Collision of Fates

The air trembled. The ground vibrated. And in that moment, the fate of the clearing, the demon, and the two fighters was suspended on a knife’s edge.
The battle was far from over.
The treeline broke with a rush of boots through brush. Three figures carved into the clearing like thrown knives—one in a dark mantle that moved as if the breeze obeyed it, one with a staff glowing low and warm, one shouldering a broad greatsword that trailed heat-haze. Shin didn’t know them. He didn’t have to. The way they moved said enough: they were here to fight.
The demon reared, plates of jagged scale flexing with a sound like grinding millstones. Morning light flared off its hide; its second breath came out as a furnace roar that shook dust loose from the canopy. Beside Shin, the girl shifted her stance—heels planted, shoulder dipped, chin tucked. She didn’t glance back. She didn’t need to.
“Don’t freeze,” she said, voice steady.
“I wasn’t planning to,” Shin replied.
The cloaked one lifted a hand as if plucking a thread from the air. A circle of pale glyphs turned around her wrist—subtle, almost delicate. The wind in the clearing hiccupped. The leaves slowed their flutter midair, then resumed, but the demon’s next step stuttered just enough to break its rhythm.
“Right flank!” barked the swordsman with the greatsword. He dashed past with reckless speed, blade dragging fire from the dirt in a spray. His incantation bled between clenched teeth:
“Guren no kizami—chōtō ni hi o! Ember Carve!”
The heat writhed along the broad steel, not a free-standing spell but a sheath, a second edge. He struck the demon’s foreleg. The blade bit; the flame flared; the monster snarled and yanked back, burned more by the pressure than the fire itself.
The staff-bearer didn’t attack. She set her feet and exhaled, voice ringing clean:
“Megumi no hikari—kokoro o tsunaide, inochi o tazusae! Healer’s Oath!”
The air brightened with a soft gold that wasn’t sunlight. Warmth combed through Shin’s chest, smoothing ragged breath, tuning the tremor out of the girl’s sword arm. The light didn’t make them invincible. It made them able.
Shin nodded once. “We take the tendon behind the knee,” he said to the girl. “You draw. I cut.”
“That’s my line,” she said—and moved.
She went low, darting past the demon’s lashing tail by a thumb’s width, blade skimming gravel as she slashed for the soft seam where scale layered over muscle. The demon jerked to stomp. Shin was already there, shoulders turning, sword sliding in the beat she created.
Steel met sinew. The monster buckled.
“Left!” shouted the greatsword fighter, pivoting into another strike. “Keep it turning!”
Shin didn’t look back. “Talk less, swing more.”
“Ha! I like him,” the man laughed, even as he plowed into the next cut.
The cloaked woman didn’t laugh. Her fingers described another arc in the air, and her voice came quiet:
“Ito yo, kasanare. Shunkan o musubi, shunkan o sasu—Weave the instant.”
The demon lunged. It should have reached Shin. Instead the world slipped. Not slowed—miscounted. The beast’s paw arrived a half-beat late, and Shin’s blade wasn’t there anymore; it was already drawing a red line across the inside of the wrist. The monster howled, enraged by the lie of time.
“Kaori!” the cloaked woman called, gaze never leaving the foe.
“On it!” the healer—Kaori—answered. Her staff chimed as she traced a clean circle, voice firm:
“Shugo no kekkai—yuragi o tomare! Guardian Ward!”
A translucent dome flickered around Shin and the girl for a breath, just long enough to blunt a shard of flying stone that would have taken the girl in the temple. It shattered, harmless.
“Thanks,” the girl panted, never breaking stride.
“Don’t make me do it twice,” Kaori shot back, but there was a small, fierce warmth in her eyes.
The demon learned. Its next roar drew breath through a second opening ripping along its chest, a vertical maw that was nothing like a mouth at all—more like an open wound to somewhere else. The light around it bent subtly inward.
“Back!” the greatsword shouted.
Shin felt the tug under his ribs—the Abyss pulling to itself. Not his Abyss. The demon’s.
He tightened his grip. The sane play was to disengage and circle. Instead he stepped forward.
“Don’t,” the cloaked woman said—softly, as if speaking to a thread that might snap.
“I won’t fall,” Shin answered, and the lie tasted like iron.
He lifted his left hand and let the shadow under his feet pool. The whisper rose—faint, many-voiced, asking him to forget the names of things. He answered with words that steadied him because they were his:
“Kage no Enbu—yami yo, asobe. Dance of the Shadows.”
Darkness unhooked from his heels and split into three afterimages that darted toward the demon, each a half-step out of phase with reality. The monster swiped at the wrong one; the real Shin slid under the arm, blade dragging along the seam of the second maw. The cut didn’t close. The wound hesitated, edges shivering like a thought trying to change its mind.
The price came. A buzz crawled behind Shin’s eyes. For half a breath his hands didn’t feel like his.
“Hold!” Kaori cried, staff brightening. “Seijō no shizuku—kokoro ni yasuragi! Sacred Drop!”
Cool, clear light threaded through the haze. The whispers receded to the edge of hearing. Shin exhaled, just once.
The girl flowed into the opening he made, sword point snapping up, then down, a precise hammering at the same spot to deepen the failure in the demon’s hide. “Next time,” she said between strikes, “say ‘watch me’ first.”
“Noted,” Shin said, parrying a backhand that would have pulped his ribs.
The greatsword slammed down again, incantation a barked cadence:
“Enjin—myaku o moyase! Heart flame Pulse!”
Heat flared up the blade into his arms and drove through steel into scale, a pressure-wave that pushed the demon’s weight a fraction to the right. That fraction was the difference between the girl’s shoulder being broken and the claw missing her entirely.
“Name?” she asked the man, breath fast.
“Daelric,” he grinned, teeth white under soot. “Try not to die before I show you my good moves.”
“Show them now,” Shin said. “It’s getting up.”
The demon didn’t just get up. It unfolded. Segments along its spine rose like ridges on a god’s knuckles, each revealing a sliver of the same nowhere-dark as its chest maw. The air answered with an ugly resonance that made birds explode from the canopy, winging away in brittle panic.
Kaori swore under her breath. “That’s not a breath— it’s a rip tide.”
“Keep distance,” the cloaked woman murmured, and then, as if speaking a secret to the morning, she intoned:
“Hōki no ito—utsuroi o kazarē. Toki, hitofushi—nagare o yowame yo.”“Threads of the spindle—adorn the change. Time, one measure—soften the flow.”
No light flared. No circle burned. Only the sound of falling leaves seemed to arrive more gently. The demon turned its head to track Daelric, but its gaze arrived a breath late, as if the world forgot to deliver the moment on time.
Daelric barked a laugh. “Knew I liked you, cloak-lady!”
“Less liking, more cutting,” Kaori said, eyes scanning everyone for fractures and blood. “Shin—how long can you push that shadow stunt without losing yourself?”
Shin didn’t answer. He didn’t know. The Abyss inside him was both hunger and gravity; it wanted more, and it didn’t care what he was called afterward.
The demon slammed its forearms down. The ground pitched, roots wrenching free. Shin stumbled—and the world twitched. A thread tugged tight somewhere, and he didn’t fall; his foot found purchase where there hadn’t been any a heartbeat ago. He glanced at the cloaked woman. She didn’t look back. Her fingers had tightened as if pinching thread.
“Left knee,” Shin said. “Again.”
“On it,” the girl replied, and they went.
She baited high, a reckless feint that only a fighter who trusts the partner beside them can make. The demon took it, claw scything for her throat. Shin beat the claw aside with the flat, the shock numbing his fingers, and stepped through to cut the tendon they’d opened before. His blade bit deep.
The demon’s leg buckled. A roar became a gargle.
“Daelric!” the cloaked woman called. “Now!”
“Kasai no nageki—yoru e utae! Searing Dirge!”
Daelric’s blade howled as it came down, the heat not an outward flame but a dense core that flashed scale to steam on contact. The strike drove the monster’s head toward the dirt. The girl vaulted onto its forearm and ran, bare inches from snapping spines, to put her sword to the thin skin near the eye. She stabbed, fast and neat. The eye went white.
The demon convulsed. The second maw opened wide—not inhaling, not exhaling, but calling. The morning light bent. The warmth on Shin’s skin dimmed, as if stolen.
“Move!” Kaori shouted, voice cutting like a bell. “Everyone—down!”
They scattered. A column of wrongness erupted from the maw, not a beam but an erasure that unstitched color and sound where it passed. Trees on the far edge of the clearing simply… weren’t. A smell like cold iron and wet stone rushed in.
Shin hit dirt and skidded behind a mound of torn root. The column swept past where his chest had been a breath ago. The Abyss inside him leaned toward it like a starving thing.
He bit his tongue until he tasted blood. The pain stapled him to himself.
“Status!” Kaori demanded, already moving. She pressed a glowing palm against Daelric’s ribs—two cracked, one hairline—incanting clean and quick:
“Mitsu no ito—hone o tsunaide! Sinew Mend!”
He grunted and slapped her shoulder with a gauntleted hand. “You’re a miracle.”
“Pay me later,” she said, already looking for the next wound.
The cloaked woman’s eyes were half-lidded, attention somewhere just out of sight. She flicked two fingers and the demon’s next swipe landed a hand-width short of the girl’s spine. Not luck. Intention.
Shin pushed up. The world wobbled and settled. The girl slid in under a backhand and came away with a new cut across her forearm for the privilege.
“Don’t stop,” she hissed, shaking blood off her fingers. “If it breathes, it kills us.”
“Understood,” Shin said. His voice felt like gravel. He lifted his left hand again, and the whisper rose to meet it, pleased.
“Kurayami no tate—waga kokoro o mamore. Shield of Darkness.”
Shadow condensed like cooled smoke in front of him. The demon’s tail hammered it and cracked the shield like glass—but that breath of delay let Daelric slip in and hew the tail root. Scales burst like burnt bark.
“Kaori!” Daelric shouted, bracing to keep from being flung. “Cover!”
“Kōmyō no hashira—aku o hanete! Luminous Pillar!”
A pillar of gold leapt up between the demon’s next strike and the girl. Claw met light; light buckled, held, and shattered in glittering dust that smelled faintly of rain. The blow spent itself in the air.
Shin’s lungs burned. His head rang. He hadn’t truly dived—not like the abyss wanted—but even skimming its surface cost. The whispers were louder now, offering easy paths: slice the threads that hold you to names and faces; fall, and you will win.
He glanced at the cloaked woman. She was watching the demon, not him. Good. He didn’t want anyone else to see what was in his eyes.
“Plan,” Shin said. “We make it commit to the second maw, pin it there, cut in sequence.”
“Define ‘pin,’” Daelric said cheerfully. “Because that sounds like my department.”
“You and…” Shin nodded at the cloaked woman. “…whatever that is—make it misstep. Healer—keep us upright. Sword-girl—”
“Hikari,” the girl said, bluntly, as if names were a waste of breath.
Shin blinked. “Hikari.”
“Don’t get attached,” she said, and smiled before sprinting low.
“Charming,” Daelric muttered, then grinned wider and charged after her.
The demon smashed down. Daelric took the impact on an oblique parry and turned it, the ground gouging under his boots as he redirected the weight. He bellowed his answer to gravity:
“Dōran—gōka o tsuranuke! Vulcan Line!”
For an instant a straight seam of heat cut through the air from his shoulder to his ankle, and the demon’s wrist rode along it, forced into alignment. It overcommitted. Mira was waiting. She stabbed the soft meat where forearm met palm; Shin slashed the thin membrane behind the knee again; the second maw yawned, seeking.
“Now,” Shin said.
He let the whisper in.
“Kuroi honō… sono manazashi o watashi ni ataete… subete o nomikome.”“Black flame… lend me your gaze… devour all.”
No fire appeared. Instead, the edges of things around the maw darkened, as if charcoal was being rubbed along the lines of the world. The maw’s pull focused, not wider but keener, and for a heartbeat the demon fought itself, its own gravity snapping tight like a jaw.
The price hit harder. Shin’s vision tunneled. A laugh that was not his scraped along his ears.
“Stay,” Kaori said, planting a steadying hand to his back. Not a spell. Just a word. Then, softly, an incantation like a hand in the dark:
“Yawaragi no uta—kokoro, koko ni. Gentle Hymn.”
It hurt less. Not much. Enough.
“Finish!” Daelric roared, shoulders bunching.
Hikari was already moving. She ran up the demon’s forearm again, steps exact, breath short, blade tip trailing a thin line of the beast’s blood. She reached the eye, swung to its cheek ridge, and drove her sword with both hands into the seam where the second maw met the chest. The steel sank half its length.
The demon convulsed. The maw snapped shut on her blade.
“Let go!” Shin shouted.
“Obviously!” She kicked free as the jaws clamped, rolling down the shoulder, blade torn from her grip, fury flashing across her face as it vanished into the beast.
Daelric didn’t hesitate. He stepped into a madman’s range and swung for the hinge of that impossible mouth.
“Rekka—shō! Blazing Break!”
Metal shrieked. The maw cracked. Not destroyed. Damaged—enough to stop the world-eating breath for a heartbeat.
A heartbeat was all the cloaked woman needed. Her voice found the seam everyone else had made, and she whispered to it like a seamstress to fabric:
“Hajime to owari—ito o kaeshite. Return the stitch.”
The crack held. Not sealed. Refused to widen.
The demon went wild. It slammed its head into the ground and rolled, spines scything a deadly path. Kaori threw up both hands:
“Kōsei no hibiki—kizu, yameru! Harm-Stay!”
A bell-tone burst outward; cutting edges kissed skin and drew nothing. The effect ripped through her like a wave—her knees hit dirt, breath punching out of her lungs.
“Kaori!” Daelric called, backing to her, sword up.
“I’m fine,” she lied.
Shin’s chest heaved. He gripped his blade in both hands. “Again,” he said. “Before it remembers how to think.”
They surged. The clearing was a long, breathless sentence punctuated by impacts and the hiss of cut air. Hikari found her fallen sword and wrenched it free from a crack in stone, the edge notched, her smile meaner now. Daelric became momentum in a human frame, every incantation a lever, every cut a fulcrum. Kaori threaded strength where bodies tried to quit. The cloaked woman—who still hadn’t offered a name—painted the fight in small edits: a miscounted step, a softened fall, a moment tied and untied so precisely the demon couldn’t fix its balance.
For a handful of seconds, they owned the rhythm.
Then the monster cheated.
Its spine ridges flared open like gills and sang. The note crawled into the bones of the forest. The shafts of sunlight through the canopy flickered—not dimmer, not brighter, but off-beat. The world took a step wrong and the demon took three right.
“Down!” Kaori yelled, but the warning came a fragment too late. The song curdled into a pressure-front that burst outward.
Shin threw up Kurayami no Tate and it broke like sugar glass. Daelric set his stance and was thrown like a nail from a hammer. Hikari tucked and rolled, came up with blood in her mouth and murder in her eyes. Kaori’s barrier cracked spiderwebs across the air and sprayed motes like fireflies. The cloaked woman snapped both hands into a cross as if catching threads about to tangle—and did, for all of a heartbeat—then the force tore her sideways into a splintered trunk.
The clearing went to shrapnel. Leaves and bark churned into a green-brown storm. The demon surged out of its own dust, eyes like quenched steel, second maw rehinging with a wet, eager sound.
Shin hit the ground hard enough to forget the name of pain for a second. He clawed air. The whispers rushed him—drop the blade, drop the body, be the fall—and for a heartbeat he wanted to obey. It would be so simple. You can’t scatter if you are the hole everything falls into.
“Shin!” Kaori’s voice cut. Not an incantation this time. A call. He turned his head toward it by force and saw her—face pale, staff planted, one hand outstretched toward him, a glare like a tether. “With me.”
He breathed. In. Out. The world returned like cold water.

Hikari dragged herself from under a tangle of roots, hair plastered to her face, sword up again because the alternative was dying. Daelric spat blood and laughter in equal measure and staggered back to his feet. The cloaked woman stood, slow and controlled, as if the threads she held were heavy and she would not drop them even now.

The demon drew breath. The second maw opened.
Daelric planted his sword like a standard and roared at the sky, voice cracking with the incantation:
“Kagutsuchi—yoru o wari, asahi o yobē! Dawncleave!”
The blade blazed—not outward, but along its own length, a heat so concentrated the air shuddered. He dragged it up and across, a line that wanted to be horizon. The cut met the maw just as it began to pull. The world’s edges screamed.
“Help him!” Kaori shouted, thrusting her staff down:
“Seinaru tsunagi—karada o tsuyoku! Sanctified Bind!”
Strength poured into Daelric’s arms. He held the line. Just.
Hikari sprinted the long arc of a circle, came in on the demon’s blind side, and hacked at the hinge she’d stabbed earlier. Shin staggered up and joined her—their blades a ragged harmony, every note of it paid for in breath and blood. The hinge cracked further.
The cloaked woman’s voice came soft enough to be mistaken for wind in leaves:
“Wasurezu—kizuguchi, ima wa tozare. Forget not—but close for now.”
The hinge resisted closing. Good. They didn’t want it shut. They wanted it stuck.
“Push!” Daelric bellowed, and for a heartbeat it looked like they might. The line of heat held, the hinge cracked, the maw’s pull stuttered—
The spine ridges sang again.
The pressure hit like a rolling wall. Daelric’s line buckled. Kaori’s support snapped from his arms with a visible shiver. Hikari's feet lifted a hand’s breadth off the ground and dropped again. Shin’s knees went numb.
“Not again,” he rasped, and reached one last time.
He felt the cliff-edge and leaned over it.
“Abyss no fuchi—me o hirake. Watashi no na o nomi, sono kawari ni—subete no kage, osaemure.”“Abyssal pit—open your eyes. Devour my name, and in return—hold every shadow.”
The world listened. For a breath, every shadow in the clearing pinned itself to the earth and would not move. The demon’s own darkness froze its joints—a snare made of the shape of light’s absence. The maw’s pull hiccupped.
The cost ripped through Shin like a rip saw. His name—his sense of the syllables that made him—slid in his mouth like a loose tooth.
“Shin!” Kaori’s hand slammed into his back, light flooding. “Kokoro, kaerinasai—Return to yourself.”
He stayed. Barely.
“Now!” the cloaked woman snapped, and it wasn’t a request, it was the needle in the seam.
Daelric roared something wordless and drove his cut deeper. Hikari screamed—a tight, furious sound—and hammered the hinge with three machine-perfect blows. The crack spidered.
The demon chose madness. It coiled in on itself and detonated a ring of force from its ridges, a brutal, physical shock that didn’t care about wards or threads or names. The line broke. The ring took them like leaves.
Shin felt the world tilt end over end. Trees and sky swapped places. He hit a trunk shoulder-first and tasted copper and dirt. Hikari vanished into brush with a snarl. Daelric skid-marked a furrow ten paces long. Kaori’s cry cut off into a hoarse cough. The cloaked woman vanished in a flurry of torn leaves and reappeared—no, was—two strides from where she should have fallen, jaw set, blood at her hairline.

The demon stood in the clearing, breathing ragged, both maws cracked and leaking, but very much alive. Its eyes found Shin first.

He pushed up to one knee. His sword was still in his hand. Good. His name felt… mostly there. Good enough.

Across the ruin of dirt and roots, he heard Hikari spit blood and say, very calmly, “Round two.”

Kaori forced herself upright on her staff. “We are not done.”

Daelric grinned like a man who’d just been punched by a god and enjoyed the audacity of surviving it. “Thought you said you had good moves,” he called to himself, and then louder to everyone, “We can take it!”

The cloaked woman met the demon’s gaze and spoke so softly the morning had to lean in to hear:

“It’s not your hour.”

The demon lowered its head, both maws flexing. It stepped forward, and every footfall said end.

Shin lifted his blade. The shadow under him quivered, wanting. He kept it on a short leash with the only thing the abyss respected—a price willingly paid.

“Again,” he said, and they moved because there was no other answer.

The demon inhaled.

The world narrowed to the space between that breath and the next.

And then—through the high canopy, far away and far above—something answered the demon’s song with a deeper note from nowhere, a resonance that made the morning shiver.

Every head turned, just for an instant.

The demon’s maws opened wide.

The clearing exploded into motion.

—to be continued—