It was inevitable, really. The proliferation of cheap, powerful, highly caffeinated coffee drinks in the late 1990s and 2000s led to an arms race in which major corporations and minor mom and pop beaneries competed to perfect their products. Eventually, through the addition of liberal amounts of real or artificial sweeteners, incredibly strong coffees were made palatable to even the most wretched dilettantes and hipsters. Through habitual use and the gradual buildup of tolerance, it became possible for devotees to safely attain caffeine concentrations once thought impossible or toxic.

At higher tolerances and with supersized portions of powerful new coffee drinks (often full of sugar as well), java hounds were able to perceive the world at a fraction of its true speed thanks to massively overstimulated hearts, endocrine systems, and so on. At first, this talent was largely used for party tricks or in emergencies, such as rescuing people from rapidly spreading fires. But it quickly became apparent that there were far greater applications possible, and the martial art of 咖啡拳 (Kafei Quan, literally “Coffee Fist”) was born.

Recognizing that the jitters that accompanied heavy coffee use, to say nothing of the speed of Kafei Quan movments,made using traditional weapons very difficult. Practitioners soon seized on steel and aluminum coffee mugs as ideal weapons, being readily available in cafes and by design suitable for use by the ridiculously overcaffeinated. Use of coasters as (albeit wildly inaccurate) throwing weapons and ornate metal coffee stirrers coated not with poison but with decaf spread as well. By 20XX, every cafe of respectable size included an adjacent Kafei Quan dojo. Enthusiasts practiced the popular Topless Mermaid style favored by global conglomerate Stubb’s Coffee, the Everlasting Miasma style employed by rival Tacoma’s Best Coffee, or one of hundreds of smaller cafe-specific styles.

Of course, a careful rereading of the prophetic Wan Nian Ke and Cang Tou texts of ancient China and the so-called “cafe quatrains” of Nostradamus indicated a far more sinister outcome of the Kafei Quan craze. They told of a fallen barista who would unleash the Darkest of the Dark Roasts, corrupting the Kafei Quan into a tool with which to subjugate all humanity and not just dilettantes and hipsters.

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