The Lead Boy
"Hagan?"
"Oh, Sin. My favorite Burning Kong player."
"……."
He came at me with the trademark overblown American showmanship, wrapping an arm around my shoulder to express his delight at seeing me.
A man whose most striking feature was a frame that looked like it could shrug off 150 kilograms without breaking a sweat.
Paul Hagan.
The man currently running Rkdawn — pro wrestling's resident traitor.
As the former head of a promotion called EZW, he had once delivered a fresh shock to the entire industry.
But that revolution had failed, and that was exactly why I'd always thought the name "traitor" suited him so well.
Because he had failed.
His talent was undeniable, but he'd butted heads with Bart at every turn, and as a result he was languishing, never quite trusted with real power.
Paul beamed at me now, gazing at me the way one might gaze at a beloved partner.
He was the genuine article, this man — the kind of person who might actually find happy time just from watching pro wrestling.
"I've been waiting for you."
"Me?"
"That's right. Right now, my plans absolutely require you."
What on earth was he talking about?
For him to show up with the Burning Kong production team at this point in time…
Ah.
"The King's Rumble?"
"Yes, exactly that."
Hagan flashed a sly grin.
"I'd like you to serve as the Lead Boy of the Rumble."
"……."
For a moment, the words caught in my throat.
"What do you say? You become the driving force of the King's Rumble."
"Not a bad offer, actually."
I broke into a grin.
As if he'd expected that answer, Hagan chuckled along with me.
The King's Rumble.
One of WWF's four flagship pay-per-views.
Its attendance rivaled that of Wrestle Imperium, the biggest pay-per-view of them all, which boasted two hundred thousand fans.
If anything, the lighter the fan, the more they preferred the King's Rumble to Wrestle Imperium.
The reason was simple.
Like Ring Survival, the Rumble match fit the pay-per-view's theme and took place only once a year.
The traditional King's Rumble match: thirty competitors, all vying for supremacy.
The rules went like this.
Entrants number one and number two enter the ring, and the match begins.
At set intervals, the next competitor comes down to the ring.
Any wrestler who goes over the top rope and touches the floor outside the ring with both feet is eliminated from the Rumble.
The match continues like that all the way through entrant number thirty, until a final winner is decided.
The winner earns a championship match at that year's Wrestle Imperium.
That was how it worked.
It was a wildly unfair rule set.
Absurdly speaking, you could duck under the bottom rope, hang out on the floor munching popcorn, and it would still count as legal.
Even if you went over the top rope, you could hop around on one foot, or perch on the barricade and leap back onto the ring apron — all of it technically allowed.
And pro wrestling was precisely the art of packaging even that kind of unfairness as a "battle between men."
Pull a cowardly stunt like that and the fans will never respect you. But flip it around, and it means you can turn such a stunt into drama all its own.
This really isn't a bad deal at all.
I had been offered the role of "Lead Boy" of the King's Rumble.
With thirty wrestlers involved, the Rumble was endlessly prone to chaos, and each man knew only his own script.
Go in, do a specific spot, then get eliminated by this guy before that guy — that was the shape of it.
The Lead Boy was the one who untangled the confusion those colliding scripts produced and held the match together at its center.
Not the winner, but the competitor who draws the most eyes in the match.
The one who can pull cheers out of the crowd, the best performer in the ring with the stamina to back it up.
In basketball terms, the point guard.
In American football, the quarterback.
Locking down the heartbeat of the team — that was the Lead Boy's job.
A crucial role reserved for wrestlers the caliber of John Michaels, Gert Angel, or Chris Jenco.
Most of the time the Lead Boy never won the thing, but even so — in only my second year since debut, this was more than good.
Walking the corridor with Hagan, I checked our surroundings and asked.
"Who's the winner?"
"That?"
Hagan likewise scanned for any listening ears.
The King's Rumble winner was a closely guarded secret. A juicy target for gamblers and reporters alike.
The company wanted to keep it under wraps until the very end, milking every last ounce of anticipation from the live crowd and the television audience.
In my past life, it was Batista.
That same man was currently living as plain old Member A of Revolution.
All because of Hunter's injury.
In my past life, Hunter had hidden his injury and, needing someone to carry the faction while he was out, had pushed Batista with everything he had.
That wasn't happening now — which meant the outcome had almost certainly changed.
Because Batista, talented as he undeniably was, had yet to let that talent fully bloom.
So who would it be?
The highest probability was…
As I was mulling it over, Hagan rose up on his toes and whispered a single name into my ear.
"Shawn Cena."
"……."
I'd figured as much.
Cena was currently making steady progress toward becoming Rkdawn's "Top Guy."
So overwhelmingly popular with the crowds that his heel status was pure formality, he was in the middle of a long-running feud with JBL.
In my past life, too, that feud carried on until he finally captured his first World Championship at Wrestle Imperium.
It had been a deeply moving coronation.
Even if, behind the curtain, Cena's push was nothing less than the company throwing down its trump card.
At the time, the WWF had a rather serious problem on its hands.
Brock Lesnar — the man they'd given a mega-push to, trusting he would carry the company's future — had walked out on them.
A fiercely individualistic streak had left him disillusioned with the industry barely a year into his career.
And that was only the beginning of the trouble.
The company desperately needed to unearth a next-generation star.
But stars weren't found just because you went looking.
Lance Orton's attitude problems were a constant talking point, and Batista, at thirty-six or so, was already fairly long in the tooth.
The company's Top Guy slot demanded everything of a man. Viewed through that lens, Cena had his shortcomings too.
First, his wrestling skill.
His fundamentals were stiff and his experience thin, so he couldn't put together a particularly entertaining match.
And at 185 centimeters, he was ever so slightly small for a pro wrestler.
But the company, rating his diligence and performance ability highly, elevated him to World Champion anyway.
And it was an absolute blockbuster.
Of course, that was all in my past life.
It wasn't the case now.
Right now, the company had any number of potential Top Guys waiting in the wings.
Me, for one.
And then the rest of the bunch.
By "the bunch," I meant a reformed Orton, Russell who refused to lose to backstage politics — and, well, Cena himself.
All of them close to my age, all of them destined to lead the same era.
And the first one the company chose was, of course, Cena.
Naturally. Of course it was.
Orton's ascent had only just begun, and Russell hadn't even been called up to the main show yet.
As for me, I was still being tested by Bart.
So Cena, the one the company had placed its hopes in, being chosen first was simply the natural order of things.
Just then, Hagan — reading the tangled expression on my face — spoke up.
"You were my first pick. Unfortunately, Bart and most of the other decision-makers called it crazy talk."
"Thank you, Hagan."
"But I did argue that you could be trusted with at least half the job. An encouraging sign, in this calcified industry of ours."
"Well, that's a relief."
"And this is a fine opportunity. Go out there and prove you can take the ring in the palm of your hand as the Lead Boy."
Hagan clapped me on the shoulder.
Once again, he had read my ability with pinpoint accuracy.
That thought made me square my shoulders a little. I followed Hagan down the hall toward the office.
The fire in my belly roared back to life.
Cena winning?
I could congratulate him.
But I was a little pissed off, all the same.
Last year, I'd more than matched — no, exceeded — the performances Cena had delivered on Rkdawn. I was confident of that.
I'd started as Kung-Fury, ridden a GCW-based storyline into a dramatic upswing, and peaked on the European tour.
And that run had carried me all the way to the WWF Intercontinental Championship.
After Hunter went down, I'd eclipsed a flat main-event program to become the most talked-about star on Burning Kong.
And yet, when it came to the company's decision this time, I couldn't…
…couldn't quite argue with it.
Yeah. Cena's the right call.
Cena was currently running a storyline that had him dropping the U.S. Championship to chase the main title.
On top of that, the company had committed to pushing him with everything it had.
Him winning this King's Rumble and rising to the Universe Championship at Wrestle Imperium was sound booking.
It made for the more beautiful story.
My current character was still a long way from the main championship picture, after all.
But that was only how it looked on paper.
By pure ability — every skill weighed and measured — the winner should have been me.
I made one decision.
I'll show them.
Show them their choice was wrong.
By leading this King's Rumble myself.
I had a feeling Hagan would be a man I could talk to.
And my prediction proved dead on.
"No — Taburi getting eliminated there? How does that make any sense whatsoever?!"
The booking meeting room.
In the middle of a heated debate over the King's Rumble match, Hagan was holding forth at full volume.
His fundamental stance on pro wrestling was identical to mine.
Everybody rises together.
For a show to be truly entertaining, every single wrestler has to showcase their particular specialty and give the audience something to look forward to.
No one gets left holding the short end of the card.
Because that's how you make sure no stretch of the show ever goes cold.
Now, differences could exist, of course.
Pecking orders had to be established — that was where stories came from.
But even the underdog had the underdog's own way of shining, and Taburi, mentioned just moments ago, was a perfect example.
Taburi.
A quintessential WWF Low Carder, a Japanese pro wrestler by origin.
On the surface he was short and unremarkably built, but his rock-solid character had earned him a fair measure of popularity.
His trademark shamelessness and surprisingly solid English had made him well-liked backstage too — the man had worked for the company for years.
Above all, the "Green Mist" — holding a mouthful of green liquid, then spraying it into an opponent's face — was his exclusive signature.
And that was the whole point.
Taburi was clearly no number one. But when it came to the Green Mist, he was the undisputed special one.
One single move, and it was enough to make a man unforgettable.
Of course, it's not an easy thing to pull off.
But that's what shows are for — the oil field waiting to be tapped, you never know when it'll strike.
Which was exactly why we needed to respect every wrestler's individuality as much as we possibly could.
That was Paul Hagan's philosophy.
And I felt it resonate in me, deeply.
But Bart's loyal hounds, sitting across the table from him, just couldn't bring themselves to agree.
They wanted to build the story precisely to Bart's taste.
And by that yardstick, Taburi's role was simplicity itself: the sneaky Japanese guy cheats, and a heroic American swoops in and destroys him.
Something like that. Filthy, infantile stuff.
After a long, grinding silence at Hagan's speech, the head writer finally opened his mouth.
"And how exactly is Taburi supposed to shine in a Rumble match?"
"He's got the Green Mist!"
"And what reaction do you think showing that off in the match will actually get?"
"Honestly, we'd be better off spending that time on another Taker spot."
"……."
Hagan pressed his lips shut, wrestling down his temper as the writers chimed in from all sides, muddying his point.
Still, it was true that spotlighting Taburi wouldn't make Taker's aura vanish into thin air. The man was a draw of a different magnitude entirely.
Having spent a moment gauging the room, I cautiously spoke up.
"Ninety seconds."
Everyone turned and stared at me, puzzled.
"It's not an iron rule, mind you. Sometimes it stretches, sometimes it shrinks."
"What are you getting at?"
"That entire timing is Bart's call, and his alone… has it never occurred to anyone to wonder why?"
"What are you talking about?"
"The intervals between the wrestlers' entrances."
I allowed myself a small smile.
"When the crowd energy starts to sag, Bart sends the next man out early — that's when it drops below ninety seconds."
And conversely, when one hot spot stacked on top of another, the intervals stretched past ninety.
Even Bart refused to give an order that would break the show's flow.
"The fans don't consciously keep track of any of that timing. Our job, in the end, is simply to make them happy."
"So you're saying…"
"If we arrange the field and structure the match properly, almost no one will have to go out before their ninety seconds."
I said it with total confidence.