Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 7: Temujin vs. Masha

Several slow clouds came and went. The bracket wheel burned and turned and sent ashes fluttering down.

Temujin’s name appeared again. With renewed zeal, he stood, beat his palm, and said, “Alright, bring it on!” 

As he walked, the voices of his new ‘friends’ cheered him on. This drew a complicated, but grateful warmth to his fists.

There surged a sound different from the roar that had greeted Qinglong. This was a warmer noise, uglier for being warm. Temujin recognized it as the typical lowbrow no-good testosterone-driven dumbassery he himself was guilty of on more than one occasion, and of course: listen to those low whistles, hoots, bone-necklace clatter, prayer beads clicking twice before their owners pretended they had not touched them. Sounded just like Naga Keduan blokes hungry for nothing.

Oh of course, he thought. There’s no saltier recipe for disaster ever written. Hungry meatheads, m-e-a-t, tend to rise quickly the moment they get beaten over the eyes by a beautiful lady. 

The woman stepped into the arena light and smiled as if the whole mountain had been built to bring men close enough to disappoint her. Temujin remembered her as the gullet-stuffer. 

Masha of Silk-Wound Valley.

Masha wore layered silks in pink, black, and bruised purple, slit and tied in such a way that every movement offered and withheld the same piece of skin. Her hair fell in a heavy blue-black rope down one shoulder. Two little horns rose from her brow, polished and lacquered at the tips. Her eyes were green with red pupils, her mouth painted dark, her hands long and petal-soft except where the nails curved bright as knives. A sash of pale silk drifted around her waist, and threaded through the sash were little bells that purred.

Mali brought the head of the microphone to her lips and said,

“Temujin of Earth returns! Still human, still lucky, still standing on both feet thanks to excellent roadside majin care! And facing him now— Masha of Silk-Wound Valley, kiss-artist, silk-binder, chi-taster, and beloved cause of several ruined monasteries!”

Masha bowed to Mali, to the Daimaō, and finally to Temujin. Her bow bent much lower than it needed to. A few demons in the upper tiers applauded with their knuckles beating against the railing.

A voice cracked out: “Beat her silly, Temujin!”

It was Ari-apari, on his mother’s shoulders, jiggling as he waved his fists.

Temujin nodded, stepped forward, and took a breath thick with perfume. Plum wine, crushed flowers, something like sweet pork beneath it.

Masha smiled wider and beckoned him. “Little man,” she said. The words slid through the air with soft alliterative pleasure. “Little man with nimble limbs and nervous lungs.”

He chose to stretch away the temptation. “I’m gonna ask something before we start,” Temujin said.

“Oh?”

“I hope you’re not one of those types who gets offended by a mixed match. Lost my hesitation years ago. Between those two over there, as well as Mako and Mydella, I’d probably disappoint my mom if she was still around to see me now.”

Over yonder, Yulaan clenched her fists and shouted, “What are you looking at us for, you dope?!” Enekai waved. 

Masha looked Temujin over from his wrapped knuckles to the thawed foot Sesame had just saved. “Adorable. But ‘offended,’ boy? Do you take me for a common whore who stumbled in from the streets?”

“Hey, don’t blame me. Some people get weird about it. Even in tournaments. If we’re both meeting as fighters, I can punch a woman if you can punch a man.”

Masha’s tongue touched one fang.

“I eat men.”

The little bells in her sash purred again.

Temujin rubbed under his nose. “Okay. Good to know we’re both being open-minded.”

Mali lifted the red flag. “Fighters ready? Try not to make this too erotic unless it’s legally relevant. Begin!”

Masha moved first, but not toward him. She stepped sideways, and the silk around her waist loosened into a white ribbon. Then the ribbon became three ribbons, then seven, then a pale web that flowered out from her body and crossed the ring in drifting curves. Temujin cut back. The nearest ribbon kissed the air where his wrist had been and tightened around nothing with a sound like a garrote testing itself.

The ribbons! He dodged and then understood: no, the gaps! She wanted him looking at silk.

He went in low.

Masha’s hand flicked. A ribbon snapped down. Temujin caught it on his forearm wrap, turned with it, and let it pull him rather than stop him. The movement dragged him faster than his own legs would have carried him. He came out of the turn inside her reach and struck twice: lead fist to ribs. The first cracked her ribs like eggshells under a hammer. Then he swung his best haymaker to break her face.

He struck air and fell forward off balance. 

Masha folded backward, then too far back, until her hair brushed the stone and her eyes stayed on him upside down. Her mouth opened. Pale vapor trailed from his fist into it.

She drank the hit.

Temujin snarled and grabbed his wrist. The pain dragged under the skin like a sadist running a vacuum inside his muscles, drying the meat and sucking the veins from the inside.

Masha straightened and brought her arms across each other with a courtesan’s flair. Her ribs popped in dry, crepitating cracks. “Sweet.”

Mali leaned away from a whipping ribbon. “Masha takes a taste! Temujin, keep your hands out of the lady’s mouth unless you filled out the forms!”

She stood erect. “Feed me more, boy. I know you have excellent control of your chi. Show me the full bore of your fruits!”

Temujin flicked his nose with his thumb. “Fine! I’ll show you a little technique Yulaan taught me. It’s a strength multiplier move.”

Yulaan’s brow flicked under her curtain of bangs. “Oh? But I never taught him that…”

Masha opened her arms.

“It sounds delicious! If you can survive… Then let me feast!”

The next exchange came faster. Masha’s ribbons snapped and swam. Temujin’s feet worked around the bronze trigrams, touching, lifting, touching again before the silk could find an ankle. 

He ducked, dodged, rolled, and closed the distance.

With a ferocious leap, he crossed his arms and ripped off his shirt, and felt what he needed gather along his right hand.

Red sparkled around his fist.

“Could it actually be…?” went Yulaan.

“Give it all to me!” screamed Masha with a vile smile.

Her entire face crumpled in. Her feet left the ground as her body arced through the air and crashed into the ceramic floor. 

When she pulled herself up, there was a motion to lick the lips that brought on a grimace. Then the full stinging knowledge of pain bent her over. Blue blood, sloppy and squirting, spilled onto the stone and left rivulets down her chin.

“Wha-what was that? Where was your explosion of chi, boy?! How did you increase your striking power without putting out more energy?” she spat under bloodshot eyes.

Temujin landed and pumped one arm.

“Whoa!” said Mali. “Temujin shows off his mighty brass jewels after an explosive blow to Masha’s face!”

Masha focused in on the polished ruby-red ridges atop brass metal on his fist, glinting wet blue in the light.

“Figured you were hungry, so…” He crunched his palm with a flex. “Decided to give you a brass knuckle sandwich.”

Yulaan sat back. “I forgot I even gave him— so that’s where those were! Pilfering dick!”

Masha stood and rubbed her mouth, then dashed forward. 

He used straight punches, oblique steps, small ugly angles. Twice he struck her body. Twice she yielded to the tool’s heavy blow, and her face cut deeper at the cheeks. 

Temujin recoiled and clutched the hand with the brass knuckles.

“Shit…!”

Again she wiped her mouth, and sucked up noodly strings of chi lingering from his fist. 

“Wonderful seasoning.”

Finally, she smiled with a brighter mouth as the boy staggered to his knees, grabbing his arm in jerks as if half the meat off his bones had been drained.

She sucked in and suddenly a massive wave of chi left Temujin’s body— such an amount that the boy felt his soul nearly split from his body, and he folded in on himself, falling to his knees with a scream.

She laughed and breathed in again, and he felt his arms thrust forward. The brass knuckles flew off his fingers and into her mouth.

There they were between her teeth, until her tongue wormed through the fingers and pulled the tool deep into her throat. 

Yulaan started to curse until her face twisted and she said to Enekai, “Uh! S-she can keep ‘em.”

“Now for the real ones.”

Panicked now, Temujin threw his hands together and let chi pool into his palms swirled fast into a spirit-blue sphere, and shouted, “If you want my energy so badly, then take a big-ass wad of it, bitch!”

She opened herself greedily, ribbons slackening in anticipation. 

And Mali popped black sunglasses out of the ether with one sizzling beam from a head-tentacle and said, “Amazing! This human’s like a solar flare of power!”

The chi burned bright enough to cook the whole ring in a cold raw blue, bright enough to make the black water below show glazed ripples, bright enough that even the Thirty-Six-Armed Sword Kannon appeared, for an instant, to be holding moonblades.

“Heaven’s Vengeance Fist!!”

His sweaty palms shot the spiritual blast at her face. 

Masha’s grin widened faster than her eyes. Light swirled in the whites of her eyes.

She opened her mouth and consumed it all til it vanished pathetically down her throat. 

“Oh crap!” went Temujin.

The wild surge of energy brought Masha to sway and convulse as she digested such an overflow, and for a horny moment, many thought she would fall over and vomit, and tickling Temujin’s hope, the lady let loose a sickly, fiery belch. 

She let her head fall and rolled her eyes up towards Temujin.

She slithered the syllables, “De-lect-a-ble…” 

“Shit…! I can’t keep wasting energy like that, when she’s already leeching it off me to start.”

Her head popped fully erect and her voice now took on a singsong lilt: “You’ve got great power, young man, enough to fill my belly full! Heehee, I’ll leave you a withered husk!”

Ringside, Yulaan heard another demon say, “She leave ME a husk all she wants,” crumpled her face in bewilderment at why Earthlings and Makai-jin were so goddamned horny, and scratched her chin with her tail trying to figure out what simple ways Temujin could survive that the man himself hadn’t considered.

“Hmmm… If I was in that ring… Think, Temujin, think— you can beat her, if…”

!! 

‘Of course…!’

Masha let him drive her back three paces. She let him land a hard elbow near the sternum. For fun, she let the crowd see him push against her all the way to the edge of the platform and thrust his knuckles deep into her stomach as if she’d fall all sprawled out of bounds. 

Her left hand wrapped around his sleeve and she pulled herself against him. Every fluttering ribbon in the ring went still. 

“Mine,” she whispered.

The ribbons tightened.

One loop closed around Temujin’s thigh, one around his right biceps, one around his throat. More curled from below like pale eels. He struck the throat-loop with two fingers, hardened chi cutting through the strand, but the severed silk bled perfume and became two strands. His lungs narrowed. Masha drew him toward her, inch by inch, with the dreamy patience of a spider teaching gravity to a fly.

The skin along her jaw split where his knuckles cut it.

Temujin saw the rips and stopped struggling for half a beat.

The woman-shape remained, but something beneath it had grown tired of this foreplay. Her cheeks opened in seams around a second mouth, black-red and wet, ringed in serrated teeth. Her throat unfolded downward in petals of muscle bloomed into twenty more tongues licking and lashing for his face and God knew where else.

Now he understood what she had meant.

She ate men. 

Each tooth and tongue bristled about cutting the air and his chi, and she sucked more fiercely than before until it felt as if his soul was being ripped from the body.

His heels scraped the stone. A thin line of blood worked down from under his jaw where silk had bitten.

“Yikes!” shouted Mali as she narrated, “It seems Masha’s ready to slice and dice Temujin like an electric cutter! If he can’t peel out of this, at least his blood’ll make for a great gravy!”

‘I hope that mic gets sucked out of your hands!’

His wrist twitched. Something itched inside the wraps, scratching from under the cloth.

!! 

‘Of course… The sage bean! And she ate the brass knuckles without flinching. So that means she doesn’t just eat chi— she’ll suck anything! Dammit, I bet Yulaan even figured it out.’

Temujin twitched his wrist, slipping the bean out into his palm, and dampened as much of his chi as possible to ebb the spirit-bleeding.

Masha saw the chi-gathering motion and laughed into his face with that great second maw. “Oh, yes. Strike me. Feed me. Fill me.”

Temujin grinned despite the viperous silk at his throat. He hoped she didn’t see the other motion.

“Sure.”

He planted his trapped foot, twisted his waist, and gathered chi into both palms. It came rougher than he wanted.

“Heaven’s Vengeance Fist,” echoed out again.

Temujin thrust both palms forward.

The chi wave tore through the air straight into Masha’s open mouth.

She let it all in.

The crowd screamed approval. Masha’s monster-throat expanded, drinking blue-white fire by the armful, the belly beneath her silks rounding, then rounding more. Her ribbons released him and whipped in ecstasy. She took one step forward, eating the blast, her eyes shining with obscene gratitude.

Masha swallowed by reflex and licked all of her lips.

Temujin fell to his shins and gasped. 

“Temujin collapses!” cried Mali, “Like a runner sprinting on empty, he’s lost too much of his chi to even stand! This might be it for the Earthling!”

Sesame pushed towards the railing, hands clasped.

“G-guys, you ready to make that wish? Quick, so I can give Temujin his energy back!”

Enekai opened her mouth, but Yulaan spoke first: “Shut up, Sesame, and look.”

Masha frowned and bent back.

Temujin chuckled. With one eye closed, he looked at her belly.

“Hope that was enough for you to snack on.”

Her belly swelled.

Then her ribs.

Then the silk split.

Temujin had already thrown himself backward, arms over his face. Masha’s maw tried to close, tried to vomit, tried to scream. What came out was light, too much light, a blue-white-green overfeeding that cracked through her pretty skin, her monster throat, her lacquered horns, her hands, her bells. The ribbons snapped upward, rigid as spears.

Masha burst.

She ruptured into steam, silk, sweet smoke, and little wet flashes of green fire that pattered across the ring and died hissing on the trigrams. One bell landed near Mali’s boot and purred until she kicked it into the black water moat.

Silence held for one uncertain beat.

Temujin sat up, hair blown wild, forearms smoking, throat striped red where the silk had bitten. He looked less destroyed than offended by his own plan’s success.

Mali lifted the flag.

“Winner, by way of a real overfeeding: Temujin of Earth!”

A roar came, mixed this time: cheers, boos, laughter, outrage, and pure confusion. 

Makku’s voice came through the cacophony, “Aw yeah, you got it! Way to go, man!”

Temujin rose carefully. His legs obeyed. His foot, the one Sesame had healed, held. His arms ached, his throat stung, and his chi had been scraped thin at the edges, but he had not been broken, frozen, bitten in half, or reduced to a cautionary smell. Considering the day, he took that as a triumph.

The hyena mother’s gaze lost balance for a second. He saw them and gave her a finger gun salute. She smiled. Zeru pulled his eye and stuck out his tongue, but Temu saw his mother and also smiled. 

He heard a mighty thump-pump-thumping rhythm in the crowd and saw Ari-apari beating his belly, sending rippling waves of fat out of every fist.

“Temu-temu-Temujin!” he chanted, as Utita rested her head on her clasped hands.

He limped back to safety and, at ringside, met Sesame torn between scolding and grabbing his face. 

Yulaan, look at her, Temujin thought, look at her clap. Her support felt best.

“Amazing!” she said. “I’d thought of doing that halfway through, and I was wondering if you’d figure it out.”

“Yeah, I worried about it a bit.” 

“Sorry, you’re gonna hafta tell me whatcha did, habibi. There’s no way you had enough power to overload her.”

He pulled out the empty sage bean packet between two fingers. 

“Shot this inside the Heaven’s Vengeance right into her mouth. She got enough energy for ten men,” he said with a snigger. 

Yulaan said, “If she hadn’t been so greedy with Temujin’s power before then, she might have been able to survive it. But this guy really is crazy strong.” She rested her elbow on Temujin’s shaggy hair and grinned. “By the way, she was bluffing about not being full. You’d already started stuffing her just from the chi she pulled from your arm.”

“Heh. I saw that early on too, but even if I hit her dead-on with the Heaven’s Vengeance, I still don’t think that would have been enough.”

Sesame and Enekai started singing his praises but words overlapped, and Temujin let them. His attention had already started drifting toward the jade board.

Because the other names were burning.

Because the easy part of the quarterfinals, if such a thing existed in Makai, had ended.

His heart skipped. 

She was looking at him. The ghost baby circled her several times. 

He didn’t like that the ghost girl was looking at him. But he shook it off: it was his match, so it was fine, it was fine, he kept telling himself, it was fine. 

He turned abruptly, and saw a black four-eyed condor fluttering its wings a few paces away under the pavilion. Before he could step in closer, it diffracted out of existence. 

“What the hell…?”

He didn’t have time to investigate— the next tablet flared.