AKAME ASSASINATION (65)
Long ago, there was a fox spirit with nine tails. Her name was Kurama. Kurama had a knack for stealing things—not out of greed, but out of a playful, restless mischief. She would slip down from the heavens to earth, light-fingered and silent, to pilfer swords, fine yukatas, even sleeping children. She never kept them. She'd leave her prizes in strange, unexpected places, then guide some kind soul to find and return them, weaving little tales of fortune and serendipity.
But one night, Kurama slipped into the house of a young, frail, and senile woman. The woman could only watch, wide-eyed and trembling, as the fox gently lifted her infant from its crib and vanished into the moonlight. After two days of frantic searching, the child was found—cold and still, a victim of exposure, a tragedy born of a game gone horribly wrong.
It was a mistake Kurama had never before made. The fox, wracked with a guilt she'd never known, could do nothing as the grieving mother hurled curses into the empty air. After days of torment, Kurama returned. She stood before the woman and offered her life in exchange for one wish—any wish. A chance to bring the child back, perhaps. To undo the wrong.
What the woman wished for, however, was something the fox could never have expected.
But that… is a story for another time.
For now, we return to the fight at hand.
***
Junichi struck first.
His fists were not just blows; they were declarations of war. Each punch moved faster than the last, condensing the air ahead of them into momentary vacuums that collapsed with explosive force, tearing chunks from the building they stood upon. The rooftop disintegrated beneath their feet.
Akame met the storm not with evasion, but with calibration. His forearms and open palms became moving shields, parrying, redirecting, dispersing force with precise, minimal shifts. The two men fell through the collapsing structure, their exchange continuing in mid-air—a blur of motion sketched across a canvas of dust and debris.
Junichi hit the ground with a cratering THUD. Akame landed beside him with the soft grace of a falling leaf.
Junichi rushed again, a hurricane of violence. Punches that could level walls came in flurries. Akame blocked, slipped, absorbed—and in the spaces between Junichi's relentless onslaught, landed sharp, clinical counter-strikes to ribs, diaphragm, and joints. Yet, Akame himself remained untouched, his expression one of detached focus.
"Damn, you're a hard nut to crack!" Junichi spat, wiping blood from a split lip, his grin wider than ever. "Good! It wouldn't be fun if you went down easy!"
'I'm calculating time,' Akame thought, his mind operating on a separate track from his body. 'Koji and Catherine are moving. Gil is… somewhere. I need to keep this distraction going. But what's the endgame? Just survival? No…'
"HEY!" Junichi roared, closing the distance. "FOCUS!"
A piston-driven fist sank into Akame's stomach. The impact didn't bruise—it launched. Akame shot backward like a shell from a cannon, tearing a sonic line through the dusty air.
Junichi was on him in an instant. A vicious combo of punches kept Akame suspended in mid-air—thud-thud-thud-thud—before Junichi grabbed him by the ankles and smashed him into the asphalt like a rag doll. Once. Twice. A third time, with the sound of shattering stone. Then he hurled Akame like a discus through the remaining wall of a half-collosed boutique.
Akame skidded across a floor of polished white marble—a high-end candy shop, now vacant and trembling. He stopped his slide and rose to one knee.
He wasn't given a second to breathe.
Junichi burst through the hole in the wall, a titan framed by destruction, his eyes blazing with pure, unadulterated bloodlust.
"C'MON! THE GREAT AKAME! SHOW ME SOMETHING INTERESTING!"
His next punch wasn't a strike; it was an erasure. Akame interposed the sheathed Shizen, holding it horizontally. The impact echoed like a cathedral bell, the lacquered wood of the sheath groaning, threatening to splinter.
'Gil… I can't forget why I'm here. I need to ensure they escape. Even if it kills me.'
The thought crystalized into action.
In the space between one nanosecond and the next, Akame's posture shifted. Weight settled. His left hand steadied the sheath. His right hovered over the hilt.
IAIDO: QUICK DRAW — SILENT MOON.
Junichi's eyes widened. He didn't see the draw. He only saw the aftermath—a faint, curved afterimage of white steel hanging in the air like a ghostly crescent moon.
Pure instinct made him leap, catapulting himself upward just as the arc of the cut finished its journey.
What followed was not a sound, but a sensation. The entire foundation of the candy shop—and the structural column behind it—shivered, then parted along a line as smooth as glass. The upper floors groaned and began a slow, grinding collapse.
Junichi landed amidst raining plaster, his heart hammering not with fear, but with ecstasy.
'That wasn't an artifact… No F.E. enhancement… Just raw geometry and force. He cut reinforced concrete like rice paper.'
"YES!" Junichi screamed, laughter bubbling from his throat. "YES! YOU ARE REALLY HIM! THE MAN WHO LEFT IT ALL BEHIND! HE WHO ABANDONED HUMANITY TO BECOME A DEMON! HE WHO LIVES SOLELY AS HE PLEASES!"
He clasped his giant hands together, not in prayer, but in forge-work.
EARTH ALCHEMY: FORGE OF CREATION!
The rubble around him—chunks of concrete, twisted rebar, shattered tile—levitated. It didn't just assemble; it disintegrated and reconstituted, breaking down to granular matter and re-fusing under the pressure of his will. In his hands, the earth forged itself into two massive, cleaver-like daggers, linked by a heavy, segmented chain of solid stone. The weapons hummed with dense, gravitational energy.
"I've been saving this," Junichi panted, his voice guttural with excitement. "Just in case you needed a proper welcome back."
"I love the enthusiasm," Akame said, as the ceiling above them finally gave way.
What followed was a dance of earth and edge.
Junichi was no longer just a brawler; he was a combat geokinetic. He didn't just swing the chained daggers—he animated the battlefield.
With a stomp, he raised a platform of asphalt beneath Akame, then dissolved it into quicksand. He slung one stone dagger, using the chain to whip support pillars out from underfoot. He created localized tremors to disrupt balance, all while attacking with the brutal, weighted grace of a meteor hammer master.
Akame moved through it all with pure swordsmanship. No tricks. No energy beams. Just Shizen, unsheathed now, a length of silver in the gloom.
When the ground surged up, he cut the rising stone at its base. When the chain whipped toward his legs, he deflected it with the flat of his blade, using the momentum to pivot into a counter-cut. When Junichi tried to bury him under a crushing ceiling of debris, Akame carved a doorway through it and stepped out unscathed.
It was a clash of philosophies: Junichi's world-bending force versus Akame's unbending line.
Junichi grew more frenzied, more creative. He launched both daggers, yanking them back to crisscross Akame's position. He collapsed walls to funnel him. He even attempted to forge a stone cage around him mid-swing.
Akame simply cut. Every obstacle, every attack, was met with the same economical, devastating solution—the edge of his sword.
The candy shop was now little more than a crater filled with dust and the smell of crushed sugar.
Finally, with a roar, Junichi gathered every fragment of stone within twenty meters and forged it into a single, colossal fist the size of a bus. He brought it down in a final, apocalyptic hammer-blow.
Akame didn't dodge. He stepped in, blade held vertically.
SHIIIIING—CRUNCH.
The stone fist split down the middle, cleaved perfectly in two, parting around Akame like a rock around a river. The force of the blow cratered the ground at his feet, but he stood untouched in the eye of the destruction.
Junichi stood panting on the other side of the new fissure, his stone weapons crumbling to dust, his body heaving with exhaustion and exhilaration.
Akame turned. Behind him was the mostly-intact counter of the candy shop. He walked over, calmly reached into a shattered display case, and plucked out a single, unwrapped cherry lollipop. He brushed off a bit of dust, popped it into his mouth, and turned back to Junichi.
He gave the lollipop a thoughtful suck, then nodded.
"I needed a bit of sugar," he said, his voice calm, almost conversational. "Helps me get fired up."
Junichi stared. Then, he began to laugh—a deep, roaring, genuine laugh that shook his massive frame. He wasn't defeated. He was fulfilled.
The first round went to the demon with a sweet tooth.
SAIKYO AKAME VS SUZAKU JUNICHI END!