The shrine had become a maze of shattered wood and churned dust. Lanterns lay tipped like broken moons, smoke drifting in skeins. The air tasted of copper and old cedar. A gust pushed ash across the tatami as if to sweep a stage for the next act.
Jack's knives flashed between Chiaki's fluid spear-work and Aiko's blink-fast entries while Jay—horned forearms up, eyes burning—held the line around Ellie. Mamushi's coils threshed across the back half of the hall, a living tide of scaled muscle and hissing heads. Near the altar, Sensei fenced in a ring of his wife's faces while the original Doppelganger prowled at the edge, red-white kimono spotless despite the ruin, clones sliding out of shadow like reflections seeking a surface.
"Damn," Chiaki said, breath tight, shoulder already darkening where a blade had kissed it. "It's three against one. I'm surprised he's still an Upper Demon and not a Chosen One."
"His reflexes and reaction time are insanely quick," Aiko said, reappearing in a blur behind Jack and vanishing as his knife split the place her throat had been. "My teleportation is as fast as the speed of sound, but he still manages to deflect my attacks."
Jay's gaze flicked to Ellie. She clutched a splintered beam, cheeks streaked with soot, eyes wide—determined and afraid. A plan crawled up his spine and made a home in his stomach like a cold stone. He didn't like it. It left Ellie exposed in a way that made everything in him snarl. But the pattern of Jack's defense was clear: one-on-one, two-on-one, the man could juggle knives and angles all night. To break him, they had to break time around him.
"Chiaki. Aiko." Jay's voice cut through the percussion. They ducked toward him, keeping their weapons up, listening.
"I have an idea," he said. "We hit him in a rhythm he can't keep up with. No breath. No reset. Chiaki—change your spear to a rifle like the one you gave Reid. Hammer him from range. Aiko and I keep pressure in close. He can't watch three speeds at once."
"What are you three babbling over there?" Jack sang out, irritated, knives flicking in little arcs as if to underline his attention. He couldn't hear their hissed words, just saw their heads bend together, and it irked him the way gnats do an open wound.
Jay raised his voice deliberately. "You ready?"
"Yes," Chiaki and Aiko answered like a chord.
Chiaki's spear inhaled in her hands and exhaled as an assault rifle, neat as thought. The stock braced against her shoulder as if it had always belonged there. She squeezed the trigger. The rifle coughed forever of brass. Jack moved as if a floorboard tilted under him, step sliding, shoulders angling to let the first hail spend itself on air.
Aiko blinked into that air, heel spearing for his cheek. Steel snapped up and met bone; she felt the sting down to her kneecap and vanished before he could harvest the reprisal cut. Jay's claws came from the blind side, a fan of horn that should have opened Jack from hip to ribs. Jack bent his spine in a way that suggested missing vertebrae. The horn scored the coat, not flesh. He grinned.
Chiaki kept him answering. Bullets stitched the space where the grin had been. Jack slithered out of their line, knife ringing once as it clipped a round and turned it into shrapnel glitter. Aiko: there and gone, calf whipping in. Blocked. Jay: claws carving. Dodged.
"Louder," Chiaki barked to herself, stance solid, cheek welded to stock. "Louder." She poured fire again, each burst placed to herd rather than kill. She didn't need to stop him. She needed to make him arrive where Aiko already was.
Aiko's next kick wasn't a kick; it was a feint that ended in her grabbing his wrist and blinking with it, dragging Jack a shoulder-width out of his own intentions. His knife bit nothing. Jay's claw bagged something: a slit on Jack's cheek. Blood slicked down, bright against his pallor.
The three of them shared a flash of teeth—short, sharp, almost smiles. A real hit. Proof of map over myth. Don't savor it. Make another.
Chiaki's rifle hammered again. Jack vaulted, coat hem slicing air. Aiko appeared where he would land and put her heel through his center mass. He hit floorboards that were already tired and bit a mouthful of dust. By the time his spine processed down from the shock and more than reflex moved muscles, Jay was there, claws driving into his abdomen, horn sawing through muscle, stopping at the hinge of pride.
Jack's mouth opened with a laugh and a cough came out. He lifted his chin—expecting the next percussion of bullets—and found, instead, Chiaki standing square before him. Her rifle was gone. The spear had come back, and its point was inside him.
She'd chosen a shape that did not forgive. He tried to lever himself off it with strength that had never failed him. It failed. The blade slid deeper, true as sunrise.
For a heartbeat the whole hall ricocheted quietly. Even Mamushi's snakes paused in their hiss. Even Doppelganger tilted her head. Ellie's fingers whitened on the beam. Tears—so human they almost seemed out of place on that face—climbed out of Jack's eyes and cut tracks down the dirt.
"No," he breathed, and the word had centuries in it. "I can't die right now. I stayed alive for centuries just to see my love. You can't just leave me again."
His gaze found Ellie and didn't leave her. Time turned in his eyes and showed a room lit by gaslight, a smaller girl with a ribbon in her hair smiling up at the wrong man, a river flashing like a blade, a rock, a splash, a keening that lived in him like marrow. He had tried to drown it with blood. It learned to swim. He remembered the bridge. The wind. The way the dark opened beneath him like a mouth.
The dark had not been empty. He had landed in void, and out of it a woman had walked—white silk dress, white hair like winter sun, skin pale, eyes bound in a black cloth that made her gaze feel everywhere at once. The space seemed to bow around her.
"Who are you?" he had asked, voice echoing because there was nothing to catch it.
"I'm the Goddess of Creations," she had replied, her voice a velvet knife.
"Why am I here?"
"I brought you because I sense you haven't fulfilled your life."
"What do you mean?"
"You're missing someone."
He had said Ellie's name the way starving people say bread. "But she passed away."
"She's still on Earth, wandering as a ghost. I can bring you back, and I can give you the ability to see her and touch her." The way she said touch had turned his bones to heat. "As long as you continue killing women as you did before."
"Of course," he had said so quickly that shame could not catch up. "If I can see my love again. I will do anything."
"Excellent." She had closed the space, a finger pressing his chest. Fire and cold spread in a circle under his skin. When she withdrew, a tattoo burned there—a dot. "It's time for you to take your revenge on the world that took something away from you."
Jack's face now was that same mixture of awe and hunger and borrowed purpose. He looked at Ellie as if she could rewrite all of it by letting him touch her hand. "Please," he whispered, voice shaking apart. "Just one touch."
Chiaki shoved. Jay's claws ripped free. Aiko's heel crushed his forearm as he tried one last reaching gesture. He sagged, the light around him guttering like the end of a candle. Smoke unraveled him. The knives clinked to the floor without hands, too quiet for what they had done.
Where he had been, there was only the smell of iron and old regret.
At the far end, Reid's rifle sang on, the muzzle a metronome, shoulders a machine in perfect economy. Mamushi had become a storm front—a roiling canopy of scales and mouths. Every snake Reid severed, she spat two more. They rippled over the wreckage with meals in mind. The assault rifle's stream kept the nearest from becoming fangs on his throat, but the whole thing felt like bailing a boat with a teacup.
"Damn," Reid grunted between bursts. "This is going nowhere. The more I shoot them down, the more she creates."
Sota stood at his shoulder, jaw clenched, eyes milk-white as his vision reached into the next five seconds over and over until the present blurred. It gnawed at him that Reid was the hammer while he was a metronome. He wanted to hit. He wanted to be the reason something fell.
The desire outpaced discipline. Before Reid could bark his name, Sota sprinted forward, shimmying through a tunnel between snapping heads, pivoting left-right-left in time with futures only he could see.
"What are you doing!?" Reid's voice rode gunfire.
"Don't worry about me!" Sota yelled back, a note of thrill riding the words. He had been sidelined by visions his whole life; this was the first time the visions felt like wings.
Mamushi's eyes narrowed, vertical pupils feeding on his audacity. She spat snakes. He wasn't where they bit. She swept an arm. He wasn't there either. He threaded a path that seemed like luck until you caught the pattern of how his shoulders pre-moved into what the next second demanded.
He reached her. For the first time, he was face to face with a myth he'd only tracked in after-images. Her breath smelled like riverstones and rot. She swung, and he had already begun to duck. He had seen this swing thirty heartbeats ago.
What he hadn't seen—what he literally couldn't see because the five-second window had been crammed with upper limb patterns—was the low whisper of her tail snaking along the floorboards behind him, scales soundless against dust. It wrapped his ankles with an affection that turned to violence.
"—Sota!" Reid shouted.
The tail whipped. Sota flew, crashed back-first into a cracked pillar, breath leaving him in a hurk. The vision snapped off like a light, shock scrambling the white in his eyes to a dead gray.
Mamushi smiled, a long, terrible curve that showed too many teeth. "You sure have fast reflexes," she purred. "Seems like you can read my attacks. Too bad you weren't focused on what was happening beneath you."
Sota's head throbbed. He pushed to elbows, coughed grit, and tasted iron. "And you forgot you were fighting two people," he said, because even dazed, his mouth could still carry a plan.
A clean, metallic click carried across the ruin. Reid's voice slid in after it, cool as a hand on a fevered brow. "You're wide open."
Mamushi turned, too late for this breath. Reid stitched bullets into a precise rectangle across her chest, then filled the rectangle until it was a door to the dark. Black blood sprayed and smoked. She staggered, more surprised than wounded—then the surprise cracked into something raw.
"NO!" she screamed, and the hall shivered.
Pain turned her inward. Memories broke their cages. The bridge appeared in her eyes, a rain-lashed span from another century. She was sixteen and obedient and trying. Takeshi's mouth had said love once; had said ugly hag now. His hands had lifted her, not the way brides are lifted, but the way trash is. The river had been cold and the rock unyielding. The dark void had been warmer than either.
The Goddess in white had told her that pain could be a purpose if you wrote it in other people's blood. A dotted mark had burned onto her chest, arranged like seeds planted in anger. Kill the ones who would throw women away, the Goddess had murmured. Kill them while they are still preening. Kill them before they have the chance to lie about love.
Back in the present, Mamushi's body began to smoke along the edges of her wounds. She shuddered, hissed a last vow with more ache than venom, and then tore apart into streamers of shadow that curled like incense and were gone. The shed snakes collapsed into skins and empty air.
Reid lowered the rifle only after Sota shouted "Clear," and even then his hands stayed tight a beat longer than necessary. He offered the boy a hand up. Sota took it, cheeks hot with the cocktail of pride and embarrassment, ribs barking, eyes already scrolling for the next five seconds.
"You scared ten years off me," Reid said, which was as close as he was going to get to a good job.
Sota smiled, winced, and nodded. "Sorry. It was the only path where you didn't get bit."
"Then I'm glad we're on that path," Reid said, patting his shoulder so he could pretend to be annoyed and concerned at once.
Sensei fought in a tight circle of tenderness and steel. The clones wore Hana's face, and every time one came close enough for him to smell the ghost of the iris oil she had favored, the world tried to pull him into a year long gone. He refused, not by hardening, but by choosing to treat the memory like a bowl set on a shelf: precious, breakable, not to be used as a weapon.
Doppelganger grew impatient. "What's the matter, old man?" she laughed as her clones raked shallow cuts into his forearms, his ribs, his cheek. "Is seeing your wife's face making you weak?"
He was bleeding freely, shirt clinging to his back, hair stuck to his brow. But his eyes held the same quiet he used to have when instructing Aiko on footwork in the courtyard. "No," he said, and let the cane's blade knock a clone's knee sideways. She dissolved with a hiss. "It's making me careful."
"Maybe you should give up and join your wife in the afterlife," she smirked, and four Hana-mouths smirked with her. "I can send you."
"Sensei!" Chiaki's voice. Jay beside her, horns dulled, Aiko limping a little on the leg Jack had nicked, Reid and Sota rushing up with smoke still clinging to them like bad perfume. The fight behind them spoke in absences: no Jack's laugh, no Mamushi's hiss.
Doppelganger's gaze flicked, taking census. The clean arithmetic of me versus many appeared along the line of her jaw. "My, my," she sighed, true annoyance thinning the vowels. "This isn't fair. It's six against one."
She dropped into shadow between floorboards as if the darkness under the shrine were water. Her clones winked out, leaving Sensei alone with his breath and the echo of Hana's shape burning like an afterimage against his eyes.
She reappeared on the hole-torn roof, silhouette cut out of twilight. Crimson and white, hair black as an ink stroke. From that height, she seemed to drink the last of the light.
"I'll be going for now," she said, cheerful again, as if dismissing a dull meeting. "But this fight isn't over. We'll revive the Goddess of Creations, and then this world will be covered in blood."
"We?" Chiaki called up, spear-tip still angled, voice steady. "So there are more of you?"
"Oh yes." Doppelganger smiled in a way that made the room feel smaller. "Much more. Bye-bye now."
She stepped backward into nothing and was gone. Wind pushed through the hole she left, flipping a charred prayer slip that clung to a beam. It twirled down and stuck to Sensei's sleeve. He peeled it off and pressed it to his chest without reading it, a small ritual against breakage.
For a breath, the shrine was only the sound of breathing and settling wood. Then footsteps and shouts rushed in as other shrine members arrived at a run, eyes widening at the wreck.
"What happened here?" a young man blurted, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
"We came as fast as we could," a woman said, hand already going to Chiaki's shoulder wound, palms beginning to glow with a healer's light.
"Wait," Chiaki said, looking from one to the other. "How did you guys know there was danger?"
Sota raised his hand like a kid caught with a slingshot. "While Detective Reid was distracting Mamushi, I, uh, took the chance to press the emergency button." He pointed with his chin toward a toppled dragon statue now resting belly-up against a cracked pillar. "It's hidden behind Sensei's favorite dragon."
Miles away, twilight soaked into the narrow aisles of an old neighborhood where the buildings leaned conspiratorially over the alley, where laundry lines made borders and light pooled in puddles of warm yellow.
A couple walked there the way couples do when they think they are alone with their evening. They argued about nothing that would matter tomorrow. She gestured with a cigarette, laughing. He reached for her hand and missed and reached again.
The first shot took him in the shoulder so cleanly that for a ridiculous second he thought he had been tapped by a friend. The second found the line between ribs on the left, and then he understood. She turned to him in a gesture that might have become a cradle, and a third shot tore the gesture apart. The sound in the alley was smaller than the way their bodies fell.
Shoes walked into the blood. They were gray. The figure above them was gray, clothing cut like anonymity, face obscured by the hat brim and the angle of shadow, the jawline wrong for any guess you might try to make. On the neck, just visible when the head tipped to consider the work, was a mark: an eye with a vertical line cutting its iris.
The figure crouched. Fingers—gloved, careful—dipped in the blood and lifted it with a kind of reverence. The alley wall became a canvas. The hand drew a circle and then an eye inside it, methodical. It was almost tender. The blood dripped down the lines like rain down window glass.
When the symbol was complete, the figure dropped a note that said, "Who am i?" and underneath were symbols blocked together like a crossword puzzle.
End of Volume 1