Shinrabansho: Myriad Souls

Shinohara-san crouched in front of the cabinet beneath the television and dug through it with the sort of brisk focus that made even these kinds of ordinary actions look skilled. Haru watched her pull out two Gamestation 5 controllers, test the weight of one in each hand, and slide one of them across the table toward him without looking up.

He caught it automatically.

She kept the other at her side and stayed sitting on her knees while she worked. She turned on the television and then the console. The Gamestation logo flashed on the screen as the operating system started, showing a library of digital games and advertisements for upcoming games and more. She’d pulled a Tekku disk from the cd case, feeding the disc into the console’s disc slot. The small widescreen television lit the room in a cool wash of color as the game showed up. She crawled back to her place near her tea, settled onto the floor, and picked up her controller and started the game. Since it was pre-installed, the game started quickly and characters were shown in action, fighting each other with other elements that had little to do with the actual game, but added to the appeal.

After thinking for a moment studying the menu, she looked at him.

“Which mode would you like to do?”

Haru smiled, a little more easily than he had expected to. He felt in his element now.

“How about a best-of-five match? Winner takes all.”

“Sounds good to me.” Shinohara-san suppressed a yawn, glanced at a clock, and selected the set mode. “That gives me time to take a bath once you’re off.”

That hit him harder than it should have.

He tried not to picture her walking around this apartment afterward in pajamas, hair damp from the bath, and failed badly enough that he had to clear his throat and focus on the screen before his face gave him away. He wondered why he thought about that before the actual bath for a moment, his cheeks pink.

Get it together.

The character select screen came up.

Haru’s hand moved toward Rexblade almost on instinct.

He paused.

That had been his old main for as long as he could remember. Even as a kid he had loved the smug sword fighter with the showy stance, how quickly he could get in your face, and how easily he could make the other player feel like they had no right to stand in front of him. He still knew that character better than any other. He still liked how he felt with Rexblade on the screen. But now there was more to it. He understood spacing well enough to beat his friends fairly consistently. He knew when to stop swinging and wait for a whiff instead of committing to a bad read out of pride. 

In the end, he locked Rexblade in anyway.

No excuses.

Shinohara-san rolled her eyes, let out a little breath through the corner of her mouth, and chose her own character without hesitation.

Asuna.

Haru felt a small jolt of anticipation at that. Most players did not like using her. She had awkward strings, odd timing, and enough stance changes to make people feel like the game was too complicated. But Shinohara-san did not seem bothered by any of that. If anything, she looked amused.

Huh...

The stage loaded in.

It was a small industrial lot at dusk, wet pavement, a chain-link fence in the background and light streaking across the ground under a violet sky. The round markers appeared beneath their names.

Haru rolled his shoulders once and settled his thumbs on the buttons.

At least here, I can show her that I’m good at something.

The first round began.

Haru started carefully. A quick jab. Then a low right after it. Not enough to commit. Just enough to see what she would do.

Shinohara-san blocked the jab and let the low hit her. She did not swing back right away.

He stepped in again with Rexblade’s fast mid, trying to see whether she would press or move, then sidestepped and threw out a slash that usually caught nervous players trying to hit too early.

She didn’t fall for it. Instead, she blocked it cleanly.

Haru’s eyes narrowed.

He tried a throw next, wanting to see whether she really knew what she was doing.

She broke it.

That didn’t feel like luck either. She got out too quickly and too cleanly for that.

“Okay,” he muttered.

Shinohara-san said nothing. She only kept playing.

Haru still won the round, but only barely. By the time he closed it out with a short wall combo, he had already felt the change. She was no longer just seeing what he liked to do. She had started countering it. She was blocking more of his low attacks. She was no longer swinging in the wrong places. She had even stepped around one of his approaches cleanly near the end.

She looked at him thoughtfully, like she was working through something.

That worried him more than if she had rushed in and lost badly.

The second round began.

Haru tried to come back in with the same advancing mid he had used earlier.

This time she stepped just far enough to the side to make it miss and punished him with a launcher. Asuna’s knee hit first. The follow-up popped Rexblade up high enough for her to hit him again and carry him almost to the wall before she cut the combo short to keep a better position.

The combo wasn’t flashy, but it did exactly what she wanted.

Haru hit the ground badly, got up trying to press right away, and ate a quick low for swinging too soon.

He smiled despite himself.

So that’s how it is.

He adjusted quickly, but not quickly enough. Shinohara-san had already figured out when he liked to back away and start over. She stopped his jabs before they could lead into anything, blocked the rushed attacks he threw out when he tried to force his way in, and hit him whenever he started stepping side to side or dashing around without a real opening.

She took the round.

Not by blowing him up with some huge combo. It was by making him play at her pace.

When the announcer called it, Haru leaned back a little and exhaled through his nose.

Shinohara-san took a sip of her cooling tea without showing off at all.

“Nice,” she said.

That should not have stung, but it did.

He smiled anyway.

The third round started.

This time Haru stopped thinking about trying to impress her.

That made all the difference.

He started playing more simply with fewer big attacks, more jabs and more lows. He waited to see whether she would press after blocking. He made her block each part properly instead of trying to scare her into making mistakes. When she stepped after one of his advantaged attacks, he caught her with a mid that clipped her out of movement. When she kept blocking, he mixed in a throw. When she ducked once on instinct, he caught her with a mid launcher and finally got the full combo that he had been trying to land since the match began.

He did not grin as he kept playing. 

That was how he had done better in tournament brackets too. The moment he stopped trying to look cool, his offense got harder to read.

Shinohara-san had to work harder now. Haru could see it in the way she stopped sipping her tea between rounds, in the way her posture changed. She leaned more forward and seemed more alert.

He took that round.

That left them even.

One round each.

The fourth round began.

Haru could feel the pressure now. Not from the game, instead from her.

Shinohara-san had gone very still.

She didn’t seem upset, exactly, nor embarrassed over losing the last round.

Instead she was serious.

That did something dangerous to his pulse.

He had a weird feeling that she had been feeling him out this whole time, and now she had decided to stop doing that.

When he jabbed, she interrupted at the exact places where he wanted to keep going. When he took a small step back to reset spacing, she didn’t follow automatically anymore. She made him come to her, then punished the approach. When he tried to sneak in the same low that had worked before, she blocked it and launched him hard enough that he hissed through his teeth.

She stopped taking those little hits that had helped her read him earlier. She stopped testing his rhythm out in the open. She already had it. Now she started breaking it.

She wasn’t mashing or guessing, and instead she’d started reading his movements.

“You suddenly got better,” he said under his breath.

Shinohara-san’s mouth curved slightly.

“You too. Way better. I wish that I’d gotten a chance to fight Riko-chan.”

“Who’s that?” Haru asked.

“Mm? Ah, sorry… an old friend.”

Regret filled her eyes for a moment, but she refocused on their match.

He felt that he should have been flustered by her comment earlier, but instead it made him want this round even more.

He nearly stole the round through sheer determination, landing one clean sidestep punish and driving her back toward the wall without ever overcommitting.

But the longer it went on, the more she changed. For a moment, the answer to the problem she posed seemed easy to grasp, but then she adjusted. She wasn’t figuring him out anymore. She already knew what he liked to do. She knew when he wanted room to move and when he would try to take it. She knew when he was getting impatient, at least enough to press instead of waiting. 

She took that round.

It was two rounds to one now.

Set point for her.

Haru adjusted his grip on the controller and forced his hands to loosen.

He was not angry. That was the strangest part.

As a kid he would have been furious by now, sulking, loud. Ready to blame the character, the stage, the controller, bad luck, anything but himself. Now all he felt was the pressure of not wanting to sink that low in front of her.

She really is out of my class, he thought, then hated himself for thinking it in the middle of the match.

The fifth round began.

He gave it everything he had.

No showing off, no attempts to swagger. He worked for the cleanest Tekku he was capable of.

He punished properly and checked her movements. He blocked blows that he’d fallen for earlier. He got in the first clean launcher of the round, but Shinohara-san got out before he could carry her to the wall. He kept the lead for most of it anyway, getting in small hits, keeping the pressure on her tight and taking no stupid risks.

Thirty seconds were left.

She still had not panicked when faced by his best game.

He wanted to finish the match so badly that he went to the advancing mid he trusted most. It had worked all night when he slipped it in behind smaller moves. This time he threw it out by itself.

Shinohara-san stepped just outside its path.

The moment it missed, she struck. Asuna caught him cleanly and popped Rexblade up off the ground. She hit him again before he could fall, carried him forward with the follow-up, and knocked him flat on his back when the combo ended.

It wasn’t enough to finish it, but it was enough to swing the life lead to her side.

Haru got up and tried to force his way back in, guessing right once on wake-up, then wrong the next time. Shinohara-san cut off his next attempt with a fast mid, took a small step back, and made him come to her again.

He had one more chance left.

One clean read would do it.

He went in.

She stopped him with another fast mid, and when he tried to take his turn anyway, she beat him to it and closed the match.

Asuna’s win pose played.

The best-of-five ended three rounds to one.

For a second Haru just sat there with the controller in his lap, breathing through the loss and not hating it nearly as much as he otherwise would have.

Shinohara-san took a sip of her cold tea.

Then she looked at him properly and smiled.

“That was fun.”

Haru laughed once, short and helpless.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “It was.”

He ran a hand back through his hair and looked at the results screen.

“You got me.”

“Mm.”

“That was a little unexpected, but I’m not sure why,” he said. “You really play well.”

Shinohara-san lowered her cup and looked a little self-conscious for the first time since the set got serious.

“I got in a lot of practice. Studying martial arts is one way to get better at Tekku. You start understanding certain things more intuitively.”

Haru believed that.

He also believed something else now, something he was not sure he wanted to.

She had not been bluffing about any of it. Not her cooking. Not her fighting skills. Not the strange confidence she had. Not the way she could shift from being a little awkward to terrifyingly competent in a heartbeat once she stopped hesitating.

A normal girl did not fight four men in the street and then calmly out-adapt him in Tekku over tea.

He looked at her hands on the controller, at the jacket she had thrown on only because it had pockets, at the way she sat with one knee angled and one shoulder slightly forward as if she were always ready to move. He wondered what that was about. Maybe it had something to do with being a martial artist. Was it possible that learning them made people like that?

Then he looked away before he embarrassed himself.

“You’re very impressive, Shinohara-san,” he said.

Shinohara-san laughed softly. “Thanks,” Shinohara-san looked away and then drained the rest of her tea from her cup.

Haru looked away too, glancing out the window toward the balcony and the moon rising low in the sky. The moonlight caught on a shape out there, outlining it just enough for him to make it out. A pair of glowing eyes were looking right at him.

It was a cat that had somehow gotten there.

“It’s getting late, Mizuno-san,” Sumire said.

Haru blinked and nodded.

“Ah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to overstay.” Haru bowed as Sumire rose smoothly to her feet.

“I’m sorry if that came across a little rude, but I’m getting tired.”

He nodded, thinking about how his first visit to a young woman’s home had gone.

Losing in Tekku should have made his inferiority complex flare up. Maybe it had, just a little, but not as badly as it might have. He could see himself winning another time when he was luckier and more focused.

Even so, she was good at so many things, even if there was at least one thing that he could compete in. He could still feel that same inferiority in him, reminding him of how far above him she seemed in every way that mattered.

“Yeah, I should probably go before you end up taking your bath even later.”

Shinohara-san looked at the clock and winced.

“Probably.”

For a second neither of them said much.

Then Haru laughed at himself.

“You know, when I ran after you, I thought maybe I’d at least be useful in one thing tonight, and it wasn’t playing Tekku. I never thought you were the kind of person that would play video games.”

“You did a little more than that,” Shinohara-san said.

He blinked.

“What?”

She looked at him with that same calm face she had worn after dismantling four drunken men in the street.

“You made the first night in my new apartment a little more interesting than it would have been if I’d gone home alone. And you were better at playing Tekku than I expected.”

She had that same faraway expression in her eyes.

After a moment, she led him to her genkan and waited with a smile.

“Make sure that you pay attention to everything on your way home. If you see any groups of people, I’d avoid them to be safe,” Sumire said.

Haru nodded, followed her, put on his shoes, then stepped back out into the night and started home with Shinohara-san still stuck too vividly in his head, with the unsettling feeling that he had handled losing to her far more gracefully than he ever managed with his friends.

Special thanks to PrincessArylin, ShinjiHinako, Assurbanipal II (Achan) for beta reading book three!