Story: Dojikko-Ken

Three girls were on their way home from school. One was skipping, happy, carefree, while two others stalked closely behind her with a more melancholy air.

Then out of nowhere - more specifically a tree branch - a boy wearing running gear leaped out while yelling "Akane Tendo! Go out with me!" at the top of his lungs.

"Whoopsie doopsie, I made an oopsie!"

That was said by the girl in the lead, whom the boy was specifically diving towards, when she tripped over seemingly nothing at all. Her foot went up into the air, causing her shoe to fly off upwards, and her rucksack to swing in a similar direction. The shoe caught the boy under the chin, making him an enemy of his own momentum, and making him land on his back next to and behind his target.

"Akane..." one of the other girls sighed.

"No, ignore him!" said one of ten other boys to appear, all in a variety of sporting equipment, charging en masse towards her. "Date me!" they all cried in unison.

"Akane!" the other girl rubbed her forehead.

Suddenly she snapped back up to standing straight. "Did someone say my name?" she coyly asked - and her bag finished its arc, travelling down in time to strike the first boy as he was sitting back up, and sending him flying off towards the other ten for the perfect, accidental, clumsy and cute strike. Eleven boys down in two simple moves.

Oh, yeah. She was really into this now. Her martial arts skills were improving by leaps and bounds. She had plenty of sparring partners to practise on. And it was fun! Discovering this weird and esoteric martial art was the best thing to happen to Akane in years!

"Akane, are you feeling alright?" Yuka asked all of a sudden.

She blinked at the unexpected question from her friend and turned around, putting on her best smile. "Of course I am," she said, cutely rapping the top of her head with her fist and sticking out her tongue. "I caught myself before I tripped! Not even a scratch."

"That's not what we mean," Sayuri sighed. "You've taken being turned down for the martial arts club pretty hard, and, well..."

"You've not been behaving like yourself recently," Yuka reluctantly finished. "All clumsy and oblivious! It's not like you at all!"

"When Kuno made that announcement this morning, we expected you to blow your top!" Sayuri said, stepping forward to place her hand gently on Akane's shoulder. "Now all the boys in school are going to try to beat you up in order to date you! That doesn't make you mad?"

"Oh, he was being a little stupid is -"

"You smiled! You want things like <i>this</i> to keep on happening? You won't be this lucky every day! One of them is going to get a lucky hit in, and then - And then something terrible will happen!"

"Do you want to talk about it? We're here for you, so just let it off your chest."

A great weight of guilt settled upon Akane's heart. She had been so caught up in mastering this new form of martial arts that - that her friends had gotten the completely wrong idea. Look at them. Yuka. Sayuri. Her emotional support. A pair of girls that could put up with the weird things that her family sometimes had to deal with, but couldn't bear the thought that something was wrong with their friend.

That guilt was more effective than any punch of kick. Akane stepped forward, took her friends by the hand and guided them off towards her house. "Come with me," she said, a touch bleary eyed. "There's something I want to show you."
<hr>

Well, that didn't go as planned. Instead of putting some snotty, pseudo-clumsy, uncute fool in her place, Mariko was the one made to look like the fool. Now here she was, sitting in front of her mirror while a comically oversized ice pack was strapped to the top of her head. So embarrassing! So humiliating!

"Akane Tendo," she growled, absently reaching out to twirl a pen between her fingers with perfect precision. "How dare you B-E-A-T me twice now? How dare you pretend like it was no big thing, while smiling innocently and, like, carefree and stuff? Next time we meet, you're going D-O-W-N! Mariko, Mariko, you're the chick, Akane's butt will soon be kicked!"

The cheerleader rose, wobbling, to her feet and threw open her bright pink wardrobe. One might expect it to contain a series of adorable girl clothes, floral dresses, bright colours and so forth. Instead, what swung down was something a little bit... Different.

To understand what it was first required a basic and core understanding of what exactly martial arts cheerleading was, and what made it such a deadly dangerous thing to try to fight under normal conditions. To put it simply: Martial arts cheerleading was the fighting style designed to push the one you were cheering on to victory at any cost. It could be a soccer team, a boxer, a gymnast, a racer or any manner of sport you can think of. All that mattered was that your cheered one won, and all others fell before them.

This requires something rather unique, when you really step back to think about it. In order to be a truly effective martial arts cheerleader, it is absolutely necessary to understand the rules, tactics, psychology and - well, everything about every sport.

Every. Single. Sport. In the world. Consider that. Consider the dedication to the craft this requires. Consider the mentality, the obsession and the drive to win that a true master of this, perhaps the most difficult to learn martial arts ever developed has to, <i>has to</i> have.

Which is why Mariko's pretty, pink, stereotypically girly wardrobe was stuffed to the brim with sporting equipment. It was as if someone had found a sports-obsessed boy's room and then condensed it into the corner of a room belonging to the girliest girl to rock a cheerleader uniform. The contrast is, shall we say, a striking one.

"But I've been, like, too careless and stuff," Mariko said. She stuck a stick of gum in her mouth and started chewing... And just like that her body language transformed instantly. Gone, the feminine cheerleader. Enter, the very image of a tomboy complete with a baseball being tossed between her hands. "Someone oughta teach her a thing or two 'bout who the cutest chick is 'round these parts. 'Cept how do I go about doing that when she's pretending to be so damned cute and innocent?"

A thorny question indeed, and bouncing this ball between her hands and pacing her room while chewing gum always helped her think this sort of thing through. Even though she didn't much care for the answer. It seemed to her that her problem was, she'd done the opposite of what a martial arts cheerleader ought to do:

She'd run right at her opponent without knowing the rules of the game.

"In that case..." Mariko said, stopping to blow a bubble, put down her ball and retrieve her large pompoms from beside her bed. Each one of them was bigger than her head, which suited her purposes just fine and well.

"Before our martial arts cheerleading contest next week, Akane Tendo! I'll just have to learn your rules so they can be broken! I'll just have to arrange for a little friendly competition... And I know exactly what school will do the job!" Mariko broke out into a pseudo-cheerleading chant, waving her pompoms around to and fro, watching herself in the mirror to pump herself up. "D is for Defeat! I is for Isn't! E is for Enough!"

1. Akane explains the concept of Dojikko-Ken to her friends... and gains two new disciples in the weird martial art!
2. Mariko sets up a fight between Akane and someone else.
3. Tatewaki Kuno makes plans to date Akane Tendo!
4. Nabiki is starting to get suspicious.
5. Something else