One-Punch Metrics

Screenplay draft

Akira Mori stands in the smoking crater where a kaiju called the Like-Leviathan just dissolved, his fist still steaming. He yanks the phone from the pouch on his hero suit and refreshes the upload. Twelve views. The built-in chest cam has already tagged the clip #SClassOneShot and pushed it to the agency feed. Nothing. He kicks a chunk of scaled concrete and the number ticks to thirteen. A salaryman across the street films him on a separate phone, but the angle is bad and the man walks away without liking.

Inside the Shinjuku tower the Hero Association calls a floor meeting. Mr. Tanaka stands at the head of the table with the quarterly spreadsheet projected behind him. Columns track kaiju neutralized, average view duration, and “dramatic tension minutes.” Tanaka points at Akira’s row. “Borderline ero or staged rival friction by next cycle or your retainer drops to C-class rates.” Kato, two seats down, nods without looking up from his own phone. His latest clip already sits at 2.4 million, the slow-motion dust clearing exactly when the sun hits his jawline.

Akira spends the next week in Akihabara trying to obey. He lets a smaller kaiju chew on an overpass while he adjusts the zipper on his suit for the chest cam. The resulting footage shows three seconds of torso before the one-punch lands. Views reach four hundred. Tanaka texts him a thumbs-down emoji and a demand for “at least one rival confrontation.” Akira calls Kato and suggests they both show up to the same alert in Shibuya. Kato answers that his calendar is already optimized and hangs up.

The reversal hits on a Tuesday in Roppongi. A new kaiju, the Share-Shark, surfaces under the expressway. Akira arrives first and lands the clean kill, but Kato’s drone is already circling. The published clip opens on Kato’s arrival pose, cuts Akira’s punch to a three-second reaction shot, and ends on Kato walking away while civilians cheer. The agency feed credits Kato with the neutralization. Akira’s row on the spreadsheet turns red. That night he sits in his apartment above a ramen shop, scrolling through Kato’s older uploads. Every frame is perfectly lit. Every monster dies at the precise second the background music swells. He opens the raw files from his own suit and finds the timestamps altered by six minutes.

The dark stretch lasts four days. Akira stops answering dispatch calls. He watches his retainer number drop in real time on the internal portal. Tanaka leaves a voicemail offering a buyout if Akira agrees to a farewell “ero tribute” clip filmed at the agency gym. On the fifth morning Akira takes the train to the monitoring center in Odaiba and pulls the archived drone logs for every Kato-attributed kaiju since March. The pattern is simple: Kato’s private drone arrives twelve minutes before the public alert is issued.

Akira waits for the next Share-Shark ping. When it appears near Tokyo Station he does not punch immediately. He stands on the platform roof and lets the creature rampage for ninety seconds while he records the empty skyline behind it. The clip uploads with no hero visible. Thirty seconds later Kato’s drone arrives and Kato appears on the feed, fist raised. Akira steps into frame from the side, stops the punch mid-air, and holds the monster still long enough for the chest cam to capture Kato’s drone feed in the reflection of a shop window. The numbers on the agency spreadsheet flicker and then freeze. Kato’s row goes black.

The final image is Akira in the empty monitoring room at 3 a.m., the spreadsheet still projected, every cell now showing the same number: one view. His own phone lies face-up on the console, the chest cam still recording the blank screen.