Short Fiction: Takahashi's Fight

Takahashi Reiko sat on the cool concrete in her dark navy blue school uniform awaiting Kendo, out of sight of the crowd moving about the street that could be heard here behind the metal and brick of her Kendo school. The brutality of the high school far from her thoughts, though it had regularly imposed itself on her life and shaped those thoughts. Kendo was her retreat. A hiding place from high school bullying that afforded no grounds for retreat. Education increasingly was an equality afforded those who took it from others, and that was an equality her Sensei had taught her to fight for though she still struggled to comprehend why the fight was no longer a shared struggle with shared rewards.
Other than her Sword, Takahashi was not in anyway someone who stood out. She was at the age of seventeen, youthfully pretty, with the straight black hair of her mother, standing one metre-fourty six tall. She had sacrificed social popularity for a respect both learned and earned. One that her parents, though they had wanted more from her than mediocrity, and wanted more for her than high school, accepted as their daughter's destination in life.
"Perhaps you might find a husband if you do well." Her mother had commented this morning at breakfast though her mother had wanted her to do well and go on to University every conversation up to this morning. Takahashi wondered what had happened to her mother that she would have accepted so much less for her daughter.

Takahashi was brought back to the world when the noise of the street intruded down her alley and a young man made the blind turn down the alley behind the Kendo school only to be quickly nailed to the wall of the building in that distant alley end by a spear.
Takahashi, wide-eyed in surprise at the event that unfolded, screamed in horror when a giant well muscled shirtless man over two metres in height appeared near the meat on a stick and pulled it from the wall. Takahashi sat quietly clutching her sword until she was sure the predator had seen her at which she, back against the wall, she stood slowly and pulled her sword from its scabard.
Takahashi wasn't a killer, as her Sensei often reminded her, and she would always be denied the power it took to kill. Now, this monster of a man, obviously a foreigner by his dark skin and monstrous size had murdered someone with ease, and here she was in an alley way where he controlled one of two exits.
"Sensei?" Takahashi leapt at the back entrance to the kendo school and knocked. She desperately wanted her teacher to be early. At this the ugly man at the end of the alley accelerated toward her, speared meat on a stick in hand. She could see him now with greater accuracy. He was ugly and monstrous in a way that seemed reminiscent of Oni from some fantasy anime, and his clothing, what little of it she could see, though he hid behind his impaled victim, seemed predominantly bloody yet scant to non-existant. And now as the monster, the meat on its skewer screaming and flailing out of some last moment of life ahead of him closed on Takahashi, she screamed at the terror of it all and dropped into a ball diving beneath the skewered meat impacting the wall where she had been.
Her path, sword in hand, scratched her monster's leg as she passed unleashing a spray of blood that painted her, as she slipped its grasp. And she ran for her life down the alley toward the distant turn and the escape of the public and crowded street beyond.
Takahashi slid into the alley turn, her shoes slipping in the dark blood as she looked back down the alley and watched the giant monster chasing after her approach. Takahashi, on her hands and feet, finger painting like an awkward child, crawled out of the blood screaming, only to impact against an unexpected new obstacle that disarmed her of her now panicked flailing sword and silenced her objecting screams, attempting to strike her unconcious, though the impact had felt more like a hard body blow.
Takahashi vomited down the back of the individual now carrying her like a butcher a piglet over his shoulder and she would have remained there had the monstrous giant pursuing her not attacked her abductor for the prize piglet that was clearly his.
A roar of hostile intent screamed in Takahashi's ears as the Monster impacted with the thief, and she dropped against the alley wall with her scattered sword, the weight of a monster landing on her leg, breaking bones as she pushed her sword out blindly impailing something that dropped heavily and unexpectedly on the point of the blade. A voice screamed and died on top of her as she passed out from the pain in that alley-way in Ginza.