Prologue

Ryoichi was sweating. His car shuddered as it ran over the bumps, bouncing up to the air for a fraction of a second before landing, accompanied by small cloud of sparks as the bottom scraped the tarmac. He floored the throttle again, and his RX-8's rear squatted a bit as it did it's best to deliver the power to the road.

"How in the hell can that ancient junkpile keep up with me?!" He thought, glancing at his rearview mirror, noticing that the headlights of the car that was chasing him had actually creeped closer, despite of his flawless drift through that slow chicane. He could hear the weird sound of his chasers engine, jet engine-like whine followed by more familiar whistle and hiss of turbocharger. He looked forwards, and sighed from relief. "Finally, uphill section starts.. now I'll show that kid who is who!"
With a grim smile, Ryoichi kept his foot down despite the strained howl of his naturally aspirated engine. He knew that his car could not lose to that ridiculous econobox on uphill section. He looked to his mirror once more, and his grin faded. "Wha-?! It can't be!" His opponent was almost scraping his bumper with his own, keeping up with a car that had rolled from factory a quarter of a century earlier than Ryoichi's.

The short uphill section ended, and downhill took over. Ryoichi grit his teeths, squeezing his steering wheel hard as he did his best to keep ahead. "This is ridiculous! I will not be humiliated by that piece of crap!"
Despite his best efforts, he lost ground at every entrance. Finally, the pressure was too much for Ryoichi, and he entered the corner bit too fast, exceeding the limits of his badly worn tires. "Oh shit, the tires don't respond!" Rear started to slide wider than he had wanted it to, and he had to ease off the throttle slightly. That was the last nail to Ryoichi's race, and snap-back caused him to swerve off the road and into the ditch as his menacing opponent's car went by.

"FUCK!" Ryoichi yelled from frustration, pounding the steering wheel with his fist as he watched the opponents rearlights vanished behind the corner.

Ryuu wiped off some sweat while calming down. He still wasn't used to the sudden surge of power when he used the Boost Scramble. He slowed down, glancing at the gauges. Everything was within normal limits and he sighed from relief, before turning his car around and returning to his opponents wrecked car to check if he was hurt.

Chapter 1: The journey begins..

Ryuu was tired but happy. The race had gone well, and his opponent got mere bruises in the crash. After few hours of sleep, he waked up as his phone rang. It was Akira.

"Morning, Ryuu. Sorry that I waked you up, but I needed to know if the upgrades worked as we planned." Ryuu yawned and groaned a bit before answering. "Yeah, they worked like dream. Only trouble I had was trying to keep the rear end of the car still while using the boost scramble. I guess we need to.. (yawn) .. soften the rear dampers a bit."

Ryuu could almost see his friend nodding his head eagerly. Despite being more interested of electronic gadgets, Akira knew pretty much about suspension and other stuff about cars, after all, his father had been a race driver few years back. "I agree. What about the drifts? Were they easy to control?"

Ryuu grunted as he walked to his kitchen, before replying. "As easy as they just can be in a car with such short wheelbase. But the car is more and more oriented towards grip, so it's basically useless to drift it when it can go just as fast with grip. Zero countersteer drifts are the ones that happen almost without any input from me, which is just perfect." Ryuu did put some coffee coming, yawning again. "You know, I've been saving money for a rather special engine that I could use in Wangan runs. With new front bumper and better diffuser kit under the car I'm pretty sure that I could keep up with those nutjobs out there."

There was a short silence, before Akira answered. "I see.. well, you got me interested. What kind of engine is it if I may ask?" Ryuu chuckled. "It's a secret, but I assure you that it'll be phenomenal. In drag use some tuners have pulled out over 1000bhp from it, but I think that approximately 850bhp will be more than enough for my needs. The transmission and almost whole drivetrain has to be replaced with stronger one etc.. But we'll speak about it later."

After finishing the call, Ryuu ate some breakfast, dressed up and walked into his garage. His car, Midnight Dragon was sitting in there. He touched the hood, that was still warm after the race. Ryuu could already see how much the new front spoiler would change the look. He wondered if he should put the car on diet, but he abandoned that idea soon. His car already had excellent power to weight ratio, and with the new engine he would be pretty close to F1 territory.

After few moments of lazy pondering, he opened the garage door and drove his car out. Supercharger's whirr covered other noises pretty well as he revved the engine, and as usual, neighborhoods kids came running to him, begging for a ride and asking same questions again and again.

Some other day he would had been patient and given the kids a short ride etc, but now he had an appointment at the bodyshop that had the task of creating him a new front bumper and rearwing with adjustable downforce. The kids were disappointed, but that was fixed with a show-style exit that included loads of wheelspin.

Bit later...

Ryuu was in the shop discussing with his friend, Arata. Arata, the designer of the bumper had shown him some sketches and glass-fiber mold that was still quite un-detailed. Ryuu had given him some more instructions about the shapes and details that would direct the airflow more efficiently.

He was really pleased with the adjustable carbonfiber part that was going to create the downforce. His car would look and sound dramatically different on the notorious Wangan runs, and he was quite sure that he'd create quite a lot of stir in those petrolheads.

After some discussion with Arata, Ryuu left and headed to mountains. He already knew that he wasn't even near of the top Touge drivers of the area, but he was advancing towards them quite swiftly. He had heard that some of them had started looking over their shoulders, but Ryuu was still quite skeptical about that rumor.

He was driving along the road that he had raced last night, seeing the black tire marks on the road. He could tell which were his and which had belonged to the crashed RX-8. "He had way too stiff and low suspension.." Ryuu said to himself, smiling a bit.

He pulled over at the crash site and stepped out of his car, walking to the spot where the RX-8 had stopped. There was chips of paint and pieces of plastic and glass. Then he walked to the spot where the RX-8 had started skidding uncontrollably. "He pushed too hard and wore out his tires.." Ryuu shook his head. Luckily Ryoichi had understood that the crash was his own fault.

Ryuu was just sitting into the Starlet when he heard screech of tires and deep rumble of exhaust. He looked over his shoulder and saw a blue R32 GT-R. "Ryuu, you old scoundrel! Returning to the scene of victory to bathe in the memories?" The driver of the R32 grinned, and Ryuu laughed.

"Hi Daichi. I see that you've heard of last night events.." Daichi nodded and grinned. "Ryoichi won't underestimate KP60's anymore, that's for sure. But, that's not the thing I'm here to talk about."

Daichi got serious. "Ryuu, have you heard of Three Katana's?" Three Katana's was a team that was competing about the lead of local areas touge drivers with few other well known teams.

"TK? Yeah.. two S2000's and NSX Type R, right?" Daichi nodded and told Ryuu that the leader of TK was going to challenge him, since he had defeated Ryoichi, the last lone wolf outside of the top five teams.

"What? They're going to challenge me? Damn.. I never realized that I've got that far.."

Daichi patted Ryuu's shoulder. "Well, you've been too busy building up that doghouse of yours and beating other drivers with it. You've actually built a small hype around yourself." Ryuu stared him, still shocked from the news. "Are you gonna accept the challenge?" Ryuu sighed, relaxing a bit. " Like I'd have a choice. Thanks for the heads up, Daichi. Maybe if you'd concentrate on your outdated Playstation car instead of hunting gossips, you'd be on my place." Daichi laughed. "Maybe. But I'll let you go now.. 'outdated playstation car'.. Man, I'm gonna get you for that one sooner or later." Ryuu grinned, sitting into his car and sped off, towards the exciting future.

to be continued...