Chizuru Nagahara vs. Blade Uehara - One More Reunion

One heave, two heaves, three heaves. Boy, Blade was not as light as everyone thought.

Uh, not that she meant that as an insult or anything, but Uehara was an aerialist. The Wrestle Angels roster had always been home to a vast collection of bulky hardbodies, fulsome figures, and everything else in between. But a high-flyer as well-versed as Blade cut a different kind of build, more slimming, more aerodynamic. Like a bird. A Blade Bird. Not to mention she wasn’t the tallest wrestler around. But she was still a wrestler, and that meant plenty of athletic muscle to carry.

Easier said than done, though. Woof.

Still, it was nice to have some words of encouragement...even if she had absolutely no idea what they meant. Guess that meant it was deep, right? Blade was such a philosopher.

With a few more seconds filled with deep breathes and pulsing steel-pole-induced headaches, Chizuru had finally made it to the top, still clinging onto Blade tightly by the waist, but from her new position on her perch she could contribute another hand to her grip on the Okinawan, making the tight hold seem more fitting to a loving hug from behind between two best friends finally reunited after an eternity apart...if one of the friends was passed out drunk.

Then Chizuru whipped the two of them around, pulling Blade along like a child tucked in her arms to face the audience. Unlocking the hold, Chizuru dipped low and tucked her head between the tomboy's legs from behind, propping Blade up on her shoulders as she stood tall before the camera flashes and the fixated gaze of the crowd that grew louder with each passing second. The Suplex Girl took another breath, just barely able to keep herself steady with the added weight.  She could do this. She could beat Blade. She could be at the top.

With one finger to the sky, her voice sounded through the arena. One phrase that marked the Suplex Girl’s grand return to the greatest stage of all.

“JUST WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AAAAAAAAAMMMM?!” With that, Chizuru would buckle her knees and go to throw Blade off her shoulders. As the Okinawan would seemingly plunge to her doom, the German Suplex Savant would grab her by the waist and heave backward, plummeting the both of them towards the ground with her ultimate finisher - the Nagahara Super Crusher Drop!

Trademark, Rei Tomizawa.

Blade's babbling's were not becoming anymore coherent whille still slumping in Chizuru's embracing clutches with a slackened lifelessness to her. The scruffy-haired veteran being toted around like a tuckered out infant nodding off and ready to be put to bed. Why it all felt so bizarrely comforting to be in Chizuru's hugging arms, despite the foreboding knowledge of what usually comes next, were all thoughts for another day as Blade started to become a wee less spaced out after being propped up to sit on the turnbuckle. Her wincing eyes fluttering open to now find herself facing the cheering audience who were suddenly all rising to their feet as Chizuru slotted her head between Blade's legs, and rose the battered veteran higher up. Somehow making Blade's precarious situation even more...uh, precarious.

*...Make...Make the...impossible...*

Blade knew when she was beaten...and the suplexing savante had just about proven her point in permanent marker. Sweat dripped down from Blade's forehead as she stared blankly forward into the ethereal masses clamoring to see the chipper and perkier underdog German Suplex her way into the limelight by scoring the pinfall victory over someone she would have had no chance of winning against back in W.A. Blade took a defeated, accepting breath in silent resignation of how badly she had screwed this one up, and of how badly this next part was going to sting. Not just physically, but from her battered pride after having it on her record that was going to suffer a humiliating loss to one of the Three Idiots...

...no...Chizu didn't deserve to be called that anymore. She wasn't the same ditzy prankster more concerned with landing a cream pie in someone's face than accomplishing something worthwhile in the ring. Blade just underestimated Chizuru, and how much potential she had squirreled away beneath all that perky goofiness. That's all. People always underestimated her...People always underestimated her...made her feel like a pint-size joke...smacked around her friends...talked down to her like she was nothing...double-teamed her...cheap-shotted her...hand-cuffed her...embarrassed her...power-bombed her into oblivion...drove her out of the business, out of her home country...away from her friends family...her Dad...

*...possible...*

Blade gnashed her teeth and gripped her hands into fists...her heart beating rapidly with a renewed vigor once Chizuru hopped Blade up into the air, only for the Aerial Artist to land herself promptly back onto Chizu's shoulders while leaning backward in an attempt to pitch her opponent half way across the ring in a reverse hurricanrana!!!

Moments like these never failed to remind Chizuru why she wasn’t a flyer. She’d trained in that department a bit when she was still a fresh airhead rather than the hardened airhead she was now, thinking she could round out her style a bit better for the people her suplexes couldn’t handle. Yukiko never failed to make it look easy, at least.

But then came the time to actually stand at the top and look around, look out from the summit and take in the height. The chills always got her, like a pair of cold and deadly fingers tugged onto her spine and sent shivers all around her body. Forget jumping. She was scared to death just stepping back down. None of that had changed. Even now, she was terrified to make that one wrong step that could mean the end of her.

Only she’d learned how to use that fear now. The fear of tripping, falling, failing...looking the director in his disappointed eyes. She accepted all of that and grit her teeth as she lifted the Okinawan high! She’d take Blade by the waist, summon up that strength, and throw her down so hard that nobody would ever-!

“Ghrik!”

That was what she was thinking until the moment a pair of steel pliers locked around her head. Blade’s legs certainly felt that way in her moment of exhaustion, catching Chizuru utterly in surprise by the amount of strength she was able to pump into them despite her disheveled state. The Suplex Girl’s head was ripped right away from her and her body was close along for the ride, flying several feet from her perch to the floor with a resounding splash. The cheers from the crowd quickly turned to a sporadic mix of sudden gasps for their fallen heroine and rousing cheers for the rebounding punk princess. Chizuru had little reaction to any of it for her part. She was too busy trying not to scream as she flipped and flopped head over heels once, then twice, before finally flopping flat on her stomach just beyond the ring’s center. Her mind was awash, her head and back in

And still, the plucky up-and-comer refused to stay down. It was barely noticeable at first, nothing more than a twitch that’d sooner come from a corpse than the energetic ball of charisma that the fans adored. Those twitches turned to movements, a clenched fist, a shaking head, and finally, a step forward. Chizuru pushed against the floor, her long brown hair and messy bangs covering her eyes as she shakily rose to all fours. She seemed on the brink of collapse. Every other slight spasm of her arm threatened to bring her back down to the floor. She tucked in her knee and tried to summon the energy to stand on two feet with an uncomfortable sway.

“Grit...grit those…”

All-night anime binging with microwave pizza and wine coolers was a dangerous mix.

Blade willingly admitting that their were some irresponsible habits from high-school she was just never going to outgrow. Impassioned mech animes and junk food just so happened being two of them. But combining these particular pastimes the night before she had a match was now becoming a twisted cocktail of fatigued exhaustion and distorted mental faculties from recent head trauma. The only coherent thoughts now revolving around accidentally appropriate quotes from one of her favorite shows. Blade just wished she knew who she was talking to...or where she was...or why her head was hurting so damn much. A fluttering flap of her eyelids at least answering the second question through half-lidded vision. The side of her face was mashed against the middle turnbuckle with her arms dangling over the adjacent middle ropes and her lifeless body was outstretched behind her.

Whatever counter she had performed to get her in this position still not ringing any bells considering she was running on the auto-pilot's auto-pilot. Nothing but ingrained wrestling instincts were guiding Blade's actions at this point, but whatever her manuever was it must have been a doozy given the divisive but vociferous reaction it brought out of the people around them. By now, most wrestlers had known better than to risk matching aerial wits with the Okinawan Eagle for reasons such as these. She had a propensity to outdo any death-defying aerial assault her opponents utilize with one even more ludicrously dangerous. But whatever fire compelled Blade to quite literally flip this situation on it's head was only flickering for now, the Aerial Artist blathering muffled mumbles into the middle pad while spastically tapping her boot into the floor. One arm reaching up at a time to snag the top ropes and tug her back to her unsteady legs...than twisting around to see Chizuru shamble at roughly the same pace, but having started moving only once Blade was back on her feet.

"...Tch...I...be...leive.....in the...me...that...I beleive in. My drill...is my soul..."

Blade was clearly delusional from being suplexed all night, but she was nevertheless spurred on by undeniably motivational and uplifting music spiraling around in her head. She sluggishly but steadfastly slipped through the ropes to stand wearily on the ring apron. She clamped onto the top rope fiercely, that tethered cable for support quite clearly being the only thing preventing her from falling flat on her ass. But as the song in her head played, adrenaline pumped through her veins and reignited those withering sparks into a blazing inferno...the Aerial Artist gnashing her teeth and clenching the rope with white knuckled intensity as Chizuru sauntered up to her feet with her back to Blade. The second Chizuru started twisting around, up Blade would go to nimble balance herself on the rope before catapulting through the air!!! Arm cocked back with a wild eyed look of impassioned ferocity and diehard determination in the millisecond before attempting her awe-inspiring AIR SLICER finisher!!!!!

"And my drill, IS THE ONE THAT WILL PIERCE THE HEAVENS!"

Chizuru had never been drunk before. She’d been to bars with friends at night, she’d celebrated a big victory at a post-match afterparty, but alcohol was just never a major part of her life. Just no place for it to fit in between all the training and matches and moving around.

If she had to draw her best comparison to how a hangover felt, though, this would probably be her prime example. Her head suddenly weighed a million pounds, her vision was blurring in and out, and the world wouldn’t stop spinning around her no matter how much she wanted it to be otherwise. Yeah, this sounded like a hangover. At least if Rei was a reliable source of information after spending an hour pruning herself in a cold shower. It was so easy to just lay down and accept the pain. Maybe it would even pass in a moment.

But she had to stand up anyway, right? That’s why she was here wasn’t it? Yeah. She still had to give it her all, while there was still some all to give. She guessed that was why she was somehow standing upright again on a pair of wobbly legs, even though she had no idea what to do with them afterward except stand there.

Not until a shift in the light above her caught her attention. Chizuru looked up and saw a giant bird of prey coming from on high. An eclipse against the sun as the eagle swooped down on her, and that was the last image her mind had the time to record before everything went black.

The “punch” sounded more like a pistol as the gunmetal grey glider smacked Chizuru square in the face. All of her pretty features became buried beneath the Okinawans knuckles in a violent torrent of power that speared through her face, sending ripples and shockwaves over the surface of her creamy skin. Time seemed to stop for a moment. Newton’s first law came into action. As Blade shot with her all her power, Chizuru’s face pushed back against her fist with just as much oomph, their combined forces quickly reaching an epic cascade right in the middle of German’s fair countenance and when the climax finally came...the results weren’t pretty.

Chizuru’s head whipped back and the rest of her body followed close behind, slamming into the floor with a hard splash. Her back arched and her legs came high off the ground, tumbling head over heels before coming down flat on her stomach. Arms splayed at her sides, hair tangled in a jumbled mess, and a distant look in her eye beneath the surface. The German Suplexing Machine was well and truly out of it with only a vague sense of what even hit her. Her mind was a blur, rushing to and fro in and out of reality.

So that’s...how a drill works...

Amidst a backdrop of anime speedlines and the electrifying crescendo of whatever blood-pumping rock opera was booming at max volume in her silver-haired head...Blade effortlessly took to the air as if it was second, or maybe first nature to her. A wrestling journalist once attributing Blade as being as at home in the air as a fish is in the ocean, as if the sky was her canvas where she immortalized herself every-time she leapt from a precariously elevated position...though every artist needed to reinvent themselves if they didn't want to wind up settling into creative doldrums. Hence why Blade concocted this never before seen finisher in secret...only coyly dropping the name of her finisher during interviews to get fans speculating as to what it could be.

The "Air Slicer" TM being the end result of countless nights throwing balls of scrunched up loose-leaf paper into the trash as Blade agonized over sketching it out and thinking up a badass-sounding name to boot. A name that no lamebrain marketing wizards could ever think up, and emphasized Blade's unnatural agility, accelerated flight speed, and propensity for hurling herself through the air at people with wild abandon. Blade getting her eureka moment while casually traipsing along the top rope of a wrestling ring at practice one day. Her brow furrowed and arms folded before randomly noticing another luchadora in the gym she despised, and wished she could clock her in the face from this vantage point.

Funny how inspiration strikes sometimes.

Probably not as hard as poor Chizuru being the unlucky recipient of the meteoric forearm smash in it's momentous debut. The impassioned frenzy in Blade's focused iris' not evoking any sign of outright maliciousness towards Chizu, but more of a renewed thirst for victory, which was all that would now satiate her emblazoned fighting spirit. The cocked back strike reforming Chizu's adorable face around Blade's fist and forearm with a high-pitched thunder crack of a sound as if someone was letting loose firecrackers in the arena, with rippling undulations only visible during one of the many impending replays and under the microscope of slow-motion.

Blade herself comically tumbling and fumbling over onto her back into a spread-eagled slump right beside Chizuru, breathing profusely and seemingly coming back down to Earth from the heights of her delusional madness with a sudden peeking open of her eyes. The Aerial Artist not immediately remembering where she was, but she still noticed someone laying beside her in what she assumed was a wrestling ring. All of her other memories would start trickling back in, but for now her wrestling instincts compelled her to roll over to that person over and lay her fatigued frame atop them, a perky press to their boobs while nuzzling cheek to cheek...

"One!"

Out of body experiences were never really a fun thing for Chizuru. She’d done so much slamming in her life, in so many places, and in so many ways, that people tended to forget how often she was the one on the receiving end of those slams. It wasn’t hard to picture. She was by no means the largest girl in her old league, nowhere near the fastest, and for sure not the heaviest. It happened nowhere near as often as it used to, but it was still all too familiar with her.

She stared up far below herself, watching herself being pinned for the last time, but not able to comprehend what that really meant. She wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t sad either. She just was. This pale white apparition floating ten miles beneath the world, unable to understand or care for anything in the world above her. But she felt a curious warmth this time, deep inside of her. It didn’t burn. Just grew warmer and warmer, steadily rising like steam on the air and pushing her way back up to the surface.

Chizuru slowly opened her eyes into a blinking fit, feeling her heart beat a million miles per minute inside of her chest. Her vision was hazy, and for a second she couldn’t remember where she was or what she was doing. Everything just felt really hot. And it was getting hard to breathe.

“TWO!”

Chizuru’s heart skipped a beat. Her eyes darted to the side and caught the official steadily raising his hand into the air. Everything told her to move, to fight. But her body was done with all of that. The Okinawan's weight may as well have been a thousand chains binding her to the floor. A slight roll here, an errant buck there, and that was it. The gas valve was empty. Cut swiftly through with a blade harder than steel.

“THREE!”

The adorable Suplex Specialist popped her eyes open after she felt the final slap against the side of her head. Her eyes widened and relaxed one after the other, overcome with surprise and fatigue in a simultaneous concoction of instant drowsiness. Her mind was moving too fast with the rest of her, trying to understand everything that was happening inside, outside, in the future, in the past, and right now. The back of her head hit the canvas as the arena became a sea of roars and cheers, ones that Chizuru could only barely make out through her half-lidded eyes.

Poop.

...still just a kid who belongs in the back in catering...

...go back to hugging…

...that? You just got Chizu’d...

...favorite snack when you have the munchies?...

...yo wrestling skills are S-A-W-F-T...SAWFT!!!...

...THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AAAAAAAAAMMMM?!...

No one ever tells high-flyers this once they officially choose their preferred method of laying the proverbial smackdown on other wrestlers, but even when you're sapped of all traces of energy, looking up affordable housing in your own private world of pain, splayed out in the middle of the canvas laying either beneath the better wrestler or atop the lesser one...you never...really ever...stop flying. As thoroughly grounded as Blade was at this moment, her addle-brained consciousness was as a leaf in the wind. Levitating high above the ring and feeling light as a feather while scarcely making out through her anchor heavy eyelids the fallen Wrestle Angels down below. Aside from the referee's jostling slaps to the ring canvas, all Blade could hear was the faint echoes and callbacks from earlier in the match from a pair of impassioned wrestling professionals laying it all on the table and bringing their absolute A-game to a match that, on paper, had diddly up for grabs...

...so why would Blade feel like she just become World Heavyweight champion upon hearing the dam burst over with wave after wave of appreciative applause alongside a standing ovation?

Blade blubbered and groaned from what felt like her Dad waking her up for school, but was in fact just the referee attempting to jostle her awake and raise the Okinawan's noodly arm up above to officially declare her the winner...the ref stirring her up to be half-awake and half dead tired. The Aerial Artist twisting and turning off of her cozy bed before taking out her retainer and trying to remember what was on the lunch menu today...before peeking through her eyes and getting a well-needed reality check. Blade breathing haggardly and panning around the clamoring arena whilst seated on her butt next to what was still a motionless Chizuru, to whom her eyes honed in on as she gradually began to calculate and do the numbers in her head until coming to a conclusion she never thought possible.

*...Huh...might be the mild concussion speakin...but unless I'm mistaken...she...just gave me one of the best matches of my life...* Blade internally processed, a split second away from directing a hand in Chizuru's direction before it was promptly interceded by a wave black and white pinstripes. A gaggle of referee’s swarming around her and thinking it best to escort the still unconscious W.A. to the infirmary to the worried concern of all in attendance...including the lone grappler still in the ring after everyone had vamoosed. Blade passing a hand through her scruffy locks and taking her battered carcass outta the ring soon afterward, hands propped on her hips as she sauntered back up at the ramp with a lot on her mind besides trying to remember why half her outfit was with stained with nacho cheese.

Winner: Blade Uehara