Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 20: Fated Siblings, Fated Paths? Temujin vs Ryūei FINALE

The crowd slowly settled to safer ledges and broken seats under his light. Even the Daimaō came down on his cloud in a crooked glide, beard pulled loose on one side, expression caught between humiliation and delight.

He raised his fist.

“Go, Temujin!” the demon king cried. 

Ryūei broke free and the aura dispersed. She panted and felt her wrist.

“To hell with your silly self aggrandizement, filth. You’re a normal puke born under a normal sky. You don’t even deserve to bear a name.”

Temujin and Ryūei, he and her, stood apart, eyes against eyes. All the condors, fluttering demonlets, circled around in a dark halo, dark, dark, then white above Temujin, passing back into darkness, into black over Ryūei. 

Temujin’s eyes opened wider. “You’re enjoying this, ain’cha.” 

Ryūei shook her fist at him and spoke like shattering glass, “I need you dead! I need to see you broken and writhing on the ground, face ripping in blood and terror, under my power, in grief eternal.”

“No, no no, something about the way you look at me tells me— some part of you is enjoying this. You like that someone so normal became strong enough to… challenge you.”

Ryūei shook with the force of her own breath. 

“What… what are you saying! I seek vengeance against the living. Against the Twelve Kings. Against their houses. Against the sons, the daughters, the servants, the guards, the children at the garden gates. Against anyone who speaks their names and keeps their world breathing.”

“Some of those children are harmless.”

“They heard the names and lived.”

He stared at her for a moment, then gave one small, disbelieving scoff and rubbed under his nose with his thumb.

“Aw, come on now. Even the innocent seamstresses and farmers?”

“Every one of them. The curse of their ears damned them!”

“The curse of their ears damned them?”

“Yes.”

The last of the humor left him.

The genki in his body settled deeper, past muscle, past bone, into whatever place had chosen to open when he stood between Ryūei and the people she wanted to kill.

“Then you know I can’t let you do that.” He stepped forward. The air quaked.

She stepped back. Her hatred sharpened to a point where it stabbed through her teeth, “I hate you!”

“I know.”

“I hate your breath. I hate your eyes. I hate the years you were given. I hate the father who held you. I hate every morning you woke under a sky that had forgotten me.”

“I know.”

“I hate that you stand there.”

“I know.”

“I hate that you are so noble. So heroic! You’re everything I was supposed to be, and you don’t even care!”

Temujin’s expression shifted.

“Bull—” The boy dashed forth in a bound, and threw his fist against her face. “—SHIT!”

Ryūei flew back in recoil, for but a single fathom— Temujin grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back.

“I’ve been living as a thief and delinquent for years. I could have saved loads of people, and I didn’t. I’m not like you. I’m no bodhisattva. All I ever wanted was to live my damn life. The hell’s ‘noble’ supposed to mean with me?”

The ground beneath them shattered and broke into pieces as if lifted through the air. Ryūei winced and fell to her knees, whimperingly crying out as her wrist felt hot and tight with pain. 

Thousands of black condors descended upon the two, enclosing them in an orb that cut off the light of Demon World, as dark as Ryūei’s heart.

Temujin was sick of this dark hearted loathing crap and threw his fist against her again.

“Why! The fuck!” He kept punching. “Do you think!” His fist made face bloody. “I fucking!” A haymaker set her flying back. “CARE!” Before she hit the ground, he caught up with her momentum and drove his knee into her spine. “About!” And followed with a flurry of strikes that juggled her back up, down, up, down, back up. “Your! Fucking! Mommy! ISSUES?!” 

His madness ended with an ax-handle that smashed her into shattering ground.

Yulaan looked on, impressed. Enekai gasped, “Whoa…!”

Utita far away looked at the dust cloud billowing around Ryūei’s body and tugged at her son, “Oh wow, you were right. He is kinda cool…”

Mali chirped, “Awesome! Holy Temujin delivers a wild meteor flurry of attacks, and the onryō is laid flat on her face! You gotta hand it to the young man, not many can punch a ghost in the face and live to tell!”

Demons cheered at the brutal physical violence, many shouting, “Pulverize her! Pulp up her face! Beat her to death! My hero Temujin!”

Sesame shifted herself, looking at the fallen girl and the glowing brother. 

She lay there, moaning, as he panted, groaning. 

“You…! You said it yourself, I’m just— I’m just a normal-ass kid you, you, decided to turn into some super-man because you couldn’t move past getting stabbed in the back by mom…” He gritted ‘mom’ through teeth, feeling his own disappointment in the woman. The marble at Ryūei’s neck flashed blue like the jerked motion of a weep, the anguished tear-blue of a mother watching her children kill each other.

The shape from before, the shape in the shadows in the Red Chamber, was Mizuki after all. He could see it in the Moon Marble. He didn’t want it to be true, but she had chosen her path, and that path led to her soul being trapped weeping against an onryō’s neck. 

The aura around him stilled. He heard the sound of crying, muffled, in the dirt.

“The hell is wrong with you…? You made her pay for what she did to you. You could have left it alone. Instead you had to drag me into your teen angst bullshit. And you can’t even admit it now, can you? You walk around talking all this crap about vengeance and hatred…” He cut the arm with his arm, shouting, “When all this time, all you were ever looking for was a reason to die! That’s why you cultivated me all these years.”

Ryūei set her palms against the ground and pushed herself up to her knees, still taking staccato breaths.

She looked up with a bleeding grin.

“Now you get it…! You understand!” 

Her body rotated off the ground in a backwards thrust, and she stood, drooling and laughing through bloody teeth.

“This is our fate, here and now, together, in battle! Your strength against mine, at last!”

Her back convulsed like electricity arcing, throwing her spine back and her knees down to the ground. Temujin flinched.

“No! I need him dead! I need them all dead! I want suffering, ruination! Everything, everything, turned to nothing! I don’t care about batt—”

Black fire crawled around her fingers and up her arms. The ghost-flames at her sleeves stretched into long banners. The infant ghost backed away, little face crumpled in an expression that finally looked like fear. Above them the clouds, scattered once, tried to reform and were driven into a spiral by her power.

Temujin brought his hands together.

He thought of the Toad Sage teaching him to pull all rivers to the hands. He thought of Batu Qiao, one arm gone, telling him that one-handed men ask where two-handed men shove. He thought of Lady Mizuki coughing in lamplight. He thought of Tsukiko on the flag he had once tugged from a festival pole. He thought of Yuanjia, Mako, and Mydella waiting in glass. He thought of every road that had taken him here, and for once the roads did not argue.

He opened his palms.

No named technique came to him.

The body did not need one.

Ryūei lunged like a dragon.

The black fire came first, shaped into a long blade of grudge. Temujin stepped inside it and let the white-gold aura take the cut. It opened across his chest and sealed behind itself. Ryūei followed with a palm aimed for the heart she had already sliced. He turned, caught her wrist, and brought his elbow down on the joint. Bone cracked. She ignored it and bit into his shoulder with teeth that had lengthened into something wolfish. He drove two fingers under her jaw and lifted. She tore free, taking blood. The light closed the wound.

She struck his brow.

The false eye flickered.

“Ha! You’re actually kinda really strong…!”

He headbutted her.

The impact stunned both of them. Ryūei recovered first and drove a knee into his ribs. Temujin took the pain, wrapped one arm around her waist, and drove them both upward. They smashed through a broken prayer-chain and out into open air again. The dead mountain dropped beneath them. Ryūei clawed at his back. He held her closer.

“I get it now! Half of you enjoys fighting.”

He turned in the air and drove her down.

They fell together through the steam above the empty pit. At the last instant Ryūei twisted free and struck at his throat. Temujin caught the hand, drew genki from every light still answering him, and pressed his palm to hers.

Their fingers locked.

White-gold met black-violet.

“Why would a vengeful ghost enter a tournament?” he said calmly.

The clash became a sphere around them, half light and half rage, spinning above the ruined ring. The mountain shook again. What was left of the No-Longer-Thirty-Six-Armed Sword Kannon at the north niche cracked from base to crown. Demons clutched the remains of their seats. Mali crouched behind a broken lotus panel with the microphone poking over the top.

Ryūei pushed.

Temujin pushed back.

“Your onryō side wanted this, didn’t it? You and your condors, you could have killed me and my family and friends all along. But you kept me alive because—”

Her black half of the sphere grew.

His white half shrank toward his body. The genki inside him burned fast. 

“S-shit,” he seethed. 

Makai’s scattered goodness had entered him, but her rage had been cultivated with horrifying care. It knew its own shape. It had eaten everything else in her.

Her eyes reddened.

“See?” she whispered. “Nothing is enough.”

Temujin gritted his teeth.

“You’re… Really strong!!” He kept them pressure steady but each step towards crushing her burned ten times as much energy, and he felt the edges of his power begin.

“I-if I can’t do this, who will?”

Ryūei stepped forward, her aura overwhelming his. “Nothing! You were nothing! Know your fate!”

The baby ghost floated close to the sphere.

Its tiny hand touched the outside of the light.

A second warmth entered Temujin.

Small.

Almost nothing.

A baby’s genki, if the dead could offer such a thing. A life that had never learned words, never run across a bridge, never broken a toy, never argued with a father, never received pear slices from a mother who could not say love plainly. Tiny as a candle in a storm. Cold as fearful blood, released knowing nothing but what the life had lived. It entered Temujin’s body.

The white-gold sphere surged.

Ryūei screamed.

Temujin stepped forward inside the air.

One step.

Then another.

The black-violet half collapsed inch by inch. Ryūei’s arm shook. Her broken wrist twisted. Her eyes burned on him with hate, fear, and exhilaration all tangled beyond separation. He could feel the mazoku warrior in her rejoicing even as the onryō cursed.

Temujin drew his free hand back.

He did not make a fist.

He opened the palm.

The light-eye at his brow flared. The genki throughout his body gathered into that palm, dense enough to bend the color from the air. Every prayer flag in the arena snapped toward him. The cracked Kannon base shone. The floating ash of the dead drifted into little spirals. Yulaan saw the gathering and laughed through blood.

Ryūei tried to pull away.

He held her.

“Brother,” the baby whispered from outside the sphere.

Ryūei froze.

Temujin struck.

The fist landed over her heart and blossomed into a palm.

The sphere burst without sound.

For a moment everything went white.

When sight returned, Ryūei hung in the air before him, his palm still against her chest. Her black aura streamed from her in long torn bands, rising upward and vanishing into the opened clouds. The rage did not leave cleanly. It clawed. It dragged lines through her robe, through her hair, through the air around her. Her adult face shifted between the onryō and the living girl, between Ryūei and Tsukiko, between the woman the Svlic Demon Clan had forged and the baby the court had drowned.

She cursed him.

The words came broken at first, then sharp.

“May your mercy rot. May every saved life accuse you. May every child you spare grow teeth in your sleep. May the Twelve Kings laugh through their descendants. May your hands fail when they are needed. May—”

The curse struck his aura and burned down to ash.

A thin mark remained around his wrist, black as ink, cold as moonlit water.

Temujin looked at it.

Then he looked back at her.

“I’ll carry that too.”

Ryūei’s mouth twisted.

And he lifted his hand, closed his fist, and grinned. 

He grinned because she was growling at what was in his hand. “If you don’t mind, I mean. I’ll carry that too.”

The Moon Marble glowed bright as nirvana’s sky between his fingers. Holding it, the boy hadn’t felt this warm since he last hugged his mother. 

The ghost drifted between them. Its blankness had gone. The little face now held something solemn and too old for its cheeks.

“Brother,” she said.

That word did what his strike had not.

Ryūei’s adult body convulsed. The onryō screamed, and the scream turned inward. Black flame split from pale skin. Her robe burned from hem to sleeve without producing smoke. Her hair flew upward in a dark river. Temujin kept his palm there until the body could no longer hold its shape.

Ryūei came apart.

No gore. She broke like a grudge held past all possible vessels: light through cracks, black fire through light, a final resisting thread that snapped only after it had cut everything around it.

The onryō vanished.

Tsukiko remained, screaming, until the scream calmed into silence.

“He did it!” screamed Ari-apari.

“Whoa…!!” said Yulaan, looking upon the two like revelation.

The baby floated before Temujin, round hands near her chest. 

Above them, the Makai clouds opened around a moon that had no right to appear in that sky. 

It was red at first. Then its red thinned toward white.

Both brother and sister vanished into darkness.

“Guess I was right.”

He turned to face her. The baby was gone. She was like a Ryūei without rage now, with her hair parted around her face and her eyes now the same comfortable blue he’d seen all day by her neck, all his life on his mother. 

They approached.

Tsukiko floated near him and set one hand on his face and her head against his chest.

“Brother,” she said again.

He didn’t want to hear any more of that voice, no matter how soft, how girlish, how tender. For a moment, he considered silencing it entirely. Anything merciful would be an insult to its victims.  And yet, he just had to say, “Yeah?”

She looked up.

“I choose to kill you.” 

She smiled as Ryūei.

Temujin tried to speak and found his throat tight.

Tsukiko’s appearance shifted again. Once more, Ryūei looked at him. Yet what was that devilish look in her eye? Why was it so familiar?

Of course. Her eyes stared at him like Yulaan’s. 

At least they weren’t just his.

Tsukiko smiled with the spirit of the mazoku. She spoke in his mind, “Brother… Like a flame without air, the rage has abated. Fate’s pen is, at last, mine to wield. Go get stronger, and we’ll decide the ending then.”

“Really? That’s all you have to say? After all this wild shit?? You’ve been spying on me for years and killed my mom and tortured me on a stage in front of thousands ‘til I shut your ass up, and all you can say is ‘get stronger?’”

“What would you rather me say?”

“At least move the fuck on! I burned that rage out of you, didn’t I?” He brought his charred hand towards his face, in it like a saints’ shrine was the Moon Marble. “Didn’t I…?”

She turned away. “I’ve seen my life as a human. I’d have been your dorky sister.”

Now the timbre shook him. What was this voice? Why was it one he remembered and yet never heard? 

“Whenever you fall and scraped your knee and needed someone to call you an idiot for running too fast, whenever you stole another one of the neighbor’s fruits and blamed it on someone and no one believed you, whenever you get dumped by a girl for being a jerk and needed someone to prove they were right, whenever you just wanted to have another person to protect, I’d have been there. Little old me. Just a girl, with an idiot brother, and a family, and a home, and everything a girl could want.”

She turned again.

“Just the Chosen One. In this life, I never got to be your dorky annoying, chosen-one sister. I never even got to be the cursed wrathful ghost haunting the Red Chamber. I am a mazoku. The rage powered me, but what I’ve come to crave above all else is the thrill of battle. That’s why, all along, I committed to forcing destiny along the path I chose: only one challenger would be worth my time, and that one would be my own brother.”

“Oh brother!”

“Huh?”

Temujin rubbed his holy nose and said, “So you’re a girl who freakishly loves to fight. Yeah I could figure out that from the fact you even entered this tournament instead of hunting me down like an actual ghost. Same with trying to get me to awaken or whatever by calling out the numbers. Same with that creepy ghost baby. All that warrior honor thrill-of-battle bull, you’re not even the third girl I know like that. And trust me, I get enough of that from Yulaan and Enekai. So don’t bore me with this lousy plot twist, you’re not special just ‘cause you play with fists instead of dolls. Find me when you want to settle this, sis. And then I’ll break your face, or whatever it is you want me to do.”

Then he looked at her over his shoulder. 

Temujin would have said ‘you got me there’ trying to place what emotion Tsukiko’s face then twisted into. A smile was too cliché, but at least that was hers to choose. Her hair fell again, and her skin pallorized to deathly normal.

“Farewell.”

Ryūei vanished in a black shadow, flapping away into fluttering condors.

Temujin hung in the void alone.

The power left him gradually, as if even retreat had become careful. No splashback! The golden pupils dimmed to their ordinary black and the aura vanished. 

He began to fall and didn’t know how it ended.

But when he snapped back to attention, he was standing like a zombie on the ground.