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Championship decider Match, Shimetsu Kaiyū Superdome, 2009
Paper flags flapped like banners in a war camp next to oversized signs saturated with names and sponsor logos and league crests as the Shimetsu Kaiyū Continental Championship began its final bracket under the riotous glow of the city’s fight dome.
Geto Suguru sat in the nosebleeds, slouched low in a seat with worn foam stuffing and a view partially blocked by someone’s overly enthusiastic flag-waving.
It didn’t matter. They’d all settle down and lean in for the show soon enough.
Suguru shoved his hands into his hoodie pockets, fingers fiddling with the ticket paid for in cash earned through blood, one foot propped against the metal bar in front of him, ankle still bruised from a match two nights ago that no one here would ever hear about. Not unless they knew which alleys to turn down and which back doors to knock on.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford a better seat. He could have, technically. He’d worked enough fights this semester to buy the middle rows, maybe even nose-bleeding a little closer to the stage, but this seat was his by choice.
This was where he belonged now. In the shadows.
It hadn’t always been like that.
He used to be in clubs.
Karate in elementary school. Wrestling in middle school. Judo in junior high. Boxing through high school, where the medals started piling up until they didn’t mean much anymore. He was good. Not flashy. But clean. Sharp. Focused. The kind of kid a coach could point to and say “watch him.”
Until the scholarships didn’t come through, and his parents stopped helping with the bills. Suguru had always been cursed with bad luck like that.
The gyms with the good mats turned into double shifts. Tournament weekends turned into always too-mild painkillers and old wraps under cheap gloves. Suguru hadn’t been in a ring with cameras in years.
He fought to make rent now, to pay tuition, to breathe. He had learned how to hide his presence. How to duck under attention. It was easier here, where something so bright was right before everyone’s eyes, blind to the darkness around them.
And then-
Flash.
Sharp lights hit the blue corner like judgement, combated by the cacophonous war cry erupting all around in approval of the new arrival there.
It was a championship showcase, but it might as well have been a coronation.
Gojo Satoru wore the crowd, chanting his name like a prayer and a dare all at once, like a cloak. Posing. Messing around. Making girls in the front rows shriek as the cameras panned close and he removed his trademark shades to reveal those famously vibrant eyes, throwing a wink their way. Smiling.
Not nervously. Not grateful.
Like it was fun.
The arena ate it up.
Cameras circled. Commentary buzzed overhead. Every seat taken, most of the crowd not here to see a fight, but to see him.
Suguru was no better than them, watching the ring below, eyes fixed on the boy with the starshine and the spotlight stride toward the center, loose and easy.
White hair. Long legs. A build that didn’t look like it could hold the kind of force it did and the kind of grin that made people forgive too easily, because it came from a pretty face not used to hardening for impact.
To Suguru’s left, Miguel leaned forward on his elbows, eyes locked on the arena, quietly wagering chances under his breath. To Suguru’s right, Minami had her legs crossed and a drink in hand, distractedly chewing ice and smirking at the fighters’ stats as they came up on the screen. A couple more familiar voices a row behind joked too loudly about the weigh-ins, Larue and Toshihisa, but the jostle his shoulder received only moved Suguru to glance back once, giving them a thin smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
They were friends, kind of. Study peers. His personal cult following. Mutuals from certain nights and certain kinds of circuits. They knew to keep the chatter light on nights like these.
Suguru’s attention was already called forward again to the ring. To the stage.
Gojo’s opponent tonight was a decent fighter. Older, more experienced. He had a solid stance, decent reach. It didn’t matter. Everyone knew it.
Because he, upstart with a billion rich backing, was in the ring now.
The Rikugan sponsorship patch, a simple, six-sided die dotted with blue eyes stitched in silver thread to the left thigh of Gojo Satoru’s shorts, caught the light as he stepped in for the handshake, glinting like a medal he hadn’t had to earn. Meant to be seen. Meant to make sure no one ever forgot who Gojo Satoru was. Not just a fighter, but a brand. A legend in the making backed by more than talent.
The kind of support Suguru didn’t believe in anymore.
Rikugan wasn’t just some decades-old martial arts supply company clawing its way back to relevance. It was just so exclusive that the sponsorships came one in a million. And they had chosen him to be the face of its launch into the fighting world. Of course it had.
The rumor was that Rikugan’s backing came straight from the Gojo family, synonymous with it. Not a surprise. That surname meant old money, old influence, and enough legal insulation to make or break industries if they felt like it. Some said the sponsorship was just a tax write-off disguised as a PR play. Others whispered it was nepotism with better lighting.
Suguru didn’t care.
Because if anyone thought that was the only reason Gojo was standing there, smiling like a hurricane in silk wraps, they were watching the wrong fight.
He didn’t need a golden nameplate to get this far. Anyone with even a whiff of instinct could tell. The guy was good. Too good. A kind of terrifying that didn’t need an entourage or sponsorship to arrive first in the ring. Rikugan just polished what was already blinding.
Still, he thought, it must be nice.
To have the weight of your bloodline bend toward your ambition. To decide not to follow the family business and be rewarded for it anyway.
To choose the ring and be applauded for chasing glory instead of stability.
Suguru tightened his jaw and let the thought pass like a silenced cough behind a smile.
The bell was struck and the opponent was already throwing a few fast jabs before the noise had even fully died down.
None of them connected. Of course they didn’t.
That was the myth of Gojo Satoru.
Untouchable.
The legend had started early with a quote that circulated and echoed like gospel in every gym and locker room, sending it's ripples all across the country. First pro match, first televised moment.
The mic had been shoved in front of his grinning face, the spotlight reflecting off dark shades and white teeth.
Satoru Gojo had said, laughing, “If you want to land a hit on me, you’ll need more than speed. You’ll need a miracle. There’s infinity between me and you.”
Suguru had scoffed the first time he’d heard the quote repeated to him by some rabid fan crowding him in the lockers before his match with a "Have you heard?", like they were offering salvation to him through bringing the world of the honored one to his unworthy ears. He'd thought it arrogant at first, before someone had shoved a grainy YouTube replay of his moves in his face.
Hell, the guy could back it up.
And so it stuck. Gojo's infinity. Not just because it was a good line, it was, but because no one had ever proven him wrong.
That line was on t-shirts, phone cases, billboard quotes before the week of his debut had been out. (The sponsors and marketing team sure did their job.)
He had said it like a joke, but it had hit like a challenge.
And the world loved a champion prospect who knew he was unbeatable, setting the entire scene alight with the buzz of excitement coming to a head tonight.
Suguru watched quietly as the bout unfolded exactly as predicted and the crowd lost its mind as Gojo moved like physics bent to accommodate him, stepping out of reach like it was a formality, countering like he had already seen the trajectory long before the punch was thrown. No wasted movements. If anything, it looked like his opponent was always an inch short of connecting, repelled by invisible force.
The whole thing was over in thirty-six seconds.
While spectators jumped out of their seats and the wild cheers all around turned to deafening white noise, Suguru stood to tilted his head up at the screen over the arena, eyes drawn to the slow-motion replay unfold on the jumbotron above the ring: Gojo sidestepping cleanly, slipping a jab like gravity bowed for him alone. Then the counter. Sharp, snappy, a blur of motion too fast to feel real unless you were there, right in the thick of it.
And again, even slower to really catch what had happened too fast for anyone to have truly caught it until the body had went down and the ref had jumped between. Almost frame by frame it showed Gojo dancing in close, dodging like he could read ahead in time, then struck with clean, surgical precision. Flashy, brutal, impossible.
The challenger staggered back, instant K.O. and fell like a log caught in the wires of the red corner he'd only just left behind moments before. He hadn’t landed a single hit before the ref called it for safety.
Suguru knew fighting. Knew the taste of sweat and blood and the sound bone made when it cracked beneath pressure. He likely wouldn't be in any official circuit, that kind of stage. That kind of life was far out of reach now. Suguru had made peace with that. Mostly.
And yet, watching him, Gojo Satoru, who was barely older than Suguru, months, just debuted on the pro circuit, no dirt on him, no broken knuckles that had barely healed, not like Suguru’s, move like that, with all the lights in the world pointed his way… it lit something in his chest he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Not envy. Nothing quite so bitter.
Just the ache of something almost remembered. The thrill of wanting.
Gojo bowed, all charm and shine, hands loose and casual like he hadn’t even broken a sweat.
To the world, he was the golden boy. The genius. The storm you couldn’t touch. The lightning strike from clear blue skies.
The new champion.
But to Suguru he looked like something else.
A puzzle. A challenge.
A siren call to action.
Because even from a distance, through the roar of adoration and lights, Suguru could see it: Gojo wasn’t just fast. He wasn’t just strong. He was hungry.
And hunger meant something else, something deeper.
Hunger meant he hadn’t been fed yet.
Suguru raised his own hands to belatedly join the downpour of claps with his own quiet acknowledgement, drowned out. The action earned some strange looks from his friends as they turned to comment on the disappointingly brief match, catching the faintest shadow of a smile quirking his lips, too odd a sight when it wasn't used to charm the witless.
He didn't mind it. Here, it was genuine.
There was something different about Gojo’s shine. Something unbothered and terrifyingly pure.
Like he really didn’t know what it meant to lose, and wouldn’t find out anytime soon.
Suguru exhaled, low and long. There was still a part of him that itched to be in that ring, to see if that “infinity” could be crossed.
He didn’t need the fame. He didn’t want the crowd. He wasn't looking to dim that brightness.
But he did want to see what would happen if infinity was breached.
Up close. One-on-one. Untainted by the crowds, no cameras, no rules, no one collecting money after.
Just fists. Pressure. Truth.
Suguru didn’t belong in rings like that anymore.
He belonged to the back rooms, the smoky spaces, the nameless places where nobody asked for credentials and everybody bled.
The world could keep its shining star.
He’d watch grudgeless from the shadows, where his name was whispered like a curse and where he was free to follow his own rules.
Even to himself he had to admit, that part of him thought Gojo Satoru really did deserve all the blessings he got.
He just wished maybe, just maybe, for infinity not to stretch quite so far.