Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 19: Heaven’s Vengeance! Temujin vs Ryūei Part 5

The mountain ranges beyond the arena answered.

Peaks shook. Loose ridges lifted from their roots and hung in the air. Storm clouds gathered with unnatural speed, churning above the broken roof, then were blown apart by the first pulse of her power. The empty pit where the black water had been split wider, revealing old bones embedded in the stone below. The Daimaō’s cloud bucked. He grabbed the armrest of nothing and failed to stay dignified as he and three shrieking demon babes lifted from the balcony in the rising force.

Mali flew past them, grabbed a camera imp, and kept the microphone pointed roughly toward the apocalypse. “Everyone, brace yourselves…! This is it!”

The entire arena began to rise in fragments.

Seats, weapons, chains, bodies, betting boards, vendor trays, prayer strips, chunks of ring, the boar nurse’s dustpan, one surviving lunch skewer, all lifted into Ryūei’s black gravity. 

All the demons screamed and clutched at stone. Some begged, some laughed, some tried to attack the power because they could not imagine dying without swinging at the thing that killed them, and all were in Ryūei’s killing eye.

Temujin stood in the center of it, fists at his sides.

His aura held close, calm enough to seem almost small beneath her storm.

He looked at Ryūei and felt pity.

He felt the shape of her grief now. How cruel to be forgotten under a new life where the love that should have held her went to another child, a boy born under an ordinary sky, then raised by demons who gave her strength because no one had given her tenderness. Every wound in her had learned to call itself purpose.

The infant ghost looked between them, tiny hands curled near its chest.

Yulaan wiped blood from her mouth and grinned hard enough to show every fang.

“Now,” Yulaan said, voice hoarse with joy, “this is a fuckin’ final.”

Ryūei heard her.

The onryō’s head turned a fraction, and the whole broken arena tightened with that small motion. The floating debris shifted in Temujin’s white-gold suspension: stone slabs, seat beams, old weapons, bodies that still breathed, bodies that would never bother with breath again, the Daimaō’s cloud and its shrieking company, Mali tangled upside down with a camera imp and holding her microphone by pure vocational madness. All of them trembled in the air under Temujin’s chi.

Ryūei lifted one hand.

Temujin lifted his.

The first black-violet line struck the white-gold field and split into sparks. The second cut deeper. The third came curved, seeking Sesame’s throat through the glow. Temujin’s fingers curled, and the line bent away from her, hissing into the empty pit where the black water had boiled off. The fourth shot toward a cluster of demons clinging to a snapped prayer-chain. He caught that too.

Ryūei began laughing.

It was the laugh of a woman who had spent a lifetime after death learning how to make grievance articulate through violence. It had that rhythm. He hated that rhythm.

“You hold them?”

Her voice carried through the mountain and through the dust above the mountain.

“You hold the ones who came to watch you die?”

Temujin’s aura stirred around him. Torn flakes of stone brushed his shoulder and drifted away.

“Yeah.”

“They would have cheered if I slaughtered you.”

“Probably.”

“They wanted you dead, fool!”

He raised an eyebrow.

Ryūei’s eyes widened, and the aura around her burned lower, blacker, drawing violet fire inward until it climbed her hair in thin, hungry tongues.

“Do you find my rage funny?”

“Kinda, sis.”

His face whipped back in recoil against a shadow-wrapped fist. Temujin went down.

Everyone a-ground gasped, and for a breath, Yulaan wondered if the silvery goldened aura was a heavenly joke.

“You fucking bore! Let’s see you handle one hundred percent!” Ryuei’s fists quaked.

Temujin controlled his fall and lazily turned his head back towards her as if trying not to give much focus to a dog taking a shit.

She spread both arms.

The dead fragments of the arena answered. Bits of blade, broken tiles and broken trigram bronze, old nails from the seats, bone-char from lacquered buckets, and Mame’s powdered armor dust all rose from the floor. Around Ryūei they arranged themselves in a great turning circle, every piece pointing toward Temujin. The infant ghost hovered beneath her, little hands near its mouth, watching the adult rage build another wheel of death around itself.

Ryūei’s wheel fired.

One hundred and eight lines of black resentment crossed the air.

Temujin did not dodge.

He took the first across the shoulder and the light sealed it as it opened. He took the second through the side, and the wound closed around the line and drank the curse out of it. The third and fourth struck his chest. The fifth slid along his cheek. By the time the tenth reached him, his aura had changed texture. 

He held.

Ryūei leaned back and said, “Finally you stand up to my power…”

The white-gold aura thickened around his body, then moved outward through the suspension field. A demon child with a broken horn, floating near a shattered row, stopped crying. The hyena-yōkai mother, Temu, and Zeru felt the pressure lift from her chest. The boar nurse, clutching his dustpan to his uniform, whispered a prayer to a god who did not advertise in Makai. Mali, still upside down, lowered the microphone for the first time since anyone had known her and stared.

Temujin felt them.

At last, he understood, that’s what he felt earlier.

He felt Makai.

As life. Mean life, hungry life, lying life, singing life, life that sold skewers and filed lawsuits and mourned badly and loved worse and still had warmth hidden in its pockets. 

Daigen’s bow. 

The turtle-masons’ pride.

Mali’s stupid professionalism. 

Sesame’s spent wish. 

Enekai’s faith. 

Yulaan’s war-laughter.

Even the demons who had come for blood carried tiny undestroyed sparks: an old debt paid, a child protected, a lover remembered, a bowl of rice shared before a knife came out.

Genki rose again.

It came into him through breath, through skin, through the false eye at his brow and the soles of his feet. Makai’s reluctant goodness, its scraps and embers and leftover mercies, entered his body and found the vow already burning there. His body, his muscles, his brow all burned in silvery flames. Dad’s swept-back hair, his girl-teasing pride, had come free and wilder now, with a full shock suspended, as if trying to show the Saiyans how to do it right. 

He flexed his muscles and dispelled the weaponized debris in a silent kiai, clearing the air. Without his shirt on, protecting all these folks, Temujin felt like a Titan.

Seeing her half-brother’s full spirit glow and rise in tongues of pale fire made Ryūei scream, and she hurled herself forward.

They met in the center of the ruined arena, though “center” had become a courtesy word by then. Her palm struck his chest. His fist struck her ribs. The impact crushed the air outward and rang through the hollow mountain. Suspended bodies drifted back in the shockwave and then steadied under Temujin’s will. Ryūei kicked at his head. He lifted his leg, let the kick pass, and drove an elbow into her shoulder. Black flame burst from the joint. 

They went at it, blow-for-blow. Several strikes pulled Temujin back to the dust, and he got back up and dashed onwards again, fist forward, straight against her fist.

She answered with a flip and zipping forth, two fingers sharpened for his throat.

He caught her fingers between his own.

“You’re slower angry,” he said.

Her hair lashed around her face.

“I will skin your mercy from you.”

Temujin looked at her and smirked.

Ryūei drove herself into him, sending him falling back, and dug her fingers into his calf. With a shrieking scream, she brought him crashing down, and shot her fist down and upwards against his tile-dusted spine. 

Temujin blew upward, and before he could recover or succumb to gravity, she caught and dragged him into the cloud-broken sky. 

Temujin slipped from her grip and speared his elbow down, crashing against her face and her skyward momentum. 

Ryūei cried out in a drizzle of black blood as she fell.

Mali looked through binoculars and shouted, “U-unbelievable! The glowing holy Temujin has drawn the onryō’s blood!”

Ryūei caught herself above the former ring’s dust-plain and seethed through bloody teeth. 

Two voices left her.

Some heard raging torrents: “You mock me, you terrible fool! You consider my rage to be light entertainment?!”

And yet others heard ecstasy: “At last, you’ve shown me your true strength. I’ve succeeded at last!

She blew the ground apart behind her as she launched herself against the heavens.

Quietly, Temujin said, “Bring it on, you bitch.”

Their blows struck clouds into rings. The dead mountain below shrank and shuddered. 

Peaks around the temple lifted from their roots, then dropped as the two forces passed. Far ridges cracked and broke off against gravity.

Old cypress forests bent flat and rose again with leaves stripped from one side. The shock of each collision rolled through the Makai air in visible waves.

Ryūei ran like an earthquake, shattering the ground beneath her feet, and rammed her elbow across Temujin’s face.

The force of this struck Temple Saion-ji and the dark mountain it was on hard enough to blow turrets and eaves into the wind.

Yulaan’s Kaiōken aura flared hard at the rail below.

Her knees buckled. She caught herself on one hand and laughed blood onto the stone.

Sesame seized her by the back of the cloak.

“Stop it!”

“No way, man, if I stop, I won’t be able to see them move. I’ve gotta see this through!”

Enekai stood again, staff planted beside her. Her chest rose and fell heavily. She could barely follow the air around Temujin, much less the two combatants themselves, but she refused to sit.

Yulaan forced more Kaiōken into herself just to stay standing, as she kept Sesame and Enekai in her hands against the bomb-force winds.

Her wound opened down the side, dark and bright, and she barely noticed.

“Yuli!” Sesame shouted.

Yulaan bared her teeth. “Look at him!”

She could see fragments now. Temujin’s palm turning Ryūei’s wrist. Ryūei’s knee striking his ribs and failing to fold him. A halo-flash at the instant he shifted. Black fire spilling from Ryūei’s sleeve in the shape of a dragon and breaking against the white-gold field. Yulaan watched like a starving thing before a feast.

Enekai watched Yulaan watching and understood only part of it.

“How strong is he now?”

Yulaan laughed again, one hand pressed hard to her bleeding side.

“He’s strong enough!”

Ryūei descended like a nuclear missile.

Temujin met her above the old pit. Her full rage came with her now, all control abandoned, all patient cruelty burned to a single wish to break him where everyone could see. The infant ghost cried out without sound beneath them. Ryūei struck with both hands, a downward blow that pushed the air into rings and drove Temujin toward the ruined ring.

He stopped himself a hand’s span above the stone.

His aura held.

Ryūei pressed harder. She pressed heavy against his weight, ripping her fingers into flesh that would not tear.

The cracked mountain groaned. The suspended crowd swayed under his chi. The Daimaō’s hat nearly flew off, and two demon ladies clung to his beard with shrieks he pretended not to hear.

Temujin looked up into Ryūei’s face.

There, beneath the rage, he saw the living girl from the bridge, four hours old and never older. His sister. His enemy— a soul that had been taught to call pain purpose because no one had called it beloved.

His pity returned.

Ryūei felt it at once.

The pressure doubled. The ground depressed in a circle that spread fast in all directions.

“I said don’t pity me!”

He did not apologize.

Her face went blank with fury.

She drove a knee into his stomach. He bent around it, coughed blood, and took an uppercut that could have sent him to space, but she caught his ankle and threw him into the ground where he shot through the black mountainside and crashed into the plains below, left now in a dust-smoking crater. 

She landed on his chest. The crater opened into a still-deeper crater, fifty-times larger than before. So massive and so explosive that the audience back at Saion-ji flipped and jumped involuntarily from the quaking ground. 

Yulaan pressed her teeth and said, “T-times three!”

Her body ached and quivered as the red aura burned fiercer, but the tradeoff made her grin through the pain. Now she could, just barely, make out individual motions of the sun-white and moon-dark warriors clashing just outside the mountain.

As she screamed to tear his heart from his chest, Ryūei was checked— Temujin caught her by the wrist. His other palm rose and struck her square in the chest. The blow did not launch her this time.

White-gold light poured through his hand into the onryō’s body and met black rage surging outward.

For a breath, both froze.

Ryūei’s mouth opened.

A human sound came out first. Then a demon’s snarl swallowed it.

She threw him off and he vanished.

“W-what?!”

He stood unbothered atop the mountain, arms folded, smiling like a Buddha.

She sped back towards the temple and landed at the far end of the broken arena, feet scraping two deep lines through stone. Her robe hung in torn strips. Her hair had lifted wildly around her face. The infant ghost floated between them now, trembling harder than before.

Temujin landed opposite her.

She rushed forth, fingernails sharp and heartwise.

He caught her by the wrist, then snapped his other hand around her second wrist.

Yulaan saw the descent and slapped the rail with one palm.

“Unbelievable! He’s like Super Temujin! What the hell do you even call this, Super Human?” 

Temujin, with his sister growling in his grip, turned back and said with a cocksure smile, “Call me Nirvana Temujin.”

“Tsh! That’s pure shit, pure grunge as fuck, dude, but you’re the one who’s glowing!”

He considered this.

“Alright, how about Holy Temujin? That a better name?”

“Like I said…!”