Kevin thought he heard someone yelling, but he couldn’t be sure. His hearing was growing weaker, along with his vision. Darkness seeped at the edges. Everything became blurry. He was… everything was…
Darkness.
***
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion.
A light spear appeared behind her mate and pierced him through the back. Lilian could only stare helplessly as Kevin stumbled forward, falling to his knees. Her eyes remained wide open, incapable of looking away when Kevin fell onto his side and didn’t get back up.
“Beloved…”
Her beloved. Her mate. Kevin was the most important person in her life. When he was with her, Lilian’s happiness knew no end. Her life had been an endless bliss ever since he started reciprocating her feelings.
“K-Kevin…”
Kevin meant more to her than anyone else. For the past six years, ever since their first meeting, her life had revolved around his words. They had given her the strength to fight against what she deemed an unfair fate.
And now he was lying there, on the ground, in an expanding puddle of his own blood. The light spear had since evaporated, which meant she had a picture-perfect view of the hole that went through his back and out his chest.
Lilian was not the only one staring at Kevin in shock. Iris, too, gazed at the still form of her sister’s mate.
She had learned a lot about the young man during their journey together, had seen more sides of him than she’d realized existed. Kevin had an inner strength that she had never seen in another person. Throughout their journey, he’d done things that she would have never believed possible had she not seen them with her own eyes.
A single human being should not be capable of fighting yōkai like he did. They should not be able to fight a yōkai on even grounds. Yet Kevin did, and that ability had made him seem invincible to her.
He didn’t look so invincible now, lying there, unmoving.
A distant rumble reached their ears. The sounds of battle met them and the ground beneath them vibrated as if being shaken by an earthquake.
Shinkuro frowned as he stared in the direction he felt the vibrations coming from.
“It seems my eldest son is battling someone…. rather recklessly at that,” he said, seemingly to himself. He turned back to the group of lesser kitsune before him. “I will have to deal with him after dealing with you.”
Maybe it was his words, the nonchalance with which he spoke. Or, perhaps the shock of what he had done to Kevin had finally worn off. Whatever the case was, in that moment, Lilian snapped.
“Extension! Celestial Art: Big Bang Theory!”
Lilian’s two tails entwined around each other and shot toward Shinkuro. At their tips, a small ball of compressed celestial youki quickly expanded in size, until it was nearly four times larger than Lilian herself.
“Aegis.” The word was calmly intoned, as if Shinkuro were merely speaking from a script.
Giant ball met shield and exploded with enough force to destroy the very ground around Shinkuro. Dust and rocks and clods of earth flew into the air, kicked up by the powerful explosion. It cleared seconds later to reveal Shinkuro standing at its epicenter, completely unharmed, protected by his Aegis.
“I commend your audacity, but an attack of this level will not—”
Kotohime appeared in front of Shinkuro, her katana flashing, a mere sliver of light reflected off a highly polished surface of steel.
“Ikken Hissatsu. Ichi no Ougi.”
Kotohime spun around in a clockwise motion, sparks flying as her blade slashed against Shinkuro’s Aegis. When she saw that the shield remained undamaged, Kotohime spun counterclockwise.
“Nii no Ougi.”
She pulled her wakizashi from its sheath and held it in her left hand in a reverse grip. Kotohime used it, along with her katana, to unleash an uncountable number of attacks on Shinkuro’s Aegis. San no Ougi. Yon no Ougi. Go no Ougi. Roku no Ougi… all the way to Kyū no Ougi. A small ripple seemed to pass through the golden barrier, which undulated for several seconds before settling down.
“An admirable effort,” Shinkuro began, “but ultimately a futile gesture. Surely, you can see that—”
“Void Art: Void Fire!”
Kotohime leapt out of the way just in time to avoid the black ball of compressed void fire that struck the Aegis.
In most instances, Iris’s void fire would not have done anything. While the Void consumed everything, it could be overpowered by techniques with more youki put into them. Shinkuro, as the mightiest of Celestial Kitsune using the highest tier of celestial techniques possible, would normally easily be able to overpower the attack of a two-tails had it not been for one tiny problem.
Kotohime’s attacks were techniques that used intense speed to create subatomic vibrations that could slice through anything. Even light. While the Aegis did not appear to have taken any damage, the truth was that Kotohime’s blades had, indeed, cut through his barrier. Dozens of tiny, millimetric cuts that created a small, almost invisible network of cracks.
And Iris’s void fire had just slammed into those cracks.
Shinkuro’s Aegis of Infinity shattered.
Too bad Shinkuro was no longer behind it.
Lilian’s eyes widened. “Iris, behind you!” she warned two seconds too late.
“Despite your kind being my mortal enemy, I must congratulate you on breaking through my barrier,” a voice said behind Iris seconds before half a dozen light spears pierced her body from a multitude of directions. Iris crumbled to the ground like a broken marionette. “However, your attacks are futile if you cannot even hit me.”
“Then try this on for size!” a familiar male voice shouted a split second before the clapping of gunfire rent the bamboo forest. Shinkuro put up an Aegis, but that proved useless when Kevin slammed into the shield and shattered it.
Kevin’s headbutt snapped Shinkuro’s head back. The young human followed this action by aiming his guns and unloading a barrage of youki bullets at the Celestial Kyūbi. The attacks missed, however, not because Kevin’s aim was off, but because Shinkuro was no longer there. In the blink of an eye, the powerful nine-tailed entity had vanished.
Two spears of light sank into the ground Kevin had been standing. Having thrown himself into a swift shoulder roll, Kevin landed back on his feet and spun around, handguns rising to fire another barrage—
—only to stop.
Shinkuro wasn’t there.
“You should be dead.” Kevin spun again to find Shinkuro standing several meters away. Even though his face remained expressionless, the tilt of his head betrayed the Celestial Kyūbi’s curiosity. “How did you recover from those wounds I inflicted?”
Kevin would have smiled, but that would have ruined the moment, so he settled for a smirk. “Like I’d tell you.”
Another unloading of bullets proved futile when Shinkuro conjured another Aegis. Kevin tried to close the distance, but their enemy had learned from experience not to let him get close. Before Kevin could even blink, Shinkuro was gone, and he was forced to avoid sixteen light spears that appeared out of nowhere and tried to skewer him.
While Kevin kept Shinkuro occupied, Lilian and Kotohime rushed over to the downed Iris. Lilian couldn’t heal her sister because of their diametrically opposed affinities. However, Kotohime quickly went to work on the Void Kitsune’s many wounds.
“How curious,” Shinkuro said several meters to Kevin’s right. “You are somehow able to dodge my attacks, but that should be impossible. All of my attacks move at the speed of light. You are a human, albeit, one with a strange ability that I’ve never seen before, but still just a human. There should be no way for you to dodge them.”
The smirk on Kevin’s face turned into a feral grin. “You should never underestimate humanity.”
“So it would seem,” Shinkuro said coolly before summoning another Aegis.
“Extension! Celestial Art: Double Flare!”
Two t
ails with bright balls of light on their tips struck the shield. Instead of detonating like a pair of bombs, these simply burst into twin lights of bright sunfire. Having clearly been expecting a regular attack, Shinkuro was unprepared to deal with such blinding radiance and stumbled back, furiously rubbing his eyes.
Despite being blinded, the Celestial Kyūbi still had the peace of mind to move away from his location, though the term “moving” didn’t adequately describe what Shinkuro did. It looked a lot more like instantaneous teleportation.
Kevin, Lilian, a now healed Iris, and Kotohime quickly gathered into a group, standing back to back in order to ensure that Shinkuro didn’t have a blindspot to use against them. About a dozen meters to their left, the still unconscious yama uba lay in an inglorious pile.
“I do not believe I need to tell you how foolish this is,” Kotohime stated. “Going up against a Kyūbi is suicide.”
“We know,” Kevin, Iris, and Lilian said at the same time.
“So long as you know.”
There was no more time for conversation, because at that exact moment, several dozen beams of light shot up from the ground.
***
Kevin had known the moment their battle truly started that it was going to be a hard fought one. He’d been hoping to use Shinkuro’s innate sense of superiority to defeat him before the Bodhisattva went all out. That hope was dashed after their initial assault failed.
Even when holding back, the Bodhisattva was not an enemy they could defeat.
The first to fall was Kotohime. Shinkuro had clearly determined that she was the greatest threat, possibly due to her possessing the highest number of tails, but Kevin also wondered if the Celestial Kyūbi knew that she was the one who’d healed him, Lilian, and Iris.
Like before, Shinkuro disappeared, vanished as if he’d never existed. Also like before, beams of light, the same beams that had pierced Kevin, Iris, and Lilian, tried to spear Kotohime. Those beams were swiftly and decisively reflected back at their owner by the arcing of Kotohime’s katana. Shinkuro reappeared some distance away and was forced to move again when his own beams were swatted back at him.
“Muku.”
Kotohime vanished at the same time that several dozen beams speared the ground where she’d been standing, perforating the earth with perfectly circular holes. The swordswoman appeared behind Shinkuro, her arm outstretched as if she had performed a slash, until she grunted in pain and fell to her knees. Kevin could see it, then, the blood leaking down her right shoulder and left thigh from wounds that he knew had not been there seconds before.
“You can fight at the speed of thought,” Shinkuro determined as he turned his head to regard the maid-slash-bodyguard. “That is most impressive. Very commendable. However…”
Several dozen globules of light appeared around Shinkuro’s head, hovering like fireflies. The globes became beams of light.
“Against someone who can attack at the speed of light, such commendable talents are still lacking.”
“W-what the heck?” Kevin gawked at what he was seeing. The beams of light were moving, bending and twisting and turning at irregular and impossible to trace angles. It should have been impossible. It was impossible.
Light always travels in a straight line unless the light particles are broken up by something like a prism, and even then, the light is no longer a single beam, but rather, multiple refractions that move on different wavelengths. It becomes a spectrum as opposed to a single beam.
Lilian’s techniques were not beams, which was why she could move them as she willed, but that also meant they couldn’t move at the speed of light.
What he was seeing now should have been impossible, and it was this very impossibility that made Kevin realize something he should have realized from the very onset of this battle.
The being they were up against was a Kyūbi. To such a creature, even the laws of physics were a suggestion at most.
Still, Kotohime moved. She was a swordswoman, and her voluptuous figure moved with swiftness and grace, sinuously dancing around the beams of light that assaulted her in all sorts of serpentine trajectories.
To the Celestial Kyūbi, the speed of light was not a constant for a specific medium. Making light move in curvilinear trajectories forced that light to lose some speed. Even if it was akin to dividing infinity by half, Kotohime existed on a level where such a difference could be taken advantage of.
Kevin and Lilian tried to help Kotohime, who was taking the brunt of Shinkuro’s attacks, but it was no use. Youki bullets and light spheres struck the Aegis and broke apart.
“Void Art: Void Fire!”
Iris also did her best to render aid as well, but it became immediately clear that even the black flames of oblivion could do nothing against Shinkuro’s overwhelming divinity.
“River Art: Ice Armor.”
Kotohime decided to up the ante. Rather than simply dodge attacks as they came, she covered her entire body in a layer of armor-like ice reminiscent of a samurai from the feudal era, and then charged at the nine-tailed kitsune. She deflected numerous beams of light with her katana. What beams she missed chipped away at her armor, which she quickly regenerated with liberal use of youki. It was draining, undoubtedly so, but if she could just reach Shinkuro before running out of youki, then she could…
But it was not to be. Kotohime was thoroughly blasted away a step before reaching Shinkuro. Fortunately, that kitsune was just a clone, a distraction. It dissolved into water, and the real Kotohime lunged at Shinkuro from behind.
It was clear from the onset of her attack that Kotohime had failed. Her blade penetrated his back, but it was too easy, there was too little resistance, like she was slicing through water instead of flesh and muscle.
And then the Shinkuro in front of her dispersed, bursting into thousands of tiny motes of light.
A clone. Like how she had tried to fool her opponent, Kotohime had been duped by a clone.
Shinkuro was no longer in front of Kotohime, no longer in front of anyone. What she and everyone else saw were hundreds of thousands of tiny motes of light, each of them roughly the same size as a grain of sand. These motes flew around in a swarm like fireflies and gathered to assemble the shape of an anthropomorphic, nine-tailed body.
This was the true form of the “body of light” technique that Li had tried to use. Kevin could already tell, even from this single glance, that Li’s technique was nothing compared to this. Above the enlightened being’s form, hundreds of orbs floated like will-o-wisps, waiting for the mental command that would transform them into an unstoppable rain.
Kotohime looked at the being who stood so far above her it wasn’t even funny, and she saw neither pity nor anger in his eyes. To him, this fight meant nothing. She meant nothing. Her powers, her skills, her precision with a blade, all of it was useless before this being whose unimaginable power let him stand on par with the gods. How could she dare to dream of matching such a creature?
“I commend you, Kotohime,” Shinkuro said. “Your skills are truly enviable. In other circumstances, I would like nothing more than to test your mettle, to watch you prove yourself. However, our current situation has dictated otherwise, and so I must end this.”
“Not before I end you!” Lilian shouted. “Gomu Gomu no Kevin!”
Kotohime blinked. Shinkuro blinked. Neither of them could understand just what they were seeing. It was so surreal, so incredibly stupid, that had it not been happening before their eyes, they would have never believed someone was dumb enough to do this.
Kevin’s legs were entwined firmly by Lilian’s tails, which extended to incredible lengths at an impressive speed, turning the young teen into a human missile.
Shinkuro did not bother to deflect or dodge the incoming Kevin. The bullets that splashed against his body of light, fired from the gun in Kevin’s right hand, did nothing to him. Kevin reached Shinkuro and still the Celestial Kyūbi had not moved. After all, it was one thing to defeat his Aegis, but there was no
way a human could—
Shinkuro’s thoughts were abruptly halted when Kevin extended his left hand and slammed it into his torso. The Celestial Kyūbi’s body was thrown away like a ragdoll, tumbling along the ground before coming to a stop when he impaled four of his nine tails into the earth.
“Ha! How do you like that?!” Kevin barked a victorious laugh as Lilian walked up to him. He and his mate shared a high five. “Are we awesome, or are we awesome?”
“I… I can’t believe it…” Kotohime muttered in shock. “He just… Kevin-sama just…”
It was just like when he broke through Shinkuro’s Aegis. It should not have been possible. Kevin was a human with no supernatural powers. Even if he wasn’t, it would take an entity on the same level as a Kyūbi to defeat that technique, and yet he had done it so easily.
Kotohime allowed herself a smile. “Maybe we can really…” “Win” was what she wanted to say. She couldn’t, however.
Because at that moment six beams of light suddenly penetrated her body, leaving fist-sized holes in her chest, shoulders, and thighs.
***
It was like watching a movie in slow motion. The beams pierced Kotohime from behind, the woman’s eyes widened in shock, and then she looked down at the holes that made her body look akin to Swiss cheese. She looked back up at Kevin, Iris, and Lilian with uncomprehending eyes, and then toppled over, crumbling to the ground where she lay unmoving.
“K… Kotohime….?” Lilian stared at the figure of her maid. “Wh… what…?”
“Truly,” a voice said somewhere to their left, “you are a strange and problematic human.” Shinkuro stood before them, his body once again pristine, showing that Kevin’s attack hadn’t done any lasting damage. “It seems I will need to take care of you first. Such a troublesome ability does not belong in the hands of a human.”
Kevin’s danger sense warned him seconds before ten beams tried impaling him and Lilian. He shoved his mate out of the way just in time to let her avoid certain death, but could not do so himself. Fortunately, he’d already seen this technique enough times to avoid the beams before they could hit him.
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