CHAPTER 42

"Have you ever read Sun Tzu's Art of War?" Marcos asked. Robby shook his head.

"Can't say I have." He replied. Marcos nodded.

"Right. Well, I have. It's one of my favorite books. I read it many times growing up. And you know what my favourite quote in the whole book is? Se você conhece o inimigo e conhece a si mesmo, não precisa temer o resultado de cem batalhas. Se você se conhece mas não conhece o inimigo, para cada vitória ganha sofrerá também uma derrota. Se você não conhece nem o inimigo nem a si mesmo, perderá todas as batalhas."

Robby raised an eyebrow expectantly and Marcos nodded.

"Rough translation of the quote is: if you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but don't know the enemy, for every victory you gain you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will lose every battle."

"Interesting." Robby replied. "But I don't get it. What does that have to do with me?"

"It means that after that day you came to our dojos and we made the bet for the tournament, I decided to do my due diligence about you. I looked for everything I could find about you. Spoke to all of the Cobra Kais who you trained with. Spoke to your former sensei. I learned all about you, about your life, about your relationships with those around you. Built a whole internal fact file about you. I 'knew' the enemy, just like Sun Tzu said."

"Is there a point to this? Other than sounding really creepy?" Robby asked. Marcos slowly nodded.

"Yeah. Do you know what I found out after doing all of this?" Marcos said.

"What?"

"I found out that you have some really shitty people around you. The people you call friends, you call a sensei, you call a father…"

"Hey!" Robby snapped. Who did he think he was, disrespecting all of the people Robby held most near? Marcos raised his hands in surrender.

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to offend. I just want to provide my insight on a situation which, to be fair, I wasn't there for the vast majority of. You're more than welcome to call me crazy and ignore everything I say. But when I looked at your relationships with all of these people, I couldn't help but notice that it just looks like you're being used by everyone around you, Robby."

"That is not true." Robby shot back. Marcos shrugged.

"Let's go back to the beginning. You were invited to train with Mr. Larusso. From what I've heard, training you helped him as much as it helped you. But when he found out that you were Johnny Lawrence's son, you were no longer the same help to him that you used to be, and then it didn't matter how much he was helping you. He just kicked you to the kerb."

"He made a mistake. People do that." Robby snapped. Marcos nodded.

"Sure, but this wasn't an isolated incident, was it?" He commented. "Then came his daughter, Samantha Larusso. Now, you cannot sit here and tell me that she wasn't using you to make Miguel jealous. And when that plan worked and he made a move back to her, she completely forgot about you."

"How do you know all of this?" Robby demanded. Marcos shrugged.

"Like I said. I've done my research. You'd be amazed how many flies there are on the wall all around. People who are there for everything, but remain in the background. Mitch, Kenny, Kyler, Shawn, Sensei Kreese" He remarked. "But that's besides the point. I want to go back to what happened with Sam Larusso, what happened in the school over a year ago. Now I've read the Valley papers, and they all describe you as the psycho that kicked Miguel Diaz over the railing. That was how you were portrayed after the fight, wasn't it? That's how you were treated by all of the people you used to love. But that wasn't what actually happened, was it? It took just 1 youtube search to tell me that. I watched the replay of the fight taken from a student's phone, and imagine my shock when I saw that it was you who was trying to stop the fight, not start it. Miguel Diaz started it. He continued to attack you as you tried to end Sam and Tory's fight. He was even about to break your arm, after already having seriously damaged your shoulder in last year's tournament."

Robby said absolutely nothing, but the slightly pale look on his face implied that Marcos was right on the money with everything he said.

"Then the kick happened, right? A complete accident. A complete misunderstanding. And just like that, you're painted the villain and pushed aside by everyone. Sam Larusso immediately turned her back on you and didn't even call when you were locked up, let alone visit, even though it was you who was protecting her from Tory. She didn't have the courtesy to break up with you, before she was done using you and she moved back to Diaz. None of your supposed friends in Miyagi-Do, who spent the entire summer protecting from Cobra Kai, visited you or even called you either. From what I've heard from Shawn, even your own father automatically blamed you for what happened. He didn't do what family is supposed to do and trust each other. He didn't even do the incredibly easy thing and do what I did: find the fight replay on youtube and see what happened. He just automatically painted you as the bad guy."

Robby's face was no longer pale, but instead was quickly turning dark crimson in anger.

"Stop." He murmured menacingly. But Marcos wasn't about to stop. Not now.

"Then you got out of juvie. And you see your father and Mr. Larusso arguing, once again caring more about their rivalry than about you. Did either of them even give you so much as a 'congratulations on getting an early release'? Or were they too busy arguing with each other to even notice or care?"

As Robby didn't respond, Marcos nodded.

"Thought so." He replied. "So you're out of juvie, after having taken blame for the school fight that you didn't even start. Just you and Tory Nichols were charged for it. Not Miguel Diaz, who started the fight with you. Not Eli Moskowitz who escalated the whole thing into an all-out brawl. Just you and Tory Nichols. Anyways, you go back to the Miyagi-Do dojo and see your girlfriend making out with her ex, the boy who started the fight that got you locked up in the first place. Did she even dump your ass first? Did she even apologize for making out with him at the party, or at the dojo that night? No. She turned you into the villain once again, completely turning her back on you. She was done with using you, so there was no reason to keep you around any longer."

"That's enough." Robby demanded, but with a lot less vehemence than before. Against his wishes, Marcos' words were indeed provoking deep thought within him.

"So then you joined Cobra Kai. Fair play, that was actually a very patient move. I probably would've done a lot worse. But that's neither here nor there. You join Cobra Kai, and if I have this right, Sam then spoke to you, right? Now that she was in a more stable place with Miguel, with Miyagi-Do, with her rivalry with Tory, surely now she must've remembered to apologize for what she's done to you, right? Surely. Oh wait… she didn't, did she? She instead talked about how you returning to Miyagi-Do would bring the team together. I call bullshit on that, by the way. I wasn't there obviously, so you could probably answer this better than me, but how could you returning possibly bring the team together? You had already been vilified by every single member of the dojo. Coming back would only increase the war. But who cares about that? It was in your own best interests to join Cobra Kai, so that's exactly what you did. You didn't go out of your way to start ambushes or anything, but instead kept yourself to yourself, and even started protecting a kid who was being bullied by guess who? Miyagi-Do. You try to talk to your dad to make him tell the Miyagi-Dos to stop, but what does he do? Turns the blame on you. Tells you that it's you who's become aggressive with Cobra Kai. The aggression doesn't come from those who have been bullying Kenny. God forbid him, or any of them, actually take responsibility for their dojo's actions, and not just use you as a scapegoat."

"I wasn't a scapegoat." Robby stated, though he sounded more sure than he felt. He wasn't a scapegoat, was he? He thought to himself silently. Marcos shrugged.

"Whatever you say, Robby." He responded. "Anyways, let's skip ahead a little. Past the part where Sam Larusso once again tries to blame you for breaking her heart, when it was her who shoved you aside, not the other way around. Let's move to when you return to Miyagi-Do. Now, I'm not even going to ask the question about whether the Miyagi-Dos apologized for the shit they did to you from the moment of the school fight to the moment you returned to the dojo, because I already know the answer. But you had to apologize, didn't you? For joining Cobra Kai. It didn't matter that you had been abandoned by everyone around you in the leadup to making that move. It didn't matter that Eli, Miguel, Demetri, Chris, Bert, Nate and every single Miyagi-Do but Samantha Larusso fought in Cobra Kai at one time or another. You were just one person of a whole list, but were any of them vilified in the way you were? Were any of them treated like the enemy for as long as you were, even after you had returned to Miyagi-Do?"

"Stop it." Robby snapped.

"Did you even want to come here today?" Marcos asked. "Because I'll tell you honestly… I didn't. I think this whole thing is stupid. I just want to go to Japan, win my trophy and get out of there. All of this on the side serves no purpose but to distract me from training. And I can only imagine it's similar for you."

Once again, dead silence from Robby.

"Look, the reason I say all of this to you is because we would genuinely love to have you back at Cobra Kai. I would love to work with you, train with you. I hope you don't mind if I say this but we'd be an unstoppable team. I guarantee that you'd be more valued here than you would be there. We could really use someone like you."

"A male fighter? You already have one." Robby pointed out.

"A leader." Marcos replied. "I might be able to hold my own in a fight, but I do not have an ounce of the leadership you do. Look at what we spent the day doing. You wandered around the forest, looking after your team, making sure none of your teammates got hurt. While I just lay here on this hill, tanning myself and waiting for a couple of people to come my way. That's the difference between you and I. You can always teach someone the ability to fight. But the genuine love and blind support you have for your teammates… you can't teach that. That's ingrained in you, Robby, and it's what makes you truly special. Too bad your teammates at Miyagi-Do can't appreciate it."

It had been a long speech from Marcos, and when he finally finished speaking, it left Robby deep in thought. Marcos knew that what he had said managed to pierce through Robby's resistance. However, Robby didn't allow himself to ponder them for that long. A part of him assumed this was a ploy to get into his head before their inevitable fight, so he quickly shoved Marcos' words to the back of his mind and he stood up.

"Enough talk." was all Robby said, and Marcos understood the message immediately, rolling to his feet too. It was time to fight…