Box Bunny
[Boooooooooooooooo!]
The crowd showered me with jeers.
But that was all part of the show. People vented their stress by hurling abuse at the wrestler they loved to hate.
And of course, if a hero were to appear and punish the villain on their behalf, it would only sweeten the deal.
Waiting for exactly that, I stood in the ring and did what I did best—stir the pot.
"Oh, so you're booing me? Boo all you want—it won't change reality! Next week, I'm going to kick the young master's teeth in!"
At that very moment, a sharp guitar riff tore through the arena. Music eerily similar in feel to my uncle Greg Hart's blared out at full throttle.
Russell made his entrance. And the crowd erupted into a thunderous cheer.
This was everything I had built in the five minutes since I climbed into the ring. The heat had reached critical mass.
Grinning boldly, I waved toward the entrance ramp as if beckoning him to come out.
Russell emerged to an enormous ovation and climbed into the ring. Keeping a wary eye on him, I backed away and retreated to the opposite corner.
Time to use the whole ring.
Answering my cue, Russell moved big too, like a cowboy out in the wild frontier.
He grabbed the mic and spoke.
"Honestly, I can't stand to listen to this. Is that really all you've got, Sin?"
"What?"
"Running your mouth about other people while showing us nothing. What have you actually done since you stepped in this ring? Shown these people anything worth respecting? No. All you've done is squawk like a Box Bunny."
The crowd burst into laughter.
Frankly, I'd been thinking the same thing.
Invoking a cartoon character famous for never shutting up. Clever.
Box Bunny, huh.
It wasn't in the script. Russell had seized the mood of the room with a flash of improv humor.
I furrowed my brow, and the crowd, delighted, began mocking me in perfect unison.
[Box Bunny! Box Bunny! Box Bunny! Box Bunny!]
The chant rang out again and again. I let out an exasperated laugh, then picked the mic back up.
"So then, what's the occasion, teach?"
The moment I recited Box Bunny's famous catchphrase, the crowd roared with laughter.
"I came out here to kick your ass on behalf of everyone in this building."
"Oh yeah? Go ahead. Let's see it."
I strode right up to Russell.
He matched me without backing down an inch.
We performed a face-off so tense it looked like we'd come to blows at any second, ratcheting the crowd's anticipation higher and higher.
Face to face.
Then it was shattered—by Husky Harrit's metal music.
Russell and I turned toward the entrance ramp with deflated expressions. Husky came out to his tuneless entrance music, climbing into the ring with that signature grin of his.
An oblivious, insufferable heel.
The crowd, whose hopes of watching me and Russell tear into each other had just crumbled, buried him under a mountain of boos.
But Husky didn't care one bit. He took the mic from Russell and began to talk.
"Whoa, whoa—no need to get all fired up, fellas. You two haven't even been here a month and you're already this passionate."
He talked down to the both of us like we were a couple of rookies.
"Besides, what does it matter how your match goes? Whichever of you wins is just gonna get squashed by me in the semifinals anyway."
I raised my mic.
"By the way—who are you again?"
The crowd burst out laughing all over again. Dismissed outright, Husky's face froze.
"What are you, Luna Toon? Russell, is this guy your 'Taz Mania' or something?"
"Oh, now we're pretending to be close."
"You little brat... I don't know what rock you crawled out from under, but this is GCW. This is no place for you to run your mouth."
Husky came at me with a menacing scowl.
Perhaps because he was so deeply immersed in his current character, his acting had improved dramatically since before.
"Get out of my ring. Rookies."
The crowd booed him again.
But Husky ignored it and kept glaring at the two of us. The boos from the audience grew louder and louder.
Watching that reaction, I thought to myself:
This isn't quite right.
If we stuck to the original script, the mood was heading somewhere seriously problematic.
I glanced at Russell first.
"Well, fine."
Husky and Russell both shot me puzzled looks. But I kept talking.
"Today's not the day... let's settle it properly when we're both at a hundred percent. Russell."
I said it with a wry smirk.
Russell let out a deflated sigh, turned, and walked out of the ring. I did the same.
No—not just pretending to leave.
Slowly.
Gauging the crowd's reaction.
Then I slid back into the ring and attacked Husky from behind.
The mic cracked across the back of his gloating skull, a deep whumm echoing through the amplifiers.
The crowd cheered for me.
Just as I thought.
That's why I had changed the details of the segment—I could explain that later.
For now, my job was simple: spend the remaining ten minutes of airtime beating the holy hell out of this insufferable man.
I dove on top of the fallen Husky and swung my fists with everything I had.
Russell had already exited per the script. I kept up the assault on Husky, who resisted only half-heartedly.
"Guhk! Hah! Hrrgh!"
Husky curled himself into a ball, trying to protect his body. Trusting him, I pulled him up to his feet.
Off the ropes, my finisher—the Knee Kick—crashed flush into his face.
With a sharp crack, Husky crumpled to the mat. Catching my breath, I scanned the arena and felt the crowd's reaction playing out exactly as expected.
Exactly the opposite of what GCW had predicted, of course.
They were cheering me.
It was one of those things that just happened often enough in pro wrestling.
Nothing ever goes according to plan one hundred percent.
Which is exactly why improvisation mattered so much in moments like these.
I reached under the ring, grabbed a steel chair, and slid back in.
One of the industry's most frequently used weapons. Specially crafted with a hollow frame, it bent easily and rang out with a deafening clang—superb for selling the impact.
CLAAAANG—!
I brought it down square on the head of the rising Husky. Then I advanced on his fallen body.
I contorted my face as if spewing curses, though my actual words were the exact opposite.
"Sunbae, I need a blood job."
Husky looked up at me, bewildered.
"If I walk back there with nothing but cheers, my character gets muddy."
Understanding dawned on Husky's face, and he nodded. Just in case, I pulled the razor blade I'd kept stashed in my trunks pocket and hid it inside my fist.
Fortunately, the crowd's reaction was hot enough that nothing felt off.
I dragged Husky toward the ring post, shielding him from the camera, and slipped him the blade in the process.
"Next chair shot."
Having passed along the message, I returned to my spot and picked the chair back up.
Husky staggered, gripped the ropes, and barely pulled himself upright. I waited for him to turn around—then swung.
CRACK—!
Husky went down hard.
The crowd's cheers swelled. The violence I was doling out still registered to them as pure catharsis.
I leaned into the camera trained on me and shouted.
"THIS is a chair shot!"
While I was spouting the appropriate trash talk, Husky opened up his forehead with the razor blade.
As the blood flowed, I kept swinging the chair, using his fallen forehead as my target point.
Husky's body sprawled on the canvas twitched like a corpse.
In truth, I wasn't hitting his forehead at all but the ring floor just above it—I swung the chair at blurring speed to minimize any sense of wrongness.
From the broadcast cameras or the distant seats, it would have been nearly impossible to tell the difference.
Which is exactly why the crowd's cheers died abruptly. They decided I had crossed a line, and the ovation stopped cold.
But I kept attacking Husky until the officials, timed to rush out the moment the broadcast cut, pulled me away.
Husky's blood-soaked face painted my cruelty in vivid strokes.
"Stop it! Stop!"
"Sin! That's enough—get out of there!"
Under the restraint of several officials, I flashed a wicked grin and backed off. As I stepped through the ropes, silence hung over the arena.
But I raised both hands high as if daring them to say something, mocking the crowd—and only then did the boos rain down.
One way or another, we'd arrived at exactly the ending we had ultimately envisioned.
After the show, I finished my shower and stepped out to find the locker room packed with people.
All the wrestlers who'd worked the show with me tonight, Harley, and even Baku.
Every one of them wore the look of men who had watched my ring segment and had plenty to say about it.
Here it comes.
I tousled the water from my hair and walked up to Harley. He sighed and spoke first.
"Hell of a segment."
"Thank you, sir."
"Why'd you do it?"
"Because the crowd was cheering for me. I felt I needed to act a little more vicious."
I explained calmly.
It was a problematic move, I'll admit. The script called for no 'Blood Job'—no blading, no blood.
But it had been absolutely necessary.
I was on trial now, and I had to win everyone over. ...Unfortunately, the one man who could've vouched for me, Husky, was absent for treatment.
Thankfully, Harley seemed to find my reasoning at least somewhat persuasive, and nodded.
"Explain it to me more."
"The crowd's reaction to Husky was worse than we expected. If Russell had just walked out of the ring right then, he'd have gotten booed."
It would have been a direction that accidentally painted Russell as a coward.
So I'd staged it to look like I'd tricked him into leaving the ring.
The problem was what came next.
For next week's fight, there was supposed to be a moment where I, as the villain, drew all the heat—and Husky had stolen that heat from me.
And it wasn't even good heat. One way to look at it, Husky had hijacked the spotlight that should have belonged to me—in the worst possible sense.
Considering he was due for a character overhaul imminently, his segment offered nothing of value to the show. So I had no choice but to pull those boos back onto myself.
"That's why I went with the Blood Job. It was the only choice that served the script."
"Harley, this is clearly—"
"Baku, quiet."
"Yes, sir."
Baku, who had been about to defend me, obediently shut his mouth at Harley's word.
The other wrestlers who'd listened to the story all wore complicated expressions too.
Going off-script was, without question, an unforgivable taboo.
But my actions had ultimately been in service of preserving the script's continuity.
Harley, who had been silent for a while, finally let out a long sigh and looked around.
"Where is that bastard."
"Sir? Who...?"
"Husky! The damn kid! Nobody blades that deep!"
"..."
In fairness, it was an awful lot of blood for a blood job.
But that was Husky's mistake.
...Or so I thought, until Harley rounded on me, looking thoroughly irritated.
"You too, damn it!"
"M-me?!"
"Yes, you! Do you have any idea how badly those guys in the back freaked out watching that?! We honestly wondered if a real accident had happened!"
"I'm— I'm sorry."
In the end, Harley's scolding seemed to come purely from anger—no, from worry for us. So I decided to accept it meekly.
That said, some of the other wrestlers had opinions of their own.
"Still, it was 'hot,' Harley."
"Yeah. Even watching it, I'm actually looking forward to next week's match."
"Shut up, you punks. Ratings going up doesn't add a single cent to your paychecks—what're you so happy about?"
Harley barked, then spun on his heel and stormed out.
Right on cue, Husky walked in with a bandage wrapped around his forehead. We greeted him with applause, as if we'd been waiting.
I went straight up to him and patted his shoulder.
"Sunbae, great work out there."
"Does it hurt much?"
"Eh, this is nothing..."
"You didn't cut it too deep, did you? Looked like a scene out of a slasher movie."
The guys cracked light jokes around him.
The wound, disinfected and hastily stitched, was covered in gauze. I felt genuinely grateful to him for trusting my sudden request and going along with it.
"Thanks to you, we got an amazing scene."
"Never dreamed getting sliced open would end up being a good thing."
He laughed sheepishly.
At that, the wrestlers who'd gathered around us all roared with laughter and ruffled my hair.
"Our cocky little rookie went and pulled off something even flashier today, huh."
"I expect something spectacular next week too, rookie. Don't let us down."
Watching my sunbaes tease me so affectionately, I thought:
I'd say I've been fully accepted into the pack now.
Someone might look at this and think these seniors had no shame. But that wasn't it at all.
If anything, it was the cool way to be.
I had earned their respect with my skills and my grit.
And because of that, trusting me was never the wrong thing to do.
The only problem was that expectations raised by me could end up making things a little harder for someone else.
"Hey, Russell!"
"Yes, sir!"
"We're practicing again tomorrow so you don't screw up next week!"
"Understood, sir!"
Russell Hart, the scion of a legendary wrestling family, snapping to attention with military precision.
I should give the kid a hand later.
I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for him.
After all, the two of us had one hell of a match to put on next week.