Chapter 1734: Disgrace to the Ancestors |
Chizuru watched Black Fang’s katana carve through Tatsumi in a diagonal stroke that split the youngest Fujimori elder from shoulder to hip. A man she’d mentored for centuries folded to the dirt before his blood finished leaving him.
The terrible, blazing violet eyes left the corpse without lingering, lifting skyward to where Ragnar’s screams rained down from the Primordial Villain’s grip, and whatever passed behind Black Fang’s gaze lasted less than a heartbeat before she turned back to the Fujimori line as if ticking a name off a list.
Chizuru’s fingers tightened on her blade.
Tomoe stood to her left with blood running from her temple and her breathing gone short, Hozumi held the right with his guard braced against Alexios, and the morale that had held the Fujimori line together was hemorrhaging faster than any wound on the field.
Her gaze found Kaede.
The Sword of the Fujimori burned bright arcs that carried force enough to split formations, and every exchange drove both opponents backward because the raw power behind the blade was simply greater.
But Ayame slipped beneath a slash that would have taken her head, her spine arching backward until her hair swept the ground.
Seeing the follow-up come for her neck, she launched into a backflip from the bent position, her body rotating past Kaede’s blade in a single fluid arc, thighs tight and legs cutting the air above her.
Kaede’s next strike came even faster, but Ayame managed to catch it on her katana while inverted, head toward the dirt and feet toward the sky, the parry so clean the ring of steel carried across the field.
Before Kaede could attack for a fourth time, using Ayame’s position to finish the job, claws raked toward the back of her neck.
The dogkin had struck from behind, and Kaede’s blade whipped around to parry, sending her counter at the blonde girl’s midsection in the same fluid motion.
But the assassin in questionable black leather armor had already read it.
Her acute senses caught the shift in Kaede’s muscles before the sword arm finished committing, and she bent away from the edge with a flexibility that no rigid skeleton should have allowed, the blade close enough to stir the fur on her ears before she settled into a low crouch a step back, weight forward, fingers curled.
She stood and began slowly prowling, blue eyes tracking Kaede with extreme patience and a commitment to kill.
Ayame managed to land on her feet thanks to the dogkin’s intervention, and the two young women, both barely past twenty, framed the Fujimori’s chosen from both sides.
The statistical gap between them and Kaede wielding that blade should have made this fight a slaughter, and instead the Sword of the Fujimori couldn’t find a single clean kill.
’These girls are geniuses among geniuses.’
Chizuru saw it with a clarity that tasted like ash.
The dogkin was a predator whose intuition ran so far above what even beastkin veterans were capable of that watching her fight looked like watching someone who already knew the outcome. She turned every exchange into a hunt where Kaede was forced to defend herself regardless of how much harder she swung.
And Ayame... what Chizuru was watching was no longer samurai technique. At least, nothing the Fujimori elder knew of.
The foundation was there in the footwork and the angles of the cuts, but what the girl was doing with it had evolved past anything the Fujimori had ever produced in recorded history.
The elders had known she was talented when they discarded her.
They had seen the raw promise ever since she was a little baby taking her first swings with a miniature wooden sword.
But whatever Ayame had become in the year since went beyond talent and beyond training, and Chizuru could not identify what had done it, because neither the Primordial Villain nor Black Fang could account for mentoring the kind of swordsmanship she was watching.
The Fujimori had thrown away their own greatest blade, and it had come back to cut them.
"You better deflect properly or it’ll all be over, Hozumi! Oh, to be carefree again!" A joyous roar erupted behind Chizuru, Alexios’s voice unmistakable in its boisterous savagery. "Let’s see which of us fossils shall live to see the new age!"
Her neck strained toward the sound but the motion died in her spine, because Black Fang had started walking toward her.
Every step was unhurried, the blade at her side still burning with the serpentine patterns, and the pressure that poured off the Venomborne Terror closed around Chizuru’s world until the battlefield’s roar dimmed to nothing and only the eyes remained, carrying a killing intent so dense and so patient that the composure the old woman had maintained cracked down its center.
"You..." Her voice came wrong, pitched higher and thinner than she had ever permitted it to be. "You were such an adorable child. I held you in these hands, did you know that? When you were born, I was the first elder to hold you. So small and warm against my chest..."
"It’s not too late!" Desperation climbed through the cracks. "Embrace your heritage, child! The Fujimori are your blood, your history, your home! Come back to us!"
Black Fang’s expression didn’t change and her pace didn’t slow.
The eyes that tracked Chizuru carried the same flat, serpentine patience they’d worn since Tatsumi hit the dirt, and the old woman’s pleas washed over them the way rain washed over stone.
Chizuru’s heel caught the earth as her body took a step backward without her permission.
"How?!" The word ripped from her with a rawness that made the nearest soldiers flinch. "We are the same level! The Heavenly Restriction binds us equally! You should not be capable of growing stronger, yet you carry a pressure that wasn’t there when we last crossed blades! How did you take the next step?!"
She didn’t need the answer spoken.
The mark on Black Fang’s belly pulsed violet through her clothing, and Chizuru’s gaze snapped skyward to the armored figure conducting his orchestra of suffering above the battlefield.
"That man..."
"You refused us!" Every shred of composure vanished as four centuries of frustration erupted.
"Four hundred years we offered you everything! Home, riches, power, a seat among your own people! You could’ve become the youngest elder in our history! You could’ve gone down as the greatest warrior our people have ever known! And you spat on every hand the Fujimori extended, choosing to live as a filthy criminal rather than accept the clan that birthed you!"
The old woman’s entire body trembled, rage climbing as she shrieked, "Yet that man appears and within months you fight at his side?! The woman who rejected every concession we ever made gives her loyalty to a foreign villain?!"
"And Ayame! He purchased her from a slave house for zero gold! ZERO! Acquired by some nobody through sheer idiotic luck! And now both daughters of the Fujimori stand against their own clan, tearing apart everything their ancestors bled to build!"
"If that man did not exist, everything would have gone according to plan!" She was shrieking, her face twisted beyond recognition. "His impossible, unfair existence undid our clan’s greatest ambition! The sacrifices, the thousands of years of patience, ALL of it! Even the king was..."
The raving turned into guttural cursing. "Cursed be the Primordial Villain, Quinlan Elysiar! May all his loved ones experience the same despair his unjust actions inflicted on others!"
Black Fang’s eyes blazed an even more violent violet the instant Chizuru spat her words, a single fierce pulse.
For the first time since the walk began the faintest shift crossed the Venomborne Terror’s face, and it belonged entirely to the man in the sky whose name Chizuru had just spat like poison.
Chizuru saw the pulse. She saw where the mark sat and what it meant, and the last thread holding her to anything resembling dignity snapped.
She spat at Black Fang’s feet. "Whoring yourself to a foreign devil! Branded on the belly like livestock!"
The words pouring from her bore no resemblance to the elder who had offered grandmotherly mercy moments ago.
"You are the disgrace of your ancestors! A stain on every generation of Fujimori blood! Your lineage, your name, everything this clan stands for, you defiled the moment you spread yourself for that creature and let him mark you as his property!"
"Finally." Black Fang’s voice cut through the vitriol and Chizuru’s mouth snapped shut.
Her eyes danced, trailing gorgeous iridescence with every step.
"The mask of hypocrisy came off at long last."
She smiled, entirely unbothered.
Then, she decreed:
"Hanako Fujimori died when you killed her. No amount of screaming will reach her."
Her blade hung loose at her side and the smile widened into something that looked, impossibly, at peace.
"But I, Black Fang, Disgrace to my Ancestors, thank you for your words."