"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
(Infamous paraphrase of a Mark Twain quote)
Youtou Shinnoken: Demon Sword
A Yuyu Hakusho/Rurouni Kenshin fic
by Chester Castañeda
Original concept by Chad Yang
Was this fight really about Hiruma versus Kenshin or Kenshin versus the Battousai? Also, just how far do the Hiruma brothers want to go with their vague and indistinct mission anyway?
Disclaimer: Yuyu Hakusho is the rightful property of Yoshihiro Togashi, Shueisha, Fuji TV and St. Pierrot. Rurouni Kenshin is the rightful property of Nobuhiro Watsuki and Sony. This disclaimer also covers all the other copyrighted material that are far too many to mention here. Don't sue me please, I'm very poor.
Chapter 15: To Protect Loved Ones (Part 3)
Kenshin simply could not kill Hiruma while the monster held Botan hostage. Not while he could still taste the tang and feel the warmth of Tomoe Yukishiro's blood even after a century had passed.
Kenshin and the Battousai were no Jekyll and Hyde. Kenshin was still mostly himself when he was the Battousai... the same man with the same goals of protecting the weak, innocent, and defenseless against the forces of evil using his immeasurable strength... only a lot more intimidating and, more importantly, a lot less hesitant in not just killing, but on how he approached life, death, and battle in general.
Battousai was a man who eschewed limits and restrictions, but that wasn't to say that he let his great power go to his head. Nothing of the sort; succumbing to the lure of his own abilities was exactly what the Battousai wasn't. He was instead all about control.
The difference between Kenshin and Battousai, in Kenshin's mind, wasn't their mode of thinking or even their general attitude about the value of life. Rather, their differences lay more on the amount of control they had on themselves at any given moment. The had the exact same motivations and intentions, they just went about them differently because the Battousai was far more willing to cross the line... and the slippery slope beyond it... than Kenshin.
'You have no choice now. There's no better recourse than to kill her along with the demon,' the Battousai inside his mind beckoned. 'You know me better than anyone else, Himura Kenshin. Don't tell me that you're just as naive as the rest of them, thinking that the Battousai... Youkiri, Hitokiri, or otherwise... is merely a mindless psycho like Jine was or a killer with a superiority complex like Shishio was.'
Kenshin stirred in his melancholic reprieve. 'Even as Youkiri, we didn't take a life for granted. We simply followed Hiko's teachings to the letter and readily faced the consequences of taking a life, come what may. Remember, a sword is meant to kill, and swordsmanship is the art of killing. There are times when you have no other alternative but to kill.'
Most certainly, when given the chance, the Youkiri Battousai could be as eloquent and loquacious as his more peace-loving counterpart. 'Do you think of me as a simple murderer?'
'Yes and no,' Kenshin detailed. 'I know your... our... reasons behind killing. Yes, there are times that it simply cannot be avoided. I know that. But...'
"I trust you, oh magical redheaded swordsman!" came Botan's tongue-in-cheek vote of confidence, which left the Demon Sword Guardian somewhat shaken and confused at the time, but in hindsight helped him regain quite a bit of his eroding self-confidence.
Kenshin chuckled in remembrance of the ferry-girl's antics, then frowned as a bitter, unbidden memory entered his mind... that of him slicing his wife in half as she jumped in front of him to protect him from his hulking opponent's furious charge, which led to both their deaths by his sword's blade. Tomoe had given her complete and total trust to him at the time, but look what that got her; he made her bathe in a rain of her own blood.
Kenshin had another less horrible but equally depressing flashback, this time of Kaoru Kamiya waiting patiently for him back in Aoiya as he did battle against the superhumanly powerful Makoto Shishio. Due to circumstances beyond his control, he broke his promise to the kendo-girl and never came back from his death match.
To think, Kaoru had also given her complete and total trust to him at the time, and look what that got her; he made her wait for nothing because his will to live wasn't as strong as he'd hoped it would be. The sharp rocks of reality saw to it that he would never, ever find his happiness, as though he never deserved such leisure.
On both counts, Kenshin Himura had betrayed the trust given to him in the worst way possible. These separate yet significant incidents were two of his greatest failures in life. And now, yet another innocent woman was offering her trust to him this time around. Would he fail to uphold her faith in him as well? Would his letdowns come back to haunt him at this unfortunate time, making this momentous fight against the Hiruma brothers his third opportunity for catastrophe? Would he even manage to outdo himself in creating despair and tragedy at this point?
'Never again. I'm not so naive as to believe that killing could never be a final resort, and I know the Battousai's... my reasons behind it. Of course I do. There really are times when it's foolish not to kill, especially if it could mean saving a lot of people's lives. I know that. That's the reason why I became the Battousai in the first place.'
Kenshin exhaled. 'But still, there's a big difference between defending yourself because of your self-preservation instinct and killing someone in cold blood. It doesn't matter what your intentions are. When you make the conscious decision to end another person's life, then that's killing in cold blood right there; no ifs or buts. That's the whole point of the Battousai's persona: the willingness to use killing as a means to an end, regardless of moral implications and consequences.'
There were many occasions where Kenshin felt like he lived in a world of eggshells, with him always taking constant care not to break something... or someone. He, of all people, knew just how weak and delicate life... human or demon... really was. A stabbed heart here, a decapitation there; when you were pushed, killing was as easy as breathing.
Still, he never allowed himself to lose control of his incredible power over life and death even for a moment, even when he'd already crossed the line and became the Battousai, even when he had his back against the wall, even when killing truly was the only option, all because an innocent... any innocent, even his opponent at the time... might suffer and die in his hands if he did. Indeed, an imperfect justice system where the guilty got away in order to prevent the greater injustice of condemning an innocent was needed to keep the world from spinning out of control, or at least stop the hero from falling from grace himself.
Sure, this kind of blind justice made his mission of protecting the weak just a tad more complicated and difficult, but he was willing to take the risk and the trouble of holding back just so he wouldn't have to compromise his own principles and high morals. That was just the way he was. Only justice could bring peace.
Then again, Kenshin's pacifist self couldn't even begin to comprehend the hypocrisy behind protecting life by taking it away... death for life... becoming the judge and executioner and deciding which life mattered more than others or choosing to end a life in exchange for the lives of many just because he could didn't sound very heroic to him in the least.
These facts made his morals and actions seem rather dissonant with each other at times, Kenshin reckoned. Just who was he to decide who deserved death or not? The world wasn't divided evenly by black and white or good and evil. By taking justice into his own hands, what made him different from a totalitarian extremist who'd decided by himself who lived and died by forcing his own code and belief system upon others?
Such thoughts had haunted the Spirit Guardian in life as well as in death. Violence was never the answer, but when faced with a violent madman who endangered all those around him, what could he do?
On one hand, as someone who had already killed before and could kill again in a heartbeat, he knew the toll murder had on someone who'd never wanted to kill in the first place and only did so for noble, if rather misguided, reasons. He simply couldn't just go around wiping out people he didn't like. Well, he technically could do just that, but it went against everything that he believed to be right. On the other hand, he couldn't just stand there and let injustice happen either.
When he was the Battousai, such choices became a lot simpler. With the Battousai's preeminence in the surface of his consciousness, any overwhelming emotions that clouded his thinking soon got stripped away... or at least momentarily pushed aside. He became a more methodical, more practical, and more pragmatic Kenshin... an attitude that made perfect sense when it came to facing life-or-death situations and the horrors of battle and war, because the thing that really held him back was his complex set of ethics and technical pacifism.
Battousai had no patience for such two-facedness, such as the ethics of sparing evil men at the cost of risking the lives of good people in the process. He who didn't punish evil commanded it to be done, he believed. But for someone who held himself back even less than Kenshin, he still made use of his tenuous control of his strength to its fullest, bottling up the lightning in his veins and the fire in his eyes with the pure, unadulterated concentration of a ray of light.
Too much hesitation and uncertainly would inevitably give birth to chaos and disaster just as quickly as a hasty and impetuous decision. Battousai, like Kenshin, also believed that only justice brought peace, only that he would never let an evil flourish just because his cheap morals and higher-than-thou outlook kept him from soiling his hands. That point became moot way back when he became a hitokiri for the Ishin Shishi more than a century ago anyway.
In any case, Kenshin knew the real deal in regards to killing. Slippery slope and moral ambiguities aside, he'd always managed... or at least struggled... to redirect his murderous instinct to a more positive direction, and his Battousai self was most certainly all about cold, calculating control and sobering restraint, despite what others might think. Alas, there were numerous occasions where enemies would take advantage of his holding back, having it backfire on his face from time to time.
If Kenshin had shown more decisiveness and acted sooner, then he probably wouldn't be in this position right now. The same could be said of all his other exploits in the past. He could've stopped the Hiruma brothers, Genbu, Rando, Saito, the Chojin, and even Shishio himself before everything in his life went to hell. His restraint and his self-control were hand-in-hand both his blessing and curse, shaping his character and marring his decisions.
'So will you or won't you?' Kenshin's emotionless, methodical Battousai self challenged him in the simplest of terms.
Kenshin shook his head as he addressed his other persona. 'I know that you aren't some blood-lusting psychopath who'd kill at the drop of a hat. All the same, don't you think that I have just as weighty a reason not to kill Botan and Hiruma as you have of killing them? Or anybody else, for that matter. Hope against hope, idealism against reality, I will find a way around it. Not because I believe that there's always a choice around not killing; I don't believe that for a second. And certainly not because Koenma Daio made some silly stipulation that I'd lose control once I do kill; I now understand that I embraced that condition because I never wanted to kill in the first place. That's what Botan made me realize just now.'
Battousai snorted impatiently. 'Isn't that attitude essentially selfish? You're basically just keeping yourself uncorrupted by not taking a life at the cost of many other people's lives! Sure, you won't stain your hands with the blood of another, but you'll be enabling murderers indirectly by letting them keep on doing what they're doing. I'm certain that any future victims the Hiruma brothers will have won't appreciate your decision not to kill. Botan certainly won't, especially if she doesn't survive this battle.'
'Selfish? Don't you think I want to kill Hiruma?' Kenshin argued in seldom-manifested outrage. 'Killing him at this point is all too easy; we both know that. But if I kill Hiruma, he's going to take Botan with him, and there's no way I'm going to stand for that. More to the point, by resorting to murder by convenience, what separates me from Hiruma? What's to stop me from killing again? What if I become so desensitized by killing and disregarding the lives of both friend and foe that I'll begin using it to solve all of my problems? You know how great that went during the Bakumatsu no Douran, don't you? Call me selfish or a hypocrite, but killing isn't even a choice at this point!'
'Huh. I guess we haven't scraped the bottom of the barrel yet. Just how much more dire must this situation become before you abandon your silly ideals and save Botan from a fate worse than death? Oh, sorry. Does that make too much sense to you? Then I apologize. My mistake. I admit, in the way you constantly deny yourself the pleasure of killing Hiruma, then sure; you're selfless. So selfless that you'll even let a mass-murdering chimera live and cause pain and suffering to even more innocent people that you so claim to protect,' Battousai retorted so crisply that Kenshin had to wince.
'Of course! How dare I not sacrifice my moral code because its currently inconveniencing me at the moment! How dare I not make the situation worse by doing something I don't want to do in the first place!' Kenshin hotly answered back. Then, after a lengthy pause, he explicated, 'Look. Thing is, killing Hiruma is exactly what the Chojin wants; he wants Hiruma to drive me to the point of killing him because it probably ties in with their bid for world domination or something. I'm not sure, I wasn't really paying attention to Hiruma's rants. Still, this fight will become meaningless if the Demon Sword gets corrupted. There's got to be another way. I know I've said that killing will occasionally be an option, but it should only be reserved as the very last option!'
Battousai metaphorically rolled his eyes. 'Spare me the 'You shall not kill' bullshit; killing Hiruma won't make you a bloodthirsty murderer. It's a little too late for that already, don't you think? Besides, the only ones who've ever entertained such a silly notion have never killed themselves. Who cares if the Chojin has manipulated everything so that you'll be forced to kill? Who cares about Koenma's silly stipulation? Do you really have so little trust in yourself that you'd automatically presume you'll again become a psychopath by killing a psychopath? You'll become a vigilante, maybe, but you won't suddenly start killing people at random. Get real. Killing doesn't work that way. What's to stop you from killing again? Simple. It depends on whether or not the person you're facing deserves to be killed. This is not the time to dillydally about killing, Himura Kenshin.'
'I'm not dillydallying. I know exactly what I'm doing,' Kenshin adamantly insisted to himself. 'If I fail, I'll give you free reign to do whatever you feel is right; save Botan and the others for me. But before that happens, I'll stick with my decision and rescue Botan in my own way.'
'Then what are you going to do? Time is running out. Decide now,' came Battousai's ultimatum.
'It's not really even a choice. Even if scumbags like the Hiruma brothers or the Chojin himself deserved to die, I will not be the one to make that decision if I can help it. Never again will I let what happened to Tomoe and Kaoru happen to anyone else ever again: not to Botan, and not even to the Hiruma brothers. A life is a life; they're all equally precious. Besides,' Kenshin smiled as the hands of time started to move again. 'I give my trust to Botan as well. It's only fair.'
The Demon Sword Guardian couldn't see the Battousai nod in agreement, but he took his other self's admission of, 'I don't really care what your decision is, so long as you're completely sure and unhesitant about it,' as a sign of approval, or at least assent.
Kenshin finally realized that it didn't matter that he couldn't save Botan from Hiruma as the Battousai. He ultimately decided not to kill the both of them in order to save the former from being fully absorbed into the latter's body. What he did instead was employ a feint using his kenki and continue the mind game tactics he'd been executing since he transformed back from Battousai to Kenshin, unbeknownst to the gigantic crossbreed. From there, Kenshin did his 'leap of faith' high above the slow-as-molasses, mix-and-match beast, his body becoming a blur as he defied the very concept of gravity itself.
The hero was helplessly assaulted and bruised; he couldn't keep up with his enemy. Then the villain picked up a child, girlfriend, or someone similar and drew back his weapon for a killing blow... and suddenly, the hero was able to ignore his wounds and charge at his enemy, attacking with a flurry of furious blows that utterly overwhelmed his opponent.
Or at least, that was the idea. Unstoppable rage and heroic resolve are usually seen as a response to a threat against something or someone that the protagonist cared deeply about, gaining his newfound power purely from guts and the desire to protect. But for Kenshin, the situation was a bit more complicated than that. He wanted to protect not only the hostage's life, but his opponent's life too; and because he couldn't wait for Hiruma's karmic death, he had to attack immediately while keeping those rather troubling thoughts at the back of his mind.
In any case, the battle had finally reached its fever pitch, with Hiruma leaping a hundred feet up in the air in response to Kenshin's diving attack, both combatants engaging in one last-ditch effort to one-up each other... and, apparently, the amalgamated beast was able to cheat his way into winning the exchange, all thanks to his special little contingency plan: absorbing one of Koenma's Angels/his personal kidnapping fodder, Botan. To hell with Kenshin's heroic resolve! Hiruma would beat the odds and subvert the norm, even (or especially) if he had to systematically break down the supposed hero's spirit in the process. Sure, it made him the villain of this story without a doubt, but he wouldn't have it any other way anyway.
"KUZU RYU SEN!"
As Hiruma expected... specifically counted on, in fact... Kenshin held back on using the full power of his instantaneous nine-strike attack at the last second, with the special technique's final strike... the 'tsuki' or a forward sword thrust... stopping just short of stabbing Botan's throat. What Hiruma wasn't able to count on, despite having enough savvy to use the shinigami as an effective shield of sorts against Kenshin's unblockable attacks, was the amount of power the watered-down strikes still possessed.
So, with all the exquisite agony that Hiruma experienced regardless, his body's complex network of pain receptors firing up all at the same time, he felt that the Spirit Guardian might as well not have held himself back. Then again, he was still alive and well, Botan was still his hostage, and he most definitely still had the upper hand in this fight this time around. A bout of mind-blowing suffering was hardly going to change any of that.
'So much for your accusations of me losing my mind and being manipulated by the Chojin, you samurai chump! I'm the real winner here! I... I've won. Yes, I did. Who cares about what I want? You never really know what you want till you get it, anyway! Besides, I've won against the Legendary Battousai! That's what every demon wants to accomplish, right? Yeah. To win against the Guardian of the Demon Sword and make use of the Reikai Artifact's power; I guess that's what I wanted to do. No, that's definitely it!' the monster ranted to himself, unaware of the extent of his unraveling mind's damage.
"I leave the rest to you," Kenshin enigmatically remarked as he sheathed his sword and let gravity take control of his exhausted body, diving backwards to the Genbu-devastated ground a hundred feet below. He was now in an awkward and vulnerable position that left him wide open to any number of Hiruma's overwhelming counterattacks.
Hiruma could hardly contain his glee; it was like Kenshin had just quietly wrapped himself in a neat bow and handed himself over to him. The youkai was ecstatic, if a bit relieved. Because of the promising turn of events, he didn't need to die in order to corrupt the Youtou Shinnoken anymore. All he had to do now was reach down, eliminate the impotent Battousai, and make use of the sword's power for himself. Everything was going his way for once, save for one problem... Hiruma couldn't move a muscle right then and there for some reason, his aching body turning as frigid as a rock. "What in the...?"
Even though the slashes of Kenshin's weakened yet painful Nine-Headed Dragon Flash were hardly enough to render Hiruma incapacitated... much less dead, despite its ability to torture... he sorely underestimated the deepness of its cuts and the fact that Botan, his only ace in the hole in this fight, was also proving to be his greatest weakness too.
Hiruma had been so preoccupied with stopping the ferry-girl from completely escaping his belly that he neglected to take into account the fact that it was taking him a whole lot of energy to literally keep himself together in the first place. With the combined forces of Kenshin's attack, Botan's insistence to escape, and Hiruma's own high-maintenance, hodgepodge body that sapped him of his recently siphoned jaki power at an alarming rate, the cross-hybrid demon felt himself start to fall apart from the seams.
The truthful mind could endure all deceit and deception without getting lost. The truthful heart could touch the venom of hate without being harmed. From time without end, darkness flourished in the abyss, but always yielded to hallowed light. Those were the things that entered Botan's mind as she struggled against Hiruma's clutches; she didn't really understand these words at first, but she was comforted by their wisdom.
Botan concentrated her reiki-based powers some more: far more than Kenshin had anticipated. "Botan, what are you doing? Get out of there now! Hiruma might still get you if you don't use this opportunity to escape right this instant!" the Spirit Guardian protested.
Botan turned to face Kenshin, her pinkish eyes seemingly boring holes into his very person. She then winked impishly at him and reassured, "Didn't I tell you to trust me too? I won't let myself be your load; I couldn't stand it! I never was such a person during Yusuke's rise as a Spirit Detective, and I won't be like that during your fights against this Chojin person as well. Just watch and learn, samurai boy!"
Kenshin balked as a fleeting vision of Kaoru's face superimposed itself on Botan's visage, a feeling of wistfulness and nostalgia filling his heart. 'What was that all about?'
From there, Kenshin heard Hiruma screech: a strangled, choking gasp of torment and agony. The crossbreed, completely helpless, watched in mounting horror as Botan struggled against his abominable (abdominal?) trap, the bright blue-green ki in her delicate hands building rather than diminishing. The skin of his cracked face tingled in agony, almost as if in response to the power buildup of Botan's reiatsu. The beast could feel it... feel the might of her willpower and determination increasing before him, converging in the palms of her hands, and knew that, after what he had made her endure, she would give her escape her all.
Hiruma clenched his beastly teeth in agonized frustration, his feral eyes haunted and desperate as he struggled hard to keep on fighting. 'Dammit, kidnap victims aren't supposed to do shit like this. This is a serious breach in tradition! Why can't you just be still while I finished your emasculated knight-in-shining-armor off like a good hostage?' the Iehik part of Hiruma's brain scolded Botan telepathically using the remnants of their increasingly tenuous bond.
'Oh, shut up and screw yourself,' Botan scoffed as she finally paid Iehik back for the Kanashibari mind-breaking technique he'd unleashed upon her earlier by releasing the blinding force of her mass of shinigami power right into Hiruma's very ki-flow, spreading itself like an intravenous feed into his demonic bloodstream.
The ferry-girl briefly appraised the current progress of her attempt at escaping Hiruma's body. She'd so far managed to extricate even more of herself out of his abdomen... right up to her knees, in fact. That was good. Just one more push, then.
The push came in the form of her entire body turning into a conduit of purifying energy as her reiatsu battle aura converted Hiruma's toxic black jaki into pure aqua reiki. At first, Hiruma's borrowed negative energy enveloped Botan's body almost completely, covering it with an unspeakable void of poison, decay, and death, but eventually, Botan's immaculate aura took over.
Hiruma's body was afterwards swathed by the blue-haired girl's own luminescent spirit, and the straw that broke the camel's back also broke his weakening frame, except replace 'straw' with 'high-level spirit power few shinigami ever mastered'.
With grim determination, the ferry-girl pushed one final time and successfully broke free from Hiruma's cowardly trap, which resulted in him receiving an unbelievable amount of damage from the simple act of bodily separation. This dire consequence happened because, unbeknownst to him, Botan was actually the only thing holding his monstrous yet volatile frame together at that point.
Hiruma had taken so much accumulated damage from Battousai's devastating attacks that his hybrid body had become unstable; so much so that, had he not thought of the brilliant idea of merging the ferry-girl into himself in the first place, he would've lost the war of attrition sooner than he would've anticipated.
The Hiruma brothers were never within Kenshin's league from the very start to the very end of this battle, despite the artificial enhancement of their powers care of the mysterious Onmyouji and the Shisejyu body parts, as well as Kenshin's unwillingness to go all out on them. As such, Botan was merely the unexpected catalyst to Hiruma's mounting burdens in this instance. The demon's attempts at becoming a diabolical mastermind who could make his opponent do exactly as he wanted while the latter cursed his name all the while was for naught. Battousai was right; he truly was the pawn and the fool of this story, and nothing more.
Still, though Kenshin had given Botan the necessary inch of leeway she needed to escape, the surprisingly innovative shinigami used that very inch to carve out a veritable mile of payback. Botan had used the large amounts of charged-up reiatsu she'd accumulated inside Hiruma's belly to tear apart the chimera's body in order to escape. "A-Amazing!" Kenshin appraised in wonder.
Falling straight into Kenshin's waiting arms, Botan collapsed in a rather trite and unintentionally intimate embrace with the redhead, much to her growing embarrassment and consternation. She also had an out-of-the-blue desire to blurt out, "You are not my boyfriend!" despite the fact that no one was asking, and it would really make the already awkward situation worse. She even had the suspicious feeling that the Kenshin-loving Kaoru Kamiya inside her mind liked the situation even less.
Then Botan remembered she could fly, and promptly did so, summoning her oar and boarding it with Kenshin as she removed the both of them from Hiruma's reach and the mortifying situation/position they were both in. She was so on the roll in these last few moments of the fight.
Hiruma roared like an indignant yet toothless lion as he saw the two rabbits he was chasing escape. He gasped and coughed, horrified and ashamed at the circumstances surrounding Botan's release, retching at the awful taste in his mouth, and gingerly favoring the gaping hole where his stomach used to be as the remaining amount of jaki currently hemorrhaging out of his body went at odds with his deteriorating condition. Despite all his urging and goading, Kenshin proved just how weak he really was by managing to win their battle anyway by virtue of overall health.
So now what? What sick lesson had Hiruma learned now? What sort of twisted moral had the browbeaten behemoth gotten from this mortifying experience? That, no matter how hard he tried, how many times his two selves... Iehik and Iehog... trained to improve their demonic powers, how many demonic parts they stole, how diabolical Iehik's plans were, how determined Iehog got, and how many horrifying things they went through, somebody more talented and powerful would always bring them down? That they would forever be, instead of cosmic horrors, cosmic jokes? That it was wrong for a demon to dream of a better life?
Was that it? Was hard work only reserved for those gifted enough to make it matter in the end, and if those less-than-talented actually tried to improve their lot in life, the fates would conspire against them, putting them back in their place? Did some people simply deserve more out of life because it was their birthright? That Hiruma's only purpose was to merely highlight the gallant hero's heroism, the dear damsel's purity, and that Hiruma himself was fated to fall into the fiery pits of hell, where there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth forever and ever, until the end of time?
'Screw that,' Iehik thought, and Iehog agreed, which made their feelings become one again and compelled their minds to become 'Hiruma' once more. Even at the cusp of nigh-defeat, even when their body was about to be torn asunder by the dark powers given to them, their mantra remained the same. To hell with life lessons and destiny, because life sucked and destiny was overrated.
Botan was only a good twenty feet away from the falling Hiruma when the overly dramatic hybrid used the darkness in his missing belly to redirect his surplus of jaki into a concentrated blast that was neither the Mei-Kou-Shou-Kai-Ha nor the Kyomei-Jissatsu-Jin: Fu no Senrei; instead, the negative force coalesced to form an endless maelstrom powered by the Hiruma brothers' mindless obsession and dark ambition.
"Holy Spirit World, doesn't he ever stop?" Botan cursed under her breath as she performed some aerial maneuvers to avoid the closest of the deadly attacks, the projectiles effectively razing whatever was left of the patio below into what looked like the United State's world-famous Grand Canyon. On their own, Iehik and Iehog were able to increase the power of their jaki with their combined feelings of motivation and hope... hope that they could prove Battousai wrong and show him that they were not mere puppets to their destiny. Ironically, their self-destructive actions illustrated the exact opposite of their intentions.
"Hiruma, stand down now. Your body has taken too much abuse already. Escape and live to fight another day! To continue this battle is pointless," Kenshin begged from afar as Botan struggled to escape from the damned hybrid demon's machinations yet again, but Hiruma would have none of that.
"Live? This is the very moment that I've been living for! That Iehik and Iehog had been living for! Fuck living an empty existence afterwards; this is the fight of our lives! It's either you kill us or we'll kill you all, motherfuckers!"
Kenshin had already seen what Hiruma was attempting to do before; he'd witnessed it a good one hundred and fifteen years ago, in fact. Even with his occasionally unreliable memory, the redhead could never forget the fiery self-destruction of Shishio's crippled body once the mummy-like samurai surpassed his supposed limits. How could he forget? His greatest opponent's self-combustion was the very cause of his own defeat, demise, and Reikai-imposed incarceration. In any case, the same thing was happening to Hiruma now: unlimited negative energy power at the cost of his own limited constitution.
Therefore, in the middle of him lobbing numerous Retsu Hoko shots using the chaos swirling inside his hollow viscera at the still-bleary Botan and the equally hapless Kenshin, missing his targets by mere inches, Hiruma felt his body start to corrode from the inside out, the toxicity of the Chojin's evil energy finally taking its toll on his hefty frame. Thusly, for the first time since his epic fight with Kenshin began, Hiruma felt genuine terror and dread, amplified tenfold by the irrepressible waves of jaki feeding unto his negative emotions.
"H-Help me! HELP ME, CHOJIN-SAMA! RANDO-SAMA! ONMYOUJI-SAMA!" Hiruma beseeched desperately, remembering in kind the panic and despair he'd experienced when Kenshin's Battousai self talked him down like a child. Tragically enough, it wasn't really Kenshin or the Battousai who defeated him this day; he was duped by some rank-and-file shinigami he'd kept around as bait to cut down the spirit guardian's effectiveness in battle.
Hiruma's eyes lit up. Yes, it was all Botan's fault. Everything was going according to plan until she decided to ruin everything by becoming some sort of wildcard to his schemes! How dare she! She must pay for her crimes. And, like the only flotsam on his sea of misery, Hiruma held on to that illogical idea for dear life, conveniently blaming all of his troubles on the shinigami. He decided that if he was going to die then and there, then he would take both the ferry-girl and the spirit guardian with him.
A Retsu Hoko hit the pair a bit too close to home, tearing the flat part of Botan's oar into splinters and making both her and Kenshin spiral out of control. At that very moment, the resolute Hiruma was neither thinking straight nor pondering about the highfaluting values of improving his lot in life and becoming more than he could ever be.
What Hiruma wanted now was vengeance, pure and simple. To his confused, panic-stricken, corrupted, and ultimately deteriorating mind, his choices weren't between vengeance or finding a solution to his own pitfalls; vengeance was the solution. "The harlot will die, and yes, I'm doing it out of spite. I want to see her die. I want to watch the light dim in her eyes as she realizes that there will be no tomorrow for her. I also want to see your eyes, Battousai, as it dawns to you that, yes, because of your unwillingness to kill me, somebody else will die! Suffer and die with that knowledge!"
Just then, as Hiruma caught up with the falling Kenshin and Botan, the darkness on his abdomen promising a world of pointless agony in the form of a screaming vortex that, as far as vortexes go, was plenty powerful... it had the basic features of razing everything in its path and the added bonus of having a toxic aura that could render the nearest living being into a trembling, fetal ball of wretchedness... the most random event possible happened. A large blue demonic bird the size of a small aircraft swooped over the duo, shielding them from the brunt of the subsequent onslaught.
"..." Kenshin remarked before saying his trademark phrase that started and ended with the letter 'o' or spelled only in katakana, because its closest homophone kanji had the rather distasteful meaning of 'feminine discharge'. And, speaking of bodily excretions, the demon bird's name was incidentally...
"PUU!" Botan greeted the sizable animal as she lovingly nuzzled his beak before helping herself and Kenshin climb atop the non-singed portion of his back for added shelter and protection against jaki-related perils. "Good bird! Now how did you know where to find and rescue us from that stubborn and mindless demon hybrid bent on annihilating us completely? Not that I'm doubting your abilities or anything; I'm just curious."
Puu cheerily let out a cacophony of squawks in reply. "I see." Botan sighed, rubbing her fingers over her forehead. Rather than trying to translate bird to Japanese, the ferry-girl instead put two and two together. "Did your coming here have something to do with Yusuke, Puu?"
Kenshin tilted his head to the side in askance. "What does this demon bird have to do with Yusuke-dono, Botan? I remember this creature from when Genkai-dono gave us a tour of her temple, with Yusuke-dono calling him his pet of sorts, but aside from that and the fact that he's a demon bird the size of a car, I don't really recall anything significant about him."
"Oh? Didn't you know? Well, I guess you probably wouldn't, would you? You've literally been under a rock when Yusuke was but a guy who died when he wasn't supposed to die," Botan considered, tentatively scratching her cheek at Kenshin's understandable cluelessness. Ergo, she decided to get him up to speed concerning Puu's true identity.
"Well, it's sort of a long story, but Puu is basically Yusuke's spirit beast. He feeds off his owner, Yusuke's energy, and takes his form based on the nature of that energy. He also has the same sort of bond with Yusuke that you yourself had care of the Demon Sword's magic. As such, when Yusuke gets hurt, angry, or becomes more powerful, so does Puu. This big guy here is like... Yusuke's very own mood ring, only that he's a gigantic demon bird. So yeah."
Puu screeched some more, as though to corroborate Botan's testimony.
"Okay. I think I understand now," Kenshin confirmed wistfully, his eyes half-lidded and his expression pensive. "Even though Yusuke-dono had already fainted and spent all his spirit energy after his grueling fight against Rando, he still found a way to help me in my time of need... in the form of his very own spirit beast saving me from certain doom, no less. What a guy."
"HA! Yusuke was planning something clever on purpose? You must not know him very well, then," Botan scoffed jokingly, then cautiously looked behind them to see if Hiruma was still on their tail. What she saw instead horrified her. The behemoth's body had gained an ashen pallor... even his scaled and leathery parts were infected... as it convulsed and contorted itself into a variety of shapes and positions that barely resembled anything that a living, non-protozoan creature could manage to pull off.
"By Enma's beard! What's happening to Hiruma?" Botan worriedly asked Kenshin as she reflexively grabbed his kimono's sleeve in apprehension.
"He's destroying himself. Or rather, he's already destroyed himself. His body can't handle that much jaki anymore. It's finally reached its limits, separating into its component parts," Kenshin concluded grimly as he closed his eyes and bowed his head in seeming prayer for the Hiruma brothers' damned souls.
"BIG BROTHER!" Iehog blubbered pathetically as the now-nonexistent Hiruma's body fell apart, just as Kenshin predicted; before the enormous youkai could even wrap his mind around the unfortunate fact, he was already flying a good ten feet away from his brother and the severed Shisejyu body parts they'd so carefully scavenged on the other side of Genkai's property, his power reduced to that of a mere C-level demon.
Unfortunately, as established earlier, all that was left of Iehog's precious brother was a mere brain... grey matter that would quickly crumble apart in midair if Iehog didn't do something about it. 'Iehog! Save me! SAVE ME!' the poor demon-turned-internal-organ begged his sibling.
His horror rising, Iehog bared his fangs, the mist of his frostbitten breath billowing from the gaps of his frothing mouth as he dived after Iehik and the Shisejyu parts. Luckily, the Seiryu aspect of Hiruma's hybrid body hadn't completely separated from Iehog, so he was still able to make a frozen water slide to help accelerate his descent. Alas, he was too late; although he was able to retrieve Seiryu's arm, the Byakko body parts had already disintegrated into worthless chunks of rotting flesh, while Iehik's brain was now...
Gone. Iehik was now gone. The one constant in Iehog's life... his mentor, guardian, partner, and only friend... was now gone forever, turned into worthless giblets by intense air pressure. And it was all Iehog's fault; his mindless determination to finish Botan off led Hiruma to self-destruct.
Iehog laughed crazily: a bitter sound that woke Kenshin and Botan from their false impression of security and made Puu hesitate in mid-flight. "I have nothing left. You're the only one I had, big brother. And now... now that I've lost you... I need to do this. I need to... I don't understand it myself, but like you always said, we need to fulfill our destiny." The youkai's eyes lit up with an impossibly deep steadfastness as his voice trembled. "I want our lives to mean something, and this is the only way I know how!"
Then, impossibly, Iehog heard his brother speak to him; he wasn't sure if it was from his own crazed imagination or if Kenshin and the ferry-girl could hear Iehik talk as well, but he didn't care. To him, his wise and all-knowing big brother was drawling, "Very good, little brother. You finally understand where I'm coming from. Now quickly, take Seiryu's arm, merge it with yours, and use every last bit of your hopes, sadness, desperation, and rage to take control of this growing ball of darkness inside of you so that we can finally fulfill our destiny!" And so Iehog did exactly as he was told.
Seiryu's dragon arm soon reintegrated into Iehog's depressed, browbeaten form; from there, the youkai's metamorphosis happened right away. Subsequently, an abominable pit so dark and foreboding that Kenshin, Botan, and Puu's eyes collectively recoiled upon seeing it ripped itself in the air. It was yet another inimitable vortex of jaki, but one so powerful it equaled, perhaps even surpassed, the whirling spindle of black energy Hiruma produced before. Twinkling sparks of brilliant vermillion shone out from that appalling maelstrom, and the aura of concentrated dread poured forth from the fissure like some venomous miasma.
"This is getting ridiculous," Kenshin dully whispered, in awe of what he was witnessing. "Iehog's power had already gone down to C-Class when he, his brother, and the Shisejyu parts separated from one other, yet by merely getting Seiryu's arm back, he was able to accelerate back to the B-Level power he just lost! Where is he getting all this strength? Why does he keep on fighting? Doesn't he realize that his so-called destiny has been a joke the Chojin made at his and his brother's expense all along? Is he really going to force himself to continue this pointless battle?"
"He's acting just like Yusuke, the poor fool," Botan assessed, gulping and shivering in incredulity. "He'll never give up. The more you beat him down, the more determined he becomes. If you take away anything of importance to him, he'll become even more powerful than you can ever imagine. Really, the only thing separating him from Yusuke, in my eyes, is the fact that he's uglier and crazier than him; scarier too. Who does he think he is, the hero of this story?"
"Why the hell not? Why should I let you dictate to me how I'm going to live my life? How my brother and I are going to live our lives?" Iehog spat as he flew forward, ignoring the fact that his jaki-immolated body was crumbling into ash and dust even as he spoke. "The future we're trying to reach isn't a future you've already decided upon! I'll be the one to choose my tomorrow!"
Iehog seemed to grow as he approached the flying trio, swelling with his endless umbra, his remaining limbs thrashing about as if caught in the grip of some wild storm. His blood-red eyes burned with the promise of crimson hellfire, zeroing in on his would-be victims with their hideous glare. The sheer power that pulsed from the monster beggared the imagination. From there, he unleashed wholesale nine Fu no Senrei leviathans in answer to Kenshin's own Kuzu Ryu Sen attack earlier.
Iehog's furious Trial of Negation onslaughts bruised the sky with nebulous clouds of black and blue plasma as the air became sharp with the conflicting scents of ice and fire. Rivulets of black smoke burst out from the core of the nauseating spiral of Fu no Senrei, arcing back and hurtling towards Botan, Kenshin, and Puu's direction like an elemental antipode roiling through the surface of the planet Mercury.
"P-Puu, can you out-fly those things? Even you can't survive that many Fu no Senrei," Botan queried in concern, to which Puu merely chirped in reply. In mere seconds, the ice-and-fire dragons surrounded them in a spiraling sphere of certain doom. There was no escape.
"There's no need to run anymore," Kenshin suddenly declared as he jumped onto the top of Puu's head, his sword arm already grasping the hilt of the sheathed Youtou Shinnoken.
"...W-Wait, what? I thought you didn't want to kill anyone, human or demon! What was the point of holding back earlier if you're going to kill Iehog now?" Botan complained to Kenshin as her mind desperately searched for some other, less morally ambiguous way out of this predicament.
"My selfish desire to leave my hands unsoiled by demon blood is at an end. If anything, Iehog has proven to me that he deserves to die by my blade, come what may," Kenshin concluded, readying himself with his proverbial battoujutsu stance. 'Dammit, Chojin. You're just like Shishio. Using a confused yet well-meaning creature like this to do your bidding is simply unforgivable!'
Yet despite Kenshin's willingness to finally abandon his morals once he was forced against another wall of difficult decisions, the gigantic stone hand of karma reared its craggy fingers and stopped Iehog's last stand cold on its feet.
"W-What... now?" Botan tiredly managed to squeak out as she collapsed into a weary bundle of exhaustion on Puu's back; the back-and-forth roller coaster of unexpected events and subversions was starting to get to her. "Is that... Genbu's giant hand? By Koenma's Sacred Pacifier, we're not going to fight even more resurrected dead bad guys, are we? There should be a goddamn quota per resurrection!"
"No... Look," Kenshin curtly compelled as he mutely pointed at what was happening below them. The remnants of Genbu's body... notably, half of his head, an arm, and part of his torso... struggled against the ticking jaki time bomb that was Iehog by lobbing and burying him under as much Bakuretsu-Ganshou-Dan rubble and landslides as possible. "Genbu-dono's helping us out. Can you believe it?"
"Now I've seen almost everything. Kenshin, kill me now before I see Hiei pregnant with Kurama's kid," an exhausted, seemingly jetlagged Botan kidded... or so she told herself.
Kenshin raised a curious eyebrow at that last comment. "Why would mountains impregnate each other?" He then shook his head as if to clear it. "Never mind that; Genbu-dono and Iehog are going to kill each other! We've got to stop them somehow!"
Botan opened her mouth to protest, but thought the better of it and instead raised her hands up in complete surrender. "Whatever. Fine. Okay. Do whatever the hell you want, Kenshin. The world's gone bat-shit insane anyway, so I'm fine with whatever floats your boat."
Meanwhile, Iehog struggled frantically against Genbu's unforeseen betrayal of their cause, dealing more damage to the second-to-the-last-surviving Shisejyu than Kurama and Kenshin combined. "THIS ISN'T FAIR! This isn't fair at all! How dare you get in the way of my vengeance, you damn Johnny-come-lately! Aren't we on the same side? Aren't we supposed to corrupt the Demon Sword, destroy the Reikai Tantei, and start a jihad for the glory of the great Chojin? What's gotten in to you, you fucking traitor? Let go of me! Let go of me, or so help me I'm going to...!"
"SHUT THE FUCK UP," Genbu boomed with an undertone of malice, making the entire mountainside tremble with the might of his voice. "You're a fucking moron, you know that? The Chojin can kiss my ass. Seeing what he did to you and your imp of a big brother, I'd rather go about things my way from now own, thank you very much. You want to get to the Battousai? Then you have to go through me first."
Iehog, being the obedient demon that he was, did exactly as he was told, blasting Genbu's body with the inescapable might of the Fu no Senrei dragons. The stone golem's constitution was still equivalent to that of brittle chalk... the reason for his earlier defeat against Battousai... so even though his healing factor were still up to par, he himself was at the edge of his rope in regards to staying alive. A few more good shots and he was sure to be a goner.
"You don't understand a thing, you petty excuse for a Shisejyu. You can't stop me. Compared to you, weakest of the Saint Beasts, I'm a god. You know why? It's because of what I've been through. To enumerate, my brother and I have held our grudge for Himura Kenshin for more than a century, culminating to this fight where we've sacrificed our dignity, individuality, and in my brother's case, his very own life in order to win!"
To be Continued...
Next: The stony hand of karma.
I'd just like to note that, as far as I'm concerned, when writing this story, I have no interest in applying to it what I believe is right and wrong; what does interest me is showing why these characters do what they do, complete with whatever justifications they have for their actions regardless if I or anybody else find their reasons laughable, stupid, pitiful, or downright noble. That makes for a far more interesting story, I believe.
Paalam!
Abdiel