In a relatively absent dojo stood two anthropomorphic animals, Jinu, and Anthro, standing face to face on a large mat with a small-sized square painted in the middle.

“Do you mind if I ask a question or two?” Anthro asked.

As usual, Jinu would shrug without an expression change. “Of course.” He answered, as a buzzer sounded, signaling for them to begin. Instead of the usual grappling that would take place in this mod, they instead slowly circled each other as Anthro was thinking.

“What do you consider fun when you are around here?” He’d ask.

“Hm.” Jinu would glance towards the ground, making sure he didn’t step outside of the square as he’d say, “Well, I wouldn’t say I exactly have fun just fighting. I don’t really enjoy beating some new guys up 15 times in a row, or winning a hard fought match. It’s like just going through the motions. But if something cool happens, or something funny it makes it much better to stick around.”

Anthro nodded slowly, taking a single step back to dodge a roundhouse kick from Jinu. It had some degree of pace behind it, but it was easy to see coming from far away.

“If I asked you the same question, what would your answer be?” Jinu decided to ask, as they both went back to slowly circling each other, clearly not taking this session seriously, as always.

“Nothing, really.” Anthro answered, not having to think much about it.

“So, the entire time you climbed to Rank 1 in Aikido, you never had fun doing so?” Jinu said, attempting to calf kick Anthro’s lead leg, who would in turn simply just bring his leg up and over it due to Jinu not putting that much effort into the kick.

“Getting Rank 1 in Aikido is pretty easy; it is not as hard as you think.” Anthro would plant both of his feet before launching a thrust kick, of course with not much power behind it as Jinu deflected it with his forearms. “In fact, if I really wanted to, I could probably get Rank 1 in a lot of other mods if I tried.”

“Are you that good?” Jinu would ask, with it being a legitimate question as he had never really fought Anthro in other mods that much.

“No, It’s not a case of me being good, but just me playing a lot. And that’s the thing with modranks, once you get to a certain skill level, it doesn’t even have to be a very high one, but just enough to usually defeat those who are less skillful than you are. What I mean, is that I’d usually fight someone either very new, or someone who doesn’t practice or train like that.”

“So what you’re saying is that you, more often than not, fought people vastly lower than your skill level?” Jinu said, as Anthro nodded.

“Yep. Don’t get it twisted though, I still fought very good people on the way there, but if I really wanted to keep a vice grip on that Rank 1 spot, I probably would’ve already been in the 1700s ELO wise.”

“I see. So then, why don’t you head into Ranked more often?”

“It’s simple really, I hate trying so damn hard. Because sometimes even when I know what I can do to win, or what I should do in a certain situation, sometimes it just doesn’t work out and I get frustrated. And I hate getting frustrated because that makes me fight worse, and I do stupid things outside of the battle afterwards. I know if I keep at it again and again, sure I’ll hit Gold, hell maybe even Platinum… It’s just, when I can relax like how we are now, and just do whatever without getting annoyed about the loss, I can kind of enjoy the fight.”

“Yeah I feel you, when you can just do random bullshit and not instantly lose because of it makes for some pretty cool scenarios.”

“When I was talking about how easy it is to get Rank 1 in mods, Aikido is the biggest culprit of it. Especially since one of the best moves is just-” Anthro would stand in place, lowering his arms in front of him before raising them above his head. “That.”

That would get a brief chuckle from Jinu, “Yeah.”

“I couldn’t do that normally even if you paid me. Even though it’s not illegal, it’d just feel wrong constantly doing it over and over again, and I hate winning easily anyway, I’d just feel bad…”

“You’ve got more honor than most.”

Suddenly, Anthro dropped his arms, rushing forward towards Jinu who started to jump away from him.

“Whoa! Whoa-hey!” Jinu eventually back stepped out of the square, causing a buzzer to alarm them that the match had ended. Sharing a laugh, Jinu would shake his head. “That was fucked up.”

“Maybe.” Anthro would smirk, getting back into a starting position inside of the square as Jinu re-entered the ring. “How about some Boxshu after? I don’t think we’ve done much of those.”

“Sure.”