Testing Our Guts
After that, the four of us went to find Bart, who was running the final checks just before the show went live.
He burst out laughing and immediately declared to us:
"Alright, show me some guts!"
And so it began.
THWACK!
A shot straight to the nose — Russell.
CRACK!
A slap across the cheek — Orton.
POW!
A hook to the jaw — Cena.
……Cena?
"Oh. That one was too hard."
Bart had weathered Russell's and Orton's blows reasonably well, but Cena's single strike to the jaw dropped him where he stood, out cold.
Watching it happen, Orton trembled in terror like the Billhaus family who'd just wet themselves.
"……I'm not involved."
"B-Bart?"
While everyone stood frozen, I went to check on Bart first.
He was half-conscious, and the show was about to start.
Meanwhile, Bart, even half-dead, was still grumbling his way toward Gorilla Position.
"Well, we're screwed."
I let out a sigh and patted Bart's cheeks, trying to wake him.
"Bart. Bart. Come on, wake up. We hit you exactly like you told us to."
"Ugh… mm…"
"Anyway, we're going with my plan for the King's Rumble. Got it? You stubborn old pervert."
"Sin, don't you think you're saying a little too much of what you actually think?"
"If not now, when would I ever? …So cut it out and get up."
Having answered Cena's remark, I shook Bart's body hard, doing my best to rouse him.
But Bart was completely gone.
I could practically see him silently climbing the stairway to heaven.
……No, honestly speaking, it wasn't quite that bad.
He just seemed like the type who wouldn't come to until well after the show ended.
What was I supposed to do about this?
As I lifted my head, worrying, I noticed that Russell's gaze was fixed somewhere.
The far end of the corridor.
His face stiffened almost imperceptibly, then went pale.
"Russell?"
"Uh, um…"
I turned around — and understood why.
"What in the hell are you all doing?"
Greg Hart.
His black hair swaying as he approached, he looked down at Bart.
"What is this? Boss. Boss. Please wake up."
"G-Greg?"
"Sin. Explain."
Standing before him, utterly grave-faced, I laid out the whole truth.
Orton screamed through tears begging me not to say it, but I ignored him.
Having heard the entire story, Greg calmly pointed at Cena.
"First, bring the team doctor. I'll handle the rest."
"What are you going to do?"
"The show has to go on, so someone else will have to direct the crew."
He spoke as though he had a headache coming on, then sprang into action.
He went to the head of the video team and told him to run the show, then had Bart moved to the medical room to rest.
Only after all of that was handled did the show's opening begin.
"Whew."
He exhaled, then turned a cold, level gaze on the four of us.
"We'll talk after the show."
Sounded like I was getting chewed out.
Even so, Greg stayed cool about one thing all the way to the end: he never told anyone that Bart had passed out from our punches.
He only told the head of the video team that Bart had fainted, and thanks to that, no scandal spread.
That was the moment I thought Greg was a genuinely admirable man.
He was almost exactly the age I'd been at the end of my past life, but he was far more of an adult than I had been back then.
Thanks to him, I went on to execute my planned script flawlessly — facing Orton in a match, winning, and receiving the kiss ceremony from the women.
It was all thanks to Greg's cover.
But this part, I could have done without.
"Back in my day, you see—"
Precisely because he was so much more mature, he was also far more of a boomer than the me of that era.
"It used to be tradition to help the veterans get changed in front of them before the show started."
What is a boomer, you ask?
The kind of tiresome man who lectures you about things nobody asked about.
"And why do you think that tradition existed?"
"……No idea."
"To prevent exactly this kind of accident from happening right before a show."
Greg furrowed his brow.
"You never know what a hot-blooded young wrestler might do."
In the medical room.
Bart still hadn't woken, but Greg paid him no mind.
He rose from his seat and glared at each of the four of us in turn.
"But in all my years as a wrestler, I never predicted something this absurd would happen."
After a long, deep sigh, Greg bellowed at the top of his lungs.
"Assaulting the company chairman?!"
"You told him to do it."
"Shut up! Who the hell actually goes through with it just because they're told to!"
"……Greg."
Right at that moment.
A faint voice from the newly awakened Bart made Greg turn around.
"Boss, are you alright?"
"Don't be too hard on them. It was my suggestion, after all."
"Are you alright, sir?"
"I'm fine. It's nothing. My brain still feels a bit rattled, but."
"You're not young anymore. Pushing yourself like this isn't good for you."
"I'm fine. More importantly, let's get the show moving."
"Ah, um… about that…"
"What?"
"The show… it's over. While you were unconscious."
At those words, Bart's face drained to a sickly blue.
After trembling for a moment, he shot to his feet and roared.
"You damned bastards, how DARE you ruin the one joy in my life!!"
Genuinely enraged, he began hurling anything he could grab at us.
"B-Bart!"
"GET OUT!! All of you, get OUT!!"
We left him raging like a child and bolted straight out of the medical room.
The empty corridor.
"……What do we do now."
Utterly hollowed out, Orton collapsed to his knees on the floor.
"If I get fired from this job too, my dad is definitely going to kill me."
"……"
This kid — unlike the way he'd hyped himself up earlier, his personality was way too timid.
And judging by the way he kept going on about his job, he was probably desperate, day in and day out, just to avoid getting cut.
Feeling a pang of pity, I went to comfort him.
"It's fine, Orton. If anything happens, I'll take responsibility."
Not that anything would.
Bart's insane personality was common knowledge anyway. Give him a moment to cool off and he'd come around on his own.
I let the teary-eyed Orton cling to me for a while.
A grown man hanging off me like that left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, honestly.
Having more or less smoothed things over, I turned to greet Greg as he came out.
One of his cheeks was red and swollen — probably from Bart.
"……Who was the ringleader?"
"Me."
"Sin?"
"These idiots were planning to cover for each other, but it was my idea. I led it."
I admitted it honestly.
Well, I was the one who'd knocked Bart's block off with the agreement that I'd take the fall, after all.
And even if it hadn't been me, taking responsibility as the team's leader was the classy thing to do.
After a long silence, Greg demanded the full details from me.
"Well, you see, it all started with Heigan…"
I told him everything, from the situation with Heigan up to the present moment.
It was absurd, really.
Bart, demanding we genuinely hit him — and the four of us, who actually showed up and did it.
But this company had always been like this.
……No, if I'm being honest, the root of all evil was that lunatic company chairman.
Greg pondered for a long while, and at last reached his conclusion.
"We'll let this incident go unpunished. Bart stood up for you."
"Yes, sir."
"But Sin, you'd better be more careful with your actions next time."
Having quietly closed the matter, Greg turned his back to leave.
Watching him go, I had to admit I'd been playing things a bit too fast and loose.
Bart had deliberately set an impossible condition on us, so I'd wanted to give him a taste of a difficult situation in return.
Well, mostly because even if something went wrong, I was confident I could fix it.
Greg didn't know that — which was why he'd blown up the way he did.
But I felt like I understood Greg a little better now.
A principled man through and through, no doubt about it.
Somehow, I felt like I'd figured out exactly how to provoke him when we ran our feud after the Rumble.
But that could wait.
For now, my focus had to be on pulling off the King's Rumble, which was now just two weeks away.
Bart, for his part, promptly acknowledged our guts and declared he wouldn't quibble with the script anymore.
Heigan and I toasted our success and kept hammering out the script.
And in the process, the influence Heigan commanded truly shone.
Staying at my side, he kept calling in the wrestlers we needed to discuss the script with, one after another.
"Ah, Taburi? It's me. …Yeah, come over to our side once your show wraps up. We've got things to discuss about the King's Rumble script."
Taburi, who'd come looking for Heigan with a puzzled look at the summons, along with his close friend Maino.
The two of them heard my plan for the Rumble match and reacted with genuine astonishment.
"I figured I'd just fight for a while, hit one Gore, and get eliminated. This script is pretty damn entertaining."
"I had such a fun time teaming with Maino. If there's a script like that waiting, my motivation just doubles — I'm delighted."
"What are you saying, Taburi!"
Maino barked out.
"Between you and me, it's Maino-san, isn't it? Right? Taburi-san!"
"Ha, indeed it is. Maino-san."
The two of them exchanged a greeting that seemed to belong to that particular culture.
……Well, Taburi really is Japanese, and it seemed he'd absorbed that culture while getting close with Maino, so no harm done, I suppose.
As I was thinking that, Taburi bowed his head before me.
"Thank you, Sin."
"Don't mention it, senpai. You've built a career over all these years — of course we should use it when we can."
"There are so many people who never even think of that. It's been difficult in more ways than one."
It was one of pro wrestling's ugly old customs.
To push one wrestler, they grind up plenty of others as fuel.
Of course, not everyone could become the superstar they'd imagined themselves to be — not even close.
But everyone rising together? That was possible.
The industry itself climbs. And when it does, everyone gets rewarded.
The money doled out to them grows too.
For that to happen, everyone needed at least one genuinely cool thing about them.
Taburi's Green Mist.
Maino's Gore.
Those two moves were more than enough.
Maino was a man built like a boulder — a massive upper body crammed onto a short frame.
His finisher, the 'Gore,' where he charged at his opponent and slammed his entire body into them, carried magnificent impact.
The crowd chant was legendary — 'GORE! GORE! GORE! GORE! GORE! GORE! GORE! GORE!' roaring out at full speed.
If that landed in the King's Rumble, it would be an absolutely colossal pop.
That was how Heigan and I worked through the roster, calling each wrestler in or phoning them, sketching out the broad overview.
Everyone knows their own strengths and who they're tied to, after all.
We'd fix each man's elimination timing, and they'd already be painting it roughly in their heads.
That was efficiency.
That was innovation.
A kind of magic: feed the wrestlers a handful of key details, and they'd fall into sync on their own.
And I was the Lead Boy — the one who held all of that information in my head and barked the instructions to the wrestlers.
One more thing, though.
I still had to talk to Greg Hart about his elimination.
Yet when I did, while he complied with the script without complaint, he threw me a curveball:
"Did I ever say I was retiring this year?"
"……If I had to pick, no, you never said that outright."
"Then let me make something clear about my career, Sin."
He squared his shoulders and said:
"I intend to keep wrestling a while longer."
……At that completely out-of-nowhere declaration, I stood there dumbfounded for a long moment.