Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 6: Meeting People is Easy

Mali brought her flag down.

“And that will settle the first rounds! Now it’s time for a much-needed food break!”

Enekai and Yulaan ran towards the food court, a hundred paces away from the pavilion and arena. The bronze champion hyperventilated around Yulaan and calmed when Enekai rushed along. 

Sesame shook both fists after them. “I’ll tie your tails into knots if you spend all my money stuffing your goddamn maws again, monkeyfucks!”

Temujin felt cooler than the other side of the pillow. Surely, he reasoned, he’d be taken out by one of the freaks, but his flight-footedness had always been what made him dangerous. His steps quickened into brisk-popping, almost skipping. At last, he felt as he had during the Toad Sage’s tournament: greedy, writhing in agonizing cockiness, tongue against the grin-wise teeth. A thought came then, to rest on that cool-side pillow and be calm. Save the joy to share with his rescued friends, then they’ll join together at a wheeling feast-table: twenty cheers for the Toad School senshi, victorious rescuers and dearest friends. 

He sat down at a stone table next to a neon jacket-wearing gaki boy who had already eaten what Temujin assumed was thrice the thing’s body weight in blood sausages and cabbage.

“Yo! You’re Temujin, aren’t you?” he said, or at least Temujin assumed those were the words through the chewing. His eyes were stuck in a perpetual squint, but his voice sounded enough like a dumb kid that Temujin paid him attention. “My brother bet on you!”

“Oh really!”

He swallowed, but the mass seemed not to satisfy him, so he grabbed another handful of sausages. “If you win, we get a million zhu-dollars.”

“Huh… I didn’t think I’d be worth that much.”

He beamed, showing the bits of meat on his lips. “You’re not! It’s a Longshot Bet. You dying pays out pennies and grass.”

Temujin scowled. 

“I wanna play that new crusader killer arcade game, but it takes, like, a billion quarters. You better win, Muji-chan.”

He scowled harder. These were the moments in life he wished he had a brother, a soft-body ready to be hard-bruised whenever the soft-brain couldn’t control its soft-tongue. 

“Thanks, kid. I’ll fight for your right to party.” Then he leaned back.

“Hey, are you matched up against Bakuga?”

“Hm? I don’t know. The wheel didn’t show yet.”

His words caused the boy to cease stuffing his mouth and instead sit contemplatively still. 

The first words he said that Temujin could make out without guessing were, “You’re screwed if you are.”

Temujin looked across the court. Bakuga sat alone with a rubber band stretched between the index finger and the thumb, plucking it into a tune too small for the mountain and too sweet for the meat on the tables. The sound slipped into Temujin’s neck and loosened something there.

“I heard there was a spiritual temple somewhere in the firelands where everyone committed ritual suicide by sword for no apparent reason. One of the only survivors was some idiot janitor who said it was one of the students who did it. He supposedly lost his family to human demon hunters, and couldn’t handle the grief. But instead of seeking vengeance like a real demon, he said he just wanted to ‘let go.’ And when he finally reached enlightenment, well…”

“Wow.” Temujin looked over to Bakuga, his fingers deftly moving to tune the vibrations by stretching and relaxing the rubber until it tickled the air like an angel’s harp. The timbre relaxed the nerves— into horror, as Temujin realized why he felt so unbothered. 

“But actually,” said the demon, now chewing again, “everyone thinks he already reached it long before then because he was known as a healer in his hometown, and that’s usually one of the signs, right? That and having some animal follow you around, like, what was it, bugs and birds? You know, he might even have been born one.”

“Is that even possible?”

The gaki shrugged. Then he extended a hand. “Makku!”

“Oh! Uh, Temu— well you got it already. Thanks.”

Makku said, “As long as you don’t fight ‘im, you might win!” 

He exhaled and went, “Heh…” The calm in him now felt like the unmixed red-blue of sunset sky on the eve of his execution day. 

Yulaan found Killkamesh, who had admitted that upon hearing of Saiyans traveling into Demon World, he had joined his frail, frightening mother in frantic over-burgering, hoping to get their attention; upon hearing of them signing up for the tournament, he claimed he had not slept the entire night until he’d flipped so many patties on his stone grill that he felt he earned the right to wear his apron: “The Burger King”

Yulaan said, “I ought to take you on a trip back to Earth-Prime, to around… a year there named 1952, I think, and you can capitalize on that and make your mommy proud.”

Seeing how many of the demon delicacies the two Yabans had consumed, Sesame ranted, “Alright then, I gotchu. I gotchu. Next time you two make a wish for food, I’ll remember to make sure to add a little something extra.”

Killkamesh, that portly green djinn— Temujin had no idea why the word ‘ogre’ came to him before, maybe it was the greenskin thing— squeezed unfortunately in bike shorts, slipped a spatula under a sizzling patty and flipped it through the air. Enekai jumped to catch it with her teeth, but Yulaan pushed her down and seized it with her tail.

“That’s it,” said Sesame. She lifted a little purple velvet bag and emptied air in sardonic jerks. “We’re broke. You wiped me out.”

Enekai shoved Yulaan’s face trying to get the patty and said, “We’ll win treasures! You’ll have way— more!!”

With a mouth-shrug and a taut gait, Sesame strode over to Temujin and said, “Habibi, remind me to put shock collars on them.”

In fact, Temujin had enjoyed the overwhelming joyously salty aroma of the masses of burgers, but wanted to delve into the wild world of demonic cuisine. He bought a plate of ‘koshimo kori’— grilled ice cubes. 

When he realized he’d been tricked by a sneaky gobliness named Utita, Temujin growled and demanded the most expensive item on the menu for free. 

Utita said to him, “Don’t worry, soon-to-be human champion!” and sent her son onwards. While she was a not unpleasant snot-green busty lady, even with the chipped gold-pinned ear and a badly laced shirt, her plump onion-shaped ghost-white yaoguai son— was he adopted, Temujin wondered— pattered his feet across the stone. His face was mostly sagging lines trying to become a face, and when he grinned, two teeth fell out and plorped upon hitting the ground.

Utita then slithered her hands across his cheeks and forced his head in place. “You asked for it, sonny! If you want something without paying, then honor my boy’s talents. Sit back, relax, and watch the great Ari-apari soothe your uneasy nerves! Dance, my son!”

Ari-apari danced.

Temujin squirmed. The demon boy before him undulated with each long step, twist, turn, and step.

While jiggily doing so, Ari-apari would chant, “A-choko-choko!” in time, mostly, with each step.

Utita cheered him on, and jerked Temujin’s face back to face the dance, and stretched her long bony fingers to gently pull his eyelids open when he shut them.

She spent the next several minutes describing in excruciating detail to Temujin the meaning of every single roll of fat on Ari-apari and how every iota of kinetic movement shook those fat rolls.

A short while longer, at eternity’s end, the dance was over.

Utita let Temujin fall and clapped in a rapid pap-pap-pap, grinning wide enough to nearly rip her face.

“Bravo!!”

The boy shook off his underwear and handed it to the retching Temujin, who was on his knees and elbows.

“You’re the first person who ever watched my full dance without threatening me with a knife or throwing themselves into a punji pit,” he said with a smile that pulled his face like taffy. “Not even my dad would do that!”

There were many things Temujin couldn’t believe about his current situation, but the powerful manly voice coming out of a shortstack half his height was the final break. He let a snorting pseudo-laugh answer the luckless demon.

Sesame snickered, saying, “Well, Muji-chan, at least you got a little something extra too.”

Seething and wishing his next match’s opponent was some memory-mancer or could at least give him a concussion, Temujin pinched the part of the garment closest to a whitish color and pulled the sopping mass to the ground, where it slapped sloppily against the stone and bled greasy and dark-green.

“Well,” Temujin said, violated, “It’s a cool color scheme at least. I’ve never seen black and, oh, I hope that’s green dye.”

Utita pulled a cigarette to her lips as she said, “It was the only pair of underwear he had. He has lived his entire life in that thing. He’s worn it since it was a fresh, clean white. What an honor, human champion!”

Temujin no longer wished to eat.

But the goblin beckoned him to at least enjoy his honestly deserved drink for making her son smile. Unfortunately, that drink was a lovingly tall frothy glass of fermented oni ass sweat. 

“So that’s what I was smelling, habibi!”

“Back! Back!!” said a choking Temujin, perhaps to Sesame, perhaps his stomach.

“Good luck, boy!” cried Utita, and her waving cheering son held his hands together and materialized a tulpa-thing with his face. It even got the swept back hair correct.

“Go Muji-chan!!” he said. 

“What the hell happened,” asked Yulaan, rubbing her hands against her bolyaga pants, as she laughed at the prone young man. 

“No, we’re not talking about it.” 

The underpants kept harassing his nose, so he focused on some of the other contestants. The one time he wanted to look at Mukhahīna, he was disappointed— the yogi sat floating above the smoke. 

Did he eat smoke through his skin? Now that he considered how much sense that made, he didn’t want to know.

Ryūei. No.

Exciting him, a succubus sat cross legged, filling her mouth with as much meat as the bollois, and the sight of such a sensual lady stuffing her gullet tickled him, but a motherly hyena-yōkai broke his sight. She dragged two cubs from under a bench, and one of the two ran up to Temujin close enough for him to see the jagged scar over where an eye used to be, in the same pattern he knew exorcist paladins Earth-side used to blind weaker demons. The boy said, “Ew, a human!” and ran off cackling. 

“Thanks for that, kid. Means a lot to me!”

The mother paused and pressed her palm against her eye. “Those two are going to be the death of me…” 

“For real, madame.”

She turned and jumped. “O-oh, my goodness, it’s a human… Mortal-worlder, don’t take Zeru’s words as offense.”

Temujin stood, and she flinched.

“None taken. It’s just kids being kids, right? Same as everywhere. I called demons gross as a kid. Kinda fitting they’d do the same back.”

Hearing his words, she exhaled and pulled her other child closer. Zeru bolted over, took one look at his brother clinging to their mother’s robes, and grabbed a fistful of fabric to bury himself beside him.

“Of course, child… Thank you for understanding.”

“Ew, gross!!”

“Enough of that, Temu.”

“No, not him— that!!”

Temujin looked at the sopping monstrosity by his foot and chuckled. “Temu, eh? Well look at that, we’re almost name-twins.” He crouched and reached for the cub who trembled. 

He kept his hand steady, and Temu hesitantly closed the gap before recoiling. Both of his eyes were wide, made wider by the shrunken pupils. He looked to his brother, Zeru was snickering as he held on, and then back to Temujin. 

He reached again and the two touched hands. 

The mother said, “Temujin, was it? You survived that awful noble scholar, didn’t you? I think you’ll go very far.”

“Eeh, I’m just quick on my feet, is all. I’m not like Enekai over there.” He thumbed towards the monkey girl, who had just said the most unlikely thing he’d ever heard her say—

“I’m full!”

Sesame fell over on herself. “How is that even possible?! You didn’t even eat a tenth as much as you usually do!”

Yulaan said, “That’s what happens when you eat a sage bean.”

Enekai pressed a finger to her chin, looking up and saying, “Oh, right, the dirt bean.”

“One bean can feed ten men for ten days.” She downed a combobulation of burger, lizard hand, and glazed-guts pastry. “Or heal some major wound, if you can swallow it. It’s kinda like a free Shifa wish.” Then she air quoted with her tail and added, “Free. If you can get one.”

Enekai hopped and stretched her arms. “Wow! Where did you even get them?”

“Tried looking for a sagely cat, but I guess that’s another universe still, so before I came back to you lot, I was going to come here to try my hand at the Makai-Ichi Budōkai, because I felt I’d gotten enough of my strength back to give it another try, thanks to fighting some Capes on Earth-Prime. But I wound up following this magic-man to his shop—”

“And he sold them to you?”

“No. He pointed me to a giant at the top of a heavenly beanstalk.”

“So a giant sold them to you?”

“No! I robbed the big thieving fucker blind, and he chopped his ax into my side.” She gestured toward her bandages.

“Oh!! So that explains—”

Yulaan bonked her atop the head with the bottom of her fist. “Don’t remind me.”

Sesame floated sitting in slow rotation, nibbling on a kebab stalk. “But how did you get the beans then?”

“He didn’t check me too closely, so I smuggled them out. I would have eaten one of them to heal up, but when you said Yuanjia and the others got trapped by an Imajin and you only had one Shifa wish left, one thing led to another, we’re here— wham bam, thank you ma’am.”

“I could have healed you.”

“I mean, look, I’m not taking chances. You finally learned to get, what, two Shifa wishes a week? Who knows, we might need that second one if Enekai pounds Temujin too hard.”

Enekai pouted, “Why are you so cranky? He’s not weak.”

“Focus on making sure he gets to the final with you, habibi!”

Temujin sat back down, flustered. Three girls talking about him wasn’t a novel experience. But, two of those girls being bollois whisked his chest into something bare, tenderized. Enekai straddled a sororal line. All the wild and wonderful days spent together in the sunny, rainy palm forests of Naga Kedua made her more like the sister he never had. If that sister was a fight-crazed martial artist. Yulaan was the dottier case. Enekai, at least, had the excuse of being raised by yōkai, isolated on Devil Fruit Mountain. 

If Yulaan was possessed by an Earth girl and she learned to stand coyly leaning forward with her hands behind her back, he’d probably beg her for her hand. In isolation, she was everything “pretty” isn’t. Untamed hair, par for a Saiyan. Muscles, par for a Saiyan— actually, he hadn’t met more than two fem-Vegetans, and neither were more defined than any Earthly or demon woman, so it must have been a Kollidorian thing. She had the pallor of a villain. And, of course, those bangs hiding her eyes. 

He’d love her if she wanted, but Yabans never seemed to care. 

Like a Yaban, he was hungry, but he couldn’t stomach anything worth eating and couldn’t find his sage bean. For a moment, he started patting his pockets and pants, but saw the puddle of underwear and decided to keep his mouth closed, just in case he risked giving himself an even emptier stomach. 

Temu and Zeru stuck their tongues out at him when they walked off with their mother. The act reminded him of the tense silliness of his childhood friend Naran— half his body, eaten by a demon, still had a sly tongue to stick out at demons— and he sat back with the thought itching in his head.