Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 10: Cursed Doom, Ryūei vs Dokkan

The wheel turned.

Ryūei
versus
Iwagashira Dokkan

Dokkan crushed his way out of the pavilion first and Temujin liked how onryō-killing he looked. The Stone-Head Oni of Mount Abura rolled his shoulders as he walked, slate-blue skin thick over muscle, black horns polished by habit because Temujin didn’t take him as vain. The orange sash at his waist had been tightened. Someone had painted a fresh charm across his brow in black ink. He spat into his bowl one last time and handed it to a small attendant, who held it with both hands and a noble-underling reverence Temujin did not admire.

The crowd liked Dokkan. He had the right shape for their affection: heavy fists, blunt head, cruel humor, visible scars. He had eaten walnut shells for an hour and headbutted a spider monk out of scripture. 

Demons regarded subtlety. Temujin wasn’t sure yet if they regarded it highly or like a damp fart from a swampy ass, but they did regard it, and Dokkan hinted towards the latter. Though perhaps that was the sneaky one the ogre cracked off as he stomped past the young man.

Ryūei slid through the opposite gate.

The noise thinned.

She did not hurry. The infant ghost floated near her shoulder, close to the noose-bead marble. One bare foot touched stone, then lifted. Walk, almost. Drift, almost. 

Mali introduced them quickly. The flag fell.

Dokkan charged. 

His head lowered between his horns, shoulders driving behind it, feet hammering through cracks Daigen had left. The first impact would have broken a gatehouse.

Ryūei moved aside.

Dokkan struck the far barricade and shattered two lotus panels. He turned with surprising speed, grinned around one broken tooth, and came again. This time his fist led, a straight punch thrown from hip and shoulder and horn-root, the stone under him grinding backward from the force.

Ryūei lifted one sleeve.

The fist missed by less than a finger.

Dokkan’s second hand came up from below. She was no longer there. He followed with a headbutt, a backfist, a stamping kick that sent a crack racing toward the dirt into the black water where the full force hit the outer wall with a tremendous and dirty explosion. Each attack displaced air hard enough for Temujin to feel it at the rail. 

She did little.

That was the trouble. Temujin could see it in the way the demon’s eyes kept flaring wide and bloodshot that this wasn’t some theatrical warm up. She was too fast.

Too fast. She must have been burning through too much ghostly energy to avoid him!

And then Temujin could follow her motion more clearly than before. Her float-slithering motion halted, jagged, and she stumbled to her feet. Dokkan roared and caught her sleeve.

“He’s got her!” Temujin sweatily screamed past his voice’s breaking point. “He’s gonna win!”

The crowd surged to its feet. His fingers closed around the white cloth. He yanked her toward him, other fist drawing back for the blow everyone had come to see. 

“I’ll crush your skull with a single blow!”

The infant ghost opened its mouth.

Ryūei’s visible eye turned toward Dokkan’s wrist.

Dokkan’s arm kept pulling back, white fabric clenched in his other fist. 

Temujin’s heart sank, his sickened mind’s eye flashing him with ghostly dodging maneuvers.

 She moved faster in his head.

Dokkan struck her face with meteoric force. Her head jolted back, throwing black hair over her shoulders. Hear that crack, feel that blast; Wilson cloud, transient white-gray sphere hitting faces, debris following, ear pain!

“Damn!” Temujin bent his knees and brought his hands half towards his ears. Yulaan’s bangs fluttered up long enough for Temujin to see those golden-eyes focused on the stage— ring shattered; focus instead on the deepening gulch of broken stone cutting down the ring’s right half. 

Veins wiggled and pulsed all over Dokkan’s arms and face. His eyes had gone black, and the black bled down his cheek. Temujin didn’t know if that was blood or self-possession, but the savaged results looked lovely.

Ryūei’s arms slacked. Her head fell back, slack-jawed. 

He punched the limp onryō again and again.

Each blow split the air in seismic cracks and those cracks spread to shatter glass and spew audience-dissolving black water out the moat. 

Yulaan’s jaw fell. “By Getavara’s Laughter, what the Hell…!”

Sesame cheered, “Yeah, pulverize that spooky bitch!” Then she recoiled and meekishly cooed, “Oh god, he’s going to obliterate Temujin…”

Temujin tried making more than staggered sounds, wincing only at the strikes, which themselves punched burning numbness deep past the ear into the neck. 

Dokkan pulled Ryūei into the air and slammed her against the tiles repeatedly in arcs; swinging up, crashing down, whipping up, thundering down. Temujin ducked to avoid a shard flying past him; far yonder, it cut down a distant metal lamp post and severed a hapless blue demon in half at the waist. He looked back and saw a tall jet of debris still rising and then shifting to ceramic sleet and snowdust flurrying and settling.

“Dokkan pulverizes Ryūei like a gorilla brutalizing a mouse! And it looks like the ghost-fighter is unresponsi—…!” Mali’s face twitched, her mouth collapsing into a small ‘o’.

Dokkan growled and kneeled to look closer.

The dust cloud, he didn’t wait for it to fade, he swiped his brass arm wide in an horizontal arc, and brought a thundering bassy rumbling through the chest and feet.

His eyes became emerald-into-wisping black orbs— both had been pushed so far out of their sockets that Temujin could see their roundness.

Ryūei stood straight up diagonally. Her hair fell against the ground, her back inches above the floor. She looked down upon Dokkan. 

She fell in reverse and brushed her fingers across his chest like the tease of an imperial courtesan.

Dokkan’s roar stopped.

His body remained standing. His face showed annoyance first, then surprise, then a concentration so deep it looked almost scholarly.

A red line opened across his chest.

Then another across his shoulder.

Then ten.

Then many.

For one impossible second the Stone-Head Oni held his shape out of habit. His horns, his broad torso, his thick legs, his old scars, his sash. Then the habit failed.

He came apart in wet slices.

Meat struck the stone in heavy folds. The horns clattered last. The orange sash landed whole atop the pile, absurdly neat.

Demons reminded Temujin how much they loved gore with cheers loud enough that he felt if he stood in the stands, his eardrums would resemble the mess on the stage.

Ryūei stood before the remains with one torn sleeve hanging from Dokkan’s fist on the floor.

The infant ghost closed its mouth.

Mali lifted her flag.

“Winner by pure gory goodness: Ryūei!”

The gore proved a demonic aphrodisiac, so exciting as to erase individual words into chaotic whoops.

That was all.

At ringside, Enekai had stopped squirming in Sesame’s ripping grip. Yulaan watched Ryūei with a face Temujin could not read.

She mumbled something he tried to hear through the rhythmic thumping in his ears.

He licked lips to replace the metallic nastiness with anything, even sweat, and said, “What was that…?”

Makku, who had sat not far from them, sauntered over and muttered, “Wow, that was brutal. It was like every punch hurt him instead!”

Daigen, sitting sagely on a mat behind them, chimed in, “Indeed! I don’t envy the fighter who faces off against such a vengeful ghost. Temujin, is it? Best to avoid directly touching her. It appears she has cultivated and weaponized ghostly phenomena.”

“Oh! Y-yes, sir, good idea.”

Mukhahīna, across the ring, seemed neither impressed nor unimpressed; his third eye swiveled towards Ryūei and followed a wild pattern like her whole body was a throat. Actually, Temujin stopped watching—

Mukhahīna flicked a glance at him. 

Yulaan winced and rubbed her wound. “I should have asked Sesame to heal me with a wish…” She didn’t look at him. He figured watching a life in decline wasn’t something she felt like doing. “Something’s not right about this. I don’t like how this feels.” 

“Yeah. No touch fighting in a tournament is cheating. How the hell do you punch a ghost?”

A breeze brushed the bangs off her nose. He could see her staggered eyes.

“That’s not what I mean.”

What…?

“What do you mean then? Don’t leave me hanging!”

She pulled him to sit away from others. “Everyone else is wrong. That was no ghostly technique. Most yūrei and onryō I’ve heard of kill either by curses or psychic attacks. If that’s all this was, I’d say use your chi as a fire and burn her away with her own rage. But…”

“But?”

“But… That was mazoku strength!”

Temujin blinked and it stung. “What?”

“She wasn’t converting Dokkan’s punches into damage.”

“Then what was she doing?”

Yulaan looked sick with the answer.

“Tanking them.”

If his blood could run colder, it would break physics. 

He slipped hands into his pockets. “Alright then, so how do I beat her?” As soon as he said it, he wished he sounded more concerned. Maybe it was Yulaan’s face twisted in concern that did it. Bollois were fearless and grossly macho, so said the warrior cosmology. A girl who he’d never seen vulnerable before finally letting even a flash of it run across her face gave him the tiniest dangling thread to seize to offer comfort he didn’t himself have. 

Once he consciously realized Yulaan, Yulaan, was concerned, his strength began to leave him and he sat down to avoid fainting.

She still stood. “Just keep fighting. You’ll figure something out.”

Sesame sat with both hands clenched in her red pants, sweating so profusely Temujin saw himself reflected, warped but clear, on the sheen covering her face.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. This is salvageable.”

Then she tipped sideways on the bench.

“Ohhh, my stomach hurts. This can’t be happening.”

In a quick sizzling burst, all the sweat vaporized off her face. She jumped upright and threw her fist down as steam blew out of her ears.

“Damn it! I feel like I’m gonna die! Temujin can’t take these guys by himself! Why the hell did you go and lose, you monkey bitch?!”

She was right, and that didn’t hurt at all. He couldn’t watch her pace nor could he believe in Enekai’s unconcerned confusion. 

“I mean, he beat everyone he fought,” meekly said Enekai.

And that was just as disgustingly true.

He had beaten Qinglong. He had beaten Masha. He was through. He was alive. 

The jade wheel turned like it wanted to change that.