Forty seconds.
He had lasted forty seconds before his patience ran out completely.
A decent amount of time, considering what was going on on the other side of that door, and the fact that he knew what was going on.
In the end his impatience won. He lifted his finger, extending it like a lazy accusation toward the chunk of loose concrete near the baseboard.
It lifted off the ground, and flew towards the metal door.
Bam!
It hit the door hard, producing a sound like a gunshot. The ringing sound of the metal door vibrating spread through the empty corridor.
He retracted his finger, crossed one leg over the other and looked back at the wall.
'There.' A pause. 'Problem solved.'
Behind the door, the noise stopped.
Then came the scrambling, and then silence again.
It was the kind that meant people were getting dressed and picking up weapons and having a very quick and very quiet conversation about what that sound was and where it came from.
He waited patiently, this time, because this time he knew they'd be out quickly.
Two minutes passed, maybe a little more.
'I should have just crushed the whole room.'
Just as that thought popped into Muzan's mind, the door opened, and out stepped two men.
David came through first. He was wide through the chest, a spear loose in one hand.
Prana already running low and steady beneath his skin in the way of someone whose body had learned to arm itself before the mind gave the order.
His face was flushed, a sheen of sweat still caught the light at his temple.
His eyes moved to Muzan immediately, fast and sharp, and what filled them wasn't simply disdain or anger, but a particular type of irritation.
The second man, Cable, followed half a step behind and slightly to the left.
He was larger, considerably so, the kind of build that suggested the word "doorway" had been a recurring inconvenience throughout his life.
There was a massive sword that rode across his back, its blade wide and dark. His face held nothing readable, but his lips did twitch in annoyance.
They both looked at Muzan, and Muzan looked back at them.
He was still sitting on the crate, hunched forward, his hands in his lap.
His expression held nothing, conveyed nothing. It was a blank stare.
But there was a feeling the two men could feel from a mile away. There was a subtle kind of pressure around him.
David's grip on the spear shifted.
Cable's hand moved to his hilt without him looking at it.
Muzan let the silence sit for a moment, before he said,
"Jorge," he said. "The three outside, the man on his lunch break, the two in the main corridor, and the girl with the red lance."
He didn't explain anything else, just watched their faces.
David's eyes narrowed. "You took out all of them."
"Yes."
Something moved across David's expression. Not grief exactly, more like professional recalibration. "Some of them had an Orga Lux."
"They did." Muzan nodded.
He looked Muzan up and down, perhaps looking for some injury or any sign of battle.
"The jacket got a bit dirty." Muzan said, showing a small dirty stain.
A short silence.
Then David laughed. A short, sharp sound. The sound of a man who'd been impressed. "I like you," he said.
"You're either the real thing or you're completely insane and lying, and either way the next few minutes are going to be interesting."
"David." Cable looked at David, his voice flat and quiet.
"I heard you." David didn't look at him, but his tone softened.
Cable looked back at Muzan with narrowed eyes, and asked, "What do you want?"
Muzan looked at Cable, matching his tone, the flat kind, he answered. "Whatever I want, I'll take it myself. What you should be concerned with is what I'm offering."
He showed them two fingers as he said, "I'm giving you two options."
He stood up from the crate. "Take me to your leader and die with him, or die here and now."
He looked at them both. "Your choice, but make it quickly."
There was silence in the corridor.
David tilted his head. "That's not much of a choice."
To that, Muzan simply shrugged.
Cable and David exchanged a look.
They didn't need to speak to communicate with each other; they'd been partners for eight years.
Things like threat assessment, tactical consideration, and something else underneath both of those, something that had nothing to do with tactics, they didn't need words to converse about such things.
They looked back at Muzan.
"Tell me something," David said. His voice had dropped into a register that was almost conversational, almost pleasant, and was neither. "When you took out the others, did any of them make you work for it?"
Muzan blinked, a bit confused for a moment.
'Ah, a battle maniac, is it?'
He considered for a moment and then answered.
"No."
David gave him a toothy smile. "Then you haven't fought anyone real yet."
And before his words had even finished, he moved.
---
The spear came down, and the wind came with it — not a gust, a column of pressurized air.
Muzan sidestepped almost a second earlier, before the attack had even been launched.
Which turned out to be the correct decision, because the attack passed him just half a second later.
The column passed through where he'd been and blew a hole through the corridor wall, opening the view of the night outside, distant city lights visible through the gap.
'Hm, must've been the wind.' Muzan chuckled to himself.
Cable had already moved right. The massive sword cleared its sheath with a tone like a bell struck hard, and he was positioning — not attacking yet, boxing in the space, working the geometry in tandem with David's push without a word exchanged between them.
'Good.' A bone club formed in Muzan's right hand. Dense. Irregular. Spiked along its length with short, brutal projections. 'Very good.'
He went directly for David.
David thrust his spear forward.
Wind erupted from the tip mid-motion, a second burst of acceleration that turned a strong attack into something with an entirely different velocity behind it.
Muzan rotated his body and let the tip pass his ribs. The edge of the wind bloom tore his jacket open along the left side.
The club came down on the spear shaft with both hands.
The shaft held — Orga Lux didn't break that easily — but David's stance collapsed under the impact, his arms driven inward, and in that half-second of compression Cable's sword arrived from the right in a diagonal cut, heat trailing from the blade's edge.
Muzan caught the flat with his open palm and pushed down, redirecting it into the floor.
The corridor floor cracked from the point of contact outward in three directions.
Cable wrenched the blade back. Muzan stepped into the space it left, inside Cable's guard, and put his elbow into Cable's sternum with his full weight behind it.
Cable stumbled back a few steps, leaning against the wall, then using the distance from the retreat to bring the sword back around horizontal, forcing Muzan to drop under it.
David had recovered. Wind screamed from the spear tip, low and wide, a pressure wave rather than a column, designed to sweep.
It caught Muzan's legs, but he adjusted quickly, letting himself fall over the attack rather than letting it sweep him away.
He dropped to one knee.
"There." David's voice had gone sharp with something that enjoyed this. "Stay down there."
The spear drove down toward Muzan's shoulder.
The club came up in a short, vicious arc and caught David's forearm instead.
The crack rang through the corridor.
David grunted, as a sharp pain sank into his body.
His arm barely held — Prana-reinforced bone — but the thrust went sideways, the spear tip carving off the concrete beside Muzan's knee.
He was already rising, his left hand found David's collar, and then he pivoted.
David flew into Cable's follow-up swing.
Cable killed the strike a hand's width from David's shoulder. The heat from the blade's edge was close enough that it left a faint red line across David's arm.
"Watch it—" David snapped, spinning back into position.
"I watched it," Cable said, already moving. "You were slow," he said in his characteristic flat voice.
"I was setting him up—"
"You weren't."
David made a sound of pure irritation and drove back into the exchange harder, wind building around the spear in rapid tight bursts, each one nudging Muzan's footing, disrupting his base, creating windows for Cable to cut through.
It was elegant.
Not in any aesthetic sense, but in the sense of two people who had been running in parallel long enough to become one system.
David pressured, Cable punished. David opened, Cable closed. The rhythm was deep enough that neither of them seemed to think about it.
Muzan broke through David's next burst with a horizontal swing and kept walking forward.
Muzan's attacks, on the other hand, had become raw and barbaric instead.
Club across David's ribs. A slap across Cable's face. A forearm into David's chest when David reached for him.
Muzan was walking around them in circles, only engaging when they got too close.
"He isn't stopping," Cable said.
"Then we don't stop either." David's voice had shed the cruelty and left something harder underneath.
He drove forward again, wind screaming, and the combined pressure and teamwork from both of them finally pushed Muzan back towards the wall.
And then, a sudden strike from David pushed him back, his back hitting the concrete.
David laughed, breathless. "Cable! You see—"
Muzan came off the wall.
A punch hit David's shoulder, but this time, a bit harder.
The laugh stopped mid-breath as he was flung backwards.
Cable caught him.
"—that," David finished through his teeth.
His arm had slowed.
Cable's response was not a sound. It was the sword igniting, fire running the full length of the blade, and a swing that put everything he had into it.
His weight, his Prana, his feelings. Everything.
The slash reached Muzan and he caught it on the club.
The impact drove him backwards again, this time his back hitting the wall harder.
The club cracked along its spine.
Cable swung again, and again, and a third time.
"Stay—" Cable's voice had finally broken from its characteristic flat tone. "—DOWN!!!"
The club shattered on the fourth strike.
And as soon as it did, Muzan smoothly came up inside Cable's guard.
Both hands on the sword arm. The grip locked.
Cable's Prana pushed back, everything he had left going into resistance, and for half a second it was just that — Cable's remaining strength against Muzan's patience, which had no bottom to it.
Then the angle gave, and a sharp crack rang out.
Cable went down hard on one knee, sword arm wrenched out of its socket.
"Cable!!" Sharp. David's voice, something entirely different in it now, the cruelty completely gone and something much more exposed underneath.
David's spear came for the back of Muzan's skull.
He let go of Cable and dropped under it. The tip passed over him and drew a thin line across his scalp.
He formed a new club without looking at his hand.
David thrust again. Muzan caught the shaft, pulled him forward, and hit him across the jaw with the club at close range.
David's head snapped back, his jaw deformed. It was a miracle his neck hadn't snapped.
"Oou—" he started. (You)
The club came back across the other side.
"—afafouute—" (absolute)
And again, this time David didn't say anything anymore.
He lay on his back now. His Prana was doing remarkable work keeping him awake.
His eyes had gone briefly somewhere else and were fighting their way back.
"Haaf, aaa, u?" (What are you?)
He barely got out.
But Muzan didn't answer.
He moved forward.
Cable had recovered enough to swing with his off hand, a low cut, aimed at the legs.
Muzan just jumped it.
Cable ripped it free from its momentum and sent a beam of compressed fire down the corridor in a wide horizontal release — the swing carrying further than his arm, heat traveling the length of the hallway.
Muzan turned his cheek into it and let it pass. The heat was scorching enough that this small distance would have made any other man's skin blister and burn.
Of course, that is for any "other" man.
He stepped in and put the club into Cable's ribs.
Once, and that's all it took for the whole thing to give in.
Cable stumbled to the ground, and coughed painfully, something red and wet in it.
In this much time, David had recovered, and just like Cable, he put his all into one single strike.
He launched everything he had left in one thrust. Wind shrieking from the tip, the floor cracking under his feet from the force he was putting into his legs.
"Just—" His voice was barely recognizable. "—DIE—already—"
Muzan stood still as the spear tip hit his chest and went in.
A centimetre, maybe two.
But that's it.
The flesh closed before the blood moved, not even a drop escaped.
David stared at his own weapon embedded in a wound that had already stopped existing.
Muzan headbutted him.
The sound rang through the corridor.
David dropped again, this time for certain.
Cable caught him before he hit the ground.
No hesitation, no thought.
His good arm was simply there, already moving before David's legs gave, and they went down together — Cable's back finding the wall, David's weight settling against his chest, both of them on the floor with the corridor wreckage around them and the night showing through the hole in the far wall.
Cable's hand found David's.
He didn't say anything, and just held it.
David's eyes were half-open, the focus drifting in and out. His fingers moved against Cable's.
"...Should've run," David said very quietly. His voice wasn't something recognisable, but Cable could understand him.
His snark, anger, or whatever else he'd had, had already gone out. What remained was simple, and tired. "Told you."
"You didn't tell me anything," Cable said.
"I thought it loudly."
Cable didn't respond to that. His thumb moved once across David's hand. That was all.
Muzan stood over them with the club hanging loose at his side.
The corridor was destroyed. Concrete dust still drifting around in the wind.
The hole in the far wall framed a section of night sky, city lights scattered across the darkness beyond the platform's edge.
He looked at them.
He didn't hold any particular anger towards them, or any hate or anything like that either.
He didn't care about anyone's love life. Anyone could have whoever they wanted.
He was simply annoyed because he saw something he had no need to see.
...That's it.
Muzan looked away from them.
He formed a blood spike from his palm, thin and sharp.
He threw it. It was a painless conclusion for them.
He stepped past their bodies and walked toward the corridor's end, toward wherever the leader had decided to be.
A door opened below their fallen forms, and they fell down into the storage.
And then, the corridor went quiet again.
Just like before.