By the time Episode Three rolled its end credits, the audience had already lost whatever dignity they'd been clinging to. Alex's Joseph - still somehow alive, still somehow grinning - pulled off one more stunt so absurdly shameless it had people laughing the kind of laugh that hurt, the kind that made you sound less like a human being and more like a kettle boiling over.
A moment earlier, he'd been sent flying by Wamuu's finishing move, the impact snapping the atmosphere tight like a whip. The fight had turned ugly in an instant - danger real enough that even the most carefree viewers felt their stomachs drop. And then Joseph did what Joseph always did: he took that fear, grabbed it by the collar, and turned it into a joke before it could swallow him.
"What - what kind of person is this?" Caesar's voice practically shook with rage, teeth grinding so hard it felt like he might crack them. "He's trying to run? I could almost forgive that, but he was going to ditch Mr. Speedwagon too? That guy's trash!"
On the surface, it looked exactly like cowardice - pure self-preservation, a man bailing out the moment the tide turned. But the truth was colder, sharper, and far more infuriating: Joseph was drawing Wamuu away. He was dragging the monster's attention like a hook through flesh, pulling him off Caesar and Speedwagon with the kind of instinct that didn't come from cleverness alone.
He might have been a loudmouth. He might have acted like the world was a stage built for his nonsense. But there was no denying what lived under the sarcasm and the swagger. Somewhere inside that chaos was the same sense of justice his grandfather had carried - stubborn, stubborn enough to show up even when it was inconvenient, even when it cost something.
And at the end of the episode, Joseph did what only he could do. He didn't overpower Wamuu. He didn't outmuscle him. He outplayed him - sliding a blade right into the enemy's pride, twisting until it stuck.
One month.
A duel to the death.
Wamuu, for all his terrifying strength, was honest in a way that made him predictable. He wore his pride like armor and treated his own word like law. Under Joseph's relentless needling - taunts disguised as jokes, jokes disguised as insults - Wamuu's composure slipped, then cracked, and finally he agreed.
Of course, agreeing didn't mean trusting.
To make sure Joseph didn't run, Wamuu forced a poisoned ring into his body - something like a vow made of venom, a countdown placed inside his chest. And just when you thought it couldn't get more absurd, Esidisi leaned in with a grin that made the whole thing feel like a punchline whispered at a funeral. Another ring - this one lodged near Joseph's throat. Another timer. Another threat.
"Seriously? A death wedding ring?" Joseph wheezed, hand at his chest as if he could feel time ticking between his ribs. Even with death hanging inches from his pulse, he still found room to be ridiculous. "Two of them? Isn't that, like… a felony? Bigamy?"
It shouldn't have been funny. It was. The tension snapped, and the audience snapped with it, laughter spilling out in helpless bursts - because that was the spell Joseph cast. He made terror feel survivable, even while the story made it clear: surviving would not be free.
That week, Battle Tendency kept doing what it had been doing since the first episode - refusing to slow down, refusing to let viewers breathe for long. Joseph and Caesar arrived in Venice, stepping into a city that felt like a stage built for drama, water and stone and history pressed together under a pale sky. There, they met their instructor, Lisa Lisa… and the woman playing her became an instant fixation. Elegant, untouchable, the kind of presence that made the camera look like it was trying to behave.
And then Joseph, because Joseph couldn't exist without ruining something sacred, found a way to turn even that into chaos.
"If I've gotta wait thirty minutes, then fine, I'll wait," he said with a gravity that lasted exactly one second. "But obviously the best place to wait is right outside Lisa Lisa's door. And while I'm there… you're telling me I'm not supposed to - "
There was a pause. A breath.
His eyes lit up like a man discovering fire.
"Nice!"
Viewers practically choked. The same man who'd just faced down ancient monsters and walked away with poison inside his body was now reduced to a shameless, grinning menace trying to peek through a keyhole. It was so brazen it looped back around into comedy, the kind of stupidity you couldn't help but respect on some cursed level.
The discussion online was loud. Battle Tendency was trending constantly. Clips were everywhere. Reaction videos, memes, debates about strategy, about power systems, about whether Joseph was a genius or simply too weird to lose.
And yet, none of it mattered.
Because something else dropped like a bomb and stole the entire internet in one clean hit.
Alex.
Bleach.
Season Two.
The Arrancar arc.
And to make it even more surreal, the open casting call was going to be held in the United States.
Suddenly, the feeds weren't full of Hamon theories anymore. They were full of panic, hype, and that particular kind of fandom possessiveness that felt like love until it started sounding like war. People who hadn't mentioned Battle Tendency once all week were suddenly awake, typing like their lives depended on it.
How could they not be?
Battle Tendency was earning praise - real praise - but Bleach wasn't just another series. It was one of those works that didn't belong to a niche. It belonged to everyone. Even people who didn't watch anime knew the name, knew the silhouettes, knew the soundtrack without knowing they knew it.
And Alex wasn't just "announcing a season." He was moving pieces on the board like he owned the entire game. He'd managed to pull in Rebeca Verne, too - the actress the public had been associating with that iconic heroine for so long that her name and the character's image had basically fused in the collective mind. The moment her involvement became public, the last scraps of restraint vanished.
Comment sections turned into battlefields.
Some people called Alex a snake, a heartbreaker, a menace.
Other people didn't even pretend to care, because they weren't thinking about morality. They were thinking about one thing: getting Bleach back.
And then, mixed in with all the screaming, came the conspiracies. Why the U.S.? Why make casting international? Was it a creative choice? A market move? A sponsor demand? Would they force in faces that didn't fit? Would investors meddle?
The fear had a familiar shape: Don't ruin this. Not this.
But even the skeptics couldn't fully deny it. Alex had a reputation, and not all of it was flattering - but when it came to the work, people trusted him in a way they didn't trust anyone else. He could be reckless in his personal life, sure. He could be messy. But on set? With a script in hand and a vision in his eyes? He didn't play.
One week later, Battle Tendency dropped its newest episode - and right at the end, it shifted the tone so hard it left a bruise.
Joseph and Caesar argued. Not the playful kind of bickering. The kind that came from two people staring at the same danger and seeing completely different truths. Joseph insisted the enemy's exposed hideout was bait, an open door meant to lure them into a trap. Caesar insisted the opportunity was too perfect to waste - that hesitation was just fear wearing a smarter mask.
Neither could convince the other.
And in the end, Caesar made the choice that always scares you when you see it: he walked into the lion's den alone.
The episode didn't rush past it, either. It reached backward, grabbed Caesar's past, and pulled it into the light - showing the loneliness behind the charm, the pain behind the smirk. He'd grown up believing his father had abandoned him and his siblings for another woman. The truth was crueler and kinder at once: his father had pulled away on purpose, trying to keep his family safe while he investigated the Stone Mask.
And when Caesar, as a child, nearly touched the wrong thing - nearly got swallowed by horror itself - his father had saved him without even recognizing him. A man risking his life for a boy whose name he didn't know. A man choosing his son, even from a distance.
Caesar finally understood what that distance had meant.
He swore revenge.
He swore he'd defeat the Pillar Men.
When the credits rolled, JOJO fans everywhere felt something sour bloom in their chest - an instinctive dread that came from years of stories teaching them the same lesson over and over again.
This was a flashback episode.
This was the kind of episode you gave a character right before you took them away.
All week, people talked about it with forced confidence and thin humor. They tried to joke it off. They tried to pretend they hadn't noticed the signs. But the affection for Caesar had grown too fast, too deep. He was the kind of "second lead" who didn't feel like a second lead at all - vain on the outside, loyal on the inside, the type who acted like he cared about nothing and then proved, over and over, that he cared about everything.
Surely Alex wouldn't kill him.
Surely.
Meanwhile, the Bleach: Arrancar arc announcement kept swallowing the air. And somewhere far away from fandom wars and trending tabs, a streaming executive stared at the numbers and felt his mood sink.
He'd bought the domestic exclusive rights to Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency. On paper, it looked smart - prestige titles, strong reviews, the kind of content that built a brand.
But prestige didn't pay the way hype did.
Battle Tendency was the kind of show people praised loudly and watched quietly. Critics loved it. Hardcore fans adored it. The ratings, though? The kind of numbers that made investors frown and ask uncomfortable questions.
He didn't care about art. Not really. He cared about traffic. He cared about subscriptions. He cared about the only language the industry actually spoke when the doors closed: money.
And now Alex was filming Bleach Season Two.
The timing felt like betrayal.
So we're fighting ourselves now? he thought bitterly. Taking the audience we already have and splitting them in half.
The next day, he called his media team into a meeting and, with the impatience of a man who expected problems to solve themselves, demanded to know what could be done to push JOJO's heat higher.
Someone muttered under their breath that it was JOJO, not "that Jojo whatever," but nobody was brave enough to say it too loud.
A marketing staffer - awkward, careful, and clearly someone who actually watched the show - tried to explain the truth: JOJO had always been a little too strange, a little too stylized, a little too niche to ever dominate mainstream conversation the way Bleach could. Hamon, no matter how creative, didn't have the endless toybox of powers that a Zanpakutō did. And style? Bleach had style baked into its bones.
Silence stretched.
Then someone offered a solution that sounded simple enough to be dangerous.
"What if Alex goes on a reality show?" they said. "He promotes JOJO, and at the same time he builds hype for Bleach Season Two. Two wins with one appearance."
The executive leaned back, eyes narrowing - not in disagreement, but in calculation. Reality shows were the fastest way to turn attention into currency. The most efficient machine the entertainment industry had ever built. Wash a name in exposure, watch the numbers climb. It worked on washed-up actors, on singers with one hit, on influencers who'd never created anything at all.
Alex, though?
Alex would break the meter.
"So which one of our shows is the hottest right now?" he asked.
The room hesitated for a heartbeat, then answered in near unison.
"The Good Life."
And just like that, the decision was made.
Kyoto Airport.
Alex was already on the move, already heading out for the U.S. casting call, when his phone lit up with that executive's number. He answered, listened, and his expression twisted into something that didn't quite look like annoyance and didn't quite look like amusement.
Because there was a saying people threw around like a joke, but everyone knew it carried teeth.
Whether the world was calm or chaotic…
The Good Life would decide.
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