Bachiko the Grappler Ch. 04

Author's note: This series is my homage to the manga and anime series, "Baki the Grappler". Yes, I know there are about 3 different mangas and, I think, 2 different animes with different titles, but I'll just call the whole thing "Baki the Grappler". So, meet Bachiko. Any resemblance to the original work in terms of characters, plot and theme is entirely intentional. I hope fans of the series will enjoy my homage!

IMPORTANT NOTE: The original character Baki is 13 years of age at the beginning of the series. Bachiko is a 19-year-old girl. Previous chapters included a note here placing her age at 21 – that is by the conclusion of the series. Within this chapter, she is 19.

***

Hanayama Kaori shrugged off her bathrobe to bare her upper torso.

Kaito's throat went dry as he struggled to control his reaction to this behavior. True, he had already changed his perspective of what it meant to be a "woman", but he still had to get used to how all these fighting women were so comfortable with nakedness. It was as if for them, everywhere was an onsen, and every day was onsen day.

Countless men had endured nosebleeds and painful bucket impacts on their heads to catch a glimpse of attractive women in the hot springs. He knew he was unreasonably lucky and enviable. But he still wasn't quite used to it.

And he was aware, if he displayed any impolite reaction... this girl was the Yakuza Princess. Never mind his relationship with Bachiko – his very life would be over within minutes.

But Kaori didn't even look in his direction. She extended her right hand in Bachiko's direction, and for a moment Kaito thought she was challenging Bachiko to an impromptu contest.

Instead, Kaori slowly clenched her fingers into a fist. She held it there, for some seconds, while Bachiko's eyes narrowed, and suddenly widened.

Kaori smiled. "Impressive! You've already noticed it? Truly the daughter of the Empress Hanma Yuriko."

Bachiko smiled. "You are the impressive one. I see it now."

Kaito blinked. All he saw was Kaori stretching out a fist in Bachiko's direction. What had Bachiko noticed?

"It's very kind of you to show me in this way, Kaori-san. It wasn't something I could observe properly when I faced you in the Arena."

"Naturally! When I am in the Arena, all my muscles are already pumped up and ready for exertion. Here, you can see what I am doing much more clearly, because my muscles are still in a relaxed state."

"Yes, I see that."

"Would you like to explain it to your boyfriend, Bachiko-san? He looks completely puzzled," Kaori laughed.

"How would I presume to do the explaining, Kaori-san! I am here as the student today," Bachiko modestly demurred.

"Very well, then, forgive my presumptuousness," Kaori chuckled, and addressed Kaito directly. "Kaito-san, you know the basics of how muscles work?"

"Um... uh... sure! Muscles contract when pulling, all movements are actually pulling movements..." Kaito said uncertainly. This had never been his particular field of study, but he had picked a few things up from having Bachiko as a girlfriend. "A movement is created when a pulling muscle, also known as the agonist, contracts, and another corresponding muscle, the antagonist, relaxes. This allows the movement to be done."

"A very rough explanation, but that will suffice. What about synergists?"

Kaito stumbled over the unfamiliar word. "I'm sorry, I... am not sure about that."

Bachiko spoke up. "Synergist muscles help to stabilize the movements of the agonist-antagonist pairs." Her eyes had lit up. "So that is your secret... that is the extent of your muscle control. Truly impressive."

Kaori's eyes glinted as she smiled. "Truly, the Hanma daughter. Nothing pertaining to muscles will escape your understanding for very long."

"You flatter me."

"Now let us explain to your boyfriend," Kaori said, not unkindly. She spoke to Kaito again. "When I clench my fist, which muscles are being activated?"

"Those in your forearm."

"Yet, look at my biceps." Kaito swallowed hard at that casual invitation. It was one of the most magnificent arms he had ever seen, and through these weeks he had seen some truly spectacular female arms. "Are my biceps not flexed right now?"

"Yes, but of course you are tensing them... I see! All muscles work together in a system... even when an ordinary person like me makes a fist," Kaito made one, "other surrounding muscles tighten as well! But... how is that the secret to your grip strength, Hanayama-san?"

Kaori smiled. "Watch closely. I'll do it again. It's alright. Just watch, don't be embarrassed. It's just the human body."

He wished he could have that blasé attitude! But Bachiko nodded and smiled at him encouragingly, so he supposed it was alright. Wordlessly he nodded, and watched carefully.

Kaori relaxed her fingers, and for a few moments all her muscles were in a relaxed state, like smooth slabs of carved marble decorated with her floral and dragon tattoos. Then, ever so slowly, she curled her fingers into a fist again, and this time, since he was actually watching for something, he saw it. And his jaw dropped in amazement.

The cords of muscle shifted and writhed, and tightened in stages... all the way to her shoulder and her chest! There were actually three distinct cords of muscle on Kaori's upper chest that flexed and bulged, now clearly perceptible to his eyes when he was looking at it full on and not averting his gaze out of modesty.

"You see, Kaito?" Bachiko said. "Her grip strength comes not just from her arms. She is able to control her muscles so well that they work together in this way. Her entire right upper chest is the 'base' of the 'support system'. When her forearm muscles do their contracting and relaxing, she is able to use much more of her connected muscles to stabilize and add force to her muscle movements. Her chest is able to function as a synergist set of muscles for movements that she makes with her arms. Truly remarkable."

Kaori relaxed her grip, and the striations disappeared as the cords of muscle stopped bulging, but she now looked pumped all over. Kaito recalled how Kaori had been able to achieve the "pumped" look very quickly, due to her supreme cardiovascular conditioning. He gulped – he felt as if he was in the presence of meta-humans.

"Nothing you can't master yourself, Bachiko-san, now that you understand the principle involved. As long as you can do this," and suddenly Kaori made each of her pecs jump, alternately, causing her breasts to jiggle and bounce one by one, "you can eventually do the same thing I do with my grip."

"You mean like this?" Bachiko said, stripping off her sports bra with one smooth motion, and making each of her pecs bounce separately, in the same way.

"Yes, those control techniques are the foundation," Kaori said, synchronizing her pec bouncing with Bachiko's. Left with left... right with right...

Kaito stared wildly at the two pairs of muscular female chests performing this feat of muscle control, with the soft springy breasts moving as if they had lives of their own. The blood slowly drained from his face, and into another part of his body.

The next thing he knew he was being resuscitated by a very anxious Bachiko using CPR, while Kaori hovered over them both in the background, her face radiating concern. When he sat up, blood trickled out of his nose.

And that was the day he would remember evermore as the day he fainted with a nosebleed in front of two topless beautiful muscle girls doing boob-bouncing tricks with each other.

***

Kaito sat and typed.

He had several university assignments to complete, but he knew he wasn't focusing properly at the moment. Fortunately, one of them was a group project, and he was doing it with his buddies who were willing to cover for him this time, but he owed them and they would make sure he remembered it. That left the individual assignments which were due by the following week. He wasn't too worried – he was a talented coder who knew his stuff, and he was no stranger to doing last minute work and still making it good. He had his talents, and he was aware of them. So, he sat and typed away at his keyboard, with his afternoon Rwandan Blue Mountain coffee close at hand – one of his few "foreign" indulgences.

In the meantime, his mind kept wandering somewhere else. Specifically, it kept wandering over to that desolate region of Earth called Siberia, where a young Ukrainian girl had been taken shortly after her birth and raised almost in isolation.

You could find a lot of things via the deep net, if you were willing to put on the mental equivalent of a hazmat suit and wade past the child pornography and snuff pornography and hitmen classifieds. Unsurprisingly, you could find a fair few references to the Tachikawa Arena as well, though there were no pictures or videos of the Arena's interior. There were, however, plenty of photographs of the grapplers themselves, in their daily lives or from their pasts. Kaito even found a few of Bachiko walking around town with him, but taken from a great distance or in poor lighting, so he couldn't really be recognized. Bachiko, of course, could be recognized anywhere with her physique.

There were comments about those photos: "The Empress's Daughter has found a new boy toy! Or maybe he is her slave?" And other comments, too, along similar lines.

He put all that out of mind temporarily – nothing he could really do, in a world devoid of genuine privacy, nobody really demanded privacy as a right anymore, it was something that only those with sufficient power and influence could secure for themselves – and concentrated on what he had found out about Polina Petrovna.

She had been born of two unremarkable Ukrainian parents – unremarkable, that is, in the sense of not having risen to public prominence. Her father had been a farm owner, and her mother had been his wife. Apparently an agreement had been struck with the Soviet government, and when she was about one year old she had been taken away from her parents to a remote government facility somewhere in the middle of the Siberian tundra.

It wasn't just anywhere in the wilderness – the facility was located right in the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion of 1908.

Some basic research that did not even require the deep net turned up some information on that, but Kaito knew that the "general knowledge" accepted by the populace probably did not even scratch the surface of the complete truth. Even the deep net wasn't guaranteed to grant access to classified government information. It would just take too much trawling to be worth the effort. He didn't fancy himself a conspiracy nut, so he decided not to go to that kind of trouble and possibly invite unwanted attention.

The information he was compiling was centered on Polina herself. She had been raised in isolation and secrecy in that facility. At the age of 5, there were documents and reports hinting at remarkable physical development for a girl that age. At the age of 7, Polina was being taken out on endurance runs in the taiga forest and made to swim in Lake Cheko. An incomplete document appeared to be a fragment of 11-year-old Polina's training regimen, which seemed to indicate that carrying huge logs on her shoulders while marching for miles in snow, while clad only in threadbare clothing, was part of her regular training.

There was even a document that, once translated, was about how a 15-year-old Polina had overcome a bear in unarmed combat, by choking it into unconsciousness.

Kaito could not verify the veracity of any of these documents, but if true... the adult Polina was the result of some kind of Soviet program dedicated to, among other things, her creation: the creation of a woman possessing surpassing levels of physical strength.

But why her? The answer lay in what little could be dug up of her lineage. There were uncorroborated stories of how her female forebears, great-great-grandmothers and great-grand-aunts and such, were renowned in their local communities for various feats of physical power. Lifting up boulders, defeating five men in a tug-of-war across a river and yes, wrestling bears and winning... Kaito could only surmise that there was something in Polina's genetics that made her a prime candidate for the Soviet scientists' training program.

And she was his girlfriend's next opponent.

This... 25-year-old Soviet-bred... unarmed-combat machine... with an unbelievable level of physical conditioning... was going to wrestle his girlfriend.

Kaito was starting to realize that what they had seen in the Arena was actually only a tiny sample of what Polina could do.

He reached for his coffee mug, and made a face. His coffee had grown cold. Sighing, he stood up and stretched.

The feats of muscular strength and control that he had seen Bachiko perform so far... When he and Bachiko were making love, they were a source of incredible arousal. But sometimes, when he watched her do something he'd never seen anyone do before, sexual arousal was secondary to a feeling of awe. The athleticism she exuded, the sheer prowess she displayed, and the aesthetic appeal of her body... these things could not be denied, by anyone.

Girls would tend to titter and giggle over photos of a well-built muscleman and say how grotesque he looked, yet be unable to look away because of their sheer fascination. Or some boys he knew would jeer at muscular women for being too masculine, and in the privacy of their bedrooms jerk off to fantasies of being with those women, usually with pictures and videos for masturbation aids (that was how Kaito knew). The human body, pushed towards the limit of its development potential... even a nerd like Kaito could appreciate the beauty of it.

Yet for all that... as impressive as Bachiko had been so far, what he had seen of her... he had to admit to himself, it didn't come close to what he had found out about Polina Petrovna.

There had to be some way he could help Bachiko out... there had to be!

***

"I already told you," she said with some irritation, and took another gulp of her protein drink. There were several raw eggs in that concoction and some other things Kaito had never really bothered to look into. "I don't need to know her life story, or about some natural disaster from more than 100 years ago. I am not interested! I already know what I need to do in order to beat her."

She was naked and sweating profusely after her workout. This time she seemed to be going for a gymnastics focus – she used a set of custom-made rings attached to her power cage, and performed the Iron Cross movement. She held it for a full 5 minutes, five times, with only a short break in between. Kaito had looked it up on his phone – the "world record" for the Iron Cross currently stood at 44.5 seconds, Zhang Shu (male, China), during an exhibition in Beijing. He could only shake his head and laugh softly to himself. His girlfriend really was some kind of superheroine.

And then she had also done hanging leg raises – but instead of lifting her legs up in front of her, crunching her abs, she had actually raised them straight out to the sides. It had looked painful and extremely difficult, even for her, but she had grimly persevered and the end result was that she could hang from the bar, and look as though she was performing a perfect split in mid-air. She held that pose for a couple of minutes before her leg muscles got too tired and the angle between her legs became smaller than 180 degrees.

Bachiko had seemed dissatisfied with herself after that, even though to Kaito's slightly biased eyes she'd looked perfect doing it. She'd remarked that she would need to do better than that, and she would also need to strap weights to her legs as she did that exercise.

A quick phone search revealed that she had been training her abductor muscles. What a way to train those!

"But surely knowing these things about her can give you a tactical advantage," he protested, waving at his laptop – he'd made a slideshow presentation. "Weak points, abilities..."

Bachiko dismissively waved her hand. "Kaito-chan, I saw everything I needed to see when I saw her body move. Telling me all these numbers and reports is meaningless. I don't even know what the Tunguska event is, and I don't need to know. I really do appreciate what you want to do for me, Kaito, but you can save yourself the trouble."

She moved in closer to him and he found himself responding to her naked sweaty nearness, as she crooked her strong arm and cupped the back of his head lovingly.

"Don't you want to save our time and energy for something more... pleasing?"

He decided he couldn't really argue with that. She stripped off his shirt, baring his skinny torso and pale pasty skin. He still felt self-conscious every time he made the mental comparison between himself and Bachiko, physique-wise, but she never seemed to mind, with the way she kissed down the front of his body and stripped his pants off with a playful snarl. His cock sprang to life and stood ramrod straight, already leaking a drop of pre-cum from the tip.

She wrapped his arms around his waist and took his cock into her mouth. Then, seemingly without much effort, she stood upright, bearing his entire body weight with negligent ease. Kaito did not even feel a sense of being unbalanced; she was bearing his whole body weight so easily and steadily, even while she bobbed her head back and forth, and did magic with her tongue. He placed his hands on her rock-like shoulders, not for any added stability, but so he could feel the hardness and strength of the muscles at work. And that beautiful face, occasionally looking up at him... with those clear eyes that were practically willing him to orgasm...

When he came, he felt like a spigot that couldn't be turned off. Bachiko let him down after he had stopped convulsing, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand, grinning slyly.

"Protein Dispenser," she said. "I should start calling you that."

Kaito was too weak to protest.

***

It was time...

Kaito fidgeted. He had once again been invited up to Tachibana Fujiko's VIP box – the grand old dame had somehow taken a shine to him, and told him that he had free access to the box anytime he wanted, for all future matches, even if Bachiko wasn't the one competing. While conscious of the great honor being done to him, Kaito was a bit leery of being the cynosure of attention. Many of the Arena's spectators were casting long looks in his direction, even from the other side – some had viewing glasses, like at a Western opera, and he could see they were focusing those glasses on him.

"Bachiko-chan told me you have been trying to compile information on her opponents to help her," Fujiko suddenly said, sipping her ocha green tea with evident pleasure. She had just personally performed the tea ceremony, playing the gracious hostess. "That's a very nice gesture, boy. At least I know your intentions are good."

"Oba-san, I..." Kaito shifted uncomfortably. "I'm afraid I wasn't able to be of much help. I could not persuade Bachiko to pay much attention to the information. She seemed to think it would not be useful to her."

Fujiko laughed quietly. "She is young yet, my boy. She will have to learn painfully, through experience, the value of certain things in life. Just like her mother did."

There was some silence after that, at the mention of Bachiko's mother. Then Fujiko broke it by saying, "I suppose you are familiar with the details of the story about Miyamoto Mushashi's duel with Sasaki Kojiro."

"Of course!" Every child in Japan knew that story. "He rowed out to that island, and sharpened one of the oars to serve as his sword."

"That part is most likely folktale embellishment, boy! It's hardly germane, now is it! Is that all you learnt?"