Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 12: Rebuilding the Will to Fight

The yōkai repair crew had learned to move fast. 

The faceless priest repainted bronze trigram lines around blood that refused to wash out. Two turtle-backed masons argued over whether a cracked lotus panel could be billed as new if the crack now resembled a sacred river. Mali hovered above them, microphone tucked under one arm, red flag under the other, cheeks puffed as if a delay in bloodsport were a personal insult.

Temujin sat near the rail-edge of the now-quiet fighters’ pavilion with one arm half-numb, one leg newly bandaged, and Sesame’s palm pressed against his ribs. The little red eye in her hand had closed, leaving only a darker pink oval in the flesh. Her healing charm worked slowly now. It had already used the eager part of itself. What remained was warmth, pressure, patience, and Sesame muttering darkly at his injuries as if they had shown poor manners by existing.

Enekai sat cross-legged beside them, adjusting the gold-curl crown on her head with one hand and playing with a little wooden toy version of herself with the other. A stall-oni had carved it during the break, badly and enthusiastically. The toy had a tiny staff, a tiny tail, and a smile so large it made Temujin doubt the artist had ever seen Enekai angry.

She tilted the toy toward Sesame.

“How come you don’t enter?”

Sesame did not look up from Temujin’s ribs. “I’m a lover, Eni-kun, not a fighter.”

Yulaan leaned against the barricade with her arms folded, white cloak hanging loose, face hidden under her hair. “Bad at both.”

Sesame snapped her hand towards Yulaan’s head.

Yulaan’s hair jumped. She turned slowly.

Sesame pointed two fingers at her own eyes and then at the bolloi. “I should reconsider so I can hit you guys better.”

Enekai laughed. Yulaan grunted and snickered. Temujin tried to laugh and found the motion painful, so he let the attempt die in his throat and stared at the ring.

Nothing felt good. He was violently, writhingly, pukishly unhappy. 

Memories bled through his eyes and bloomed into sunnier days. Back on a couple years now, at another gathering of martial artists: the Toad Sage’s Budōkai of Naga Kedua, comfortably painful. He lost the finals against Enekai then, which spared him her near-death thrashing by the Blood Devil. On the way to his magnificent defeat, his own devilish blood pumped up adrenaline and toxic ego. Thank goodness Enekai knocked him down then, but he couldn’t forget how every victory and every bruise for that victory excited him further along the brackets.

Ryūei or Daigen. That was the shape ahead. Daigen might smash him flat, fold him out, win by technicalities he couldn’t remember anymore, or break every bone and memory of bone with a bow and apology. But Daigen had manners. Daigen had rules inside him. If Temujin surrendered, Daigen would at least try to leave him alive. 

Panicked he ran it through his mind, now convinced of the gambit.

Daigen, you martial lord! I concede to you, with the highest of respect. You’ve bested me and my will to fight. I beg of you, let me fight you again in better circumstances!

Then the spiral opened beneath him and Daigen started speaking politely, ‘All apologies, young master, but this is a fight to the end,’ and then came the sneer, ‘You did not attempt to fight me with everything, boy?’ and then the rage and disrespect and Temujin already knew how much Warriors™ in their insane mania for blood and honor loathed disrespect, ‘Boy! I will slaughter you!’ 

With a ferocious gulp, Temujin readied himself for the possibility of that match. It was the most comforting outcome. It— was.

Ryūei had looked at him as if life were something she might permit out of curiosity. She moved as if nothing ever interested her. Yet she always looked at him. That had to be interest in some sick, sadistic way, right?

He put his good fist before his mouth and breathed against the knuckles. He had come for the Sun Emerald. He had come because three souls were trapped in a little glass prison and because every ridiculous, impossible step since then had kept him from admitting the plan might have been stupid from the start. He could not give up now without making every injury into a joke told by somebody else.

Yulaan’s hand pressed his shoulder.

This time she did not try to make it hurt.

That alone made him look at her.

Under the hair, her mouth had tightened. She said, low enough that the crowd swallowed most of it, that she had not wanted to tell him this, but if he was truly serious about giving up, now was the time. Before the next gate. Before the last shapes of the bracket closed around him.

Temujin looked at the ring, then at the buckets, then at the far arch where Ryūei waited.

“Thanks,” he said. “Great speech.”

Sesame’s mouth pulled sideways. She kept healing him anyway.

Temujin spent the lull looking upon a clock ticking ten times too fast, jerking five, fifteen minutes ahead with each check of time, yet time slowed when watching shadows stretch longer and longer, and he wished he could have done that for hours. Ten minutes. Half an hour gone. 

Vendors flew through the tiers selling pickled eyes and fruit soda, and Buto Ijo— Temujin did double-take seeing him here, of all places, and in a sweatshirt. He came upon the pavilion, saw Daigen sitting and offered a mighty handshake so intense that the motion fanned Temujin’s sweat off his face even at that distance. 

Then the green giant saw Temujin and swooped over fast enough to knock the young man over by nervous reaction, and said, “Whoahahaha! If it isn’t little Timun Jin!”

“Temujin, sir.”

“Sure— you must have a death wish to be here. I’ll give you an offer, boy! Get in my belly, and you’ll have nothing left to fear!” And he cackled again.

Temujin sighed and brushed the spittle off his face. “I’m tempted.”

“Oh, where’s that spirit you had, boy! Weren’t you the one who punched your will to live into me?”

He was, and that made him want to clock himself in the throat. 

Daigen stood, pulling an enormity of mass with energy, even at that slow pace, that Temujin could feel the rising shift in air.

“It is time.”

And the sumo patted Temujin on the shoulder, in a way, tenderly. “I trust you will survive the day, Temujin of Earth. But you must do so as well.”

He looked up and saw Enekai’s tail and legs dangling on his shoulder, and he leaned forward to see her wave. 

“The Temujin I know wouldn’t be this defeatist, you know…”

Sesame fumed, literally, out the ears, and said, “Had to go and ruin our chances…”

“What did I do?!” said Temujin. 

“I meant her.”

“You were looking right at me. You were literally seething directly at me.”

Buto Ijo laughed again.

“I remember the damage you left, Timon. You can survive Daigen, surely.”

Temujin felt his hair blast over his face as Daigen leaned forward to say, “But, should I survive and we face each other in the ring, I will not hold back, and I trust you will regather your will to fight as well. If not, I will be most.” He paused. 

Temujin cranked his head to look at him.

Daigen was scowling.

“Disappointed.” Then the massive sumo’s expression broke into a warm smile, and he walked on.

Enekai fluttered down and stood akimbo.

“You’ll do great! Besides, Daigen’s got a lot of respect for you.”

“The more respect you have for someone,” said Buto Ijo munching on a hapless munchkin, “the more bombastic the disappointment!” And he found his way back to the audience tiers. 

“I don’t get it, what’s gotten you so spooked? You never backed down before now,” said Enekai. 

Sesame pulled away from Temujin’s wounds, smacked both of Enekai’s cheeks and squeezed, and said, “Temujin isn’t as strong as you, dumbass!”

Enekai politely pulled Sesame off with her tail at one wrist and a grab at the other. Brow furrowed, she said, “Then why were you so sure he would make it to the finals in the first place!”

Every so often, someone driven by indefatigable faith will ask a question so profoundly honest in spirit and so blatantly obvious in answer, unto those who lost all faith in any answer being possible, that it hits like a brass knuckle sandwich to the throat— well, Temujin just didn’t have much else to say. Sesame stood wide-eyed and speechless.

Enekai then smashed Sesame’s pink cheeks, between hands, and snarled, “I say he’ll win.”

Temujin looked away. By chance he saw Ari-apari, still jiggling and beating his chest, and saw ‘TEMUJIN’ written on his belly, getting a bunch of other yōkai together in a cheer for— him! Cheers for him, Temujin the future champion. 

He made a pseudo-laughing snort, but the second sound became something kinder. 

“Well, you know, Sesame, she’s got a point. If I can make it to the final, I can take it too.”

Sesame threw herself on him and beat at his chest, the way he always wanted her to. “You better, Muji-chan…!”

The last match of the semifinals was finally ready.

Mali bounded out to the repaired center, spun once, and landed with her boots exactly between two wet patches the crew had failed to scrub away. “Lovely demons, ugly demons, ugly demons who paid extra to look lovely, we are back! Last match of the truncated semifinals! Daidarabō Gen’emon against Ryūei, Dragon Shadow!”

Daigen entered under a wave of applause. He bowed to all four directions, then to the Daimaō, then to Ryūei before she had even crossed the threshold. His chest bore fresh wrappings, his hand still showed Enekai’s bite marks, and one cheek had swollen from their collision. He looked happy. He looked bruised. He looked prepared to make a death very polite.

Temujin didn’t mind his spirit. He was a good man among demons, whatever that meant down here. Though the young man began to think it meant more than he assumed.

Ryūei appeared opposite him.

A red-eyed condor alighted near the barricade, its gaze fixed upward. High above the arena, a silent black tornado of its brethren circled the mountain’s throat before settling along the upper concourses.

“I’ve seen those condors all the time growing up…” Temujin folded his arms. “Now they’ve followed me here to Demon World.” 

The cheering shrank.

Temujin’s fist tightened near his mouth. 

He felt someone behind him. “She’s stronger than he is, though,” Temujin said. 

That someone rested her chin on his shoulder and wrapped her tail around his free hand in a squeeze. “So?”

“She took on that Dokkan guy and he couldn’t even hurt her.”

“So?”

He looked right at Enekai and said, “What faith do you have in him?”

She grinned. “Nothin’ in particular. I just think…. Huh?” She looked elsewhere and dashed back, settling in a battler stance. Yulaan also came running from one end of the pavilion.

Temujin asked, “What’s wrong?”

Mali lifted the flag. “Fighters ready—” Then she made a confused noise, seeing a gleaming star trail crawling along the tiles, realized it was a reflection, and looked up.

Something cut across the sky.