Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 2

Three men from Black Reed Hall entered in dark green robes, each with a reed flute tucked into his sash. Nobody looked at them until the last one stepped wrong and showed the iron plates beneath his sleeves.

Then everyone looked.

“Those must be dignitaries or somethin’,” Sesame said, leaning back for a better view.

“Daimaō’s boys, maybe,” Yulaan said. “Means the big guy’s here.”

Near the entrance, a bald oni spat into a bowl. He was brawny and broad, his skin a dark pale slate-blue, with thick black horns rising from his skull. His gi was black-gray, sleeveless, patched at the shoulder, and belted by an orange sash. Scars climbed his forearms. One bite mark was wide enough to have come from a horse.

He had been introduced earlier as Iwagashira Dokkan, the Stone-Head Oni of Mount Abura. He had spent the hour cracking walnuts between two fingers and eating shell and meat together.

Farther along stood Daidarabō Gen’emon, though everyone had shortened him to Daigen. He was a sumo demon, a mountain in a ceremonial mawashi, oiled and tattooed, shoulders like temple bells. His first preliminary opponent had been a spear-wielding kappa from a river clan. The kappa had begun a formal speech about lineage. Daigen’s arms had stretched across the ring like wet ropes, seized him by the ribs, and crushed him against the wall until he came apart with a noise like a butcher dropping a sack of shrimp.

Afterward Daigen bowed with exquisite manners and asked whether the mess counted as a ring-out.

Fifty paces right stood a brazier holding a ghost-gray flame. It pulsed in rave-lit eddies, broke into iridescent smoke, and climbed in wrong directions, drifting sideways, downward, inward, until it curled into a false flame around a floating body. That body, Temujin noticed, was a dark yogi.

No one stood near him.

He sat cross-legged a man’s height above the brazier, untouched by the smoke, as if he had been floating there long before anyone entered the hall. The fire below him gave no heat. It breathed upward in translucent ribbons, gray becoming pearl, pearl becoming the faintest violet, each vaporous strand curling around his ankles, knees, shoulders, shaven skull, then peeling away in thin, trembling scripts that wrote themselves and forgot themselves in the air. Against the temple’s blackness he looked impossibly bright, though his skin was brown-black and dry, the color of sandalwood burned past worship and into bone-char.

No mouth broke the lower half of his face. There was only the smooth cruel plane where speech, hunger, prayer, laughter, and mercy had all been cut away.
In place of hands, curved blades grew from his wrists, not strapped there, not forged there, but emerging from him as naturally as talons, pale along the edges and dark at the roots, as if the metal had drunk from him while it formed. A manji pendant hung against his chest, hardly moving. His ordinary eyes were shut. His third was not. It remained open in the center of his brow, and it did not sit in his face the way an eye ought to sit in a face; it seemed rather a wound in the world through which some small, patient executioner peered, its pupil swiveling with a wet insectile delicacy from one throat to another, pausing not on faces, weapons, hands, hearts, or stances, but always the throat, the throat, the throat.

Temujin kept looking at him even though he knew better.

“Assassin,” Yulaan said, finishing off the meat and tossing the bone aside.

Temujin blinked. “What?”

“The yogi. Assassin.”

Temujin looked back. The yogi’s body had not moved. His shoulders were loose. His chin dipped slightly, giving him the aspect of a meditating saint or a corpse posed by disciples. His legs floated in a perfect lotus, bare feet tucked high and still. Even the blade-hands rested with an awful serenity, each curved edge angled inward toward his knees. If not for that eye, madly wakeful and terribly precise, Temujin might have thought him asleep.

Doubting his judgment, he said, “He’s sleeping.”

Yulaan’s grin showed a little fang. “No.”

“Trance, then?”

The third eye slid toward a tiger-headed swordsman by the east wall, settled for half a second on the thick rope of his neck, and moved on. It passed over Enekai without interest, over Sesame with something like distaste, over Temujin with a slow little stop that made the skin beneath his jaw tighten, then onward toward a masked ronin whose scarf hid exactly what the eye wanted.

Yulaan leaned forward, interested now in a way that made Temujin uneasy.

“Look where he watches.”

Temujin looked.

“The throats,” he said.

“Mm.”

The yogi’s aura thinned and brightened. The gray flame around him licked the air in delicate tongues. The frost beneath the brazier spread outward through the stone in white veins, and one little demon nearby pulled his foot away before losing a toe.

Temujin rubbed the side of his neck. “Is there an asura in him?”

Yulaan tilted her head, bangs hiding whatever her eyes made of the question. “Could be. I’ve fought an asura before. Proud bastard. Wanted Saiyan blood and mazoku blood both. Their kind have a taste for anything born to war.” She studied the floating yogi again. “But this one feels quieter. If there’s an asura in him, it’s been starved and taught to kill without enjoying its own roar.”

“That possible?”

“For a human?” Her tail lashed once against the floor. “Maybe.”

“He’s human?” 

“Human enough to ruin the word.”

Temujin watched that impossible third eye. It did not blink. It never once wandered to a chest or brow or blade. It kept drawing invisible lines across the room, measuring soft columns of flesh, calculating where breath lived and how quickly it could be evicted.

Yulaan’s grin deepened, and there was no mockery in it now.

“Brutal discipline,” she said. “Imagine how many years it takes to make the body sleep while the killing eye stays awake. Imagine how many throats he cut before he learned which ones mattered without looking at the rest of the body.”

Temujin glanced at her. “I don’t know if I could admire that kind of person.”

“Yeah, sure. But any true Kollidorian would.”

The yogi’s third eye fixed on a burly oni laughing too hard near the benches. The oni’s laughter faltered. He touched his own throat and stepped behind a larger man.

Temujin heard the oni mutter, “It’s Mukhahīna Śveta! Why is he here?” 

And a second backed off and said, “On second thought, I’ll settle for the alleyways,” and Temujin saw him and his compatriot sprint out the door.

Yulaan snapped him out of his heavy anxiety with a small, hungry click of her tongue.

“Damn shame,” she said.

“What is?”

“That I’m not fighting today.”

Sesame snorted. “That just means you’re all mine, Yuli.”

“Don’t call me that.” Yulaan’s tail thumped once against the floor.

A whistle came from across the hall.

The younger boy with the pilot-style goggled hat had climbed onto one of the window ledges and was waving down at a cluster of gaki and oni children outside. He could not have been many years younger than Temujin, maybe thirteen, though the pale blue skin and devil tail played games with the age. A little firefly circled his head, leaving golden sparks that vanished before touching anything. He had a beaming smile so clean it seemed to have entered the wrong building.

“That one,” Yulaan said.

Enekai looked up. “What of him?”

“Be careful with him.”

The boy outside laughed, slipped on the ledge, caught himself by his tail, flipped upright, and bowed to the gaki children as they applauded.

Enekai stared. “Him?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t look so impressive though…”

The goggled boy hopped down from the window and jogged over with an easy bounce. His sleeveless orange tunic showed lean arms, not large, but corded and lively. There were burn scars on both palms and a little white crescent scar under one eye.

“Hi!” he said.

Temujin immediately distrusted the brightness of him. In rooms like this, no one had any business being bright.

The boy bowed to Yulaan first. “So…. you’re, like, Sol Yulaan, right? The Butcher of Gorta?”

Yulaan tilted her head a degree. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m Bakuga Kōten! Burning Sparrow School. Well, last student of Burning Sparrow School. Well, technically new master now, since my old master died, but that feels rude to say so soon, but it does mean I learned a lot from him. I heard about—” 

The firefly orbited him faster. He closed his eyes and turned to Enekai, un-seeing Yulaan baring her fangs. “Well, point is, I’d love to fight you if you’re up for it.”

Temujin saw Enekai’s tail flicking as she rose from her squat. “Oh wow! You fight?”

“Yep!”

Yulaan calmed and asked, “With what technique?”

“Mostly punching. Sometimes kicking. Sometimes falling very fast.”

Enekai nodded and said, “Sometimes simple is best!”

Temujin didn’t like the way he spoke.

Boys can be happy and calm, and older boys like Temujin found dishonest happiness and calm as lovely as splattered puke. 

Was that what bothered him? No, it couldn’t have been, he couldn’t see dishonest happiness in that annoying beaming smile of Bakuga’s.

“Thanks! By the way, you’re Enekai, right? I saw you carrying that extending staff thing. It’s got a really nice feeling.”

Suddenly Enekai recoiled and wrapped her body closer to the staff. “It is mine.”

“I know.”

“You can’t have it.”

His smile hadn’t changed. “I wasn’t asking.”

Enekai lost hers. “You were thinking.”

“I think about lots of things.”

“Don’t think about my staff.”

He shut his eyes, and hadn’t lost the smile, and after a beat he said, “Okay!” so cheerfully that Temujin couldn’t tell whether he even meant offense. For all the years he’d known her, Temujin knew better than most that Enekai was slow to anger, especially over words.

At once Temujin understood Yulaan’s warning. The boy’s chi was not large in the obvious way. 

Chi, his father said, was like spiritual ink. Geniuses of calligraphy and horses broken into studios could both spill it out, but everyone and everything had its own pattern and method.

This one, though… It hopped, vanished, reappeared in pinpricks, jumping, sparking, laughing, laughing more, it bloomed and burned in such joyous yellow happiness that the weight of his power struck him only then. He’d known chi to erupt in anger, in grief, in despair, in passion, even in (he could barf) friendship. 

Raw happiness…?

What a damn odd chi! 

Yulaan, Temujin knew, wasn’t nearly as forbearing as her monk-clad friend, so he expected that Bakuga had committed some nearly imperceptible slight to annoy her. Before he could ask, a bell rang from the far side of the hall.

This, Temujin understood, began the preliminary matches. Hundreds of fighters had come upon Temple Saion-ji, but the day’s matches would condense down to sixteen contestants, as per the command of the ancient sign.

In their section, there opened two doors into the wall, revealing a small inner gold-wood lei tai bordered by stone railings and black ropes. 

Excitement crossed in first and beckoned everyone else forward. Temujin and Enekai advanced inward and found a clear spot to stand in between a dozen other musky musclebound demons. Other doors opened to their own stages. 

Temujin’s shoulders shuddered enough to bother him. To ease that twitching agitation, he crossed his arms and looked down at something or nothing on the floor to organize his mind’s eye around what he deemed his best chances at victory. 

Why had they come here?

His friends were trapped.

Dear Yuanjia, Mako, and Mydella had failed to avoid the trap of the Imajin Wizard, poor dolts, and now floated in the void of a crystal Moon Marble. Yet every time Temujin played their fate back in his mind, it was the devils’ little things that had doomed them.

That had been his own folly too, or so he had grumbled all day: damned luck, fate synchronized by demons. Every day had its tiny rhythms and atonal beats, but then you stepped in deep rainwater, or received a burnt-black vendor’s chicken kebob when it should have been crisp and brown, and one began fearing the day had been cursed by some trickster demon with a grudge.

Why fight in this tournament? 

He had to. And so he was here now in Temple Saion-ji. It had been Yulaan who told him of the Makai-Ichi Budōkai, where the prize for winning always, without fail included at least ten different demonic de-enchantments (demons, of course, need help against demons).

He perked up as he watched the preliminary rounds unfold. One official, an ostrich-yōkai in blue robes, introduced his pair of fighters quickly, and he looked around at the platforms all holding their own little physical dramas. 

Then he looked back to the ostrich’s stage and saw a tiger-headed pugilist named Tai Lung take three steps after being decapitated, grab his own head from the floor, and throw it at his opponent’s face hard enough to win by blunt-force ten-count knockout.

The yōkai began to walk forward to lift the tiger’s fist, only for his cradled head to suddenly bellow, “I have gone as far as I wish! I forfeit my place in this tournament. Next year, I will be more prepared!”

When he bowed, his arms nearly fumbled the head, but caught it with a jerking grab, and he walked off.

“Contestant Lung forfeits!” said the talking ostrich.

Temujin blinked, running through just what childish demonic physics allowed any of that to work. 

He could not think for long. A thin bone-white mazoku in scholar robes strode onto the platform as if writing himself there. The yōkai introduced some robed scholar-thing, Temujin guessed that’s what this one was, as Ink-Wash Ransui of the Thousand Character Palm. 

And so he raised one hand to salute his opponent. 

Something walked out.

The hall hadn’t bothered with the muttering to begin with, yet something about the silence that followed made Temujin sick.

She came through the entry curtain as a woman might come through the paper wall of a dream: first the white of her robe, dead-white and loose-sleeved above jet-black pants, then the black fall of hair, and then the face half-lost behind it, oh God look at how pale and deathly— Temujin shook his head and compared the two and found the scholarly mazoku swarthy.

She walked at first. That was the worst of it. Not the ghost-flames that drifted about her sleeves, white at the heart and violet where they thinned, not the black hair hanging over her eyes in a funeral curtain, not even the infant spirit floating near her shoulder with its round blank face and little open mouth that made no sound. It was the walking. 

Heelflat—heelflat—heelflat—heelflat, so odd that gait, so unnatural that gait through the gate of the stage, yet so soft that gait as a girl defiling a nursery floor at midnight, and with each step, the robe stirred a little too late, as if the cloth remembered her body after the body had already passed. 

Then, at the edge of the lei tai, she ceased to obey the floor. Her bare feet lifted from the stone and suddenly she stood on the polished wood.

No flare of bukūjutsu announced it, no martial pressure, no bright swelling of qi; Temujin had seen Yulaan rise into the air as naturally as breathing, had seen Enekai vault heavenward on that ridiculous staff, had seen Sesame floating even now with her ankles crossed and one pink elbow propped on nothing at all, all these were wondrous flight.

That motion, however, was a corpse forgetting how to fall.

Temujin felt his heart tick sickly in his throat.

He forced a more mechanical curiosity to compare their sizes and stances. The scholar’s shadow stretched twice the length of the girl herself. Poor shadow, Temujin thought.

Men who had laughed through broken teeth stopped laughing. A blue-skinned oni looked away and pretended to fix his sash. One of the kitsune boys in the rafters curled his two tails around a beam and went very still.

“Ooooh, an onryō, I didn’t know they entered martial arts tournaments,” Sesame said, until she said the word again, pressing each syllable against the tongue, “An… onryō… That’s not good.”

Yulaan unfurled her arms and mouthed something to Temujin he either did not hear or she had not said, though he saw the motion of her face and guessed it had been some incredulous swear.

The announcer called her name, and even amplified through the demon brass and electric speakers, it sounded like a boogeyman rumor.

“Ryūei. Dragon Shadow!”

Ransui, waiting opposite her, swallowed. He had fine hands, long fingers, and the delicate face of someone who had never expected his own death to be ugly. His robe was blue-gray, his sash ink-black, his hair pinned with a silver scholar’s clasp. Now that his opponent had her fifteen seconds of horror, the man chose traditional honor with a fist-palm salute once, correctly, hands shaped in the old way; then again, more deeply, as if ceremony might yet build a little fence between himself and the thing before him. 

Ryūei did not.

The infant ghost beside her turned its empty eyes toward the scholar’s neck. Then Ryūei’s visible eye did the same. Temujin rubbed his throat. Always the throat…

He noticed then the only itty dot of living color: a tiny orb hanging a-bottom a noose of beads around her throat. Comfortable blue, wrapped in swirling clouds that reminded him of watching the sky with his mother.

The bell sounded.

Ink-Wash Ransui struck first. His palm blurred, and black characters spilled from his sleeve, each one a cutting mark of qi. Each black thing swarmed Ryūei and would have, against an unprepared man, eviscerated meat and stained it with ink.

She walked through them. The characters sank into her robe and vanished.

Ransui stepped back, both palms moving now, his sleeves snapping. Off his body, a hundred characters appeared in a ring and wrapped around into a halo encircling the nightmare-haired girl.

And he spoke so gently, “Rest well, child— I’ll write your obituary with elegance.”

Ryūei’s hair lifted.

The infant ghost opened its mouth wider.

Ransui’s technique shattered like a thought interrupted by terror. Every word failed him.

Ryūei crossed the distance with a movement Temujin did not follow. One moment she was there, the next her hand closed around Ransui’s throat. Her fingers pressed in. He struck her wrist, her elbow, her shoulder. He drove two fingers toward her visible eye. She did not blink.

A wet crack traveled through the hall.

Ransui’s feet kicked once. Twice. No more.

She let him fall.

The referee stared at the body. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at Ryūei, looked away, and lifted a flag.

“Winner: Ryūei!”

The hall did not cheer. A few warriors nodded. One man laughed too loudly and then stopped when Ryūei turned her head.

Her visible eye found Temujin before her hair washed over it.

The cold moved through him with frightening patience. It entered his fingers first, then the wrists, then elbows, then chest. Whatever healthy momentum his heart kept simply ceased.

What was this that stood before him? This fear felt older than the human ability to fight back.

Normally, Temujin enjoyed attention from a cute lady. 

This one made his blood run cold enough to superconduct.

The infant ghost turned too.

It looked at him.

Temujin forced a grin onto his face and hated the shape it made. He pointed at himself, mouthing ‘Me?’ and she did not speak. 

Ryūei stepped down from the lei tai and passed through the parting crowd. The infant drifted after. Every candle blew out in her wake no matter how distant, and every curl of smoke swirled and twirled towards the girl. There she went, a ghost of smoke, back into the shadows.

Then, because demons were demons, they began talking twice as loudly to prove they had never been afraid.

“Well,” Temujin said, “she seems friendly.”

Sesame leaned in. “I think she likes you.”

A second pulse of superconductivity shot through the young man.

Yulaan still did not speak. 

The goggled Bakuga whistled. “Wow. She’s something. That’s, like, anti-nirvana.”

Enekai nodded. “I’d love to see what she’s got!”