Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 11: Guile vs Guillotine Fist, Temujin vs Mukhahīna

Condors fluttered by as tiles and trigrams went down in a grid around them, clinking, clinking, until the workers shooed them away. They continued to watch the repair in collective fervor, cocking their heads as the thing came back together, as if befuddled as to how all these squares made a circle. A uniformed snake (even had the Saion-ji employee of the month badge) slithered on and tried to gobble one with a lunge. It chomped air. The would-be snack had disappeared— literally, here and then it was gone. 

The snake wiped its forehead with the blue polyester sock on its tail and said to an ogre (clad in a full blue uniform), “Those things spook me.”

The ring had been put together again by yōkai who worked with the injured patience of city road crews. Temujin wondered if they could do the same thing for fate itself.

Four turtle-backed masons crawled across the broken trigrams, each carrying a bronze strip in his mouth. A pair of broom-armed oni swept Dokkan into red-black piles, and a squat priest with no face repainted the cracked lotus panels while muttering invoices under his breath. The Stone-Head Oni of Mount Abura, who had eaten walnut shells and broken a spider monk with his skull, fit now into three lacquered buckets and a sash folded on top.

Temujin looked at the buckets like they were coffins, and wondered how much meat a 17-year-old could fit into one.

His chest tightened.

It tightened past fear, past nerves, past the familiar pre-fight burn that made his hands want to move. For a second the heart seemed too large for the cage around it, a hot knot under the breastbone, furious and stuck. He touched two fingers to his chest and wondered, with real embarrassment, if one could survive Qinglong, Masha, and Demon World tournament architecture only to die of a heart attack at seventeen.

Enekai said something beside him, soft and innocent.

“She has your eyes,” she said.

Temujin turned away and stared ahead at a slender oni girl carrying fifty tiles on a shoulder when even brawny ogres struggled to carry twenty. He wished wholesomely she was the one staring at him, for any reason, for no reason. There was Utita, giving him double-thumbs up, with Ari-apari still hanging around her neck. He welcomed her looking at him. The hyena lady, now he wished he got her name, knowing names are good reasons to look at one another. 

Majin Mali consorted with Daigen, he guessed asking for an interview. For a moment, she looked his way and shot him with a finger gun, winking, a little pink puff out the tip, and a beige yellow plastic egg shot his way. 

He caught the egg, pressed the seam with his thumb, and dropped the Mali-shaped jellybean into his hand. 

All lovely ladies looking at him.

None of them had his eyes. He didn’t want to see his eyes. He didn’t want to look at her. 

He stared ahead again back to—

She was looking at him. With the eye and with the marble, she was looking at him.

Enekai nudged him. “When she looks at you.”

He began praying.

He did not plan to. His hands simply found one another. First came the clasp he had learned from old ladies in roadside shrines. Then some half-remembered bow to Heavenly Kami. Then the salute from the Southern Master’s temple. Then a hand position from a drunken monk who had once taught him three punches and stolen his shoes. He prayed east, west, upward, inward, to dead masters, living masters, merciful gods, stern gods, nameless gods, local gods, foreign gods, and one embarrassed household spirit whose name he had forgotten.

Then, in a moment of wild civic panic, he prayed toward the Daimaō.

A psychic roar slammed into his skull.

STOP PRAYING TO ME, BOY. I’M IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING.

Temujin snapped his focus towards the balcony.

The Daimaō sat reclined on his black cloud amid a disgraceful arrangement of demon babes, legal scrolls, snack trays, and bare red thigh. Temujin looked away before discovering whether the throne-cloud counted as pants.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Sesame was laughing so hard she had to hold her own waist. Yulaan looked disgusted as the Majin kept laughing until her head fell off, and Sesame held it in her hands, still laughing. She set her head back on her neck; as if the act of magical repair healed her brain, she stopped laughing and gasped and breathed and heaved and sat down in a huff. 

“Temujin, you gotta— you gotta cheat or something! You gotta pull down their pants or— or,” and then she hiccuped.

Enekai sat back and said, “You—”

“QUIET LOSER!” Then Sesame swooned into Enekai’s arms.

Enekai said, “Ah, Temujin, I think she needs to rest. You want I should root for you from the side?” He ignored her mangling that sentence and sat on a contemplation-shaped stone bench.

Why was Ryūei looking at him? What did she want? He had never seen her. He had never heard of her. His mother was dead but of reasonable causes. His father was no sick-in-the-head hooligan worth cursing. No ancestral ghost had cursed the family rice pot. As far as he could remember, his town had produced no tragic onryō legend, no drowned bride, no murdered mother, no bloodline debt wrapped in hair and white robes. Before the Yaban and the Majin, before the bad ol’ days of life and adventure in the palm forests of Naga Kedua, he had become a wandering runaway delinquent, for unreasonable reasons, but that never led to tragedy. 

Perhaps history will say he had done extraordinary things and met extraordinary people, but Temujin was a completely normal boy.

Completely normal boys did not get chosen by ghost women who could slice oni into lunch meat without moving enough for anyone to admire the technique.

Yulaan watched Ryūei a while longer. Then she said that sometimes yūrei did not need reasons to attach themselves. “Sometimes the dead get lazy. Sometimes they’re hungry. Sometimes they see a face and make it their personal kill-shrine.”

She turned to him and made the shoulder squeeze pinch. “But if I had to guess, man, she’s got a history with you. Somehow. For some reason.”

That nearly finished his heart.

What history? What possible history? Was he expected to apologize for events from a past life now? He stood up and refused. He had enough trouble with the present one.

“I don’t care. I’m probably dying in this next match anyway, so it’s going to be his problem.”

The bracket wheel turned through the last bits of repair dust.

Mali did two sponsor spots, turned a heckler’s tongue into a commemorative ribbon, and posed with the nurses while the boar demon swept the last of Dokkan from between the north-side stones. Mukhahīna Śveta stood alone by the eastern gate with his arms behind his back. He no longer floated.

Temujin watched him in pieces, rebuilding what the man cut away, just to ruin it again.

Withered-burnt skin. 

Blade-melted hands. 

Vestigial-dying eyes.

Absent-unmade mouth.

Hypocritically-uncut throat.

Seeing the yogi close up, he agreed with Yulaan. Human felt less like the word for him than the memory of a word. Something had used humanity as scaffolding, then taken the scaffolding down. Among demons, he was the least human. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised.

The next match burned above the ring.

Temujin of Earth
versus
Mukhahīna Śveta

Temujin’s anger arrived before fear could organize itself.

Enekai had lost. Their clean team path had broken. The Sun Emerald sat farther away now, behind this mouthless corpse-saint, behind Daigen, behind Ryūei, behind whatever one-hit death waited with hair over its face. He wanted to be angry at Daigen, but Daigen had beaten Enekai honestly. He wanted to be angry at the rules, but the rules had always been there. So he aimed it at Mukhahīna, who had killed Bakuga with a flick and then looked mildly curious about the missing nail.

He prayed again under his breath, this time to Heavenly Kami alone.

Mukhahīna walked past him on the way to the ring.

The voice came without lips.

It passed through Temujin’s head with the cold dryness of ash rubbed between fingers.

Gods are witnesses. They are poor armor.

Temujin stopped.

Mukhahīna continued toward the lei tai, arms behind his back, blade-hands angled down.

Temujin felt Sesame’s hand at his sleeve. She did not joke at first. That worried him more than any joke could have. She looked from him to the ring and back, pink face tight with effort, because the wish she kept in reserve could heal, yes, perhaps even drag someone back from the edge, but the day had only one true miracle in it and they still needed the Sun Emerald for three souls in glass.

He made himself grin at her.

“Thanks for the reassurance, babe.”

She tried to slap his arm. It came out too light.

He stepped away.

Behind him, Sesame said to Enekai and Yulaan that he always had been a bit of a dork. Enekai cheered. Yulaan folded her arms and looked off to the side. He hoped it was out of sardonic loss of hope in him. 

A good number of demons cheered because they had no choice. By now the human boy had become an irritation large enough to entertain them. They wanted to see him win, die, scream, improvise, or be diced into an educational shape. 

Most did, at least. 

Makku gave him a thumbs up with a smile. He was wearing Bakuga’s hat, while another gaki boy had the firefly in his fingers. They didn’t calm him, and he could at least be thankful for that.

Ari-apari’s deep voice bellowed, or he heard it above the other bellowing, “Kick his ass, Temujin! I’ll give you my pet onion if you do!”

Temujin swallowed. He wanted to snicker so badly, and couldn’t.

Mali sprang to the center, her tentacle-hime cut bouncing in place.

“A rare treat for the Makai!” she sang. “Human versus human!”

Temujin reached his side of the ring.

Mukhahīna stood against him. His ordinary eyes were closed. His third eye watched Temujin’s throat.

Mali glanced once at that eye, drew her shoulders in, and lifted the flag.

“Fighters ready?”

Temujin set his stance.

Loose. Small. Ugly to formalists. Left foot forward. Lead hand alive. Rear hand near the chin. Breathe low. Keep the throat moving. Keep the shoulders quiet. Believe the win fully enough to move before doubt.

The flag came down.

Temujin waited.

Mukhahīna breathed.

A shining devil-cloud passed above, and its shadow brightened the arena into making it and everyone in it glow bloom-white.

A blade of grass lifted from a crack near Mali’s boot.

It spun once, green and harmless, then crossed the ring with a hiss so thin the ear could barely own it. Temujin shifted his head. The grass grazed his cheek and opened a line from cheekbone to jaw. Blood warmed his face.

Mali hopped backward, found the grass embedded halfway into the barricade behind him, and decided to comment from several steps farther away.

“Keep the ref out of your gardening practice!”

Temujin touched the cut.

Damn.

Mukhahīna breathed again.

This time the air leaving him was black.

It leaked from the absent place, from the nostrils, from the seams around his closed ordinary eyes, from under the blade-roots at his wrists. The black breath spread across the ring in slow bands. Where it touched the repaired tiles, the old blood in the grooves darkened and trembled.

Temujin moved before it reached his feet.

He went in low, not straight, cutting across the grid lines, launching three fast strikes at three heights: knee, ribs— Mukhahīna drifted around the first, let the second pass along his aura, and answered the third by turning one blade-hand flat to protect— throat.

The bottom of the man’s face pulled into crooked wrinkles with the demented memory of a smile.

He pulled himself back barely in time. A blurring swipe of the blade took cloth from his sleeve and one hot line from the forearm beneath.

Then the pain came.

The cut burned black at the edges. Thin veins of cold prana ran from it toward his wrist. His fingers twitched open and would not close fully again.

Cursed.

He kicked.

Mukhahīna sank half an inch and became unreachable by an inch. Temujin’s heel passed over his shoulder. A blade-hand touched the back of Temujin’s calf as he spun past. It felt at first like a brush from a fingernail.

His landing leg buckled.

Blood ran down the outside of the thigh, then behind the knee. He did not look at it. Looking made wounds bigger.

At ringside, Sesame’s voice sharpened. Enekai went quiet. Yulaan made a sound under her breath that carried no concern at all, only fierce interest.

The rims of Mukhahīna’s third eye shimmered in the inverted-shadow of the demon cloud. But it did not move. That eye locked itself onto his throat. 

All at once, Temujin understood what Bakuga had tried in vain to destroy. The ordinary eyes were ornaments— old habits still withering away. The killing eye chose the true line. The body followed. Anything that entered the eye’s decision became available to the hands, the nails, the breath, even the grass underfoot.

He feinted high.

Mukhahīna did not take it.

He feinted low.

Nothing.

He gave the throat a fraction.

Mukhahīna moved.

Temujin had been waiting for that.

He snapped both hands up and fired a short Heaven’s Vengeance pulse from the palms, less a full wave than a flash charge. Blue-white chi struck Mukhahīna in the chest and burst around him.

For one breath, the mouthless man was hidden inside light.

Then he stepped out of it.

The black breath around him folded inward, carrying torn pieces of the blast into the channels crossing his torso. His wounds from Hakujō had already scarred, but now those scars darkened, drank, and closed further. Temujin’s attack had fed the wrong thing.

Mukhahīna opened his ordinary eyes.

The arena felt it.

His blank gaze settled on Temujin with none of the surgical patience of the third eye. Something else looked through those eyes. A man, perhaps. Or the last remains of one. Under the vows, under the cremation-ground stillness, under the cold machinery of throat-cutting, there was appetite.

The voice entered Temujin’s skull again.

The Demon King’s prizes are but fleeting metal and brain chemistry.

Mukhahīna’s blade-hands lowered.

I enter tournaments to kill the strong.

The black breath thickened.

“Weak men die everywhere. It is an insult to Heaven and Hell that strong men die old and withered.”

The crowd loved that. It rumbled through them in a delayed wave, not quite laughter and not quite approval. Yulaan’s response broke above it with an ugly little laugh. Temujin did not need to look to know she was grinning.

Of course she liked him.

Saiyans and demons understood that logic too well: a tournament as a hunting ground, the prize as table dressing, the opponent as the only feast.

Mukhahīna moved for real.

Temujin saw the first three steps. The fourth had already happened. A blade-hand rose from below and cut toward the inside of his thigh. He turned his knee in, took the slash shallow, and hammered an elbow toward the closed ordinary eyes. Mukhahīna bent at a degree too neat for human joints. Temujin’s elbow clipped the aura and went numb to the shoulder.

The cursed arm sagged.

Mukhahīna’s left blade passed across Temujin’s chest. Cloth opened. Skin opened. No deep wound, but enough blood to make Sesame curse from the rail.

Temujin retreated one step.

Bad.

Mukhahīna followed.

Worse.

The black breath coiled around Temujin’s right arm and tightened. His fingers clenched without his permission. The arm lifted toward his own throat. He caught the wrist with his good hand, teeth bared, both shoulders shaking as he fought himself.

Mukhahīna’s third eye watched.

There. That was the line. The eye did more than see. It assigned. It made the body believe the cut had already been decided.

Temujin dropped to one knee, not from worship this time. From leverage.

The cursed hand inched closer to his neck.

His leg bled warmly into his sock. His left palm slipped against his own wrist. He could feel the third eye pulling the act tighter and tighter: hand, throat, severance. A complete sentence being written inside his muscles.

He needed to interrupt the grammar.

He let the cursed arm rise.

Sesame screamed his name.

Mukhahīna’s third eye narrowed in completion.

Temujin spat blood from his cheek-cut into his own palm, slapped that palm over the cursed wrist, and fired chi through the blood.

The cursed arm jerked sideways instead of inward. The black breath snapped around it like a rope pulled off a post. Temujin surged with it, using the misfire as a launch, and drove himself straight inside Mukhahīna’s reach.

The blade-hands crossed for his neck.

He ducked under them by less than a prayer.

His left hand shot upward.

Thumb first.

Into the third eye.

The texture was wrong. Wet, hot, furious, and strong. The eye tried to close around him. Temujin drove harder, shouting now, no words, just the whole terror of the day compressed into the joint behind his thumb. Mukhahīna’s silent composure broke into a convulsion. His blade-hands slashed outward. One cut opened Temujin’s shoulder. Another took hair from the side of his head. A third passed so close to the throat that blood rose there without the skin fully understanding why.

Temujin gouged.

The third eye burst.

Mukhahīna’s first audible sound was not made by a mouth.

It came from the chest, from the scars, from the blade-roots, from the black breath, a dry rasping roar that knocked dust from the prayer-pillars. His ordinary eyes went wide. The curse around Temujin’s arm loosened.

Temujin had one second.

He took less.

The Toad Sage had once made him stand under a waterfall with both palms pressed to a stone until his arms shook and his legs failed. Draw all the rivers to the hands, the Master had said. No spare current. No cleverness. No self watching from the side and deciding whether this is possible. Hands only. Win only.

Temujin stood.

Energy rose through the soles, through the bleeding leg, through the locked hips, through the ribs Masha had nearly squeezed shut, through the burned arm and the cursed arm and the shaking throat. It hurt in clean vertical bands. The root, the belly, the heart, the throat, the brow he had just ruined in another man. He did not know the proper names. He knew only that Mukhahīna had stacked himself like a tower of locked gates.

So Temujin aimed at the lowest gate.

Crude target. Correct target.

Mukhahīna’s blade-hands came down.

Temujin stepped in until there was no room for elegance and planted both palms low.

“Heaven’s Vengeance Fist.”

The blast fired point-blank into Mukhahīna’s balls.

Blue-white chi vanished into the black aura.

For one tiny instant Temujin thought he had failed.

Then Mukhahīna’s whole body arched.

The energy did not explode outward. It climbed him from below, forced through the root channel and up the central line he had polished into a killing instrument. The ruined third eye leaked black-red light. The scars across his torso burned open. Every channel he had trained to obey became a road carrying too much fire in the wrong direction.

His smooth mouth-plane split.

A ragged hole tore open where speech had been cut away.

The cry that came out was human enough to shame the word.

Temujin kept firing until his arms emptied.

The Heaven’s Vengeance Fist ended in sparks.

Mukhahīna staggered back three steps.

Then four.

His heel caught on a broken bronze trigram and his balance finally went. One knee struck stone. One blade-hand stabbed down beside it. For a moment he held himself there, not fallen enough for the crowd, fallen enough for the rules.

Mali’s flag twitched up.

“One!”

Mukhahīna’s shoulders rose and fell. The black breath around him came apart in ragged strips.

“Two!”

Temujin stayed upright. He had no idea how. His right arm hung cursed and heavy. His left shook so hard the fingers blurred. Blood ran down his leg, chest, cheek, and shoulder. He could feel the whole ring waiting for him to join the man on the floor.

“Three!”

Mukhahīna pushed against the stone. The blade-hand scraped a white line through old blood.

“Four!”

His ruined third eye leaked down the bridge of his nose. The new mouth in his lower face opened and shut without sound.

“Five!”

Sesame clamped both hands over the railing. Her pink knuckles went pale.

“Six!”

Yulaan had stopped grinning.

“Seven!”

Enekai shouted something bright and desperate, but Temujin heard only the count, the crowd, and the wet drag of Mukhahīna trying to gather his limbs under him.

“Eight!”

Mukhahīna rose halfway.

The arena roared.

His feet found stone. His back straightened by inches. For one horrible breath Temujin thought the man would stand, eye gone, mouth blown open, body split by overloaded channels, and still come on.

“Nine!”

Mukhahīna lifted his head.

His ordinary eyes found Temujin.

Then the body understood the damage.

The knees buckled. The blade-hands failed to catch him. He struck the ring chest-first, bounced once, and lay still.

“Ten!”

Mali’s flag snapped upward.

“Winner, by holy castration! Temujin of Earth!”

The sound that followed struck Temujin from all sides.

He did not celebrate. 

He did not even smile. 

He did not and could not and would not. 

Some stupid part of him believed walking looked better. Or maybe his mind didn’t trust victory until his body was out of the ring.

He passed Mukhahīna on the way to the rail.

The mouthless man lay on his side now. He had a mouth after all, blasted ragged through the lower face, black at the edges and wet with blood. His ordinary eyes were half-open. The ruined third was a dark pit. Somehow, he seemed calm, as if he expected his own death.

As Temujin came close, the new mouth moved.

“You survived,” Mukhahīna said.

The voice scraped air this time.

“Forty-six thousand, eight hundred fifty-three didn’t.”

Temujin stared down at him.

Boy who lived, he thought, stupidly.

Then he remembered Ryūei under the arch, Daigen still breathing somewhere beyond the bracket, and the white eye that had chosen him for reasons no god had volunteered to explain.

Boy who lived, yes.

For approximately another hour.

“Gotta admit, you scared me. You scared everyone.”

And then the dying man said, “Not her.”

The gore on his forehead bubbled and yet he could still read the motion. What was once an eye looked south. South was— Temujin snapped back to the man’s dead face and felt the overpowering urge to throw up. Mukhahīna, please for the love of every god, you were the last person I needed to hear say something like that.