Hito-mane Extermination Part 1

"Where there is no struggle, there is no strength."

-Oprah Winfrey

                                 ...

The purple glow in Tatsuchi's eyes flared, casting a sharp, violet hue over the contour of her face. So Brass was a part of the Revolutionary Army... The realization settled heavily in her chest, a bitter anchor tying past failures to the present threat.

With a sharp, metallic ring that cut through the howling desert wind, she pulled Shinkoku from its scabbard. The dark steel caught the stark, crimson reflection of the three blood moons hanging like open wounds above the desolate landscape of Harpyra. Attached to the hilt, the two long ribbons, one a deep sapphire, the other a striking crimson, caught the wind, snapping violently behind her like twin serpents.

Across from her, Kaguya Katsugoro remained entirely unfazed. He swung his bo staff in one final, heavy circle, the seasoned wood slicing through the air with a low, threatening whistle that cleared the encroaching sand before he settled into a low, coiled battle stance. His single silver eye locked onto her, cold and analytical.

Between them, the desert wind died away entirely, as if the world itself were holding its breath. The silence that followed was suffocating. The long, jagged shadows of the dunes stretched across the earth, and around them, the fine white powder of the salt flats hung suspended in the stagnant air, catching the moonlight like shattered glass.

The fight was about to begin.

Tatsuchi initiated.

She practiced a martial discipline famous for its absolute focus on the first strike. The fighting style was brutal in its simplicity: end the conflict before it has a chance to breathe. The style demanded terrifying, hyper-aggressive momentum, training its practitioners to deliver a single strike from the very first movement. It was a methodology designed for one purpose: to shatter an opponent’s guard instantly, leaving neither room for retaliation nor time for regret.

She exploded forward, her shoes kicking up a cloud of crystalline salt. Shinkoku was raised high above her head, held with both hands in a vice grip. She brought the blade down in a flawless, vertical arc, a descending guillotine meant to cleave Kaguya in two. The sheer kinetic force of her descent distorted the air around the edge of the steel.

Kaguya did not panic. He utilized a staff-fighting martial art centered on fluid leverage, continuous rotation, and flawless momentum redirection. As the blurring steel of Shinkoku arrived within inches of his brow, Kaguya executed a microscopic shift in his footwork. He pivoted his rear heel inward, dropping his center of gravity just enough to allow the lethal edge to skim past his shoulder, missing his flesh by a fraction of an inch.

The sheer force of Tatsuchi’s missed strike sent a shockwave into the salt flats beneath them, cracking the crust. But before her blade could fully recover from its downward trajectory, Kaguya capitalized on the opening. Sliding his hand down the polished wood of his bo staff to maximize its reach, he snapped the opposite end upward in a brutal, rising trajectory aimed squarely at her ribs.

Tatsuchi’s reflexes, honed by years of merciless training, saved her. She whipped the flat of Shinkoku’s blade downward, intercepting the wooden staff just before it could shatter her thoracic cage.

Clang!

The impact was deafening. A physical shockwave rippled through the air, tearing up the loose salt in a three-meter radius around them. The vibration traveled up Tatsuchi’s forearms, rattling her teeth and sending a numbing ache straight to her shoulders.

Heavy... she noted internally, her jaw clenching.

He wasn't simply swinging harder than Brass had. His strikes were terrifyingly efficient. Every motion flowed seamlessly into the next without a microsecond of hesitation. There wasn't a single wasted movement, no theatrical flair, no unnecessary shifts in weight. He wasn't fighting to overwhelm her or to show off his prowess. He was fighting with the cold, calculating precision of a man who intended to kill her.

Tatsuchi slid backward, her sandals carving shallow, parallel grooves through the crust of the salt flats to disperse the residual kinetic force of his strike. As she created distance, her mind moved as fast as her muscles.

To compensate for her innate lack of a Zyn Technique, she was forced to rely on Kai. It was a fundamental distinction that separated her from many of her contemporaries. A Zyn Technique was an internal manifestation, allowing a user to project their own spiritual energy outward to create elements or forces from absolute nothingness based off the soul of the user. Kai, however, was fundamentally different. It could not create; it could only borrow.

Kai demanded a deep, intrinsic understanding of your surrounding environment. It required the user to draw inward and channel natural energy and external objects, whether it was pulling moisture directly from the clouds above or manipulating the fine sands drifting between one's feet. Most people relied strictly on their innate techniques because they were natural extensions of the soul itself, requiring far less cognitive strain. Kai was a stubborn discipline. It required the physical world to cooperate, and as Tatsuchi knew all too well, the world rarely cooperated. To bridge the gap further, Tatsuchi employed a technique that had become exceedingly rare in the modern era: Zyn coating.

The application was deceptively simple in theory, but nightmarish in practice. Zyn was exceptionally difficult to output and coat onto external weapons or objects. It required the practitioner to simultaneously manifest and perfectly balance both Soul energy and Chaos energy within their core, forging them into stable Zyn before projecting it into an external medium like Shinkoku's steel. While this hybridization occurred naturally within the pathways of the human body to form innate Zyn Techniques, projecting it outward into an inanimate object required flawless, deliberate manipulation. It came far easier to those whose abilities were already anchored to an external catalyst, but for Tatsuchi, it was a testament to raw, unadulterated discipline. 

The air around them remained thick, saturated with a heavy charge of static electricity that literally stuck to the atmosphere, a lingering remnant of Zhenyu’s earlier gravity manipulated lightning. Tatsuchi’s purple eyes seemed to glow with a sharper intensity as her bright yellow kimono flared against the stark yellow and white backdrop of the desert. She steadied her feet on the flats, locking her gaze firmly onto Kaguya's single exposed eye. Then, Kaguya vanished. He was gone in an instant. Tatsuchi’s eyes widened, her eyes straining to find a trace of his silhouette. He wasn't in front of her. He wasn't above her. He wasn't beneath her.

“Where could he have go-”

Her train of thought was violently shattered, ripped from her mind along with every ounce of oxygen in her lungs.

Kaguya Katsugoro appeared directly behind her like a flash of lightning.

That's it! Tatsuchi realized in a fleeting moment of agony. Kaguya had not teleported. He had used the residual, gravity-manipulated electricity still hanging in the atmosphere as a sensory cloak, moving at blinding speeds while Tatsuchi’s focus had momentarily flickered. It was pure, ruthless misdirection.

The heavy end of his wooden bo staff slammed directly into her spine. The impact sounded like a thunderclap. Tatsuchi went flying forward, her body turning over twice in the air before she managed to dig her heels violently into the salt flats, skidding nearly twenty meters before coming to an upright, trembling halt. She coughed once, a sharp metallic taste filling her mouth. A thin line of blood trickled down her chin. She steadied her breathing, refusing to let the panic take root. The air still crackled with static, a sensory blur that had almost cost her the entire encounter. Before she could fully reset her posture, Kaguya disappeared again.

Not this time.

Anticipating a repeat of his previous maneuver, Tatsuchi spun on her heel, her blade raised in a sweeping, defensive arc meant to intercept an attack from the rear. But the strike never came from behind. Instead, her survival instincts screamed, a sudden primal alarm triggering at the base of her neck. She forced her torso to lurch violently to the left. An instant later, the bo staff came whistling horizontally from her flank. Because of her last-second evasion, the heavy wood skimmed harmlessly across her side rather than shattering her ribs. She twisted her wrists, bringing Shinkoku down to meet the staff.

Clank!

Wood collided with steel once more, sparks flying from the contact point. Tatsuchi stared directly into Kaguya’s face. His eye held the exact same unyielding determination as her own.

Standing at close quarters, Kaguya’s striking appearance was fully visible. He was a tall, lean man in his early thirties, carrying himself with an effortless, relaxed posture that bordered on supreme arrogance. Long, slightly messy black hair fell to his shoulders, with loose strands framing his obscured face. His skin was exceptionally pale, contrasting sharply against his single exposed silver eye, which featured a faint, ominous crimson ring near the iris.

Excluding his mouth and that singular eye, the entirety of his face and his left arm was completely concealed beneath overlapping, tightly wrapped white paper talismans. Thin, faded scars were barely visible beneath the edges of the wrappings along the side of his neck.

He wore a high-collared black coat with a deep crimson interior lining that reached just below his knees. The coat hung completely open over a fitted white undershirt, the low collar of which exposed dark, intricate tattoo patterns that spread like creeping vines across his collarbone and upper chest. His sleeves were neatly rolled up to his forearms, revealing skin marred by old, jagged combat scars. He wore tailored black trousers tucked into reinforced metal shin guards, completed by simple shoes that looked to be used for silent footwork rather than aesthetics.

Around his waist sat a thick black leather belt, secured by a metallic buckle bearing the distinct insignia of the Revolutionary Army. Hidden beneath the back of his sweeping coat, multiple thin, metallic wires emerged, trailing silently behind him like silver webs before disappearing directly into the salt-covered ground beneath his shoes.

Kaguya wasn't acting the way he had moments prior. The casual sarcasm, the attempts to get under her skin, all of it had evaporated. He was executing a clinical strategy, going directly for the kill. He wanted this battle finished before she could find her rhythm. Realizing the shift, Tatsuchi immediately adjusted her mentality. She dropped all thoughts of a reckless, aggressive counter and transitioned from full offense to pure, calculated defense.

Kaguya, despite wielding nothing more than a wooden bo staff, was putting on a masterclass in martial arts. Recognizing her sudden defensive shift, he seamlessly transitioned into full offense with lethal precision. He stepped into her guard, the staff moving in a blur of rotations. Each strike carried a terrifying weight, yet Tatsuchi could feel a chilling undercurrent, he was more than capable of completely exceeding her physical strength, yet he was intentionally holding back just enough to maintain perfect balance and recovery speed.

Does he think I'm weak? she thought, anger flaring beneath her focus.

She parried a thrust aimed at her throat, her blade ringing as it deflected the wood. She ducked beneath a sweeping strike meant for her temple, the wind of its passage rustling her hair. She checked a low blow aimed at her knee with the reinforced shin guard of his footwear.

Finding a micro-opening in his relentless sequence, Tatsuchi spun her blade completely around in her grip, utilizing the momentum to drive the reinforced flat of Shinkoku directly into the center of Kaguya's staff.

Crack!

The heavy impact successfully knocked his weapon off-line for a single heartbeat. Kaguya blinked, his silver eye widening by a fraction of a millimeter. "...Better," he murmured softly. Without a moment's pause, he resumed his assault as though the disruption had never occurred.

Despite the pressure, something inside Tatsuchi began to click. She was starting to keep up with the blinding velocity of his movements. Was it the innate perception of her Kokketsugan? Did her lineage inherit some subconscious ability to adapt to high-tier combat mid-stride? Or was she simply riding on whatever residual good karma she had saved up from her brutal, near-fatal encounter with Brass Hymlinn? Regardless of the cause, Kaguya clearly recognized the change, and his strikes grew noticeably more severe. He needed her eliminated, and he needed it done now.

Tatsuchi utilized a heavy parry to forcefully gain some distance before Kaguya's next strike could land. Her fingers instantly blurred into a sequence of hand signs, forming the traditional mudras for Prana and Apana.

The loose sand and salt crust directly around her feet began to rumble violently.

"Resonance Kai: Hidden Quicksand Subversion!" she shouted, her voice maintaining a forced, calm composure despite the adrenaline coursing through her veins.

Under normal circumstances, the natural energy she channeled would have forcefully liquified the earth beneath her opponent, causing the salt flats to cave inward and swallow them whole. But as she completed the mudra, the rumbled sand abruptly ceased its movement. The ground did not budge. The technique failed entirely.

Am I lacking power?

Tatsuchi had never allowed herself to doubt her own abilities. But after enduring consecutive losses and mistakes, her tightly held pride had taken a massive, undeniable hit. She had firmly believed that after Lady Signa had taken everyone in, teaching her the precise intricacies of Kai techniques, refining her Zyn coating, and completely rebuilding her unrefined battle prowess, she would never have to worry about her capacity to stand among the strongest ever again.

If she were to lose a straightforward duel here, how could she possibly justify calling herself a captain? What would her father think of her if he saw her struggling in the dirt? And if the rumors were true, if her brother Ichirou was truly out there somewhere in the world, what would he think of her current inadequacy?

It didn't matter. She had to fight.

Right then, a voice echoed in the cavern of her mind. It was soft, distant, and terrifyingly gentle. “What do you consider everything?” Tatsuchi froze for a microsecond, her heart hammering against her ribs. My own thoughts? Was she truly doubting her own strength to the point of hallucinating an internal crisis?

Before she could process the question or form an answer, the salt flats all around both herself and Kaguya sank inward with a violent, concussive pulse. The ground dropped by several feet in a perfect circle. An instant later, Kaguya materialized directly behind her, his breath warm against the back of her neck. He leaned in and whispered softly into her ear:

"Mokuningyo-sōsa.”

The desolate sands tore open.

Dozens of pale, skeletal hands burst upward through the fractured salt crust, clawing at the moonlight as if crawling out from the depths of an absolute abyss. Tatsuchi, jolted by adrenaline, immediately leaped backward to create distance, her blade held high in a defensive posture.

Her eyes darted across the rapidly changing battlefield. The thin, metallic wires that had been trailing quietly beneath Kaguya’s coat were no longer hidden. They tautened, gleaming under the moons as they extended directly into the shifting sands, physically connecting his fingers to the emerging anomalies.

...Puppets.

“So that was his true technique.” Tatsuchi thought out load. Before she could form a counter-strategy, Kaguya raised his pale, scarred left arm. With a swift, practiced motion, he drew a traditional steel kunai from his sleeve and sliced it deeply across his own palm. A kunai? Tatsuchi’s brow furrowed. Shinobi are exceptionally rare in this day and age, let alone those who carry their traditional arsenals. What was he planning? It didn't matter. She couldn't afford to let him dictate the pace. Tatsuchi flooded her pathways with energy, coating the edge of Shinkoku in a dense, shimmering layer of Zyn, and rushed forward to breach his immediate guard.

But as she advanced, another layer of the white paper talismans covering Kaguya’s face slowly began to singe and burn away into ash. The fragments drifted into the wind, revealing his right eye completely and the firm line of his mouth. Simultaneously, the talismans tightly wrapped around his right arm unraveled and disintegrated, exposing pale skin marked by intricate seals. Instantly, the puppets in front of him, still buried in the sands, which had been emerging with sluggish, heavy movements, came to a sudden, absolute halt. Kaguya's silver eyes flared with a distinct, brilliant luminescence, the exact same evolutionary glow that characterized Tatsuchi’s own Kokketsugan.

Their eyes locked across the short distance. Tatsuchi continued closing the gap, her blade ready to strike.

Then, Kaguya spoke, his voice echoing with absolute authority:

“Mangekyou-Zenshin.” (Kaleidoscope Advancement).

The transformation was instantaneous. The wooden puppets that had been barely halfway out of the earth rose fully upright in the blink of an eye, shattering the remaining salt crust. Each one stood roughly 5'9" in height, just an inch taller than Tatsuchi’s own 5'8" frame. They were entirely featureless, possessing smooth, blank wooden faces with no eyes, noses, or mouths. In their hands, they perfectly balanced lethal Kusarigama, chain-sickles that gleamed dangerously under the crimson moonlight. Tatsuchi skidded to a halt across the salt flats, her eyes scanning the small army. How did they move that fast? Did I lose tracking for a second?

She could clearly sense the staggering, overwhelming wave of raw power radiating directly off Kaguya. But curiously, the concentrated pressure around his individual body suddenly began to taper off, dropping significantly. Is he intentionally making himself weaker? No. Her sensory perception corrected her. His total volume of Zyn energy hadn't decreased or vanished; he had meticulously divided and distributed it near-evenly across the twenty-odd puppets that now formed a protective, lethal perimeter around him. Looking past them, Tatsuchi caught the faint shimmer of even more metallic wires trailing deep beneath the salt further back.

Just how many of these things does he have in reserve? She was already experiencing severe difficulty matching his individual speed and maintaining a safe distance. Now, she would be forced to execute those exact same calculations against a small battalion of synchronized combatants. Kaguya locked eyes with her once more through the clearing dust. "You need to start utilizing your different Resonance Kai variations," he said, his tone entirely objective, "if you want to even think about standing a bit of a chance here." Tatsuchi tightened her grip on Shinkoku, her knuckles turning white. "Will I ever be strong enough to handle the Revolutionary Army?" she demanded, her voice tight with a mixture of anger and desperation. "How am I supposed to understand my own strength when the ceiling keeps shifting?" Kaguya’s mouth, now fully visible, curled into a sharp, mocking smirk. "That's the neat part," he replied smoothly. "You don't.”

In an instant, Kaguya’s entire demeanor shifted. The arrogance receded, replaced by an unnerving, dead-calm focus. He carried himself with absolute, unflinching confidence, his posture completely relaxed despite the imminent clash.

The puppets moved.

They went from entirely lifeless wooden husks to executing fluid, high-velocity martial movements that mirrored Kaguya's own style perfectly. They closed the distance on Tatsuchi from multiple angles simultaneously.

Tatsuchi met them in the center of the caved-in flat, the sound of clashing weapons erupting into a continuous tempo. She parried a descending Kusarigama sickle from her left, but the remaining puppets were hot on her heels. They possessed the exact same blinding speed as Kaguya, with the solitary saving grace being that their individual physical strikes lacked a portion of his raw, bone-shattering power.

Realizing the length of her blade was becoming a liability in the suffocating crowd, Tatsuchi seamlessly flipped Shinkoku into a reverse grip. She stepped inside the guard of the closest puppet, driving a brutal, straight punch directly into its featureless wooden face using a precise centerline strike. The wood splintered beneath her knuckles. Without looking, she ducked a high chain swing, spinning on her heel to drive the reverse edge of Shinkoku straight through the torso of a puppet attempting to flank her from behind. With her sword now physically embedded deep within the wooden core of the puppet, she channeled her energy. Suddenly, the weapon erupted. A torrent of brilliant, bright blue flames burst from the steel, completely incinerating the puppet from the inside out.

Kaguya’s dead-calm expression fractured. His mouth opened slightly, a subtle look of genuine shock washing over his pale features as he silently mouthed something that was completely drowned out by the roaring of the fire.

Tatsuchi glanced back at the destruction for a fraction of a second, her own expression twisting into deep confusion. She knew how to utilize fire-type Kai Techniques, but the fundamental law of Kai remained absolute: you can only manipulate an element if there is a pre-existing, natural source available within the immediate environment. There was no fire in this desolate salt desert. Yet, as she observed the inferno, her senses confirmed a shocking truth, the blue flames were distinctly coded with her own unique Zyn signature. The fire was coming entirely from her. But she didn't possess an innate Zyn Technique.

“Was something inside my soul starting to change?”

Her brief moment of cognitive confusion proved fatal. Before she could process the anomaly of the blue fire, the sheer numerical advantage of the swarm caught up to her. Fifteen puppets capitalized on her split-second lapse in concentration, closing in like a well-oiled machine. Their Kusarigama flashed under the three blood moons.

Slash! Slash!

The cold iron sliced through her yellow kimono, biting deeply into her flesh. Cuts scored across her thighs, her shoulders, and her torso. The pain was immediate and blinding. Tatsuchi gasped, a thick torrent of blood pooling in her throat before she coughed it out violently onto the pristine white salt beneath her.

Her legs gave out, and she collapsed heavily onto the hard earth. But the puppets showed no mercy. They persisted relentlessly, driving their sickles deeper into her limbs, pinning her down against the salt flats. A few meters away, the puppet she had previously impaled was still engulfed in the strange blue fire, but without her active focus, the flames were rapidly dying down into embers. Kaguya slowly approached her fallen form, his shoes stepping softly over the blood-stained crust. His face was a mask of dead, clinical calm. "Is this truly all the daughter of the strongest has to offer?" he asked, his voice devoid of pity. He paused, his silver eye looking down at her shuddering frame. "Answer me, Tats." Tatsuchi’s eyes widened slightly through the haze of pain. Tats? 

That was a nickname reserved strictly for those who were closest to her soul, people like Itaka and Asumi. How did this high-ranking Revolutionary commander know that name? Who was he to her? The sheer volume of unanswered questions surrounding this encounter felt heavy, crowding her mind as her vision began to blur at the edges. Her physical strength was rapidly evaporating. She could feel her nervous system shutting down, her limbs growing entirely numb and limp against the frozen ground. Then, like a recurring nightmare, the gentle voice echoed clearly within her mind once more:

“What do you consider everything?”

Dying on the freezing salt of Harpyra, Tatsuchi genuinely forced herself to reflect on the question. Did she care about the world? Did she care about the grand machinations of the Revolutionary Army or the political stability of the Gate Guard? No. She didn't care about "everything" the way a traditional leader was supposed to. She had grown up as the literal child of the strongest man alive, a member of the most formidable clan to ever walk the earth. She possessed more inherent structural reasons to stand above humanity than anyone else alive. She had never truly believed that anyone could genuinely equal her in terms of raw battle prowess. Her own comrades within the Guard couldn't even hold a candle to her drive.

She thought of her team. She couldn't even bring herself to call them friends. She had operated as a captain for nearly four consecutive years now, yet she still looked down on everyone around her, incapable of viewing a single soul as her true equal. No matter how many crushing defeats she suffered, no matter how many critical mistakes she made, her immense pride and overbearing ego always blocked her from visualizing the grander perspective.

But as she lay bleeding out, she realized she didn't care about changing that flaw.

To her, the only concept that truly considered "everything", was strength.

Strength was the ultimate arbiter. Strength overcame the weak. Strength provided the absolute freedom to dictate one's own destiny without permission. Strength was the exact catalyst required to walk over the worthless scum that populated the lower rungs of the world. Nothing mattered more to her soul than the absolute acquisition of that power, at whatever cost necessary.

The moment she firmly codified that truth within her consciousness, an overwhelming wave of relief washed over her. 

The agonizing pain of the multiple deep stab wounds began to recede, replaced by a strange, cool numbness. Her heartbeat grew progressively slower, a rhythmic thumping that echoed in her ears. Behind her, the remaining blue embers died out completely. She believed strength was the absolute law of nature, yet here she was, dying in the dirt due to the undeniable inadequacy of her own power. The irony was absolute.

Then, her eyes snapped open.

The environment had changed.

The twenty puppets that had been pinning her down were completely dismantled, their wooden limbs shattered into splinters and scattered across the salt flats as if hit by an invisible, kinetic shockwave. Kaguya had retreated a significant distance. He stood far back, his single silver eye wide, staring at her with an expression of profound, unadulterated disgust. "So that's where you are," Kaguya said, his voice dripping with venom. "Devil." The blue flames that had died out moments prior suddenly erupted once more from the sands behind her, burning with a ferocious, unnatural intensity before gradually settling down onto the dark steel of Shinkoku, being slowly consumed by the blade like fuel.

Tatsuchi slowly rose to her feet, her movements rigid. Her voice was completely devoid of emotion, cold enough to freeze the desert air. "Don't call me a devil."

Kaguya didn't blink. "I wasn't referring to you," he stated flatly, pointing the tip of his bo staff directly at her chest. Tatsuchi ignored his words, her fingers tightening around the hilt of her sword. But curiosity got the better of her, and she cast her gaze down at her own torso. Her breath hitched.

The strange, anomalous black substance that had remained stubbornly lodged within her chest cavity ever since her six-month coma following the Brass encounter... was completely gone. She had been passively ignoring its dull ache ever since she had set foot in the territory of Harpyra, and in the chaos of the conflict, she hadn't even noticed its total disappearance.

She forced the confusion into the back of her mind. Scanning the immediate radius, she noted that there were no more silver wires protruding from the sand or connected to Kaguya’s person. "Looks like you're completely out of tricks," Tatsuchi said, her voice dripping with lethal intent. "It's just going to be the two of us settling this." Kaguya stood perfectly still for a beat before his shoulders began to track upward. He burst into a cold, mocking laughter that echoed across the empty flats.

"You think my arsenal is that shallow?" Kaguya sneered, his posture shifting back into his low battle stance. "My bag is infinitely deeper than yours, girl. You are fundamentally incomparable to me.”

He lunged.

Kaguya blurred forward, swirling his bo staff in a blinding, horizontal figure-eight pattern. Tatsuchi met him head-on. Steel clashed against wood for a split second, a shower of bright sparks illuminating their faces. But Kaguya didn't maintain the lock. Utilizing his superior weight distribution, he slid his hand down the shaft, leveraging the momentum to pivot completely around her guard.

With immense, blinding speed, he delivered a brutal jab with the butt of the staff directly into her lower back. The force sent her flying across the flat once more, but this time, Tatsuchi refused to lose her footing. She twisted mid-air, landing squarely on her feet, and instantly launched herself back at him like a coiled spring.

The exchange descended into a hyper-fast, claustrophobic melee. Kaguya systematically refused to lock weapons with Shinkoku, recognizing the danger of the blue flames coating the steel. Instead, he utilized the superior length and dual tips of his bo staff to execute rapid, short-range strikes targeting her vital weak points, specifically angling for her liver and the side of her face.

He drove the tip of his staff hard into the salt crust, using it as a vaulting pole to launch his entire body into the air, swinging his shoes forward in a heavy dropkick aimed directly at her jaw. Tatsuchi reacted instantly, employing a wider stance of defense. She brought her forearms up in a cross-guard, trapping his oncoming boot mid-strike, and used her residual momentum to drive a heavy, counter-punch straight toward his exposed ribs.

Kaguya utilized fluid acrobatics, twisting his torso in mid-air to absorb the brunt of her punch against his reinforced shin guard, pushing off her frame to cleanly regain his distance across the sand. Tatsuchi wiped a smear of dirt from her cheek, a harsh smile touching her lips. "You're making a mistake trying to utilize those fragile puppets against someone of my caliber," she mocked, her voice echoing across the dunes. "They were strong, sure, but look around you, they're all gone now."

Kaguya completely ignored the taunt. He swung his bo staff into a rapid wind-up, and Tatsuchi closed the distance, her blade trailing blue fire.

She executed a devastating, horizontal slash directed straight at his right arm. Kaguya clearly anticipated the trajectory. In a flash of tactical calculation, he smoothly swapped his bo staff to his left hand, deliberately leaving just enough open distance between his right palm and Tatsuchi's oncoming blade so that the steel would precisely cut open his flesh.

Slash!

The edge scored deep across his pale palm, blood spurting out into the cold air. But as Tatsuchi pulled her blade back, her purple eyes caught a terrifying detail. The deep laceration on his palm was already closing, the tissue knitting itself back together at an exceptional, supernatural velocity. It was an exact mirror of the anomalies she had witnessed during Brass Hymlinn’s battle against Itaka and Zhenyu, the distinct, cellular regeneration characteristic of a user employing Hollow Zyn.

As Kaguya’s palm bled openly under the cold light of the three blood moons, he raised his hands, his face contorting into a mask of absolute zealotry.

"Mangekyou-Tensei!" (Kaleidoscope Reincarnation)

He shouted. His fingers instantly blurred into the complex hand sign of the Kali Mudra. In the split second before anyone could track the movement, he had expertly stabbed his wooden bo staff deep into the shifting sands beneath him, using it as a grounding lightning rod for his energy.

This time, the reaction from the environment was catastrophic.

It wasn't a modest squad of twenty puppets emerging from the crust. The entire landscape of the salt flats began to heave and tear itself apart. Hundreds of featureless wooden forms began sprawling out from the earth simultaneously, a literal legion of pale wood and cold iron emerging as far as the eye could see. Before the deep self-inflicted wound on his palm could fully seal itself shut, Kaguya executed his follow-up command, his voice booming across the desert:

“Mangekyou-Zenshin.”

The army of a hundred-plus puppets transitioned instantly from sluggish husks into fully realized, hyper-fast combatants, their Kusarigama chains rattling in a deafening, synchronized chorus that filled the night air.

Tatsuchi stood in the epicenter, completely surrounded on all sides. She took a step back, her mind racing as she evaluated her physical state. She realized with a shock that all of her deep, debilitating cuts and stab wounds from the previous exchange had almost completely healed up. Her skin was smooth beneath her torn kimono.

How did that happen? The rules of this entire engagement were completely fracturing. Her confusion was rapidly transforming into the cold manifestation of her absolute biggest psychological fear. She couldn't win this fight.

She lacked the necessary volume of raw strength to overcome this army, and more importantly, she lacked the unyielding, fanatical fire that burned so clearly within Kaguya’s eyes. In the harsh, unforgiving reality of this world, the individual who wanted victory more would ultimately seize it. Looking at the sea of wooden faces surrounding her, she realized she simply didn't want it enough to bridge the gap. If she truly considered strength to be the absolute everything, the natural order of the universe, then wasn't this crushing defeat simply the logical conclusion of that philosophy? The strong stomping out the weak? Why does it only feel wrong when I'm the one on the side of the weak? she thought bitterly.

She didn't want to run. Every fiber of her pride screamed at her to stand her ground and die with her blade drawn. But her survival instinct, buried deep beneath her ego, told her she had to escape. Yet, her stubborn pride physically anchored her muscles, refusing to let her shoes move backward.

The decision was ultimately made for her.

Without warning, her feet began to sink heavily into the salt flats. Tatsuchi jolted, assuming it was a coordinated subterranean assault from Kaguya's remaining puppets. But as she cast her gaze down to lock onto the threat, there was no wood or silver wire beneath her feet. There was only a swirling, absolute black void.

"Die!" Kaguya roared, rushing forward with his massive legion of puppets, their sickles raised in a unified, descending executioner's arc meant to mince her into nothingness. But they were too late. The kinetic velocity of the collapse was absolute. Before the first sickle could claim her flesh, Tatsuchi had already fallen completely through the threshold of the dark portal, disappearing entirely from the battlefield.

Thud!

Tatsuchi hit the ground hard, her breath escaping her in a sharp gasp as she rolled across cold, damp asphalt. The clean, sterile moonlight of Harpyra was gone, replaced by the suffocating, narrow shadows of a mundane metropolitan alleyway. The air smelled of a storm, exhaust fumes, and stagnant garbage.

She was back in Kokohama.

Before she could even begin to process the spatial transition or freak out over the sudden teleportation, her hands made direct contact with something cold, fleshy, and distinctly furry. She scrambled backward, her hand immediately flying to the hilt of Shinkoku. She looked down. She had fallen directly onto the bloated, burned corpse of a Skinwalker.

She froze, her heart hammering against her ribs as she waited for the creature to twitch or lash out. But after a long, tense silence, she realized the truth. It was already entirely dead. The flesh was ice-cold to the touch, the puncture wounds across its torso old and draining. Who could have possibly done this? she wondered, her eyes scanning the dark, empty mouth of the alleyway.

Was it her team? Were Zhenyu and Asumi truly that much more capable of handling high-tier threats without her presence around to anchor them? As much as she desperately wanted to tell herself that she could trust her subordinates implicitly, she knew it was a lie.

It felt as if all three of them were constantly standing with their backs pressed against one another, weapons drawn. Every single one of them was harboring a deep secret, and there was a terrifyingly small amount of genuine trust binding the unit together. Tatsuchi, Zhenyu, and Asumi... all three of them knew significantly more about the true nature of this world than they were ever letting on to each other. Not just regarding this specific skirmish, but about everything.