Cold Machine
Shawn Cena, standing right in front of me, still looked like he couldn't make heads or tails of what Baku had said.
“A cat...?”
I had no idea why he was so hung up on that angle. The 'Tiger' gimmick he'd floated earlier was already more than bad enough.
Why a tiger, anyway? Did he think tiger power would come surging out of him? Or was he planning to claim he was descended from some Native American Tiger Tribe?
When I asked him as much, Cena answered like the question had caught him off guard.
“...It didn't really mean anything.”
“Then why did you pick Tiger in the first place?”
“W-well, honestly, the Hercules gimmick I thought of first was my favorite. But y-you said it was absolutely no good.”
“And with good reason. You went through that Sun, Moon, and Stars gimmick, and somehow you just keep getting worse.”
“Hey, the idea is a warrior who fights with the power of the sun, the moon, and the stars!”
And there it was.
Colossally bad.
“Do you see any wrestlers these days running around with a cartoon-book gimmick like that?”
“Th-the Casket-Taker?”
“He debuted back in the eighties.”
“And he's still going!”
“Sure, but people don't see him as an undertaker anymore. They see a veteran who's given twenty years to the WWF.”
At that, Cena went quiet.
“Realistically, your gimmick has to carry your actual life. It doesn't need to match it exactly. You can exaggerate. Or you can borrow from how you look, how you carry yourself.”
“Hmm. In that case...”
After a moment's thought, Cena rapped his knuckles against an arm built out of pure muscle.
“I've got a great body, right? I mean, a really great body.”
“You do.”
The answer was slowly coming into view.
Back in his GCW days, Cena had worked under a gimmick called 'Cyborg.'
It was lifted straight out of The Terminator — the emotionless, cold artificial man.
And honestly, depending on how you interpreted it, that gimmick had all kinds of potential to be genuinely entertaining.
In a gimmick, the character's purpose mattered, but so did its room to grow.
So consider this: the 'Cyborg' could actually be a cyborg. But what if, instead, he was a man who trained himself like a machine — gruff, emotionless on the surface, with warmth buried deep in his chest? Would a story like that land?
It would definitely land.
I smiled.
“How about a villain gimmick — a guy who loves muscle. A Muscle Lover.”
Cena, however, betrayed my expectations beautifully.
“Aw, damn it.”
We clearly had a long way to go.
Baku had ordered re-evaluations for everyone except me.
Yes — even Russell Hart.
Is he holding up all right?
I stared at the wall as I thought about it. Russell's room, by coincidence... no, not really a coincidence — with trainees getting cut left and right, rooms had shuffled, and he'd ended up right next to mine.
But the guy who usually dropped by constantly hadn't shown his face once since the gimmick test ended.
I should probably check in on him.
He must have proposed that gimmick because he had his own reasons, his own convictions.
Still, to my eye it looked half-baked. Baku and the others must have felt the same way — that's why they'd sent it back.
Anyway.
“I should get to bed.”
Sleepiness was beginning to creep over me, and I murmured it half to myself. Cena, deep in thought, nodded.
“Yeah, you need your sleep. Skip it and you'll lose muscle.”
I couldn't help but smirk at how rigorously disciplined he was the moment anything touched body maintenance.
Though I suppose that discipline is why I've been taking such good care of myself too.
My abs were starting to come in. My arms had grown far thicker than before — my shoulders too. My build hadn't been bad to begin with, so the muscle packed on quickly and kept growing.
Being young again probably helps.
Well, it was a good thing either way.
Wake-up call tomorrow was four in the morning.
That was when we started training.
The stillness of early dawn.
Through the window, the forest was barely visible in the dark.
I was charging down the treadmill, the display reading 15.0. In the silent gym, the only sound was my own ragged breathing and the pounding of my feet.
Sleep had long since been shaken off.
Training while tuned in to every sound my body made was incredibly refreshing. And it was even better now, because I could see a future ahead of me.
I was young again.
I had possibility.
I can do this.
In my head, positive phrases repeated on a loop — practically self-hypnosis. But that loop only ran because opportunity had come back around.
The first time around, when opportunity existed, I kept slamming into a wall of reality. I never found a way over it. I just kept slipping back down.
And by the time I finally did find a way over that wall, it was far too late. I was smeared with the stains of failure, filthy with them.
But not now.
I was armed with a whole arsenal.
If I fail even here, then maybe I was never cut out for this in the first place.
And that thought was exactly what made me want to fight — to spare myself that miserable report card.
Three minutes at 15.0. Then a minute at 7.0, brisk walking to catch my breath. Repeat.
About an hour in, I noticed the silence behind me had gone on too long, and I turned around.
“Hmm... mmm.”
Cena was deep in thought.
He stared at himself in the mirror, turning something over and over in his mind, studying those bulging muscles as if they might whisper the answer.
Should I throw him a hint?
It wasn't as if I'd skipped out on it either — I'd received every scrap of wrestling knowledge along with the rest.
I slowed the treadmill and stepped off. As I approached, sipping a protein shake, Cena jumped and spun toward me.
“Ahem. If you've logged your hour, let's move on to the next exercise.”
“God, this stuff is brutal.”
“That's what training is.”
“Doing this every single day to build a body? You're not a 'cold machine,' you're a human being. How does anyone do it?”
“You just do it. The trick is not thinking about it at all.”
...Is this guy completely oblivious?
“N-no, wait, that's not what I meant... Cena. Your whole vibe kind of reads that way, you know. Cold machine.”
“Huh?”
Did that land?
“Haha! Right, I'll help you stay cold and focused on your training!”
Failed again.
The man's brain, too, appeared to be made of muscle.
With Cena spotting me, I ran set after set on the press machine. Sweat poured off me like rain, and a pleasant ache flooded through my muscles. Adrenaline surged, lighting up every nerve.
Feeling like this was my last chance, I finally gave him the hint, plain and outright.
“Cold machine. That's you.”
“Wait — don't tell me...”
“Yes. Use it as your gimmick.”
“Cold machine. Hoooh... Iceman... frozen like ice...”
“No. For God's sake.”
I laughed, half exasperated.
“It's your body itself, Cena. You don't need to go that far.”
I slapped Cena's rock-solid shoulder. It was so hard my hand nearly bounced off.
“Cyborg. That's your ring name.”
“Cyborg...”
He looked sold.
“Should the trunks be blue?”
“...It really doesn't matter.”
He still wasn't quite grasping what I was trying to tell him.
For all his occasional clumsiness, Cena was a relentless worker — hard enough to make up for all of it a hundred times over.
“Cyborg. Cyborg.”
He kept muttering the word under his breath, mulling over his new gimmick endlessly.
I watched the process with a quiet enjoyment. Every time he voiced an idea or asked for my opinion, I walked him through it patiently.
Russell, on the other hand, was digging in his heels for reasons I couldn't fathom.
In the days that followed, the trainees sharpened their various techniques and began bringing their gimmicks to Baku one by one for a private review.
A few started passing. But whenever Baku went out of his way to ask Russell directly about his gimmick — granting him a courtesy he gave no one else — Russell answered in the same flat, emotionless voice:
“I believe this gimmick is enough. A wrestler born of the Hart family. That is me, is it not?”
“...Can't argue with that.”
Even Baku seemed reluctant to push the point. He couldn't very well tell the kid to tack something else onto it.
Because it was, undeniably, a piece of Russell's own life.
Why is he like this?
Aside from that, though, he was cool as ever. He taught Cena the usual wrestling skills, showed no sign of sulking, and got along with us exactly as he always had.
I could have let it slide — but I couldn't help caring.
Because I was sitting this exam in order to prove myself through a rivalry with Russell Hart.
It would shape my career, and it would deepen the trust people placed in me.
The work I'm about to do is work that will revolutionize this industry. Which means that trust matters more than anything.
Pro wrestling is a conservative business. But face a crisis squarely enough, and even it has no choice but to change.
My plan was to climb, step by steady step, adding each innovation I carried in my head at every one of those moments of crisis.
I can do this.
And then, when Shawn Cena unveiled his gimmick, the problem arrived.
Late at night, after the afternoon session had ended.
By now, only the ones who threw themselves into training with real fire were left.
Nobody had called for it, yet everyone had gathered in the training hall. Baku seemed pleased by it, because he even turned on the lights.
The lights of pro wrestling — built to make a performer shine.
Someone came through the door.
And music began to play.
When did he even put that together?
That heavy, droning Terminator main theme. Head bowed low, shoulders spread wide, Cena walked out — and, remarkably, he looked completely normal.
No ornaments. Just broad, plain trunks. He clenched his wide jaw and stepped into the ring, then stood still.
And picked up the microphone.
...We never had anything like this back in my day.
Cena opened his mouth in a flat, almost toneless voice.
“I am a Cyborg.”
At those words, Baku shook his head slowly, as if to say here we go.
“Look at this body of muscle. This is me. I can obliterate whatever enemy stands before me — without a shred of mercy. That is why I built this body.”
But the 'mic-work' that followed genuinely startled me for a moment.
That... is real talent.
The man was a silver tongue.
Mic-Work. Work done with a microphone. To shake your fist and make your name, to steal the souls out of the crowd, and to kick your opponent square in the ass.
Cena was a natural at it.
...For one moment, it was almost unsettling enough to make me wonder if something was wrong with him.
“You, pig. Failed. You, string bean. Failed. Every last one of you is carrying around a garbage body. Did you drink nothing but cola your whole lives to end up like that?”
...Wow. Incredible.
It was a real gift for a wrestler. This was, after all, an industry where you'd bury your own parents if the moment demanded it.
“Th-that concludes my performance.”
And then he went all shy about it.
Baku, who happened to be holding a can of cola, looked at Cena's sheepish face and his expression stiffened sourly.
But only for a moment. Then he threw his head back and laughed, loud and hearty.
“You pass, Cyborg. You creepy damn monster. You've actually built yourself a proper gimmick these past few days.”
“Th-thank you, sir!”
“And the rest of you, got nothing? Huh? THIS is what a gimmick is supposed to be — something with your own personality poured into it!”
With that, he turned to the corner of the training hall where Russell stood alone.
“You got anything?”
He's really going to push this again?
I was startled for a second — but then it struck me as exactly like Baku.
To put it coldly: if Russell couldn't get past this, he wasn't ready to be a professional.
After a long silence, Russell walked toward us.
“May I come up?”
“Anytime.”
Baku, if anything, gave him a push toward the ring.
Taking the microphone from Cena, Russell climbed up. But his face stayed tight with tension the whole way.
He doesn't see it yet.
I let my mind drift briefly over Russell's WWF career as I knew it from my past life.
As I'd said — the reason Russell never grew into a true 'big name' was that he lost the backstage political war.
And the reason for that was obvious...
His uncle's shadow had followed him for his entire career.
One WWF wrestler who loved to belittle him used to say it constantly: Why bother pushing a cheap knockoff when the real, better uncle is right there?
And he wasn't wrong.
Which was exactly why those words were so useful to me now.
Maybe it's time to place a little gamble here.
With that thought, I looked at Russell, who was struggling to get the words out.
“I, um, I...”
“A knockoff of your uncle.”
And I cut him off — using the very words he hated most in this world.
Good.
It was time to begin the rivalry.