Chapter 59: Killer Instinct
Raizen did not answer to any of Keita’s mocking words.
He looked once at Hikari across the floor, being carried soft in Osamu’s careful hands while Kori spoke low. The part of him that smiled and apologized and joked stepped back. The part of him that had moved like a knife in the Maw stepped forward and closed the door.
His eyes closed. Then barely opened. They went calm.
Keita raised his fan for another performance.
The flash came. The lightning you could have missed it even if you never blinked.
Raizen’s blade lived in Keita’s abdomen before the fan could turn. A precise place that made everything else in the body forget its job. Raizen’s back was straight, as if he never tried to bent space itself. He pulled the blade out with a small gesture, putting it back into the sheath.
Keita’s mouth remembered first. It coughed blood, not being able to say anything else.
Raizen’s eyes looked down at the figure that tried to breathe: "Next time" he said in a tone that did not belong to a student, "when you face four, don’t celebrate when you have defeated three." Keita hit the floor in a curl he did not mean and the fans clattered away in small metal protests.
The crowd did not make a sound. Somewhere a cup hit a shoe.
Oren reacted like a good shield should - forward. He tried to measure Raizen with his eyes and tried to find a set of solutions that started with hold and ended with crush. He drove in. The shield’s rim should have caught Raizen’s thigh where it would instantly disable. Raizen was no longer living where Oren’s math lived.
He moved one step to insult distance. His foot met the bottom rim of the shield in a short kick that treated it like a door. The center of Oren’s weight asked for the ground and did not find it. In the thin space that opened, Raizen did not pull any of his blades out. He touched the neck in an unescapable grip. Absolute. Then he changed his mind and decided not to strangle him. He finished him swiftly. A small hit where a second ago his grip was.
Oren’s whole body listened to that one point as if it had been waiting all morning for a command. His legs went away. His arms released the shield like a child dropping sleep. He sat down on the floor with his eyes very wide, empty.
Raizen looked at him, only to check the math.
Iris had been building heat like a kettle in the corner of sight. She cast from her whole being. The green bloom came big, angry, and final, meant to make a crater where Raizen was.
Her mistake? Raizen was not there. anymore
He had not yet cleaned the blood from the point of the first blade. He let the second whisper free just enough to make a bright tooth. He rested the metal like a stethoscope against the place between Iris’s shoulder blades.
"Stop!!" Kori shouted across the floor, but it was not a command that could move physics in that moment. It was a prayer to a boy who was not there. Another whisper: "Don’t-"
Raizen told the blade to be thunder. The shock leapt from the blade into Iris’s spine and turned her muscles into locked wire. She gasped once in a sound that tried to be a word and was only an electricity. He caught her as she tipped, guided her to the floor, and tapped the weapon to shut the current so she would sleep like a person, not a mannequin, before sheathing it back.
Three bodies on the floor. Only one more standing.
Ryuu was still up.
In the first seconds of the duel he had been a hidden kind of problem - a ruin without speech. He wasn’t the fastest person but he was the most honest about momentum. He adjusted, planned, and never forgot to take the space the enemy gave. Now there was no plan that looked good. He chose the one that looked least like a death. He ran in a line, let his ankles crank, and tried to meet Raizen’s waist with a tackle meant to break a tree.
Raizen didn’t raise his blades. He decided to be empty handed. Then he let all the bright go into his feet, his hips, his hands.
The dash he chose was not polite. It was not the clean arc threaded through a friend’s circle. It was... To put it simply... The worst one.
It crossed the space between them and left only a thin taste of metal in the air.
He didn’t cut Ryuu.
He pointed his knuckle to his chest and hit, lightning touching his hands, even tho his blades weren’t in his hands.
It was every piece of speed he had paid for in practice, all at once and all at the correct angle. The sound was the arena remembering the first time someone struck a rock on purpose. Ryuu went from standing in front of Raizen to becoming an object learning about flight. He met the far wall back first, creating serious cracks. Both in the wall itself, and his mechanical limbs. A second later he slid down in a straight line. The room stayed very quiet because the room wanted to know what the rules were now.
Raizen stood alone in the circle. He looked for Hikari out of the habit that had become a need. She was propped on a bench under Osamu’s hand, eyes open now, jaw tight, watching. Keahi sat beside her, ribs wrapped, the left corner of her mouth bled and had been cleaned. Ichiro was grim and awake and crushing the bottle he held a little. They were three and did not look away.
Kori’s face had not changed during the last ten seconds because changing takes time. It was still terrified. For his sake. Now it tried to decide. The calculation moved through her eyes and left something behind that did not belong to pride.
"Too dangerous" she said, very quietly, because she had meant to say it to herself and the part of her that kept people alive. "This is too dangerous."
Osamu’s hand hovered above his shield. He had not stepped a foot onto the floor, because rules. His son was sitting and blinking slow, trying to tell his arms a story about rising. Iris was breathing evenly and would wake with her muscles stuttering complaints they would lose by lunch. Keita had two fingers pressed to the slick on his stomach and was laughing under his breath for no reason Raizen could hear.
The overhead tone came back as if remembering the schedule. The panel stood. The voice was steady as bridgework.
"By incapacitation, winners: Raizen, Hikari, Keahi, Ichiro."
The sound the crowd made was not a roar. It was three parts astonishment, one part fear, and one part joy sneaking in because the human heart is rude. It built on itself and then broke in a dozen places. A girl cried. Someone started to clap and then stopped because it seemed like clapping death itself.
Raizen’s feet came back one by one. He started to feel his hands. The shift from the Maw slid back behind his ribs and latched the little door that kept him from walking into the next person as if they were made of math. When he lifted his head, he was only a boy who had moved too fast.
He walked to Keita first and handed the fan he had stepped over back to the boy’s hand.
Keita blinked at it as if it were a creature. He curled his fingers around the handle. Blood dampened the grip. His grin had sobered into a thin line that did not know where to go. He glanced once at the place Raizen’s blade had been and once at Raizen’s face. The crazy look was gone. In its place: a student who had just learned something true.
"Lesson" Keita said, grunting. "Received."
Oren tried to stand and found that his legs still had committee meetings to attend. Raizen crouched next to him and slid two fingers under the angle he had pressed earlier. He lifted a little and released. The pressure point let go with a small sigh. His toes returned.
Iris still hasn’t woken up. Osamu healed her, but her eyes still decided to be shut.
Ryuu was still a shape on the far wall. Osamu was there before Raizen wanted make a second step, a palm already hovering over the sternum, the other hand steadying the neck. Light ran from teacher to student like a river closing a cut bank.
"Hold" Osamu said, and Ryuu’s breath found the track. The man did not look up at Raizen until the boy’s chest rose twice on its own. When he did look, it was with the unblinking patience of someone who had been a wall for a living and had not forgotten.
"You don’t pull your cuts" Osamu said. Not a question. Not an accusation. An observation placed between them like a stone.
"Neither did them" Raizen said, dryly. He wanted to say he had chosen non lethal. He looked at Keita’s face, Iris’s steady hand and Oren rolling to his knees and found that his need to defend went away.
"I will" he said. Next time."