The Forgotten Legacy

Section 1: The Bubble Tea Heatwave

For the past few days, Dave had continued wandering the streets around the martial arts school, wearing nothing but his pink, triangle-shaped women’s underwear.

Today was brutally hot. Even Dave, almost naked, could feel the heat radiating through his body. The whole city felt like a giant steamer.

As he walked down the sidewalk, he passed two dead bodies lying on the street, most likely victims of heatstroke. Dave glanced at them and kept walking. Death was an everyday sight in this world, whether someone got beaten to death or simply dropped dead from the heat.

Even Dave was starting to feel dizzy.

That was when he spotted Kung Flu Tea. Without a second thought, he stepped inside to escape the heat. He ordered an extra-large protein bubble tea, found a quiet corner, and sat down.

He slowly sipped his drink, chewing the boba one by one. After walking around all day, he knew his body needed protein. His muscles needed it. Otherwise, they would shrink, and he would lose his strength.

Still, part of his mind was elsewhere.

Lately, Dave had been thinking about that goofy-looking young man from before. That scrawny guy in his twenties wearing a Zhongshan suit, with every button unfastened and his abs and chest fully exposed. That weird, thick fringe covering his eyes. He fought like a maniac and looked like a clown, yet somehow, he was still handsome.

Their battle last time had been cut short. The guy had suddenly dashed off, yelling something about catching a TV show—Digimon, or something like that. Dave couldn’t even remember.

Now, as Dave relaxed with his bubble tea, he noticed two girls sitting just a few feet away. One of them, the girl facing him, was wearing a Zhongshan suit too. She was beautiful, with a high ponytail and a long katana strapped across her back. Clearly, she was a student from the same martial arts school.

Dave was mildly surprised. He hadn’t known they had female students there, especially ones this pretty.

But it didn’t matter.

Dave wasn’t the type to chase after beauty. His one true love had died, crushed beneath that beast Marvel’s waist. The wound still hadn’t healed. His heart still ached, and he had no interest in women anymore.

He simply sat there and sipped his drink in silence.

That was when he overheard their conversation.

The girl in the white shirt and black skirt leaned toward Jessica. “Hey, Jessica. That Zhongshan uniform at your school is so ugly. Have you ever thought about transferring to ours? We’re more modern. We can wear whatever we want. Look at me, I’m learning martial arts in a skirt. And our teacher’s pretty good too. Strong, and kind of hot, actually.”

Jessica gently shook her head. “No, I’m fine. Our teachers are amazing. Haven’t you heard of our school’s founder? Our Master? He used to be one of the legendary Four Kings. His name is Mario. His speed, his blade, his power, nobody in this world can match him.”

Her friend frowned. “Didn’t he, like… lose his right leg or something? I heard he has a prosthetic leg now. Can he still fight?”

Jessica rested her chin in her hand and thought for a moment. “Honestly… I’ve never seen him fight. Not since I enrolled. But I’ve heard stories. Back in the day, he was unstoppable. There was this one time, on a moving train, when he saved a woman from a man who lost control after a personal tragedy. The whole city talked about it for months.”

Her friend’s eyes widened. “No way. What happened on the train? Tell me everything.”

Jessica leaned in closer, ready to share.

Dave leaned in too, quietly sipping his bubble tea and pretending not to listen while hanging on every word. He wanted to hear the story. He wanted to know what kind of man Mario really was.

Section 2: The Shadow on the Track

Five years ago, on a quiet winter night, a passenger train pulled out of a small-town station, its lights disappearing into the darkness.

Back on the platform, a man sat alone in the waiting lounge, quietly smoking. He had just seen his wife off on that very train and stopped to rest before heading home.

That was when he noticed another man stepping off the train. He wore a Zhongshan suit, his hair neatly parted down the center, with a katana hanging at his waist. Pulling a suitcase behind him, he calmly walked across the platform.

The smoker glanced at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Come on, a Zhongshan suit? Who still dresses like that nowadays?” he muttered.

A few minutes later, the smoker’s phone rang. He answered and put it on speaker.

His wife’s voice came through, soft and panicked. “Hey… babe… something’s wrong. There’s a man in our car. He snapped. He thinks this lady is his wife. Said she betrayed him. He’s holding a pair of scissors to her neck. He says he’s going to die with her.”

The smoker’s expression changed. He immediately sat up. “Stay calm. Don’t make any noise. Just stay seated and don’t draw any attention. Has someone called the police already?”

“Yeah,” his wife whispered.

“Good. Just stay on the phone with me.”

By the time the man looked up, Mario was already gone. Only his suitcase remained, abandoned on the platform.

Mario had already jumped down onto the tracks and taken off after the train.

He activated his ultimate technique.

TOTAL CONCENTRATION BREATHING — FIRST FORM: SHADOWLINE SURGE.

Mario’s feet struck the ground in a steady rhythm.

Tick… tick… tick, tick, tick.

Then faster.

His steps grew lighter and quicker, as if he were gliding just above the rails. With every step, he built more momentum. His legs began to blur as his speed climbed from sixty kilometers per hour to one hundred, then two hundred.

Soon, his entire body became a blur in the darkness. He tore down the tracks at incredible speed, chasing after the train.

In less than ten minutes, Mario caught up.

With perfect control, he leaped onto the narrow platform connecting two train cars.

Inside the carriage, the situation was tense.

The man still had the woman trapped in a chokehold, the tips of his scissors pressed against her throat. His eyes were wild, lost in grief and delusion.

A young woman sitting a few rows back still had her phone to her ear. She lowered her voice to a whisper.

“There’s a guy in here now. He’s wearing a Zhongshan suit… and there’s a sword at his waist. He looks like some kind of swordsman.”

Her husband froze.

“Wait… the guy in the Zhongshan suit? I just saw him get off the train. How the hell did he get back on?”

His wife stared at Mario for a moment, then lowered her voice even further.

“I think something’s about to happen. This might go viral. I’m gonna film it and put it on YouTube.”

Before her husband could respond, she ended the call, opened the camera on her phone, and started recording.

Section 3: The Worst Negotiator

Mario stepped into the train car.

The first thing he saw was a man holding a woman hostage. The man was clean-cut and dressed in business attire, with a collared shirt, tie, and slacks. He looked like an ordinary office worker, but his eyes were unstable and his hands were twitching. He gripped a long pair of scissors in one hand, the sharp tips pressed against the woman’s throat, while his other arm held her in a tight chokehold.

The man didn’t look like a killer. Not yet. His rage was real, but there was still hesitation in his eyes. He didn’t seem like someone with a death wish, just a man spiraling out of control and trying to make the world feel his pain.

Mario stood quietly near the entrance of the car, still catching his breath from chasing down the train. His chest rose and fell heavily, and even his hand was trembling from exhaustion. Right now, he could barely lift his sword.

He needed to buy some time.

Still, his hand rested on the hilt.

That was enough to set the man off.

“Is your sword faster, or are my scissors faster, huh?!”

The tips of the scissors hovered barely a millimeter from the woman’s throat.

Mario looked at him, still breathing heavily.

“My sword is faster,” he said calmly. “You don’t even need to test it. That’s not a maybe. It’s a fact.”

The man’s pupils twitched. His hand began to shake harder, and his breathing grew uneven.

Mario kept talking.

“Maybe you should think about improving yourself. Maybe your wife left you because he’s better than you. Maybe he’s better-looking. Richer. Smarter. Or maybe… he just knows how to treat a woman right.”

The words hit the man like a slap. His entire body stiffened. His grip tightened around the scissors, and his hand began trembling even harder. The sharp tips pressed into the woman’s throat, breaking the skin as a thin line of blood began to run down her neck.

The woman trapped in his chokehold cried out.

“Stop! Please… please just stop talking! AA-huhh—hhuhhh! You’re not helping! You’re making it worse!”

Her voice cracked into sobs.

The passengers around them were terrified. Some clenched their teeth. Others quietly prayed, hoping the man in the Zhongshan suit would just shut up.

But Mario didn’t stop.

After a short pause, he continued in a strangely gentle voice.

“Try to think about something nice. Think about the good times. Every little treasured moment you shared with her. Just don’t picture her moaning under someone else. Don’t imagine her arms wrapped around him, his tongue all over her chest, her hips grinding into his. Don’t see them tangled up, sweaty and breathless, kissing and fucking like there’s no tomorrow…”

That was it.

The man snapped.

His pupils dilated. Whatever hesitation had remained in his eyes disappeared. His face went blank as he fell into a silent rage.

His arm jerked forward, driving the scissors toward the woman’s throat.

But nothing happened.

No one saw Mario move.

The next second, the man’s head was no longer on his shoulders.

It spun through the air like a kicked melon.

A thick spray of blood erupted from his neck, arcing across the train car and splashing over the passengers nearby. People screamed. Some ducked while others froze in place. Blood covered their clothes, faces, and bags.

Mario stood exactly where he had been before, still breathing heavily, his sword already back in its sheath.

To everyone in the car, it looked as if he had never moved at all.

Section 4: The Blade in a Blink

Back in the present, inside Kung Flu Tea, Jessica unlocked her phone and pulled up an old YouTube video.

“This is the clip,” she said, turning the screen toward her friend. “It’s from the train incident five years ago. Watch closely. At normal speed, you won’t see anything. But if you slow it down to one-sixty-fourth speed… look right here.”

The two girls leaned closer to the screen.

In the video, the scissors were just beginning to cut into the woman’s neck. Then, frame by frame, Mario finally became visible.

In a single blur of motion, he drew the sword from his waist, sliced clean through the man’s neck, and returned the blade to its sheath, all in less than a tenth of a second.

At normal speed, it looked as if Mario had never moved at all.

Jessica’s friend slowly sat back, staring at the screen.

“No way… so that’s what happened?”

She looked at Jessica’s Zhongshan suit. “No wonder you guys still wear these weird Zhongshan suits. If I had a master like that, I’d probably wear one too.”

Jessica smiled and opened Mario’s Wikipedia page.

“Mario entered the National Swordsmanship Championship when he was just eight years old,” she read. “In the round of sixteen, he suggested an all-versus-one match. Fifteen opponents attacked him at once, and he defeated every one of them effortlessly.”

Sitting nearby, Dave let out a soft, impressed whistle.

“Unreal…”

Jessica continued. “He’s a monster when it comes to speed. By the time he was five, he could already run over a hundred kilometers per hour. And he barely even trained. He picked up a sword for the first time just three days before that tournament.”

She paused for a moment.

“There are some people in this world who are just born different. Colin mastered Golden Speech when he was seven. Frank was already unbeatable at the same age. They say that when Frank was born, his inner Qi was already flowing on its own, like an automatic transmission. No training. No effort. Just natural.”

Jessica sighed. “They’re on a level the rest of us can’t even reach.”

Her friend smiled. “Yeah… but that’s okay. We don’t need to be monsters. As long as we’re strong enough to protect ourselves, that’s good enough.”

Jessica nodded. “True.”

Then she opened the Amazon app on her phone.

“Let’s see if they’ve got any cute stuff on sale.”

The two girls leaned over the screen together.

“Oh, look at this one,” her friend said. “Pink triangle underwear. So cute!”

Jessica smiled. “Yeah, that’s actually pretty cute.”

Their conversation quickly drifted away from legendary martial artists and back to everyday girl talk.

Section 5: Nice Guys Finish Slashed

A skinny, greasy-looking guy dressed in a wrinkled Zhongshan suit walked into Kung Flu Tea.

It was Pimple Face.

The katana he normally carried was gone. Dinello had taken it from him a few days ago, and now Pimple Face was saving every dollar he could to buy a new one.

He walked up to the counter and asked in a nasal, polite voice, “Um, excuse me… can I get an extra-small cup of water?”

The worker blinked. “Sorry, the smallest we have is small. That’ll be one dollar.”

“One dollar?” Pimple Face blurted out. “Isn’t that a little steep for water?”

The worker replied patiently, “Our cups cost money too, sir.”

Reluctantly, Pimple Face pulled a crumpled dollar from his pocket and handed it over.

“Damn,” he muttered. “Even water’s a luxury now.”

From a table near the window, Dave tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. He watched Pimple Face walk away from the counter, holding that sad little cup like it was a priceless treasure.

“Zhongshan suit, center-parted hair…” Dave mumbled to himself. “But that’s where the resemblance ends. Too skinny to be Marvel. Way too greasy.”

He scoffed under his breath. “Even I’m broke, but at least I can afford some protein and drink with dignity. This dude’s out here surviving off water like a damn alley mosquito.”

Pimple Face scanned the room and, instead of choosing an empty table, headed straight toward Jessica.

“Hey, Jessica,” he said politely. “Mind if I sit here?”

Before either girl could reply, he pulled out the chair next to Jessica’s friend and sat down.

Jessica’s friend turned to her. “Uh… do you know him?”

Jessica gave him a polite but confused look. “No idea.”

“We’re in the same class,” Pimple Face insisted with a sheepish grin. “It’s me!”

Jessica shook her head gently. “Sorry… I really don’t remember.”

Then, out of nowhere, he dropped it.

“Jessica, I like you. Would you be my girlfriend?”

The table fell silent.

Jessica stared at him for a couple of seconds, then gave him an awkward smile.

“Oh… sorry, but you’re not my type.”

There was a pause. Pimple Face’s jaw clenched. His eyes flicked between the two girls, then dropped to the table.

Finally, he said it out loud.

“I’m not asking for much… just one night. I mean, you did it with Canelo, didn’t you? Everyone knows. You’re not as pure as you act, so what’s the big deal?”

Both girls froze.

The audacity left them speechless.

Jessica’s friend looked genuinely disturbed. Pimple Face sat there with his tiny cup of water, his face full of acne and desperation, making the whole scene feel like a fever dream of cringe.

Dave leaned forward, his expression darkening.

“Bro… you serious right now?”

Jessica’s hand slowly reached over her shoulder toward the hilt of the katana strapped across her back.

Section 6: Twisted Like a Beast

Just as Jessica reached for the hilt of her katana, Dave froze mid-sip.

He slowly lowered his protein bubble tea, his expression darkening.

He wasn’t looking at Pimple Face anymore.

He saw Marvel.

That same disgusting attitude. That same sense of entitlement. Even though Pimple Face was facing away from him, Dave could almost see Marvel’s face emerging from the back of his head, like a demon staring back at him through another man’s body.

Dave said nothing.

He stood up and calmly walked toward Pimple Face. He set his protein bubble tea aside on the counter and placed both hands on Pimple Face’s head.

Then he twisted.

Pimple Face’s neck turned all the way around until his face was pointing backward, exactly 180 degrees.

A horrible grinding sound came from his neck as flesh strained and cartilage creaked.

But Pimple Face didn’t die.

His bladder gave out on the spot. He peed himself right in front of the girls, the urine dripping down from the chair and pooling on the floor beneath him.

“AAAAAAAAAAGHHHHH!! MY NECK!! IT HURTS! IT HURTS SO BAD!!”

Tears streamed down his cheeks, but with his head completely spun around, his hands went to the wrong place, desperately wiping the back of his skull while he sobbed uncontrollably.

Jessica and her friend were still frozen.

Dave didn’t wait.

He picked up his protein bubble tea, took a slow, dignified sip, and walked out the front door without looking back.

More than ten seconds passed.

Then Pimple Face suddenly jumped out of his chair and stumbled toward the exit. With his head still twisted backward, he staggered from side to side, bumping into chairs as he desperately tried to find his way out.

A few seconds later, he finally stumbled out of Kung Flu Tea.

Jessica’s friend stared at the door for a moment.

“What the—who the hell was that? A grown, muscular man wearing nothing but pink triangle underwear? Do you know him?”

Jessica frowned and shook her head.

“Beats me. Never seen that pervert in my life.”

Jessica’s friend shook her head. “He’s probably a walking felony. Total creep. Might even be a rapist on the run.”

Jessica nodded calmly. “Yeah. Completely unhinged.”

Her friend leaned closer. “Since you’re, like, the prettiest girl in school, does stuff like this happen all the time?”

Jessica gave a tired smile.

“Yeah, it happens every day. Lonely ones, crazy ones, creepy polite ones… I’ve just gotten used to it.”