The Death Chamber

The Xaxalpa family home was the type any passing driver would not have found extraordinary. Two stories of a Cape Cod house, a manicured front yard, a picket fence as a border, and of course the raven-haired Saiyan girl in the backyard. Sol Yulaan had been out there since midnight, standing over a block of Devilmite Blackstone with a pick-hammer, shaping a skull.

Devilmite didn’t yield to much. A Gosamyrian noble could fire a star-busting chi wave at a Devilmite wall and knock off a chip no bigger than a fingernail. Yulaan had smuggled this block up from one of Lord Saké’s contacts across a dimensional line and hadn’t bothered to explain where it came from. But under her own hand, with enough hours and enough blood, the stone shaped. The skull came out of it fang first, then brow, then jaw, with the eye-hollows cut last.

She could hear Ramona and Esmeralda yelling about something through the kitchen window. A lawnmower ran three doors down. A cicada sawed in the trees. This, as Yulaan had come to enjoy, was the extraordinary mundane of suburban summer schmaltz.  

When the last cut was clean, she set the hammer down, hoisted the skull onto her shoulder, and walked it across the yard to a patch of grass where the ground had gone yellow in a rough circle. 

She stomped on it. The earth parted and a shaft opened at her feet, square-sided and lined with black-cut stone she had hewn herself. The first twelve feet were still lit by the afternoon sun. After that the walls stopped reflecting anything. 

Yulaan stepped off the edge and let herself fall into the abyss. 

Long before this, she had moved earth. She stood out in that backlot at midnight with a shovel’s worth of chi banked in each joint and carved a cavern out of the bedrock beneath the Xaxalpa estate, hollowing out a negative space the size of a football stadium.

She hadn’t used blueprints. She had sketched it in DOOM II mods on the family PC, night after night, til she figured the structure clear in her mind’s eye enough to build without a formal map.

The shaft let out into the threshold hall. Torches along the walls lit themselves as she passed, the ability of an enchantment she had picked up from a warlock whose bones composed part of the wall decor, and her shadow stretched across the basalt behind her. She carried the skull on her shoulder and walked.

Somewhere through the rock above her, Jóhanna had started dinner. Yulaan could feel the kitchen in her chi-sense, the stove on and a pan set against the burner. A stadium-sized cavern lay between them. Jóhanna was cooking directly over a Devil World hab-dungeon and had no idea.

The hall opened out into the main chamber. The ceiling was lost in the dark overhead. Columns ran up the walls in the shape of ribs. At the far end a shallow river moved across the floor from a source Yulaan hadn’t bothered to name, its water an electric green and acidic, and the light from it climbed the walls. Above the river sat an empty pedestal of black basalt. Yulaan carried the blackstone skull on her back and flew up to set it upon a perch over the green river whose shimmering evil glow shone back through its blackened eye holes. 

She adjusted it by degrees until the sockets looked out across the hall in the direction an approaching warrior would have to come from.

She hovered a few feet off and folded her arms.

This had been the whole point, in the end. Her dream prize, won at the 616th Makai Ichi Budōkai: the Yōkai Shōkan-jin. A summoning circle proven by the Makai Daimaō himself to draw on the raw infernality of Demon World, and to provide endless apparition warriors to satiate the battle lust and martial training needs of any warrior who could dare stand to control it.

“A Saiyan of Kollidor!” the Makai Daimaō had bellowed, lifting her bloodstained body above a jubilant crowd of Yōkai and majins. “This year’s champion will enjoy a splendor that drives Demon warriors wild and mad-eyed with envy! And what better to enjoy such than a Saiyan! You, Skullcrusher of Kollidor, your Saiyan blood screams for carnage! You will, most assuredly, enjoy your prize…”

And she would. All that had been left to do was forge the dungeon in which the hellspawn would fight. Earth’s soil knew not the vigorous and vicious limit-testing these floors would suffer.

Yulaan flew off to the control chamber.

The control chamber was a separate room, reached by a curved corridor lined with unlit braziers.  She ran down the halls towards a terrific circular chamber shrouded in milky shadows that seemed to undulate and whisper. At the center was a 魔陣, a Magic Circle, where she popped off the top of a blue Crayola marker, knelt down, and began scribbling kanji onto the stone. Once all had been done she uncapped a small bottle of rice shochu, sniffed it, made a face at the smell, and poured out a pale liquid. It splattered against the circle. Black flames ignited. They followed a path spontaneously filling spaces between the characters. 

Yulaan stepped back and wrapped her tail around her waist, folding her arms and grinning. 

The flames shot up high, first past her head, then as high as a skyscraper and further still.

Yulaan watched as the flames retracted into the sigil and faded out in a violet pulse. The grooves kept glowing like coals.

And again, she was surrounded by darkness. 

But first: the gravity engine. The promise of training under enhanced gravity was too enticing to pass up. Yulaan had been so kind as to not explain how she had come into possession of a Gosamyrian gravity engine but had told Esmeralda and Majin Sabbata, “I knew a guy 

who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy’s cousin… “

For that, Sabbata had self-wished Yulaan’s clothes off in a magical ‘POOF!’ and smiled away the nosebleed Yulaan gave her in return.

She then left the chamber and returned with the Gravity Engine, and set it in the still smoldering circle where it began to sink into the shadows. The coals rose around it like water, and within a breath it was gone, and the sigil pulsed where the alloy had been.

Yulaan then said, “Controls!”

A heads-up display materialized out of the air in front of her, showing numbers and symbols and chamber indices from 1 to 108, each an escalation on the last. Whatever waited at the 108th chamber was Getavara’s business. All our little Yaban warrior knew of it was that she knew her current limits. The 108th chamber was the goal, but every young master tempers themselves to what they know they can handle.

She dialed down to the 11th, well below what a Vitakoze recruit would call a serious trial and well above what any unaided human could hope to survive. Honestly it was a little low for her, but an honest warm-up.

Gravity: 30G. 

Spawns: limited, settled to a horde of C and B-class yōkai. 

Arena: Wasteland.

She thought the confirmation. The dials evaporated into mist. The shadows of the control chamber contorted and danced like a fire seen on acid, coming apart and reassembling, and her stomach lurched as her bare feet left the basalt and found different ground a breath later.

Yulaan braced herself.

The scene condensed. She stood in a rocky field under bright daylight, with rock towers and dead karsts and gulches around her, carved by some long-gone sea. The earth was orange under a bright blue sky.

A pebble clattered.

She turned and punched her fist through the chest of a descending demon. His mercury-purple blood spewed out his back and dripped off her hand.

The yōkai had horns and faded yellow hair, and wore a dark-gray gi with a red sash. All around her stood many more like him, similar in cut if not in color.

She pulled her fist back, licked the blood off her wrist, and bared her fangs as she cracked her knuckles.

“Alright then! Who’s first?”

A yōkai broke from the line and planted his feet. He was taller than the rest, skin bruise-blue and hair spiked white, and he drew a breath so deep the dust around his boots lifted off the ground toward him. Chi gathered at his chest, condensing into a pale flickering mass that tightened as he exhaled. He thrust both hands forward and the wave shot out across the field at her.

Yulaan walked into it.

She cocked her fist back at the last second and drove it through the center of the wave. The chi split around her knuckles and sheared off to either side, scoring twin furrows into the rock behind her, and her punch kept traveling until it met the yōkai’s sternum. Ribs gave. He staggered.

She closed to Hakkyokuken range and went to work on him.

Elbow to the solar plexus, driven in with the full rotation of her hips. He doubled and she brought her knee up under his jaw. His head snapped back and before he could fall she caught him by the shoulder with her off-hand, planted her foot, and drove her other elbow down onto his collarbone. Something crunched wetly.

She finished with Tessan-kō.

She stepped in, dropped her weight, and slammed her shoulder into his chest with her whole body behind it. The yōkai left the ground. He cleared twenty feet in the air before he hit a rock tower face-first, and the tower came down on top of him in three large pieces.

Yulaan shook out her shoulder, bared her fangs at the rest of them, and commanded for them to come.

They all rushed forward.

The first came in with a pudao, sweeping the blade at her knees. Yulaan leapt over it, caught the shaft with her tail as she came down, and yanked the yōkai off his feet into the elbow she drove into the back of his neck.

Two jian came at her from opposite sides. She caught one wrist on the bone of her forearm, stepped inside the other, let the second blade pass over her shoulder, and twisted her hip so the first swordsman’s blade carried into the second swordsman’s chest. Both yōkai fell. Three more took the ground where they had been standing.

A fist came at her ear and she slipped it. Another fist at her ribs, same answer, and a kick at her thigh she took because the angle wasn’t worth addressing. She turned into the kicker and broke his knee on the way past.

A qiang thrust lanced at her throat. She caught the haft one-handed, pulled the spearman onto her rising knee, and kept the spear. The next yōkai up swung a dao; she parried it with the qiang and ran him through with it in the same motion, and the yōkai after him took the qiang in the gut as she drove it sideways.

Four weapons clattered to the ground around her. Six more yōkai stepped into the circle.

Yulaan spat blood out of her mouth, cracked her neck, and waded forth.

At last again, the thrill of battle and carnage!

6 hours later

Two warriors remained!

Their fight had ended in a field of ashes where the weapons of fallen demons spiked the ground. The sky had taken on a blood-red hue streaked with bone-white clouds. Yulaan stood panting and shivering in the middle of it. Her bruised and bloody body had bulked over the course of the battle, her physical limits not just met but surpassed. She could feel the nexcidium flowing freely in her veins, hot and clean, and she had not yet let it blow her mind. She had, however, found where that boundary lay.

Her hair had spiked under unrestrained bioelectrical charge, and that combined with her chi whipping and flaming around her gave her a near-constant sizzle of electrical discharge at the skin. The Kollidorians called it “high-voltage state.”

Before her stood the chief challenger of the chamber. He was bigger than the rest by a head and then some, dark-pink-skinned with a single white horn curving up from the side of his bald skull and a tongue lolling loose past his fangs. Loose blue hakama, orange sash. Bare feet planted in the ash. He wasn’t in a stance. He was just standing there, leaning back on one leg with his fists hanging easy, watching her like a predator ready to kill.

She didn’t know why this one was arbitrarily stronger than the rest, and she didn’t much care. Seeing him tense for another attack set her tail lashing. She chose to strike first.

The red demon raised his wrist to block her punch. She swung a knee at his ribs and he caught the leg and brought his elbow down on her femur. The pain dropped her onto one knee, and then a foot caught her chin and shot her back through the air in an arc. Her back hit the sharpest point of a rockface, and when she slid down it a streak of blackened red blood followed.

The yōkai stomped forward, each step as loud as a drum.

Yulaan forced herself up and dashed at him, so fast that for once he could see her yellow eyes from under the mess of her hair. That might have been the last thing he ever saw. She sprung off the ground for momentum and her elbow shattered his face. He cried out and grasped at his eyes and his nose, both now overflowing with blood. She landed and followed with a flurry to his chest and stomach, each blow rupturing some internal organ, and finished with Sōsuishō: wrists braced, both palms driven flat into the center of his chest. The force carried him off his feet and drove him six feet back through the ash before he hit the ground.

He didn’t move for much longer than that.

Yulaan stood panting and sparking. Seeing the fallen fighter before her set afire the nexcidium-tainted adrenaline within her. She raised her fists to the sky and bellowed a war cry of triumph.

Her celebration ended abruptly when the chamber returned to shadow. She twisted and turned about, confused in her diminished mind at first, until her reasoning came back and she realized everything had, in fact, gone well.

She limped toward another part of the chamber where, in defiance of the grim aesthetics surrounding it, the walls gave way to ultrasaccharine pastels and cheerful animals and rainbows. Above the entrance in kindergarten letters and colors read “WEENIE CARE.” 

Inside, she patched her wounds and assessed the damage to her leg.

“Ah,” she said. “It’s shattered. I’ll get Sabbata to fix it.” Then she rubbed her temple and thought: she’d better not ask for another boob rub for it, either!