MaruMonzterz - 4. When the Cavalry Goes Marching In

Monday, 6^th January 2014.

The first day back to school was usually a horrible occasion for Rumiko. It meant the end of her freedom, and the beginning of daily struggles against scary teachers and mean classmates. Added to that was the nightmare of homework, and the challenge of going to bed early to prepare for the next day of classes. Rumiko had no reason to look forward to school days, so she tried to delay getting out of bed for as long as she could (which usually meant until her mother came into her room and bribed her with chocolate).

This time around, however, things happened a little differently. Before going to sleep, Rumiko did not notice that her parents had put a new alarm clock on her dresser that doubled as bedside table. She had been so distracted by the thoughts of her MaruBall that her brain did not consider this small detail worth registering.

That was a grave mistake.

The new alarm clock was not just an alarm clock. It was designed to be particularly effective against people who had evolved to ignore normal wake-up calls, like this story’s Main Character. At first, the alarm went off just like any other clock. It made an annoying sound, but not any more annoying than a conventional alarm. After ten seconds of not being turned off, however, it was programmed to jump off whatever surface it had been put on and run on the floor while blasting a horrible song with ten times of the original volume.

“This is your wake-up call, I sing it just for you, and if you want me to stop, you have to hit the button, but I know you’re slow when you have to wake, so I’ll sing it over and over and again and again! This is you wake-up call, I sing it just for you…” sung the clock as it took over Rumiko’s bedroom floor and scared the poor girl for life. The lyrics were in English, so Rumiko could not appreciate their deep poetic beauty, but even if she could understand what her alarm clock was telling her, it would not have made her any less scared of it. She ran to her parents’ bedroom like an anime character prone to making exaggerated body expressions.

“Mum, there’s a monster in my room and it’s singing something horrible! Make it stop! Please!” Rumiko begged her mother. She had jumped on the bed between her parents, though thankfully the adults were already awake enough to get their bones and internal organs out of the way before they could be shattered by fifty kilograms of bouncing child. Just like Rumiko, they had been awoken by the alarm clock’s loud song.

“It’s not a monster, it’s your new alarm clock,” Rumiko’s father explained. “We got it as a birthday gift for you.”

“That thing is a gift? It’s so scary!” Rumiko protested. Suzume and Takao looked at each other and raised eyebrows. They knew their daughter well enough to expect that kind of reaction.

“We thought it would be good for you to learn to wake up on your own. We’ll use that clock until you can get out of bed on time,” Suzume explained, trying to sound kind even as she was dooming her daughter to daily ear-drum torture. “You’re already twelve years old, and soon you’ll start your last year of primary school. You have to grow up now.”

“But mum!” Rumiko tried to argue, though it was too early in the morning for her to think of any vaguely valid points.

“Don’t worry, Rumi-chan, I know you can do it!” Takao said, patting his daughter on the shoulder to show moral support. Rumiko almost lost her balance. “I’ll show you how to turn it off now, but from tomorrow on, the alarm clock is your responsibility.” Takao got up and guided Rumiko back to her room. He walked in front of her not unlike a warrior, though his weapon of choice was a pillow. “All you have to do is hit the alarm clock like this,” he said, throwing the pillow at the running demonic machine. It hit the target full on, and the room fell silent once again.

“But what if I miss?” Rumiko asked. She was terrible at sports in general and target practice in particular, so there was very little hope of her ever managing to replicate her father’s prowess.

“Then you’ll have to get up, catch it, and turn it off manually,” her father answered. “Though be careful, I think the instructions said something about it trying to bite…”

Rumiko began to dread early mornings with the same fervour that she reserved for her maths teacher.

(...)

School was set to be another horrible disaster, until the teacher announced the class had a new transfer student. All of the thirty eleven-to-twelve-year-olds immediately became curious and began whispering among themselves about who this new student could possibly be. Rumiko was the only one who actually stayed quiet, but it was only because no one wanted to talk to her. If Rumiko had been just a little smarter, she would have figured out everything about the new transfer student before the new girl stepped into the room. But since Rumiko’s working brain cells could fit inside a peanut, she was surprised to see Kinomoto walking towards the teacher’s desk. She was asked to introduce herself to the class, and just like the day before, she spoke in an unnecessarily formal tone that caused her new classmates to stare at her in confusion.

“Good morning, everyone. I am Satsuki Kinomoto and I come from Hiroshima. It is a pleasure to be with you for the rest of this year. I look forward to working together with you from now on.”

The teacher thanked Kinomoto for her introduction and looked over the class to find a place for her to sit. “It looks like the only empty place is beside Higurashi-chan. I can only hope your intellectual capacity will not be damaged by hanging out with her.”

“I have met Higurashi-san before, sensei,” Kinomoto said. She turned to face the teacher with a curiously innocent look. “She seems like a very nice person.” Kinomoto’s unexpected compliment made Rumiko blush. Her classmates laughed.

“Higurashi-chan is not the smartest pea in the pod. Don’t let her drag you down,” the teacher elaborated. Twenty-nine children laughed. This was enough even for Kinomoto’s socially underdeveloped brain to understand the social dynamics of the classroom, and she did not like it at all.

“Higurashi-san is my friend. I shall help her improve her grades.” Kinomoto turned her back to the teacher and rushed to her assigned place. Rumiko was still blushing and nearly-hyperventilating. Between being humiliated by classmates and teachers and being called ‘friend’ by a girl she had met barely the day before, Rumiko had a lot of emotional baggage to process. She was not able to concentrate in class for at least fifteen minutes afterwards.

During the break, Rumiko and Kinomoto stayed behind as the other students ran for their freedom. The new transfer student wanted to make sure her friend had understood their last lessons, and she wanted to know a bit more about Rumiko’s school life.

“Are they always like this to you, Higurashi-san?” Kinomoto asked. Rumiko nodded and lowered her head in shame. “Why?”

“Because my grades are horrible. I’m always failing exams and bringing the class average down.”

“If that is the case, I can help you try to understand things better. Perhaps if your grades improve, they will stop doing this,” Kinomoto offered.

“Do you think you can do that?” Rumiko asked, surprised. Nobody apart from her mother had ever tried to help her before.

“I can certainly try. For example, what did you understand from the lesson we just had?” It was probably not surprising that Rumiko told Kinomoto she did not get any of it. Kinomoto was not discouraged, though. Instead, she spent the entire break teaching Rumiko everything she had learned. They were not able to get through the whole lesson, but the little they managed to cover made a huge difference in Rumiko’s brain. It was the first time in five years of formal schooling that things made so much sense. Kinomoto knew how to explain things in a way she could actually understand instead of memorising.

If Kinomoto did this for the rest of the year, Rumiko might be able to get a passing grade after all.

(...)

“Ah, there you are! I was wondering when you would show up!” Rumiko and Kinomoto were ambushed by Urashima just as they approached their building. The boy had apparently been perched on a tree nearby, jumping to the ground as soon as he saw the girls. He ran towards them with a maniac grin and wide wild eyes, which obviously scared Rumiko to such an extent that she had to find refuge behind Kinomoto’s shoulder. “Let’s go to my arena, I want to play against you and your vomiting bunny again!”

“We have homework to do,” Kinomoto answered. She was obviously not impressed by Urashima’s enthusiasm, and she had different priorities.

“We can do it afterwards! Come on, it’ll be fun!” Urashima insisted. His MaruBall’s tufts of hair were visible coming out from his backpack. “And then maybe Higurashi can finally get enough points to get a decent attack! I promise I’ll help her!”

“You want to help me?” Rumiko timidly asked, still hiding behind Kinomoto. “Really?”

“Well, yeah,” Urashima answered like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I thought once you can actually fight properly we could have more fun together, but for it to happen we need to get going with your new attack.”

“To be honest, I did not think Urashima-san was capable of thinking this far ahead,” Kinomoto noted, nodding slightly at the boy. “I still do not think we should play before our homework is done, but I am glad that you seem so keen to help Higurashi-san.”

“Me too! I want to play!” Rumiko beamed. She finally decided Urashima was not dangerous and ran to his side. “We can finish our homework afterwards, right?” she asked her two friends with the kind of hopeful expression that puppies often make when they want a bit of delicious human food.

“Yeah, we can! Come with me, Higurashi! Let’s get your MaruMonzter ready for the real world!” Urashima signalled for Rumiko to follow him and headed back to his own posh building. Kinomoto could do nothing to stop them, so, after carefully considering all her options, she decided to follow them. At least this way she could be sure Rumiko was actually going to do her homework.

Urashima lived just a couple of blocks away from the girls, so the walk to his arena was short and punctuated by exciting battle plans. True to his motivation, he played against Rumiko until she was able to accumulate the 200 points necessary to buy a new attack. He defeated her five times in total during the process, and had great fun watching the vomit machine in action. Though, after twenty-six repetitions of said vomit machine, even he got a little sick of it (pun totally intended).

“Yay, I have 200 points! Finally!” Rumiko beamed. Her bunny had just been sliced by Urashima’s red bear in armour, but she was too happy to care. She could finally have her MaruMonzter do something other than throw green slime balls, nothing else mattered.

“Let’s go spend them!” Urashima agreed. He seemed just as enthusiastic as Rumiko. However, Kinomoto did not let them enjoy the feeling for long.

“It is almost dinner time and we have not done our homework yet. We will have to do this tomorrow.”

“But…” Urashima tried to argue. Kinomoto did not let him elaborate, though.

“It is late. Thank you for having us, but we must go now.”

“What if we do our homework together?” Urashima proposed. “We can go up to my flat and have hot chocolate to help us think!”

“I do not think it is a good idea, Urashima-san,” Kinomoto said. She had not been comfortable visiting Rumiko’s house the day before, there was no way she would feel capable to see Urashima’s. Twenty-four hours was not enough time to turn him into an intimate friend.

“Ok, whatever. But we could do it here!” the boy insisted, gesturing that they could use the entire playground for school work. At first, Kinomoto wanted to reject that offer too, but once again Rumiko quickly sided with Urashima, and she felt defeated enough to agree.

Kinomoto was already expecting that she would end up doing most of Rumiko’s homework, or at least giving her so many hints about the answers that it would not make a difference. What she did not expect was to learn that Urashima was just as mentally-challenged as Rumiko, which meant that she ended up doing his homework too. Towards the end, Rumiko and Urashima started to complain that their brains were dying. They lost all concentration and annoyed her so much with their whining that she ended up finishing the whole thing for them while they played another round of silly fights in the improvised arena.

(...)

Sunday, 12^th January 2014.

Rumiko and her parents were having breakfast when a special delivery post buzzed their flat. Takao immediately became suspicious, so he decided he would go down to the building’s front gate to collect the special delivery on his own.

“What could it be?” Suzume asked no one in particular. She stood by the window to watch her husband. There was a red van parked outside, and a person in a mechanical wheelchair waiting by the gate. “There shouldn’t be post on Sundays.”

“Is dad going to be ok?” Rumiko asked, too scared to look out of the window. Her imagination was already suggesting the worst possible outcome for this unusual event. She thought that this mysterious Sunday post could only be some kind of plot to get her father taken away forever.

“Of course, my dear!” Suzume tried to calm down her daughter. As a fully-developed adult, she believed there was a perfectly rational explanation for everything, even if she could not figure out what that explanation was.

Meanwhile, Takao arrived at the front gate, where the person in the wheelchair was waiting. She did not seem surprised to see the man alone.

“I’m sorry to bother you on such an unusual time, but my delivery could not wait,” Yukina Tomino said as way of greeting. She smiled at Takao and handed him a small package tied with a yellow glittery ribbon. “This is a very special delivery to your daughter Rumiko Higurashi. Please make sure she gets the package, but tell her to not open it until the time is right.”

“What is in the package?” Takao asked, eyeing the strange woman with more than a healthy dose of suspicion. She looked like she had barely survived an explosion: her hair was sticking up from all angles and she was wearing a white lab coat. Her glasses made her eyes look uncomfortably huge.

“Something she will need in order to find out who she really is,” Yukina Tomino answered. She made sure her voice sounded ethereal and sinister to give just the right level of spooky feeling to the situation. She could have chosen to give the package to Rumiko on any other day, or even through the normal post, but she thought it would be too boring and anti-climactic. Important events like this had to unravel in the right atmosphere. They had to seem slightly creepy and paranormal and freak out the people involved; otherwise those people would not treat the occasion with the proper reverence it required.

That, plus she really liked to play the creepy witch. It fitted her personality well.

“You haven’t quite answered my question,” Takao noted. Yukina Tomino mentally rolled her eyes. Why did this man have to question her so much? Could he not just take the package and leave? She had a disappearing shop to run; she could not waste her whole day with an overly-inquisitive parent.

“That is because only your daughter can give you the answer,” the woman kept her ethereal tone. “She is the only one who can open the package. If anyone else tries, they will become aware of a world that is beyond their comprehension. And that includes you.”

“This sounds dangerous. I don’t want something like this anywhere near my daughter,” Takao said. He examined the small package in more detail: it was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and weighted about half a kilogram.

“I must warn you that this is something you cannot control. Your daughter will get the package and open it when the time is right, no matter what you do.” Yukina Tomino was becoming annoyed by the man’s resistance, though on the bright side she was absolutely enjoying to make her voice sound deep and mysterious. She should have taken that offer to start an acting career when she had a chance.

“We’ll see about that. Have a good day,” Takao dismissed the woman and walked back inside. Yukina Tomino tried to warn him one last time.

“It is always better to let destiny take its course peacefully, rather than fight it.” Takao ignored her. She shrugged and returned to her van, aware that the man was still watching her from inside the gate. When she drove away, Takao threw the package on the ground and returned home like nothing had happened. He told his family there had been a mistake, and that the special delivery had been for someone else. He thought this way he could protect his family from whatever horribleness was hidden in the package, but obviously he was wrong. Yukina Tomino meant every single one of her words, even as she doused them in special effects.

Later that day, Rumiko and Kinomoto were going to visit Urashima to play more MaruMonzterz. As they approached the building’s front gate, however, Rumiko noticed a small package lying laying by a patch of grass.

“What is this?” she asked, picking up said package. It had nothing written in it, just a yellow glittery ribbon tied around it. “It looks like someone threw it out. I guess it means I can keep it.” Rumiko put the package in her coat’s pocket and walked away.

(...)

“Hey, girls, ready to fight?” Urashima asked Rumiko and Kinomoto as soon as he saw them walking up to his building. He had been waiting by the gates, anxious to challenge the Main Character’s yellow bunny again. Once Rumiko got her second attack (slap), she became an even more interesting opponent. Little by little she was learning not only how to attack, but also how to dodge and how to run away. In Urashima’s opinion, those were very valuable skills, and it meant that he could have fun chasing the little bunny around the arena as well as terminate it with one single hit.

“Yes, we are,” Kinomoto answered. Urashima noticed she was not carrying a backpack and made the obvious conclusion (which was so obvious that even someone of his intellectual level could figure it out).

“Still no MaruMonzter, then. I’m starting to think that you were faking that story about the True Spirit.”

“I am not lying! My parents will not let me anywhere near those boxes. They say it is too dangerous for me to check on them on my own, and they do not have time to help me,” Kinomoto answered in a mix of frustration and anger. It had been a week since she moved into her new home, but most of the cardboard boxes still lay untouched. Her father was at work for most of the day, and her mother was too busy watching over her four-month old second daughter to care about some toys.

“Well, the registration for the tournament opened today. If you don’t hurry up, you won’t be able to compete,” Urashima told Kinomoto. The girl frowned and hissed her reply.

“Do you not think I am not aware of it, Urashima-san?” The boy in question was caught by surprise by her sudden change of demeanour, and was quite intimidated by it. Rumiko got so scared she tried to hide behind a tree. “I have tried to ask my parents to help me find Flamelus, but whenever I try to tell them how urgent it is, they say I have other things to worry about, like school and homework.”

“Ouch. Sorry, I didn’t know that,” Urashima gruntingly apologised. “Having crappy parents sucks. Mine don’t care about how much I play, but they don’t really seem to care about anything else anyway, so…”

“Your parents don’t like you?” Rumiko asked. She always took it for granted that parents cared about their children, as if it was as simple and straight-forward as ‘people who do not want to care for children do not have them’.

“I don’t really know,” Urashima shrugged. “They’re just always really busy, and when they’re home they pay more attention to my brothers because they’re younger and get more in trouble.”

“I find it hard to believe that there is someone who can get more in trouble than you, but I think I know what you are talking about,” Kinomoto said. She felt really weird being able to relate to Urashima on some level. The boy was her least favourite kind of person, and yet there was something they had in common. It was obviously not enough to make Kinomoto actually like Urashima, but it was enough to make his presence more tolerable.

Urashima, on the other hand, somehow thought that this new-found link was enough to take their friendship to a whole new level (Kinomoto was not even sure she considered him a friend). “Hey, you know what, I’m tired of being polite just for the sake of it!” he announced, facing the girls with a kind of maniac grin that forced Rumiko back to her hiding place behind the tree. “We’ve seen each other every day of this past week. Kinomoto did all my homework and Higurashi made her MaruMonzter vomit for my own entertainment. I don’t know about you, but I think it makes us pretty close friends.”

“Actually, I do not…” Kinomoto tried to protest, but Urashima interrupted her. His grandiose plan for the trio’s friendship was too good to be stopped.

“I want you guys to call me ‘Ken’. You’re the closest friends I’ve got, so we might as well get on first-name basis,” Urashima posed like he was someone important making a vital announcement for the survival of the nation. Kinomoto only raised her eyebrows, but Rumiko was impressed.

“You really don’t have other friends?” she asked the boy. She tried to refer to him as ‘Ken’ in her mind, but it sounded weird.

“Well, there’s the people I defeated, who hate me but respect my power, and there’s the people who hate me because I pulled a prank on them. They kind of want to kill me. Everyone else thinks I’m too weird.”

“That is because you are, Urashima-san,” Kinomoto said. She did not feel like calling a guy she barely knew by his first name.

“It’s ‘Ken’ for you,” the boy snarled. He sounded offended. “And yes, I’m weird. I like being weird. It’s fun, and it means people don’t expect me to do anything right, so I don’t have any pressure to do the right thing.”

“Whatever,” Kinomoto rolled her eyes.

“Can I really call you Ken?” Rumiko asked. She had not noticed Kinomoto’s body language of disbelief and annoyance, and seemed quite honoured at being given such friendship privilege.

“Yeah, sure. You’re my favourite rival,” the boy smiled with just a little hint of maniac. It was mostly cheerful and uplifting. “Can I call you Rumiko too?”

“I guess…” Rumiko answered. Ken’s open offer of friendship was almost too much for her. Before her birthday, she did not have any friends, but just a week later she was already someone’s closest friend. It was an incredibly nice change.

“Cool! Let’s fight, then, Rumiko!” Ken took his friend’s hand and ran to the arena, ignoring Kinomoto’s exasperated sigh. The girl ended up following them anyway, but she told herself it was only because Rumiko was her friend, and she needed to help her get better at playing MaruMonzterz.

(...)

“Let’s fight!” Ken screamed, throwing his MaruBall in the launch triangle. Rumiko did the same, and her cute bunny emerged ready for battle. “I’m not going to play easy with you anymore, Rumiko! Be prepared!”

“I’ll do my best!” Rumiko answered. She tried to slap the bear, but it dodged right on time. MaruMonzterz acquired the ability to dodge similarly to how they acquired attacks. The MaruMonzter had to reach a certain level of experience (meaning time spent fighting) before it could unlock a button sequence that allowed it to dodge incoming attacks. Whether it succeeded or not depended on how quickly the player gave the order and how strong the incoming attack was. For this reason, even though Rumiko had technically learned how to dodge, she was almost never successful, whereas Ken nearly always escaped unharmed.

“You need to be quicker!” Ken told her, preparing his bear to attack. He wanted to stomp on the poor bunny to turn it into a pool of goo and end the match (it was his favourite attack for a reason), but just as he was preparing to push the first button of his attack sequence, Rumiko’s bunny attacked again. It jumped high in the air until it was level with the bear’s head and slapped it across the cheeks three times. Rumiko got fifteen points for the successful hit. “Well played, Rumiko, well played.” Ken tried to prepare his attack sequence again, but the bunny kept attacking. “Whoa, what are you doing?”

“I’m not really sure,” Rumiko answered. She was no longer pressing any buttons, but the bunny still kept going.

“Maybe you pressed some kind of secret combination,” Ken suggested. Kinomoto came closer to Rumiko so she could see what was on her MaruMind’s screen.

“This is not possible,” Kinomoto said.

“Then maybe it’s broken,” Ken suggested. Rumiko had so far gained forty-five points since the attack sequence started.

“Oh, no!” Rumiko cried. It was not fair on her that her MaruMonzter broke just as she was beginning to get used to the game. If there was a defect on her bunny, she was not even sure she would be able to find the disappearing shop to get it repaired. Come to think of it, she was not sure she wanted to go to the disappearing shop at all.

But just as she was giving in to despair about her MaruMonzter’s condition, she felt something hot burning in her coat pocket. On reflex, she reached for it with her bare hand. Logically, if the thing was hot enough to burn through her coat, it would be hot enough to turn Rumiko’s skin into molten lava, but all Rumiko felt as she touched the mysterious package was a slightly warm sensation.

“That is that package you found on the ground,” Kinomoto stated the obvious, mostly for Ken’s benefit because everyone else knew about it.

“I wonder what is in it…” Rumiko said just as she reached for the yellow ribbon. The package felt warmer once it came undone, and got progressive warmer the more Rumiko tore away the remaining outside wrapping.

“That is…” Kinomoto did not have time to finish her sentence. It turned out that the package contained a small black stone. As soon as it was free from all wrappings, it emitted a dark glow and hovered a few centimetres over Rumiko’s hand. In the arena, the bunny finally ceased its wave of attacks. It fell on the ground and turned towards its owner. The dark glow from the stone intensified, and it shot straight into the bunny. Rumiko and Ken screamed in horror as the stone hit the bunny in the eye, making it glow with the same dark aura.

As if the scene was not gruesome enough, the bunny’s body immediately began to stretch. Its legs elongated until they became thin and muscular; the paws morphed into hooves. The body grew, losing its soft fur and replacing it with hard metallic armour. The bunny’s neck also stretched, forming a human armoured torso from which a pair of arms and hands sprung. The head also became visibly human, though the cute helmet that used to make the bunny smile stayed in place. Lastly, the bunny’s ears shrunk until they were no longer visible.

A fully armoured centaur stood in front of the three children. Its body glowed with a black aura that made Rumiko’s blood freeze.

The sheer terror of the moment could not be translated into words. Rumiko’s brain had gone into safety mode and shut down all non-vital functions. Something horrible had taken over her cute bunny, and now it stood there, ready to attack her.

This moment of terror lasted only until the creature spoke, though.

“Yo, Master! I’m here to serve you!” the centaur said, in a deep ethereal voice, like it was coming from a cave far, far away. Rumiko did not realise it was speaking directly to her mind.

“Serve me? Who are you?” she asked out loud. Kinomoto immediately understood what was happening (she had lived through something similar after all), but Ken freaked out.

“What is going on?” he tried to ask, but Kinomoto signed that he should shut up.

“I’m your True Spirit. The name is Fenki, and I’m here to save the day!” the centaur answered. Even though his voice had the same pitch and overall creepiness of the voice given to villainous, violent, and bloody-thirsty monsters, his tone was cheerful and strangely charismatic. Once Rumiko got over the shock and the fear, she found it quite entertaining.

“My True Spirit? How?”

“What? Rumiko has a True Spirit? But…”

“I have chosen you to be my master. We will work together from now on.”

“Why did you choose me?” Rumiko had not yet realised she was the only one who could hear the centaur. Ken was puzzled by the seemingly one-sided dialogue, but Kinomoto was sending him a scary vibe of ‘do not interrupt them or else something really painful and unpleasant is going to happen to you and you will not like it’, so he limited his actions to staring at the centaur in absolute awe.

“I have many reasons, though I like to say that it was because if I didn’t, there would be no story to tell.”

“You’re making me confused.”

“And you are making your friend confused,” the centaur laughed. He figured Ken had been freaked out long enough. “I can hear your thoughts; you don’t need to speak to me.”

“Oh, I see!” Rumiko beamed. Then she realised she had spoken out loud again, and tried to just think about her words. “What happened to my bunny?”

“I have taken over its body. It no longer exists as such,” the centaur answered. Rumiko was a little sad that the bunny she put so much effort into looking cute had lasted only a week. The True Spirit realised this. “You don’t need to be sad about your lost bunny, master. I’m much cuter!” Rumiko looked over the centaur. He was probably as tall as her, or maybe a little taller. His human half was covered in simple metal armour, and his horse half looked like it had been running marathons for its entire existence. He was not what Rumiko would call ‘cute’, with the probable exception of the smiley helmet. “Now why don’t you test my power? I guarantee you I can defeat that bear in no time!”

“Ken, let’s carry on with the game,” Rumiko told her friend, following the orders of her True Spirit. Ken hesitated, but ultimately agreed once Kinomoto nodded to him. “This is my True Spirit. His name is Fenki and he said he can defeat your MaruMonzter easily.”

“I think he’s right…” Ken gulped. The centaur was still emanating his ominous dark glow that made him look like the story’s main villain rather than the Main Character’s weapon of choice. He could feel the creature’s strength all the way to his bones. His whole body shook in anticipation, and he almost missed the buttons for his attack sequence.

The bear slashed the centaur. In a perfect inversion of what the ‘Rumiko v. Ken’ confrontations consisted of until then, the hit made negligible damage to the True Spirit and gave Ken meagre five points. Ken attacked again, with the same result. Rumiko pressed the orange button, the key to unleash ‘slap’, and was quite amused to see the centaur’s human hand slap the bear on the face three times. The bear fell on the ground, Rumiko got fifty points, but the fight was not yet over.

“The bear is almost finished. One more attack, and the fight is ours,” Fenki told Rumiko. He seemed very keen to deliver the finishing blow. Ken was very conscious that the end was near, but he was too marvelled by the True Spirit’s strength to do anything. “It doesn’t even need to be a very strong attack…”

The centaur’s true intentions reached Rumiko on a more subtle wave of thoughts. She realised Fenki had a strange sense of humour (or at least warped sense of revenge), but she went along with his idea anyway. It sounded like fun.

Rumiko pressed the green button of her MaruMind, and Fenki immediately began to make retching noises. Realising what was about to happen, Ken approached the arena to see it from a better angle. The centaur’s green ball of slime hit the bear full on, and little pieces of it splashed all over the place, including Ken’s face and clothes.

“What the hell?” he cried as he felt the warm, smelly substance hit his body. He tried to shake it off, but even as the slime cleared away, the smell had already impregnated everything.

“True Spirits’ attacks are not illusions,” Kinomoto explained. In the arena, Fenki and Ken’s bear dissolved into puddles of goo, then reshaped into MaruBalls. True to Fenki’s dark glow, Rumiko’s MaruBall was now black instead of yellow, and its fluffy tufts of hair had turned brown. “They are very real.”

“Noticed,” Ken grumbled. Rumiko handed him his MaruBall, but recoiled when his smell reached her nostrils. “This is not fair, you know?”

“What is not fair?” Rumiko asked, now standing a safe distance from the boy.

“That I’ve been playing forever and I haven’t got a True Spirit, but you got to know the game a week ago and already have one!”

“I told you it is not easy to get True Spirits, Urashima-san,” Kinomoto told him. The boy scowled.

“It’s ‘Ken’ for you. And it’s still not fair!” he scowled again. Just as it looked like he was going to complain about the unfairness of life again, though, he opened a huge, bright smile instead, and declared, loud enough for the whole building to hear, “But I won’t give up! I’ll register for the tournament today, and I’ll find a True Spirit before the fights start! I’ll be strong enough to defeat Rumiko again or I’ll eat Fenki’s vomit!”

“Prepare your stomach, then…” Kinomoto grinned. She still did not like Ken that much, but the mental image he suggested was very entertaining.

Later that day, Rumiko and Ken filled the online registration forms for the Japanese Tournament. Kinomoto decided to wait a bit more, still hoping she could persuade her parents to recover Flamelus from its cardboard prison. Unfortunately for her, though, her hopes did not materialise.

For the next two weeks, Ken lived in sheer agony and despair as the days went by without him finding a True Spirit. He did not want to give in to the feeling of impending doom that he got every time he faced Rumiko on a friendly game (the vomit attack had been outlawed for everyone’s nasal wellbeing), but he was very aware that he would not be able to get too far on the competition if he faced other True Spirits without one of his own.

For Rumiko, those two weeks were spent mostly trying to get used to Fenki’s strength and to the weird telepathic link they shared. Fenki’s power allowed her to accumulate considerably more points per fight, and also made it possible for her to start customising attacks beyond the initial options that were given to her old bunny. By the time the tournament started, Fenki’s special attacks included ‘flick of the finger’, ‘one-leg butt kick’, and ‘double butt-kick’. All attack names had been suggested by Fenki, which led Rumiko to suspect the centaur’s true personality in no way matched his scary appearance.

Rumiko was not entirely sure it was a good or bad thing.