Woooooosh!
The moment the emerald strike pierced Omaru's heart, the air in the clearing exploded. A pressurised wall of wind hammered into Wabonoske, hurling him backwards. A massive cloud of brown dust and debris surged upward, swallowing the shrine in a choking veil.
"Kkkkrr... what is this now?" Wabonoske hissed.
One of his demonic limbs, partially severed by the sheer force of the gale, hit the dirt, but he didn't flinch. His coarse, black hair reached out like hungry tentacles, stitching into the discarded meat and pulling the limb back into his socket with a wet, grinding snap.
Wabonoske cleared the dust with a swipe of his claw, his yellow eyes widening.
Omaru had grown taller, his skin taking on the deep, unnatural shade of lime-green. His hair, once dark and unkempt, had turned a fiery, incandescent red, whipping in the wind like a living flame. Two jagged, dragon-like horns arched back from his forehead.
The heavy Hiko armour he had been wearing shattered and fell to the floorboards as scrap. Beneath it, a simple, open-sleeved kimono remained. Where his left hand had been torn away, the air began to churn and solidify, forming a semi-transparent limb made of compressed, howling winds.
"Ayi... tttttchttt… It's been too long."
The voice that vibrated through the clearing was ancient and deep, resonant thunder.
"Mmm? What's this?" Wabonoske murmured, his frantic laughter finally dying down as a rare flicker of caution touched his mind. "Did he awaken his Divine Body? It's just like Master said... I thought he was just like the others whose blessing was thin."
Wabonoske stepped forward, his hooves clattering on the blood-soaked stone. He stopped just paces away from the transformed Omaru. The two entities locked eyes.
Divine Bodies are the rarest treasures of Nihon, while most warriors possess a Reiryoku nature and their own unique Onmyōdō spirit arts; those with Divine Bodies possess a dual-core existence. Upon awakening, they embody their nature. They inherit the physical characteristics, the primordial strength, and the conceptual authority of a specific deity, gaining exponential growth that defies standard Grade classifications.
"Awaken, Kazebuko."
Omaru raised his shimmering hand of wind toward the bruised sky. The reaction was instantaneous. Thick, black clouds rolled in, blotting out the crimson light of the domain until the shrine was plunged into a suffocating darkness.
"What? I have to sto—"
Wabonoske didn't get to finish his sentence. With a casual flick of Omaru's wind-hand, a massive, jagged tornado erupted from the earth. Omaru pointed at the demon.
The winds tore through the stone foundation of the shrine, ripping the very trees from their roots.
"That won't work! I am Fourth Grade!" Wabonoske roared, desperate to maintain his dominance. He tapped the ground, commanding the earth to rise in massive, jagged walls to block the storm.
But the earth was no match for the sky. The stones were pulverised into dust and swallowed by the rotation, adding weight and lethality to the cyclone.
Wabonoske turned to flee. The tornado lifted the entire temple frame from its moorings, spinning it in the air like a child's toy.
Dzzzzzt.
Wabonoske was so focused on the swirling debris of the temple that he failed to notice the silence directly in front of him. Omaru had closed the distance in a blur of motion that left no footprint.
He stood there, calm and terrifying, and simply pointed a finger.
A high-pitched whistling sound, like a thousand flutes played at once, filled the air. Before Wabonoske could blink, his body was struck by a vacuum of invisible blades. He wasn't hit once; he was sliced hundreds, thousands of times in a single second.
Wabonoske hit the ground as a shredded ruin. Omaru didn't stay to watch. He glided away with a ghostly grace, leaving the massive wreckage of the shrine and the boulders that had been circling in the air to rain down on top of the demon's broken body.
BOOM. CRASH. THUD.
The silence that followed was heavy with the scent of ozone and copper.
"Waaaaa... so this is the power Master Arikuni was talking about," Omaru marvelled. He hovered high above the wreckage, his crimson hair fluttering like a banner of war. "It truly feels amazing."
But the feeling was fleeting. Below, the mountain of rubble began to shift. Stone slabs and broken temple beams were tossed aside by an invisible force. Wabonoske emerged from the debris, a mangled, red-soaked nightmare. His limbs were re-attaching themselves with wet, sickening pops, but his eyes were wide with a frantic, animalistic desperation.
"Tch. I knew that wouldn't be enough," Omaru hissed, his lime-green skin flickering. "Let's end this now. My body is about to break anyway."
"Huuu..."
Omaru took a deep, rattling breath. From every corner of the shrine, the winds began to scream, rushing toward him to fuel one final, world-shattering strike.
"Now that all the points are placed... let me start the ritual—"
Da-dum.
A sharp, white-hot spike of agony stabbed through his chest. The emerald light in his veins stuttered. Omaru began to descend not with grace, but with the heavy, uncoordinated fall of a bird with a broken wing.
On the other side of the clearing, Wabonoske dragged himself to his hooves. His sadistic smile returned, jagged and blood-stained.
"Shishishishi! Did you really think you got rid of my poison?" the demon wheezed, black ichor leaking from his mouth. "That was just naive of you. Spirit devouring Venom, if you are not used to the spirit arts they is no way to get rid of it."
"Shit..." Omaru hit the ground on one knee.
The weight was back, a crushing pressure that made his Reiryoku leak out of his pores like water through a sieve. Every step forward felt like dragging his body through thick, freezing mud.
"Damn it... damn it! I really thought I had him," Omaru thought, his vision blurring. "I can't let it end like this."
The air grew heavy and stagnant, the winds of the shrine dying down into a haunting silence. Both Omaru and Wabonoske stood fixed, staring at one another. They were ghosts of their former selves, battered and leaking blood, yet their hands rose in a final, synchronised motion.
Everything was poured into this.
In Omaru's palm, the last of Kazebuko's light flared into a sharp, emerald spark. In Wabonoske's clawed hand, a cracked, unstable purple miasma pulsed like a dying heart.
Ta.
A single, cold raindrop hit the blood-soaked earth.
They rushed. There was no finesse, no tactical manoeuvring, only the raw velocity of two souls seeking an end.
STAB! GLOOOOPP...
The sound was wet and definitive. Omaru's wind-hand plunged into the centre of the demon's chest, while Wabonoske's jagged claws tore through Omaru's ribs, piercing the very heart he had already sacrificed.
"Let's end it," they both wheezed, their voices overlapping. They didn't pull away. Instead, they drove their remaining Reiryoku deeper into one another, trying to incinerate the other's spirit from the inside out.
"AHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Their roars of agony merged into a single, discordant frequency that vibrated through the bone-white bamboo forest.
"You were both such good pawns. Now, it is time to fulfil your purpose."
The voice echoed directly inside their skulls, crisp, polite, and terrifyingly calm. It was the voice they both knew all too well.
"Master Arikuni..." they both responded, the realisation hitting them in their final moment of clarity.
"Spirit Art of Soul Transformation: Deity Gate Forge!"
The command roared through their consciousness. The emerald green and the toxic purple didn't destroy each other; they began to braid. Omaru and Wabonoske felt their individual identities being stripped away, their memories and flesh melting together.
"Shit... I see now I was dancing in the palm of Buddha all along." This was the line Omaru thought before his head went blank.