Raiten:

  Eight clashes. I cut his leg.

  He dances back. Another cloud. I pursue. Six more blows, each blocked, each lightning fast—blurring to the eye with only raging red flowing against the green.

  I rip a line across his arm.

  He retreats again.

  This is our flow, our dance. Crimson chasing lime, cloud to cloud, one the wolf the other the rat. Often, he tries pouncing on me from different angles. I block with the chain from close quarters and then fling it after him, sometimes nicking his back with the kunai.

  I’m wearing him down. And he knows it. Yet still he fights this game of attrition. It's frustrating.

  He jumps to a lone-cloud away from the island-like mass of the bigger cumulus. I leap to follow and he immediately rushes my position. I raise the kunai and block a downward swing of Souta’s, letting my arm go limp to avoid taking the shock. My smaller blade makes a sparking scrape against his larger one. He inhales a sharp breath as I move past his blade and slash forward, ripping into his shoulder, the blade striking deep. He winces in pain and leaps back, firing off three diagonal cuts of lightning.

  I weave around two—raise my imbued chains to block the third. Lightning fizzles against lightning until all ceases.

  Souta is on a far cloud now, breathing heavily. Blood drips from his wounds—red against the teal of his robes. It's not entirely one-sided: he’s also scored some blows against me. Just not nearly as many.

  Besides, he’s waning. And I’m just getting into it.

  In all honesty, this boy shogun is not what I expected. He fights frantically. Each movement is a twitch—a muscular reaction rather than something planned. Yet, his body is trained for this. He can keep up with me, and even in martial skills, I recognize him using near perfect forms of Iron Winter, Eternal Spring, and other arts I haven’t yet learned.

  But his hits are weak.

  They don’t feel like shots meant to kill.

  No… it's not that. There’s no intent behind his movements. He fights like an open textbook—a scroll from Sorina’s library brought to life.

  And he’s wasting my time.

  I circle around now on the grey nimbus, feet cautiously edging against the cloud’s frays. The battle below is fierce. Tumultuous. But I can vaguely see that for some reason, the whales can’t enter the pitched fighting. Nor can the black mass of the plagued set themselves upon the spirit army. Instead, it has become a contest between Sorayvlad’s main army and ours.

  Souta takes a step back as I near, his katana shaking in front of him. I start spinning Meteorfang, letting its metal create a horrifying, electric tune in the sky.

  I do this to frighten him, not to taunt. It works well, for the boy steps further back and he has to growl to steady himself.

  The blood on his shoulder makes a steady drip to the cloud below.

  Continuously.

  Wait. There’s no way—

  “You can’t regenerate,” I realize. His eyebrows scrunch up in confusion. But before he can reply, I start laughing. “Masaru is such an arrogant idiot. He thought you could beat me without regeneration? Without the immortal curse? Hells, you wouldn’t have been able to beat me with it, but still, this is stupid, even for him.”

  It doesn’t make sense. The Masaru I know would’ve given this boy the immortality curse without a second thought. Perhaps something to bind him to Sorayvlad or even, the same curse that I received—for I know no such clause of it being reserved for one person alone.

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  So why didn’t he?

  The boy works his mouth and finally stops backing away. His sword ceases its pathetic shaking.

  “Don’t insult my Uncle,” he growls lowly.

  Oh.

  Ohhhhhhh. I shake my head and stuff the smugness that now comes to mind.

  Masaru actually likes this boy. There’s no other explanation—he probably didn’t want Souta to go insane later, like I’m bound to do. Like Sadai was bound to do.

  “What are you then? His nephew? Is that why he came to Sorayvlad?”

  The boy doesn’t answer, though his face grows colder.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I lie, for it matters greatly actually. I can use this against the Elder. And, I can use this against Souta.

  Because if we keep fighting like this, our battle will not end soon.

  No. I need him to fight me face to face. Angry.

  I need him to be more like me.

  “I wonder how Masaru would feel if I brought him his nephew’s head? Or maybe, if I brought you your uncle’s head—”

  Souta yells furiously and charges.

  And I smile slightly as the boy shogun charges into me with his blade, his lightning desperately trying to pierce through mine, his eyes inflamed by that familiar fury which I often see in my own.

  I wrap the chain around the blade as Souta tackles us off the clouds, roaring through the sky as we fall, twin meteors of red and green.

  I lock his blade in my chains and push my legs against him. Stubbornly, he holds tight to the blade, thinking I’m trying to pry it out of his hands.

  Instead, I let lightning flow through to my feet and coalesce.

  Then, I kick out fully.

  He gasps with pain just before the red sends him flying up, his chest smoking.

  And his blade is still in my grasp.

  I toss the katana to the battle below—watch it spin into oblivion—and lasso Meteorfang to a cloud. Souta manages to flip and imbue lightning through his own legs, now sticking to the underside of the cloud we fell from. But his chest heaves with pain. And a smoking hole has been made through his robes, revealing the bare, sizzling flesh. Quite a deep burn.

  Better for me.

  I try swinging up to the same cloud, but the boy shogun surprises me by jumping off and diving for me once more. I curse futilely, but mid-swing, his body hits mine like an arrow and we go flying above the battlefield.

  Spinning. Kicking. Elbowing. We grapple midair, coiling like vipers. I try to bring Meteorfang back but his assault distracts me so the chain merely flails along with us, no longer attached to a cloud.

  His eyes are full of rage. He wraps his legs around my body, pinching his knees tight to constrain my chest. Then, Souta tries elbowing my forehead. I raise my freehand up to my ear, turn my head away, use my bicep as a shield against his blow. Still hurts. Some of his lightning leaks through and scorches my ear.

  I respond by biting his ear off.

  He screams as I lean forward and chow down on his upper left ear, biting until I feel the cartilage rip away. The coppery tang of blood reeks in my mouth.

  It's a savage instinct that compels me—one that he could never understand.

  He sees it in my eyes too, when we stare at each other for a brief moment. Souta’s rage cowers in the presence of my own—his anger a mere drop in the ocean of my fury.

  He also understands it from peering at my face. Because I don’t smile at him with bloodied teeth, nor do I gloat, nor do I even look that angry.

  Instead, all he sees is… neutrality. A thin line of an expression.

  And then comes the horror: the realization that this, for me, is just normal. Ripping his ear off is what comes naturally to me.

  And now… Now he knows that what I have come to do is not merely kill. Is not merely murder.

  No.

  I’ve come to make his Uncle suffer.

  Desperately, Souta pounds his fists into my stomach. Then, he lassos to another cloud with branching lightning and tries to escape me, unwrapping his legs.

  I grab one of the legs. He arcs nonetheless, trying to run from the battle.

  At the top of our swing, I pull the leg down and jerk it to the side, trying to break it. The angle is wrong. Doesn’t work. But I do disrupt his line and the lightning fizzles out, suspending us in freefall.

  Then, keeping tight hold of the leg, I spin and whirl Souta ‘round before sending him flying with a blast of lightning—soaring across the valley.

  And I follow the boy, blood dripping from my mouth, a predator loping to finish off his injured prey.