Chapter 2.3 / Aftermath: Terrorism
"Terrorism is the use of indiscriminate violence for political ends. It has a logic, even if it is one we
mostly do not care to understand."
~ Johnathan Cook
•••••
Just after Asylum XI goes off air -- Halls of the Ultraviolent Complex
Kei Hideshima was the epitome of a smug bastard.
There was literally nothing else that could describe the Japanese Oyabun. It’d gone off perfectly, he had to say so himself. It didn’t matter that Crosslin hadn’t lost. It didn’t matter that Whelan hadn’t won. All that mattered was that the Ultraviolent Faithful understood one thing: fuck with him, fuck with his students, and you better fucking believe that your world will be turned upside down. Did he give one little shit about Samantha Baltimore and her unborn child? Fuck no. The message had been sent, and that was all he cared about.
He was disappointed, to be sure, in Finn’s reluctance to capitalize on it, but he understood exactly why Finn didn’t step into those shoes. The Irish-American stood on every upstanding principle that he could: honor, respect, loyalty, and integrity flowed through the kid in every way, shape and form. Finn wanted his wins to be on him. He wanted his losses to be on him. And Kei wasn’t willing to stand there. One day, sooner or later, Finn would understand that the wrestling scene wasn’t going to toss him a bone until he lost those values.
He pulled his iPhone from his pocket, and rolled through his messages. A couple from Alejandra that he could message later, a beautiful two word phrase of praise in the way of “Fuck you” from Crosslin on Twitter, and a few text messages from his lovely sister. With a smirk, he began responding. And so in tune with what he was doing, as he stopped in the middle of that hallway, he didn’t even hear the pounding footsteps from behind him, the soles of leather boots hitting the concrete floors with a sickening squelch. The iPhone went tumbling to the floor as Kei’s head suddenly became best friends with the wall.
“THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” Finn Whelan roared at the top of his lungs at his mentor as the Japanese man dropped to the ground on his hands and knees, dazed.
The adrenaline that had evaporated over the time where Samantha was laid out on the broken table had come back tenfold once Finn realized what’d happened. He had the match. A few more minutes of wearing Crosslin down, he would have won. He refused to believe otherwise. But Kei -- fucking Kei -- always had his own agenda. He may have believed he was helping his protege, but to Finn, all it was was an ill-boded stain on his record.
Finn grabbed Kei’s asian-blonde hair and pulled him up before locking in a chokehold, jumping onto his back to put his full weight into the attack. If murder wasn’t a crime, Finn may have honestly thought about committing it.
“I,” he growled, “had,” he applied more pressure, “it!”
Somehow, some way, Kei found his way back to his feet and fought off the blood loss from the pressure around his throat. He stumbled forward, backward, and then pivoted, finding himself able to slam Finn’s back into the brick wall behind him.
THUD!
Finn refused to let go, gritting his teeth against the pain of his spine hitting the wall with force.
THUD!
Still holding on, he locked his fingers around his arm, holding the hold in place.
THUD!
This time, he slipped, the bones in his spine smarting from the pressure themselves. It only took that for the more seasoned competitor to grab Finn’s hair with one arm, and somehow got the other around his waist, allowing Kei to flip him forward and onto his back. Finn hit the concrete floor with a sick smack. He winced, but resiliency was his game. At least, until Kei’s fist collided with Finn’s face, cutting open the younger man’s lip and knocking his head onto the floor in the process.
“Ungrateful bakayarou!” Finn’s sensei screamed as he stumbled back against wall, trying to regain his footing. “Dono yō ni anata o aete!”
“You seriously believe I should be grateful for that shit?!” Finn fired back, blood streaming now from his mouth, waiting for the exact moment that Kei would reach down to grab for him again. It was predictable -- Kei taught him that very same move himself. He lunged for the man’s legs, taking him down to the floor, and climbed atop of him, grabbing for his head and bashing the back of Kei’s skull into the floor. “I will never be okay with that!”
“Finn!” Elena yelled, stepping onto the scene, followed by the blue-haired Transglobal Spectacle herself. They both ran up, Elena tossing her championship to the floor as she did so, their miniature feud forgotten for the moment.
Finn’s focus was only on the person who destroyed his chances at a clean win tonight. It didn’t matter it’d been a draw due to a double count out, all he could see was red. Because of Kei, Samantha Baltimore was headed to the hospital. Because of Kei, Finn’d lost the respect of Crosslin, of everyone in attendance, and that was not how it was meant to be. He’d fought so hard for recognition, only to have it shoved in his face as if he were the villain.
Aaron was the first to reach the two, having been slightly more quicker than Elena due to her low clearance to the ground. She reached for Finn, grabbing his shoulder, but he wasn’t having it. He pushed at her, and surprised, she too lost her footing, crashing into the metal shelves behind her. She fell to her ass, her leg flying up and kicking Finn in the jaw.
Seeing the opportunity wide open, Elena grabbed for her teammate -- regardless of their current predicament -- and pulled him off of Kei, tugging him to the floor and pulling his arms behind him and upwards, pressing her her foot into his back, threatening to pull upwards if he fought back.
The back of Kei’s head was slightly red, having been busted open, and he crawled to his hands and knees, finding a place against the wall and sitting back against it. Finn’s chin was covered in blood at this point, and Kei’s nose was bleeding as well.
“Try me,” Elena snapped at Finn as he struggled, “I’m literally dying to snap your arms off.”
“Elena.” Aaron tried to admonish, holding her back as she sat up on the floor as well.
“Don’t Elena me, Smurfette.”
Only when Finn relaxed did Elena let him go. He sat up, and got to his feet, wiping the blood from his lips. He turned and looked back at all of them. And every single eye was on him. He’d clearly lost his mind, and none of them knew exactly what to do with it.
“You may not get it now, Kyodai,” Kei breathed outwards, and swiped at his nose. “But I am trying to help you.”
“You call that helping?” Finn started. Both Elena and Aaron leapt up, grabbing his shoulders, keeping him back from attacking Kei again. “You caused me to look like an asshole!”
“Because that is the only way you’re ever going to get noticed here, Finn!” He screamed back. “You hold your morals in your hand, but standing back and being that nice guy isn’t going to get you shit in this business.”
“Attacking Reece’s pregnant wife--”
“She should have known better than to get onto the apron in an environment such as So-Cal Ultraviolent.” Kei retorted. “Anything can happen, and anything did.”
“You--”
No one let Finn talk, generally. It was an unwritten rule, apparently.
“Did you just feel that rage?” When Finn stared at him, Kei chuckled. “You were mad enough at me to take my head off. You need to find that if you’ll ever face Crosslin again. The man hates you now,” another laugh, “regardless of if you knew a damn thing about it, he will hold it against you, and he’ll carry it into your next match. If you want the Ultraviolent Championship, I need him to hate you so that you lose it just like you did four seconds ago.”
He was so much worse when it came to manipulating than Aaron.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about what people think, and neither should you. The only thing that matters is causing enough problems in people’s lives that they don’t know what the hell to do with you. If I have to do that for you because you’re such a goddamn pussy about it, then I will. Do what you will, Callien O’Hanlon, but you will never attain glory by sitting by and being ‘Good Guy Finnegan’. You’ll never be more than a second rate wrestler.”
“Fuck off.” Finn snapped.
The Yakuza head snorted and shook his head, “I won’t be fucking off any time or day soon. Get it through your head, kid. ‘The Seattle Saint’ doesn’t exist without me. Your tenure in So-Cal doesn’t exist without me. You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you shit.”
Again, he snorted, and got to his feet. He looked at Elena, and then to Aaron, and then to Finn once more. “You owe me everything. Who will get you the championship shot when Cortez won’t even look at you? Me. Who makes sure your whole family is safe? Me, because I haven’t bothered to give a royal shit about who is around you. But you touch me one more time like that, Finn Whelan, and you and everyone you care about,” he pointed at Elena, and then to Aaron, “karera wa shinde iru. Dead. You follow my rules. You don’t make your own. If you don’t want terrorism at your doorstep, you’ll think twice, Kyodai.”
Aaron’d had it. “If you actually had his back, you wouldn’t be doing this.”
“If you weren’t so interested in sucking his dick, you’d be up in the ring yourself, sweetheart.” Kei retorted. “I would keep my mouth shut if I were you, Asphyxia. Ghosts could be popping up in your dreams to take them away permanently.”
“You’re threatened me in the past. Haha, so scared.”
“And those scars on your stomach should remind you of what I’ve done.” When Aaron blanched, Kei grinned. “Exactly. Is it ten years those have been there, Aaron?”
“You don’t touch her.” Finn snapped. “You don’t touch Elena, Aaron, Isabella -- none of them.”
“Or what, you’ll come at me?”
“I’ll . . .”
“Please say you’re dying to kill me, Finn.” Kei, with a smirk, reached for his phone. “I’d say you’d be welcome to try, but you’re not. You don’t have the balls to do it, and even if you did, you’d lose any chance of finding Addisyn.”
Finn went silent. Completely. It was almost as if he wasn’t breathing.
“That’s what I thought.” He chuckled, once more. “Ten A.M. sharp, Finn. Need you to help with the movement of some product. Wouldn’t want Cortez getting any sort of whiff of where Alejandro is. After all . . . he is your ticket to the championship.”
The three tattooed wrestlers watched as Kei walked off, almost as if he wasn’t even phased by Finn’s assault.
“If any of that’s true . . .” Elena started, clearly worried for Finn. His demeanor had changed from angry psychopath to unfocused kid, just as if it’d been changed by the snap of his fingers. She looked up at his face, where blood was streaming down from the cut at his temple, a reopened wound from an attack at Phoenix. It flowed past his eye, and now dripped softly on the floor, accompanied by the new wound on his lip. “Callien, if you get the shot, it’s not even on you.”
“I don’t care.” Finn spat. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s because of Kei that I even get the shot. Reece will want a rematch after this shit. Maybe not at Asylum. Maybe not at So-Cal World War. But he’ll want a rematch. Whatever happens in that ring is on me. Just like it was tonight. Reece is right. This is my fault. Everything that happens in that ring is my fault if it goes wrong. I’ll spend the next few shows making up for that wrong, but I will not let it tarnish my name. Kei may want to destroy me, but saints will only ever be martyred in the name of what they think is right.”
“Kei has Addisyn.” Aaron murmured softly.
“Kei’s gonna get the fuck out of So-Cal, or he’s going to wish he’d died during the bombing of Hiroshima after what I’m gonna do to him.” He swiped at his lip again, wiping the blood off of his mouth and chin. “This war has begun.”