Raigeki Ragnarok

Noah reclined in his desk at the back of the classroom, gazing out the window instead of paying attention to Mr. Manchester and the blackboard. He didn’t want to hear the self-righteous, pedantic ramblings of a High School Math teacher who too often alluded to his broken dreams and “Being Held Down By The Man”. Even if the guy did teach something about the unit in his lessons, Noah swore he’d fare better studying on his own instead of trying to parse out the method from the madness. But then again, he did already know this stuff from learning it oh-so-long ago.

Noah smiled to see everything outside was just as it had been back then. The mid-morning skies were a clear and cloudless blue, and there was that same little Cardinal with its unfettered chirping, perched atop one of the dainty points of the lacquered black fence encircling the school. He felt happily assailed by the aroma of grass and Green Ash trees from the park across the street. And over the broken concrete of the sidewalk, his mind’s eye superimposed impatient images of the students crowding to get the hell out of there at the end of the day.

He’d only seen a Cardinal one other time in the middle of Brooklyn. It had been on the same day, the same month, the same hour, and the same minute of twelve years ago. And while sitting in the same damn chair too.

“Mr. Balaya, you wouldn’t happen to know the page we’re on, would you?!” the teacher suddenly boomed from the front of the room. His voice was deep but resonant, like a bass.

Twelve years ago, Noah had also been reprimanded by Mr. Manchester. But this time, Noah actually caught the projectile that subsequently sped towards him instead of letting it smack into his face and spill brittle on his faded Black Sabbath T-shirt and ripped navy-blue Jeans. It was a smaller fog of chalk than before that billowed from the white-stained brushes of the eraser, and by managing to spare himself some humiliation with quick reflexes, there wasn’t a single person laughing.

“What an embarrassment you must be to your parents. On top of getting yourself suspended two weeks ago, near the start of the year no doubt, you still have the audacity not to pay attention in my class. What, you think you’re tough, boy?! Holding that eraser in your hands like you’re gonna stone me with it? Like you hit that other kid? You don’t know shit! The streets would eat someone like you and those other fools you smacked around alive, but especially someone like you. A prestigious science high school like this ain’t no place for that bullshit.”

This sudden outburst caught Noah off-guard, but not as much as it should have. It made total fucking sense, given Manchester’s personality and Noah’s own decision to actually catch the eraser. The teacher didn’t say a thing when Noah let it smack him above the eyebrow before. He only shook his head disappointedly before demanding Noah to return it.

Noah paused for a while. His jaw dropped slightly and his eyes stared confused, aimlessly at Manchester. But suddenly he smiled; he realized something that almost made him laugh.

“So one small change really can mess with everything?” he mused to himself quietly as he stood up from his desk. In fact, the thought scared him, but because of the look on his face and the way he so tightly gripped the eraser, he knew Manchester felt threatened. “It’s something I always knew, but experiencing it is a totally different thing. And to think I’m the only one who’s actually here to revel in it?! Fuck. I really do tread a dangerous, lonely road… the first man in history to travel back in time!”

--

Noah got that the universe would lash back harder and harder the more anyone knew of and struggled against its hidden tyrannies. A modern-day successor to the Onmyouji, the Tao Mystics of Medieval Japan, he believed this more than anyone. But only now did he truly know just what kind of a quantum physics tightrope he was walking on.

“Raigeki…”

Weeks ago, Noah found himself standing in the middle of a wormhole as if there’d been invisible ground beneath him. In the undulating purple swirls illuminating the quantum tunnel, which menacingly crackled every few seconds with thunderbolts, stood another man in front of him at arm’s length. Dressed in nothing but black, from his trench coat to his open-collared shirt, to his hipster jeans and combat boots, Noah almost took him for a personification of Death (or at least some super-powered wacko who’d been watching the Wachowski Brother movies one too many times). Even his long, flowing hair was raven black, in contrast to Noah’s own dark-brown mane.

But Noah shoved these thoughts aside when he noticed how much the other man resembled him. Sure, his eyes had a more Asiatic slant, and his nose was slightly more pronounced. And where Noah only had slight stubble on his chin and above his lip, his counterpart’s beard and mustache were grown out in a minimal but wild brush. But their olive-hued complexion, face-shape, and even hair were unmistakably the same… they were about each other’s height too.

“Ru--? No... You’re not him.” Noah stopped himself. “The differences are subtle, but you’re not him. Who are you?! Are you coming after me from the Metahuman Division?!” he demanded, dropping the ornate and bladeless handle of a sword from his robed sleeve into his hand.

“Look, I have orders to either kill you or send you back to your own time, but from a higher power, not those dumb fucks who’re after you. The Law of Causality and all that shit, you know? But I’m letting you go this time.”

Noah’s eyes widened upon hearing the other man’s dark-toned voice; they even sounded the same. Was he a superiorly powerful, but imperfect clone? Their contrasting features killed the idea that he’d confronted another time-hopping version of himself, this one further advanced.

“To find out that one of my own would be the cause for all of time-space about to cave into itself…” the other man continued with a smug grin. “It’s too damn ironic, like fate transcends even quantum physics…!”

A body-length, circular mirror suddenly appeared between him and the mystery man, its edges burning with the same, vast essence of the wormhole, and its surface clear and wavering as if made of water. Noah feared the intentions of the man in black, but knew better than to attack when a potential foe was already alert to him. Instead, he would comply with his enemy until he had an opening; taking this as a sign that he should examine himself, he stared attentively at his own reflection.

Noah’s costume put him in red robes with open-sleeves that went past his knuckles and an equally crimson pair of flowing, skirt-like, pleated pants with black trim. He would have seemed like the traditional bishounen swordsman out of Japanese literature, were it not for the bronze-hued, serpent-headed armor on his shoulders, metal-soled sandals, the small, gold-embroidered black mask covering around his eyes, and the lightsaber-esque weapon in his grip. With his accoutrements, he better represented the modern pop culture spin on the archetype, so commonly found in video games and comic books.

But now the stubble by his chin and above his lip had gone from his face. He lost two, three inches to his height. And his body felt lighter, actually encumbered by his own battle garb. He hadn’t felt this way in years. He scoffed suddenly through gritted teeth, eyes narrowing in hostility.

“Why am I a teenager again?!” Noah demanded to know as the mirror disappeared quickly in a vibrant lavender flash. Now he’d become even more suspicious of the mysterious figure in front of him.

“The machine you used to jump back in time was damaged as you tried to make your escape. I could’ve let you die as the wormhole here tore apart your vehicle, but then I realized if you died, then…”

The Man in Black paused momentarily, eyes rolling while he sighed.

“Look.” He continued. “Good luck is all I’m saying. I’m aware of the real reason you’re doing all of this. Save Misato, but… I’m warning you that you won’t have control over everything. I think the fact you’ve jumped eleven years too early and that you’ll have to share your existence with your past self proves that. I know how it’s like to be so in love with someone, but there’s a chance you won’t get her this time around. You’d be surprised just how much everything can change when you mess with time.”

--

Almost a month passed since Noah was literally forced to relive his life from the start of Sophomore year high school. This left him free to torture himself plotting and pondering how to salvage his ‘botched’ mission instead of being bogged down with schoolwork; the semester was only just getting into full-swing, and he could do little else. Especially since he’d been grounded.

“Remember, son, mom doesn’t want me to lift it until next Monday.”

Noah strained, grunted… teeth clenched and face bright like a ruby. “Oh, very… funny...!” He’d almost blown out spit in his struggling.

Noah’s father, a graying, grizzled man with wavy hair in a ponytail and a strapping physique for his fifty-year old body, snickered as he helped his son rest what he’d been bench-pressing back on the exercise rack. Each side of the bar had been stacked with a 25 pound weight and Noah found himself unable to finish even the third rep on his second set of ten.

“Don’t be so disappointed when you’ve never been putting effort into it in the first place, son. Even though you’ve been practicing all those techniques with me, you’ve stopped exercising on the side since 8th Grade.” In Mr. Balaya’s subtle, diminished accent, half of his f’s and v’s were still voiced into p’s and b’s.

Noah’s father already died of old age a year or so before he jumped back in time. The family had long sold their Brooklyn house by then, a cookie-cutter two-floor, two-bedroom in Bushwick with a basement, garage, and small backyard. Even now, Noah’s pangs of nostalgia still “bit strongly into his mind” as his dad had once said, cracking a little self-referential joke. Maybe it was because Noah hadn’t really been in the garage much since he came back, to smell that aged must of mold and wood, or see those damaged statuettes of Jesus and family taking refuge on the moistened, slowly decaying shelves, or see that familiar Filipino flag hung inverted against the wall, red stripe on top and the words “Kalaban” painted over.

But if anything, Noah secretly reveled coming back to relive experiences and make new ones with his father, even though he would be forced to start off on the wrong foot.

“How did you beat up those guys anyway? If it was only one or two of them, I could understand, but three of them?” Mr. Balaya asked, sitting by the foot of the exercise rack. “They must have either been really stupid or just didn’t know how to fight. And considering how the bad kids are these days, I doubt either. ”

Noah sat up beside . He was wearing the same t-shirt from earlier in the day, but he had shorts just above his knees instead. He swept his bangs from his face, undoing the band of his ponytail to fix his hair. “I told you before, it was probably because they didn’t expect me.”

Noah tried to recollect the event, but his memory was sketchy at best. The only thing he remembered specifically was that seeing his friend being smacked around by bullies on a grassy knoll just over the park wall. He’d managed to find a loose brick by the perimeter, and charging them as they’d failed to realize his presence, effectively knocked out one of the thugs with a toss to his head from only a few meters away. From there on, everything disintegrated into a frenzy of adrenaline; being forced to jump right into the fray, it all came to him as muscle memory and he simply countered the attackers as they came at him, dropping them cold one after the other without himself even taking a hit. By the end of it, he’d been breathing hard and fast, his knuckles swollen and muscles fettered with fatigued. His younger body didn’t have the endurance that his battle-hardened, older body did.

“Well just remember, it’s not something to brag about son. You may have gotten one of them expelled because they found a knife on him, but now they’re gonna want to hurt you. You watch your back, and remember not to let your pride get to you. Run away if you can.”

Away from his father’s view, Noah rolled his eyes and scoffed out a chuckle. In his mind, he could picture the student-thugs chasing him down streets and alleyways, only to run into his alter ego and being subsequently lobotomized with dismissive shocks of electricity from his fingertips. It was exactly what he thought when his dad told him to stay cautious the first time around, but the image came to him more vividly, because unless some pesky ripple in time would throw off everything, it was going to happen.

--

Around midnight that evening, Noah laid himself atop his roof, eyes locked at the stars peppering the sky and its blackening purple gradient. He had on an old, tattered, denim coat to keep warm, as the days had been getting colder. Also, the crannies in between the shingles were most likely dirty; between grime and dried bird shit, he had no idea what kind of nasties he’d pick up from pressing his back down on the roof for even a short while. This was also why he had his ponytail laid out on his chest and his hands behind his head.

Gluing his eyes to the glowing, faraway balls above, he could’ve been thinking about anything; about how he’d received his powers from a talking thunderbolt that had struck him during the summer, about how he’d still be grounded on his birthday, about he about that mysterious, untrustworthy black figure who’d let him slip back through time. But he was up on this roof because the one thing on his mind kept him from going to sleep.

Noah first knew Misato Tachibana from his childhood, her family well-acquainted with his from common visits to their Japanese Restaurant in Park Slope. Noah could still recall his family stopping by the cozy Sushi Bar with its sliding, wood-framed glass doors for a small celebration of his First Communion. They were about eight, seven then, and while it was only the second time he’d been to Fuji-San, it was the first time he’d ever laid eyes on Misato. He could still remember her wearing that white, rose-print dress and smiling coyly at him with her signature cheeky-faced grin, as he stammered helplessly around her. He once called her kawaii on a subsequent visit, which surprised her, as the only Japanese words she thought he’d known were attack names out of Street Fighter II and battle terms his father threw around from their Jiu-Jitsu training. Flattered, she pecked him on the lips, away from their parents’ view, and from then on he swore he was in love. “Dai suki” he told her right after, thinking it would get him another kiss. but she giggled, calling him a “baka” before running back to her mother conversing with Noah’s own parents.

But a little more than a year after, the restaurant would undergo new management, and his family would visit to celebrate his birthday there, only to find that the Tachibanas had moved to Manhattan and a spiffier, more expensive restaurant midtown. He begged that one day they should visit her, but they’d insisted the Japanese restaurateurs probably thought themselves “too good”, and told him to forget about it. He figured he’d never see her again.

But one weekend just the previous summer, after his family finished doing groceries on the corner by Mulberry and Canal in Chinatown, Noah asked to check out an arcade down Mott. He grew tired of playing video games either alone or with his neighborhood friends, who gave him little challenge. He’d heard that Chinatown Fair was known to house some of the country’s best players, and wanted to see if this was true. He didn’t believe it, given the broken, lighted sign hanging above the arcade, the cramped quarters on the inside, and the fact that it smelled of sweat and smoke.

It was after he’d become frustrated with his consistent losses to a college-aged Korean guy with a topknot ponytail that he spotted a familiar face among the huddle of players by the Dance-Dance Revolution corner. He saw a petite girl dressed in baggy, black UFO’s and a blue, camo-pattern tank-top hopping down from the dance platform, smiling the same smile he’d remembered in his childhood. As he stared helplessly, their gaze eventually met each other’s, and, the both of them shocked, suddenly looked away.

He waited until she was by herself to ask the girl politely if “he’d seen her somewhere.” She only narrowed her eyes impishly, telling him that he had the wrong girl. But upon asking if she remembered a boy from back in a restaurant in Park Slope, she told him to keep on talking until she finally realized that it was in fact Noah in front of her. She pounced on him with a hug, but given that her friends had to leave for someone’s birthday, she simply left him with her phone number and Instant Messaging handle, asking him to hit her up sometime so they could catch up.

They’d been talking ever since, but upon making the jump back in time, Noah had been reminded painfully how different Misato as a teenager was from when she’d married him as an adult. Immature, stubborn, selfish, manipulative, prideful, ignorant… too many adjectives existed to describe her and her shortcomings. Teenage Misato irritated him to no end, and he’d been tempted to stop talking to her for another couple of years. He’d almost lost it when she began to brag about how many boys in her school and at the arcade fell so hard for her like he did as a kid; but he had no choice but to endure this if he wanted to save her in the future.

--

Noah pulled his cellphone from his pocket and stared at the LCD display. He’d spent an hour thinking to himself about Misato, and the robbery in Manhattan was probably happening now. Even without his powers toggled, he still had a mystical sense of when something wrong was going to happen; it suddenly explained to him why when he’d been alerted to this crime the first time through, he’d been jolted right out of his sleep.

“Well, it looks like I can’t help but miss some of the things I needed to remember in the past. But it’s no biggie… RAIGEKI!”

With his sudden shout, Noah got up and leapt off from the roof into the air. And from out of the deep abyss of the cloudless skies, lightning struck down on him, adorning him with the robes and armor he wore into battle. Transforming himself into a bolt of thunder before he landed on his sidewalk, he zipped through the mostly empty streets of his neighborhood, traversing his way to the Dekalb Avenue Station on the L line. Stopping in the middle of the Manhattan bound tracks, he shortly rematerialized into human form before closing his eyes and concentrating. He cared little for the attention the few late-night bystanders on the station gave him, as he channeled into the magnetic energies of the subway tracks to catapult him where he wanted.

“59th Street, here I come…”

The few who noticed Noah would have seen cracklings wings of blue light emanate from his back before he disappeared in a blinding, screaming flash with the intensity of a gunshot.

A little over a minute passed, and once again embodied in a gigantic zap of electricity, Noah zoomed right out of the 59th Street Station on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan before rematerializing in front of the Jewelry Store with an immediately suspicious 2002 Ford E350 Van out in front and the glass of the front door broken in from the outside. He walked slowly towards the entrance, and the moment he saw a man in a ski-mask run out carting a duffel bag obviously filled with stolen gold and diamonds, he quickly raised his hand and sent a blast of electricity barreling. It slammed into the man’s chest with an incriminating bang, knocking him out and sending him flying down the sidewalk a good distance.

“THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” Noah heard one of the burglars shout as he rushed to confront him with a Shotgun. As if he’d had the gun on a puppeteer’s strings, Noah only pulled back with the same hand he’d used to blast away the other goon, and magnetically brought the weapon into his own grasp, before holding him up by the neck with the other hand and electrocuting him just enough to incapacitate him. He dropped the man and continued to walk unfazed inside, letting the shotgun float slowly to the ground.

There, from behind opposite counters of bashed-in glass, two more robbers foolishly took aim at him with their own guns. Noah pointed the middle and index fingers of his left hand respectively at them and zapped each of them in the eyes from a couple of meters away. They dropped to their knees in anguish, screaming in horror. Noah chuckled to himself; they’d only been blinded temporarily, but he knew that the pain would stay with them until the cops arrived.

It was just then that from the storeroom one last thug emerged. But in his arm was the security guard responsible for watching the store, gagged, bound, and struggling, with a Beretta pointed to his head.

“Shit, nigga.” the burglar spoke, apparently confident he could barter his way out of the situation. “You dressed like that, you think you a superhero? Why don’t you let me go, and I’ll spare this punk-ass’s life…!”

Noah only sighed. As he’d done to the goon with the shotgun moments earlier, he magnetically forced the gun out of the robber’s grip. But unlike what he’d done to that man, he also took hold of the thug’s naturally human magnetic field, pulling him off of the security guard and crashing him down to the ground in the middle of the store. In the blink of an eye, he was next to the robber with a blade of energy two-feet long ignited from the hilt of his mystical weapon, held against the robber’s neck. As he spoke, Noah could hear him trembling.

“Th--the fuck are you…!”

“I’m Raigeki Ragnarok; ‘Raigeki’ as in a clap of thunder, and ‘Ragnarok’ as in me rocking your world. Remember it. Tell it to your friends. This city belongs to me now.”

--

“Hey, Noah, what’s up?”
“Yo, Noah…”

Noah saw his friend Wayne, a pudgy, square-headed Dominican guy with a crew cut and a good-natured smile (the one he’d saved weeks ago), and his friend Leon, Filipino like him but almost Chinese-looking with his fair complexion, come into the classroom right after he’d sat down on his desk and laid his head on the table. Even after he cleaned up the mess at the Jewelry Store and sped back home, he still had trouble sleeping the early morning prior to school, and so now he decided he would use Japanese class to catch some z’s; three weeks had gone by and their professor from last year was still ill. It would only be a matter of time, a few days he knew, until the school would tell all of the students taking Japanese 2 that the entire year had been cancelled and they would have to find another class immediately to fulfill their language requirements.

“Hey, what’s good?”

“Yo, you heard about that guy on the news?” Wayne started excitedly. “That guy with a lightsaber and Jedi powers who roughed up those burglars? That was fucking sick!”

Leon was shaking his head. “Man, I really can’t believe it. Shit, to think stuff like that is real, it’s not even April Fools yet, I must be dreaming…! What do you think, Noah?”

“Yeahh…” he slurred. “… didn’t see the news this morning, there’s too much evidence to be a hoax, unless people were lying to me about what they heard.”

As he talked, Noah suddenly noticed an unmistakably familiar figure sneak into the room, carrying a leather business bag. His pupils dilated in genuine fear and he’d almost gone breathless when he saw the long-haired man in that distinguishing black trench coat. Under it, he wore an, off-black dress shirt and red tie in place of his open-collared shirt from before, and formal dress-shoes replaced the black boots he’d donned earlier. But his face, so similar to Noah’s own but for a few differences, was the exact same.

“Noah, who is that guy?” asked his classmate Fei Yen, a slender, baby-faced girl with twin-pigtails sitting in front of him. “He looks like he’s related to you…! You’ve even got the same hair!” She then turned to Wayne and Leon, who were also staring at their new teacher with intrigue. The resemblance was uncanny.

With his back to the class, the man began to write his name on the board in Japanese. “Okay, now if I’ll have everyone’s attention, I’ve heard about your situation and I’m here to replace Dr. Hasegawa.” In contrast to when Noah first met him, his voice sounded a bit higher. R’s replaced his l’s, and it seemed difficult for him to end words in any consonant other than the letter n. However, his accent sounded robust and natural, not at all affected.

Noah gritted his teeth. Was this man truly an Arbiter of Time as he’d hinted during their first encounter? Then why was he directly involving himself with Noah? Why was he FUCKING with the flow of time when it was his job to keep it running smoothly? Fearing what was going to happen, he readied himself to transform at any moment; even if it meant revealing his identity to everybody in the room. He had to make an effort to stop this person, who he concluded had dangerous intentions.

“You might not know some of the Kanji I’ve written on the board, but my name is Shichiro Kuroi. You could refer to me as Mr. Kuroi or Kuroi-sensei if you’d want to, although I’d much rather prefer it if you called me the latter.”

“Kuroi…” Noah mused to himself. “Black as your heart and black as your intentions, huh?” Slowly, his angry grimace began to warp into a defiant and battle-ready grin.