Yuji Itadori POV
My hand rises up with a harsh horizontal flick "Dismantle," I calmly intoned. A small invisible slash sent one of Rynosuke's arm's flying off.
I should have been questioning how I was able to pull the move off. After all this was something that belonged to a man that I knew very well.
"MY ARM-!" I wasted no time charging directly at him with a hard flying kick that blasted Rynosuke out of the building.
With a small inhale I leapt up after him in the air.
The air underneath me gave way and I came down on Rynosuke like a dropped guillotine.
Both of my feet connected with his collarbone simultaneously and the force drove him straight into the road surface.
The asphalt cratered outward in a spiderweb of fractured lines. Dust erupted upward around us and I was already moving before it settled. I grabbed his remaining arm by the wrist and pulled him up off the ground.
My left fist connected with his jaw mid-pull.
The mana coating detonated on contact and his head snapped back so hard that his feet left the ground entirely. His body was sent flying until he hit the road shoulder-first.
The secondary wave of Divergent Fist arrived a beat later and hammered the same jawline with a concussive force. That visibly compressed the air around it, a small shockwave radiated outward and flattened the loose debris on the road surface in a perfect ring.
Rynosuke bounced once and came to rest face-down.
The arm I'd taken off was already doing something in the periphery of my vision. Tentacle-tissue reached across the gap, desperately stitching itself back toward the shoulder.
I raised my hand.
"Dismantle."
The invisible attack slashed right through the reconnecting tissue cleanly and the arm stopped moving.
Rynosuke pushed himself up with his remaining arm.
His face was doing things faces weren't designed to do. The bone structure underneath shifted as his tentacle-tissue worked frantically to fix what I'd broken. His jaw tracked back into alignment with a sound I felt in my back teeth even from three meters away.
His eyes found mine, "at this rate," he began, "I am just going to kill you instead of taking you to the big guy."
"I don't care," I dully replied and raced forward.
Rynosuke brought his remaining arm up to intercept. I went under it completely though and drove the heel of my palm upward into his chin. His head snapped back. Before he could recover I stepped behind him, hooked my foot behind his ankle, and pushed forward against his back.
He went down again and I went down with him, one knee between his shoulder blades, and sent three Piercing Needles into his reattaching arm at point-blank range. Each one threading through a different section of the tentacle-tissue and injecting my blood through the wounds it made.
The arm stopped reaching.
The tentacles inside it writhed against my blood's presence, contracting away from it, and without the tentacle-tissue to hold it together the structural integrity of the reconnection simply stopped.
Rynosuke bucked underneath me with a sound of pain.
I grabbed the back of his collar and pulled him upright to standing height. Which briefly required me getting my feet off the ground given our height difference, and swung him sideways into the lamppost at the road's edge.
The metal bent around the point of impact.
He hung there for a moment, partially wrapped around it.
I stepped back and shaped the blood from my eyebrow wound into seven needles simultaneously, smaller than the previous ones.
I fired off all seven in a spread formation targeting his major joints.
Knee, hip, shoulder of the remaining arm, wrist, and ankle. The junction of his neck, shoulder, and the final one between his ribs.
The tentacle-tissue at each point recoiled from the contact of my blood. His enhanced healing suddenly had seven different problems to deal with simultaneously.
Rynosuke slid down the lamppost and hit the ground at its base.
He was panting and groaning from the higher dose of poisoned blood that had infected his bloodstream.
"You and I..." I started with a hard glare, "are nothing alike. I am nothing like you."
He looked up at me from the ground with one eye before his expression slowly cracked "pfft!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Rynosuke began to laugh.
I raised my hand ready to fire off a Dismantle at his face.
"He's quite cool, isn't he Rynosuke?!"
The voice that came from the street's far end was all too familiar.
I slowly turned and there he was.
Gilles de Rais stood in the center of the road with his oily hair, poppy eyes, and cultish robes.
Both of his hands were clasped in front of him in that grotesque pantomime of serenity.
Arranged around him on both sides were twenty new figures. They moved in that same lurching, overcorrected puppet-motion I had burned into every corner of my memory.
Children's faces.
Children's bodies.
Things that were not children anymore wearing both like borrowed clothes.
The red at the edges of my vision deepened while the malevolent aura around me spiked up.
I gritted my teeth so hard that it felt like some of them cracked, "w-what..." I took a slow step forward unable to tear my eyes away from what I was seeing again.
New kids like me and my friends were being taken and killed again, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GILES DE RAIS?!" I roared.
"HOW MAGNIFICIENT!" Gilles yelled back his voice carrying the raw unhinged reverence of a man whose sanity had long since left, "HOW ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT YOU'VE BECOME, ITADORI YUJI!"
He spread both arms wide, face tilted upward toward the night sky with an expression of transported ecstasy.
"Do you see this, my precious Jeanne?!" he cried upward, "this innocent boy was abandoned by God just like you and now he stands before me again AS A DEMON HIMSELF!! IT'S SO COOOL AND INSPIRING!"
Lowering his hand Giles continued, "BUT NOW LET US SEE IF WE CAN TURN THE CREATION OF GOD INTO SATAN HIMSELF!"
Following his command the twenty shapes all began run at me.
.
.
.
I went left first because left was where the cluster was thinnest.
Dismantle cleared the space in front of me with two horizontal sweeps.
The small invisible slashes tore through the leading three before they could close the distance and I moved through the gap before the ones behind them could react.
The fourth one caught me with both arms.
Its grip strength was unnaturally strong and I felt my ribs protest the compression. I fed it some of my blood into both of its hands through contact. The poisonous aspect of my blood immediately made its grip spasm and release me.
I fired off a Piercing Needle through its chest at point-blank range and it went down.
Five.
The fifth and sixth came from my flanks simultaneously and I jumped, extending my hang time with mana through my feet, and dropped between them with an elbow for each. Divergent Fist exploded on the left one via my foot while Dismantle took the right.
Seven.
Three came from behind while I was landing and I spun, bloodied hands already shaping what I had into a spread of needles, and fired all of them in a cone. Two of them went down but the third one got its hands on my shoulder and the tentacles inside it reached for my face.
I grabbed its wrist.
Flooded it with a stream of blood.
The reaction was immediate and violent. It released me and I finished it off by making it explode in a crystalized explosion of blood.
Ten.
I stood in the road with ten of them down and ten still standing.
Gilles watched from behind his remaining line with an expression of transported delight and my legs were shaking again, the fine tremor back.
The remaining ten charged.
I went for the nearest one and Dismantle took its body apart. I turned over to the next when the one behind me got both of its arms around my torso.
It started to squeeze and the air left me again. I felt my healed ribs from earlier flare up in a painful ache.
Something cut through the air above my head with a sound similar to something being torn by a knife.
The grip released.
I dropped to one knee and glanced up to see..."Nanami?" a smile makes its way on my face.
The black markings on my face and red aura around my body fading away.
My vision returned back to being normal.
He stood fifteen meters away in the road.
No jacket on only just the blue dress shirt, his sleeves were rolled up, and yellow-black dotted tie perfectly centered. Around his eyes were a pair of goggle glasses instead of his normal ones, the lenses catching the streetlight at an angle that made them ominously glint.
In each of his hands was a bandaged butcher knife with black dotted patterns.
Blood stained one of them while the other remained clean.
"You and I," he began giving a small glance over at me, "are going to have a very long conversation after this...Itadori," Nanami said in a very serious tone.
-end of chapter seventeen-
Alright so I lied we don't see Caster and Rynosuke retreat in this chapter. They will however do so next chapter. But we did get Nanami aura farming by the end once he appeared to save Yuji.
As always positive comments do well for my motivation.