Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 18: Transformation! Temujin vs Ryūei Part 4

Beyond them, demons who had stopped cheering and started edging away. The hyena mother and Zeru and Temu, skittering to safety not far off from Makku, who ran and didn’t turn back.

Injured spectators crawling over broken seats. Sword-school disciples forming a defensive ring around their wounded master. The arena’s appetite had curdled. The crowd that had come to watch death had discovered death laughing back.

He saw Utita pulling Ari-apari, but the boy refused to move.

And the manly voiced boy cheered, “You got this, Temujin!”

Ryūei lifted her hand.

Black-violet lines gathered around her fingers.

“Wait,” Temujin said.

His voice barely left the blood in his mouth.

Enekai stepped over the rail first, staff retracting in her grip. She pulled off the curled monkey-king crown and let her hair rise over her ears. Yulaan grabbed the edge of her own cloak and tore it off. Bandages showed, dark and wet. 

“So you’re coming after us then? Alright, then at least this’ll be interesting!”

Sesame turned towards her. “No, w-wait, you can’t go like this!”

Yulaan ignored her.

The red aura ignited around the bolloi.

“Kaiōken!”

It cast her hair and cloak scraps crimson. It made the reopened wound on her side bleed faster. 

“You remember what I said when we first met, Temujin?” she said, loud enough for Temujin to hear through the roaring in his ears. “I was born. That means someday, I will die.”

Sesame’s eyes widened.

Yulaan’s tail coiled, hard and eager.

“If I’m gonna die, let me die in war.”

Her grin twitched.

“Shame it’s one I can’t win.”

Enekai looked at her once, then forward.

Ryūei’s hand dropped.

The first wave hit them.

Enekai met it with the staff across both palms. The Ruyi Jingu Bang bowed under the pressure. Her boots carved back through stone. Yulaan launched beside her, Kaiōken burning red, fist cocked and laughing in the face of her own stitches. For one spectacular second the two Saiyan girls looked like a wall.

Ryūei passed through the space between their efforts.

Enekai folded around a blow to the stomach and flew backward into the rail. Yulaan caught a palm on the shoulder, struck back with a crimson-wrapped fist, and hit only afterimage. Ryūei’s elbow found her wounded side.

Yulaan’s breath left her in a bright red spray.

Ryūei slammed her into the stone hard enough to crack the rail under Sesame’s floating feet.

Enekai pushed herself up, furious now. Ryūei kicked her in the chest and sent her sliding through broken seats..

Yulaan groaned and tried to rise. The Kaiōken aura flickered around her like a torch in rain.

Ryūei looked past them.

At Sesame.

The majin’s face changed.

For all her jokes, all her little mouths and cuffs and flirts and obscene confidence, Sesame looked very small. She raised both hands regardless. Pink magic bubbled around her fingers. Her ears flattened. Her lips pulled back from her teeth.

“Come on then,” she said, voice shaking and mean. “Try the cute one.”

D-Damn it! Move your ass… Move! They’re gonna die if you don’t! They’re all going to die!

Temujin saw it.

He saw Sesame standing there with no wish left. Enekai down. Yulaan bleeding through Kaiōken. There was Makku and Ari-apari, both willing to throw themselves into the fight no matter the cost and Utita ready to carry her son forth even if she fell in the rush. The hyena mother, Zeru, Temu, all cowering together under the stands. Demons crawling away from the shadow of a vengeance that would not stay in its lane. Yuanjia, Mako, and Mydella still in glass. The Sun Emerald beyond reach. His mother’s sin. His sister’s corpse. His own pride, still clinging to the idea that this fight was about what he could do to prove himself against the world.

All of it fell away.

Fear would have been lovely to lose, but he did not lose it.

Nobility would be righteous to gain, but he was not noble.

Rage would have been worth expressing, but he did not have rage. 

Love would have been easy to give, but he did not want to love her.

Like the pieces of his body, everything fell away and left the heart beating by force. Why force a heart ripped to pieces to continue beating against its will? 

Ryūei crossed the space toward Sesame.

Killing hand forward; black fire towards pink— she struck flesh.

He caught Ryūei’s fist.

“What a load of crap, sis.”

White light rose through the blood.

It poured from inside him, black and red where it touched torn flesh, gray and purple, peach, white, shining, lifting, flowing. The places Ryūei had stripped him began to restore themselves under the glow. Skin knitted over exposed muscle— blood lifted from his chest in shining threads and returned to the wounds— the eviscerated heart sealed around the chi that had kept it beating, and the next beat came freely, huge and calm.

Then came the radiant eye, vertical and false, blinking above his brow. The real-eyes’ pupils shone gold. 

For one breath, a halo flared behind his head, a broken wheel rimmed in white-gold. Then the halo drew inward, condensed, and became a flaming aura: sacred, heavy, bright, swirling around him in spangling bands that lifted the dust from the floor.

Ryūei stared.

Three beings warred behind her face.

The onryō saw the prophecy lost. Kill. Sick with rage, kill!

Tsukiko, who had died at four hours and never had a word for brother, felt despair.

But it was the spirit of the mazoku that drew the wild and wonderful smile on her face.

Temujin tightened his grip.

Ryūei raised her free fist.

He struck first.

The blow landed in her stomach and folded the robe around his fist. Force carried her backward through the rail, through three broken rows of seats, through the carved arena wall, through the outer temple face, and out into the Makai air. Stone burst after her in a comet tail. The mountain groaned around the hole.

For a heartbeat no one moved.

Enekai blinked. “T-temujin?!”

Mali picked herself up and spoke into the mic, “Wow! To any audience member blinded by the attacks or born with too many or not enough eyes, contestant Temujin seems to be… to be… glowing a brilliant white gold! I’d make a currency joke, but Mali wonders if this human actually has Saiyan blood all along!”

Yulaan picked herself up and looked onwards, “No…!” And she chuckled. “No, that’s not Saiyan energy at all.”

Makku looked on from afar, shielding his eyes from the light. “And that’s not demon energy either. Bakuga never had anything like this!”

Sesame fell to her knees and looked on at the young man, seeing the flesh on his torso, back, and chest as he turned, scarred without blood, damaged without pain, set alight with pale, rolling fire.

The Daimaō picked himself up as well, adjusting his crooked hat and awful tie upon seeing the further damage to the south-side of the ring, and said, “To Hell with it all, my father will have to pocket the bill. Human, Temujin! We can’t afford to wait for the Makai’s special forces to arrive. Do what you’ve got to do to take her down!”

Temujin tipped his head up towards the demon king, and then back towards the smoking chasm. 

“Get to safety and heal the others,” he said. When he hadn’t heard any footsteps, he turned to Sesame and said, “Do as I say.”

Sesame did not argue. That frightened him more than if she had; he’d never known her to simply listen without a wisecrack, and he wondered what he must have looked like to them. He looked at his open hand— it really was pure light, white-gold as Mali said, as if the sun dripped on his body and he made use of it.

Yulaan dragged herself upright. The Kaiōken aura flared again. Blood ran from her reopened side down her hip and leg. She wiped her mouth, and began laughing.

“Ha! There it is! There it fuckin’ is!”

Enekai staggered up and Yulaan braced her with an arm to help her stand. Seeing the glowing man standing at the last remnant of the ring, Enekai said, “I told you guys he’d pull through.”

“That Earth dog, he did it. He actually did it! He found a Human transformation…”

“Temu-Jin! Temu-Jin!” went that familiar deep voice. And soon, others gathered in. Then more, then more, then Enekai, then Sesame and Yulaan until the entire crowd chanted.

Then, miles away across the dead peaks, something flashed black and white.

She came through the hole without slowing, neck twisted all the way backward from the impact, head facing behind her while the body flew forward. 

She reached up with both hands, seized her own jaw and skull, and turned the head back into place with a crack-crack-crack that many hoped would have killed her.

That feeling intrigued him. Temujin looked around the crumbled stands, and saw one ogre feeling hatred, and saw a rusulka elsewhere thinking of curses, and saw a skinwalker imagining Ryūei in gruesome agony. All of this and more, and more upon more, the malevolence he had come to believe was the Makai without filter.

Yet, standing not too close and yet near enough to be in danger of the wake of any attack, he felt the thoughts of Temu and Zeru, and they were cheering his name.

Ryūei burned in serrated black flames, pushing away the curtain of hair so he could see her drooling smile. She let her hands fall into sickly curled fingers. 

Temujin stepped away from Sesame.

Sesame screamed at him, “Do it, Temujin!”

Ryūei rose into the air.

The black-violet aura around her collapsed inward until the robe hugged her body. The infant ghost hovered away in a streak, clinging to a broken rock.

The rage of an onryō burned black.