The arena beneath the Gachinko Fight Club throbbed like a living organ.
Sound came first.
The roar of the crowd.
The bark of bettors trying to lock in last-second wagers.
The shrill excitement of men and women who had paid to see someone get broken in a way polite society would never allow above ground.
Then came the lights.
Harsh. Focused and hot.
They poured down onto the ring and painted it into the center of everything, turning the cage around it into less a barrier and more a promise.
Panda stood off to the side with his arms folded, watching the betting boards flash and shift as money changed hands at absurd speed.
"…This is already bad," he muttered.
Because Oden—
Oden was somehow leaning into it.
He stood inside the prep area with his hood up, blindfold in place, shoulders loose, expression unreadable. He looked eerie enough already. But then he added the smallest touches on purpose. The angle of his head. The stillness. The deliberate lack of reaction.
He was playing a role.
And worse—
He was good at it.
Panda frowned.
'Since when can he act?'
A voice boomed across the underground hall.
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN—!"
The crowd exploded.
The announcer stepped into the spotlight like he had been born wanting attention, one hand gripping the microphone as if he intended to physically beat excitement out of the room.
"Tonight's next bout is one of raw instinct versus cruel experience! A fresh face against one of our tried-and-tested crowd bruisers!"
The audience screamed louder.
On one side of the ring, a heavy gate rattled open.
"Fighting out of the red corner. Standing one hundred eighty-nine centimeters tall and weighing in at ninety-eight kilograms!"
The announcer stretched the moment for maximum effect.
"A savage body-shot specialist! A man who turns ribs into dust and confidence into regret!"
A broad man emerged through the gate, rolling his neck as the crowd jeered and cheered in equal measure.
"Give it up for Daigo 'Iron Maul' Tsuchiya!"
Daigo Tsuchiya looked built from warehouse labor. Thick shoulders. Crooked nose. A shaved head with an ugly scar running above one brow. He moved with the comfortable menace of a man who had made hurting people part of his routine.
He raised one glove to the crowd.
They answered with money.
Names shouted. Bets called. Numbers traded.
On the opposite side, the gate remained closed for one extra beat.
Then the announcer smiled.
"And in the blue corner…"
His voice shifted.
Different now.
Curious.
He could sell this.
"An unknown! A mystery! A blindfolded kid from absolutely nowhere!"
The crowd laughed.
Then quieted.
Because the gate opened.
Oden walked out slowly.
Hood up. Blindfold on. Hands loose at his sides.
The strange thing was not that he looked intimidating.
He didn't.
He looked young. Too young, if anything.
But he walked with the kind of balance that made people stop underestimating him halfway through the thought.
The announcer sensed it too.
"No record! No history! No fear!"
The crowd howled.
"Give it up for, ODEN!"
He did not wave.
Did not posture.
He just stepped into the ring and stood there as if the screaming around him did not matter.
Which, of course, made him more interesting.
Panda stared from the sidelines.
"…He's good at this."
And on a higher level of the building, in a room above the noise, Kinji Hakari watched the ring through a live feed on his laptop.
He leaned back in his chair, one arm hooked over it, eyes narrowed with amused interest.
The blindfolded kid had presence.
That mattered.
It mattered a lot.
Hakari had seen fighters with more size, more polish, more obvious brutality. But this one—
this one had instinct for spectacle.
Without even speaking.
Without even trying too hard.
Hakari's mouth curled.
"…Interesting."
Back in the ring, Daigo cracked his neck and looked Oden over with open contempt.
"This some kind of joke?" he asked.
Oden tilted his head.
"No," he said. "Unless the joke is on you."
The crowd exploded.
Panda slapped a paw over his face.
'Oh no.'
Daigo's eye twitched.
Then he laughed.
A rough, ugly laugh.
"Good," he said. "I was worried they brought me a corpse with manners."
The bell rang.
Daigo moved first.
No feeling-out process. No respect for distance. He charged hard, exactly like the kind of veteran club fighter who trusted aggression to break in the uncertain.
Oden made his first move half a second before Daigo fully committed.
A tiny sidestep.
Daigo's first punch cut through empty space.
The return came immediately. Oden's palm heel snapping up under the man's jaw, enough to lift his head and break rhythm.
The crowd reacted fast.
Daigo stumbled one step and regained himself with a snarl.
Then the real exchange began.
Daigo attacked like a maul was a mindset rather than a nickname. Hook to the liver. Elbow upstairs. Knee if he got too close. He crowded space brutally, trying to drown Oden in pressure and make technique irrelevant.
Oden gave ground.
Not too much.
And while retreating, he made it dramatic.
A lean that came one inch too close to getting clipped.
A pivot that let Daigo's glove graze the hood but not the face.
A stumble that looked accidental and became a spinning backfist to the ribs.
The crowd went wild for it.
Panda stared.
"He's embellishing."
He absolutely was.
Oden wasn't just fighting.
He was performing.
Every dodge came with the exact amount of danger needed to make people gasp. Every counter landed with neat visual clarity, nothing muddy, nothing hidden inside close-range wrestling. He understood, instinctively or otherwise, that this audience wanted moments.
So he gave them moments.
Daigo drove him toward the cage.
Oden let it happen.
The bigger man loaded up a monstrous body shot that would have folded most fighters in half—
and Oden dropped under it at the very last instant, let the fist slam into metal, then turned and drove a knife-hand strike into the side of Daigo's neck.
Daigo lurched.
Oden followed with a low kick to the thigh, then a sharp elbow to the chest that sent the larger man crashing backward.
The crowd came unglued.
Money changed hands mid-fight.
Shouts layered over shouts.
Hakari, still watching upstairs, leaned closer to the screen.
There it was again.
The kid's control over pacing.
He wasn't overpowering Daigo in some crude, obvious way. He was making the fight feel close while quietly taking it apart.
That was business sense.
That was heat.
Hakari liked heat.
In the ring, Daigo was getting angry now.
Bad angry.
The kind that stripped the thinking out of a fighter.
He rushed in with a roar, throwing combinations too hard and too wide.
Oden slipped three in a row.
Then, for pure theater, ducked the fourth so deeply the punch seemed to skim air right above his blindfold.
The crowd screamed.
Oden straightened, raised one finger, and lightly wagged it.
"No."
Daigo lost his mind.
The finish came a minute later.
Daigo swung another desperate right.
Oden stepped inside, trapped the arm, pivoted behind the larger man's balance line, and with a clean rotational throw sent him crashing face-first into the mat. Before Daigo could recover, Oden planted a knee between his shoulders and drove the flat of his hand into the back of the neck with just enough precision to shut everything off.
Daigo went limp.
The announcer nearly blew his own voice out.
"IT'S OVER! IT'S OVER! THE BLINDFOLDED MYSTERY TAKES IT!"
The audience erupted.
Oden stood up, adjusted his hood, and left the ring like he had just finished a light errand.
---
At the payout window, the same woman from earlier looked up at him with noticeably more interest.
Panda stood nearby, still processing the fact that Oden apparently had hidden performance instincts.
The woman counted something out, made a note, and said, "Not bad."
Oden waited.
She went on, "People who work full-time for the club can earn one million yen per month if they become valuable enough."
Oden's mind stopped for exactly one second.
'One million yen.'
For a fight club.
For this.
His face, mercifully, did not change.
But inwardly—
he was stunned.
'That much… for one measly fight?'
Tokyo was incredible.
The woman slid his current paperwork aside.
"Also," she said, "the big boss himself wants to meet you."
Panda straightened immediately.
"Hakari wants to meet him already?"
The woman shrugged. "That's what I was told."
Panda looked at Oden.
Then at the hallway beyond the window.
"…Wow."
As if summoned by the moment, another figure approached.
A girl.
Stylish. Pretty. Confident in a way that felt affectionate and dangerous at once.
Kirara.
She smiled the second her eyes landed on Oden.
"Oh?" she said. "So this is the one Kin-chan wants?"
Before Oden could respond, Kirara stepped in close and touched his arm, then his shoulder, with casual familiarity.
"Well, aren't you cute."
Oden blinked once behind the blindfold.
"…I don't know how to answer that."
"You don't have to," Kirara said sweetly. "I'm taking you to Kin-chan."
She then glanced at Panda.
"Only him."
Panda pointed at himself. "Seriously?"
Kirara smiled without apology.
"Seriously."
Panda looked wounded.
Then sighed.
"…Alright. Fine."
Kirara turned back to Oden and guided him along with a light touch.
"Come on."
Oden followed.
---
Hakari's room was quieter than the arena below.
The noise still lived under the floor, of course distant, pulsing, muffled by structure but up here it felt controlled. Curated. The space of someone who preferred to sit above chaos rather than inside it.
Kirara left him there.
Then it was just Hakari and Oden.
Hakari lounged in his chair with the easy confidence of someone completely at home in his own influence.
He looked Oden over once.
Then smiled.
"You've got style."
Oden stood with his hands in his pockets.
"I only had a single fight."
"You did more than that." Hakari gestured loosely. "You understood the room. That matters."
Oden said nothing.
Hakari leaned forward.
"Do you know what I want this place to become?" he asked.
Oden answered honestly.
"No."
Hakari spread a hand.
"Bigger than an underground club. Bigger than scraps and low-end gambling. I want heat. Money. loyalty. A machine people can't ignore."
His grin widened.
"I want something alive."
Oden listened.
Hakari's eyes sharpened.
"And I think people like you can help build that."
There it was.
The real point.
"I want you to join me," Hakari said.
Oden considered that for all of two seconds.
"I'll consider it."
Hakari laughed.
"That careful, huh?"
"For now," Oden said, "I want my payment."
Hakari blinked once.
Then grinned wider.
"Fair enough."
He stood, walked over to a safe built into the wall, and opened it. After rustling around inside for a moment, he pulled out a banded stack of cash and returned.
He held it out.
"Here it is," he said. "Thirty-five thousand yen. I threw in an extra two thousand."
Oden stared.
Took the cash.
Stared some more.
His soul briefly left his body.
Hakari, mistaking the silence for something else, tilted his head.
"What?"
Oden slowly looked up.
The betrayal he felt was so profound it almost had shape.
"…That's it?"
Hakari raised a brow.
Before Oden could fully say what he was thinking, Hakari's eyes drifted to the blindfold.
"Huh," he said. "That reminds me of Gojo Satoru."
Oden's irritation sharpened immediately.
"I don't know who that is," he said. Then, after the briefest pause: "Are you trying to scam me?"
Hakari ignored the second part.
Mostly because the first part was far more interesting.
His gaze changed.
Not openly hostile.
But watchful now.
"…You don't know who Satoru Gojo is?"
Oden folded the cash once and put it away.
"No."
Hakari's suspicion rose fast.
"What kind of sorcerer doesn't know who Satoru Gojo is?"
The room cooled.
The distance between them, which had seemed conversational before, now felt measured.
Hakari's smile remained.
But it was no longer friendly.
His voice dropped slightly.
"…Unless you're not what you seem."
Oden stood still.
Hakari's eyes narrowed.
"Tell me," he said, "are you a spy sent by Jujutsu Tech?"
And just like that—
the tension between them tightened into something dangerous.
---
Find early chapters and daily updates on my patreon
[Patreon.com/tenten100?]
Follow me on Instagram [www.instagram.com/tenten100_?]