This is something like the prologue for Chapter 2.
My name is Tenma Ōtori.
I live with my grandpa.
I don't have a mom or dad — apparently they both died in a car accident when I was three years old.
But I don't remember that. I only vaguely remember being with a man and a woman when I was little.
The one who took me in was my dad's father, apparently.
The place where Grandpa lives is so depopulated that there are no kids my age. Occasionally, someone's grandchild from the village comes to visit, but only for a few days a year.
The people living near Grandpa's house are all his friends. They all dote on me. Especially the grandpas who live across the street and on both sides — they look after me a lot.
My grandpa's name is Ōtori Kotetsu. He often shoulders his rifle and heads up into the mountains.
The grandpa in the house to the right is named Ken'nosuke, and I call him Ken-jiichan. He's a somewhat strict grandpa who's always out in the yard swinging his sword around.
The house to the left is home to a grandpa named Shōtarō and a grandma named Tamio. I call them Shō-jiichan and Tama-baachan. Shō-jiichan is always punching boards or wrapping a belt around the tree in the yard and pulling on it. Tama-baachan makes delicious meals and sweets for me.
Across the street lives a grandpa named Genzō, and I call him Gen-jiichan. Everyone calls him the "kinda-shady old man."
We sometimes fight, but we're all really close, and they all watch over me.
When everyone has free time, they teach me all sorts of things.
Grandpa teaches me judo,
Ken-jiichan teaches me kendo,
Shō-jiichan teaches me karate,
and Gen-jiichan helps me with my studies and teaches me fun stuff.
But all four of them are always getting scolded by Tama-baachan for "going overboard."
I didn't have any friends my age in the village, but when I started elementary school, I made a friend named "Takashi." The problem was that the school was almost an hour away by car, so we couldn't hang out much unless it was a day off.
I didn't have many friends at school, but we'd play our hearts out during recess, and at home I'd train hard with Grandpa and the others — and that's how I spent my six years of elementary school.
Then, right after I entered middle school, I went and caused trouble.
Well, "trouble" might be an overstatement — from my perspective, it was just a fight. Me against about ten guys,
The reason was that some guy in the new class had laid hands on "
Takashi
" so I punched him.
Then his so-called big brother and his buddies came after me, so I took them all down — except I miscalculated and ended up hurting them.
Apparently their parents stormed the school and made a huge fuss about it. I say "apparently" because I'd skipped school that day and was getting an earful from Grandpa and the others.
I mean, the parents didn't know their kids had ganged up on a single new student in what was basically a lynch mob and gotten beaten for it, so they even came to our house to apologize. But as far as Grandpa and the others were concerned, the real problem was that I — practically their disciple — had failed to hold back properly.
Something I heard around that time was that Grandpa and the others were actually quite famous in certain circles.
Grandpa specialized in grappling arts like judo, jujutsu, and aikido; Sword Grandpa handled weapon arts like kendo, kenjutsu, and bojutsu; and Karate Grandpa was all about striking — karate, boxing, and the like. Apparently, having been taught by those masters, it was only natural that I'd win against anyone at the middle school level.
The three of them were rivals, and each had become strong because he refused to lose to the other two.
When I heard that, I thought — what kind of manga world am I living in?
By the way, Gen Grandpa apparently had no talent for martial arts, so he laughed and said he'd trained his brain instead.
And so, spiritual training was added to my regular practice.
It included waterfall meditation, zazen, sutra copying, and more. During long holidays, I'd even be thrown into the mountains and told to "survive and come back." (Tama Grandma eventually found out, and the four grandpas ended up being made to sit seiza.)
And so went my middle school years. Somehow, I ended up being treated as the class delinquent. Obviously, I never got a girlfriend.
Once I got to high school, things got even busier — helping out with club activities, part-time jobs here and there, socializing with friends, studying, and training that kept escalating in intensity.
Studying wasn't too bad since I'd already learned most of it from Gen Grandpa, but when it came to training, Grandpa and the others went overboard. Every long break, they'd sometimes run a "Hundred-Man Kumite" (hundred-round sparring session) — they used to call everything from free sparring to ground fighting "kumite," but apparently "kumite" was just easier to say.
Grandpa and the others called in some contacts from that world to put me through a hundred-round kumite — covering judo, kendo, and karate.
Well, with opponents rotating every minute, some of them just being instruction rather than real sparring, and sometimes there weren't even a hundred rounds to begin with, so I thought it'd be more accurate to call it "a hundred consecutive timed instruction sessions."
Those were the days of my youth, but as expected, I never managed to get a girlfriend. When I asked Takashi — this guy somehow already had one — for advice, he laughed and said, "You've got a decent face, good grades, great reflexes, and you can cook, so why aren't you popular? Hahaha." That got on my nerves a bit, so I whacked him on the head with the corner of a textbook.
Since Takashi was no help, I asked his girlfriend Miki instead, and that's how I found out the unexpected cause. It was Grandpa and his acquaintances.
Near my school, I'd occasionally run into Grandpa's acquaintances — most of them were tough-looking, intimidating guys — and I'd greet them politely. The school students who saw this mistook me for being buddy-buddy with yakuza.
To make matters worse, some of the guys mistaken for yakuza were the deferential type who would use honorifics toward me and even bow their heads. So the rumors spiraled from "the grandson of a gang boss" to "the son of a senior executive," growing wings and then some.
On top of that, all the grandpas except Grandpa Gen had somewhat intimidating faces, which only fueled the rumors further.
I somehow managed to slip into university on a recommendation. Takashi and Miki were there too, but they'd taken the normal entrance exam, so they were jealous... Serve you right for being a happy couple, I thought, just a little.
In university, I finally got my long-awaited girlfriend and we became a couple, but we broke up after about a year.
I was definitely bummed out — seriously bummed out. If Takashi and the others hadn't consoled me, I might have impulsively gone on a heartbreak trip. To the Aokigahara forest, maybe... just for sightseeing, of course.
I mean, Aokigahara apparently has sightseeing trails and camping grounds and stuff.
Because I took courses efficiently and earned credits at a good pace, I ended up with more free time and managed to have a fairly fulfilling university life.
After graduating, I got a job at the village hall. The work wasn't all that difficult, and the people around me were mostly acquaintances, so it was an easy job for me.
But three years into the job, a tragedy struck on my way back from an errand at city hall.
I'd stepped out for lunch and was crossing the street when I spotted a car barreling toward us at incredible speed.
I noticed it and froze in place, but a young girl walking beside me didn't see it and ran straight out into the road.
I could hear the car's horn blaring, screams from the people around us, and before I knew it my body had unconsciously shoved the girl into the opposite lane. The result: my consciousness cut out right there.
The next thing I knew, I was floating above my own coffin at my funeral.
People dressed in mourning clothes had gathered, crying. Takashi and Miki were there too — they were engaged, holding each other by the shoulders as they wept. My old college friends and senior colleagues from work were all crying as well.
When I looked for the grandpas, I saw a middle-aged couple bowing repeatedly in front of one of them. The little girl from before was there too. The couple kept apologizing to Grandpa, but he was waving it off.
According to Grandpa, it wasn't the little girl's fault — I had simply done what anyone would have done, and was just unlucky.
The couple and the little girl burned incense and left. The little girl thanked me while she was burning the incense.
As for me, the shock of watching Grandpa and the others grieve hit me harder than the fact that I had died. I was still trying to process it all when —
"Tenma Ōtori. I've come here to recruit you."
A voice called out to me from behind.
I had a vague feeling about it, but this was a dream — I was dreaming about my previous life.
The moment I realized that, everything around me began to turn white —
And through the woman's voice trying to rouse me, I could hear a man's voice too.
A woman's voice nearby, and a man's voice a little further away.
The one holding me and calling my name was Mom Celia, and peering in a little hesitantly was Dad Ricardo.
Ah… I'm so happy.
I felt that warmth, but gradually their faces began to fade and disappear.
Then I felt my consciousness rising. It seemed the time had come to wake from the dream.
No matter how much happiness I felt in this place, no matter how much sadness — it was only a dream, not reality.
I understood that, and yet I wished — if only for a little longer — to stay held in Mom's arms, to keep being gazed upon by Dad. Even so, my consciousness continued to awaken.
I kind of felt like adding some explanation of Tenma's past life, so I wrote this.