Very short and silly fic based on a joke I heard the other day, and partly based on one of Ryuga's lines in Episode 13 of Metal Fury. Set after the end of Metal Fury, but a sort of AU end.

Strongest?

It had been a very strange day.

Ryuga had been awoken at the crack of dawn by a loud banging that forced him up and out of bed in a couple of seconds. It sounded like someone was trying to break his front door down.

Grabbing his coat, he had thrown it around his shoulders and yanked his door open with far more force than was strictly necessary, only to find that the noise was coming from nowhere near his house on the south side of the main square. In fact, it was coming from the west of the square, where a small crowd was beginning to gather in front of Masamune's house.

In the centre of the crowd stood Masamune himself, a hammer in one hand and steadying something with the other. He seemed to be hitting the top of it repeatedly – some kind of post, if Ryuga's vision wasn't failing him as it sometimes did now.

"Masamune! That's not fair!" Gingka's yell burst out from the top floor of the Pegasus-blader's west-facing house. "It was only once, it doesn't count!"

Masamune, grinning broadly, finished hitting the post into the ground and stepped back, hands on his hips. The crowd shifted around him, and suddenly Ryuga could see exactly what it was. It was a large sign, with letters tall enough to be read across the square in Gingka's house.

Here lives the strongest blader in the world.

Ryuga rolled his eyes at their childishness. Honestly. This had only come about because Masamune had somehow managed to beat Gingka in a battle yesterday. Ryuga hadn't even been there, but Kenta and Yuu had told him everything he needed to know (and a lot more) the moment he got back from the forest.

It was strange, living in this secluded forest village with all the others who had fought off Nemesis. Ryo Hagane, or The Annoying Phoenix as Ryuga liked to call him, had suggested it as a way to let them return more gradually to the real world. After all, there were still things that made all of them flinch, and only the others who had seen the things they had in the heart of darkness would ever be able to understand.

Not that Ryuga was there because of that. No. He was just there because that was where his mountain was – the place where Meteo L-Drago had been born. It was they who had intruded on his space, not the other way round.

Muttering something to himself about people with heads that were too big for their boots, Ryuga had stomped off into the forest, determined to find some form of peace and quiet that seemed so lacking here now.

By the time that he returned, late in the afternoon, there was another new sign in the village; this one outside Gingka's house. It was similar in both size and shape to Masamune's, right down to the letters, big, bold black against the white board. But there was one very important difference.

Here lives the strongest blader in the UNIVERSE.

Ryuga first started to shake his head at the stupidity of the two younger bladers, but then he frowned, an idea sparking deep inside his agile mind. He disappeared back into his house and was not seen for several hours.

Finally he emerged, a hammer in one hand and a third, though slightly smaller sign in the other. He strode down to the end of his front garden and quickly drove the spike on the end of the pole deep into the earth, tapping the top of it with a hammer just to make sure that it was well-seated. Once he had arranged the sign to his satisfaction, Ryuga stepped away from his handiwork and allowed himself to smirk. The setting sun caught the red-painted, gold-edged letters on the board and made them blaze with light, easily visible from the windows of both Gingka and Masamune.

Here lives the strongest blader in the village.