Author's Note: After seeing episode twenty-three, I couldn't resist. It seemed like such a good idea, though, that I guess it's no surprise I wasn't the first to think of it – my apologies to Defectron, who seems to have already written something along these lines. Probably my version will turn out nothing like his/hers. In any case, no plagiarism of him/her and his/her work is intended.

Prologue

North of the city of Kobe, the hills rise in a lazy progression toward serenity, toward wild cliffs and streams like the Japan of ancient scrolls. Some peace can still be found here, even with the dense metropolis in sight – and peace was what Watanabe wanted, after a year of adventures which had been as dangerous as they were absurd. For twenty-five years, he had bemoaned his dull and undistinguished life, but now he longed for nothing more than to be dull and undistinguished. To work from eight to five and to tend his sunflowers, and to protect the fragile health of his recent bride – these were all the pleasures needed to transform the small, Japanese-style house on the side of the hill into a fabled paradise.

Watanabe served as assistant principal at Yama vocational high school, an ideal post because it required no skills beyond the scope of wearing a tie and nodding whenever the principal spoke. The principal was an elderly, forgetful man who regarded Watanabe, along with every other young man he ever happened to set eyes on, as a son. He always sought to impart his wisdom to the younger generation, and that he had no wisdom to impart never seemed to dim his zeal. Watanabe had no fonder wish than to sit in his dusty, sunlight office in the afternoon, watching the motes of dust float like angel's dandruff by the window, listening to the lifeless, wandering drone of his superior's voice.

Watanabe's wife had once been a prominent official in an organization that was now more powerful than ever before, but she also seemed to prefer the tranquility of her current life to any benefits of power. The ideological organization ACROSS now ruled much of northern Japan, and had set its sights on the Kansai region, but Ayasugi-san (whose surname Watanabe had never learned) seemed uninterested. She had fallen out with the leader of ACROSS, she had explained, over his treatment of a coworker. To Watanabe, there seemed many more pressing reasons to have abandoned ACROSS – brainwashing, arms-mongering and despotism not least among them – but he would settle for whatever circumstances had delivered his beloved to him, and he was touched that she should be so touched by such a minor incident. It was in her nature, he thought. She was a sensitive, kind and infinitely gentle person, while he was crude and ordinary and almost certainly did not deserve her; but at night, lying beside her with a tissue ready to stem the flow of blood from her fragile lips, his happiness was such that it never failed to overwhelm his doubt and fear.

Not long after they had retired to the house, Ayasugi-san had happily conceived. Her morning-sickness was cataclysmic and more than once, both she and her unborn child lingered long on death's door, but the next year she gave birth to a lively and healthy girl. During the birth, as Watanabe waited in the hall, a grave-faced nurse gently broke the news that his wife had passed away. Watanabe only smiled, and she assumed that he had been driven mad by grief; but within an hour, Ayasugi-san had recovered completely, and informed him, after wiping a persistent trail of blood away from her mouth, that she wished to name the child Excel Excel Watanabe in honor of an old acquaintance. It was an odd name for a girl, thought Watanabe, but he was prepared to yield to her in anything. The doctors had all fled screaming from the room when she returned to life, and they were able to share a quiet, happy moment in each other's company, with the newborn baby.

The four-room house with its sliding paper doors, its old-fashioned tiled roof and its miniature koi pond never knew a moment's distress until the day when, more than fours years after the 'incident' of ACROSS's ascension and Ayasugi-san's departure from its ranks, it heard the fretful creak of a bicycle climbing the mountain path.

Hyatt stood at the kitchen sink, slicing a cucumber into slivers for her daughter's afternoon snack. The curtains fluttered. She watched the sun, half-hidden behind the curve of the mountain, and listened to the distant creak of the bicycle.

Now who could be visiting?—Watanabe's friends, who had somehow found him in Kobe even though he had never given them his address, always dropped by in an executive limousine in their capacity as government officials. Watanbe's old boss, the new chief of the Japanese resistance to ACROSS's forces, favored a helicopter. They did not receive a newspaper. Who could it possibly be?

Cheered and excited by the mystery, Hyatt dried her hands and removed her apron, brushed the front of her dress, and waited for the doorbell.

"What pierced my breast was not the bullet, but his rejection. What was torn apart was not my body, but my soul."

—Excel Excel

"There is a something terrible and past all cure, when quarrels arise 'twixt those who are near and dear."

—Euripides, Medea

"I, Koshi Rikdo, hereby give my permission to turn this episode of Excel Saga into a tribute to a popular American film!" (1)

Incanto presents

a La Petit Band production:

Death Rides a Bicycle (Shi wa Jidensha o Notte)

Or: Kill Il

(Alright, everyone all together now…)

I was five and he was six, we rode on horses made of sticks;

He wore black and I wore white, he would always win the fight…

Starring:

Excel Excel as Beatrix Kiddo

Ilpalazzo-sama as Bill

Bang Bang: he shot me down;

Bang Bang: I hit the ground;

Hyatt,

Key

and Cosette Sara

as The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad

Bang Bang: that awful sound;

Bang Bang…

Nabeshin as Pai Mei

The Mohawk Brothers as themselves

and Menchi

…My ba-aby shot me down.

Excel's preview: "Can you taste it? That's the exquisite, bitter tang of revenge, a dish best served cold over lots and lots of ice…or is that tuna belly? Anyway, if you leave it out in the sun too long, it's bound to spoil! But when it comes to revenge, my appetite is whetted, so be sure to keep tuning in and watch me bump off one by one everyone who stands in the path of me and my delicious, savory, mouth-watering revenge! Who will be the first to fall! Could it be Hatchan, who was clearly set up for it in this short introductory chapter? Only time will tell! The suspense is almost too much to bear!—Next time on Death Rides a Bicycle: "About Square." What about squares? I don't know, even though I read the script, so be sure to tune in next week and find out!"

(1) Koshi Rikdo may not have actually said this. All elements and aspects of Excel Saga belong to either Rikdo or Shinichi Watanabe; all elements and aspects of Kill Bill belong to whoever Quentin Tarantino 'borrowed' them from.