To Lyger 0: That's kind of what I was going for – Viperion's power leads to a lot of repetition of terrible outcomes.
To Butterfly: Not too long to wait now…
Ryoku barreled through the swinging doors alongside Shiro, both with their swords upraised. The tea shop's main café room was largely deserted, the patrons all having fled at the first sign of conflict. However, five people still remained in the building, waiting for them. Kamisenshi, Kamiyama, Kamikaze, and Kamikangae all turned as one to face Ryoku and Shiro, forming a loose semicircle in front of their boss. Behind his super-powered henchmen, Okamura sat calmly at a table, sipping his tea and watching the impending fight.
A lyre rocketed out from behind Ryoku, ricocheted off the floor and wall, and shot straight for Kamikangae, catching him in the back of the head. With a pained grunt, Kamikangae dropped to the ground as the lyre bounced away from him, deflected off of a post, and flew back to Viperion's hand. Ryoku raised an eyebrow: for him to have mastered that level of accuracy, he must have rewound this battle a lot. And either that meant that this fight would go perfectly… or that he still hadn't found the ideal outcome.
But Ryoku couldn't worry about that troubling possibility right now; she trusted Viperion to do his job. She would do hers. "Who wants to go?" she taunted, her grip tightening on her sword's handle, her eyes darting back and forth between their four opponents.
Shiro narrowed his eyes and sprinted straight toward Kamisenshi, lowering his katana and leaping immediately to the attack. "You will pay for my father!" he shouted, slashing straight at Kamisenshi's shoulder. His opponent, however, sidestepped to evade the slash, aiming his own strike at Shiro's exposed side. Shiro flipped his katana around to catch the slash and redirect it away from himself before punching Kamisenshi in the head. Kamisenshi ducked, stepping back from him to gain distance, placing himself between Shiro and Okamura, closer to the door.
"Your father was an unfortunate victim of your own actions, Kamiken," Kamisenshi retorted, sweeping his katana through the space separating them, forcing Shiro to back away a pace.
"I am 'Kamiken' no longer. My father may have been a victim of my action," Shiro acknowledged, raising his sword in a ready position, eyes narrowed to tiny slits. "But you still killed him!"
Viperion hurled his lyre across the room between Shiro and Ryoku, striking the push bar door with enough force to bend the mechanism in the locked position. "You need to get Kamiyama out of the fight," he told Ryoku without looking. The lyre bounced off the wall directly above Okamura's head and returned to him.
Ryoku launched herself at Kamiyama. If she could remove one of her two remaining opponents from the fight right away, she could end this thing quickly. Kamiyama raised his hammer over his head, bringing it down with a bellow. Ryoku leapt out of his way, landing on her toes on the back of a chair as Kamiyama's blow fell, only to evade again as he splintered the furniture under her. She landed behind him and shouted, "Lightning Dragon!" A flash that seared her retinas, and Kamiyama fell to the ground, twitching as the lightning coursed over his body.
"Absorb his wind," Viperion instructed her, flicking his lyre back to lie along his forearm, catching a strike from Kamisenshi and punching him in the shoulder. Kamisenshi narrowly avoided the punch, only to move directly into Shiro's next strike.
Spinning to find Kamikaze, Ryoku held her hand out, calling, "Wind Dragon," moments before Kamikaze spun both tessen in her direction. A gust of wind built up around him before spinning toward her in a cyclone, picking up leaflets and menus scattered around the room and hurtling them into her face. But as quickly as the wind had come, it dropped away to nothing against Ryoku's hand. She spun her sword around in a quick pinwheel, leaving shredded paper floating around them in the air. Kamikaze stared at her in shock as she kicked a piece of the smashed table at him. With only a moment to spare he flicked his hand to one side, sending an eddy of air at the wood, knocking it off course so it sailed over his shoulder and into the wall next to Okamura.
Okamura's eyes narrowed at that, staring at the heroes. His shoulders tensed.
"You are on the wrong side of this," Kamikaze called, flicking one tessen open in front of his face.
Ryoku scoffed. "That depends on whether you consider murdering families to be the right side!" With a yell she sprang across the distance separating them and brought her sword down on Kamikaze's arm. He, however, dropped back, ducking under her follow-up swing and leaping over her leg sweep. Anticipating his position, she stabbed straight at his chest.
Kamikaze pushed the blade aside with his tessen, using her energy to push himself into the air and blowing himself away from her with a breath, spinning around in midair to avoid hitting the ceiling and landing in a crouch, just outside her range. "The Yakuza help people!"
"You have a funny way of helping people, if what I saw last night is any indication!"
Viperion deflected his lyre off the floor between himself and Ryoku, sending it hurtling straight toward Shiro. At the last moment, Shiro, still engaged in dueling Kamisenshi, slid to one side to avoid a slash. Kamisenshi drew a wakizashi from his waist, slicing at Shiro's unprotected stomach. Viperion's lyre interposed between Shiro and the blade, turning the wakizashi aside. The lyre clattered to the floor on the other side of the room. "Block high right!" he shouted to Ryoku.
Reflexes honed from a year of practice, Ryoku turned, automatically spinning her sword by the handle into the correct position. Almost before she was ready a hail of spoons dropped into her guard, bouncing off of her sword in all directions.
Kamikangae pushed slowly to his feet, raising his fists and dropping into a fighting stance. Kamikaze held out his tessen, snapping one shut and pointing it at Ryoku. "You will die for your insolence – right now!" declared Kamikangae as a cloud of wood shavings rose from the ground, spinning around him in a complicated pattern. Viperion's eyes flickered to Ryoku, and she smirked. Both heroes sprang into action simultaneously.
Kamikangae punched, sending his wood debris straight at Ryoku. At the same moment Viperion kicked over a round table and flipped it into the air just as Ryoku charged. The table shuddered as wood splinters struck home, burying themselves into the tabletop, the longer ones penetrating the table surface entirely to protrude from the other side. With a slash Ryoku cut straight through the table before kicking one half straight at Kamikangae. The table half shuddered as Kamikangae turned his power on it, slowing it down slightly and altering its trajectory to orbit around him before hurling it across the room at Shiro. Viperion, however, kicked a chair in that direction, deflecting the table half so it clattered to the ground in front of Okamura. Ryoku's sword flashed, and Kamikangae only barely evaded her attack, stumbling to the ground and crabwalking away from her.
Viperion evaded one wind gust from Kamikaze, spun around another one, and punched Kamikaze in the chest. Kamikaze jumped into the air, propelling himself away from Viperion and holding himself in the air with a steady stream of air. Viperion leapt, spun around, and kicked him in the chest, throwing him across the room to slam into the wall next to Okamura, behind where Shiro and Kamisenshi continued their back-and-forth duel.
Ryoku jumped after Kamikangae, flipping her sword around to stab into his chest. However, movement from the side drew her attention. She glanced in that direction, glimpsed a steel hammer, and pulled her arms back without a second to spare. The floorboards erupted.
Kamiyama had finally rejoined the fight.
Ryoku landed in front of Kamiyama, sword raised to block the hammer blow he aimed at her head. A metallic clang echoed through the building, again and again as Kamiyama leveled two-handed blow after two-handed blow on her and she parried every one, shifting the hammer's trajectory to fall on either side of her. Kamiyama steadily pressed her back. Without taking her focus off of him, Ryoku cast her gaze about the room, cataloguing possibilities. Kamikangae had risen to his feet to one side. The floor all around them had become cratered by hammer strikes. Little of the furniture around them remained undamaged. Finding a table leg with her foot, she kicked it at Kamikangae's feet, and he stumbled backward over it.
"Go water!" Viperion shouted.
"Water Dragon!" Ryoku vanished into a puddle of water, moments before a wind blast caught Kamiyama full in the chest, throwing him backward. Looking around the room, Viperion had left Kamikaze alone to help Shiro, whose strength was beginning to flag under a relentless barrage of strikes overhand strikes from Kamisenshi, his movements slowed by his injury while Kamisenshi's energy had not diminished. Viperion pushed Shiro to one side to avoid a strike that he was a moment too slow to block. With a thought, Water-Ryoku slid across the floor toward Kamikaze, rematerializing behind him and slashing at his back. Kamikaze, however, ducked and rolled forward away from her, sidestepping again as he turned in order to evade her follow-up strike. The next strike he caught with a cushion of air centimeters from his chest. Ryoku feinted a strike to the left and followed up with a right, but he avoided both attacks, moving backward away from her. Across the room, Viperion gave her a pained look before turning to grab Kamisenshi's katana, snapping the blade in half. Finally, Ryoku caught Kamikaze in the chest with a kick, launching him backward through the wooden wall of the tea shop.
"Duck!" The shout came the moment Ryoku kicked Kamikaze, but even so a fraction of a second too late.
Suddenly Kamiyama was there. Ryoku tried to avoid him, but his hammer smashed down on her sword arm. She dropped the sword, screaming in pain and cradling her arm to her chest. She looked up just as Kamiyama rammed his forehead into hers. Ryoku fell to the floor as the world turned black.