Fig. 01
Two weeks had passed since Mrs. Kokoro Superior and her dogs took Dr. Superior’s body back home. I came back to this ninja-run hospital for another test, to see if I could find the root cause of the weird chronic problems in my body. Some young specialists in the 4th-tier city and the 1st-tier city had told me to give up. But because of the expectation treadmill, I kept feeling I was getting closer and closer to a breakthrough. So I still came back, following online recommendations, just to try my luck again.
This test only took five minutes. The sample had to be sent to another place for analysis, and the report would take a few days. So I got ready to leave. But in the hospital hallway, I suddenly ran into a young man. His hairstyle had changed, but I recognized him right away. He was the one who had used the Sharingan on me in the subway in that second-tier city.
He said, “Uh, it’s you? You’ve got some nerve coming back to our hospital.”
I said, “Aren’t you the guy who was sitting on the subway floor playing with his phone? I thought you were a college student. What, are you here to see a doctor too?”
He said, “I’m Gary. I work here. People call me Director Woo. Some people also call me Vice Professor Woo. Back then, those people in the subway were all under me.”
I said, “So you people were doing training in that second-tier city? You don’t dress like a doctor. You don’t look like security either. Don’t tell me you work in administration. If someone who uses genjutsu works in admin, and uses it to mentally control medical staff, that would at least make sense.”
He said, “I’m not with those people. I’m in charge of IT at this hospital.”
I said, “Then did I ever do anything to you?”
He said, “You still have the nerve to ask? You killed Dr. Superior. Blood has to be paid with blood. I saw the whole scene of your fight with him on the surveillance system.”
I said, “No. That was self-defense. Other staff in your hospital said Dr. Superior got what he deserved. They said I was getting rid of a public menace. Even his wife, Mrs. Kokoro Superior, didn’t blame me.”
He said, “Mrs. Kokoro Superior had already become a stranger to him long ago. What I had with him is not something outsiders like you can understand.”
I took a sharp breath. I thought to myself: wow, Dr. Superior’s true love has finally shown up. Looks like I won’t be getting back to work that easily today.
I said, “So Dr. Superior didn’t just go after those female medical workers. He also had a boy toy in this hospital? Does Mrs. Kokoro Superior’s family know about this?”
He said, “Don’t talk nonsense. We were roommates in college. You killed my old roommate. I’m not letting you go that easily today.”
I said, “I already told you, that was self-defense. Otherwise he would have turned me into a specimen. You work in this hospital, and you can see the surveillance footage. There’s no way you don’t know that. So why are you standing with an evil man?”
He said, “Cut the crap. I don’t care about any of that. I’m going to avenge my brother. You don’t get to decide what’s justice and what’s evil.”
Fig 02
Then he launched his first move: Fire Style: Fire Fall, trying to block my way out. It was the first time I had seen a fire-style attack in real life instead of in anime. Honestly, it did not look that different from a stage act.
That was when it suddenly clicked for me: right, you’re a descendant of the Uchiha clan. Of course you can use fire-style jutsu. So when Dr. Superior was trying to kill me back then, you were the one who set the fire, weren’t you? That day Mrs. Kokoro Superior told me that sooner or later, you and I were going to meet. So this was what she meant. But if you were helping him, then why did you save me?
He said, “I wasn’t helping him hurt people. I was stopping him in secret, so he wouldn’t make an even bigger mess inside the hospital again. Every time he killed an innocent person, the hospital director, Dr. Divine, and I had to spend a lot of effort cleaning up after him.The president had to wine and dine the people who came to investigate, and I had a ton of IT work to deal with. There’s no point explaining any of this to you. You wouldn’t understand. I’m not wasting more words on you. You’re not leaving here alive today. Let me show you a new fire-style move.”
Fig. 03
Then he launched Fire Style: Fire Tornado. It was several times more powerful than the last move. I could already feel the temperature in the hospital hallway rising fast. At the same time, his phone turned into a light saber.
I said, “Is your light saber made of plasma? What happens if someone gets hit by it?”
He said, “What, scared now? Once it hits you, it’ll cut off your chakra pathways. Then you won’t be a threat to me anymore. I know that once you lose control, you’re capable of stabbing Dr. Superior to death. And I heard you can also use summoning jutsu. If you dare summon those two stinky shoe insoles again, I’ll slice them apart with this light saber.”
I said, “Do you smoke? Cigarettes? Cigars? Or hookah? Your smoke rings are pretty good.”
I thought to myself: this guy has the Sharingan. I can’t let him control me again. It’s already this late, but looks like I still have no choice but to fight.
Fig. 04
At that moment, the cat on my shirt jumped out and fused with me. We turned into a half-beast centaur form. I used a water-style move I had learned from watching videos and sprayed straight at Director Woo. It could not directly put out the flames coming from his mouth, but it did lower the temperature in the hallway, and it also cooled down the anger inside me.
He said, “You bastard. You used water vapor to block the light. I was planning to activate the Sharingan, but if I do it now, the genjutsu has to travel through all this misty air, which takes a lot more power. The light could also get scattered. I overused my eyes a few days ago trying to meet the deadline of an engineering project. My eye power still hasn’t recovered. Looks like I gotta use the ultimate fire-style jutsu now.”
Fig. 05
Then a Fire Phoenix burst out of his mouth. The expression on the phoenix’s face directly showed the anger inside him. And high heat already made his nervous system lose control more easily, creating a positive feedback loop. At the same time, the color of his light saber changed too, from a cool light to a warm light. It was so glaring that I did not even dare look at him head-on. I could only keep spraying water.
I said, “Using this kind of heat to hurt your own body, is it really worth it? For Brandon Superior? For a dead mad scientist? What exactly was going on between you two?”
He said, “I already told you. He was my buddy. We were classmates for four years in college. Every day we went to the library together, ate together, watched videos together, played games together. After I finished grad school, he was already here working under the hospital director, and he introduced me to this hospital. I even helped him chase Mrs. Kokoro Superior. I gave him advice, and I used software to automatically send her a lot of romantic text messages in his name. A few years later, he got his own department, and I slowly worked my way up to become director of the IT department. You got him killed. That means you killed my family.”
I said, “That’s weird. I also had a lot of close male friends in college, but I never formed that kind of intimate relationship with any of them. Something feels off. Relationships between people should develop in multiple threads. You can’t cast your net in just one pool. As an IT guy, you should understand that. And one more thing. You’re a man, so why is the jutsu you came up with based on a phoenix? To be honest, it feels kind of feminine. It doesn’t really match your style.”
He said, “You don’t know shit. A phoenix can rise from the ashes.”
I said, “Rise from the ashes? Back then I even asked Mrs. Kokoro Superior whether she wanted to use forbidden jutsu to summon Brandon Superior back, and she said no.”
He said, “Her marriage with him was not harmonious. She didn’t care, but I did!”
I said, “See? See? That tone is off. Are you sure you only saw him as a buddy?”
He said, “Cut the crap. If you think the phoenix is too feminine, then I’ll use a more masculine jutsu to intimidate you.”
Fig. 06
Then he launched a new jutsu: Fire Sparrow. The phoenix coming out of his mouth suddenly turned into a wild bird that looked like a sparrow. It glared at me and charged at me with its wings flapping. I had no choice but to keep spraying water to block his attack.
I said, “Not feminine anymore, but now it has a strong rustic vibe.”
He said, “Give me a break, will you? That’s called wildness. Do you get it or not? Forget it. People like you who grew up in a greenhouse will never understand. Release, Data Knife.”
I froze for a second. The high-temperature plasma light saber in his hand changed form into a zanpakuto. I knew that sword way too well. Wasn’t that Ryujin Jakka? The zanpakuto of the old captain commander in Bleach.
I said, “How can you use a zanpakuto? And such a good one?”
He said, “Once spiritual power was infused into my Data Knife, it became this. Once it cuts you, your body will also be broken down into data.”
I said, “What? Broken down into data? Do you think you’re living in the world of Digimon? So in that second-tier city, you weren’t just there for IT project training. You also went to the hospital run by the Soul Reapers, right? Was Dr. Warm the one you saw?”
He said, “Yeah. If I have my own medical problems, I also have to go to the second-tier city for treatment. A lot of medical staff from our hospital do the same thing. We just have to take turns asking for leave. Dr. Warm is a real Quincy descendant. His marksmanship is excellent, and his bullets are refined at a very high level.”
I said, “Looks like we’re both patients then. That gives you even less reason to kill me. We’re both dealing with illness, and we even went to the same specialist from the same hospital.”
He froze for 200 milliseconds, then suddenly burst into rage.
He said, “Cut the crap. What a joke. You killed the genius celebrity doctor who had the best chance in this world of curing me completely. Dr. Warm only relieves the pain again and again. His bullets can’t reach the lesion deep inside my body. He doesn’t dare do it. He’s afraid of taking responsibility.”
I said, “That may not be his fault. Bullets refined with spiritual power really do have side effects. The little cosmos in my body took a few weeks before it got absorbed. Some places that are rich in nerves and blood vessels probably just can’t be shot. The Soul Reaper school can only solve certain problems. The ninja school can only solve certain problems. And the pirate school, which only exists in the 1st-tier city, can only solve certain problems too. Sometimes medicine depends on people being brave enough to try. So what illness do you actually have? What kind of disease could someone like Brandon Superior cure when other people can’t?”
He said, “That’s none of your business. What I have is an autoimmune disease. Mainstream medicine still has no way to cure it completely. I’ve been forced to use medication to control the pain ever since middle school. Hah. Since you once had the little cosmos in your body, I guess you can probably use sage chakra now. You’re connected to nature as one whole. That makes you hard to deal with.”
I said, “Heh, maybe. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to draw on this much groundwater to fight your flames. Don’t tell me you have ankylosing spondylitis?”
He said, “How do you know the names of so many diseases? You actually guessed it.”
I said, “Come on, that counts as private information? I know patients with that kind of condition too. There are plenty of drugs that can control it. Imported drugs may be expensive, and you may need private insurance, but I’ve heard natural therapies can help to some extent too. No wonder you had to sit on the floor playing with your phone back then. You couldn’t stand for long. The people next to you were all standing.”
He said, “I don’t want to depend on drugs to stay alive for the rest of my life. Now that you even know my private health information, how could I possibly let you live? You’re not leaving here alive today. Anyway, your time is already running out. So before you die, you might as well see the tech-style fire jutsu I developed.”
I said, “My god. You’re sick yourself, and you still want to kill another patient. Your brain has really been burned through. Other than shooting ‘birdy’ flames at people, what else can you do?”
He said, “Heh, didn’t you see that my Data Knife has already been released? Next I’m going to use data structures step by step to push you into suffocation.”
I said, “So you really did combine your college major with your genetic heritage? This hospital really is full of one master after another. I can understand the suffering of chronic illness. Of course I understand that every drug has side effects. Otherwise I wouldn’t have kept trying to figure out the pathology behind my own condition. At this point, there’s no turning back. You’ve already seen the debut of my cat-man fusion form. Now I can only fight with my back to the water.”
He said, “Release, Fire Matrix.”
Fig. 07
Gradually, a matrix made of 0s and 1s started coming out of his mouth. I had never imagined that flames could look this dazzling. He was almost as cool as Leo in The Matrix. If those 0s and 1s came flying at me, would they break me down into data? Could my water-style jutsu block them? Would water molecules get split into hydrogen and oxygen? My heart started beating faster. My body started changing shape…
End of part 1.
This is a creative project inspired by the traditions of Eastern shonen manga and Western comics and cinematic storytelling.
All characters, abilities, and world elements are original creations.
Any similarities to existing works are coincidental or intended as respectful homage, without any claim of ownership or affiliation.
I’m open to legitimate collaboration on various levels.