulder and drove her right elbow into his face a half dozen times before she spun in place to build up massive momentum and drove her right knee into his left arm, an audible snap filling the airbefore Kuno hobbled back from her.
Akane was positively radiant now, never in her wildest dreams did she think this morning would be so satisfying.
Nabiki, still filming, pondered where this video was even going to go now. “Is Worldstar still a thing, or will LiveLeak get more views?”
Despite his bruises and his broken bones, Kuno spaced his feet and kept standing. Heaving for breath, he looked up at Katie with his left eye–the right already swelling shut just like how his lips were starting to balloon–and began to blubber.
“… You… you have not…”
Katie lifted an eyebrow.
“… beaten me.
She turned and brought a hand up to her ear. “What was that bucky? Yer kinda mumblin’ there.”
“… You have not beaten me,” he said, gaining strength as he declared. “With no sword… with no arms… with naught but the spirit of the warrior, the honor of the Kuno bloodline… I will demonstrate my true power!”
In spite of his pain, he managed to stand upright and even partially open his swollen eye “You, an American… cannot understand the depths of power, that the bushido code provides me…! This is the moment, that I, Kuno Tatewaki… will strike you down with all my might…”
After a brief pause, Katie gestured for him to finish.
“… And you shall date me with all of yours!”
Katie nodded. “There ya go. Just wanted to make sure you’re still a denser than a devil’s food cake.”
She snapped back into her fighting stance. “But you know what? Let’s get that first date going right now.”
Kuno stopped. “… Wait, you shall?”
Spacing her feet, Katie got ready as she looked at Kuno and the school behind him. “Mm… the issue is… it’ll only last about eight seconds.”
And just like that, Kuno seemed to have forgotten he was injured at all. Closing his eyes, he began to speak as Katie shot towards him like a missile. “Even a date of one second is fine when it is with-”
The blow that followed didn't seem visually all that different, but where the others merely prompted desperate flailing, the knee that caught Kuno in the solar plexus forced his eyes to widen in sheer heightened panic.
Akane's joy cut a little as she felt something was very different from the other hits.
Nabiki, not a martial artist, could read the panic in his eyes. "What's with th–"
She was cut off when Kuno opened his mouth to speak and proceeded to spew out a mouthful of blood. “Oh… shit.”
“Let this be a lesson to ya, bucko.” Katie swept back, performed a full body rotation as she dropped low, then leaped and swung her knee up to collide full force with his chin shattering his jaw.
A blast of wind washed over the students behind Kuno, blowing back hair and flipping up skirts, before there was a loud bang behind them. Behind Katie, Akane gasped when she saw a huge dent appear in the face of the clock near the top of the school’s front. At that same moment, Katie ground her knee against Kuno’s ruined chin, her green eyes lit up with fury. The air was still–filled with incredible tension even after the strange impact.
“Don’t be the clown…”
All at once the suspended tension snapped, and she completed the motion of her knee to launch Kuno skyward.
“AT YER OWN RODEO”
The recoil of her blow caused her to perform a backflip, and Kuno–a trail of condensation rings radiating from him in his short flight–smashed into the clock at the center of the school’s tower and hitting the clock’s bell behind it with a loud, warped clang and an uncomfortable grinding of gears.
|Nuclear|
The schoolyard was quiet again, as Katie landed on her feet. Letting her hands hang limp at her sides, she looked at the group of students staring at the hole in the building where Kuno had gone–and waited. Sure enough, one by one all eyes returned to the foreign girl who just made an embarrassment out of who had been once the undisputed lord of the school. Quiet murmurs rose.
“She… she put him through the school’s clock.”
“So powerful…”
“Is he dead?”
Everyone waited and listened. Sure enough, they could hear a high-pitched whine of pain from a man too durable to avoid being knocked unconscious, but not durable enough for when it counted.
Katie let out a sigh and dusted off her knees. “Hoo… I needed that like a peacock needs a hen…”
Akane walked over to Katie, entering her field of view with care. The taller girl noticed and turned her head to greet her. “Howdy.”
“Hi,” Akane returned. “You are… way stronger than I expected.”
Katie shrugged her shoulders. “I’d better be, ‘else all that martial arts training was a huge waste of time and money.”
She looked back up at where Kuno’s legs dangled out of the school.
“Like with that dumb buck; he oughta look for a refund–at least to help with the medical bills.”
Akane let out a small laugh. “Yeah.”
Katie placed her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. “I mean, who in their right mind practices kendo, and don’t even know how to fight without a weapon?”
Akane shook her head. “The problem is right there… he practices kendo, and nothing else.”
It took a moment for Katie to process. “… Oh, he’s an over-tiered sport fighter.”
Akane closed her eyes and nodded once in confirmation. “Mm.”
Katie tsked. “Ya hate to see it.”
She brought a hand up to herself. “By the way, the name’s Katie. Katie Izland.”
Akane blinked. “Izurando? That’s a bit weird.”
Katie waved it off. “Ugh, yes, there’s a Z instead of an S. It ain’t my first choice in a name, but I can’t go helping it.”
Akane nodded, and then bowed to her. “I’m sorry you had to be bothered, but thank you for stepping in. I don’t think I could put up for his nonsense for another day.”
Katie waved it off. “Weren’t no thang. Been too long since I had me a real fight.”
Nabiki joined them. “A real fight? I’ve seen slaughterhouses that gave the cows better odds.”
She hadn’t, but the sheer one-sidedness of that beating warranted the comparison. Katie appreciated the reference.
“Even better, he won’t be bothering anyone none for a hot minute,” Katie said with confidence.
And with that, an epiphany struck one of the boys in the horde of Akane’s suitors. “Wait, hang on. Does this mean we can ask Akane out on dates like normal people now? We don’t have to do this fighting thing anymore?”
Akane went stiff where she stood, her eyes wide and glassing over as fury radiated from her.
Before any could ask what Katie had referred to… Akane’s sheer rage manifested as a visible blue glow, bright enough to make Katie hop back from her.
“… Uh oh,” she said as Akane began to twitch and ramble.
“Ask me… out? Still what think… you after… me did to…?”
Nabiki was impressed, never had she seen her little sister so angry that sentences were a challenge. Like a car with a popped clutch rolling down hill, though, Akane’s sputtering stopped.
It was the only warning anyone had, before she exploded.
“I’LL NEVER GO OUT WITH ANY OF YOU DISGUSTING PERVERTS!”
Just about every boy in the group went so pale they seemed titanium white except for a faint blue shade appearing on their foreheads and descending down their faces. Nabiki stepped back to catch everything on camera.
“YOU THINK THAT I’D GIVE YOU THE TIME OF DAY, WHEN I HAD TO PUT UP WITH YOU SHOUTING AT ME TO GO OUT WITH YOU WHILE YOU WERE SWINGING FOR MY FACE?! SCREW YOU! SCREW ALL OF YOU FOR EVEN THINKING IT!”
A dark cloud appeared over them, weighing down their shoulders and forcing their heads down in shame. The students not directly in the path of Akane’s verbal assault stood stock still, most of them–almost all girls–in awe of the unfathomable wrath that was pouring from the girl.
“YOU WEAKLINGS COULDN’T EVEN BEAT ME UP WHEN THERE WERE HUNDREDS OF YOU, WHY THE HELL WOULD I DATE ONE OF YOU?!”
Katie’s mouth dropped open, but no words came out.
On the other end of the verbal assault, what had once been a large percentage of the male student body were now extras for a zombie apocalypse film.
“SO GO AND FIND SOME OTHER GIRL TO BOTHER AND LEAVE ME ALONE–OH WAIT! YOU CAN’T! BECAUSE EVERY FREAKING GIRL HERE KNOWS YOU’RE DESPERATE ENOUGH TO BEAT UP A GIRL YOU CAN’T HAVE!”
It was the most powerful and devastating truth of her eruption: in their desperation to avoid Kuno’s wrath they hadn’t just poisoned the well–they contaminated the entire aquifer. All any girl saw for the last three days were hundreds of boys gathering up to beat up a girl and get beaten by that girl like she wasn’t trying.
Who would date a guy like that? Who would want to go near a guy like that? Who could call themselves a man after that?
Her long, ribbon-secured hair looking more disheveled than it ever did fighting the boys, her face red, and her body covered in sweat, Akane stood there gulping down a lungful of air and shaking as she growled out the last words she ever wanted to say to any boy.
“Get the hell out of my sight, and if I lock eyes with any of you, I will do so much worse than what happened to Kuno!”
Completely destroyed, the male students of Furinkan High School obeyed, and one by one began to disperse.
As they marched silently away, everyone could see it in their lifeless eyes: there was no hope for them, no light, not even a faint glimmer. All romantic aspirations for every single one of them were dashed with their irrational decisions. There would never be a springtime of their high school days, or real love and companionship to look forward to.
All that was lost forever, in lieu of a dark, lonely future surrounded by plastic figurines and posters of unattainable fictional representations of women, warmed only by the light of computer-generated wives programmed to worship them but feel nothing.
Akane couldn’t imagine a more fitting punishment.
Katie took a deep breath. “… Damn.”
Nabiki let out a whistle as Akane’s reactor scrammed and the meltdown ended. “Well, you didn’t throw a punch this time, but I think you neutered all of them.”
“They never had any balls to begin with,” Akane snapped back.
“Inclined to agree there,” Katie said as she dusted off her hands. “Iffin’ that’s all square, I’m gonna go to class.”
As she began to walk away, however, Akane called to her. “Wait, Izurando-san!”
Katie stopped and looked back at Akane. “Yeah?”
Akane bowed deep once more. “Seriously, thank you so much, and I am sorry you had to see that.”
Katie waved it off. “Don’t apologize fer doing the right thing; those boys had no business picking on a pretty lil’ thing like you.”
Katie’s compliment hit its mark with Akane. “Oh, um… thank you for that as well, uh…”
Akane brightened and seized the opportunity to learn more about the mysterious girl and that unusual attack of hers. “Do you want to have lunch together?”
Nabiki raised an eyebrow in curiosity, as Katie gave Akane a probing glance, and smiled herself.
“Sure, you don’t mind eating lunch outside, do you?
Akane shook her head. “No, that’s fine.”
Katie smiled a little broader and reached out to give Akane the V-sign. “Cool. I’ll see you out under the trees then.”
Katie turned and began walking back to the school along with the rest of the dispersing students. As they watched her go, Nabiki looked over to Akane, who was happier than she’d been over the last few days, despite having just gone off.
“She’s so nice,” she said.
Nabiki shrugged her shoulders. “Eh, she’s all right, I guess. Let me know when a hot guy comes along.”
Akane huffed noisily at that. “A hot guy? Here? If I ever meet a hot guy our age in this town, that’ll be the day I’m engaged to him!”
|Qinghai Province, China|
"ACHOO!"
The sneeze of a handsome Japanese young man dressed in a karate gi, with dark blue eyes and black hair ending in a tightly-braided pigtail, made his father and their tour guide–both middle aged, follically challenged men–jump.
Sniffling, Saotome Ranma brought his fingers to his nose. "Aw geez, I hope I'm not coming down with a cold."
"Don't you worry, son, these springs will cure all that ails you even as we train," his father, Saotome Genma, declared.
Ranma sniffled again and shivered. The air here was pretty chilly, for a place that was supposed to be a spring. "I hope so, it doesn't feel like no hot spring though, Pop."
Their tour guide, a stocky Chinese man wearing a green uniform and matching cap, looked back at them. In stilted but comprehensible Japanese he spoke urgently.
"It not hot-spring, honored guests, it cursed spring. Very dangerous, you no want to fall in."
Genma dismissed the tour guide's warning like he didn't understand it. "Whatever, even if they're not hot springs. There's nothing that a good workout won't cure!"
Ranma had been paying more attention. "Wait, what about not falling in?"
"Don't worry about it," Genma insisted. "Besides, that's the whole point of this training, you won't fall in."
The two of them looked ahead at the cursed pools of the Jusenkyo Springs before them. Thousands of wide pools spread out for as far as they could see in the mist-shrouded clearing in the hilly forest.
"Trust your old man, son. Nothing will go wrong."
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