Raizen hit the mud running.
He slammed the car door open the moment Ichiro started forming the blade. He'd been watching Ichiro's shoulder. The stone's glow had been climbing for the last thirty seconds - brighter, hotter, the veins spreading faster. When the blade rose, he read Ichiro's hand the same way he read an opponent's grip in a sparring ring: the tension was in the fingers, not the wrist. It wasn't a threat. It was a decision already made. A decision he recognized.
Kill.
A flashing line of gold surged through the opening, brighter than the thunder above.
The impact traveled through Raizen's arms into his shoulders and down his spine. Stone against steel. He didn't absorb the force. He turned it - angling both blades simultaneously, redirecting the stone guilllotine's path sideways and down. The wedge hit mud instead of throat. It shattered on impact, fragments spraying outward, hissing in the rain.
