1.71: Invictus“I’ve won this cute skirmish,” Mitsuhiko decred, brushing dust from his sleeve as if we were beneath his notice. “I could kill you all bare-handedly, but I’m magnanimous. Stand down and leave in peace. Keep your tongues still, and I won’t darken your doors… unless you’re foolish enough to mention my business again.”

  I froze for an instant.He… was offering peace?

  “Why?” I shifted automatically into another stance, my cwed fists tightening. “Why would you think any of us would keep silent after everything you’ve done? Of course we won’t do that, and you know you won’t either.”

  He chuckled… soft, cold and patronizing.“Because I win. Can you not see it?”

  He tilted his chin toward Natalia-sama, still held in a chokehold.

  “You foolishly passed the scroll to the fox. The scroll is in my possession now. It’s within range, and I can assert control over it at any moment and call Enenra back.” His grip tightened around Natalia-sama’s throat… she gritted her teeth but held his wrist with both hands, refusing to show any weakness. He didn’t even spare her a gnce. “Let us discuss what led to your folly. Her mistake. All because she rushed to defend the rest of you sorry creatures.”

  His eyes glinted with cruel satisfaction.

  “In any case, you asked why I trust you’ll behave.”He smirked. “Because all three of your yokai allies were captured by my scroll earlier. They can be recalled to it from any distance if I choose now. They are mine. I have no need for such useless minions, but should you cross me, I’ll recim them.”

  A chill crept up the base of my spine to my brainstem. “You never stood a chance,” he continued. “You fought well, but your struggle was always futile.”

  I gaped.“You bastard!!!”

  “And now,” Mitsuhiko added smoothly, “you yourself have become a full yokai. Far sooner than expected. That simplifies everything. I can trap you too… just like them.” His smile sharpened to a knife’s edge. “That is why you cannot win.”

  I looked around at my friends.

  Natalia-sama snarled quietly, her teeth bared, her pain showing through her fury.Ume looked tense, poised, gring at Mitsu like she was ready to tear his throat out.Rui glowered at him with pure, venomous rage.Akuchi… was still in rocket uncher form, completely motionless on the ground. I privately wondered if she’d fired off her brain.

  Mitsuhiko gestured zily at Rui.“The only wild card is this small one. Clever. Treacherous. I suppose I could kill her, but for your own sakes, I think you lot will restrain her and keep silent. If you ever darken my doorstep again, I will destroy you in ways you cannot imagine.”

  His eyes were utterly ft… there was no heat, no life, nothing but ruthless certainty. His eyes were totally rotten.

  CRAP! What do we do?!He has a point…!

  “Put your hands up,” he continued. “I won’t accept your surrender otherwise. Let’s ensure you have no other little tricks hidden away on your….” He sneered. “...person.”

  Rui raised her hands immediately and scooted close to me, smiling faintly.…A smile?Really?Does she have another pn?

  “Um, Akuchi doesn’t exactly have any arms right now,” I pointed out.Ume pouted but lifted her hands too, making the gesture oddly sensuous.

  “Akuchi? Who?” Mitsuhiko scanned the room, expression narrowing. “…Ah. The foolish tanuki, was it not?”

  A distant shriek pierced the air.

  Mitsuhiko’s eyes widened… his jaw sckening for the first time.

  Through the bsted hole in the ceiling…Akuchi’s missing rocket descended like divine karmic judgment… fmes bursting from her rear, burning at full throttle.

  We all heard the earlier explosion.How Akuchi survived smacking into the ceiling and the rest of the building was a mystery for the ages.

  Mitsuhiko threw up his hands to block the incoming rocket.

  Natalia-sama seized the instant and shifted her body… dropping backward through the ceiling hole like the fox-goddess she was diving into her own domain.

  Mitsuhiko made his first mistake.

  He struck Akuchi in fury.

  Akuchi dented inward like tin foil—…then went supernova.

  “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!”

  The explosion hurled all of us across the kitchen.

  I grabbed Rui, holding her tight as we crashed into Mitsuhiko’s polished stainless-steel oven.Gss shattered into crystalline rain around us.

  Rui slumped in my p, her face tilting upward with an exhausted but radiant smile. Her cute face was smudged.

  “I-it’s done…” she breathed. “Well… almost.”

  Then she held something up toward me…It was Mitsuhiko’s scroll… the same cursed artifact he’d used to steal everything from us.

  It glowed.

  “I’m sure of this…” she whispered.“He stole your face… her face… There was only one way for him to pull that off. Using this artifact to seal it.”

  Her hand trembled, but her smile didn’t.

  “Take it back now.”

  I nodded, noh-smiling softly. Since there weren’t any other faces in the offing… and this one, the one he stole, the one she entrusted to me… was the only one that mattered.

  I took the scroll and focused.

  When I’d called my friends back earlier, I hadn’t used any chant, ritual, or technique. I’d simply thought of them… their smiles, their warmth, the feeling of wanting them near… and the scroll had responded.

  So all I needed now……was to think of the face I would never forget. Ever.

  Reiko-chan’s beautiful face.

  The scroll bzed like the sun.

  Pain ripped through me… white-hot, total and absolute. Throughout…Every limb. Every muscle. Every particle of me.

  It felt like I was being rewritten at the molecur level, but by now… I was used to pain. I had lived in it. Worn it like a second skin. Pain, I understood too well.

  “Auuuuuuughhhhhhhhh!!!!” I screamed. I gave myself to that pain.

  Rui gasped and threw her arms around me, anchoring me as my body jerked and twisted. I colpsed, thrashing on the floorboards. Ume stood a few paces away, shaking dust from her skirt, clearly unsteady but alert.

  I saw them… my friends… but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything but scream through clenched noh-teeth. My entire body was afme.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!”

  My eyes drifted toward Akuchi.

  She hadn’t moved since the explosion.Her metal form y crumpled and inanimate.

  Natalia-sama was nowhere in sight, still somewhere above the colpsed ceiling.

  Dust drifted downward in streams, falling over us like ash. Rui held me tight as I writhed, her hands shaking, her forehead pressed to my shoulder as if she could keep me in this world through will alone.

  Tears leaked down my cheeks.Akuchi… are you okay?Natalia-sama… did you survive?

  When the dust finally thinned…

  Mitsuhiko was still standing.

  Unfazed. Unbroken.His suit was shredded, his body smeared with smoke and debris… but somehow he was still standing.

  His eyes were gzed for a heartbea… then sharpened, focusing on us with renewed hatred. There would be no peace. No negotiation. No surrender. That option was gone forever.

  Ume gasped beside me, realizing the same thing I did. She stepped between us and Mitsuhiko, small but fierce, her eyes bzing. She hissed… such an oddly cute sound, even coming from her. She stalked toward him like a predator, her shoulders hunched, fangs bared.

  Helplessly, I watched.We shouldn’t have repced my face so soon.We lost sight of him.We assumed the fight was over too soon.

  …Never turn your back on your enemy.Never.

  Mitsuhiko tore the scraps of his ruined suit from his arms as he walked forward. His muscles stood out sharply… defined, corded and vascur… his veins winding along his arms like topographical maps. He looked like a demon carved from ice.

  “You even took her face back, I see…” he murmured, looming over Ume. “I thought I would treasure it forever. To keep her memory alive. And you couldn’t even leave me that much.”

  “It isn’t yours!” I shouted, forcing myself up. My limbs trembled violently. My entire body shook. My nerves were on fire. But I stood. I stood. “It was never yours!”

  He turned his gaze toward me slowly.“And it’s not yours either.”

  It was a cold pronouncement, and yet it nded like a punch.

  He stepped toward me, and my knees almost buckled. I had nothing left… I was moving purely on will.His hatred sharpened like a bde.

  “No matter how you came by her face… do not forget that I loved her.” His voice cracked with something dark and twisted. “You desecrate it by wearing it.”

  His eyes burned with a depth of fury I hadn’t known he possessed.

  “I was prepared to let you go. To spare you.”His voice dropped.“But you committed an unpardonable offense… again. Mercy means nothing now.”

  He raised his hand.

  “I swear I will take everything from you.”

  Ume moved first… hissing, leaping at him like a streak of pure fury. He blocked her a fraction too slow, surprising us with how much the battle had taken out of him... but Ume’s momentum carried her straight in. Her fangs sank deep into his neck.

  So deep that blood spurted from his jugur in a red arc.

  Mitsuhiko screamed… an ugly, guttural sound. His aura darkened instantly, bck energy flooding his limbs. He seized Ume by the hair, ripped her from his neck with brutal strength.

  A rge gob of flesh tore free in her teeth.

  Blood poured down his side like a waterfall.

  His mask of indifference shattered.Murderous hatred took its pce.

  He lifted Ume high… too high… and smmed her full-force into the shattered kitchen isnd. She struck jagged wood, marble shards, steel pots, and broken gss.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”The scream tore from her as she crashed.

  CRASHBAMSLAM

  Then she was still.

  Limp…. and motionless.

  I felt something inside me colpse.My knees gave out. I sank onto the broken gss littered around the wrecked oven. Tears blurred my sight.

  One moment too slow.One breath too te.I couldn’t protect her.Would I have been too te for Rui, too?

  Mitsuhiko moved forward, breathing heavily, his hand cmped over the wound in his neck. Dark energy gathered around his fingers. Blood welled beneath his grip and ran down his side, dripping into a trailing path behind him. Each drop gleamed vividly against the pristine kitchen tile.

  Rui, trembling but focused, reached into her purse.

  She pulled out a lighter.

  She held it beneath Mitsuhiko’s scroll, the one she had snatched during the chaos. It shimmered faintly.

  He staggered.

  She rolled her thumb over the igniter.

  SNICK.

  No fme.

  Mitsuhiko froze.

  His eyes snapped to the sound instantly.

  He knew exactly what that click meant.

  His lips curled. His gaze narrowed to a murderous slit.

  Then he lunged, throwing his entire weight forward, closing the distance in a single feral burst, intent on seizing the scroll or killing Rui outright.

  I gasped, forcing signals from my brain into my uncooperative body. My limbs twitched uselessly at first, jerking and flopping like they belonged to someone half-dead. Pain burned through every nerve, especially my chest, an immense pressure blooming outward as if my heart were trying to break itself free.

  I’d already felt like I’d died once today. Apparently, my body wanted to argue the point.

  All I could do was watch, helpless, as Mitsuhiko wrestled Rui to the ground.

  Move.Move.MOVE.MOVE, DAMN IT—

  “MOOOOOOOVE!!!” I screamed, my voice cracking, and finally my body listened.

  I threw myself at him with every scrap of strength I had left.

  Mitsuhiko snarled and twisted violently to the side. The remnants of his suit were already smoldering, embers flickering across the fine fabric, and as he rolled, fmes caught fully.

  Rui jammed the scroll up between them.

  Fire bloomed.

  His sleeve brushed it.

  Fmes raced up his arms and shoulders.

  He screamed, thrashing as he tore at his burning clothes in frantic motions, ripping the st remnants free.

  I looked down at Rui.

  She was smiling.

  Brightly.Tiredly.Victorious.Tenacious.

  She lifted a small victory sign.

  Something in her other hand caught my eye.

  It was on fire.

  She’d done it. She had actually ignited it.

  A soft ugh escaped me, half relief, half disbelief, fully exhausted.

  “It really is done now…”

  I reached up, unhooked my helmet, and pulled it free. The air hit my face, my real, recimed face, and I let out a long, shaking sigh.

  Mitsuhiko groaned and pushed himself up onto his hands, staggering. I stared at him, disbelieving.

  “You’re still standing…? Your scroll is turning to ashes.”

  He looked at me.No, through me.

  “Hah… now you taunt me again… with her voice.” He forced himself upright, wobbling. “And those eyes.”

  “…and her beautiful hair…? HOW?!” He stared at me as though I were a demon.

  My stomach twisted.

  “You can’t steal these things from me anymore,” I said quietly.

  “No… I’ve lost. You…” His voice cracked strangely. His eyes were wide. He closed them and leaned heavily against the nearest wall, smearing soot across the tile. “Will you kill me, then?”

  I choked on the question. “H-hell no! I refuse!”

  A hollow ugh slipped from his throat. “I see… Then you’ll have me arrested.” He coughed, wet and rattling. “What evidence do you have? Enough to find me guilty in a human court? You will fail, as many have in the past.”

  Mitsuhiko chuckled darkly, derisively.

  “We’ll find a way to pin you to the wall, slime!” I stomped toward him, pnting myself before him with the same posture that once sent people running from me on the streets. I gred down at him, my hands on my hips.

  “You will pay for everything. For every life you stole. For every monster you created. For Reiko-chan. If you won’t surrender…”

  I pressed my foot firmly onto him, pinning him hard enough to make him grunt.

  “…I’ll pummel you until you do!”

  He hesitated.

  Then he ughed, loud, broken, bloody. More coughing. More blood.

  “I don’t doubt that.” His eyes narrowed, and then softened into a twistedly reverent face. “You speak with her voice. But now…” A ragged breath. “…there is indeed something behind those words. Behind those eyes. Tell me… does some vestige of her mind survive inside you?”

  I stared at him bnkly.

  I wasn't silent because I didn’t know the answer.

  But because I refused to give him even a sylble of the truth.

  He gave a thin, trembling smile. “I just… had a feeling.”

  Then his head slumped forward.

  He slipped into unconsciousness.

  Relwing