Sensei and Doppelganger moved like ink and brush across paper—strokes, counters, white space between that meant as much as the lines. Four clones fanned around him, toes barely touching the floorboards. The original lounged on a toppled altar rail as if they were passing the time between appointments.
"My, my," she teased, swinging a heel. "For an old man you sure have some fast reflexes."
"Or maybe you're too weak for a Chosen One," Sensei said lightly, setting the ferrule of his cane and letting his weight sink so his breath deepened into his belly. "Titles tend to make children sloppy."
The smile folded at the edges of her mouth. Then she flicked two fingers. The nearest clone dove, a blur of red-white kimono and black hair. Sensei stepped inward at a forty-five, blade whispering from the cane with a sound like a drawn breath. The clone became smoke that smelled faintly of incense and iron.
Another landed where he had been and found only a cane hook catching her ankle. Sensei tugged; the clone face-planted. He tapped her in the spine with the blunt end—polite as knocking—and she burst into shadow.
Jack's knives were a duet of certainty. He didn't feint often; when he did, the feint cut deeper than most men's committed strokes. Chiaki met him with a spear that refused to remain just one thing—a halberd to lock both blades, a whip of chain to snag a wrist, a tower shield crackling to life for exactly the time it took a knife to ping off the rim.
Aiko made the distances lie. One pulse she was above Jack, heel arcing toward his collarbone. The next she was across the hall with Ellie, one hand on the girl's shoulder, eyes tracking Jay's position for the next synchronization. Teleportation wasn't just leaving and arriving; it was choosing when your opponent committed and being somewhere you liked better when they did.
Jay, in Mimic's armor, slid into the violence like a hand into a glove. Horned forearms threw sparks against Jack's steel. Every time Jack dialed up speed, Jay threw stubbornness in response—brutal blocks that made the knives skitter, ugly but effective, buying Chiaki an angle or Aiko a safe blink. Twice Jack's blades kissed Jay's ribs and left shallow, smoking grooves. Jay grunted and drove back in, more worried about the way Ellie's fingers dug into his sleeve than the throbbing heat along his side.
"You're sloppy today," Jack purred on an in-breath, knife a whisper from Jay's throat.
"Busy," Jay answered and shoved his horned forearm into the knife path, feeling the edge screech over scale.
Chiaki cut across him, spear becoming a trident, prongs splaying to trap both of Jack's knives. "Aiko!"
Aiko was there in the time it took the syllables to cool, boot heel slamming into Jack's wrist. One knife flew. He let it go without looking, spun the other in his palm, and ducked a spear butt that would have shattered his teeth. "Good," he said, delighted. "Make me work."
At the rear of the ruined hall, Mamushi rose taller than any torch could have lit, coils rippling like wind on a field of wheat. Her mouth unhinged farther than a mouth should, a red cave rimmed with baleen-like rows of needle fangs. Snakes poured from under her scales and out from the cracked floorboards where the dark had gone thick.
Sota tracked futures like constellations. "High in three—now! Low—left left left!" he called, breath tight, eyes white in concentration. Reid obeyed the voice without looking, pivot dropping low just before a serpent as big as his arm cleaved the air his head had occupied. The assault rifle's muzzle stitched light into the mass, rounds finding eyes, mouths, the thin skin where jaw met neck. Chiaki's conjuration had no magazine. It drank his will and gave him recoil in return, steady as a word you trust.
Mamushi laughed and split the floor with a tail strike that sent splinters humming. "Shoot my snakes all you want," she hissed. "I can just regenerate new ones. Unlike you, I'll guarantee you'll run out of breath very soon."
"Maybe," Reid said, firing a controlled burst to decapitate a viper before it landed on Sota's back. "But until then? You'll be busy."
The boy was everywhere Reid wasn't, shepherding in micro-movements: a tug on a sleeve, a hand on a shoulder, a whispered "two steps right" that kept them in the narrow corridor of not-dying.
Mamushi's eyes narrowed. "The little one sees."
"He sees enough," Reid answered, feeling a small, savage pride. He edged in front of Sota another half-inch and depressed the trigger in a slow squeeze that wrote an X of impacts across Mamushi's advancing chest. The bullets punched, flattened, some deflected, but enough found tissue to stagger her.
She recoiled and hissed a syllable that wasn't a word so much as an intention. The snakes underfoot fused into a thick carpet and then into a single titanic serpent, its head as broad as a man's torso. Sota went pale. "Right eye scar," he blurted. "It's old—nerve dead there. Blind spot."
Reid didn't need more. He shifted fire, cutting into that scar, pushing deeper, deeper until black blood geysered and the giant head slammed to the floorboards and writhed before dissolving into smoky filaments. Mamushi snarled, truly angry now.
Doppelganger clapped once, leisurely, as another of her clones dissolved under Sensei's blade. "Entertaining," she mused. "You learned in a strict school."
"In a small one," Sensei said, not bothering with a smile. "Admission cost everything."
He pressed forward. His blade wasn't a longsword; it was a patient scalpel, making incisions at unlikely angles. The clones adapted, shared micro-knowledge, adjusted reach and timing. He adjusted faster. He was old, yes—old and trained to rescue millimeters from minutes.
"Why are you going after other families?" he asked, not because he needed the answer to defeat her, but because battles of breath were as much about what you filled your lungs with as air.
"Because families are a bunch of people where they show love and affection," Doppelganger said, the last word like a mouthful of ash. "Which makes me sick."
"Sounds to me you never had a family," Sensei replied, and there was no derision in it. "I'm sorry."
"I don't need your sympathy," she snapped, a crack across glass. "And I had a family once. They treated me like a punching bag. They prayed for a son every night even after I was born. They told me I was not a god's blessing but a devil's doing."
Her voice changed, stripped of its affectations. "My father was a wealthy merchant. His belief was simple: men inherit, women obey. They barely fed me. When I ran, I saw mothers hug their daughters in the market. I convinced myself to go home and show them love—maybe they'd change." She spat. "They didn't. I left for good. I stole to live. And when I almost died, a woman with pale skin and white hair and a black cloth around her eyes asked if I wanted to live. I said yes. She gave me a mark and told me I would live for eternity so I could take revenge on the world."
Sensei's blade stopped a hair's breadth short of her throat. His eyes had softened, traitorously. "I'm sorry you had to go through that," he said, and to his surprise, tears stung. He hadn't planned them; the body remembers what the mind tucks away.
Something in Doppelganger's face flickered—confusion? Disgust? She flung it away. "SHUT UP!" she shrieked, the clones hissing it back a beat later. "You don't understand how I feel. You pity me because you have a family to love. You have children you give hugs to."
"I never had a family of my own," he said softly. "I had a beautiful wife, but she was murdered by the Zodiac Killer."
That stilled her. "So you're the one who managed to survive Zodiac's bullet."
"You know the Zodiac Killer?"
"Oh yes," she purred, composure reassembling. "He's just like me. A Chosen One. You know, it's kind of sad. You get to live while your wife is gone. I bet you wanted to grow a family with her."
"You're right," Sensei admitted. His voice did not break on the memory; it bowed. "I did want a family. I didn't care if I had a daughter or a son or both. I would have loved them with all my heart. Maybe in another lifetime I might have had you as my daughter. Then I could have shown you what it is to be loved."
Her face convulsed, the elegant mask cracking to show the raw furnace beneath. "SHUT UP!"
She stopped playing defense. She came on like a weather front. The clones synched into a single rhythm, not four attacks but one blade with four edges. Sensei yielded a step, then another, letting the cane's steel hum. The third step was a fraction late. A clone's claw grazed his cheek. The cut was shallow, but blood welled bright as a blessing.
The clone caught a droplet on a fingertip. She licked it.
Her shape collapsed and, with a sickening grace, re-knit. A woman stood before him with silky black hair and a blue-white kimono. Her smile was the one he had sworn to protect for the rest of his life. It had been decades since he had seen it so close, so real he could see the tiny freckle at the corner of her left eye.
His chest locked. The hall and the war and the breath left him as if pulled by a string tied to his heart.
The other clones rippled and became her too. A ring of her—his wife, his Hana—closed around him. Every tilt of the head was right. Every blink was right. Even the way her hands warmed the sleeves of the kimono with her palms was right. He knew this was cruelty. He knew this was technique. He knew—and still he stared, transfixed, and let the first blow land, then the second, each one designed to bruise, not kill, to shake, not end.
"Sensei!" Chiaki saw him fold into a memory and felt panic bite. She broke from Jack's angle despite the knife that kissed her shoulder. "Sensei! Hold on, I'm coming!"
"No," he commanded, and the word had iron in it. He forced his gaze away from the faces and put it on Chiaki, apprentice and daughter-not-daughter, fierce and foolish and loyal. "Don't."
The clones pressed, their Hana-mouths set in lines he didn't remember. He inhaled once, sharply, and looked back at the nearest face. "I'm alright now," he said, and meant it like a vow. He put the grief back in its box, where he would take it out later, carefully. "I understand you're not the real one. But I thank you for showing me her face in person one last time."
He spun the cane, the blade a circle that sang in the air. His stance shortened—no more long lines a lover would use to guide a dance. Now it was a craftsman's stance, all economy. He set the cane upright, the blade tip vertical, and his eyes—clear, rimmed in tears he did not hide—settled on Doppelganger with a new and terrible gentleness.
"Come, then," he said. "Let's finish our lesson."