CHAPTER 20: ONE FOOT, THEN THE OTHER
KUJAKU POV
The explosion wakes me at 5:47 AM.
Same as yesterday. Same as every morning since we arrived.
I don't need to check the time anymore. My body knows Kai's schedule better than my own heartbeat. Five days of this—five mornings jerking awake to the sound of Black Dranzer destroying something at elevation.
I grab my bag. Tablet. Crushing Orca. Boots still damp from yesterday's stream crossing. Lace them anyway.
Outside, the forest was a dull grey and cold enough that my breath misted in the air.
Somewhere up the mountain, Kai is already training.
I start climbing.
***
The trail is vertical in places.
My thighs scream after the first switchback. Lungs burn after the second. By the third I'm just moving—hand, foot, hand, foot—mechanical and empty.
How Kai does this every morning is beyond me. His body doesn't work like human bodies.
One foot, then the other.
The phrase comes unbidden.
I push it down. Focus on the climb.
It comes back anyway.
One foot, then the other, Kujaku. That's how you survive.
***
[MEMORY - AGE 7]
I was seven when Father left.
Just gone one Tuesday morning like he'd never existed at all.
Mother finds the note on the kitchen table. Reads it once. Folds it in half. Never mentions it again.
I ask where he went.
She smiles—small and broken and trying so hard to hold together. "Away, sweetheart. Just away."
"Is he coming back?"
Her smile doesn't reach her eyes. "I don't know."
I wait for him anyway. Every day after school I sit by the window watching the street. Wait for a man I'm already starting to forget.
Six months pass.
One day I realize I can't remember his face anymore.
Mother works two jobs. Then three.
"Just temporary," she says. Smiling. Always smiling. "Just until things settle."
Things never settle.
She keeps smiling anyway.
That's what mothers do. Smile while drowning. Pretend everything's fine while the world collapses.
Takeshi—my brother, twelve years old—starts walking me home from school because she's never there when classes end. He holds my hand on busy streets.
Checks my homework. Makes dinner from whatever's in the cupboard.
"Don't talk to strangers," he says. Every day. Same words. Like a mantra. "And if anyone bothers you, kick them and run."
He's trying to be Father and failing. But he tries anyway.
We're poor but we don't know it yet. We're just a family missing one piece.
It doesn't feel broken. It feels normal.
That's the worst part. How fast you forget what whole felt like.
***
My boot slips on loose scree.
I catch myself against a boulder. Palm scrapes stone. Blood wells up— already clotting.
I keep climbing.
***
[MEMORY - AGE 14]
We're happy.
That's the thing nobody tells you. You can be poor and happy. You can eat plain rice for dinner and laugh about it. You can wear secondhand clothes and not care.
Mother works herself to exhaustion but she smiles when she comes home. Takeshi is seventeen and studying for exams but he still makes time to teach me beyblade basics in the park. We don't have much but we have enough.
I remember thinking: this is fine. We'll be okay.
I was so stupid.
***
The trail narrows. I press my back against the cliff face and side-step across a gap where the path fell away years ago.
Don't look down.
Just keep moving.
***
[MEMORY - AGE 14]
Mother collapses at work.
The hospital calls Takeshi because he's listed as emergency contact. He's listed as emergency contact because Mother knew—knew somewhere deep—that this was coming.
I meet him at the hospital. He's running. We're both running. The hallways are too long and the lights are too bright and the smell—
The smell is disinfectant and death.
Mother is in room 407. Machines beep arrhythmic patterns. Her chest rises and falls too shallow.
The doctor uses words like "chronic illness" and "long-term treatment" and "significant expenses." He says them gently. Like gentle delivery makes them hurt less.
Takeshi holds my hand. His palm is sweating. He's trying not to cry.
I don't cry either. I can't. The tears are stuck somewhere behind my ribs where breathing used to be easy.
The doctor leaves. Takeshi sits in the chair by Mother's bed and puts his head in his hands.
"We'll figure it out," he whispers. More to himself than to me. "We'll figure it out."
He's seventeen years old. Still in high school. Working part-time at a convenience store.
We have sixteen thousand yen in savings.
Mother's first surgery costs four hundred thousand.
***
I haul myself up another section of trail. Muscles shaking. Breath coming in gasps.
Almost halfway.
***
[MEMORY - AGE 14]
Mother survives the surgery.
The bills don't.
They come in envelopes with red stamps. PAST DUE. FINAL NOTICE.
Like screaming in paper form.
Takeshi drops out of school. Works three jobs. Morning shift at the convenience store, afternoon shift at the warehouse, night shift doing deliveries. He sleeps four hours if he's lucky.
I watch him leave at 5 AM. Come home at 11 PM. Collapse on his bed still wearing his shoes.
He never complains. Not once.
I try to help. Offer to get a part-time job. He says no—says I need to focus on school, that one of us should get an education.
I focus on school.
The bills keep coming.
Mother gets worse. Needs another surgery. Then another. The debt grows faster than Takeshi can pay it.
I stop sleeping. Every time I close my eyes I see the numbers. Six hundred thousand yen. Eight hundred thousand. One million.
Numbers that don't mean anything anymore. Just abstract measures of impossibility.
Takeshi starts looking different. Tired isn't the right word. Hollowed. Like someone scooped out everything inside and left a shell moving on autopilot.
One night he comes home with a beyblade.
" Stricker Hammer"
***
I stop climbing.
Just stop. Sit down on the trail with my back against cold stone.
I can't do this. I can't keep going. I can't—
My hand moves to Crushing Orca in my pocket.
The weight is grounding.
Why am I here?
The question sits in my chest like a stone.
I came here thinking observation would save my brother. That watching Kai master Dark Resonance would give me answers. Would show me how to pull Takeshi back from the edge he fell off three years ago.
But standing on Metal Tower's observation deck—watching Kai activate Devil's Resonance with surgical precision, seeing the phoenix manifest and fade on command—I'd understood something else.
I'm here to save Takeshi.
From spending years grinding myself down in the underground circuit. From letting desperation consume everything.
From dying before I'm actually dead.
I stood up and keep climbing.
***
[MEMORY - AGE 15]
Takeshi wins his first tournament.
The prize is fifty thousand yen. Not enough. Not even close. But it's something.
He comes home that night with the check and the beyblade—heavy fusion wheel, three aggressive contact points, weight that suggests expensive custom work we definitely can't afford.
"I won," he says.
His voice is hollow. His eyes look like drowning.
I should have asked where he got the Beyblade or how he had won, and I certainly should have noticed the obsidian sheen creeping into his fingernails.
Should see the warning signs.
I don't.
Instead, I only saw the money that would pay the medical bills and keep Mother alive.
I hug him. Tell him I'm proud. Ask if he'll enter another tournament.
He looks at me. Something moves behind his eyes that isn't quite him anymore.
"Yeah," he whispers. "I'll enter another."
He does.
And another.
And another.
The prize money gets larger. His skills improve impossibly fast. He goes from local tournaments to regional to national.
We can pay Mother's bills now. Afford her medication. Keep her stable.
The house isn't drowning anymore.
But Takeshi is.
I watch him train until his hands bleed. Watch him launch that bey ten thousand times in one night. Watch him stop eating properly. Stop sleeping. Stop being my brother and start being something else.
His fingernails turn fully black. Hard like stone. He speaks sometimes in voices that layer over each other—hundred-voice chorus using his mouth.
I ask if he's okay.
He smiles. "I'm winning. That's what matters."
"But are you okay?"
"I'm winning, Kujaku."
As if that erased the question entirely.
Like winning is all that matters.
Mother noticed asks him to stop. "We'll find another way."
He says, "There is no other way."
And he's right. We've tried everything. This is the only thing keeping her alive.
So we don't stop him.
We let him burn.
***
The trail levels out. Almost at the summit.
My legs are shaking. Breath coming in ragged gasps.
Fifty meters.
Twenty.
Ten.
***
[MEMORY - AGE 17]
Takeshi lost.
That's all it takes. One loss.
He fights in the national semifinals. Faces an opponent with a balance-type bey.
Takeshi attacks recklessly. Desperately. Throws everything into offense like he can brute-force victory through will alone.
The opponent deflects. Counters. Deflects. Counters.
Takeshi's bey shatters.
The shared pain from resonance drops him instantly. Unconscious before he hits the stadium floor.
I'm watching from the stands. Running before I know I'm moving. The crowd parts. Medics are already there but I push through them—see my brother convulsing, eyes rolled back, fingernails black as pitch and gouging lines into his own arms—
The ambulance takes him.
I call Mother from the hospital. Tell her Takeshi collapsed. That she needs to come.
She arrives forty minutes later. Already weak. Already dying. Holding herself together through sheer will.
We sit in the waiting room. Hospital smell thick enough to choke on. Machines beeping wrong through closed doors.
Three hours pass.
The doctor comes out. Says Takeshi is in a coma. Says the neural trauma was severe. Says they don't know when—or if—he'll wake up.
Mother doesn't cry. Just nods. Sits back down.
She looks so small.
I hold her hand. It's cold.
Three days later, I'm sitting in Takeshi's hospital room when my phone rings.
Different hospital. Mother collapsed at home. Ambulance. Emergency room.
I run.
The hallways are the same. The smell is the same. The machines beep the same wrong rhythms.
She's in room 312. I'm not allowed in yet. Doctors working.
I sit in the waiting room. Twenty minutes. Forty. An hour.
A doctor comes out. Young. Tired. Apologetic.
"I'm sorry," he says.
That's all. Just: I'm sorry.
Mother died of a heart attack. Stress. Underlying condition. Inevitable eventually.
I don't cry.
Can't.
The tears died with her.
I'm seventeen years old. Suddenly alone.
Father gone. Mother dead. Brother alive but not really—just a body in a hospital bed that breathes and screams and isn't him anymore.
I sell our house to pay his medical bills. The institution costs thirty thousand yen per week. I have maybe six months of savings if I'm lucky.
Then I have nowhere to live.
I spend three nights sleeping in the park. Washing in public bathrooms. Eating from convenience store trash bins.
On the fourth night, a woman finds me in the park.
Tall. Blonde hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. Muscular but curved—the kind of build that came from years of brutal training. Thick thighs. Arms that looked like they could snap bone. Scar running down her left cheek.
Eyes flat and cold.
She looked her up and down. Once—that look at me like she sees through skin to bone.
"You blade?" she asks.
I have Mad Orca. My bey.
"Yeah."
She nods once. "Then come with me. Underground circuit takes anyone. No questions. No judgement. Just wins and losses."
She doesn't ask why I'm homeless.
Doesn't ask why a seventeen-year-old girl is sleeping in a park.
Just offers a path forward.
I follow her.
Her name was—
I can't remember.
That's the problem with trauma. It erases everything except pain.
I remember her hair. Her eyes. Her voice.
But not her name.
Just one more thing lost.
***
The underground circuit eats me alive.
First fight—I lose in twenty seconds. Bey's barely spinning before the opponent shreds it. I have to pay for repairs. Can't afford them. Borrow money from someone who shouldn't be lent from.
Second fight—thirty seconds. Lose again.
Third fight—lose.
Fourth—lose.
Fifth—lose.
Sixth—lose.
Seventh—lose.
I'm bleeding money I don't have. Sleeping in stairwells. Getting laughed at.
I lost. Again. And again. And again
By the eighth fight, I stopped trying to win.
I started trying to understand.
I start watching. Analyzing. Learning to read bey movement like language.
Speed. Trajectory. Rotation signature. Attack patterns. Defensive tells.
Everything means something if you know how to look.
Ninth fight—I win.
It's not clean nor pretty. But I win.
The prize is five thousand yen. Just enough to eat for two weeks.
I win again. And again.
I buy a tablet with my winnings. Start documenting fights. Analyzing footage frame-by-frame like Madoka analyzes machines.
I get better.
Stronger. Smarter. More ruthless.
I upgraded Mad Orca into Crushing Orca.
Inspired by my brother's bey.
Two years pass like that.
Grinding victories. Paying Takeshi's medical bills. Visiting him every Sunday.
I stop crying after the first six months.
Stop feeling much of anything after the first year.
Just survive. Just keep moving. Just stay alive long enough to see tomorrow.
I thought my life would continue like that forever.
Then Kai appeared.
I keep climbing.
***
I reach the summit.
My legs give out.
I hit the ground hard—knees, palms, face nearly smashing into stone before I catch myself. Everything hurts. Can't breathe. Can't think.
Just lie there gasping.
Five days. Five goddamn days of this climb.
Five days and I still don't have answers.
I force myself up. Grab my tablet with shaking hands.
The peak is scorched. Craters everywhere—some fresh, some old. Largest one is twenty feet across.
No life in sight.
Just destruction.
And Kai.
He sits cross-legged in the center of it all. Eyes closed, face calm.
Twenty meters away, Black Dranzer was carving precise, surgical cuts through boulders.
Moving like it's still in his hand despite the distance.
I pull up my tablet. Start recording.
Resonance output: elevated. Neural activity: constant.
But different from day 1. Controlled less chaotic.
***
Kai opens his eyes, now a deep crimson, as Black Dranzer halts in mid-air before flying back to his hand, where he catches and reloads it in three smooth motions.
"Three. Two. One."
"LET IT RIP!"
The Beyblade landed in the center of the crater with perfect stillness, spinning at 4,200 RPM.
I watch through my tablet.
Rotation: 4,200 RPM. Temperature: stable. Resonance: nominal.
Normal.
Except—
Something's wrong.
I lower the tablet. Watch with naked eyes
and noticed the trajectory felt backward.
When I pulled up the rotation sensor, my hands went numb.
LEFT-SPIN: ACTIVE
The display confirmed that the Bey was in a left-spin.
I run diagnostic. Three times.
Left-spin. Left-spin. Left-spin.
Impossible.
But it's spinning backward.
The bey accelerates.
Faster.
Faster.
Until the air began to shimmer.
Black flames erupt as the Phoenix manifested. It's wings spread across entire crater. Each feather a blade of fire that swallows light.
Sensors flatline.
Showing impossible readings: negative Kelvin, inverted vectors, resonance frequencies that shouldn't exist—
Black Dranzer continued to spin in its stable left-rotation.
***
I stared at my cracked screen and the evidence of impossibility made real. As Kai stood at the edge of the crater
"How long—" My voice breaks. "Since when—"
He doesn't answer.
Phoenix erupts fully.
Its eyes found mine.
The beak opens—
It let out a screech that wasn't a sound, but a physical pressure that made my bones vibrate and my teeth ache.
My tablet screen goes black.
And I finally understand the emotion I've been feeling in its gaze.
Hunger.
And I understand:
This isn't training anymore. This is evolution.
[END CHAPTER 20]
Author's Note:
Whew. Kujaku's been through a lot, huh?
I really wanted to dive into Kujaku's past here and that the "Darkness" in this world isn't just cool auras and special moves—it's a life-ruining disease.
If you're enjoying the story, please leave good reviews.
As always, I'm all ears for suggestions and feedback. Let me know what you think!
Thanks for reading.