The pristine silence of the mountain clearing was a lie. It was a fragile shell, shattered by the lingering echo of Kenta's roar and the psychic stench of the dark blade's energy. As Kenta lay unconscious on the cold stone, Sarah's fear for him curdled into a hot, sharp fury. She rounded on the two enigmatic figures, her body trembling not from exhaustion, but from righteous anger.
"Why?" The word was a blade, aimed at both of them. "What was the point of that? What gives you the right to put him through… through that?" She gestured wildly at Kenta's prone form, her voice cracking. "That wasn't a test, it was torture! You broke him!"
Jokedone met her fury not with defiance, but with a profound, unshakable calm that was somehow more infuriating. "It was a necessary assessment, Sarah Yamazaki. The path you two walk does not lead to a garden party. It leads to battlefields where the sky bleeds and the earth forgets the names of the dead. We needed to see the mettle you are made of, not at its best, but at its breaking point. To see what lies beneath the discipline and the skill when both are stripped away."
Kaguya, who had been watching Kenta with a critical, almost surgical gaze, turned her sharp eyes to Sarah. A sly, knowing smile played on her lips. "You are both significant pieces on a board that spans continents and centuries. Your potential makes you valuable. Irreplaceable, even."
"Assets? Is that what we are?" Sarah shot back, her voice dripping with scorn. "Pawns for you to move around in your cosmic game?"
"It is for the sake of this world and all the fragile lives upon it," Jokedone's voice deepened, carrying a weight of millennia. "We, who have seen empires of dust and heard the death rattle of stars, have a duty to the future. A duty to ensure that those who will stand on the front lines against the coming tide are not merely strong, but unbreakable. What we did was not cruelty. It was a vaccination. A small, controlled dose of despair to build an immunity for the real plague to come."
A low groan drew their attention. Kenta was stirring, his eyelids fluttering as consciousness returned like a slow, painful tide. He pushed himself up on one elbow, his body protesting with a chorus of aches. His vision swam, then cleared, landing first on Sarah's worried face, then on the towering figure of Jokedone. And his breath hitched.
He knew the legends. The stories whispered in the most secretive dojos, the tales carved on forgotten stele. The First Disciple of Buddha. The last living student of the great Hikari herself. To see such a myth made flesh was a shock that momentarily overrode the memory of his own transformation.
"You…" Kenta rasped, his throat dry. "Why… are you here?"
"To look upon the successors with my own eyes," Jokedone stated, his voice devoid of grandeur, simple and direct. "To measure the spirit that now carries a legacy I once watched being born. Your potential, Kenta Yazuru, is a tangled, thorny thing. Especially your connection to the dark blade. It is both a magnificent promise and a terrifying threat."
"You know about Yami no Hikari?" Kenta asked, stunned. The blade's history was supposed to be a secret, lost to all but a few.
"I am aware of its every whisper and every scream," Jokedone replied, his emerald eyes seeming to look through him, into the very core of his struggle.
"Will someone please tell me what you're talking about?" Sarah interjected, her frustration returning. She hated being on the outside, unable to grasp the significance that hung thick in the air.
"We are discussing the weapon that nearly unmade your friend," Jokedone explained, turning his gaze to her. "And you should not feel overlooked, Sarah. The power you displayed, that cold, calculating efficiency… it is a seed. With the right cultivation, it has the potential to one day stand on the same precipice as Kanji himself."
The comparison was so audacious, so immense, that it stole the breath from Sarah's lungs. A flicker of something hot and proud ignited in her chest, a defiant spark in the gloom.
"Don't let it inflate your ego," Kaguya cut in, her smile a razor's edge. "Kanji is a primordial calamity wearing a man's skin. You have a spark, girl. He is the inferno. Remember the distance between a match and a wildfire."
Sarah's jaw tightened, her fists clenching. The warning didn't douse her pride; it poured oil on it, fueling a determination that burned brighter than any fear.
Kenta, gathering his strength, forced himself to his feet, leaning slightly on Sarah for support. The question that had haunted him since he first laid hands on the cursed katana finally found its voice. "How?" he breathed, his eyes locked on Jokedone. "How did she do it? The previous owner, Yami Matsumoto. How did she control it? How did she reach such heights without being… consumed?" The last word was a whisper.
A shadow of old grief passed over Jokedone's face. "I have my sources," he said vaguely, then his expression softened into something more personal, more pained. "But my knowledge is not just academic. Yami… was a dear friend. Her mastery of the blade was not a matter of control, as you think of it. It was a symphony."
He paused, collecting the memories. "Yami possessed a unique gift. She achieved not victory, but harmony. She did not fight the darkness as an enemy, nor did she surrender to it as a slave. She acknowledged it as a fundamental part of her own nature—the shadow cast by her own light. She found a balance, a precarious, beautiful equilibrium where both could exist without canceling the other out. Her discipline was not a wall to keep the darkness out; it was the bridge that allowed her to walk across it. That was the secret to her strength. That is how she reached the fabled LR Rank without losing her soul."
The revelation struck Kenta with the force of a physical blow. It recontextualized everything. His entire approach—the white-knuckled suppression, the frantic attempts to cage the beast within—was not just wrong, it was the very thing fueling his failure. It wasn't about rejection or submission, but integration.
Jokedone looked from Kenta's stunned face to Sarah's determined one. His gaze was final, his decision made. "Come with me," he instructed, his tone brooking no argument. "To my home. The Temple of Buddha. There, I will teach you both what you need to learn to survive what is coming."
Without another word, he turned and began to walk, not down the mountain path, but into the thick, untamed forest, expecting them to follow. After a moment's hesitation, a silent, weighty agreement passing between them, Sarah and Kenta fell into step behind him, leaving the scarred bridge and the churning lake behind.
---
The journey was a blur of dense foliage and silent, purposeful travel. Jokedone moved with an impossible grace, the forest seeming to part for him. They arrived not at a grand, visible structure, but as the trees thinned, before a massive, ancient gate that seemed to grow from the mountain itself. Beyond it, the Temple of Buddha was revealed.
It was breathtaking. Grand, sweeping roofs curved towards the sky, built from dark, aged wood and pale stone. It was a place that should have hummed with life, with the chant of a thousand monks, the shuffle of sandaled feet, the scent of incense and contemplation.
Instead, it was silent. A deep, profound, and utterly empty silence.
"Where is everyone?" Sarah asked, her voice, though hushed, echoing unnervingly in the vast courtyard.
Jokedone stopped, his broad shoulders seeming to carry the weight of the entire mountain. He did not turn around. "Years ago," he began, his voice low and hollow in the quiet, "during a time when Kaguya and I were… elsewhere, drawn away by a conflict of our own, a horde of demons found this place. They were not mindless beasts. They were calculated, merciless. They slaughtered every last soul. Every monk, every acolyte, every cook and gardener. They defiled the altars and soaked the stones with blood." He finally turned, and his eyes were ancient, haunted. "This temple is not a sanctuary. It is a tomb. A monument to our failure, our absence."
The weight of the tragedy settled over Sarah and Kenta, a palpable shroud. The beauty of the architecture was now a grim mask, every silent corridor a ghostly reminder of the lives that had been extinguished.
As if to shatter the somber mood he had created, Jokedone turned to Sarah, his demeanor shifting to that of a teacher. "Tell me, Sarah. Your abilities. Catalog them for me."
She listed them off, a roster of her hard-won power: multiple advanced combat styles, mastery over various weapons, a growing affinity for elemental magic, particularly fire and lightning.
Jokedone nodded, a faint, approving smile touching his lips. "A versatile foundation. Unrefined, scattered, but full of potential. Good. A block of marble, waiting for the sculptor."
Finally, as they stood in the heart of the silent temple, Kenta found the courage to voice the question that had festered within him since he first took up the blades. "Jokedone," he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. "How… how did my masters die? How did Hikari and Yami fall?"
The air in the great hall grew heavy, the silence now feeling attentive, waiting. Jokedone closed his eyes, pained.
"Hikari and Yami were two of the greatest warriors to ever grace this wretched world," he began, his voice thick with a sorrow that had not faded with time. "Their end was a tragedy woven from the very fabric of their power. Hikari, the original master of the light blade, was… cursed. The dark blade's influence was a poison to her pure spirit. It was not her destiny to wield such a weapon, and the dissonance between her soul and the blade's nature slowly ate away at her from the inside. It was a… a spiritual corrosion that no light could heal."
He took a shaky breath, the memory visibly torturing him. "And Yami… her end was even crueler. We faced an entity known as 'Dark Shadow,' a malevolent, fragmented aspect of Buddha's own wrath given form. In that battle, the darkness within her, the very power she had learned to live with in harmony, was amplified beyond any possible balance. It overwhelmed her, twisted her from the inside out. The pain, the madness… it became unbearable. To save herself from becoming a monster that would devour the world, and to save us from having to cut her down…" He trailed off, unable to say the words for a moment. "She was driven to take her own life."
The truth landed not with a shout, but with the final, soft thud of earth on a coffin. Kenta stood frozen, the tragic, intertwined fates of his two masters—one fallen to a foreign darkness that did not belong to her, the other consumed by the internal darkness she had called a friend—etching themselves into his heart like a funeral dirgy.
The path of the blades was not one of glory. It was a path paved with sacrifice, drenched in the blood of its finest masters. And he was now the next soul to walk it.