I still had Cursed Energy Manipulation — Lv. 1 open in front of me, though by that point I had stopped reading the description and was mostly staring at the number beside CE again. Forty-six thousand was sitting in my head like an itch I couldn't reach, because knowing how much I had meant almost nothing when I didn't know whether forty-six thousand was impressive, pathetic, or merely weird for somebody at Level 1. The Skill at least confirmed that reserves and control were two different problems, which only made me want to know how far both could be pushed.
I lifted my hand and tried to draw that heavy feeling toward my palm again, carefully this time, without doing anything stupid like seeing how much of the forest I could erase. A thin pressure gathered beneath my skin, strange enough that I kept almost losing it whenever I tried too hard to look at it, and I was beginning to wonder if forty points had been a wildly optimistic starting target. Then every thought in my head disappeared beneath one sharp, ugly feeling that wasn't quite hearing and wasn't quite sight.
Danger.
My body moved before I did.
There wasn't even enough time for me to wonder what I'd sensed. Something inside the new instincts the Fruit had shoved into me snapped tight, my knees bent, my shoulders twisted, and six black wings exploded from my back hard enough to scatter frost and loose dirt in every direction. Three pairs spread above and behind me in overlapping layers, less like the clean wings I'd expected from a Lunarian and more like something that had fallen a very long way and never bothered becoming holy again.
At the same instant, a black-magenta flame burst alive between the wings. It burned from my back without heat against my skin, yet I felt the change immediately, a dense physical certainty settling through my body as the Lunarian part of me apparently decided that whatever was coming deserved the defensive state. I didn't consciously tell the flame to appear, and that bothered me for about half a heartbeat before my left arm whipped over my head on its own.
Ice swallowed it from wrist to elbow.
It wasn't pretty. There was no spell circle, no careful shaping, and none of the smooth glasslike control I'd managed with water at the pond; frost simply detonated across my skin and thickened into a crooked shell of cloudy blue-white ice because some animal part of my brain had screamed protect this. I hadn't reinforced it with Mana, Cursed Energy, Haki, or even the Cold Manipulation Skill deliberately, so when the sword hit, I understood immediately how unfinished the defense really was.
The blade punched through the ice with a wet crack.
For one stupid instant I didn't understand what had happened because the cold had already numbed the skin underneath. Then the edge sank through roughly half the thickness of my forearm before losing enough force to stop, and pain arrived all at once—hot, deep, and bright enough that my vision sharpened instead of blurring.
My breath tore out through my teeth.
Then I smiled.
I felt the expression happen before I could stop it, and there was a familiar little twist in my stomach when I realized exactly what part of me had just crawled out of hiding. Most people probably would've screamed with several inches of steel buried in their arm, but somewhere between the shock, the adrenaline, and the clean certainty that somebody was actually trying to kill me, that old ugly excitement started climbing up my spine.
"Oh." My voice came out quieter than I expected, and I looked from the blade in my arm toward the hand holding it. "Okay."
The man holding the sword seemed to expect something else from me.
His eyes widened slightly when I turned toward him instead of away, though he recovered fast enough to wrench the blade free before I could grab it. Blood ran warm down my forearm beneath the broken ice, and the pain jumped again when the steel came out, sharp enough that I sucked air through my teeth and felt my grin get worse.
There it was.
That stupid rush.
I hadn't felt it properly since entering Etheria, not even when I'd stabbed my own hand earlier, because hurting yourself and having somebody else commit to hurting you were completely different things. One was testing pain; the other was a promise, and something in me had always responded to that promise in ways I knew weren't particularly normal.
The man jumped backward as my free hand moved.
I didn't think about a spell. I was pissed off, hurt, and suddenly very aware of how much cold there was around me, so I swept my hand outward and the frozen ground answered badly and violently.
Jagged spikes erupted between us.
They weren't elegant spears or evenly spaced constructs. Crooked masses of ice ripped out of the ground at different angles, some as thick as tree trunks and others narrow enough to resemble broken glass, chasing the path of my hand with more force than control.
The man was fast.
He twisted past the first spike, stepped onto the slanted side of another for less than a second, and threw himself through the gap before a third could close it. One jagged point caught the hem of his clothing and tore through it, but he landed several yards away without losing his footing, sword already coming back around between us.
That gave me enough time to finally look at him.
Middle-aged, probably somewhere in his forties if Etheria's faces aged anything like real ones, and built like somebody who actually used the muscle rather than posing with it. His shoulders were broad beneath plain travel-worn clothes, his arms thick without being ridiculous, and there was enough ease in the way he settled his weight that I stopped assuming the first strike had only gotten through because I wasn't paying attention.
The broken ice around my arm shifted when I lowered it.
Blood was still coming out.
I probably should've done something about that, but my attention was stuck on him now, trying to work backward from the attack and getting nowhere. I hadn't spoken to him, threatened him, stolen anything, or even known he existed thirty seconds ago.
"Did I do something to you?" I asked, because somehow that was the question that came out first. My brows pulled together when he didn't answer immediately, and I glanced at the ruined forest around us before adding, "I mean, besides apparently destroying half the neighborhood. If this is your forest, that's... actually, yeah, I could understand being pissed about that."
He stared at me like I'd said something obscene.
The hatred on his face wasn't the hot kind I'd expected from somebody defending a home. It looked older and easier than that, settled into him so comfortably that it barely seemed like anger anymore.
"I need no reason to kill a yōkai," he said.
I waited.
He didn't add anything.
"Oh." The answer landed with such disappointing simplicity that some of the curiosity drained out of me. "You're just racist."
For some reason, that annoyed him more than the ice spikes had.
His mouth tightened, and I watched his grip shift around the sword while my own brain briefly tried to decide whether racist was technically the right word when yōkai were an entirely different supernatural race. Speciesist sounded stupid, xenophobic was broader than I meant, and by the time I realized I was genuinely wasting thought on terminology while bleeding out of my arm, I got annoyed with myself too.
"Whatever." I flexed my injured hand experimentally and immediately regretted it when the cut pulled open farther beneath the cracked ice. "You stabbed me because you don't like what I am. Close enough."
His eyes moved across me then.
The fox ears.
The tails.
The six wings.
The black-magenta flame burning between them.
Whatever he saw didn't make him reconsider.
If anything, it seemed to confirm something for him.
I felt my smile fade a little, though the excitement underneath it didn't.
The attack itself I could've ignored if he'd stopped.
Maybe.
Probably not, actually.
The blade had gone halfway through my arm, and Slaughter Art had some very uncomplicated opinions about what happened after somebody committed that hard to killing me. I could feel that old mental narrowing beginning beneath everything else, not rage exactly and not hatred, because I barely knew the man well enough to hate him.
He had tried to kill me.
That was enough.
The rest of the world started becoming less important around the edges.
The man raised his sword.
I expected another rush, maybe a fire technique from the way the air around the steel had begun changing, and I shifted my wounded arm away while trying to decide whether to test the wings or stay on the ground. Then he drew in one breath and shouted two words that hit me harder than the sword had.
I still had Cursed Energy Manipulation — Lv. 1 open in front of me, though by that point I had stopped reading the description and was mostly staring at the number beside CE again. Forty-six thousand was sitting in my head like an itch I couldn't reach, because knowing how much I had meant almost nothing when I didn't know whether forty-six thousand was impressive, pathetic, or merely weird for somebody at Level 1. The Skill at least confirmed that reserves and control were two different problems, which only made me want to know how far both could be pushed.
I lifted my hand and tried to draw that heavy feeling toward my palm again, carefully this time, without doing anything stupid like seeing how much of the forest I could erase. A thin pressure gathered beneath my skin, strange enough that I kept almost losing it whenever I tried too hard to look at it, and I was beginning to wonder if forty points had been a wildly optimistic starting target. Then every thought in my head disappeared beneath one sharp, ugly feeling that wasn't quite hearing and wasn't quite sight.
Danger.
My body moved before I did.
There wasn't even enough time for me to wonder what I'd sensed. Something inside the new instincts the Fruit had shoved into me snapped tight, my knees bent, my shoulders twisted, and six black wings exploded from my back hard enough to scatter frost and loose dirt in every direction. Three pairs spread above and behind me in overlapping layers, less like the clean wings I'd expected from a Lunarian and more like something that had fallen a very long way and never bothered becoming holy again.
At the same instant, a black-magenta flame burst alive between the wings. It burned from my back without heat against my skin, yet I felt the change immediately, a dense physical certainty settling through my body as the Lunarian part of me apparently decided that whatever was coming deserved the defensive state. I didn't consciously tell the flame to appear, and that bothered me for about half a heartbeat before my left arm whipped over my head on its own.
Ice swallowed it from wrist to elbow.
It wasn't pretty. There was no spell circle, no careful shaping, and none of the smooth glasslike control I'd managed with water at the pond; frost simply detonated across my skin and thickened into a crooked shell of cloudy blue-white ice because some animal part of my brain had screamed protect this. I hadn't reinforced it with Mana, Cursed Energy, Haki, or even the Cold Manipulation Skill deliberately, so when the sword hit, I understood immediately how unfinished the defense really was.
The blade punched through the ice with a wet crack.
For one stupid instant I didn't understand what had happened because the cold had already numbed the skin underneath. Then the edge sank through roughly half the thickness of my forearm before losing enough force to stop, and pain arrived all at once—hot, deep, and bright enough that my vision sharpened instead of blurring.
My breath tore out through my teeth.
Then I smiled.
I felt the expression happen before I could stop it, and there was a familiar little twist in my stomach when I realized exactly what part of me had just crawled out of hiding. Most people probably would've screamed with several inches of steel buried in their arm, but somewhere between the shock, the adrenaline, and the clean certainty that somebody was actually trying to kill me, that old ugly excitement started climbing up my spine.
"Oh." My voice came out quieter than I expected, and I looked from the blade in my arm toward the hand holding it. "Okay."
The man holding the sword seemed to expect something else from me.
His eyes widened slightly when I turned toward him instead of away, though he recovered fast enough to wrench the blade free before I could grab it. Blood ran warm down my forearm beneath the broken ice, and the pain jumped again when the steel came out, sharp enough that I sucked air through my teeth and felt my grin get worse.
There it was.
That stupid rush.
I hadn't felt it properly since entering Etheria, not even when I'd stabbed my own hand earlier, because hurting yourself and having somebody else commit to hurting you were completely different things. One was testing pain; the other was a promise, and something in me had always responded to that promise in ways I knew weren't particularly normal.
The man jumped backward as my free hand moved.
I didn't think about a spell. I was pissed off, hurt, and suddenly very aware of how much cold there was around me, so I swept my hand outward and the frozen ground answered badly and violently.
Jagged spikes erupted between us.
They weren't elegant spears or evenly spaced constructs. Crooked masses of ice ripped out of the ground at different angles, some as thick as tree trunks and others narrow enough to resemble broken glass, chasing the path of my hand with more force than control.
The man was fast.
He twisted past the first spike, stepped onto the slanted side of another for less than a second, and threw himself through the gap before a third could close it. One jagged point caught the hem of his clothing and tore through it, but he landed several yards away without losing his footing, sword already coming back around between us.
That gave me enough time to finally look at him.
Middle-aged, probably somewhere in his forties if Etheria's faces aged anything like real ones, and built like somebody who actually used the muscle rather than posing with it. His shoulders were broad beneath plain travel-worn clothes, his arms thick without being ridiculous, and there was enough ease in the way he settled his weight that I stopped assuming the first strike had only gotten through because I wasn't paying attention.
The broken ice around my arm shifted when I lowered it.
Blood was still coming out.
I probably should've done something about that, but my attention was stuck on him now, trying to work backward from the attack and getting nowhere. I hadn't spoken to him, threatened him, stolen anything, or even known he existed thirty seconds ago.
"Did I do something to you?" I asked, because somehow that was the question that came out first. My brows pulled together when he didn't answer immediately, and I glanced at the ruined forest around us before adding, "I mean, besides apparently destroying half the neighborhood. If this is your forest, that's... actually, yeah, I could understand being pissed about that."
He stared at me like I'd said something obscene.
The hatred on his face wasn't the hot kind I'd expected from somebody defending a home. It looked older and easier than that, settled into him so comfortably that it barely seemed like anger anymore.
"I need no reason to kill a yōkai," he said.
I waited.
He didn't add anything.
"Oh." The answer landed with such disappointing simplicity that some of the curiosity drained out of me. "You're just racist."
For some reason, that annoyed him more than the ice spikes had.
His mouth tightened, and I watched his grip shift around the sword while my own brain briefly tried to decide whether racist was technically the right word when yōkai were an entirely different supernatural race. Speciesist sounded stupid, xenophobic was broader than I meant, and by the time I realized I was genuinely wasting thought on terminology while bleeding out of my arm, I got annoyed with myself too.
"Whatever." I flexed my injured hand experimentally and immediately regretted it when the cut pulled open farther beneath the cracked ice. "You stabbed me because you don't like what I am. Close enough."
His eyes moved across me then.
The fox ears.
The tails.
The six wings.
The black-magenta flame burning between them.
Whatever he saw didn't make him reconsider.
If anything, it seemed to confirm something for him.
I felt my smile fade a little, though the excitement underneath it didn't.
The attack itself I could've ignored if he'd stopped.
Maybe.
Probably not, actually.
The blade had gone halfway through my arm, and Slaughter Art had some very uncomplicated opinions about what happened after somebody committed that hard to killing me. I could feel that old mental narrowing beginning beneath everything else, not rage exactly and not hatred, because I barely knew the man well enough to hate him.
He had tried to kill me.
That was enough.
The rest of the world started becoming less important around the edges.
The man raised his sword.
I expected another rush, maybe a fire technique from the way the air around the steel had begun changing, and I shifted my wounded arm away while trying to decide whether to test the wings or stay on the ground. Then he drew in one breath and shouted two words that hit me harder than the sword had.
"Reduce All Creation to Ash Ryūjin Jakka!"
I forgot to move.
Flames exploded from the blade.
Not ordinary fire either. It surged along the steel and rolled outward with enough heat that the frost around my feet began steaming immediately, orange-red light flooding through the ruined forest and turning the false faces in the trees into things that looked even worse. For half a second, all I could do was stare because I knew that name.
"No fucking way."
The words slipped out before I could stop them.
Ryūjin Jakka.
Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto's Zanpakutō.
The strongest Shinigami's sword.
My brain immediately threw up the old images—the cane becoming a blade, fire swallowing the battlefield, Yamamoto standing there like an angry old man who had somehow convinced the sun to work for him. Whatever else Etheria had copied, translated, rebuilt, stolen, borrowed, or let players recreate, I had not expected to hear that name shouted at me in a random forest by some racist middle-aged guy.
And this guy was definitely not Yamamoto.
That thought came strangely fast.
Yamamoto had plenty wrong with him. He was stubborn as hell, buried himself in tradition, distrusted humans more than he should have, and refusing to let Orihime restore his missing arm had always struck me as the kind of decision only an ancient warrior could make while somehow convincing himself it was sensible.
His death hadn't exactly made him look good either.
I remembered being angry about that.
Not because Yamamoto hadn't made mistakes, because he absolutely had, but because sometimes people talked about him afterward like the mistakes were all there was. If that old bastard genuinely hadn't cared about Soul Society, humans, or maintaining the balance between the realms, there wouldn't have been three realms left for everybody else to argue over.
He had the power to make indifference catastrophic.
That didn't mean I would've wanted to have dinner with him.
My eyes returned to the man in front of me, and the comparison collapsed almost immediately.
He wasn't Yamamoto.
I didn't know what he was.
NPC, player, hidden class user, somebody who'd found a Zanpakutō, somebody who'd somehow recreated one, or another one of Etheria's secrets that Mira had neglected to mention because apparently she enjoyed watching my blood pressure develop personality problems. I wanted answers badly enough that part of me immediately started forming questions, but the throbbing cut in my arm kept interrupting them.
The man brought the burning sword around.
Heat rolled across my face.
My fox ears flattened without permission, all six wings shifting behind me as my body lowered itself into something closer to a fighting stance.
I stared at the flames.
Then at him.
The curiosity was still there, irritatingly alive even now. I wanted to know whether it was really Ryūjin Jakka, whether there was an actual Zanpakutō spirit somewhere in Etheria, how Shikai worked here, whether Bankai existed, and what kind of insane chain of events had put Yamamoto's weapon into the hands of a man whose opening argument had been I don't like yōkai.
But he had cut me.
That was much simpler than any of those questions.
Something cold settled behind my ribs while the pain in my arm kept pulsing with every heartbeat. My smile came back slowly, not because I thought the wound was funny and not because I suddenly hated him enough to make some speech about justice, but because the part of me I normally kept chained down had stopped asking what happened after the fight.
I wanted him dead.
The thought came cleanly.
No anger attached to it.
No argument.
Just intent.
The black-magenta flame on my back bent sideways as all six wings spread wider, and frost started crawling over the blood on my forearm without me bothering to make it neat. I could still feel the unfinished ice armor where his blade had broken through it, and instead of rebuilding the same thing thicker, I found myself wondering what would happen if I reinforced the next layer with Cursed Energy while the man started forward through his own flames.
The man came forward through Ryūjin Jakka's flames, and the heat reached me before he did. My wounded arm throbbed with every beat of my heart, blood still running from where his sword had gone halfway through it, but when I looked down I caught something that made me blink once and almost lose track of him. The torn flesh was already pulling itself together beneath the broken shell of ice, slowly enough that I could watch it happen, muscle tightening across the cut while the bleeding weakened from a steady run to thick drops.
That was new, and I didn't have time to be happy about it. The man saw it too, because his eyes flicked to my arm and stayed there just a fraction too long, his expression tightening as the wound visibly narrowed around the deepest part of the cut. I flexed my fingers, felt pain pull through the half-healed tissue, and gave him a crooked smile because apparently my body had decided that being nearly cut through was something it could start fixing while I was still standing there.
My right hand dropped to the unnamed sword at my hip. I still didn't know what the thing was, Etheria still refused to give me so much as an Unknown Sword label, and some sane little part of me complained that maybe drawing the unexplained weapon against fucking Ryūjin Jakka wasn't the smartest first test. I ignored that part and pushed the guard forward with my thumb.
Steel whispered out of the sheath.
The sound did something to me that the fire hadn't. My breathing changed, my shoulders loosened, and a savage grin spread across my face while I drew the blade the rest of the way and let its weight settle into my hand. It felt right enough that I stopped thinking about whether it should.
The black-rose aura appeared before I took another step. It bled from my hand onto the hilt and rolled down the unnamed blade in slow, uneven currents, black at its deepest points with a dark rose-colored edge that pulsed whenever my killing intent sharpened. I knew what it was this time, because there was no strange new energy behind it and no question buried inside the feeling; that was Slaughter Art, and that particular black-rose color belonged to me.
The grin stayed for another second while the rest of my thoughts started thinning out. Curiosity about Ryūjin Jakka was still there, the pain in my arm was still there, and I could still hear part of myself asking how this random asshole had gotten his hands on Yamamoto's Zanpakutō, but all of it was being pushed farther from the center. He'd cut me, he'd tried to kill me, and I wanted him dead.
I didn't rush him yet.
While keeping my eyes on his shoulders, I pulled my spell list open low beside my left hip where the translucent window wouldn't block my vision. I flicked through the categories with tiny movements of my fingers until Godskin Celebrant unfolded, and there really wasn't much there yet—only a few of the basic spells had bothered lighting up instead of sitting behind locks.
Black Flame Dart. Black Flame Burst. Black Flame Blade. My attention caught on the last one almost immediately, because throwing fire at a man holding Ryūjin Jakka sounded less useful than putting something nastier on the sword already in my hand. I selected it without bothering to read the whole description, only catching that it was a temporary weapon enchantment that coated a held blade in Godslayer Black Flame and made physical strikes carry the Black Flame's burning effect.
The spell window vanished when I dismissed it, and black fire seeped onto the unnamed blade. It didn't replace the black-rose aura from Slaughter Art; the two sat over each other strangely, the rose-edged killing intent hugging close to the steel while darker Godslayer fire licked outward over it in soft, hungry curls. Watching them coexist gave me about half a second of stupid satisfaction before Ryūjin Jakka's heat washed over my face again and reminded me that admiring the sword could wait.
Cold came next because I wanted it there, not because I had some carefully planned combination in mind. I pushed at Cold Magic almost instinctively, and frost crawled from my palm across the hilt before whitening the blade beneath the black fire, leaving thin ridges of clear blue-white ice along the flats without dulling the edge. For a second I wondered whether the two powers were going to fight each other, then the black flame simply kept burning over the frozen steel while little pieces of frost broke away and hissed into vapor.
The man slowed.
It wasn't much, but I saw it. His gaze moved from the black flame to the frost, then to the black-rose aura beneath both, and for the first time since he'd attacked me he looked less disgusted than uncertain. "What are you?" he asked, and there was a roughness in his voice now that hadn't been there when he'd decided being a yōkai was reason enough to kill me.
I almost laughed at him. "You stabbed first and you're asking questions now?" I shifted my injured arm and hissed when the healing tissue pulled too tight, though when I looked down the gash had already closed another little bit around the center. "Nah. You can figure it out while we're doing this."
His face hardened, and Ryūjin Jakka flared.
That was when Slaughter Art finished settling into me.
The savage excitement didn't disappear completely, but it stopped mattering. The thought of showing off, learning his abilities, testing my Fruit, seeing what the unnamed sword could do—all of it fell behind one simple thing that felt so clean it was almost quiet.
This strike kills him.
My foot hit the ground.
The earth broke beneath it.
The ×8 physical increase of the hybrid body stopped being a number on a menu the instant I actually committed to moving. I crossed the distance too fast for my stomach to catch up, six wings snapping backward on instinct while the tails behind me spread and shifted like counterweights, and the unnamed blade came around toward the side of his neck with black flame and frost screaming through the heated air.
He blocked.
Ryūjin Jakka crashed into my sword and the world between us disappeared behind fire, black flame, steam, and a hard metallic shriek that rattled through my arms. His strength surprised me enough that my teeth clicked together, but the surprise didn't become doubt because that strike was already over and Slaughter Art didn't let me start mourning failed endings.
The next movement was already the only one that mattered.
This kills him.
I let his block carry my blade downward instead of fighting it, dropped with the motion, and slapped my wounded hand against the ground despite the bolt of pain that tore up my arm. Cold burst outward through the earth, and a jagged ice pillar exploded directly beneath his feet with a point aimed up through his pelvis and spine.
He twisted away.
The pillar missed his body by inches and kept growing until it tore through the canopy above us.
He cut it almost casually as he moved, Ryūjin Jakka opening a molten-red line through the ice before the upper half broke away. I was already moving again, though my palm left a bloody print on the ground that began freezing at the edges while the wound above it continued closing behind me.
Another pillar erupted beneath my own feet.
I hadn't formed it as an attack this time, and the shift from killing to movement should have felt different, but my body didn't hesitate over it. The ice punched upward and carried me with it, six wings spreading just enough to keep me balanced as the sudden acceleration shoved my stomach down toward my hips.
I crouched against the rising surface instead of standing properly. My toes dug into a rough ridge of ice, one tail wrapped briefly around the back edge without me telling it to, and I realized in some detached corner of my head that all this new anatomy was already helping me move before I had any idea how to consciously use it. Then the pillar reached its peak, and I threw myself off it.
This strike kills him.
I came down upside down.
My spine bent farther than I would've tried in my real body, hips rotating while the wings folded tight enough to keep from ruining the spin, and the unnamed sword cut down toward the crown of his head. He brought Ryūjin Jakka up just in time, and the collision drove his boots several inches into the ground before the fire around him burst outward.
Heat punched me sideways.
I hit the ice pillar shoulder-first, pain flashing through the wounded arm again, but the gash didn't reopen as badly as it should have. When I shoved myself away I saw fresh skin stretching across part of the cut, ugly and pink and still wet with blood, while deeper tissue continued knitting visibly underneath.
The man saw that one.
His eyes widened.
"You regenerate." He sounded almost offended by it, which would've been funny if the heat around his sword wasn't making the skin on my face sting. "Filthy thing."
I laughed, breathless and a little meaner than I'd intended. "You sound upset."
That pissed him off.
Ryūjin Jakka swept sideways and fire followed the blade in a broad wall.
My instincts hit before conscious thought did again. Three enormous ice pillars erupted around me at different angles, not forming a proper shield but giving me surfaces, heights, and directions where a flat battlefield hadn't offered any.
I jumped onto the nearest one.
The fire chased me.
Instead of climbing straight up, I ran three steps along the pillar's side while it leaned almost horizontally over the battlefield, then planted one foot against it and let my body fall backward. My wings opened unevenly, the upper pair catching harder than the lower two, and the imbalance spun me around the pillar instead of dropping me into the flames below.
I nearly lost control.
My shoulder slammed into the ice hard enough to make me grunt, one tail whipped across my own face, and for an instant I had absolutely no idea which direction was supposed to be down. Somehow my left foot found the pillar again, and the embarrassment barely had time to register before the man came through the steam after me.
His sword cut upward.
I folded backward.
Ryūjin Jakka passed so close to my stomach that the heat scorched through part of my robes, and I smelled burned fabric before I felt the sting. My body bent nearly double around the strike, one hand catching the pillar behind me while my legs swung over my head.
That position should have been terrible.
Instead, I saw his throat.
This kills him.
I slashed from upside down.
He jerked back, and the unnamed blade missed his neck but cut across his upper chest.
Black Flame Blade touched him.
The reaction was immediate.
Black fire clung to the wound instead of flashing away, and the man stumbled with a noise that sounded more surprised than hurt before his face twisted properly. The black-rose aura didn't remain on him—it was mine, tied to the killing intent moving through my sword—but the Godslayer flame kept chewing at the cut even after he ripped himself clear.
I landed badly.
One knee hit the pillar, then my foot slipped, and I would've fallen straight down if two of the wings hadn't beaten hard enough to throw me sideways onto another column of ice. I caught the edge with both feet, wobbled, and felt an absurd little spike of irritation because the movement had looked much cooler in my head.
No time.
He was coming.
I drove my heel into the ice beneath me.
The pillar grew.
It shot diagonally across the battlefield with me crouched along its side, and I let it carry me toward him while two more pillars erupted behind his back to cut off the easiest retreat. I didn't make them as some clever trap for a later attack; each one punched toward where I believed his body would be, each one meant to impale him if he chose wrong.
He chose right.
Ryūjin Jakka turned the first pillar into steam and shattered the second with a downward slash.
This kills him.
I launched off the third.
My wings snapped once, hard.
The movement changed my trajectory in the middle of the jump so violently that my stomach rolled, but it also took me from directly above him to his right side before he had finished bringing the sword back up. I twisted with it, tails flaring behind me, and drove the unnamed blade toward the space beneath his ribs.
He caught it on the flat of Ryūjin Jakka.
Again.
A frustrated laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
Not because Slaughter Art cared.
I did.
There was still enough of me around the edges to be annoyed that this racist bastard kept surviving things I was completely certain would kill him.
Then the certainty reset.
This one kills him.
I stepped onto the side of the sword clash.
Literally.
My foot planted against the crossing blades for a fraction of a second, and even I didn't know what the hell I was doing until my legs pushed and my body vaulted over his shoulder. One pair of wings tucked, another spread, and the third beat once to keep the rotation from carrying me too far.
I landed behind him.
He turned faster than I expected.
Ryūjin Jakka carved across my side.
Pain punched the air out of me.
The black-magenta Lunarian flame on my back flared instantly, and the cut that should have opened me much deeper dragged across the reinforced body without reaching anything vital. It still hurt like hell, though, and I staggered two steps with one hand clamping against my side while blood leaked between my fingers.
I started smiling again.
"Fuck." The word came out half laugh, half breath because the pain hit harder when I inhaled. "You really don't miss much, do you?"
He didn't answer.
He was staring at my first wound.
So was I.
The cut through my arm was almost closed.
Not healed cleanly, not erased, and definitely not painless, but the flesh had visibly drawn back together until only a narrow bloody seam remained where his sword had nearly gone halfway through it. Even while I watched, the seam shortened by another fraction, fresh skin forming unevenly along the edges.
That caught me off guard enough that Slaughter Art almost slipped.
Almost.
My grandfather's rule came back before doubt could properly form.
Every strike was the ending.
Not because the last one had failed.
Not because I had a plan for what came after.
Because there was no after until the man survived again.
The black-rose aura around the unnamed blade deepened.
The man felt it.
I could tell from his face.
He tightened both hands around Ryūjin Jakka and shifted his stance, no longer looking at me like some animal that had wandered into the wrong forest. The disgust was still there, but now there was something underneath it that hadn't existed when he'd first driven his sword into my arm.
Wariness.
Good.
I breathed through the pain in my side and lowered myself slightly.
Ice began crawling away from my feet in several directions.
The man glanced down.
That was all I needed.
Five pillars erupted at once.
One came from beneath him.
Two tore in from either side.
Another grew behind me at an angle.
The fifth rose almost vertically far to my right.
He jumped.
I smiled.
The pillar behind me launched upward the moment my foot touched it.
My body went with it, folding into the acceleration while my wings drove once and turned a straight ascent into a corkscrew. I hit the side of the far pillar almost sideways, ran two steps along its frozen surface, and pushed off again before Ryūjin Jakka's fire could reach me.
He was still in the air.
So was I.
For half a second we looked at each other across a mess of steam, falling ice, orange fire, and the false nightmare shapes Echoes of Madness still hadn't completely stopped producing around the edges of the ruined forest. His face was tight with concentration now, while mine hurt from how wide I was grinning.
This strike kills him.
Cold gathered along the unnamed blade until the ice around it screamed from contraction.
Black Flame rolled over the frost.
The black-rose Slaughter Intent tightened against both like a second edge.
I folded my wings.
Gravity took me.
He raised Ryūjin Jakka.
I came down anyway.
There was no thought about what I'd do if he blocked.
No pillar waiting in my mind for the follow-up.
No second sword stroke already planned.
Everything I had was inside this one movement, and the certainty of it felt so complete that for an instant I couldn't understand how the world could possibly contain a version of the next second where he was still alive.
The blades hit.
His fire blew outward.
My frost shattered into a storm of glittering fragments.
Black Flame crawled through the explosion while the black-rose aura around my sword flared so violently that it looked almost solid, and somewhere inside that mess I felt the edge of my weapon begin forcing Ryūjin Jakka down toward his shoulder.
The man grunted and shifted his footing.
I pushed harder.
The half-healed wound in my arm tore open just a little under the strain, then began closing again almost as soon as the blood appeared.
His eyes dropped to it.
Mine didn't.
I was watching his sword.
Then his hands.
Then the tiny opening beginning to form between his guard and his throat, while my body was already starting to move before I'd decided whether I had actually seen it correctly.