The heavy bag thudded against his fists, echoing through the dimly lit boxing gym. Sweat dripped from his chin, splattering on the worn canvas floor. At twenty years old, Taro's knuckles were calloused, his body hardened from years of training—but his spirit felt hollow.
The bell never rang for him.
It was always somebody else's bell—golden boys with fast hands, good blood, and coaches that said their names like prayers. Taro's name wasn't a prayer. It was something the coach barked when someone needed rounds.
"Three with Taro," they'd say. "He won't quit."
He never did.
He bit down on his cheap mouthguard and learned the rhythm of being used. How to hide his ribs when the hooks came. How to roll a right hand so it scraped his scalp instead of shutting off the lights. He learned how to breathe with a broken nose and talk with a swollen jaw. He learned how to listen—to the squeak of soles, to the hitch in a breath before a cross, to the tremor that meant the other guy was getting tired.
He learned everything—except how to be picked.
For three years, he had done everything the coaches asked. Roadwork before dawn. Endless rounds on the mitts. Sparring until his ribs ached and his nose bled. Yet when it came time for official matches, he was always benched. His role was simple: be the punching bag for the gym's prodigies.
Day after day, he endured beatings from stronger fighters—men destined for titles, men who had the raw talent he lacked. He told himself it was making him tougher, that his time would come. But it never did.
At seventeen, he thought it was patience. At eighteen, dues. Nineteen became grit. Twenty was a slap in the mouth from reality, and the sting lingered long after he walked out of the gym for the last time—a plastic trash bag over his shoulder and his head down so the champions wouldn't see his eyes.
The underground arenas were different. No bright lights, no referees in polished jackets, no cheers from polished crowds. Just a smoky basement, sweat and beer hanging in the air, and fists that spoke louder than words.
Underground fighting didn't have bells. It had a guy with a cigarette, a stopwatch, and a bored voice saying, "Go."
The basement air tasted like rust and beer. The lights buzzed without promise. The ring was tape on concrete, and if you went down outside the tape, the crowd just shoved you back in. Taro won there. Not a lot—but enough to feel it: the click in the hips when a right hand landed flush, the way the crowd made a single animal sound when the other guy's head snapped.
He climbed. Beginner league. He took punishment and paid it back with interest. He learned to set traps with his feet. To jab the eyes, not the face. To pretend tired and then carve an uppercut through a guard that was late by half a second. he rose through the beginner fighters with ease, showing his skill, his experience was triumphing their builds and natural physiques. He finally had a champion level match against the current beginner league underground champ.
And then he hit the wall called talent and natural gifts once again.
The beginner champion was barrel-chested with a butcher's hands and a smile that never reached his eyes. He beat Taro the first time with pressure. The second with angles. The third with patience. That last loss was the worst, because Taro knew every beat of it as it happened—the way a mechanic knows the engine he's killing with his own hands.
"You're fun," the promoter told him, counting bills with nicotine-yellowed fingers. "You got heart, kid. But this is prizefighting, and heart don't sell like knockouts. We'll keep you as an opener for the higher leagues."
Opener. The guy that warms the crowd before the real fights.
By twenty-five, the mirror was a cruel friend. His eyebrows carried permanent knots. His left ear was a little wrong. He was lean as wire and poor as air. The apartment smelled like detergent and iron from the damp hand wraps drying over the radiator. The lessons had only multiplied. He could talk you through southpaw counters like a professor. He could pick your rhythm apart and hand it back to you in slow motion.
Every fight, every loss, every punch he ate—he kept learning. He memorized angles, adapted to styles, and dissected every failure. He knew boxing better than anyone else in his league, maybe better than the champions themselves. But knowledge didn't win fights. Power did.
He could not make his fists heavy enough.
One night, after another grueling loss, Taro staggered home beneath the flickering streetlights. His vision swam, and he could taste blood on his tongue. He collapsed in the alleyway, fists still clenched, as though the world itself had knocked him down.
He didn't plan to fall asleep in the alley. He planned to get home, drink cold water, and watch film until his eyes stopped burning. But on the walk, the concrete tilted and wouldn't tilt back. He slid down against the graffiti-scarred brick. Neon light puddled near his shoes. Somewhere, someone laughed too hard, like they were trying to prove it.
His fists were still clenched. That made him smile, even though his lip split again and salted his tongue. Did I really waste it? he wondered. All this time. All these years.
Footsteps? No. The alley had gone quiet in that way that meant time was getting thin around him.
Then the world breathed.
The air thickened, gathered, and stood tall. A silhouette bigger than the alley, broader than the buildings. Its shoulders were a mountain range. Its fists were constellations.
A voice like a glove on leather: low, heavy, final.
"You fell a thousand times and you learned from every fall."
Taro's breath snagged. "Who—?"
"A god—but that is only a word. What you must know is this: your will honored me."
The figure's eyes opened—twin furnaces. The alley's shadows dragged toward the heat.
"Strength unearned rots. Talent without labor rusts. You lacked both. Yet you came back. You studied. You stayed." The god's head tilted, considering a broken human with taped hands. "You will fight again, in a place where fists shape fate."
Taro swallowed. The sound was loud in the hush. "I… wasn't strong enough," he said. The confession hurt less than usual.
The god's laugh was a drumroll. "Then become stronger. I bestow you a name among my own: Martial God's Champion."
Light fell, not like sunlight but like gold dust that remembered every bruise he'd taken. It settled on his skin, sank into his bones. His hurts unknotted, but the memories stayed.
"Go," said the Fist God. "Break your wall in a world that breaks back. Learn. Adapt. Perfect your art until perfection must adapt to you."
The alley fell away. The city noise vanished. The world snapped.
He woke under a sky so blue it seemed new.
Grass swayed in waves across a meadow that spilled into a line of dark forest. The air was green and sweet and heavy with buzzing insects. A dirt road cut the meadow like a scar. Far off, a bell pealed—a distant, clean sound that didn't belong to any gym.
Taro sat up. His hands were clean. The wrap marks were gone. His nose breathed clear without a whistle. He flexed and felt… everything.
A pane of light slid into the air before him, thin as glass, covered in crisp letters that arranged themselves as he focused. Not painted. Not projected. There.
Welcome, Adventurer.
Class: Junior Fistfighter
Special Skill: Martial God's Champion [SSS]
Description: Your growth in combat is accelerated. Techniques evolve with application. Physical limits expand through trial. The ring is the world; the world is your ring.
He should have been afraid. He smiled instead—slow and helpless, like a man feeling sun on his face after a winter too long.
A shout cut the meadow's peace.
"Help! Anybody—help!"
The voice came from the treeline. Young, high, trembling.
Taro was moving before the overlay faded. Feet on grass. Arms loose. Chin tucked. His body tilted into a run with the exact form he'd drilled a million times for footwork ladders; the difference was the engine. He didn't labor—he glided. His body was strong, stronger than when he was in peak condition at age 20. Before the fights in the underground that broke him. He was barely panting as he raced across the landscape.
He hit the trees at a controlled pace, senses widening. Birds exploded from branches. Something snarled—wet and ugly—and wood snapped. He slid around a trunk and saw them:
A wagon tipped sideways, one wheel partially buried in mud. A boy stood in front of it with a stick too short to matter, guarding a woman and a sack of something that jingled. The threat was a pair of creatures like wolves starved down to knives. Grey hides, too many ribs, eyes filming over with hunger.
Taro's mind did what it had always done: check range, check angles, check balance. The boy's feet were wrong; he'd be thrown if a wolf leapt. The woman's weight was on one leg; she'd fall if she ran. The wolves would circle in a pincer.
The new thing was how easy the solution felt.
"Down!" Taro barked.
The boy obeyed. The nearest wolf committed—he saw it in the shoulders. Taro slid to meet it, left foot whispering over loam, weight on the ball. He jabbed once—not to hurt, but to find distance and freeze its eyes. It flinched. The second beat opened: a compact right hand that drove from the ground through his spine and arrived in the wolf's cheek.
The impact was different here. It wasn't just bone-on-bone. His punch bit. The wolf spun, its skull cracking, hit leaf litter, and didn't get up.
The second beast scrambled, shoulders bunching for a leap at the boy. Taro pivoted around the wagon wheel, took the inside line, and clipped it with a lead hook that wasn't even full—the kind you throw when your coach warns you to keep something for later.
The creature tumbled like laundry and vanished into brush with a traumatized whine.
Silence sharpened. Sap dripped from somewhere with a patient rhythm.
The boy stared with his mouth open. The woman pressed a hand to her chest. "By the saints," she breathed. "You—are you a guild man?"
Taro lowered his hands. He looked at his knuckles, waiting for the old ache to roll in. It never did.
"I'm… new," he said, tasting the truth. "But I can help."
They righted the wagon together. He pushed and felt the ground give, the wheel pop free with a wet cough. It should have been hard. It was only work.
"Name's Hara," the woman said, still shaky. "This is Rook. We're from Beldam. Wolves have been bad on the road since the lord's men left for the war." She peered at his clothes—plain, clean, otherworldly in ways she couldn't name. He looked at his clothing, a pair of jeans, some trainer sneakers meant for combat, and a black tank top that was dusty from the forest and his lack of time to wash it. "You really ain't a guild man?"
"Not yet," Taro said. "I'm looking for the guild."
"The stone hall in Beldam," the boy said quickly, as if eager to repay a debt. "Big sign with a sword. The registrar's strict, though. She'll test you."
"Good," Taro said softly. Test me and let me show you my efforts paid off.
They offered him a ride on the buckboard. He walked beside instead, liking the feel of the road underfoot, cataloging every muscle's conversation with the earth.
As they went, Rook chattered the way boys do after fear: fast and wide. He told stories about guilders who could throw fire, about a man who killed a bear with a spear from a hundred paces, about a monk who broke boulders with his palm.
"Do you do magic?" he asked at last, eyes bright.
Taro opened and closed his right hand. The memory of the punch into wolf bone glowed in his knuckles like a coal that refused to die. "No," he said. "Just boxing."
Rook made a face. "Is that… like punching?"
Taro laughed. It shocked him to hear it—rusty, light. "Yeah. Like punching. A lot."
They crested a rise, and Beldam unrolled below: a stout town with a ring of wooden stakes like a bear's jaw. Smoke curled from chimneys. Market stalls clustered along the main street—fruit, hides, rags, bright-ribboned nonsense. People looked up as the wagon rattled in. Eyes tracked Taro. He tracked them: the weight on their heels, the set of shoulders, the wary way their gazes retreated and narrowed again. A fighter's town. Or a town that needed fighters and didn't have enough.
The guild hall was impossible to miss—stone while everything else was wood, built like a testament to long lasting promises. A sign swung on chains out front: a sword over a shield. Someone had scratched a fist into the wood at some earlier time and been too afraid to sand it out.
"Registrar's there," Hara said, pointing to a high desk inside. "If you want to be official."
"Thank you," Taro said. He reached into the wagon without thinking and straightened a crate that would have slid later. Hara flushed and murmured another blessing. Rook waved like his arm might come off, then thought better of being too familiar with a man who punched wolves into quiet and ran after his mother.
Inside, the hall smelled like oil and parchment. A board to his left overflowed with papers—requests, bounties, promises of coin for dangerous things. A woman with grey-streaked hair and eyes that missed nothing sat behind the desk.
"Name," she said, quill poised.
"Taro."
"Class."
He glanced at the air; the panel answered like a good corner man.
"Junior Fistfighter."
She looked up. One eyebrow ticked. "Pugilist line, is it? We don't get many raw fists without an art to sit inside them." She nodded toward a side room. "Testing room one. We'll see what your hands can do before we waste ink on your card."
The room was stone and empty except for a heavy pillar and a lacquered box on a pedestal. The pillar had pits the size of thumbs. The box had a crystal sunk in its face—clear, patient.
"Standard strike to the pillar," the registrar said, taking a seat with her ledger. "Then touch the crystal. If you break your hand, you fail."
Taro stood before the pillar and breathed once. He could almost hear Coach Mino's voice from a world away:
Don't muscle the bag, idiot. Stack your bones. Drive from the floor. Let the ground hit for you.
He set his feet. He thought about nothing. Then he let the punch go.
The sound wasn't loud. It was solid—the sound of something agreeing to be struck. The pillar shuddered. Dust sifted from the ceiling. A fresh pit flared white at the edges where stone had given up. Taro shook his hand out of habit, but there was nothing to shake.
The registrar's quill didn't move for a heartbeat. Then it flew.
"Crystal," she said, voice calm again.
He touched the glass. It was cool, then warm, then alive. Letters unrolled in the air like banners. The registrar's eyes slid right, reading as if matching his projection with her own.
Her mouth made a small O she hid with professionalism.
"Basic competencies confirmed," she said briskly. "Stamina acceptable. Reflex suite… interesting. Growth potential—high." She stamped a card with more force than necessary and slid it to him. "You're provisional. Take the goblin trap-clearing in the north copse if you want easy coin. Don't die on guild property."
Taro turned the card over. His name. His class. A place in a book somewhere that said he existed—not as an opener, not as a sparring partner, but as himself.
He tucked it away. He walked out, eyes already on the request board. His hand drifted to the paper marked "north copse" and made the pick without conscious thought.
We'll start there, he told himself. We'll test this body properly. We'll see how far the wall moves when the wall hits back.
As he stepped into the late afternoon light, the air rippled. A final pane appeared. It felt ceremonial, like the judge's scorecards being read in a hush that could break either way.
Status Unlocked
He read it, because in this world you could read the truth about yourself and watch it change.
Taro — Status
Class: Junior FistfighterTitle: Martial God's Champion (SSS)HP: 160 → 660(derived from END)Ki: 17
Base Stats(before blessings)
STR: 18
END: 16
AGI: 14
SPIRIT: 15
MIND: 12
LUCK: 11
Effective Stats(Martial God's Champion bonus: +50 to physical attributes)
STR:68
END:66
AGI:64
SPIRIT: 15
MIND: 12
LUCK: 11
Skill — Martial God's Champion (SSS):
Dramatically accelerates combat growth and technique evolution through application.
Physical attributes (STR/END/AGI) are amplified by +50 while engaged in recognized combat or training.
Successful adaptation against stronger foes unlocks new technique branches and passive refinements.
Known Techniques:
Fundamental Boxing: Jab, Cross, Hook, Slip, Pivot, Guard (refined)
Adaptive Rhythm: Minor passive—quickly internalizes opponent timing to create micro-openings.
He closed the panel with a thought. The numbers didn't make him giddy. They made him settle. As if his body, his past, and his future had finally agreed on the same score.
Outside the guild hall, the town's bell rang the hour. It sounded like a fight about to start.
Taro smiled, rolled his shoulders, and went to find something that would hit him back.