Makai-Ichi Budōkai Chapter 1

The Makai was not Hell, and had no wish to be. Hell was a better place with worse people.

Scribes of Demon World (proud as warriors with none of the celebrity) wrote of demon life and published their words as truth, sold topside as postcards from Hell. To Hell with that, scribe-slaughterers would say: demon readers wanted blood and its debts paid in violence. 

But the doomed calligraphy masters pleaded anyway— sometimes to ignorant Earth mobs with torches, sometimes to the devil eating them finger-first— what of the markets and inns? Mothers who cursed sons for drinking away inheritances! Creditors with ledgers. Barbers with razors. Beggars with bowls. Priests with bells. Lonely swordsmen on rain-bent bridges. Pretty girls leaning from brothel balconies! Ugly men writing poems to them. Widowers burning incense beside cliffside graves. Monks, money-lenders! Whores! Punks, skids, frauds, throat-cutters—

Then the scribe’s brains would be eaten. The offending devil would, as punishment for murder, be scourged, beheaded, and sold as a cursed and petrified fossil for public display. The topside mobs returned happily to their labor, having exorcised another demon. 

Demons love blood and devils make no excuses for being devils. Utopia: a jianghu in black.

Long ago, there had been some quarrel over a murdered horse, or a mountain, or a princess, or a bowl of black millet wine. Whatever the reason, no one wanted to end the duels. Someone was wronged, let them fight it out, whoever survived that brawl had right of justice even if the survivor had only jumped in at the last second. 

And then at some unknown early year, some wooden sign went up on a stone wall declaring all the savagery henceforth would follow rules and the blood would settle on a raised stage, end of discussion. The writer of that sign was said to have been beaten to death and their declaration was burned. All the clans were exhausted. Generations of proud, hateful battle made ashes out of the memories— and then the memories of the memories— of why they were still fighting, besides the sheer ecstatic impulse of it all. Why then, asked some innocent devil child, could they not agree to a formal tournament? Why not make new enemies? 

They agreed.

Thus began the Makai-Ichi Budōkai.

Six hundred and thirteen of these had come and gone.

Temple Saion-ji crowned a dead mountain burnt naked black. Its tiled roofs hooked upward like the horns of the demon mason who designed them, and the corner-spouts coiled into dragon heads that caught the incense smoke and breathed it back in nacreous wisps. Paper lanterns and cold blue lamps burned together through that demon haze, old rite and bad electricity scribbling a hundred centuries of faded smoke along the walls.

Stone lions and jade turtles guarded vending machines stocked and restocked by jaded lion and turtle yōkai. A hundred narrow bridges crossed sour canals where spirit fish with women’s faces mouthed kisses at the shadows. Above the highest roof, among black cypresses and white prayer strips, tournament banners snapped in a wind that smelled of wet iron, musk, rotten peaches, and the old sweet incense of executed monks. In the unholy central courtyard, in between black pillars of abominable geometry, an ogre named Killkamesh sold his mother’s homemade cheeseburgers. 

The warriors gathered inside were, with few exceptions, too macho and cool to admit any of this impressed them.

The waiting hall ran so long that the far doors vanished into haze. Along both walls stood the former champions: some carved in stone, some cast in bronze, some made from bones lacquered red and wired together with golden thread.

A few were alive in the technical, inconvenient sense. Their eyes followed passersby. One bronze champion inhaled whenever anyone with enough killing power came close. Another, a black jade woman with six arms and no head, was said to laugh in the dreams of anyone she meant to kill in the next life.

Temujin thought that last claim was a marketing trick.

He hoped it was a marketing trick. 

He sat on a low bench, elbows on knees, hands clasped, one callused thumb working slowly over the other while he watched the hall. To his right was the bronze champion. He’d been waiting for it to inhale, though he didn’t blame it for holding its breath.

The air hurt. 

Temujin could tolerate bad air, but ‘bad air’ is the gym locker room with a bathroom where crusty unflushed piss smelled like shrimp. 

This, however, was the thick green stink of ox musk, hot blood, and male pride that Temujin heard before he smelled: no-name fighter-poets bled on tournament floors and sang winning verses to glories of this blood-odor of warriors, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.

“It smells like fermented summertime ass sweat.”

He wondered what the ass-sweat loving annalists would write about this tournament. Where would he be among beast-men and bad-men grunting and shoving, all those big hands touching each other’s muscle and fat, all that demon skin the color of withered pears and rotten cherries. Amidst that mountain range of fat and hide, Temujin sat small. His blue-and-gold silks, tailored for Earthly dueling, felt thin as paper in the damp chill. He tried for the heavy, silent look of an old hermit on a temple scroll, but kept catastrophizing that he looked like a children’s cartoon parody of one. His body had neither the frame nor the age to convince passersby of any mastery except the art of running away. 

That could be useful, he thought to himself. Across his adventures and battles on Earth, it was the demons who most often doomed themselves with their love of gross displays of power and authority. 

Unless those were all just power-mad fools. He and his friends crossed the barrier into Demon World, expecting much more of the same, and the first vile inhuman monstrosities they encountered were… sexy oni tour guides and an adorable ogre girl who kicked him in the shin when he laughed at her “pet” onion. 

And now he wanted one of Killkamesh’s burgers. 

What would the demons think about this boy— young man he’d prefer, then recorded triply hard as ‘boy.’ He spent years cultivating his hair into a perfect back-sweep, and he had his father’s face, which had allowed a humble farmer to ensnare an imperial court beauty. Here among demons, all his cultivation brought him was the same breed of lustful stares he’d hoped for from softer better-smelling sorts topside on Earth.

Majin Sesame floated cross-legged beside a pillar and picked at one long pink ear with a lacquered fingernail.

“Habibi,” she said, “you’re not wrong, this place smells like hot wretched raw RAW ass.”

Temujin glanced at her because he saw other heads turn their way, and they weren’t turning away.

She inspected the fingernail, found nothing worth finding, and flicked anyway. “Eni, am I wrong? That’s what it is.”

“I’ve smelled worse,” Enekai said. “Back in Naga Kedua, remember?”

“You mean the other tournament room? It is always martial arts tournaments with you people, and they never smell better.”

Ral Enekai squatted atop the bench rather than sitting on it, knees together, tail curled behind her. In zero voltage, her hair hung thick and black, bullied flat by her own will and by the gold-curled Monkey King crown strapped hard to her skull. Her yellow eyes were clear, foolish, and hungry. She had already eaten three bowls of rice, two oil-cakes stuffed with demon boar, and a skewer of little blinking things Sesame had warned her not to eat because one of them had said “father” when bitten.

“Well,” Yulaan said, fangs tearing meat from a green fried wrist, “it adds flavor.”

Sesame’s mouth flattened. “I hope that hand chokes your throat from the inside.”

Sol Yulaan sat on the floor with her back to the pillar, one leg stretched out, the other bent. Her tail lay across her lap with the end coiled into a tight bun. Temujin imagined it flicking only because its stillness aggravated him.

She still wore her bolyaga, but a loose white cloak, dragged around her shoulders, denied any tease of the black spandex beneath. Under that cloak, bandages crossed her ribs and one shoulder. A dark stain had worked through near her side. They had seen the wound earlier, not quite on purpose, when she lifted her shirt to wipe the half-healed gash.

Temujin had asked her about it once.

She had looked at him.

He had not asked twice.

Now she held a little paper packet in the coil of her tail and watched Enekai through her hair. Or seemed to. With Yulaan, one often had to guess where the eyes had gone.

“You’re eating this before your match,” Yulaan said.

Enekai leaned forward. “What is it?”

“A sage bean.”

“Can I eat it now?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I said before your match.”

Enekai considered this with great philosophical labor. “Will it taste good?”

“No.”

“Then why would I eat it?”

“It will keep you fed through the fight and make up for not eating on the way here.”

Her brows lifted. Hunger, even future hunger, interested her. “How long will it work?”

“Long enough.”

“What if my fight is very long?”

“Then kill faster.”

Enekai closed her fist around the bean and looked toward the tournament stage as if a doctrine had been given to her.

Sesame leaned toward Temujin. “See? This is what I deal with.”

Yulaan’s mouth cut into a small fanged grin.

“Don’t be jealous because she listens to me.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I am jealous of everything that gets your attention before I do.”

“You talk too much.”

“You want to see a Majin talk more?” A second mouth formed on Sesame’s belly. “Look at me, I’m a Yaban! Feed me!”

Temujin smiled despite himself, then failed to swallow the laugh quickly enough and wondered whether it would offend the bollois.

Sesame was, or he wanted her to be, his girlfriend of sorts. She wore nothing revolutionary for a majin: red harem silks, redder gloves, bright gold cuffs big enough to shame a jailer, a little black choker at her pink throat, the usual candy-shop bondage of her kind. Her hair was caught high in a red-and-gold ring and released backward in one foaming sweep, curling with the ridiculous confidence of smoke that knew it was pretty. No black-and-red eyes had any right to be that cute.

She floated cross-legged in those rippling red pants, wrists resting at her ankles, smiling up as if the universe were a sweet hidden under her tongue and she might, for a kiss, a laugh, or a sufficiently good humiliation, let him taste it.

Then she noticed him gawking, smacked both his cheeks between her palms, and beamed at him with evil delight.

“As if you’re not just as bad sometimes, Muji-chan!”

Something flew at Temujin’s face, so he reached out to catch it and the little packet fumbled in his hands. 

Yulaan said, “Same to you. If, and I mean it, you’d rather try it after a fight, it can restore your energy and stamina.”

To which Temujin popped the bean up with a flick and caught it again with confidence. “Got it.” He chose to set it inside a wrist-wrap and turned to see the hall doors open.