Past Life Hero, Chapter 6

After he got off work, Max did exactly what he'd said he would and headed straight for the Jiu Jitsu dojo. Once he got there, Ethan was in the front, and so was another older-looking man who looked enough like him that Max assumed it was his brother.

"Oh, Chad, this is Max," said Ethan.

"Hi," said Max. And then they all shook hands and exchanged the necessary small talk before getting down to business. But Max was pleasantly surprised by how easy Chad was to deal with. It kind of seemed like the man wasn't really involved in the day-to-day of the dojo, even though it belonged to him. In fact, the longer Max talked to them, the more strongly that impression settled in his mind. He didn't know exactly what the arrangement was, but he assumed that maybe the two brothers divided up their efforts into the dojo with time or finances or something like that. He didn't care as long as they were willing to work with him.

In only half an hour, Max had a contract to work at the dojo, and he would need to give them thirty percent. And even though Chad had ensured that Max or one of his students getting injured wouldn't hurt the business, Max would still need to sign a waiver and get any of his students to do so every time he trained there.  It was practically underlined in flashing lights and neon highlights that he was not covered under the dojo's insurance.

That kind of sucked, but he was willing to deal with it. Last but not least, before he left the dojo, he had to sign his own waiver form and a quickly rigged-up contract that noted his new status as a contractor working in the dojo. It looked like something one of the brothers had pulled up on from the internet and changed some words on. Max wasn't sure how legal it actually was, but he wasn't planning on suing anybody anyway. So, as long as everybody was happy with the current state of affairs, he was too.

Max went home that day and glanced again at the bills on the table, but this time he had far less angst about it. After all, in the last two days, he not only secured himself an extra one thousand dollars, but he also found a new part-time job. And the part-time job might even end up being fun.

He ran that night, thinking about how he was going to get some new students, which was the remaining problem. It was a pretty serious problem too. He muttered out loud, "I mean, it's not like I can just put a bunch of flyers on walls back at the college." But then, suddenly, he stopped in the middle of his run, right underneath a street light, and face-palmed. "No way," he said out loud. "Maybe I actually can do exactly that.  Why not?"

Max finished his run, went back to his apartment, and used the last of his printer paper to make some basic flyers. He went into his bedroom and made a video on his phone that he put on the internet. The video was pretty simple: just him talking about his fraudulent earth background in martial arts, something actually honest and serious about his style, more about his philosophy as a martial arts trainer, and how he would take students regardless of their skill level, beginners or experts. He did a quick demonstration with a practice sword in his room to show the kinds of techniques that he planned to teach. It wasn't anything fancy at all–just straightforward and practical.

But then he looked at his flyers again and said, "Crap." His intention had been to put the video address on the flyer itself so people could look it up and watch it. But he'd forgotten to add it. Max went to his kitchen to scarf down a late-night hot dog and thought about the problem while he chewed. Then he face-palmed again. The solution was super simple. He went back to his printer, flipped all of the pages he'd already printed over to the other side, and printed a new flyer with the website address added. Now all he had to do was pay attention to which side he put up on walls.

“Poor people problems,” he said.  “Poor people solutions.”  Then he thought of the thousand dollars he still had from the bet at Imperial.  “Actually, maybe not so poor right now.  I dunno.  Whatever.  Still don’t wanna buy more paper right now.”

When all the prep work was finally done, he felt tension leave his body. Simple problems like this could be difficult for him to solve sometimes.  Even though he'd technically grown up with technology, his mindset could still be back on Albion. "Too bad I can't get rich just killing monsters in this world," he muttered out loud. He sighed and shook his head. In this world, the only monsters were human, and half the time, killing them wasn't worth the trouble.

With that cheery thought in mind, Max went to bed early.  He planned to get up early the next day and put his flyers around the nearby college campus before going to work. Max went to sleep and didn't dream at all.

The next morning, he did exactly what he planned to do: put up flyers and went to work. For a Hail Mary plan, he figured it wasn't too bad. But he wasn't expecting much in the way of results. Not really.

So when he got home and saw that he had twenty new emails asking about his classes, he was shocked to his toes.

***

The next week flew by, and Max continued to get more emails. Apparently, there had just been an action movie that came out or something with martial arts similar to the what Max had demonstrated.  Or something. That's all he could figure. All in all, he got over two hundred emails from interested people.

He asked some of them about why they’d contacted him, and it turned out that the flyers had gotten good word of mouth. After a few people had watched his videos, they'd actually shared the video amongst themselves. So, even though he only put up a handful of flyers on one day, the video just kept making its rounds. Max wondered if he'd gotten super lucky or maybe had some sort of latent talent for marketing… He very quickly humbled himself. It had to be luck. He definitely had talents, sure. And what he'd done to get customers was at least business adjacent, so he wasn't completely clueless, but there was no way he was some sort of social media master just out of the blue.

Max knew business, but his real talents were in breaking things.  Too bad he couldn’t just distill it and sell it somehow.  All the jobs that he could make the most money at on earth would get him killed or locked in a lab for dissection.

But at least this idea seemed to be planning out.  The new problem would be balancing his workload.

Luckily, he had plenty of time to think about how he was going to manage his part-time job working at the Jujitsu dojo, puzzling out what days he would be teaching. And it turned out he was able to find three blocks of time during the week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It was perfect.

Max chewed on a pencil as he looked at the days of the week he’d underlined in his notebook.  How flexible could he be with the tuition?

He decided that all of his students would have to pay him the day of their lesson or at the end of the month, whichever worked for them, and he was only going to take a certain number of students.  Maybe he could stage a test.  Like… see who showed up on one of the three days that Max had available. He would organize something, and it was up to them whether they would show or not.

No point worrying about potential student who didn’t have the same availability as he did, and who were gonna flake out.

After going through all of his emails and responses, he finally narrowed it down to ten people and by that first Friday, he gave them a time and a day for the very first class.  Max would be officially starting his new instruction on that next Monday, his day off.

Before Monday, Max continued to exercise and work out every day. He got muscle growth and definition in no time flat. With the kind of exercise he was doing, he was never going to have really visible, obvious muscles, but he wasn't going for that. Max just needed to look the part of a martial artist. One side benefit of working out was that his already significant strength just continued to rise.

The mana in his body didn’t have to do as much heavy lifting when his body itself was helping.

On Sunday night, the day before his new class, Max looked for Olympic track records online.  Then he went out long after dark when nobody was around.  He checked, double checked, and when he was really satisfied, lowered himself, preparing to sprint.

Then he really pushed himself for the first time on Earth, running as fast as he could. He timed it. Sure enough, he had officially reached superhuman levels of physicality. He’d beaten the records he'd looked up.

Compared to his Abilities on Albion, it wasn’t much, but he was actually proud of himself for staying positive, moving forward. Improving himself.  Now he just needed to make sure he didn’t go too far overboard and let others see.  Being able to run 25 miles per hour was not something normal people did without even all that much strain.

I’m going to be a teacher now, he thought.  Kinda cool.

For once, he was actually looking forward to the next day.