The Flight That Changed Everything
WWF World Tag Team Champion.
The symbolism behind that title was immense.
Countless future Icons, Superstars, and Legends had held those belts.
Only a handful of wrestlers had ever captured them in their first year on the main roster.
'Three years, if you count my GCW days.'
Either way, it brought a different kind of joy than winning a belt in a subsidiary promotion ever had.
In GCW, it had felt like everyone working together to win that belt as one. In the WWF, by contrast, it felt like something I had seized through my own ability, fair and square.
The reactions from the people in power were just as positive.
When I walked back into Gorilla Position drenched in sweat, everyone—including Bart—came over to congratulate me.
"Great match out there."
"Thank you, Boss."
"Both teams are getting great reactions off this script of yours. Things certainly run smoothly when I listen to your ideas."
"You're too kind."
"Hahaha! Good! Very good!"
Bart laughed heartily. After exchanging greetings with the staff standing behind him, I turned to head backstage.
"......"
My eyes met Hunter's for a brief moment. He was waiting for the main event. Orton, plastered to his side, waved a hand low at his waist. I gave him a wry smirk and walked right past Hunter on my way to the locker room.
Well, here we were.
It had already been a few months since I re-donned the Sin gimmick, and in that time I'd won the acceptance of every member of Revolution except Hunter.
They respected me even while walking on eggshells around Hunter—and I returned that respect in kind. That was what mattered. We feuded with each other on television, but behind the curtain we worked together for each other's benefit. That arrangement was the best of all possible worlds.
A mutually beneficial structure. Exactly what Batista and I had built.
After our feud, each of us had climbed to a higher level than before. I was a tag team champion. Batista's character had evolved.
'If things keep going this well, great.'
The feud with Orton, and the tag team program leading up to it, both seemed to be heading in a promising direction. If even the arrogant Revolution was flocking around me, the veterans would naturally follow suit.
'Though it's a bit murky, since not all of Revolution feels that way.'
Hunter, the actual leader of the faction, still treated me like a thorn in his side ever since that conversation in the locker room. But there was nothing to be done about it.
My relationship with Hunter was complicated. With Orton, it was a simple clash of egos. With Hunter, it went beyond that.
To put it bluntly, Hunter seemed to believe I had stolen 'his woman.'
'Which isn't true, but still.'
Work was work, nothing more. Besides, Tiffany had made it clear that whatever she'd had with Hunter was long over. If anything, it was nothing more than Hunter's one-sided obsession.
He clearly knew how embarrassing it was, because he tried his best to hide it—but his acting and his mannerisms gave him away at every turn.
The tangled love-triangle storyline involving me, Tiffany, and Hunter was currently the hottest act on Burning Kong. The story went that while Tiffany and I stoked a subtle current of tension between us, her 'ex-boyfriend' kept making a pathetic spectacle of himself. Tiffany, drawing a hard line under her history with Hunter, pursued me all the more aggressively, while Hunter threw every trick he had at winning her back.
'Just like real life.'
Which was why I saw Hunter's jealousy as an unavoidable side effect. When you ranked priorities, his resentment was simply one of those things. He'd have to deal with being second-best.
Hunter was, of course, a phenomenal professional wrestler—but right now, I was a notch above him. That was the objective truth of it.
When I finished my shower, Rock Simmons was standing there holding a bottle of beer.
"Kid, you gotta drink tonight!"
"......Isn't bringing alcohol into the locker room strictly against the rules?"
"Who's gonna tell me otherwise? Kahaha! Congratulations, you monster!"
I took the bottle and set it down beside me for now. The moment my fingers touched the ice-cold glass, a craving flared up inside me, but I held it down.
"Good work out there, Champ."
"Thank you."
"Booker, you have one too."
"Yes, sir, Simmons."
Booker, who'd followed me out of the shower, took his bottle and set it down beside mine as well.
"You're not drinking?"
"Can't exactly sip away happily while my partner's going dry, can I?"
Booker clapped me on the back. I chuckled at that and turned toward the TV mounted in the corner of the locker room.
The main event was in full swing. Hunter's opponent was RockBandDAm.
That's right—the very same wrestler who'd once invoked Orton's parents and ended up with his standing obliterated, never even recovering his losses.
Hunter was slated to win again tonight, and the crowd couldn't bring themselves to invest in a match whose outcome was written on the wall.
'Worst-case scenario.'
I was equally bored. Hunter did his best to draw heat with his heel work, but the crowd's energy never rose. As a result, RockBandDAm—who possessed a genuinely high level of in-ring skill—had to bust out dangerous bump after dangerous bump just to force the atmosphere awake.
While the rest of the guys laughed and carried on around me, I kept watching the match.
And before long, someone pushed open the locker room door.
"Sin, you in here?"
"Flair......"
"Ahh, just fine. Only came by to say congrats."
Orton and Batista filed in behind Flair. Everyone who saw them froze in wide-eyed astonishment.
I handed Flair the beer I'd left sitting on my chair.
"Have a drink first."
"Oh, a beer, is it? Simmons's stash?"
"Haha! You've got a sixth sense, Flair!"
Simmons, who'd been reading the room, offered beers to Orton and Batista as well, who stood there fidgeting awkwardly. They accepted, then came straight over to me.
Lance Orton. Perhaps thanks to the advice I'd been giving him these past few months, his reactions had climbed considerably, and he was visibly adjusting to the main roster.
Though he still carried no belt, he'd changed—now he spoke up and pushed his own ideas during booking meetings.
"Congratulations."
"So that's why you came—Hunter's not here."
"Exactly why I said I'd only stop by for a handshake. Hunter's been saying that because of Tiffany, he's going to deal with you one of these days."
"......Thanks for the heads-up."
I'd better watch my back.
With that thought, I turned to Batista, who was lingering behind Orton.
"Batista, great work tonight."
"I'm sorry. The finish was the most important spot of the whole match, and I lost my composure."
"It happens. You just need a little more practice pacing your strength, that's all."
Batista was quick to own his mistake and apologize, and I didn't hold back my encouragement. That, too, was part of the craft.
I'd only jockeyed for position back when I couldn't read their intentions. Once someone lowered their head and came to me with respect, I gave consideration in return. The result was standing right in front of me.
Instead of waiting around for Hunter to finish his match, these men had chosen to come pay their respects to me first.
While Hunter defended his championship to a listless crowd, we talked and laughed and let off steam to our hearts' content.
And then, a few days later—
The tangled web between Hunter and me unraveled in a place neither of us could have predicted.
And along with it, my relationship with Tiffany Maxen began to drift toward something a little more delicate.
Late September, with summer quietly drawing to a close.
Sitting in the passenger seat of a Porsche, I felt the wind brush against the back of my neck. It was, without question, a car worth every penny of its price.
Across two lifetimes, long drives had become second nature to me, and I'd grown particular about my automobiles. Judged by that standard, the Ferrari before and the Porsche now were both simply magnificent.
The only regret was that I couldn't take the wheel myself. But there was nothing to be done about it.
'Crash someone else's car, and you crash the relationship along with it.'
Even more so when that car was the limited-edition Porsche 973 Edition—only seventy-seven units in the entire world.
Tiffany loved driving too, apparently, because she showed no sign whatsoever of handing me the keys so she could rest.
We'd split off from the production crew for a bit; we'd just finished an interview with a sports magazine and were on our way to the airport.
It was a genuinely brutal schedule. The weekly show had ended only yesterday. Today was the magazine interview. And by tomorrow, we had to be on a plane to Europe.
There was a European tour on the calendar. "Tour" sounded grand, but it simply meant filming the shows over there. English-speaking audiences all the same—some of our most important customers.
Anyway, things were going well. My feuds with the other wrestlers kept landing, Booker and I as a tag team were on a tear, and the love-triangle storyline outside of the tag division was performing beautifully too.
I was becoming indispensable on Burning Kong—roughly mid-carder territory by now. An absurdly fast rise.
But all of it owed as much to my own exceptional skill as it did to the person currently gripping the steering wheel.
Tiffany hummed some song or other the whole time she drove. The lyrics were truly something to behold.
"Something's stirring deep inside me, and it's coming ouuut~. I'm gonna kill you dead~."
"......"
"My rage will swallow the world. I will make sure you die~. You are my—hmm? What is it?"
"Uh, whose song is that?"
"Carnival Hobbs."
"Charming tune."
"Isn't it great?"
"Doesn't that get flagged by the censors?"
"It's the land of the free, isn't it?"
What even is America.
Bewildered, I kept watching Tiffany as she continued humming her death metal. The white cheeks beneath her sunglasses had turned a little red.
"You gonna keep staring at me?"
"Why do you like songs like that?"
"......That's rather rude."
"Why are you killing people? In the song?"
"It happens. It's just a song."
"It being a song is exactly why you shouldn't do it."
"Don't lecture me—go tell Jin Grel, the one who taught it to me."
"Jin Grel...... the wrestler with the vampire gimmick?"
"Yep, that's the one. He taught me this song when I was fifteen."
"Seems a bit hardcore to teach to a minor."
"Honestly, by locker room standards back then, I was one of the well-behaved ones."
"What was it like?"
"Everyone lived on women and booze. I get it, though. Wrestlers are strong, so they're lonely people."
She had a point. Wrestlers spent their lives moving from city to city, day after day. Close to three hundred days a year on the road, away from their families.
"Maybe that's why everyone leaned on each other when they weren't talking shop. The locker rooms of the old days were like one big family."
"That's not how I've heard it. I was told there were constant power struggles."
"Only when we were working. Afterward, everyone gathered around and drank beer together."
"A childhood memory, then."
"It is. Back then it really felt like we were off on some strange adventure together."
The car swung into a wide turn. I'd been too caught up in talking with Tiffany to notice, but we'd arrived at the airport.
"As always, only Father and I made it into the next era."
Probably better not to ask. She didn't look like she wanted to talk about it, either.
And so Tiffany and I boarded the Maxen private jet and set off for Europe. The reason for flying private, I was told, was that Bart would need to use the same jet for his return trip.
My first time on a private plane. The sheer, overwhelming comfort nearly brought tears to my eyes. After sampling an endless parade of delicacies, I sank into a massage chair and rode it all the way to Europe.
London Heathrow Airport.
The moment I stepped outside, I was swallowed by the stares of countless strangers.
This much was familiar by now. The women snuck catcalls my way, and the men gawked openly at my height and my build.
'An Easterner pulling this off just makes them lose it even more.'
Most of the Brits were visibly stunned to see their own prejudices shattered—the assumption that Asians were all small, slight bookworms of a professorial persuasion.
They'd be even more shocked to learn that in a few days, this very man would be competing in a show put on by the biggest professional wrestling organization in the world.
Feeling a small thrill at the prospect of surprising them all, I glanced around for Tiffany, who had walked on ahead.
'There she is.'
Tall and striking, she was impossible to miss. But she was on the phone, and her face wore a distinctly serious expression.
What now?
"Yes, I understand...... Alright, I'll head straight there and join you."
When she hung up, Tiffany let out a long, deep sigh.
This really did look serious.
"What's wrong?"
"Ah, we've got a bit of a problem."
"What kind of problem?"
"Something's happened back in the States. The plane carrying the wrestlers made an emergency landing on the East Coast."
"What on earth—"
"Apparently there was a passenger on board carrying a highly contagious disease."
"......I'm sorry, what?"
"Everyone's under quarantine right now, so they almost certainly won't make it in time—"
Hearing that, I stood there dumbfounded—and then a single memory surfaced from deep within me.
I had lived through this before. No—lived through wasn't quite right. Heard about would be the more accurate way to put it, since I'd been with GCW at the time.
Nearly the entire roster had come down with the outbreak and couldn't make the European tour.
And back then, in order to keep the show running, the WWF had most certainly—
Oh, damn it all.
There was room to climb even higher than this.