Slum Online (23 page)

Jack turned his back to the wall of the saloon. Here he was at his best.

If I could hit him, his body would rebound off the wall and I’d have a field day of midair combos. I knew exactly how he used walls to his advantage, but I had no choice but to attack. I needed a combo that packed some major damage or I didn’t stand a chance of turning this fight around.

Tetsuo threw a middle punch. Jack blocked. I chained a low spin kick onto a crouching punch, then canceled.

Jack turned and jumped. Tetsuo released a middle spin kick. Jack air-blocked, avoiding the potential counterhit, and then pushed off the wall to complete his triangle jump.

Now Jack was behind Tetsuo. He had used the same move in his fight against Keith.

If I canceled my kick and turned to face him, Jack would still beat Tetsuo to the attack. If I followed through with the kick, Jack’s next hit would be a counter. Strategically the only thing to do was cancel the kick and speed-dash toward the wall, but it would only buy me a moment’s reprieve. Jack only needed one crouching punch to finish Tetsuo off.

It was all or nothing.

But Jack didn’t know how much health Tetsuo had left. He didn’t know he had taken damage fighting Hashimoto. He wouldn’t know that one crouching punch stood between him and victory.

I made up my mind. If Jack was only going to throw rock and paper, it was time to bring scissors back into the game. I opened my eyes wide and stared at the screen.

There it was, in the middle of the screen. A barrel. The same barrel Ricky had used as a makeshift wall to set up a midair combo on Tetsuo. Tetsuo had taken a lot of damage because of that barrel. The large polygons even made it look heavy.

I canceled my spin kick. Pivoting on one leg, Tetsuo spun around to deliver a reverse spin kick. Rotating as he slid down the edge of the depression, he caught the barrel with the tip of his toes.

Under the full force of his kick, the barrel began to roll. The impact pushed Tetsuo back by a handful of pixels. Jack’s punch missed.

Unfazed, Jack continued his attack. The kick he had chained onto the punch came within inches of Tetsuo’s back. Then the barrel hit.

Jack’s body flew up over the barrel, rising slightly into the air.

The whole thing had taken less than a second.

When a split second stands between you and life or death, you don’t have time to think before you react. Your fingers do what they’ve been trained to do.
They
give the commands. From there on out, I was on autopilot.

Tetsuo caught the flying body with his fastest punch. I canceled and threw another punch, then a flying knee. Jack’s body hit the barrel again. I punched him as he bounced off a second time. Canceling the kick I chained onto the punch, I tacked on a heel drop. Jack’s body struck the ground. I caught him with a crouching punch as he bounced off the ground and then darted forward with a buffered speed dash. I canceled and threw a standing low spin kick. Another speed dash and I drove a fist down hard into his body.

Jack had stopped moving. A moment later, he vanished without a sound.

Tetsuo stood alone in the street.

I stared at my twenty-five-inch TV. It was only when I heard the AFK chime warning me I’d been inactive that I realized I’d won.

CHAPTER 12

A HOT WIND pushed dry air through Shinjuku. Two straight days of rain had washed away the smog, leaving a turquoise blue sky outside the window. I picked a butter roll cloud out of the pack drifting slowly over the city. The hint of a smile spread across my face.

It was 8:55
AM
. I was in my logic class, seventh row from the front. It was the last lecture of the semester, but apparently that wasn’t enough to keep Uemura the Elder from attacking the chalkboard with a vengeance. Muttering complaints about the heat under his breath, he flew across the board even faster than usual. I was already on my third sheet of loose-leaf paper. My right hand had gone completely numb.

“This seat taken?”

I lifted my head at the sound of Fumiko’s anime-saccharine voice. Without a word, I moved the bag I’d used to save her spot out of the seat next to me.

Fumiko sat down and started unpacking her bag, which was easily three times as thick as mine. She took her 0.7 mm mechanical pencil and silver-rimmed glasses from their respective cases. Her name was written on the front of her collegeruled notebook in letter-perfect characters.

I pushed my notes and a blue attendance card to her with a flourish. It was the last spare blue card I had, but it didn’t matter.

“Your handwriting’s terrible.” Fumiko peered suspiciously at my notes through the thick lenses of her glasses.

“Sorry.”

“I can’t even read half of it.”

“I can.”

“If you’re the only person who can read it, it’s not writing. It’s code.”

Fumiko insisted that notes you couldn’t read weren’t any good. You couldn’t count on remembering what you’d written, so you needed to write well enough that anyone could read them. I told her that with the amount of notes we had to take every week for Uemura the Elder, it didn’t matter what condition they were in. She just smiled that hamburger-shop smile.

Fumiko fought back a yawn as she copied notes down off the board.

“Not getting much sleep?” I asked.

“Some.”

“What have we here?”

“I was studying.”

It took Fumiko five minutes to copy the notes I had spent half an hour transcribing, but her handwriting was still two hundred fifty-six times neater.

Uemura the Elder was humming along in front of the chalkboard. The morning light spilling into the room erupted into a halo as it struck the gel that had hardened in his hair. He definitely had his younger brother beat hands down in the hair department.

Looking back and forth from Fumiko’s short bob to Uemura the Elder’s neatly parted Carl Sagan coiffure, it occurred to me that given the choice between his associate professorship or a fine head of hair, Uemura the Younger would probably have chosen the hair.

That afternoon, Fumiko and I went into Shinjuku. She said she had some shopping to do. When I told her I’d seen
The
Hustler
, she admitted to spending all day Sunday in an arcade. Apparently she dragged her brother out of bed to help her practice her combo moves in the neighborhood arcade. Last night she pulled an all-nighter reading a strategy guide.

I mussed Fumiko’s hair. Maybe there was hope for her yet.

“Don’t do this on my account.”

Fumiko tugged hard at my shirttail. “Who said I was?”

“Why else would you?”

“I have my honor to defend.”

“You gotta be good if you wanna defend anything.”

“I’ll get good, then.”

“Won’t be easy.”

“We’ll see.”

Fumiko claimed to have lost the game I watched her play because she had chosen the wrong character. Apparently the karateka wasn’t for her.

With an eagle claw, she swore she had the punch-cancel-palm thrust-cancel-palm thrust-punch-punch-cancel-chain low spin kick counter finishing move down cold. An E-rank combo that was a specialty of Tanaka’s.

I looked up at the narrow strip of sky from the bottom of a canyon of skyscrapers. Before long she’d be better than Pak.

“Oh, one other thing I meant to ask, Eddie.” Fumiko’s smile gleamed with mischief. “You finally beat Minnesota Fats?”

“I dropped out of the tournament.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

“After you turned down my dinner invitation?”

“I ran into someone I’d been trying to find for a long time.”

“Who? A girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” I must have laughed then. “I saw that. Come on, let’s hear it.”

“I really don’t know. You just have to take my word.”

“Lies!”

“It’s true. And quit pulling my shirt!”

I told Fumiko all about
Versus Town
then.

Tetsuo and his school uniform and wooden clogs. Hashimoto the ninja. Ben the bartender. Ricky the asshole. The maternal Masumi. The JTS Saloon tucked away in the warrens of Sanchōme. I told Fumiko the whole tale of the make-believe city and the make-believe character named Jack.

I told her why I wanted to become the best. Why I practiced combo moves on wooden dummies. Why I chose to fight Jack instead of Pak. And she listened to every word.

When Masumi and Hashimoto came to the saloon after the fight, I told them I had beaten Jack. Masumi emoted a toast to my success with a glass of whiskey and water. Hashimoto only stood there in his tuxedo and shrugged.

And that was the end of it. Tonight, somewhere far to the north, Hashimoto would be planning his next investigation even as the usual suspects filed into JTS. Life in Versus Town would go on as it always had.

The only thing that had changed was Ganker Jack. I didn’t expect Tetsuo to ever see him again in the virtual world any more than I expected to see Lui again in the real one.

The place Jack and Tetsuo fought only existed online in a make-believe city, and it only existed while we were there, locked in a battle only we knew. That place was mine as much as it was Jack’s. I earned it when I beat him, and he earned it when he lost. That was why we could never meet again. And even if we did, that one shining moment that existed between us was gone. It existed somewhere beyond our reach.

Now Fumiko and I were free to search for our own place, our own shining moment. Not my search for Jack, or Fumiko’s search for the blue cat. I was ready and willing, if she was.

I turned to her as we walked. “Wanna catch a movie?”

“Nope. Today we’re shopping.”

“Again?”

“Is that a complaint?”

“A complaint? From me? No, I didn’t hear any complaint.”

“I’m pretty sure that was a complaint.”

I took Fumiko’s tiny hand in my own. The smells of a new summer surrounded us as we walked side by side through Shinjuku.

With Jack out of the way, I had decided to give Tetsuo some much-needed rest. So it was purely chance that we passed the arcade on Kokusai-dōri, and mere coincidence that I happened to spot Pak inside.

The head-to-head game cabinet had been moved near the entrance. It would seem the arcade was holding an event to allow any brave soul to try their hand against the winner of the second season tournament.

A girl in a sailor uniform sat beside Pak. If I had to guess, I’d say she was Keith. When Tetsuo failed to show up for his semifinal match, Keith received the spot as runner-up in the match he’d lost against Tetsuo. Keith had gone on to beat Tanaka and advance to the finals.

Pak dispatched the nameless snake boxer to advance to the finals where he beat Keith to win the tournament. He had honed his sharp look, and his skills, to the point it could probably slice through a butcher block.

Fumiko watched the monitor as he played. “He’s pretty good.”

“You could say that.”

“You’re better though, right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you beat Jack. I thought Jack was the best there was.”

“Not everybody would agree.”

“I don’t think I understand.” Fumiko touched her finger to my chin. There was mischief in her eyes. The faint, sweet smell of olive trees tickled my nose. “You want to play him?”

“Not especially.” I had learned to filter my thoughts.

Fumiko translated. “So you don’t especially want to play him, but deep down inside, you might be tempted.”

“That’s right.”

“You can play him once,
if
you buy me dinner,” Fumiko purred.

“Expensive game.”

“You owe me after I had to cancel your birthday dinner.”

I folded my arms. “This Saturday. Ebisu.”

“A deal’s a deal. Have at it.”

“You’re a real slave driver.”

I sat down opposite Pak and pressed the A Button.

With a
click
I was no longer Etsuro Sakagami. I had become a karateka.

That day, I didn’t bother keeping track of how many games I won.