When I was around ten years old, I watched this movie called The Plague Dogs. Which if we’re being honest about, I really should not have been watching at that age. On a subsequent rewatch when I was older, there were so many mature themes in it that went over the head of a child or were otherwise just beyond the pale for a child to be witnessing. Still, I did take away a few things from the animated film.
The protagonists are two dogs being used for experiments and testing. An unfortunate fact of life is that many medical treatments are tested on animals before they ever reach human trials, but that was just how the cookie crumbled. In the film, though, they were being forced to swim endlessly, under a variety of different conditions, until they managed to escape the facility and went on the run from there.
What happened in the film itself wasn’t that important. The idea that the dogs would keep swimming if they thought there’d be an end eventually was one that sort of stuck with me for a while. Even with no actual tangible evidence that there was an end, they swam longer and fought harder to reach that imagined point of salvation.
The moral of the story is that if you fought harder, in certain survival situations, you had what was basically a better chance of success and actually managed to get through a tumultuous situation. If you didn’t, well, your odds began to drop precipitously. So between giving up and holding out hope, or not…
I chose to believe that things weren’t hopeless. That the situation would come to a positive end result, no matter how much my personal reality did not match that belief. Wherever I was, the dimensional control that I usually held wasn’t functioning like it was meant to. Like, I understood how I could make a portal and could feel the destinations ahead of me. That hadn’t changed. The problem here was that whatever was keeping me from leaving this bounded space was persistent. Stubborn, really, in how it disrupted my every attempt to leave. It didn’t feel natural either, which meant that someone had a hand in altering or creating my local environment.
And this environment didn’t seem so friendly to begin with. I found myself in a vast network of rocky caverns and cave systems, where there were all manner of lava flows and other dangerous environmental conditions. Nothing that was actually going to pose much of a threat to me, though. What was even stranger, though, were the presences that I kept picking up around me.
I hesitated to call them conscious in the way a person was. They were more like bundles of negative emotion attached to vast reserves of physical might, slumbering even deeper below me. None of them seemed too strong, but it was the first time that I had to wonder whether or not this world had even more threats just lingering beneath the surface.
Regardless, standing around just waiting for someone to save me was a bad idea. So as I cast my vision outward and began to explore the ins and outs of the vast channels, hopping from rock to rock as I tried to find anyone who might be able to assist me.
There were others that seemed much smaller than the slumbering signatures, but getting to them was the problem if I didn’t want to just burrow through the ancient layers of stone. However, one signature seemed remarkably close to me after the minutes of exploration, and it was, even strangely enough, someone I recognized.
So I hurried toward them, especially once my eyes confirmed that I wasn’t just hallucinating in my increasing amounts of panic.
There Damien stood. In the flesh, making me smile widely as I looked at him. “You’re here?”
“I am,” Damien spoke, sounding both upset and focused with the statement in equal measure. “I was the only one who could come to save you. This place…it’s designed to sap at hope. It’s good to see you’re still in high spirits.”
Pausing, I stared over at the man, giving the environment another one-over. “Where is here, exactly, anyway?”
“Hell. Or what the humans call Hell.”
“...Pardon?”
“We’re in Hell,” Damien explained with no further preamble. “Or the Under Realm, as we inhabitants call it. It’s a world unto itself, a metaphysical prison as much as it is a land with its own rules and mechanisms.” He gestured out to the fields of molten lava and rock, inhospitable by the standards of most peoples. “My home.”
That made sense, or at least began to explain why my portals weren’t working here. Of course the place specifically designed as a prison would have rules and mechanisms that I wasn’t actually familiar with. Much of the magic systems of this new universe, if you wanted to call them that, were just as bizarre to me as chakra was to everyone else.
I hated it.
“I can see why you came to the surface. It isn’t, uh…” How did I want to dance around what I felt about this place?
“It’s not pleasant, no,” he confirmed. “And the job of my people is to keep what slumbers here tortured and sedate, weakened under our treatment, so that they may never rise to threaten what lies above.”
Honestly, I had no idea of what the cosmology of this world was, so I didn’t have the faintest clue if he was just feeding me lines or telling the truth. My prior interactions with Damien made him seem vaguely altruistic, though, so I was willing to just listen to him. For now, anyway.
“Alright, eternal realm of infinite torture, I’m digging it,” I lied. I was not digging it at all. “How do we get out?”
“Not we,” he spoke, pointing at me. “You.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Omni-Man wars with his son on the surface, if you could call it that.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. And Damien didn’t have the generosity to let me settle with those words before he came closer. “His son rebels and tries to fight the best he can, but…”
A cold, deeper than any I’d ever conjured, settled into my gut. Was all of this my fault? No, I wasn’t so selfish as to put all of these chains of events on my own shoulders. People had their own agency. I wasn’t going to take that away from them.
But I could have done more to prepare rather than goofing off. I’d gotten comfortable here, in this new life of mine, without throwing myself headfirst into what it meant to be a superhero. To be willing to carry everything on my shoulders, because I was the strongest man available to solve some of these problems, it seemed.
“So you’re, what, stuck here while I get sent back?”
“It’s home, no matter how much I’ve tried to escape it,” Damien admitted, glancing around forlornly. “And it’s the right thing to do. Saving the world is bigger than any one man’s, one demon’s, wants and desires.”
Working my jaw back and forth, it felt as if I’d taken a measure of Damien here and now. Gotten an understanding of the Demon in a way our brief conversation hadn’t let me take his measure before. What I was getting was that more than anything else, this was someone who understood duty in their own way.
I’d never thought I had a duty to the world until now. But I felt the responsibility crowding in around me. There wasn’t anyone else who could step up and solve this problem. No miracle that’d manifest itself from the ether to stop this threat the Earth faced. Just me, a goofy little man cosplaying an alien and trying not to be found out as I roleplayed with their memories.
“...When this is all said and done, I’ll try to find a way to get you back to Earth,” I promised. “That’s the least that you deserve.”
“We rarely get what we deserve in this life, Taijitu. As long as you ensure Omni-Man gets what he deserves, I’ll be satisfied. I couldn’t find a weakness to solve this case. But I can ensure this much happens.”
With a deep breath, I nodded at the man. “Alright. What do we need to do to make this work?”
“A ritual. A mandala, a circle of sorts, that I’ll empower to send the ‘sinner’, you, from this place you fundamentally do not belong,” Damien explained. “Hell is not a place for most, and you as a foreign entity to this planet belong here less than anyone else.”
Earth’s magical traditions and systems were foreign to the extreme to me. Something was telling me maybe that ought to change if I survived the next twenty-four hours.
“Alright. Let’s get started.”
My crash course in diabolism came in the form of a tradition that wasn’t all that dissimilar to fūinjutsu or jutsu shiki. At least, that was how it might have seemed on the surface. The first was all about sealing things inside of other things, no matter how much fanfiction had lied to me over the years and stretched what fūinjutsu could actually do. Much the same was true of jutsu-shiki, though that was where you began to reach into more exaggerated, supernatural, weird effects like the Flying Thunder God technique.
This was different in that it was from an entirely separate, fundamentally nonhuman set of design imperatives. All of the symbology seemed almost like certain surface languages or had perhaps inspired them, but in the most pure form that had originated from demons. Primarily because it seemed to be designed to specifically be written with a set of claws.
I didn’t have claws, but I did have Damien, who was able to work in concert with me as we carved the sigils into the stone. Bit by bit, whorls and iconography that seemed eldritch in the philosophies espoused took form. Trying to discern meaning from it wasn’t going to come overnight, and frankly, I had much bigger fish to fry than trying to educate myself on a brand new system of magic.
By the time we were done, the smooth, flat outcropping of rock that we were perched on was more or less prepared for whatever it was that Damien had in mind. Even holding the complete symbology in my mind, I didn’t have any clue as to how this would work. So divorced was it from fundamental chakra-derived techniques, I could only guess at the space-time elements that could be surmised by what we intended to do.
“So how does this work exactly?” I asked, standing in the center of the diagram laid out.
“I’ll be spilling my blood,” Damien explained, offering an outstretched wrist. “Which, when combined with the carvings, should activate to slingshot you to the surface."
“I’d like something more confident than should.”
He rolled his eyes as a claw moved to pierce his wrist, while thick, dark ichor began to splatter to the ground. “Will slingshot you to the surface.”
“Thank you. From there, I guess it’ll be up to me.”
“Mmm,” Damien confirmed with a slow, languid nod. Underneath me, the carvings that we’d hastily made began to glow with an eerie, unnatural red light. It made my skin prickle uncomfortably as I breathed in and out, feeling a rising charge in the ritual itself. “Save our world, Taijitu. And stop Nolan’s madness from continuing.”
“I don’t intend on doing anything less,” I promised him, feeling the resolution fill me. At some point the blood spilled crossed over some threshold invisible to me, a point of no return, and there was a flash of light. A gout of flame that overtook me, sweeping over my body with a heat almost on the verge of being uncomfortable.
The entire process took seconds. One second I was there, and the next I was gone.
In the next moment my eyes were opening on the familiar clear skies of the surface. There was none of the hellish landscape that I’d escaped around me, but instead the crackle of communications channels as the GDA reasserted themselves in my ear.
“Good to have you back, kid,” Cecil spoke, his voice tight with tension. “How operational are you?”
“Nearly topped up on chakra. Where’s Nolan, Mark, and the Immortal?” While I didn’t expect the news to be good, the response from Cecil only made my mood plummet all the lower.
“The Immortal is mission-killed,” the director explained, dashing my hopes for an ally in this fight to come. “As for Mark and Nolan, I’m shooting the coordinates to you now. Mark’s not doing so hot. So… you’re our last real hope here.”
“Then I’ll be sure to live up to the expectations. I’m moving out.”
The only question was whether or not I’d actually have the strength to see it done. If the cost was everyone else on this world, or however many innocents would be slain in Nolan’s mad rampage, though…
I knew what I’d do.
It took me relatively little time to arrive where the fighting was still taking place. In my head, I had an idea of how bad things could get, but apparently my imagination for the scale of destruction and conflict that could be had when two sufficiently powerful superhumans fought each other wasn’t high enough.
Chicago from a distance mostly seemed like the place I’d known and come to enjoy over the months since I’d arrived in this new world of mine. It wasn’t as if I’d held any great appeal for it before then, even when I’d still been a human. My home back then had been Allentown, Pennsylvania. Still, when you lived somewhere, you developed a fondness for it, even the rougher parts of the experience.
I could still remember my first crappy apartments fresh out of college and the leaky faucets that always jacked up my water bill. That was just the type of sentimental person I was, someone who could get misty-eyed even thinking about the bad stuff. But coming up to the city, I could see something that was too far beyond the pale, even for me.
Tendrils of smoke rose up from ruined skyscrapers and buildings all over as the fight between father and son raged. Though I’d say calling it a fight was rather generous to Mark, if we were being honest about the matter. Nolan was an unstoppable juggernaut, and Mark, seemingly new to his powers as he was, just couldn’t seem to actually stand up to him.
People were dead and dying all over the city. Every part of me wanted nothing more than to help the people bleeding out, trapped underneath rubble. Trying to rescue their loved ones that just weren’t able to get out of the way of collapsing structures. All of the messy, horrific tragedies playing out all around me.
For the first time, I wished I didn’t have the Byakugan. If I didn’t, the scale of the horror wouldn’t have been so clearly defined to me. Or maybe I wouldn’t know what was at stake if I couldn’t see it with my own two eyes. No matter how much I wanted to peel off a few clones to help save people, I also knew that every scrap of chakra was going to be needed for the fight ahead.
So I’d just curse Nolan for putting me in this position. I saved a share for myself for not being strong enough to save everyone, no matter how unreasonable it was as a position to take. If there was ever a time to stop that from being the case, though, it was the massacre in the subway that’d just apparently wrapped up.
All of the personal horror I felt about the matter was put into a tiny little box and packed into the back of my mind. Whatever emotions that weren’t directly conducive to actually putting Omni-Man down were secondary and ultimately not useful for the moment at hand. What was useful was saving Mark, though, and buying him a bit of breathing room.
Between blinks I was there between them.
Nolan was looming over his son, preparing for whatever fucked-up part of this family fight was coming next. What he hadn’t expected was for me to teleport out of nowhere, as he caught a glimpse of me at the last second before I hit him. I might have worried about hitting anyone living if it hadn’t been for how decidedly ruined these tunnels were from his antics and the sheer lack of living vital signatures I was picking up.
“Taijitu…?” Mark spoke, looking up at me as I stood there before him. With a nosebleed, a mask that was half-ruined, and generally just a look like he’d been put through the ringer, I was more surprised that it hadn’t been worse.
Or maybe his father wasn’t trying as hard to actually murder his son, as he was attempting to discipline the teenager. If that was the case, I had even more to hate Nolan for.
Mark spat out a thick, phlegmy blob of blood as I reached down and grabbed him by the shoulder. Hauling the boy up, I knew we had seconds at most before his father was upon us again. Maybe briefly stunned by the force of my blow, but it wouldn’t last for long. “You need to get the hell out of here. Start trying to rescue people.”
“I-I can—" he coughed, spitting blood. “I can still fight!”
“You’re too weak!” I shouted, seeing Nolan peeling himself out of the ruin. “You’re a liability, and I can’t cut loose with you here!”
Whatever shouted response he had, I wasn’t listening. Instead, as Nolan came surging forth up out of the rubble, I slammed into him with another punch, putting all of my strength and as much chakra reinforcement as my body could take into the blow.
He went flying, the concussive force of the blow sending dust and debris flying to and fro, as I flew after him, grimacing at how quickly he recovered. His eyes widened briefly at the sight of me as we went up into the cloudy sky, but the surprise didn’t last long. Not as he blurred into motion toward me.
“You should have stayed in hell!” Nolan was fast. Maybe as fast as Battle Beast, much to my chagrin. But now that I was ready for it, as he came toward me with a gloved fist, I knew something for sure.
He wasn’t faster than me.
“A little too hot for my tastes!” I yelled back, jerking myself out of the way as he went reeling past me, before I slammed my foot into his exposed side. “Damien Darkblood sends his regards, though!”
We were in the skies above Chicago, and frankly, it was my goal to try and remove him from the local environment as efficiently as possible. That was the best way to ensure that civilian casualties didn’t rise any higher. Teleporting him away would have been the best option, but again… I was trying to save as much chakra as I could for the things I needed to do.
Just because I had an ocean of it didn’t mean that it couldn’t run out in due time. Flying and reinforcing my body used it up just as quickly. I had multiple different ‘win conditions’ that I needed to meet. Keeping people safe, surviving the fight, and defeating him soundly. Nolan had just the one.
Killing me.
Unfortunately, my enemy wasn’t stupid. Given the way I was trying to put my body between the city and him, I saw it in his eyes when he realized what my aim was. Then, he propelled himself even faster, dropping toward a skyscraper like a bomb. My options were limited, but I still had a few.
The sound barrier broke as I interjected myself between his outstretched fists, grunting as I put my hands against them to try and stop him. “GODDAMNIT!”
“Your fondness for these insects is a weakness!” Nolan roared, overpowering me through sheer might, though at least he wasn’t on a collision course with the city anymore.
That was the good news, I guess. The bad news was that being this close to Nolan had an unfortunate consequence. Something that I learned firsthand as he punched me in the nose hard enough to send me hurtling through the sky. Blood gushed from the wound. A wave of throbbing pain struck me as I flew miles in seconds. Getting hit like that was unpleasant, but it was also informative in equal measure.
In terms of raw strength and the willingness to use it to kill their opponents, Battle Beast had him beat. Not by a small amount, either. For the first time in this entire chain of awful events, I had the inkling that I could actually win this. If nothing else, the confidence that you weren’t fighting hopelessly was a hell of a drug.
Whatever clever thoughts I had stopped as I slammed into the waters of Lake Michigan, sending massive waves of water from my impact. Almost the second I did so, though, I split off water clones from me, infusing the local environment with chakra as a veritable crowd of Genji took off into the air, hovering above me.
Not that I was expecting them to do anything more than buying me some time. Water Clones did have some benefits over my favored Ice Clone jutsu. For one thing, they shared the capacity to be ‘charged’ with chakra, or serving as mobile bases for other water jutsu to be cast through. I didn’t need them to be combat-effective; I needed them to waste time for me. The more the better for what I had in mind to try and actually deeply harm Nolan.
The problem with Dust Release was that it required a bit of setup. If we’d gone with the original plan, before I’d literally been sent to Hell, the Immortal and Mark would have bought me the time that I needed in order to create the construct, at which point we’d find the right time to hit Nolan with it and hope that it was enough to deal some serious damage.
That plan had not survived first contact with the enemy. Apparently, neither had the Immortal. I’d give him a pass for not being at the top of his game, overpowered, and just straight up emotionally destabilized. It didn’t change the fact that our original plan just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Which meant that it was time to get creative and show Nolan just how goddamn annoying fighting someone like me could be.
Nolan was practically right on my heels from when I’d been blasted out of the city. That didn’t mean he had even the remotest capacity to discern which of my clones was the real me. Faced with that question, he went for the simplest option, which was attacking the crowd of hovering bodies.
He did so. He did so without the faintest hint of hesitation or consideration for any sort of it being a trap, which, uh, was tearing through my clones rather quickly. So I hurriedly put my hands together, every iota of concentration on the process at hand of molding chakra in the right amounts to achieve dust release.
My knee-jerk reaction to combat was, and always likely always would be, being a complete Ice Merchant. HOWEVER, there were times when I had to put my preferences to the side, and fighting Nolan was one of them. If a bandaged-up gimp and big-nosed geezer could manage it, by god, I wasn’t going to be outdone in forming the sphere between my hands as I hid beneath the surface of the water.
Above me, Nolan tore apart the clones with a brutal efficiency. The only thing that slowed him down was the fact that I threw a bunch of stupid tricks into each one, like how they’d explode into a cloud of obscuring vapor when struck. Or, well, explode into actual fragments of chakra-infused ice that he had to take the second to shield his eyes from.
After the first couple of traps like that, he got warier, slowing down his assault and limiting himself to counterattacks. All while they were floating around doing their best to make him lose his composure.
“This is the strongest man on the planet? Getting bogged down by a bunch of clones?”
“He can’t even tell which of us is the real one.”
“Nah, he’s just scared. That’s why he went through so much trouble to send us away.”
“Fair. Ain’t so easy to beat someone up if they aren’t a defenseless human or his own son.”
The goal was to make him lose his cool. Judging by the gritting of the teeth I glimpsed, I was matching the assignment well enough. Eventually, though, Nolan blew a stack as he shouted. “COWARD! You hide behind tricks, like the weakling you are!”
No small amount of self-control was required to not just immediately slam forward and abandon my tactical plan. A large part of me, a stupid part of me, wanted to prove my dominance through straight-up force of arms. For obvious reasons, I did not use my fists when I rushed toward him.
Instead I rose from the water with a crack sounding out from my sheer speed, with a pale chakra construct lacing my hand. Coming up directly below him, a combatant like Nolan had enough skill and experience in three-dimensional combat that I didn’t manage to get a direct hit on him with the Kekkei Tōta.
…But I did manage to get a glancing one.
The resistance the jutsu met against his flesh was immense. This was a technique that was basically a one-hit kill if it struck you anywhere vital in the Elemental Nations, but here and now, it was only carving against flesh that seemed to actively resist the strike. What was important, however, was that it did actually hurt him.
Going from his lower left abdomen all the way to the top of his right pectoral, blood freely ran down his chest. The costume had been disintegrated from the strike, and at least the upper layer of dermis was removed to the point where it proved that Dust Release could pierce him. Almost like he’d been flayed, to an extent, the red, sinewy muscle exposed to the open air in a way that seemed painful.
Good. I wanted it to hurt.
Maybe if I’d managed to get a more head-on strike, or with a bigger target than my globe, it’d be enough. More than anything else, I felt a thrill of hope rise within me. The notion that I could win this fight.
Not only that, but Nolan seemed downright shocked by the attack, staring at the globe in my hand warily as he reached over and touched his wounds without even blinking. “...You hurt me. You actually managed to wound me.”
“Something new I cooked up. Just for you.”
Detachment of the Primitive World Technique wasn’t bad, but I preferred to just make a version that was more like a scrape on whatever it touched. Functionally, it operated more like some kind of bastardized rasengan than the Dust Release that I was originally familiar with. Cobbling together some kind of variation of it held together by spit, hope, and my own inhuman level of chakra control.
I was pretty proud of it, but even prouder of the fact that I immediately chose to follow it up with further assaults and not rest on my laurels. He was wounded, he was surprised, and I didn’t have any intention of letting Nolan recover from the attack if I could help it. He’d proven precisely how dangerous he could be with even the slightest amount of hesitation.
It wasn’t a lesson I needed to learn twice.
Darting forward through the air, I slammed my fist into his gut with as much strength as I could muster. Enough to knock the air out of his lungs, as his initial shock had faded, while also wincing as he dodged the orb of death in my hands. Or if not death, then at least something that could actually hurt him.
If there was a problem with this tactic, it was that even my enormous chakra reserves were going to run out eventually. Maintaining my flight, strength, Byakugan, and Dust Release technique was already so far beyond your typical shinobi to maintain even for a minute simultaneously. And despite the fact that he was engaging me a lot more warily now, he still had several advantages on me.
However, I was confident for the first time in this fight. Especially as we began to exchange blows. For all that he was wary of my new weapon to face him, that also meant that Nolan had to take it into account with every attack I made. Which opened him up for punches, kicks, and whatever strikes that I could get on him.
Were they individually damaging, as, say, actually landing the Dust Release? No, they weren’t, but every little bit added up when you were someone as strong as I was. Especially as his blood ran freely from his given wounds, though I could also see that the flow was being stemmed as we fought. Viltrumites really were such bullshit.
… Yes, I know the pot was calling the kettle black there.
Still, managing to actually pressure Omni-Man of all people had me feeling some kind of way. It was that sensation of confidence and arrogance that could only sweep over a member of my race when we were ahead. Which usually ended up also being the thing that ended up getting us killed.
Case in point, when I went for another strike with the lethal weapon in my right hand, having gotten used to the flow of combat. And then Nolan changed it up on me, moving just a little slower so that he could grab my wrist…and squeeze. It was at that moment that I understood that for all of my combat experience, I still had a thing or two to learn.
Nolan seemed to be kind enough to continue my education, as he crushed the bones in my wrist to drive his fist against my face, making my head snap back. All while I tried to pull myself free, and his fist slammed into my body over and over again. Powerful, resounding blows of nothing but concussive force that made me painfully aware of the sheer difference in actual might between us.
I may have been faster, but technique and strength could win out against such things with the right moment to strike. Learning that lesson was valuable enough, though learning it at the point of being brutalized this much left something to be desired. Especially as Nolan reached for my shoulder and began to pull.
There’s something poignant about being almost certain that you were going to die. It cleared up any doubts, confusion, or otherwise secondary extraneous thoughts that might have been clogging your vision of the situation. Nolan had my wrist and shoulders in his hands and was doing his best to dismember me. Anything else that was not immediately in service of rectifying that from happening was useless.
A lot of things happened in very quick succession, as the pain and agony of having his hands literally trying to tear me apart almost became too much to take. It was all instinct, with barely a conscious thought driving my actions. Just the purely bestial need to survive.
First, I created a nigh-perfect copy of myself out of ice in the air. Then I immediately substituted myself for it. It was a move that bought me a second or two, and they were seconds I used well, as blood streamed from my eyes and ears, with my vision tinged pink.
Everywhere across my body ached, and the only thing I wanted to do was pass out just to avoid the pain. But that would mean letting Nolan win, and that was just something that I wasn’t willing to do. Call it a vestige of my Ōtsutsuki pride, or sheer, unrelenting will to survive at all costs. Whatever it was, it made me more tenacious than I’d ever been, more than I’d ever felt in either of my lives.
The chakra pathways in my arm were fine. All of the bones, joints, and muscles, less so. Could I still fight with it? It wasn’t a question of whether or not I wanted to, so much as the assurance that if I didn’t, I’d be too dead to worry about permanent injury.
It was almost an afterthought, with my mind racing a million miles a minute, to cobble together a new Dust Release jutsu. To throw it his way, as Nolan tried to twist out of the way. He’d even almost managed to dodge the cube that was rapidly expanding, only having his arm captured in the process, as the huge sums of chakra I poured into it made it take effect. All while the glowing white sphere of annihilation at the center of the cube expanded to fill the space with molecular destruction.
He didn’t lose the arm when it was all said and done, which was probably the nicest thing that could be said about the process. What was less pleasant was Nolan’s scream as layers of his arm were being broken down by a considerable chunk of my remaining reserves. As in, quite possibly nearly half in one concentrated attack. If he’d like to try and tear my arm off, I imagined that doing something adjacent in turn was fair play.
It didn’t last more than a moment or two, but as the jutsu faded, the ruins of his arm were clear as day. Pulsing, red, violently throbbing flesh as the costume and upper layer of skin had been exposed to the air. Even the bone in some places, though that had seemed too hardy for even my Dust Release to destroy.
The entire thing process couldn’t have felt pleasant, nor could it feel amazing to have me slam into him as we flew through the sky together. My arms around his chest, teeth grit, as the two of us crossed miles and miles in a few short instants. Someone was screaming, and it took me a moment to realize that it was me.
When we hit the beach, I didn’t stop my attack.
He was underneath me, stunned, and I didn’t hesitate to keep hitting with my good hand, spitting out the hottest flames of fire out of my mouth that I could manage, and slamming my horned head against his skull. There was nothing in my brain except the feral instinct to put my enemy down.
And it almost wasn’t enough, as I felt Nolan get his bearings and slam his fists into me. Each strike was breaking something inside of me, tearing me apart from the outside, as bones fractured and my internal organs threatened to rupture. There was nothing easy or quaint about it, nothing pretty, no fancy jutsu or delicately practiced techniques.
All I had left was my rage, my guttering chakra as I threw everything at the man beneath me, and the understanding that if I didn’t finish this he’d finish me. Or worse. He’d go back to punishing his son, committing atrocities around the world, or otherwise just killing me.
I had to win. Anything else, like the fact that I was pained, tired, and feeling the distant effects of chakra exhaustion for an Ōtsutsuki of all people, was secondary to that knowledge.
How much time passed, I couldn’t have told you. Could have been a minute of us just thrashing each other, or it could have been less. Two superhumans giving it everything they had, him trying to kill me but weakened from the wounds and blows he’d taken, and me throwing all of the chakra I had left at my disposal at the problem. No finesse, no delicacy, just pure power to solve my problems. All I knew was that eventually he stopped moving, and I kept hitting. At least until the realization that he was alive but not conscious hit me, and I paused, looking down at him with bloodshot eyes, practically straddling his body.
Nolan’s face was a ruin, swollen, burnt, scraped, and scratched, with patches of hair gone, though he’d been fortunate enough not to lose any eyes. That’d be his only piece of good fortune, though, since I was fairly sure some of what had happened would leave scars. As for myself…
I couldn’t recall the last time I’d felt this weak, like a stiff breeze could knock me over. Or the fact that my thoughts felt sluggish and languid. All I could do was roll to the side, falling onto the sand and staring up at the sky, passively aware of the shredded nature of my costume and my body.
I stared up, enjoying the peace on the shores of Lake Michigan. Right up before Cecil’s voice chimed in through my earpiece.
“Taijitu? What’s his status?” There was such expectation in his voice, trepidation, worry, and all sorts of tiny little elements I was barely paying attention to as I rested there. For good reason, given that moving left sharp pains radiating out through my body.
“H-He’s down,” I sputtered out, wheezing softly, for all that I didn’t actually need to do so. It was more of a psychosomatic comfort thing, I guessed. “Nolan is d-down. We won.”
I wouldn’t lie, it did feel like it wasn’t real, like he was playing possum just to lull us into a false sense of security. But as my eyes focused on him, I was almost certain that this wasn’t some grand deception. Nolan was unconscious, taken down for the count.
Not that I was in much of a better state. Floating there, I felt woozy, the promise of countless fractures visible across my skeleton and clear to my eyes. Internal bleeding, broken bones, the works, worse than it’d been to fight Battle Beast. There wasn’t a part of me that wasn’t hurt in some way, shape, or form.
Yet I was alive, and I’d won. Looking over the still damaged rubble and ruins of Chicago, though, it was hard to make this feel like a victory in my heart. That was the last thing that I thought before my head slumped back, and I proceeded to pass out against the tides.
Author’s Notes
Wew. I looked at how many pages of discussion there were on some sites since the last chapter, read a bit of it, and then privately decided that for my mood and sanity, I would look away lest I get demoralized. It was a bit eye-opening in some respects, in that I felt like I had a pretty good finger on the pulse of things, only to realize that wasn’t the case.
Welp, you live and you learn. We’re ten chapters ahead, and rewriting vast swathes of the story and my vision for it is a little silly, especially when I have a release tempo to keep up with. The only thing I can do is ensure that I keep the feedback in mind going forward.
As always, I’m thankful people have stuck with me through all of this. And my readers too.
Additionally, if you would like to read ahead, you can find up to ten chapters ahead via the linktree in my profile. For the time being, all adult content like future smut in anything I write, will be on , though in due time I'll likely try to get the processing and authentication through on to be able to post it there as well. So be mindful of where you're supporting me.