Kai said nothing more. He just kept glaring at Matsuda with animosity in his eyes. Matsuda could say nothing more. He just trembled with his fist raised in the air. Before Kai’s sheer vehemence, he was completely overwhelmed.
And there they were. Matsuda was secretly feared by just about every boy in class. Yet his opponent, Kai, was the most unassuming wallflower of them all. With the fight now in such a stalemate, one could call Kai the victor. And he relied not on the strength of his fists, but the strength of his heart. Or, at least, the part of his heart that held his feelings for Jun.
Up behind the window on the balcony, Reina found herself sighing. “I never expected it’d turn out this way...”
Her hopes had been completely dashed. And yet, she felt something burning in her heart. Her body quivered silently in excitement.
She kept staring long and hard at Kai’s distant countenance. His face had become hideously warped from the bruising it had taken. His mouth was drenched red from a bloody nose. And yet... to Reina’s eyes, he seemed so gallant, so bold!
“C’mon Matsuda, what’re ya waitin’ for?”
The prodding from Takeda brought Reina back to her senses.
“Let’s body this sucker!”
“Aw, he’s dead! RIP in peace, otacreep!”
Matsuda’s cronies hurried down the stairs to back their boss up. With that, Matsuda was heartened enough to move again.
The fight was now a sadistic four on one. They surrounded Kai and used him as a punching bag. He still tried to stand up, but that wasn’t physically possible anymore. His opponents realized it was much faster to just keep beating him down instead of letting him get up each time. All he had left was his glare.
“...Wait right there. Hold on for just a bit longer.” Spurred into action, Reina left her window and ran off in search of help. “Oh, how I detest running!”
As someone who prided herself on her refined demeanor, she couldn’t remember the last time she ran for someone else. She resisted the urge to click her tongue and sprinted with all her might.
Kai found himself in a tornado of torment.
“Say you’ll break up with Jun, dammit!”
“Swear you’ll never go near Reina’s group again!”
“And let’s hear ya say it on video!”
“Better hurry if ya wanna live! ’Cuz you’re, like, actually not gonna live!”
Every punch and every kick was followed by a threat. Kai had to chuckle to himself as he was tossed about by the waves of brutality.
How about you quit talking tough and put your money where your mouth is? Go ahead, kill me... if you’ve got the guts.
The edges of his blood-drenched lips curled upward, giving his cheeks a cynical curve.
“I refuse!” Kai shouted. He was met with another beating as he writhed on the ground. No matter how pitiful or weak he seemed, he would yield to neither their thrashes nor their taunts.
“I refuse!!” Kai shouted. But this time... it was almost as though someone heard him...
“You there, second-years! What’s the meaning of this?!”
Help had arrived. Kai heard the sound of footsteps rushing toward him. He managed to tilt his head in their direction and get a peek between the lumps obscuring his vision.
It was a teacher. A teacher with a face fit for a shoujo manga and a reputation fit for royalty.
Mr. Prince had come for him.
And behind him was Reina. In a rare display of raw emotion, she was struggling to hold back her tears.
“Oh shit, Matsuda!”
“Let’s scram!”
“Shit, it’s Reina? She ratted us out?”
Matsuda’s cronies were clearly flustered that a teacher had caught them red-handed.
“Cram it! You think we’re turning back now?!”
Matsuda didn’t share their sentiment. His eyes were bloodshot, and his sense of reason was overpowered by the rush of adrenaline. He aimed his fists at the teacher.
But they didn’t hit their mark.
“Hasn’t anyone ever taught you not to bite off more than you can chew?”
Royalteach effortlessly caught Matsuda’s fist with his right palm. His movements were far more forceful than you’d expect from someone so handsome. He must’ve had many more fights under his belt than a punk like Matsuda.
“Geh...”
Matsuda cooled right off as Royalteach flashed an indomitable grin.
“But if you insist, I’ll take you up on your offer, be it one-on-one or four-on-one. Don’t worry. I’m not so cowardly as to take a fight between men to court, so feel free to come at me.”
“U-Uh, on second thought...” Matsuda stumbled over his words, clearly not expecting a mere teacher to intimidate him. That cocksure attitude he had when beating Kai to a pulp seemed to have shriveled up.
“If you don’t want to fight me, then this is simply an act of violence, and I won’t hesitate to report it to the school as such. Understand?”
“Oh. Wait, I mean—”
“Do. You. Understand?!”
Royalteach shouted him down in a booming voice. Matsuda’s gang immediately backed down and fell to their knees. Their shoulders drooped as a sign of complete resignation.
He sure knows how to teach people a lesson...
As he watched Royalteach sternly stare down Matsuda’s gang, Kai marveled at how much further that went than just this teacher’s job title.
Shortly afterward, Royalteach was kind enough to bring Kai to a hospital.
“I’ll tell your teacher about what happened later. Hop in—don’t be shy.”
And with that, he offered Kai the passenger seat of the Suzuki Swift Sport he had in the school parking lot. Kai’s uniform still hadn’t dried from the water those goons dumped on him earlier, but Royalteach didn’t mind if the seat got wet. The rumors of his reliability were true after all.
While they were on the road, Kai checked his face over and over in the rear-view mirror and felt like laughing each time. His eyelids were so swollen that they almost made him look like a ghost. His cheeks were as puffed up as a blowfish. His mouth was caked in dried blood from his nose. Even though he knew it was his own face—or perhaps because of that—he found the ugliness so bizarre that a chuckle almost rose out. Too bad he didn’t have the energy to laugh.
“I’m impressed you held out for so long,” Royalteach told him as he kept his eyes on the road and his hands at ten and two. “And that you never punched back.”
“...Well, yeah, I’m a coward.”
“A coward would cry and beg for mercy. They wouldn’t dare talk back.”
“...Well, yeah, I threw ten thousand punches in Fitness Boxing. My fists are lethal weapons.”
“Hahaha!”
Royalteach gave a hearty laugh. Kai was glad he liked the joke.
“Well,” the teacher continued, “fighting back definitely isn’t the only way for a man to defend his pride. You didn’t want to stoop to the level of idiots like them. I understand.”
His lines were cheesy, but his voice was as serious as could be.
...I can see why the boys warm up to this guy.
Kai was grateful for the cheesy commendation. He was grateful that Mr. Prince understood him without needing a word of explanation. He was grateful that he never stopped looking forward. It meant that Kai would be spared any embarrassment if he suddenly broke out into tears.
After getting some light treatment at the hospital, Kai had an examination to make sure there was no permanent damage. His results:
“Go home and rest until tomorrow just to be safe. You should be fine, but come back immediately if you experience any headaches or nausea. Call an ambulance if you have to.”
A doctor gave him a short diagnosis and let him go. Basically, he was to watch his symptoms at home. Kai was certain he’d need to be hospitalized, so he found it kind of deflating.
Manga and the like had taught Kai that bleeding from the head (particularly the forehead) was a sign of intensity, that faces can swell quickly into painful contortions, but that sometimes the heaviest damage is skin deep. Kai finally had the opportunity to have the truth of those lessons literally beaten into him.
And yet, after such a harrowing, painful experience... a doctor took an objective look at him and said he wasn’t banged up too bad.
“Uh, sure...”
It didn’t quite feel right, but Kai got in the passenger seat of the Swift Sport regardless. Was this the placebo effect? Knowing he’d be fine made him notice the pain all around his body less and less.
“It might sound weird for me to say, but I guess you’re a bit let down?”
Royalteach had a chuckle from the driver’s seat. After staying with Kai throughout the entire treatment and examination, he was now driving him home.
“Well, that’s the most that tough-talking punks these days can do. They’re all scared to fight alone, so they usually just gather their buddies to make sure whichever weakling they pick out can’t defend themselves. They’ve never been in a real fight. They know a bit about how to hurt, but that ain’t the same.”
“...Were you a little rough as a student, Mr. Prince?”
“Well, certainly more than I am now. But that’s something I heard from a teacher back when I was a punk. ‘Tough-talkin’ punks these days ain’t much,’ he told me.”
“Did your teacher go to school in ancient Sparta?”
Kai wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take this as a joke. Doing the math, that teacher must have been a student twenty or thirty years ago? Maybe even forty? This was obviously before Kai was born, so he had trouble imagining it.
“There used to be a manga called Be-Bop High School. It was just about a bunch of delinquents beating each other up, but until Attack on Titan came around, it held the record for the largest single-volume first print run in Kodansha series history. In an age when manga wasn’t the pop culture force it is now, that was considered selling like hotcakes.”
“Wow!”
“And Rokudenashi Blues in Jump was crazy, too. See, every school in the country had its share of hotheaded delinquents. They’d squabble over who was strong, beat the crap out of each other, and the last one standing was the coolest. People idolized that life. That’s why they wrote manga about that stuff, and it flew off the shelves. It was a different time; to millennials like us, it probably seems like Sparta.”
“Uh, haha...”
Kai gave an awkward chuckle and thanked his lucky stars that he wasn’t born a boomer. But what was Royalteach trying to get at? Kai found his examples interesting, so he listened intently, but he didn’t quite get the point or meaning behind it all. He was mentally tilting his head.
“So, what I’m trying to say,” Royalteach continued. While keeping his eyes on the road, like any good driver.