APEX WORLD HEAVYweiGHT CHAMPION Finnegan Wakefield
"What narrative do you plan to weave this time around, Stark?
I’ve known you for far too many years to expect anything different. You are a creature of very monotonous habit, and how this match came about tracks with the past few years of your career to the very letter. Manipulative. Let’s for a moment entertain what you believe; that you now traverse the wrestling world with the ability to do whatever it is you want, whenever it is that you please – that you exist in this state of freedom that makes you a transcendent exception. That’s been a very common theme since I’ve come to APEX, having people believe themselves to have such freedoms, that they decide what’s inevitable because they see what they believe to be the bigger picture. But morality is a fucking cunt of a thing, isn’t it? How the definition of that bigger picture of yours changes to suit new circumstances – how it becomes more convenient to justify the means. Dimensional Warfare still lives fresh in my mind just as much as it lives as scars on my body. I don't forget, and I sure as fuck don't forgive. While time creates as much as the passage destroys, makes men more worthy as it does make them monsters; the only measurement that matters, in the end, is not the metric of time itself, but where we fit in that balance as the course moves on inconsequential. The bigger picture, what you believe to be freedom, I say all this to emphasize that what you believe means fuck-all to me. Once we stop entertaining this belief, the idea of a bigger picture is little more than justification to be a legacy manufacturer, something you’ve been for a very long time. And yet somehow it would seem people manage to find ways to trick themselves into being surprised – even by such predictable outcomes. It doesn’t particularly matter. Whoever decided to take me up on the open challenge was inconsequential; be it an APEX mainstay, some fly-in from another promotion, – dead, alive, or whatever SSW is on any given day of the week. Despite this déjà vu idiot notion that I am some pussy; I’ve never fallen short of being that fighting champion. But for you of all people to come to try your hand at dethroning me, it borders on predictable; never a matter of if you would, but a matter of when you’d try. Because I have the misfortune of knowing you, what you are, and what makes you tick. You're not that profound a science – you're little more than a failed attempt at being what Arata once was. You've preached of your greater ambitions, making yourself something that transcends realities, huffing your own fucking farts, and accumulating nothing in the process. That's why you have an issue with a guy like me; someone that doesn't need profound ambition for it to be something unrivaled – with all the rebel heart you despise.
I harken back to these words every so often, and given the sheer hypocrisy of the source, I can't help but find it utterly pathetic. It’s just oh-so-typically you. In how unapologetic and electively uneducated you are, how poor you project especially on the subject matter of me, who I am, and what you perceive me to be. While you are right about one thing; I can never be satisfied with my position, I reject any idea that there isn't that next step higher even when I'm at the pinnacle. It has never been about the attention. My modus operandi transcends the limitations of mere championships, accolades of any sort, even praise. This is how I live. This is why I draw breath, why blood flows through my veins. I fight because that’s how I chose to live. So I find it amusing that you claimed I did it for attention, when every action you take, every word comes across as a poorly-veiled cry for it. I haven’t been deaf to the goings-on in OWA since I “couldn’t hack it there” as you will undoubtedly paint it to be – I haven’t been deaf to how much you bring my name up at any opportunity to get in your passive-aggressive shots and what does it afford you in the end? An excuse to go back into hiding, wallowing – preaching your greater ambitions but never realizing them. It's ironic you call me a pussy when you speak my name only to inject snake-oil value into a point, yet not once have I found similar value in your name ever to weaponize it or even passively mutter it unless it’s addressing you directly. I find that to be awfully telling. It speaks to the fragility your ego has – to that deep-seated obsession. Something that drives you so far as to pass it down the line to the people that sit beneath your learning tree, to the point even NAMI felt compelled to label me weak for a loss against Darkane. I don’t fault her for carrying on such ignorant Starkisms; after all, you’ve always had your lips to the ear of the idiotic and easily manipulated. It’s how you keep that phantom of a legacy of yours on life support until fuckwit god complexes like Nathan Fiora or Arata Asakura drag you out of the obscurity you constantly phase into. It seems you delegate me to be another vessel to do the same.
Fortunately for you, I am not a lesser man. It would have taken a single word to bring what you believe to be your freedom spiraling down. You are no more free than any man, you abide by the same rules, never exceptions to the laws of reality. Any man can go with they please, say whatever it is they want to say, do whatever it is they want to do – free to act is not the same as being free from consequence. You were free to answer my open challenge, you're free to try and take the APEX World Championship from me – as you are equally free to fail like you have many times before. You have the freedom to proclaim me whatever you want; an idiot, a pussy, an abject failure – but no more free are you to label me than I am to further make the legacy you will leave behind is that of a fucking joke. One tired; trying to cling on to whatever relevancy it can now that it has no more coat tails to ride along. Not so much a wildcard, more a forgotten element – a phantom doomed to forever chase what he can never be. You chased Arata because he had the power you could never have. Fiora because he made it to that championship pantheon you have been denied many years. You chased Azumi because she gets the respect you can never have, chased Ravio and Jason Long because they have the years of potential that have been long-wasted on you. The likes of Darkane and Senn because they've ascended far past you, they're are considered an s-rank threat while you're perceived as something meeker, far deeper in the background, out of similar conversation. And now, you chase me because I am the epitome of everything you can't ever be. That's only personified in the platinum plate sitting on my shoulder, but it goes far deeper than that. I could see the cogs turning, in the back of my mind I can hear all the little ways you're thinking of getting an edge on me. You tried the direct approach before, all the smoke, mirrors, and even the interventions of Snoop Dogg didn't prevent me from lifting the Television Championship from you. Your freedom doesn't afford you a shortcut to the top, to the level I occupy, only a fast route to have reality bitchslap you right back down. But if you insist on being the only one from SSW that'll challenge me for this title so long as I hold it, I can only hope your return empty-handed doesn't cause the next schism that'll put them under for a fifth time. Though I will not hold them to conditions the fruits of your failure will bring. I refuse to allow you to poison that well and deny me greater challenges. I want a battalion of the best of them knocking at APEX's – MY DOOR – in an attempt to take what all these years of blood and perseverance has been for. But I urge them to head the warning that I make of you, that they will only follow suit, they'll return on a podium and draped with the SSW flag every single time.
Yours will not be so majestic – you won't be returned with flowers.
You'll be a burning effigy that demands they send Darkane next time."
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by MinaAizawa Thu Oct 13, 2022 3:46 am
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