Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 17: Defying Fate? Temujin vs Ryūei Part 3

“Nine!”

He awoke.

“And—!”

Pink smoke struck him in the face.

It had the taste of sugar, copper, and Sesame’s sweet sweat.

He sat up before he understood that sitting up should have been impossible. His ribs no longer ground together. His throat opened. The crushed place under the sternum filled with warmth. His torn cheek sealed. His lungs drank air and found room for it. 

He stood. 

Sesame stood at the rail with one hand stretched toward him, her whole arm smoking rose-pink from wrist to shoulder. 

The tiny red eye in her palm had opened wide, wider than before, then shut with an exhausted blink and sank into her flesh.

Her smile tried to look cocky. It failed around the eyes.

Mali stumbled on the count, flag half-raised. “Astounding! The contestant Temujin’s ally used a wish to restore his health!! The young man is resurrecting like some holy desert zombie!”

The crowd erupted in argument. Some swore the count had reached ten. Some insisted resurrection between numbers was legal unless specified otherwise. One demon bookie climbed onto a cracked seat and began recalculating odds with six hands.

The Daimaō laughed, pleased by the dispute, saying, “It’s been two hundred years since I’ve seriously paid attention to a match! Don’t disappoint me now, either of you.”

Ryūei looked from Sesame to Temujin.

She looked satisfied.

His body was whole again.

Ryūei’s eyes narrowed.

“You know now.”

He wiped nothing from his mouth. “Yeah.”

“Now die.”

Then she came for him.

This punch did not knock him sideways. 

It cut.

Her hand passed across his chest and took skin with it. Pain opened hot and wet. Temujin struck at her wrist, missed, twisted, and a second line appeared over the ribs. Her nails, her qi, her ghost-hatred— whatever she used, it slid through the meat. A strip of his shirt fell. A strip of him followed. Muscle showed red under the torn cloth.

He staggered back.

Ryūei stepped with him.

The next cut opened his thigh. He felt air touch raw hot-cold meat. His body tried to fold around the injury, but he drove chi down the leg and forced it straight. His fists came up. He blocked once. The block cost the skin along his forearm. He blocked again. Blood ran into his palm.

“I despise liars.”

Temujin spat what little white saliva he had left in his mouth. “When— when have I fucking lied to— to you…”

Her fingers ripped cold through his jaw as she pulled him to look upon her face like a beggar before a goddess. 

She ran the edge of her hand across her own neck and let her blood snow upon his face. 

“Oh come on!” cried Mali’s voice over the PA system, “We had our edgelord fill before now, didn’t we? Ryūei appears to have done more damage to herself than Temujin had done all match!”

Temujin tried to spout a snarky one liner, it was right there in his throat bubbling under the blood, but only the blood came out.

“I was shameful and arrogant in my lie about my power. I am not using twenty percent. In truth…”

She struck him in the belly.

The force burrowed deep and came out through his spine as a cold flower of pain. He remained on his feet by forgetting, for one instant, that knees existed. He swung. The punch found her shoulder. It moved her robe. Her body stayed exactly where it wished.

She smiled for the first time. The Moon Marble seemed to dim to ash gray without losing its blue.

“I am only using five.” 

Temujin was losing too much blood for it to run any colder, yet the words still broke his iced-over hesitation to move; he jumped back several paces, but she was already there, and forced him to about-face with a flip-grab of his shoulders. She leaned in and pulled at her half-brother’s chin and said, “Now do you understand the depths of my wrath?”

Temujin coughed blood and smirked. “But tell me something, little miss Super Onryō.” His grin sharpened under the blood. “If you’re so strong, why are you still doing math at me?”

Her expression flattened. The smallest twitch moved through her hand.

There.

He felt it more than saw it. A hairline break in the goddamn wall.

Temujin’s grin twisted sharper. “So what I’m thinking now is that you’re planning something, and— no, I know you are. You’re whining like a brat trying to prove your ugly little bedtime prophecy had a point. You’re starting to wonder if your plan isn’t working.”

And then he whispered with sinister intent, “Or is it… that you’re scared?”

Ryūei’s eyes widened by a fraction.

“Scared that you’re going to walk away from this with my blood on your hands crying to yourself,” Temujin whispered, “what was all this for?”

Her expression sharpened into a scowl that could cut the air between them. 

Yulaan leaned in and asked, “What the hell’s he doing?”

Ari-apari leaned on Utita, and next to him was Makku, who said, “Wait a second, he’s right: the ghost-lady could’ve flicked his head off! Is she trying to throw this fight?”

And yonder across the stage, Enekai tapped her elbow and said, “No… He doesn’t have a plan.”

“What— Eni! You’re the one who said you believed in him all this time! Why are you giving up on him now?”

Enekai looked on, eyes wide as if trying to capture something she couldn’t see before, and finding nothing that calmed her.

Ryūei lifted her hand, all fingers together, aimed straight at Temujin’s heart.

Temujin saw the hand.

He saw death arrange itself into five pale fingers.

He also saw that she had given him another second.

So he took it.

“Well?” he said, and beckoned with two bloody fingers. “Tell me, sis. Do you have…. the balls to kill me?”

Ryūei’s hair began to part as she quaked, mouth opening into a fanged growl. “You stupid boy! Do you really believe you can handle my wrath?!”

The enormity of it slammed the audience in a stabbing gale, whipping faces until flesh ripped, blasting arena tiles apart in a tornado-force burst, tearing loose the pavilion like wet paper.

Demons flew back— Utita and Ari-apari bounced across three benches. Mali cried out as she went spinning halfway out of the amphitheater before the Daimaō himself caught her in one huge hand and forced his other palm forward to ward off the worst of the black-violet storm.

Then it got worse. Pure weight displaced the atmosphere with a thick, greasy sludge of gravity plunging outward from her core. The sheer kinetic density of her chi ground through the amphitheater, crushing the air into a suffocating vacuum, ripping against the ground, shattering stones, eviscerating grass. 

The tide reached the stands with a wet, bludgeoning impact. The atmospheric shear tore into the front rows, collapsing the chests of lesser devils before they could scream. Sesame, hanging on for dear life, saw a  horned brute in the third tier flat against a wall, his skin rippling, his flesh peeling away in thick ribbons from his shoulders; then the underlying musculature stripped from the bone in a single, violent jerk; then disintegration into red slurry, his skeletal remains tumbling backward into the chaos. Behind, a hundred more fractured under the weight getting pulverized into dust and bone fragments by the crushing momentum.

Pitch-black light filled the entire amphitheatre and erupted to the sky, dragging with it a guttural tremor from the bedrock. Fissures zipped across the stone floor, pitching the remaining audience into a tectonic upheaval.

A cold, clotted terror broke the mob. Their predatory arrogance dissolved. Mandibles clacking, eyes bulging against the gravitational drag, the surviving demons scrambled over their own dead to reach the exits. 

“She’s…” Makku struggled to keep himself standing, as he watched another gaki boy next to him blow away eviscerated, “she’s killing everyone!”

The mother hyena threw herself onto her cubs, with her back taking lashes, splattering blackened-red blood against where she had sat on the seat.

Temujin’s back hit the wall and he couldn’t hope to move. “Damn it! She’s… putting out too much!”

Yulaan crossed her arms over her face, and caught Sesame before she could disappear in the eye-whittling gust.

“Oh shit!” Yulaan shouted.

Sesame screamed, “Should I have used the healing wish on you?”

Yulaan looked on at Ryūei’s translucent jet-black aura rolling off her skin. The gales calmed to nothing. 

Temujin fell and laid on his stomach, picking himself up in a pile of rubble at the far end of what used to be the moat. The black water was gone, evaporated ironically, but he could feel from the pressure of demon chi that he was in no less danger. Above him, Ryūei stood in the shattered ring with lightning-crackling phantom fire billowing off her body, pale at the root, black at the edges, so dense it made the air look as bruised as he was.

He pushed himself up on one elbow. All behind him, the same demons that had cheered on their savior from Mame,  well their faces broke, now that they realized that they had been cheering on an onryō. 

Even weak onryōs were, in Human World and Demon World alike, feared ghastly as catastrophes given human form. That one, right there— buzzsaw aura stolen from a Super Saiyan, now corrupted to pure black, and now lumbering heel-heavy heel-heavy, leering heartwise at his chest— was like a god’s nightmare.

“Well.. I guess she’s finally going all out now.” He flicked his bleeding nose. “I wouldn’t wanna be me right now.”

“I’m shocked,” Yulaan said. Sesame and Enekai looked towards her. “I figured before that if I was in the ring, she might give me trouble.”

She turned back to the ring.

“But this is asinine. That Saiyan’s chi wasn’t extraordinary, so I assumed he was some low-class ass clown who found a way to transform without the struggle to earn it. But this…! If I had my full powers from Gorta, maybe I could have ended this. But right now, Ryūei is so far above me that I wouldn’t fare better than Temujin. Actually, even Kevelnege would get checked pretty hard.”

She beat the railing and the entire thing folded inwards in its collapse. “Dammit! To think it would end like this…”

The smile on Ryūei’s face looked young. Human as it was. Cruel because it had once belonged to a girl who might have laughed if the world had given her enough days. “I see now. You mock my rage to hasten your death.”

Temujin answered with a Heaven’s Vengeance pulse from his left palm. She let it strike her cheek. Her head turned slightly. Smoke drifted from one lock of hair. She turned back and drove two fingers into the meat below his collarbone.

He screamed.

She withdrew. Blood came after her fingers.

Sesame shouted from the rail. Enekai’s hands tightened around her staff. Yulaan’s tail cracked the stone where it lashed.

Temujin saw none of them clearly.

The arena shrank to Ryūei’s face, his own blood, and the narrow task of remaining present.

He kept fighting.

Step. Jab. Low kick that struck her ankle and earned him a gouge down the calf. Feint into a palm that hit nothing and exposed his shoulder. 

Ryūei’s sleeve brushed his arm. Flesh peeled in a red ribbon. He punched through the pain because he didn’t have time to feel pain.

His heart began to fail.

He felt it misfire.

One beat came late. The next came shallow. The third struck too hard and sent black sparks through his sight. He clutched his chest for half a breath, and Ryūei saw it. Of course she saw it. She moved with terrible delicacy, put two fingers between his ribs, and sliced.

The heart itself opened.

Temujin felt the cut inside him.

The body knew. The spirit knew. The hands, stupidly faithful, lifted anyway. Blood flooded where blood had no right to flood. His heartbeat became a wounded animal dragging itself through a dark room.

Ryūei stepped back to watch.

He nearly fell.

Then his chi seized the torn heart and held it.

Beat.

The first one came by force.

Beat.

The second came because he commanded it.

Beat.

The third hurt so badly his mouth filled with vomit and blood.

He stayed upright.

“I refuse,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re planning, I’m not doing it.”

Ryūei’s expression tightened.

He did not know whether he spoke to her, to death, to the blood moon, to the mother who had died of a sickness sent by a child she had failed, to the little name Tsukiko fluttering on an old festival flag. He only knew his heart was bleeding and he had wrapped it in chi because dying here, like this, under her verdict, would make her right.

He came forward.

His punches had lost speed. They still came. His right fist struck her forearm. His left found her ribs. His knee drove toward her hip and missed by inches.

Her knuckles caught his cheekbone and the plain took him. He went skidding across the scraped gray flat where the ring once stood, shoulder and hip and shoulder again, each slab of dead stone grinding its toll out of him, until he gouged to a halt at the far rim under a long banner of dust. Grit stood in the trench he left. A betting slip settled into it.

He got a knee down. Her shadow was already on it.

The palm strike rang through his sternum and carried past him, and the Thirty-Six-Armed Sword Kannon at the north niche blew from its plinth whole. Centuries of carved patience went airborne and came apart, and its blades fell across the stands in a clanging slaughter, steel through bench, steel through bone, one ogre nailed upright by a sword through the shoulder, bawling, while his neighbors clambered over his lap to live.

On the royal cloud the Daimaō’s thumb found the bone stud under his armrest and mashed it, twice, five times, grinding it flat beneath his whole palm while the summons-wail for the Makai Sentai climbed out of the mountain’s guts.

Her fist hit like lightning, and the air ripped like thunder

Fist and fist and elbow and fist, blunt percussion at machine gun interval, bang-bang-bang with indifference to which round kills. His head snapped on his neck. Blood left him at angles. He stayed standing through the first dozen out of stubbornness and through the second out of physics, her hands arriving too fast to let him drop, the beating itself the scaffold that held him. She stepped off him at last, and he swayed, and came forward again with blood spilling from his mouth in a line that swung with the motion.

He was fighting for himself.

That had carried him to this point.

It was failing him now.

Ryūei caught his next punch, bent his wrist until the joint screamed, and threw him through a broken pillar. He landed among splintered sutra chains and tried to rise. His hand slipped in his own blood. The heart staggered under his chi’s weakening grip.

Clouds of dust rushed all around until he couldn’t see her eyes anymore. He laid there sprawled, more blood than clean skin, and gasped for air that stung what was left of his lungs. 

Twice he had tried to fight her. Twice, he was left mulch. 

“Enough,” Ryūei said. Her voice separated the dust. “If you refuse to succumb to terror…”

She turned away from him.

At first he thought she had lost interest, and knew he was never going to be that lucky. Then he saw her gaze move toward the rail.

“Then you’ll succumb to grief.”