124. From the Darkness of
Dawn...
The mountains east
of Kyo glowed with the first traces of morning light as the Taisha temple crumbled
from the inside out. Hundreds of gilded tiles trickled down into a vortex created
by Ravi Katjagaarda's unleashed metapsynergy, purging the temple's walls and
allowing the yoga master's power to tear through the forest. Yokai hiding
in the thicket were all vaporized on contact, pulverized by the force erupting
from the woman's enlightened consciousness.
Watching it all
from a cliff that hung over the clearing was Yakushiji Chigusa, the small, timid
girl with a bowl cut who had separated from the group much earlier in the night.
She had seen Ravi get swallowed up in the tengu battle, and had quietly
followed the woman, just in case she could be of service in any emergency.
Although her aura
was miniscule, Chigusa's Sokusai Enmei ability was capable of
disassembling and reassembling bodies, provided she had ample time to perform
the surgeries. But the more she watched the epic battle between Ravi and Matsubara,
the more she realized that it was not her place to interfere.
Just watching the
two filled her entire body with a sense of existential dread. They were beyond
this world, somehow, engaged in a struggle that spanned multiple realms. It was
unlike anything she'd ever dreamed of.
Then, a tornado of
psynergy whirled up around the temple grounds, swallowing up the trees and warping
the landscape. In the center of the storm, Ravi floated frozen in space, eyes
shut and body still.
All of the world
was splayed open for her to see. Molecules of matter collided and combined just
like the beings they made up. The world around her was nothing but an infinite
number of an infinite type of positive and negatives, births and deaths, zeros
and ones, yins and yangs, shiva and shakti, and she could see how it all connected.
Chidakasa.
There are a
million Matsubara Chujis in front of me, and yet only one. A million are one. I
am he, and he is I. We all belong to the infinite consciousness – the eternal
nothingness.
Ravi reached a hand
out from her core. Psynergy filled the atmosphere so deeply that there was no
need for her to concentrate any. All she needed to do was reach out and grab.
Matsubara Chuji watched
as Ravi opened her palm and materialized a white lotus. He knew just as well as
she did that there was no need for Ravi to get close to him, or even touch him
with the item. It was just another expression, like a smile, that stood for an emotional
feeling.
Ravi watched as her
psynergy spread and entwined with all of reality. Matsubara Chuji's particles surrounded
her at every angle, seeping in, invading her matter. He added tension to her existence,
producing antagonism. There was only one thing to do.
React. Ravi
clutched the lotus and a million spears pierced the body of Matsubara's Buddha
construct. Each spear was golden and covered in peacock plumes, producing holes
from which geysers of blood splashed down.
For the first time
in the entire night, Chuji was speechless. Quickly, he abandoned the construct
and returned to his own body, looking up to Ravi with wide eyes.
In Ravi's sights,
the tension lightened, and soon the sea of particles softened, flowing elsewhere.
Who am I?
The sea of particles roared.
I am the self. She
looked upon the white membrane that encased all.
And the self does
not exist. Ravi was one particle in a sea of a million, one piece composed
of a million other pieces.
Nothing, she
realized. That's what all this is. Everything is nothing. Reality is...
"To think
you'd push me this far." Matsubara grit his teeth, and a mechanical
whirring began to chirp out from behind his ears. "It pains me to use
this, but that is what I deserve for underestimating you at the start. Accept
your rebirth, Ravi Katjagaarda. This is your final moment."
Reality is...
"Shin-Kei-Sui-Jyaku."
Matsubara's eyes rolled
back into his head, and then, like the light of a candle, his body faded out of
sight.
"Shikishoku
Zeku."
The words reverberated
in Ravi's mind, interrupting her Kundalarian path and jolting her mind with data
that surpassed all language: Form is Emptiness.
Reality quaked, and
Ravi felt his presence. The entire spectrum of consciousness in all three of
her eyes was eclipsed by a phantom blue, and she felt him materializing, not just
anywhere, but inside her very brain.
"Kusoku Zeshiki."
In the black space of
her consciousness, Ravi saw the mad, distorted face of Chuji appear: Emptiness
is Form. Madness and desperation spilled out from his eyes like crumbling
sands. With a ghostly hand, he reached into her head.
Beyond. Fright.
Death. Regret. Life. Longing. Memories. Happiness.
Chuji tightly gripped
the throbbing organ tucked safely within her skull.
Tears. Awe. Sensation.
Bliss. Success. Honor. Camaraderie. Love.
Matsubara Chuji pushed
*************
her ruined body out
of the crumbling wall and stood once more to face Todo Heisuke, 8th Captain
of the Shinsengumi. In response, the warrior let out a heroic battle cry and ejected
streams of explosive psynergy down towards Sabine. In desperation, she leapt behind
Miyako Bara and the divining device she had created.
The pillars of the Rokujin
Shikiban vibrated, struggling to absorb the brunt of the blow, and Bara
courageously stood her ground. Sabine placed her hand on the girl's shoulder,
allowing both of their auras to intertwine for better protection.
"The gods are
on our side," Bara said firmly. "We need to move in and attack before
it's too late."
"I was just
thinking the same." Sabine looked beyond the smoke and pillars. "Bara,
do you have a sword on you?"
"Yes,"
she answered. "But I'm not very skilled at using it."
Sabine reached down
to grab the girl's ornamental sheath. "As long as it's made out of metal,
it should work. Just cover me for a few minutes."
"Leave it to
me." Bara said, spreading out her shield.
While Sabine began
her metallurgy, Bara strengthened her defenses, muttering Onmyo prayers
for divine guidance as her psynergy flowed through the materialized conduits.
Seeing that the frail-looking girl was alone, Todo dashed inwards and prepared to
decapitate her on the spot.
As Todo ran across
the ground, a previously-invisible pentacle sparked up from the floor and tripped
the Shinsengumi. Bara cried out a command, and a corporeal pillar of psynergy
materialized and shot into her enemy's back, cracking through wooden floorboards.
"Sabine!"
she shouted. "Now's our chance!"
Sabine moved her eyes
up from her work and stared at the scene. Bara's body shivered as she concentrated
with all her might to keep Todo beneath her regal purple psynergy. Todo let out
a high-pitched screech, and a wide neon explosion rocked through Bara's weapons.
Bara's barrier flickered as the girl struggled to regain her concentration, and
the Shinsengumi stood up.
Once the last bits
of her psynergy finished transforming the metal, Sabine sprang into the only
corner of the room that could count as Todo's blind spot. As the Shinsengumi moved
in to finish off Bara, Sabine clutched her new weapons in both hands and took aim.
From Bara's sword she'd crafted ten double-pronged darts that were each five
inches long.
Sabine whipped out
her right hand and sent half of her repertoire zooming out toward Todo's back.
A jolt of pain electrocuted her wrist, and she heard a loud pop as the lasting damage
that Todo's initial parry had inflicted on her caused the five darts to go
flying off course. Two missed their target entirely, while two more went sailing
just over Todo's shoulders. The final sliced through a sliver of Todo's right
arm, then continued forward and penetrated Bara's abdomen.
Sabine winced as
she listened to Bara scream in pain, but didn't give up. Just as Todo turned around,
the blacksmith threw another dart out, but it was easily knocked away.
"I do not enjoy
killing," Todo remarked, watching as Miyako Bara's illusion faded due to the
dart that broke her conentration. "But as a Shinsengumi, every battle I step
into must result in the destruction of my enemy."
Sabine inched up against
the wall and split her four remaining darts between both hands.
"Your psynergy
aura is miniscule," Todo scoffed. "There is no possible way a C and a
D-class can outfight an A, even if you do resort to tricks."
The blacksmith ignored
the taunts and dashed forward, two darts in each hand. Todo had begun charging
psynergy as Sabine slid across the ground toward her enemy's legs. Just when Sabine
swiped her darts out and attempted to slice Todo's Achilles tendons, the explosive
psynergy reached its peak, and a blast sphere burst out from within blue-and-white
robes.
"Jibakuka."
Sabine and Bara's
bodies were ripped up from their positions, then crashed through the walls of the
guardhouse as the roof was blown to pieces.
Sabine wheezed and
screamed in panic as her clothes and hair both caught fire. "No... How
*************
does it feel, filth?" Suzuki Mikisaburo sneered.
"This is what you get for poking your nose where it doesn't belong! The
very idea of another foreigner topping me in this land is utterly
ludicrous!"
Kamo lay at Suzuki's feet. "You know, if only you
hadn't gone and killed poor Hanayo's sister, I could have shrugged you off as just
another conceited goofball. But you've gone too far, man. I can't back down now."
Suzuki aimed the barrel of his mutated arm-gun toward Kamo's
face. "I'm sick of your smartass comments! I want to see you in pain!"
There was a boom, and another Ballistospore exploded outwards.
Groaning with the pain of over-exertion, Kamo deflected it, but Suzuki had something
new in store for the sniper this time. Just as the spore came flying back, he
whipped back his bladed arm and swung out at his own bullet. With a crack, he
sent the ball of psynergized fungus back like a tennis ball, increasing both
its speed and force.
The bullet struck Kamo straight in the chest this time and
knocked him backwards onto the ground as if he had been hit by a speeding train.
As he sputtered and struggled to get back up, he could feel the spores boring
their way into his flesh.
It was then that a vociferous buzzing filled Kamo's ears. A
swarm of fruit flies had flown into his chest, devouring the fungus embedded there.
Below the roof was Arashima Yayoi, standing below a sea of
fruit flies. "You're okay, Kamo! They're going to save you!"
Farther off was Ota Hanayo, who had sliced and diced through
the army of mycozombies. Her lust for vengeance pushed her spirit blade to massive
proportions as she mashed through mangled messes of fungus, flesh, and
intestines.
Yayoi's fruit flies swarmed the sky, feasting on spores, the
stalks of Suzuki's mushroom satellites, and finally the man himself. He was covered
in bugs within a flash, and the feeding began.
Kamo grimaced as the flies flocked around the spore in his
stomach. The pain was staggering, but he struggled to stay focused on his enemy.
In the next instant, Kamo let out a pained roar and shot a volley of arrows toward
the humanoid tower of flies that were eating away at Suzuki's mycotically-enhanced
limbs. A shell of hard chitin protected Suzuki's vital organs, but was easily
broken down by the flies. As they greedily devoured the rich fungal nutrients, Kamo
searched for the weakest points in Suzuki's armor and kept firing away.
As a long string of unintelligible curses erupted from the
blond man's mouth, his twisted green ankles were eaten away, and soon cracked
under his weight of his body. In desperation, he detonated his shoulder, trying
to take out a majority of the flies with it, but it barely made a dent in the
buzzing horde. All over his body, thousands of flies vomited onto his fungal
parts, dissolving them, then swallowing the remnants up into tiny mouth pipes.
No matter how hard Suzuki tried to beat them away, there was
always another swarm swooping in from Yayoi, and his fungal regeneration was
unable to keep up with their rapid feasting. Had these insects not been immune
to toxic fungus, he would have been able to fight them with his spores. Had
they not been in great numbers, he could have swatted them off with fungal
whips or shot them down with psynergy – but Yayoi had seemingly thought of
everything.
As the flies finished eating every last spore particle, Kamo
staggered to his feet. This is it...he's done for. And realistically,
that should have been the case. After taking his final aim, Kamo should have been
able to execute his foe and put a stop to all the madness. But then, a mechanical
whirring sounded out from behind the man's head, followed by an inhuman utterance.
"Shin-Kei-Sui-Jyaku."
Without warning, huge green-and-brown roots exploded from beneath
the man's body, sending tremors through the streets of Kyo. Suzuki's eyes went white
and lifeless as he rose up, becoming the top of a zygomorphy – a stalk of hardened
fungi that rose into the sky like a rotting tower.
Dark roots ripped the ground apart, searching for nutrients
to aid their host's dying body. The mycozombies that Hanayo hunted intertwined
with bristled roots, and with the help of a blast of crippling metapsynergy, what
should have taken months of time was completed in a few seconds. The citizens'
bodies were sucked dry of nutrients, and in an instant, a wealth of power was
transmitted to Suzuki.
The 9th Captain of the Shinsengumi was drenched
in a fungal aura of pure might, towering tens of meters above where his three
enemies stood.
"Yayoi! Hanayo!" Kamo prepared to shield the
group from a volley of boulder-sized Ballistospores. "You two alright?!"
The duo answered not with words, but actions. After
following the massive roots back to their origins, Hanayo, like a true berserker,
locked on to the largest target and rushed forward. Flanking her was Yayoi, sending
droves of fungus-eating flies toward the mutant and his protuberances. Skeins of
flies flew toward each Ballistospore and munched them away in mid-air. With Yayoi
handling the exterior, and Hanayo hacking away at the roots on Suzuki's base,
everything was set up for Kamo to deal the finishing blow.
I kept my eyes on them...and they kept their eyes on me.
Kamo dashed toward the bloated roots. Every new fungus
clump that tunneled out through the dirt roads surrounding the four was swiftly
cut down by Hanayo, giving Kamo the time he needed to place his hands on the cornerstone
rhizomorph. The psynergy surrounding Suzuki now was something different from what
he'd experienced so far – it felt smaller in mass, and yet somehow denser than
normal.
Is this metapsynergy? Kamo
paled. No, just focus on the task at hand. I just need to keep holding on.
Those two are giving their all for me out there. This is my role to play.
Two mushrooms arced up behind Kamo, blooming into a clone
of Suzuki. It swung down a fungal blade at him, slicing straight through his back,
but he stood his ground, taking the full force of the blow.
Kamo's aura expanded, and the veins and muscles in his arm bulged.
Determination and rage
*************
emanated from
Azuka's eyes as she stood at the foot of the Royal Palace. On either side of her
stood Chiaki and Satoka, the two women who had braved the entirety of the hellish
gauntlet and recovered their leader.
"Chiaki, Satoka,
you have my eternal thanks," Azuka said grimly. "I'm shamed by the
predicament I allowed myself to fall into, but I know this isn't a war that can
be won by myself alone. You were both essential in bringing us this far, and you
should be proud."
"It was our
honor, empress," Chiaki replied softly.
"Now it's my
turn." Azuka brandished her wooden blade. "The night is over, and
dawn is upon us. This is
*************
the... end...
Caleb watched in horror as dozens of white rubbery bone whips exploded out of
Harada Sanosuke's body. He blocked two just in time, but was slapped across the
face by another one. As he went thudding across the floor, he felt his jaw fracture.
The next thing he saw
when he got up was Muro Kyokuran's impaled body rising on another bone tentacle,
until the room was filled with them.
"Bankotsu
Kurage," Harada hissed as the marrow slowly solidified. There was a split
second of silence, and then from the hundreds of bones that he had just created
in an instant, hundreds more began to grow, inching toward Caleb's body. It was
then that a loud crash
*************
sounded out from
the debris of the guardhouse.
After desperately
leaping into the Ima River to douse herself off, Sabine cautiously climbed back
out, forcing her ruined body to keep moving throughout all its agony. The
blacksmith's body was charred, and most of the emerald hair that had once
graced her head had been immolated. Smoke still shrouded the structure, and she
could make out nothing but two vague shadows from within, one of which was crumpled
on the floor. Wincing, Sabine closed her eyes and pushed past Todo's stuffy aura
to something yellow and flowery – something that made her freeze in horror.
Sabine strained her
eyes, in utter disbelief
*************
at what was happening.
A gigantic wave of water exploded from above Harada and tore through his bones
as if they were made out of paper, knocking his entire body from his stage.
Water flowed through the chamber, dissipating just as quickly as it had appeared,
and Caleb slowly looked up to find its source.
Sliding down on a river
through the crumbling ceiling was a woman wearing skintight black wrappings and
a metal headband with three interlocking circles in the center. As she alighted
on the watery floor, she stared ahead coldly with ice blue eyes.
Caleb gaped. "You...
*************
you're..." Sabine croaked, as the smoke cleared out
from the guardhouse. "S...Sa..."
Ruby and emerald flashed as two monstrous blades rose from
the man's back.
Todo's mouth gaped. "What the hell
*************
are you doing here?" Caleb stammered.
"Don't think this is charity." Watery psynergy rippled
around Rose Quirivane as she locked her eyes on the downed Shinsengumi.
"I'm merely here to fulfill my part of the
*************
bargain." Saffron Morrigan's blades reflected the
morning sun as it crept over the horizon, illuminating his mad grin, the silver
armor covering his black tunic, and wild, flowing blond hair. "But who are
thee to ask what I be? What are these, so whiter'd and so wild in their attire,
that look not like inhabitants of the universe...and yet are on't?"
