54 — THE EYES OF SHAKA
The House of Virgo is silent and under Shaka's feet are the four Bronze Saints erased from their consciousness. The destruction caused by her huge golden cosmos had been far more than those Saints could bear.
"Phoenix must have fallen to Hell or the Realm of Asura. It's all over."
It wasn't, as Ikki took advantage of the fact that Shaka was too close to her body and suddenly stood up with her Cosmo lit to hit Shaka's brain with her Phantom Blow. At point-blank range, the Gold Saint could not dodge, terribly surprised; the Phoenix technique pierced her brain and ripped the helmet from the Virgo's Cloth.
She shivered for a few seconds without her helmet and her voice sounded surprised.
"I can't believe you're still alive even after being hit by the Six Realms." said Shaka. "Is it possible that you are immortal like Phoenix?"
"Neither Hell, much less the Realm of Asuras could stand me, so they sent me back." said Ikki mockingly. "And now it's your turn to visit Hell. Tell me Shaka, which of the Six Realms do you prefer?"
But Shaka started to laugh at her.
"Unfortunately, the Six Realms are only for fools. I am Virgo Shaka, the Saint closest to the Gods and my path is different." her laughter continued. "That mental technique of yours is really ridiculous, Phoenix. It depends on something that is very far from my heart. Things like fear, doubt, hesitation or worry are things that are healed in my chest."
The mind without a mind. The void of the mind.
"You can't do anything to stop me." said Shaka, finally.
Ikki turned to face Shaka, who had her back to her, when she heard Shun moan again, now more next to her. She saw that he gradually regained some consciousness.
"Shun!" she yelled, running to her brother who was beside Seiya and Shiryu, still unconscious.
"Ikki, is it really you?" he was moved, opening his eyes with great difficulty. "Have you really come to help us?"
"Yes, Shun. I'm here now. Hey Shun, stay with me, be strong." she said, because Shun seemed to waver in his consciousness. "I could feel your cosmos glow as I rested in the mouth of the volcano. Your cosmos is brilliant as you can't imagine, Shun."
The Andromeda Saint opened his eyes again even a little and saw that Ikki was smiling briefly at him.
"Rest now, Shun." asked Ikki.
"We can't." Shun spoke in a choked voice. "Saori. She is… she's injured in the House of Aries, we need to get to the Camerlengo, Ikki. Only he can take the arrow from Athena's chest."
"An arrow to the chest?"
She then looked at Shaka's back, who was still standing like a statue, when she could have killed them all there. It was disconcerting her posture, but Ikki noticed that Shun slowly seemed to fade away again, as much as she tried to keep him awake, his strength seemed to have been sucked into him. Shun was able to say one last thing to Ikki before passing out. A warning.
"Don't let Shaka open her eyes."
Shaka's eyes.
Ikki felt her chest heavy, but she got up to fight the Virgo Saint, now knowing what was at stake. She walked closer to the imposing figure of Shaka.
"Tell me, Shaka, if you are as enlightened as you say, how can you oppose all this? Why don't you want to help Athena?" she asked.
"Athena is at the Camerlengo's side." she said, stoic again.
"You're wrong!" tried Ikki. "And even if that were really true, shouldn't a girl who was mortally wounded be reason enough to help her?"
"She is a traitor." said Shaka very harshly, without turning around. "As are these useless ones lying beside you."
Ikki clenched her fists in rage.
"I won't let you talk like that about any of them!" she snapped. "I won't let you talk like that about my brother or his friends who took me in!"
"What a beautiful fraternity." mocked Shaka.
"Damn you. I can see that you're lost and drunk with your own ego. Can't see nothing besides this stupid god-like perception you have about yourself. Can't listen. I will end your life here and allow my friends to move on."
From her back, Shaka's voice was resolute.
"Are you sure about that, Phoenix?"
"Absolutely." she replied angrily.
"What if you go back to Hell?"
"You're the one who will see Hell!" threatened Ikki.
"Are you really sure about that, Phoenix?"
Her Cosmo stood up in the House of Virgo when her hands again adopted the gesture of the wheel of Dharma.
"I still feel the remnants of the Six Realms in your cosmos."
The Virgo Saint Cosmo was very strong and Ikki felt terribly drawn to her body, drawn as if gravity were pulling her towards that dark hair that fell down her back. Around Ikki, the reality distorted and faded.
The dry, distant beats on the wood, like a small high-pitched ritual drum. It was the only sound Ikki could hear on a huge dark hill of rough and gray earth; many thorns strewn across the floor and hundreds of thousands of small piles of stone piled up like a huge war cemetery.
"This is the Margin of Penance." she heard Shaka's voice speaking behind her back.
She looked back and saw that she was there too. Her fabulous Gold Cloth was the only thing in that place with any color, so that even her hands, her cloth, and the blood that dripped from her wounds were all either white or black and many shades in between.
"This is the Sanzu River, which leads to the Underworld." added Shaka. "It's where children who died prematurely come to build a stone tower for their parents."
Ikki looked and saw that those small stone towers covered the entire plain and the hills beyond. Forever, the small shrill drum sounding on the horizon. Desert. A terrible desert.
"Tell me, aren't you the one walking over there, Phoenix?"
When the girl looked in the direction that Shaka was pointing she saw a very suffering child dressed in rags approaching. It was really her. When she was four or five years old. She was carrying a dark trousseau with a baby in her lap. If it was her when she was younger, that baby could only be one person. She searched the hill for her brother's face, but then they were no longer in the House of Virgo. It was Shun, because it was her dear brother inside that trousseau.
She was the child who came, a little girl with wild hair carrying her little brother and walking barefoot across the sharp thorns of that plain. A difficult and terrible path, which Ikki could never remember having taken before.
But she remembered perfectly well that, although she had not been before in that terrible place populated with little towers piled up in stone, she had no doubt taken that same painful walk with her brother in her lap. She searched her chest for Shun's pendant, but then remembered that she had returned it to her dear brother, now far away from there. She found instead the arrowhead, which Helen had given her on Canon Island.
"Look, Phoenix, something's happening."
Ikki looked again at the little girl that was her, closer and closer, and realized that little by little the little girl was having difficulties to carry on, as if the child's weight was growing more and more, making her crossing very complicated.
"What's going on, Shun, why are you so heavy?" Ikki heard her own child's voice in that little girl.
That girl's little feet were sinking deeper and deeper into the thorns of the crossing, causing her blood to spread everywhere. And at every step she took, little Ikki cried and the baby that came in the trousseau also cried with her. It was like carrying a huge stone.
"Ikki." Shaka's voice echoed, suggestive. "If he's weighing so heavily, you should let him go."
The little girl looked around trying to find whoever was speaking to her.
"I'll never let go of him. Never!" replied the little child's voice.
"If you don't let go, you two will die here." tried Shaka. "Get rid of the burden that is your brother and save yourself, Ikki. What are you waiting for? Without your brother, you will be free to fly through this field of thorns."
And she laughed, but the laugh, Ikki realized, only she in her Cloth and more mature could hear. The child could not listen to that malice.
"No, I'm sure there's a better future for us!" cried the little girl again into the wind. "I have to take Shun there somehow! No matter what happens!"
And so she went back to marching with her feet bleeding and her trousseau getting heavier and heavier. She took a few steps, but her weight was so heavy that the little girl dropped to her knee, her entire body shaking with pain.
"Ikki." the condescending voice of Shaka spoke again. "I can save you, but only if you're alone."
"No!" cried the little girl to the air.
Maybe to God.
The little one staggered backward under the child's weight and still drew strength from within and marched forward.
"I know there's a better future ahead." babbled the little girl Ikki to herself.
Her feet bleeding, her arms tired, her face drenched with tears.
"Drop that child now, Ikki!" finally ordered the voice on the horizon.
But she carried on.
"Shut up, Shaka!" Ikki finally yelled as she found herself back in the House of Virgo.
The truth was that she hadn't stopped screaming for a second, begging the little girl to carry on, ranting against Shaka. But just like the colors of her body, her voice had also fallen silent in that illusion.
Shaka laughed. Ikki, desperate, seeked the temple for Shun's body and found him lying beside his friends, unconscious.
"How did it feel to see yourself as a child?"
Ikki was in shock as she hit Shaka with her Phantom Strike, but she was the one to experience the illlusion while suffering upon seeing her painful past.
"Are you understanding now, Ikki?" asked Shaka. "No matter how hard you try, never, you will never be able to reach that future that you want so much."
There was a heaviness in Ikki's chest as she listened to those harsh words.
"Now I will end your suffering." Shaka announced, changing her hand posture.
In such a way that Ikki felt her entire body twist against her will. Her feet flat on the ground, but her hips twisted horribly on its axis, as well as her arms turned against the cartilage and her chin practically touching the spatulas in her back. She was trembling with her body terribly wrong.
Shaka's Cosmo lit up the temple again and Ikki's pained eyes recognized that posture. She was going to be sent to the Six Realms once more and, paralyzed as she was, she could do nothing. She tried as hard as she could and straightened her body with great effort, burned her cosmos and prayed her wings would carry her away. Ikki simply turned her back and ran, trying to get away from Shaka's Cosmo. The woman's voice announced her fate to the entire House of Virgo.
"Transmigration of the Six Realms."
Ikki would run as far as she could with her Phoenix wings. She would fly where the Six Realms Transmigration could not reach her. As far as Shaka's Cosmo could not reach her. It would cross the entire Universe if it were possible. Her fire cosmos glowed mightily in the Universe of infernal images that formed around her as she tried to escape from all the Realms of Shaka.
Thousands and thousands of light years if she needed it and, indeed, that was as much as she felt her wings of fire carried her as far as they could. Until the golden light of Shaka's Cosmo disappeared.
And so everything went out and Ikki felt safe in the darkness.
But the uneven floor she was standing on slowly turned out to be the palm of a giant hand, for a golden light illuminated that reality of hers and Ikki found herself standing in the palm of Buddha's hand.
"Your power is like that of a monkey in the hand of Buddha." Shaka spoke calmly, and her voice came again from all sides. "Did you think you had escaped by running so far out of my reach? But you see, Ikki, you barely moved at all."
When Ikki again looked at her feet, she was a few blocks of stone from where she had been before. Again in the House of Virgo. Again at the mercy of Virgo Shaka.
Her chest heaved, for in fact she had run endless leagues without moving at all. It was no use running away from Shaka. It was impossible to run away from Shaka, Ikki realized.
"I see now." she said, turning to face the Virgo Saint. "It's no use trying to run away, I'll have to hit you. Attack you as many times as possible. A hundred times, thousands of times if need be. And I will try and try and keep trying until I win. Just like the children who never give up on lifting stones on the Margin of Penance!"
"Don't be silly. You have no power left to attack me. Hell's fire has completely caught you and will now consume your Cloth."
From Shaka's outstretched hand, Ikki saw that golden beams seized the parts of her Phoenix Cloth, igniting it completely, so that the fire was so violent that the bronze didn't even melt, but it evaporated to ash immediately.
The Phoenix Cloth was destroyed.
The cycle of hopelessness seemed terrible as Shaka took everything away from Ikki. Shaka's mistake, however, was to have given ashes to the Phoenix, as her Fire Cosmo was even stronger than before, even though her Cloth no longer existed.
"You can take away my Cloth, you can try to take away my hope, but it won't matter. I will keep coming back and I will attack you thousands of times until you die!"
The torches from the columns next to them had their flames intensified and the fiery phoenix formed on Ikki's back as she burned her furious Cosmo and released her flapping wings.
"Fly, Phoenix!"
The mighty fire phoenix flew low and landed on Shaka's right arm, making no difference to her.
"Your mighty flutter of wings is like a gentle breeze to me."
Ikki took a few steps back and tried again. Again she flapped her phoenix wings to throw another flying bird of fire at her. Shaka now used her other hand to stop Ikki's technique.
"I've already told you, even if it doesn't work once, I'll keep going hundreds of times until I fall exhausted!"
The girl returned to position and, panting, again sought to conjure her Phoenix.
"In that case, all I can do is erase your life."
Phoenix burned her Cosmo again and remembered her brother, but also Seiya and Shiryu, fallen in that House of Virgo. She had to win, no matter what. Again the fires of that temple rose and her Phoenix rose with even more fury when her scream echoed through the temple.
"Arising Phoenix!"
Shaka tried to stop that flying Phoenix with just one finger and did so successfully, not without first calcining her white sari, which she wore as a cape, destroying the fabric and causing Shaka's outstretched finger to effectively smoke with the power.
Shaka looked from that finger like a burnt match to Ikki in front of her, gasping for air.
"Ikki, you are a woman whose life so far has been like seeing the bottom of Hell." began the Gold Saint. "I admit it was a big mistake of mine to try to make you fall into one of the Six Realms without killing you first."
"Where are you going with this, Shaka?" asked Ikki, panting.
"I'll have to send you to the Six Realms the right way."
Shaka stepped forward to come face to face with Ikki.
"You won't be able to go back from this, as I'll show you Shaka's greatest wisdom."
Her hands were placed parallel to each other at the height of her chest. And her cosmos, as Ikki felt, trembled in a way that it hadn't done before. But then it wasn't as if it slowed down or faltered, rather, it was like it started to increase even more terribly. Like a small wave receding in the ocean before a tsunami.
Her voice was very calm.
"The Treasure of Heavens."
Waves of golden energy pulsed from Shaka's feet that, little by little, began to dye the House of Virgo from floor to ceiling with stained glass and mosaics designed with the image of various Buddhas and wheels of Dharma. Each wave tinged with stronger colors, like a devastating tsunami of paint.
Shaka's voice reverberated from all sides of that infinite.
"Know that the Treasure of Heavens is the truth of the Universe." she said. "This treasure is the world of perfect harmony."
Her black hair fluttered with her Golden Cosmo.
"The Treasure of Heavens is the supreme art. The perfect union of attack and defense."
Shaka's hand reached towards Ikki.
"Look, Phoenix, now the Treasure of Heavens will end your Five Senses."
Finally, the Phoenix Saint was amazed to see that, stopped in her posture, Shaka's face slowly rose and her eyes began to open. And all the images of the countless Buddhas inscribed in those stained-glass windows painted in the House of Virgo, all of them, together with Shaka, also opened their eyes, in a bewildering spectacle.
Ikki's body immediately began to tingle from head to toe. She tried to touch herself, but she no longer felt her touch; her wounds and joints that once ached now no longer caused her any pain. Her weight on her feet and her feet on the ground she couldn't feel anymore either. A sensation so disconcerting that Ikki found herself falling to her knees. But then, too, she could feel nothing of her fall. The hands on the ground she didn't feel either. It was like she was a passenger in a body that wasn't hers.
"Ikki, you lost your Touch." announced Shaka.
She could hear and looked in amazement at the figure of the Gold Saint in front of her. Her dark eyes open and wonderful staring at her. Ikki moved her arms and legs trying to get into some kind of guard position to fight, but the lack of feeling the air or even her tense muscles was terrible and she looked clumsy.
Shaka smiled at her.
"Now you'll lose your sense of Smell." Shaka announced, extending her elegant hand.
Ikki felt it in such a way that her nose actually lost the ability to smell the ash that had burned in that temple, in such a way that even breathing for her became a challenge at first, purely from missing the smell of the air, if that was possible.
She stumbled forward, walking with difficulty as it was terrible not to be able to feel the ground. She tried to land a punch at Shaka, but then it had been such a weak punch that Shaka just let her pass in front of her, like someone dodging a stumbling drunk in the night. Ikki fell to the ground.
But she felt nothing, to her despair.
In horror, she managed to get to her feet again and face Shaka once more.
"And now tell me, which sense would you like me to take off of you next, Phoenix?"
"Wait, Shaka!" Ikki spoke with extreme difficulty and with the speech slurred, because she could not feel her lips touching, the tongue twisting inside her mouth.
"Are you going to beg for your life, Phoenix?" asked Shaka.
"You who have power so close to the gods, how can you not realize that the Sanctuary is gripped by a terrible evil? Or have you decided to serve this evil? Are you not worthy to wear your Gold Cloth?"
There was a silence in the House of Virgo.
"Now I know what sense you will lose. You will never again listen to the nonsense that comes out of your mouth."
Her hand again reached forward and Ikki felt in horror as the volume of life simply reduced in her mind. She toppled to the side, losing her balance so that she could feel nothing and her labyrinth was completely lost without being able to hear. She dropped to her knees as she could no longer stand upright.
Now she could only see.
And she saw how Shaka smiled at her, but then that smile died on the Gold Saint's face, as her attention seemed to have been drawn to another direction within the temple. Shaka turned away, leaving Ikki alone, and Ikki saw in the darkness of the Virgo temple that someone else had arrived calling Shaka's attention.
A Gold Saint.
ABOUT THE CHAPTER: Aioria would wake up one time or another and the best way to bring him back was to put Aioria to fight Shaka, as they had already faced each other before. It was a way for the cycle to close. The difficulty was not letting the fight end with Ikki's sacrifice.
NEXT CHAPTER: THE BATTLE OF A THOUSAND DAYS
An interrupted battle between two Gold Saints restarts with dramatic contours.