Sunday: 27th November: 13:45:05

Sunday

27th November

13:45:05

“—Cut!”

Step one. All Naoki had to do was rattle off a simplified explanation of his routine. He’d never had to describe those details to anyone before, and didn’t know how embellish to add, how much flair. In the end, he settled for listing simple actions. Nobody needed to know more than the bare information. Nobody had come for anything but that.

The camera was interfering.

But Naoki’s stage-hesitance seemed to be far from Riku’s mind, who was instead rubbing his jaw a few centimeters below a sly grin.

“Yeah, we’ll cut that.”

“Just out of curiosity…” Naoki felt like he had the energy to ask, but wasn’t sure if the same went for hearing the answer.

“You’re more articulate than I woulda’ thought, Mr. Iron.” Attempting to reach a hand up around his shoulder, Riku settled for a clap on his rear delt. “Information that juicy shouldn’t be given away for free, y’know? I mean, I didn’t even know about that stuff with the blueberries and the… What do you call it…”

“Electron transport chain?”
Naoki supposed crawling through the agony of as many biochem videos as he could queue up before he’d burnt out on workout optimisation came in handy now and then, but he hadn’t yet followed the line of thinking that Riku’s lines of teeth were giving voice to.
“What do you mean, ‘for free’?”

“Y’don’t think the ChooTube channel is the only income stream we have, do you?” Riku’s grin said it all. “Mr. Iron, you ever gotten into doing online courses?”

Naoki was suddenly acutely aware of the notebooks around him. Two, three in the hands of the MAKIT team members, and one in the hands of one of a pair of young guys who had overheard Naoki’s monologue and stopped by the rack they were filming at, still scrawling furiously.

“—Hey! Scram!” Riku jumped up, and the two of them hurried away into a gallery of turning heads and glares before the influencer could get close.

Naoki frowned. The man was the man he was, because he hesitated. “Online courses?”

“Just—” As if sensing the friction from behind his back, Riku raised his hands up as he turned. “It’s an invitation, y’know?” He barked a laugh. “I mean, you’re the ‘Iron Katsumada’ that we’ve heard so much about from your guy. I bet you’d be surprised at how much bank you can make off your knowledge, thanks to your reputation. I’ll help you out! Ichika can film it, and you can make millions in your sleep!”

He went to speak, but as the muscular artefact of a man looked down and saw such shining hope in Riku’s eyes, he neglected to mention that everything he’d just talked about was a collage of stuff he’d found out from online courses.

“I’ll… Consider it.” He managed.

“Woo!” With a bounce, and a shimmy, the influencer planted a loud fist in his hand. ”Alright, I’m gettin’ fired up! Who’s ready for round two, eh?!”

The boys around him chuckled awkwardly, all-too aware of the surrounding gymfolk. Nobody bigger or meaner-looking seemed to be around for the moment, so they stepped up and raised their voices for the camera.

“Yeah!!”

Even though Naoki’s thoughts were frayed thin between the pulling forces of MAKIT enthusiasm, his own tired, sculpted body, the flicker of the little glass bead at the top corner of Ichika’s smartphone.

Already, the other guys were warming up. There were rows of exercise bikes beside the rack that Tattsun and Anyaro were using the handles of to ease themselves into some deep squats, and Batsuki reached high into the curtain of steam covering the gym, the flourescent lights bearing down and illuminating a familiar set of smells.

Sweat, rubber. Iron.

They were almost comforting enough to center Naoki, for him to ignore the motions and footfalls of the other goers on treadmills and machines elsewhere in the room.

He felt the frantic energy start to turn calm, as he began stretching. Even with the camera, a workout was something he could do. That was what he had come out here, to do.

That was something he could focus on.

¥¥¥

“Uunh!”

Riku took his turn first in front of the camera. These were the warmup reps, where some indeterminate amount of weight had been plated onto the bar in his hands, and slowly it was rising, shaking, falling from over the be-tracksuited influencer’s chest.

“Hyyyeeeeehh!”

The other MAKIT members had taken up positions at the edge of the frame, in a favourable spot to either jump in when it was funny, or, for the most part, stay out of view.

“Uuuunnyah!”

Naoki was offered the privilege and the misfortune of being set up directly behind the rack, putting him square in the middle of the frame.
Technically, he was spotting. But the only thing to spot, besides the 20 kilograms weighing down on the round-faced boy on the bench in front of him, was the gleam of the camera as it darted up to capture his expressions every other rep.

“AaIi’mgnnaaaa—aaahh!”

Naoki had little to give the camera. He only watched.

“Hah… Ten…”

There was a clank, and Riku apparently barely managed to push the bar back onto its rack.

“Bro… What a trial…” The man-boy wheezed. “What a tribulation… A devastation…”

Tribulated and devastated, he crawled out of the bench, and set his hands on the bar with a glance in Naoki’s direction.

“It’s… Your turn for the insanity, Mr. Iron.” He snapped his fingers. “How much you want us to add? A… Hah… Haha… Hundred kilos?”

Still unsure what exactly was wanted from him, Naoki made his most diplomatic shrug, and said,
“Sure.”

120 was already more than Naoki weighed. It wasn't the most he'd ever put on a bar that he planned to hold up without the aid of a rack, but not even he had discovered his own one-rep maximum yet.
Not that he even wanted to try. His mind flickered to an encounter with 115 kilograms that he almost hadn't walked away from, though he coolly brought it back. 

He didn't need any extra pressure. Ten reps of this weight was enough of a burden on the already-war-torn cables in his arms.

Somehow, he managed it. The MAKIT team watched with an almost eerie quiet. Only on the final rep did Naoki notice Riku jumping around the bench with his hands wrapped around his head. His voice was apparently gone, but his jaw was stretched into the extremest slack it could manage as he took shots with his eyes from Naoki, to the camera, and back.

“I dunno about you, but this guy’s pretty calm and collected, for such a beast!”
Riku danced. He jived. He grooved, he did everything but restrain himself. “W— Whattatha heeeeeeeeeeeellll—!”

No matter what domain you were in, to have any kind of outsized success you had to be a pretty firm practitioner of stoicism.

It wasn’t enough to control your emotions. You had to watch the impulse that held your feelings at bay, watch where it went. Question why. Retain yourself with enough grip that you didn’t ruin yourself with unthinking action, and at once a light enough touch that you didn’t go numb to the world.

In this moment, the only numbness Naoki felt was in his fingertips, though it was spreading to his wrists. He only hoped it would reverse course after that.

For now, Naoki was holding. But as he watched Riku tapdance around an occupied rack to complete a circuit of what Takuya would’ve described as clowning, that quiet impulse made a beeline to the part of his brain to aid in the effort of suppressing a fit of rage.

For now, he was just confused.

“Next up is squats!” Riku’s impulse seemed to lead him eagerly to the rack. “Load up that big twenny, boys. Mr. Iron — let’s see if you can keep up with my leg day, eh?!”

Downwards, so very slowly downwards Riku sank into his own legs. So slowly that it may have even been a good move to repeat for a quarter hour as a stretch. But even if the influencer didn’t go that far, Naoki felt every second ticking with ever-faster urgency the longer that the boyish man spent sinking and squatting and squealing, apparently oblivious to them all going by.

He didn’t understand. Which of them was the butt of the joke, here? Why was there even a joke?

“—Your turn! Add the hundo!” Riku exclaimed.

“Hundo?”

Naoki caught the influencer off-guard. Surely a man about whom only the bros most in-the-know about the real up-and-comers around Tokyo knew the meaning of the word ‘hundo’.

But, then, maybe he didn’t. Riku was pretty hip, if he said so himself, and maybe a guy with such an absolutely torn-up physique didn’t spend any time outside in the first place, much less talking to people, learning the lingo.

Well, this was his chance. Maybe he could spin this into a bit—

“Add two.” Naoki said.

“W-what?”

As if the low, slightly too-bass-heavy pop music had suddenly skidded to a halt all throughout the gym, Riku stopped.

The music hadn’t, and didn’t. It kept going, but the MAKIT team were frozen around Naoki.

For good reason. For obvious reasons, that Naoki’s brain hadn’t caught up with yet, and for reasons he wouldn’t realise until much later, far too late.

“C’mon.” Naoki almost goaded. He fought to keep himself in check, a smile off his face. “Add two hundo.”

But he said it.