Chapter 208: Now Let's Start Dating! (8000 characters!) (Patreon)

The days that followed were far more regular than before.

Whenever Minami Yuji had free time, he went to coach Mem-cho and Ruby Hoshino, and he didn't neglect his lessons with Kakiya Kenji either.

It was worth mentioning that both Mem-cho and Ruby Hoshino were genuinely gifted.

Ruby especially.

After her training, she'd made enormous strides, in both singing and dancing.

These days, even without relying on Minami Yuji, the two of them could carry out their lessons on their own under the instructions of Saitou Kyoko and Ichigo Saitou.

In a sense, they'd fully set foot on the path of the original story.

Unlike the frantic rush of the original, though, the two of them had decided to practice for another six months and make their official debut at the Tokyo Idol Festival that winter.

And she really was much steadier than before, after everything she'd been through.

As for Minami Yuji, he…

The moon was bright, the stars sparse.

Beneath the pitch-black night sky,

Fujiwara Kazuma was sprinting down a narrow alley.

The wind howled past.

The stench of blood stung his nose.

Louder than the wind roaring in his ears, however, was the near-ceaseless din of gunshots and furious shouts.

What the hell was going on?

Fujiwara Kazuma didn't understand.

Ever since his foster father died,

the whole world seemed to have changed shape.

Not only was the Higashihiko Gang, his old rival, hunting him down, but even members of the Saijō Society, his own side, were coming at him with murderous intent.

He wanted to think.

But the pursuers behind him gave him no time at all.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Heavy footsteps pounded ceaselessly.

His arms swung wide.

His breathing turned ragged.

Run!

Run, damn it!

No matter what, he had to stay alive!

Yes, he had to live.

He had to uncover the whole truth behind his foster father's death.

Threading through the dark, tangled maze of alleys, Kazuma's steps were frantic.

A tall chain-link fence soon appeared before him.

Yet Fujiwara Kazuma showed not a flicker of panic.

He simply turned sideways and kicked off the wall beside him.

Using the force of that kick,

he launched his whole body upward.

At the same time, both hands shot out and caught the top edge of the tall fence.

The instant he gripped it,

his arms and core exploded with power.

He actually vaulted sideways straight over a gate a good two or three meters high.

And just before landing,

he thrust his palms forward, executed a clean, crisp breakfall to bleed off the impact, and immediately sprinted onward.

Such nimble movement left the pursuers behind him stunned.

But Fujiwara Kazuma was, in the end, only one man.

As the encirclement tightened,

he was finally driven up onto a rooftop.

The Higashihiko Gang's leader, thinking it was over, pushed open the rooftop door with an eager look on his face.

In that very instant, a large hand shot out from the shadows beside him.

It clamped over his mouth,

and a blade paler than the moonlight drove into his neck!

The next second:

Squelch!!!

Bright red blood sprayed from the clean-skinned throat!

Terror flooded his eyes in an instant.

He struggled to raise a hand and cover his neck to stop the blood loss.

But the very next moment,

Fujiwara Kazuma emerged from his hiding place and drove a high kick into the hilt, buried all the way in the man's neck!

Crack!!!

It was the crisp sound of the blade punching clean through the throat bone.

The man who'd been thrashing a moment ago went limp in an instant.

Riding the force of that kick,

the body was hurled backward and slammed into the Higashihiko Gang men who had just reached the rooftop door.

Only then did everyone present see the sight before them, one that should have chilled them to the bone.

Blood was still spraying from the body.

It soaked Fujiwara Kazuma's black hair and stained his young face.

Yet standing in that gruesome rain of blood,

Fujiwara Kazuma merely picked up a baton one of the pursuers had dropped.

His movements were unhurried, utterly calm.

Then:

Clang!!!

He slammed the black baton against the ground.

The force was so great

that the shaft itself trembled with a ringing hum!

"Weren't you going to kill me?"

His black eyes snapped wide!

"Come on!"

Rumble!!!

In the distance, lightning flashed.

A white serpent of light streaked across the sky behind him.

That brief flare

lit up the terror on the pursuers' faces.

And it lit up Fujiwara Kazuma's black eyes even more.

Those eyes… cold as ice…

In that moment, everyone present understood one thing.

While his foster father lived, Fujiwara Kazuma had always been a wolf wearing a collar.

And now…

the collar had snapped…

"Good! Cut! That's a take!"

The moment Nakashima Tetsuya's excited voice rang out through the megaphone, everyone present let out a breath.

Most of them were not ordinary extras.

Many were professional stunt actors from Kakiya Kenji's studio, since some of the beatings were far too dangerous for inexperienced extras to handle.

Which was exactly why they understood how hard this scene was to shoot.

It was a night scene, after all.

The most important issue was the lighting.

It was also the hardest problem in night shoots.

Most people probably assumed a night scene was easy: set up the key light and fill light, switch them on, give the set enough illumination, and start rolling.

But it was precisely the things that looked effortless that were actually the hardest to get right.

Lighting a night shoot demanded care.

First, the light had to look natural enough to avoid continuity slips. The audience couldn't be able to tell at a glance that a big lamp was shining on the actor from behind.

Second came the actors' blocking and the camera positions. The light couldn't hit an actor's face too brightly, but it couldn't miss entirely either, or the face would go too dark.

And this was in a narrow alley, no less.

Camera positions and dolly tracks were nearly impossible to set up, so they could only shoot in multiple segments and let post-production edit them together.

But beyond all those mechanical setups,

what surprised them even more was…

Everyone present instinctively looked to the other side, where Minami Yuji was chatting and laughing with the prop master while wiping the sticky "blood" from his hair and face.

That's right. What astonished them most was, without a doubt, Minami Yuji's performance.

As professionals, they had given everything to keep up with him.

But Minami Yuji was simply too fast!

Far too fast.

If he hadn't been deliberately controlling his speed,

they suspected he could have left them in the dust in an instant.

Never mind the difficult moves he'd pulled off.

He'd vaulted the tall chain-link gate with a single side kick, without props or a stunt double.

And then there was the moment he opened the rooftop door and slid the knife into the pursuer's neck so cleanly.

This kind of action wasn't like ordinary Japanese films and dramas, which lean on slow-motion close-ups and special effects.

The whole point was to be crisp and decisive.

Right after slitting the throat, he had to throw a high kick into the hilt, and the entire posture had to carry a vicious edge.

The whole sequence couldn't take more than a second.

Anything longer would feel "slow" and "dragging."

They'd even assumed Minami Yuji would need many takes to nail that shot.

But who would have thought?

Minami Yuji got it in one.

It was their chase scene that had taken several takes. The lighting was the main trouble, sometimes too bright, sometimes too dark, and one actor had even knocked over a camera mid-chase, which had made Director Nakashima Tetsuya lose his temper.

They were murmuring about it in low voices.

"This is why I told you not to underestimate Minami-kun."

A voice sounded from beside them.

They turned instinctively and froze, because the man walking over, a clipboard of schedules in his hand, was Kakiya Kenji.

Clearly he'd overheard his studio's actors talking.

"You say that, Kakiya-sensei, but we weren't underestimating him. We just never expected him to be this good."

"You'd better not have been underestimating him."

Shooting a sideways glance at the actor who'd spoken, Kakiya Kenji shook his head.

He knew exactly how this crowd of his operated.

He also knew they'd always looked down a little on young actors of their own generation.

They'd probably assumed at first that Minami Yuji was just an ordinary young actor, one whose acting might outshine theirs but who couldn't possibly match them as an action performer.

But the facts said otherwise.

"It was never like that at all…"

Shaking his head, Kakiya Kenji looked toward Minami Yuji.

Counting actual coaching days, he'd taught Minami Yuji six or seven days at most over this stretch.

By the third day, he'd already run out of things to teach him.

All he could do was break down the moves he'd designed for the film and have Minami Yuji rehearse them on the set ahead of time.

He had to admit the boy was a genius, and he'd fully conceded the point.

Even moves he'd painstakingly designed with Minami Yuji's physical level in mind, the boy still pulled off with ease.

It was as if nothing in the field of performance could stump this young man.

And now Like a Dragon had been shooting for a little over a month.

Minami Yuji's shots had almost never gone wrong; they'd all been done in one take.

As a result, Like a Dragon was progressing at an astonishing pace, with hardly any reshoots.

In just over a month, a quarter of the entire film was already in the can.

With that in mind,

Kakiya Kenji took a couple of steps forward and greeted Nakashima Tetsuya with a smile.

"Director Nakashima, we're wrapping up for today, right? If so, I'll go ahead and release the members from my studio."

"More or less. This was the only night scene today." Nakashima Tetsuya had been discussing the upcoming scenes with Minami Yuji. Hearing Kakiya Kenji's question, he nodded at once.

"Good, I'll dismiss my studio's members for now… Oh, right, Minami-kun, you're heading back to Tokyo tomorrow, aren't you?"

Kakiya Kenji ticked something off his attendance sheet, then looked up with a smile and asked.

"Mm, more or less. I'll find time to make a trip back tomorrow."

Minami Yuji answered without hesitation.

Like a Dragon was set in Tokyo, Japan, in the 1990s.

But finding anything in present-day Tokyo that still looked like the last century was far too difficult.

So the location Minami Yuji was currently shooting at was actually an old, run-down shopping street in Nagoya that had kept its retro look.

And since traveling back and forth for an out-of-town shoot was inconvenient,

Minami Yuji had actually been staying in Nagoya for a little over a month now.

His scenes here were mostly finished… What remained were mainly reshoots for the major supporting cast, which didn't require him to appear, so it counted as a rare short break.

Naturally, he was thinking of going back for a visit.

Of course, the bigger reason was…

Minami Yuji lowered his head and looked at his phone.

There, on the LINE screen, was a user whose icon showed only half a face under wine-red hair.

Looking at the username, [Hmph! I definitely don't like you],

Minami Yuji smiled and shook his head.

He picked up the phone.

After a moment, a message went out.

[Idle S-san]: Kana, keep tomorrow free.

Then

he set the phone down.

The LINE notifications began chiming one after another like a string of bells, a dense flood of messages crashing over the screen.

Minami Yuji smiled and shook his head.

Mm… guess it's time to take a certain troublesome tsundere girl out on a date…