Chapter 1 – The Last Walk Home
The streetlights blinked on one by one as I left the warehouse.
Another long day. Same routine. I adjusted the strap of my bag and started down the familiar road toward my apartment, the air carrying that specific mix of rain and exhaust I'd stopped noticing years ago. My reflection was already fading in the dark shop windows.
Tomorrow was Saturday.
For once, I didn't have to work.
I thought about calling my parents. I hadn't seen them since New Year's two train stops away, which somehow always felt like too far. I could already imagine my mother's cooking. My father's quiet jokes about how tired I looked.
"I'll call them tomorrow," I murmured.
Same promise I'd made last week.
The crossing light flickered green and I stepped off the curb without thinking.
Someone shouted.
A horn.
White.
---
There was no pain.
That was the strangest part I'd always assumed there would be pain. Instead there was just weight, a heavy distant warmth spreading from somewhere I couldn't locate, and then even that was slipping away.
Faces moved through the dark. My parents. My apartment. The stack of dishes I hadn't washed.
I wanted to say something.
No words came.
The warmth faded completely, and I heard a heartbeat that wasn't mine slow, steady, getting closer and then a voice, soft and muffled and familiar in a way that made no sense at all.
*He's here.*
---
Light.
Too much of it.
Warmth again, but different this time. Gentle. Small hands. A woman laughing at something I couldn't see.
I cried without meaning to, and the sound that came out wasn't mine either.
The room was warm and small and completely new.
I didn't understand it yet. Not fully. But somewhere underneath the confusion, underneath the noise and the light and the exhaustion of being suddenly, impossibly alive again, one thought settled quietly.
*My life hadn't ended.*
*It had restarted.*
---
The years moved differently after that.
Memory is strange when you carry two lives at once. The new one filled in around the edges first faces, sounds, the smell of the house while the old one sat somewhere deeper, dimming at the details but never disappearing entirely.
My new mother was called Aya. She smiled often and held me close when I cried and always smelled faintly of the soap she used in the kitchen. My new father was Ren quieter, steadier, with oil-stained hands and the particular patience of someone who worked with small, delicate things for a living.
They were good people.
I knew that early, the way you know things you can't explain to anyone.
Ren ran a small repair shop attached to our house. Toys, radios, old electronics. And Beyblades broken ones mostly, brought in by parents whose kids had worn them down or snapped the layers clean off. He'd fix them at his bench while I sat on a stool nearby, watching.
The first time I saw one spin on the desk in front of me, something shifted.
I knew that sound.
I knew that rhythm.
I kept my expression carefully neutral, the way I'd learned to do when something hit harder than it should for a six-year-old.
*Beyblade.*
Not fiction. Not a show I'd watched on a screen somewhere in another life. Real. Here. The stadiums on the TV in the corner of the shop, the matches broadcast on weekend afternoons real competitions, real bladers.
Valt Aoi. Shu Kurenai. Names I already knew, attached now to actual people who existed in the same world I was standing in.
That realization took several weeks to fully settle.
Ren caught me watching the TV one afternoon and didn't say anything for a moment. Then:
"You like Beys?"
"Yeah," I said.
A beat too fast. He noticed I could tell by the slight curve at the corner of his mouth but he didn't push it.
"Then we'll need to find you one someday."
---
I spent most of my time in the workshop after that.
Other kids played in the street outside. I sat on my stool and watched Ren work. He didn't teach me directly. He just let me stay and didn't ask me to leave, which was its own kind of teaching. I learned how metal felt different from plastic under pressure. How weight distribution changed the way a Bey recovered from a hit. How the same driver behaved completely differently depending on what it was paired with.
I didn't tell him I already knew some of this.
It wasn't really lying. I knew the theory from a different world, from a show that apparently hadn't been fiction at all. But knowing the theory and understanding how it worked in your hands were two very different things, and I was smart enough at six or at however-old-I-actually-was to know I needed to learn it properly.
At night, before bed, I'd look out the small window of my room at the sky.
"Mom. Dad." Quietly. Just for myself. "I'm okay. I'm learning."
The curtains moved sometimes. I chose to find that comforting.
---
On my sixth birthday, Aya made rice cakes and hung small decorations around the door.
Ren placed a box on the table.
Inside were Bey parts old, mismatched, carefully cleaned. Layers, discs, drivers. None of them matching sets. All of them usable.
"You've watched long enough," he said. "Let's see what you can make."
I stared at the box for a moment longer than I should have.
Then I nodded.
That night, before I slept, I sat with the box in my lap and thought about what I wanted.
Not the fastest Bey. Not the most aggressive.
Something that could take a hit and answer back. Something patient. Something that waited for the moment instead of chasing it.
"I'll make something real," I whispered.
For the first time since I'd woken up in this world, tomorrow felt like something to move toward instead of something to survive.
---
Ren was already in the workshop when I came down the next morning.
He looked up from his bench. "Ready?"
He handed me a notepad and a pencil without further explanation.
"If you want to build something real," he said, "start with what you want it to do. Not how it looks. What it does."
I thought for a moment.
"I want one that doesn't run from hits," I said. "Control, not speed. A Bey that holds its position, waits for the right moment, and then strikes hard."
Ren was quiet for a second.
"That sounds like you," he said.
He sketched a rough outline a compact layer with three curved edges, angled to redirect incoming force rather than absorb it cleanly. Then he tapped the center.
"Theme?"
"Dragon," I said. No hesitation.
His pencil paused. Then he smiled, small and private, the way he did when something surprised him.
"Alright. Let's build your dragon."
---
We worked through the morning and into the afternoon.
The layer came first. Ren showed me how to sand the edges evenly and where to reinforce the points that would take the most impact. I chose the colors myself deep red and gold, no particular reason except that they felt right. The metal core was carved from a broken part he'd kept stored for years, heavy enough to lower the center of gravity without throwing off the balance.
The forge disc he called Vortex. Three vents cut for left spin, designed to reduce air resistance along the rotation path. Simple and effective.
The driver we built from scratch a narrow tip for initial speed, with a rubber ring that would only make contact once the spin slowed down, shifting the movement pattern mid-battle without any input from the blader.
"Ignis Claw," Ren said, reading my face. "You already had a name for it."
"Yeah."
He nodded. "Good instinct."
When all the pieces clicked together, I set it on the bench and looked at it.
Red and gold under the workshop light. Not perfect. The layer had one slightly uneven edge I'd noticed but hadn't been able to fix without Ren's tools. The disc sat a fraction off-center if you looked closely enough.
It was mine.
"Name?" Ren asked.
I didn't have to think.
"Eclipse Drago."
He said it back quietly, testing the sound of it. Then he nodded once, like something had been confirmed.
"It fits."
---
We didn't launch it that day.
Ren said a Bey deserved a proper first spin not a rushed one in the workshop at the end of an afternoon. So we waited until the next morning, when the light came through the small window at the right angle and the air was still cool.
He set the metal bowl on the floor between us.
"Alright," he said. "Let's see what it does."
I held the launcher tight. Felt the weight of it the familiar weight of something about to begin.
"Three. Two. One."
Let it rip.
Drago entered the bowl slower than I expected, then found the rim and steadied. No wobble. No overcorrection. He just held his line, spinning low and clean near the edge.
I exhaled.
Ren crossed his arms and watched without speaking.
The second launch was cleaner. Drago held the outer ring for almost the full duration of the spin before drifting inward, then settled and slowed to a stop near the center.
When I picked him up, he was warm in my hand.
"Good balance," Ren said finally. "It'll need work. The driver will drift right under pressure until you wear it in. But the core is solid." He paused. "You built well."
That night I set Eclipse Drago on the windowsill beside my bed.
The gold ring caught the moonlight.
I looked at it for a long time.
In my old life I'd watched a show about kids who launched spinning tops and changed the world one battle at a time, and I had thought it was fiction. A nice story. Something for someone else.
Now I was six years old in a repair shop above a quiet street, and I had just built my first Bey by hand, and nothing about any of this felt small.
I didn't know yet what was coming.
I didn't know about Regionals, or the rooftop, or the names that would matter later.
But I knew this.
Drago was real. The path was real.
And I was done watching from the sidelines.