Location: Red Reapers' Tokyo Underground War Room — Locker Annex, Just Before Midnight
The flickering halogen light buzzed overhead like a dying insect, casting jaundiced halos over cracked tile and sweat-stained concrete. The locker room beneath the repurposed Kremlin-funded gym smelled like liniment, old incense, and something faintly metallic—blood or memory, neither easily scrubbed.
Snezhnayya Barsa sat alone on the bench, his leopard mask crumpled in his lap like a shroud. He stared at the fogged-up mirror across the narrow room, elbows on his knees, fingers tightening unconsciously around the mask’s eye slits. The steam from his recent shower still lingered, but there was no warmth in it. Just ghosts.
The mirror was cracked. One jagged line split his reflection down the center. A fractured man. Athlete, assassin, exile—each shard a version of himself he didn’t recognize. A door creaked behind him. Viktor Zlovred stepped in with the limp, whisper-quiet gait of a man who no longer trusted his footsteps. His coat was still damp from the rain outside, and his eyes… were heavy. Not tired. Burdened. He held a prayer rope in one hand, the knotted beads slick with oil and thumbprints, the other wrapped loosely around a crumpled photograph of men in uniform. One of them was Boris Drago.
Barsa: I didn’t join this war.
Viktor paused, standing in the doorway. He knew not to answer too quickly. His breath fogged in the cold air like cigarette smoke.
Viktor: I guess… I can’t say the same…
Barsa looked down, curling his toes inside his boots like he could root himself here, far from Moscow, far from memory.
Barsa: They said we were heroes. That we’d bring glory back to Russian wrestling, that’s what I signed up for. Not… black bags and bullets in hotel sinks.
He lifted the mask slowly. It looked back at him now, empty, judging.
Viktor stepped closer, tossing the photograph onto the bench beside Barsa. It slid slightly on the condensation. This was the first time Viktor had seen Barsa without his mask on. He knew this meant that Barsa trusted him more than anyone in there stable.
Viktor: That was Chechnya. Me. Boris. Mordokrov. We buried things there. Bodies. Consciences.
Barsa didn’t reach for the photo. Just stared.
Barsa: And now Boris is buried again. By your hands and Mordokrov’s.
Viktor: (softly) By orders.
Barsa: (eyes narrowing) That’s supposed to make it better?
Viktor didn’t answer. The silence was its own confession. He walked to the sink and turned on the tap. The water ran brown at first. He splashed his face anyway.
Viktor: She showed me things… Yume—before the exorcism. She twisted my mind, but she didn’t lie—just… revealed. I saw Boris in a trench, begging. I saw myself laughing.
He grabbed a rag and scrubbed at his palms like Lady Macbeth with less poetry.
Viktor: I don’t know if it was real, but I remember it, and now I can’t forget.
Barsa finally looked up at his reflection. The cracks had multiplied somehow. Or maybe they’d always been there.
Barsa: I miss snow. Real snow, Russian snow, not the plastic slush Tokyo pumps out during the holidays.
He stood, slow and precise, and held the mask to his face—not putting it on, but… testing its weight.
Barsa: I wear this mask because I want to become something beautiful—something more than the boy from the frozen villages who cannot speak above a whisper.
He turned toward Viktor, eyes dark and wet.
Barsa: Now I wear it because I fear what I look like underneath and for my family's safety back home.
Viktor: Then keep it on. At least until we finish what’s coming.
Barsa: The New Breed?
Viktor gave a sharp nod. A flicker of something flared in his expression—shame, maybe. Rage. Regret.
Viktor: They’re just the next fire we walk through. Putin wants a message sent. You and I… we send it. But after that…
Barsa: After that?
Viktor didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled a chain from his pocket. A small Orthodox cross swung from it, tarnished and dented. He tossed it to Barsa.
Viktor: You’ll need something to believe in. Even if it’s just the idea that you’ll make it home.
Barsa caught the chain mid-air. It felt cold. Too cold.
Barsa: I thought we weren’t allowed faith anymore.
Viktor: Only in the mission and each other. But that’s not enough anymore, is it?
From above, a laugh echoed down the stairwell. Olga’s laugh. Wet, braying, grotesque. Something about meat or pudding. The war room was awake again. Time was moving.
Viktor: Come on, Snow Leopard. The wolves are gathering.
Barsa slid the mask on, piece by piece, adjusting the eyeholes so no one would see the tremble beneath.
Barsa: Let’s give the children something to scream about.
The two of them walked out together, shadows stretching down the hall like nooses.
Shadows of Memory
The war room had long since gone quiet. The others had dispersed into the dim corridors of the gym’s lower levels, leaving behind only the scent of iron, incense, and something deeper—something like rot. The fluorescent lights buzzed softly above, casting sterile halos over the cracked linoleum and flaking cinderblock.
Snezhnaya Barsa sat perched on a rusted weight bench, mask still on, though his posture betrayed unease. His knees bounced. His gloved hands fidgeted with the red silk thread from his wrist wraps. Across from him, Viktor Zlovred sat cross-legged on the floor like a soldier at confession, hunched before a cold samovar that hadn’t hissed steam in weeks.
Neither spoke at first.
Barsa: (quietly) You knew.
Viktor didn’t move.
Barsa: You knew what this mission really was. What it would become.
A long silence. Then—
Viktor: I suspected. But I didn’t know they’d actually do it.
Barsa shook his head slowly, his voice like frost on metal.
Barsa: You could have told me.
Viktor: (bitter laugh) Would it have mattered?
He finally looked up. The bags under his eyes were bruised shadows, his pupils still too dilated. His mind bore the fingerprints of something unnatural—though Yume’s psychic grip had been severed, the damage lingered like radiation sickness.
Viktor: When I first heard the order… kill Boris Drago… I felt nothing. That’s what they made us, you know?
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a frayed photo—faded from sweat and time. It showed three young men in military fatigues, arms around each other. One was unmistakably Boris Drago. Another was Viktor, looking shockingly human—unscarred, smiling. The third was missing a face, torn from the paper.
Viktor: Second Chechen War. Boris saved my life twice. Once from an IED. Once from a firing squad we deserved.
Barsa’s breath caught in his throat. This wasn’t the Viktor he trained with. This was a ghost wearing his voice.
Barsa: And yet… you stood there. You watched Mikhail do it.
Viktor: I did more than watch. I lured Boris to the meeting.
The admission hung like a noose.
Viktor: (barely a whisper) Yume showed me things. Not just illusions—truths. The children. The villages. What we did… what I did.
He shivered, even though the room was warm.
Viktor: For the first time, I felt it. Guilt. Real guilt. That’s what she left behind.
Barsa: (voice sharpening) And what now, Viktor? What happens when guilt isn’t enough? When we have to fight again—for them?
He gestured toward the upper levels, toward Mordokrov, Svetlana, the Kremlin, and the expectations.
Barsa: We’re not even in the tournament anymore. The Terracotta Titans crushed us. And now they want us to fight the New Breed… why? To silence them? To prove we’re still useful?
Viktor: To remind them that we’re still dangerous.
Barsa: Are we?
Silence again. Then Viktor stood—slowly, stiffly, like he was learning to walk again.
Viktor: Depends on what kind of men we choose to be. Monsters… or something else.
He walked to the nearby table where the red Kremlin folder sat unopened, its seal intact.
Barsa: You’re not going to open it?
Viktor: No.
Barsa: Why?
Viktor turned, his eyes glinting with something painful and new.
Viktor: Because I already know what’s inside.
He paused.
Viktor: Orders.
“Ghost Muscles, Dead Weight”
Location: Underground Kremlin-Funded Gym – After Hours, Tokyo
The gym creaked like an old man in his sleep. Above, Tokyo’s midnight lights blinked dimly through the reinforced grate in the alley ceiling, casting fractured neon across the dust-choked iron beams. The room had once been a bomb shelter, but now bore the ghosts of iron plates and protein-stained sweat. Soviet red banners fluttered from the walls like the skin of dead saints.
A lone bench press clanged. Again and again.
Snezhnaya Barsa moved with the precision of a machine, his chest rising and falling like a metronome. He wore only black compression tights and tape around his wrists, glistening with sweat. Every lift was a silent scream into the void—a rebellion with no audience.
On the incline press beside him, Viktor Zlovred sat motionless, fully clothed, gloved hands trembling as he wrapped his knuckles with slow, surgical care. He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe too hard. His eyes stared past the punching bag before him as though watching a different version of himself from another timeline.
Barsa dropped the bar onto the rack, the clang echoing like gunfire.
Barsa: Every rep’s a prayer, you know? Not to God, but to the person I used to be.
Viktor didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the mirror in front of them. It was cracked from Olga’s last rage blackout, jagged lines splitting his reflection in half.
Barsa: (standing, towel draped around his neck) You ever think about home?
Viktor (quietly): Only when I want to forget it.
A pause. Somewhere in the distance, water dripped from the leaking ceiling pipes like a metronome from hell. Barsa grabbed a bottle of mineral water—half vodka, half defiance—and took a long sip.
Barsa: I didn’t know… not until the meeting with Putin. Not until Mordokrov slit Boris’ throat like it was just… protocol. I thought we were here to wrestle. To show the world Russian greatness. Not erase our own people.
Viktor flinched.
Viktor: You weren’t supposed to know.
Barsa: And you did?
Viktor (whisper): Chechnya… we did worse.
Silence fell like snow. The cold kind. The kind that buried bodies.
Viktor (continuing): Boris saved me once. Pulled me out of a crater, broken leg, blood in my lungs. Told me to shoot the prisoners before they screamed.
Barsa: And you did?
Viktor: I was nineteen. Of course I did.
He looked at his reflection again. The glass shimmered like it held something behind it—something waiting, something wet.
Viktor: Yume didn’t put anything in my head that wasn’t already rotting there. She just… opened the casket.
Barsa sat beside him, the leather of the bench hissing beneath his weight.
Barsa: You think we’re damned?
Viktor (shrugging): Only if we lose.
The weight room door creaked open. Olga waddled in, a paper bag of cabbage-stuffed pastries and a 3-liter bottle of kvass under her arm. She paused at the sight of them. Said nothing. Sat on the floor like a tired bear and began to eat with her fingers.
Olga (mouth full): You two look like you’re mourning your own funeral… You haven’t died at yet.
Barsa (dryly): Maybe we are.
Olga: Don’t waste energy on guilt. You want out? Win. You want back in? Win. You want to go home to something other than a pine box? Then win.
A soft knock came from the metal utility door at the rear of the bunker. It hissed open, and a courier in civilian clothes slipped through, face masked, eyes nervous. He held a silver briefcase and handed it silently to Barsa before vanishing back through the tunnel.
Barsa placed it on the bench between them and flipped the clasps. Inside: two new flight itineraries, two crisp red folders stamped with the Kremlin seal, two printed 8x10 photos—Cassie Hurst and Colton Hurst—and a handwritten note in looping Cyrillic script.
“Make it final. Public. Spectacular. The world needs a reminder.”
Barsa ran his fingers over the photo of Cassie. She was smiling. Unaware. Whole.
Barsa: I could’ve been him. Her. Us. Somewhere else. Another life.
Viktor (shaking): But you’re not. We’re not. And the dream’s over.
Barsa closed the case. Latched it. Looked Viktor dead in the eye.
Barsa: You with me? Or is the ghost of Boris gonna keep you soft?
Viktor: I buried Boris in Tokyo. Now I bury them.
They stood together. For the first time since Chechnya, Viktor looked like he wasn’t breaking. He looked like he was choosing. Behind them, Olga let out a satisfied belch and muttered something about needing a bigger toilet. The moment shattered. But the mission held.
Barsa (coldly): Good. Because the New Breed doesn’t need a lesson.
He picked up the case and walked toward the door.
Barsa: They need an execution.