On one side of the ruined courtyard stood Diamond, a battered but unbroken monument of defiant flesh. On the other, the Apsara Tandava, a four-armed demigod of celestial flame: its single, white eye burning a hole in reality. The air between them shimmered, thick with killing intent and the promise of a glorious, final violence.
Diamond was gripped with grim focus. Without sparing a movement, he moved fluidly towards his foe.
The charge was not a desperate sprint, but a confident advance. He closed the distance, his golden-wreathed fists a stark contrast to the swirling blues and reds of the monstrosity before him. The Apsara Tandava responded with fluid, terrifying grace. All four of its arms, wreathed in solar plasma, swept towards him at once, each at a different angle and a different timing. It was not a flurry of blows, but a perfectly choreographed net of destruction designed to catch and annihilate.
Diamond ducked under the first arm, the heat of its passage searing the hair from his scalp. He pivoted, letting the second arm sizzle past his ear, blocked the third arm, and took the fourth to his face. This was on purpose: the creature landed a blow on Diamond, but his fist also sunk into the creature’s solidifying torso, fueled by the inh. The impact was like striking a furnace wall. A concussive boom echoed, and a spiderweb of violet cracks appeared on the creature’s hide before sealing themselves with molten light.
The beast’s third and fourth arms crashed down like pillars. Diamond threw his own arms up in a desperate block. The impact drove him to one knee, the ground beneath him fracturing. The sheer, overwhelming force was beyond anything he had ever felt. His bones groaned, his hardened skin shrieked, but he held.
“Is that all?” he snarled through gritted teeth, pushing back with a surge of raw power.
As he struggled, a flicker of movement from the edge of the clearing caught his eye. Kyo. He was stirring. A pang of concern, sharp and unwelcome, cut through Diamond’s battle focus. Bad timing, pretty-boy. Stay down.
While Diamond was engaged, Kyo’s limp body began to rise, as if pulled-up by strings. He floated, ascending from his crumpled position against the wall with an unnatural, eerie smoothness. His limp body floated for a moment, head lolling, like a marionette. Then he snapped to life, his hands, back, and neck all straightening like they’d been struck by lightning. The puppetmaster marionetting Kyo became apparent.
Kyo’s cracked glasses fell from his face, shattering on the gravel below as his eyes opened. They were no longer calm, focused pools of quiet intensity. They were voids. Two pits of ink-black nothingness, emanating a cold, bottomless hatred that seemed to drain the very color from the air around him.
In a flourish, this spectre manifested a dark, tattered cloak from nothingness. Dark particles seemed to materialize out of nothing and stitch themselves into some unearthly fabric, as if woven from a black hole. Kyo’s hand reached out and Shizuka came flying into his open palm. A soft hiss, like escaping gas, sounded from the bladeless hilt of Shizuka. The blade that poured forth was not Kyo’s brilliant, white-hot psi. It was a blade of pure anti-light, a sliver of solidified night that absorbed the ambient glow of the Apsara Tandava. Its edges seemed to distory the very space around it and glowed a fiery color that seemed beyond razor-sharp.
This was not Kyo Shiku.
It was at this moment that Diamond, who had heretofore been preoccupied with combat, was sent flying back into a wall. Dust, debris, and dirt were knocked up in a cloud as Diamond picked himself up, panting heavily. He was landing blows, but he was no longer certain they were doing anything to his opponent.
He looked curiously at Kyo’s floating apparition, now garbed in pure black raiments, and used the back of his hand to wipe blood from his mouth. “You switch to contacts or something?” Diamond grinned, unsure of his partner’s state, but glad for any help.
“Stay out of my way,” was Kyo’s stark, commanding reply. It was Kyo’s voice, but stripped of all warmth and gentleness, filled with pure, vitriolic contempt. The figure, floating a foot off the ground, drifted forward.
For the first, and certainly not the last time that night, Diamond was left surprised and speechless. “Kyo, you okay buddy?” he asked.
“I am not Kyo,” the floating phantom announced with a bite of attitude that was unfamiliar coming from Kyo. “My name is Ryō. Remember it.”
The Apsara Tandava had also stopped to assess the situation, instinctually wary of its new opponent and sensing something strange about it. Whereas it had no problems charging Diamond in a full-blown offensive, it now stepped back carefully into a more defensive stance.
Ryō—Kyo’s shadow self—drifted nonchalantly at a height that made it seem like he was looking down on everyone, judging everything, yet seemingly indifferent to the titanic struggle before him. His strange garb fluttered in a breeze that was not there, its tattered and frayed endings flowing in an ethereal way that reminded Diamond of Chinese New Year’s dragons.
Kagemusha was fascinated by all this, and uncertain what to make of it. He wasn’t fully sure if Ryō was even an enemy. Some instinct of him felt a certain kindredness towards Ryō. The thought crossed Kagemusha’s mind that there was some potential of Ryō being an ally. The Apsara Tandava responded in like to Kagemusha’s curiosity by holding back.
Ryō, despite being aware of Kagemusha, was far more intent on ensuring Diamond knew his name and that he was distinctly not Kyo. His black eyes fixed on Diamond from his vantage point, brimming with an ancient and profound irritation. “You’re loud,” it stated. “And your aura is disgustingly sentimental. You’re annoying.”
Diamond blinked, trying to process the insult and the reasoning for it. In that instant, Ryo moved offensively like a wraith, a chilling blur of black that was more reminiscent of a black wolf than anything human. Ryo didn’t attack the monster. He came straight at Diamond and landed a kick square to his partner’s chest.
The blow seemed light, but it delivered insane force, sending Diamond flying and flipping over piles of rubble. But it was not a blow intended to wound or hurt; it was more like a gentle nudge against a being that was fundamentally unbreakable.
Ryo now floated alone before the celestial Apsara Tandava, apparently something of a demigod in his own right. Unlike the usual sharpness and intentionality with which he wielded Shizuka, he now held it with a casual looseness, letting it hang between his thumb and fingers without gripping it, the way a high school student might wield a pencil. He didn’t take a stance. He simply hovered, an avatar of pure disdain. His mouth curled slightly into the barest hint of a threadbare smile, an indicator of the pleasure he took in what was to unfold.
The Apsara Tandava, its focus now completely on Ryō, finally seemed to regain its bearings and interest in fighting. It roared, then unleashed a torrent of fire from its central eye. It was not a beam, but a wave of raw, annihilating heat that instantly melted concrete, metal, and anything foolish enough to stand in its way.
Ryo didn’t dodge. He simply swung his black blade in a casual, horizontal arc. The blade of night drank the torrent of fire, swallowing the attack whole without a sound, leaving a trail of absolute nothingness in its wake. A small trickle of sweat beaded on Ryō’s forehead, and that was all that remained of Apsara Tandava’s fearsome attack.
Kagemusha, watching from the periphery, took an involuntary step back. “Impossible… he’s negating its very essence…”
The Apsara Tandava paused, its single eye flickering as if in confusion. Ryō sighed, a sound of utter boredom. “How disappointing.”
Then Ryō attacked. There was none of Kyo’s flowing grace or disciplined intensity. Ryo’s movements were brutally efficient, yet also disdainfully nonchalant, like an expert repeating a tedious exercise for the millionth time and operating on pure instinct. He was a storm of straight, black lines and impossible angles. He teleported—or seemed to—from one point to another, casually dodging every attack from the four arms. For every dodge, his Shizuka retaliated with punishment, carving deep, silent wounds into Apsara Tandava’s form. Where Kyo’s white blade had seared and cauterized, Ryō’s black blade seemed to unmake matter itself. The wounds it left did not bleed fire; there were no scattering sparks: there were simply silent gaps, holes in existence made soundlessly from which no light could escape.
Diamond pulled himself out of the debris, his chest aching from Ryō’s dismissive kick. He watched, his jaw slack with disbelief. Ryō was a whirlwind of pure destruction, his every move an expression of cosmic hatred. He fought with a vicious, nihilistic joy that made Diamond’s own brawling look like a friendly spar. The Apsara Tandava, despite its immense power, was being systematically dismantled. With every attack, it seemed to grow a little smaller, a little dimmer, like Ryō’s blade was sucking it up with every attack. It flailed in motions that resembled desperation, its four arms swinging wildly as it leapt after Ryō, but Ryō was like a wraith. Wherever the Apsara Tandava reached, all it ever found was air, and all it got for its efforts was another incisive slash as Ryō appeared casually out of harm’s way.
Completely in awe and not content to be sidelined, Diamond instinctively charged back into the fray. Even if Ryō was winning now, there was no telling what other tricks Kagemusha had: Diamond decided to seize the moment to ensure victory.
He never got there. A blur of black, and Ryo was suddenly between him and his target, the obsidian blade swinging not at the monster, but at Diamond’s head. Diamond reflexively threw himself backward, the tip of the shadow blade grazing his cheek, leaving behind a bleeding cut that felt unnaturally cold.
“I told you,” Ryo hissed, his black eyes burning with fury. “You are in my way. Annoying.”
Ryō teleported into another dismissive kick and Diamond was once more sent flying. He landed hard, coughing up a bit of blood. “Dammit, Ryō! The hell is wrong with you!”
He looked up just in time to see Ryoplunge his darker-than-black-blade deep into the Apsara Tandava’s central eye.
There was no explosion. No sound. Just a sudden, violent implosion. The magnificent creature of celestial flame folded in on itself, collapsing magnificently into the wound Ryō had created, like solar plasma being absorbed into a black hole, until it was all gone, swallowed by the pinprick of absolute nothingness left by the Shizuka.
The clearing fell silent. The oppressive heat vanished. Ryō stood floating in the center of the courtyard, the last rays of the setting sun refusing to touch him. He retracted his blade and turned his empty gaze toward Diamond, who was just getting to his feet.
A slow, pained grin spread across Diamond’s face. He spat a wad of blood onto the ground, his mind reeling with what he had just witnessed.
“Damn,” he breathed, a note of genuine awe in his voice. Both he and Kagemusha were both, understandably, left without words.
Leave a Reply