A Poisoned Chalice
Steel cage match.
A match contested inside an iron cage with an open ceiling, built around a bump ring. The rules were identical to any ordinary bout, with one special condition added on top.
Escape the cage and be the first to plant both feet on the floor — that man wins.
Of course, a pinfall or submission victory was still technically possible. In practice, though, it almost never happened. Which made sense: a match type that existed precisely to showcase its own unique victory condition was better served by variety.
But Russell and I had every intention of stripping those elements away on purpose.
"If we fight that way, we can bring out the symbolism a cage match was born with."
"Definitely."
Russell nodded.
Just as its appearance suggested, the cage match carried an overwhelming image of 'no escape.' That was exactly why it was the format used to end a bitter, burning feud once and for all.
And what if the two men locked inside — Russell and me — never even thought about climbing out, and simply kept tearing into each other?
That would make for one hell of a picture.
With that as the frame of our match, Russell and I joined the booking meetings and began building the feud in earnest.
Then, a few days later, our storyline took a turn neither of us had quite expected.
It was promo shoot day. I was drained from locking eyes with Russell for over an hour when Baku appeared in front of me wearing a grave expression. Even in a room already blazing with lights, his intimidating features somehow looked darker than usual.
"Something wrong?"
"……Word came down from upstairs."
"What, they're giving me a presidential commendation?"
Since I'd been doing so well, after all.
"They want you and Russell to fight at the November pay-per-view. As the main event."
"Ha."
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
"So they're just going to bury us completely, huh."
"I take it that's not a good opportunity, then."
"Of course not. Calling the two of us up out of nowhere — mid-run as GCW champions, no less — and throwing us into the main event?"
None of it added up. This was Hunter's doing, surely. And the moment I thought that, I could practically hear the words he'd used to sell it.
"Put those two on the pay-per-view. They've got buzz — should help the buyrate."
But underneath it, he had to be desperate to somehow hijack and derail our feud. That was the only reading that made sense. No one springs a proposal like that out of genuine goodwill.
A poisoned chalice.
That was the conclusion I reached. A match on the main pay-per-view meant walking in carrying enormous risk.
"Which pay-per-view, exactly?"
"Never Escape."
"How fitting for our situation."
It sat directly before Wrestle Imperium — the dream stage of every professional wrestler alive.
If I remember right, this is right around when Triple H's era of control begins, isn't it?
I dug through the memories of my past life. It was the moment the ratings began their long, steady decline — the top of the slope, just before the drop.
While I was still turning the problem over, Baku spoke up.
"They say Hunter's championship match is the main event. You think that's a problem?"
"That'll be fine."
"Yeah?"
"Because I'm better than him."
"You little punk……"
It was simply the truth. I'm the best.
But.
"The real problem is the crowd reaction."
Would the audience actually receive us favorably? WWF's flagship show broadcast to roughly a hundred countries, the United States included — and among them, of course, was Korea, my parents' homeland. The fans there might well cheer for me.
But the vast majority everywhere else? The moment some Asian man strutted out claiming to be a champion, they'd sneer — 'what the hell is this?'
Russell might catch a measure of goodwill as a member of the famous Hart Family, but either way, the story was the same: everything we'd built in GCW was unusable. The pay-per-view crowd wouldn't know us. They'd watch our match as nothing more than an ordinary championship bout.
Granted, we've been steadily building our names out here too.
But did that reach the majority of a pay-per-view audience? No. It didn't.
What I wanted was pandemonium — a crowd so delirious, bouncing so hard, that the arena floor collapsed beneath them and killed everyone in the building. And Hunter, it seemed, was scheming to strangle exactly that before it could happen.
He got his hit in, so now he's returning the favor.
Typical of him.
And yet, strangely, I felt a fierce pull toward his proposal. The reason was simple.
I was going to the main event.
Which meant that if things went well, I'd have the chance to leave GCW a little stronger than I'd found it.
Just then Russell, who had slipped out to change, came back into the room.
"Baku, what's going on?"
"Ah, well, you see—"
"We heard from up top. They want us to work Never Escape."
I cut in with the explanation, and Russell's eyes went wide.
"……The two of us?"
"Yeah."
"A championship match?"
"That's right. What do you think?"
"They can go eat a dick."
Russell's reaction was less than warm.
"Are you kidding me? They yank us out of nowhere and say fight? Not one word about our story, nothing — just, here, go?"
"Ah, well, about that—"
Baku scratched his cheek.
"Turns out they're willing to let you run the feud on the main show all the way up to Never Escape."
"That's it?"
"That's it. Don't tell me you—"
"I'm going to take it?"
"If the conditions are right."
A month was a month, whether the feud ran on the main show or anywhere else. Ours was a story with some distance on it by now, so we'd planned to walk the audience through it all over again anyway. Add a bit of self-introduction to the mix, and we'd get a reaction.
The young master of the Hart Family. And the GCW champion. The one-time super tag team. That pairing — that's what it comes down to.
The real question is whether they'll actually let us run the feud on our terms.
How many minutes of a three-hour main show would we even be allotted? Especially when Hunter was, by all appearances, directing the sabotage himself.
Well. Let's hit them back first and see.
I laid out the thoughts I'd been slowly arranging before the two of them.
"First: no interference with our booking. Second: a minimum of fifteen minutes of segment time, every single show."
"Those are the conditions, huh……"
"There's more."
The two of them tilted their heads.
"Third: our match stays a cage match, all the way through."
And finally—
"Fourth: some of the top stars on the main roster help push our feud."
"……That's quite a list."
"Four conditions, total."
My thinking was that if all of the above were met, we could turn in something genuinely special. Baku answered with a disbelieving laugh.
"……Fine. I'll go feel out their position, then."
He didn't even ask why I wanted this anymore.
Does he actually believe it's a good idea?
Or maybe he'd simply written it off as absurd. Either way, it was worth the gamble. If we really could fight on the main show with minimal interference, there was no stage in the world like it.
Make no mistake — the conditions I'd demanded of the main show were flatly beyond common sense. Main eventers could talk like that. Not a development-territory champion like me.
But I saw it differently.
It just might work.
No — if things played out the way I predicted, it had to work.
When I said as much, Baku and Harley both laughed at me like I'd lost my mind. But you never know what's in a box of chocolates until you open it. And when ours arrived and I lifted the lid — there was hope inside.
We weren't quite Pandora, but still. The main show had accepted every single condition we'd laid out. Everyone who read the response stood there slack-jawed.
Amid the stunned disbelief, the first to find his voice was Russell.
"……H-how? How did this happen?"
"Seriously, why—"
"What kind of magic did you pull, kid?"
"I'm not a wizard, Harley."
When Harley turned on me with narrowed, suspicious eyes, I gave a bitter smile.
I simply knew a little of what the future held. If that looked like sorcery, well, nothing to be done about it.
So it did happen that way.
By the calendar, there was exactly one person among the powers that be who might take an interest in us right now.
Tiffany McMahon.
It must have been her influence that got the conditions accepted.
Stamford, Connecticut.
Since morning, WWF headquarters' massive conference room had been filling with executives lingering over coffee and an assortment of juices.
WWF, like any wrestling company, was split into two great camps: the business team, stationed at headquarters to analyze the company and chart its direction, and the field team, which toured the world putting on show after show. The men gathered today were the brains of the business side — the people who decided the company's overall course and ran its various 'businesses.'
And the reason they'd assembled this morning was GCW. The proposal had come from none other than CEO John Roytas — de facto head of the business team.
Before long, the conference room door swung open and Roytas walked in with his secretary.
With his blonde hair swept back neat and clean, he was a self-made man in the truest corporate sense — a former wrestler who had clawed his way up to this seat. His in-ring career, spent a generation above Greg Hart, had been utterly unremarkable. But his early retirement proved a blessing in disguise.
Now the man himself had become one of the very 'suits' he'd cursed so bitterly as a wrestler, and he took his seat at the head of the long table.
"What did those bastards say?"
"……Here's the proposal."
He'd lived a rough wrestler's life, after all — no one could mistake him for an ordinary CEO. Not that he'd ever slam a powerbomb through the conference table, of course. But as he accepted the stack of papers with displeasure written across every line of his body, he began to read the report.
No interference with the booking. A guaranteed fifteen-minute segment. The involvement of two top stars. The match to remain a cage match.
By the time he'd read through every last 'insolent' demand, Roytas could contain himself no longer and flung the papers across the room.
"The arrogance of these nobodies……!"
Setting aside Chairman Bart Maxen and his family, Roytas held absolute power in this company. And with a frame built by a wrestler's career to back his temper, more than a few executives cowered when he raised his voice.
"Drag every last one of those sons of bitches to headquarters, right now! Since when does a GCW get to make demands of us?"
"W-well, sir……"
"What?!"
"The demands themselves don't seem unreasonable, in all honesty……"
"What did you say?"
"Recent numbers have been strong. It might be worth trusting them and letting them run with it."
"You'd be stripping a booking your own people spent years building. Some compromise is inevitable, surely."
"Word is their champion was absolutely furious about all this, though."
"The champion? That brat, Shin?"
"Yes, sir. Saying something about how they can't just steal his booking out from under him on the main show."
"Steal?"
Roy echoed the word as if it were beneath belief.
"He should be grateful just to be allowed to compete on the main show. Who does a development territory's brat think he is?"
Not a single executive in that room dared talk back to him in his fury. Which meant no one was positioned to point out the contradiction in his course, either.
The real reason John Roytas had pushed to stage the GCW championship match at Never Escape was the earnings report. WWF held its shareholders' meeting once a quarter, and they had yet to reach the targets originally set for them. To break through that wall, this had been Roytas's idea — in other words, he genuinely believed the GCW title match would move the needle on the numbers.
And yet the moment those people made a forward-looking demand, he tried to crush it?
It made no sense. And of course it didn't — because Roytas's actions were, in truth, nothing more than running errands for Triple H. In return for the field team's help, Hunter had been raising the wrestlers Roytas favored, and the men just added to Hunter's stable were among them.
The trouble stemmed from the fact that Roytas had no idea what Hunter was actually planning. And so he lacked even the standing to fend off a demand like GCW's.
And that —
"Roy. This is quite remarkable."
— produced exactly the outcome Shin had predicted: someone took an interest.
"Wh-what?"
"Ratings are up more than ten percent in a single year? No — closer to twenty? What kind of magic have you been working over there?"
"Well, I……"
"You've been running the business quite aggressively, it seems. And every single initiative here has produced results worth noting."
The one flipping through the documents was a woman who looked barely into her twenties. Blonde hair pulled back in a single tail, she was examining GCW's performance figures — the very materials distributed for the meeting — line by line.
And watching her, Roytas's expression curdled into servility.
"Ah — Miss. They're merely a development territory. There's really no need to concern yourself with—"
"And yet if the main roster had posted results this strong, the stock would jump fiftyfold overnight, wouldn't it."
The woman spoke nothing but plain truth. Even with Roytas addressing her by that odd word — 'Miss' — she showed not a flicker of discomfort. Natural enough. She'd grown up hearing it all her life, because she was the princess of this vast wrestling kingdom.
Tiffany McMahon.
Elder daughter of Bart Maxen — father of one son, one daughter — and the one widely believed to have edged past her older brother Kane McMahon in the race for succession.
Barely into her twenties and still a college student, she nonetheless wielded more power in this room than Roytas ever would. She held no real executive authority, yet everyone without exception had to watch her face for a reading.
Because she was the chairman of the future.
And with her intervention, the situation began to twist into something strange and beautiful.