Chapter 1748: Pathetic
Chapter 1748: Pathetic
"Pathetic... So damned pathetic..." Ayame sighed.
She arrived at every opening the instant it formed, her katana at the gap like it had always been part of the choreography, the water along the edge sealing each wound with a cold sting that made Kaede flinch harder than the steel.
"Stop..." Kaede swung wide and ragged.
"You’re telegraphing again." Ayame flowed around a demonic arc that cratered the ground beside her, bending at the waist in a hip rotation so smooth it turned the evasion into a dancer’s half-turn.
She came out of the bend already cutting, water trailing her katana in a spiral that hung in the cold air like brushwork before dissolving.
Shoulder. Ribs. A line across the collarbone that drew a collective wince from the nearest tiers, each cut placed where muscle met tendon, where the next swing would cost a fraction more effort than the last.
Kaede’s body paid the toll of a hundred small debts while the relic demanded movements she could no longer afford.
"Is she still teaching her?" an elven scout whispered to her neighbor in the middle tiers. "Even now?"
"She stopped teaching a while ago," the neighbor murmured, eyes on the systematic disassembly below. "What we’re witnessing now is the elder sibling handing the younger one a proper ass whooping."
Across the arena, Quinlan watched from his seat with Blossom curled in his lap and Vex welded to his side, and the pride on his face was so open and so shameless that half the front rows had stopped pretending they weren’t looking at him instead of the fight.
The realization landed across a dozen minds in the same breath as spectators looked from the woman on the floor to the man in his seat and back again.
He bent the world to his will through raw, overwhelming force.
She dissected it with precision so absolute it looked effortless.
He was the storm and she was the blade.
On the floor, Kaede was breaking.
The relic hauled her into a lunge her legs couldn’t serve, and Ayame sidestepped with a shift of weight that barely qualified as movement, then opened a gash along Kaede’s sword arm from wrist to elbow that turned the grip into a shaking, unreliable thing.
"By the rules of a Fujimori sacred duel, the match is called when one side concedes, loses consciousness, or the elders determine a decisive advantage." Ayame’s voice came level and unhurried as she circled her sister. "The elders are dead or frozen in blocks of ice."
She raised her blade, and the water caught the winter sun and burned cold white.
"No one is coming to call this match. No one is going to save you from what you earned."
Kaede’s bloody fingers strangled the hilt as the relic screamed through the bond, demonic fury pouring into arms that could barely hold a sword.
"Ayame!"
The Duchess of Silverwind howled with guttural animosity as she dragged herself upright on borrowed will and swung with everything she had left.
For one fraction of a second, Ayame didn’t move.
She looked at her sister across the shattered ground, at the blood running from a dozen cuts and the arm shaking under the relic’s demands and the desperation cracking through the fury on a face she had once loved more than any other in the world.
For that single breath the samurai saw Kaede as she had been before the succession, a clumsy little girl chasing her through the gardens with a wooden sword too big for her hands, laughing so hard she tripped over her own feet.
Ayame closed her eyes, and the mark on her stomach blazed so bright it burned through her clothes, the water on her katana surging in answer until the blade sang with it.
When her eyes opened, they were crystal blue and utterly clear, and whatever lived in them was no longer grief.
She stepped into the swing rather than away from it, closing the distance Kaede had spent the entire duel trying to maintain.
Her katana met the demonic arc at its root and split it clean down the center, the crescent dying in two halves that dissolved into wisps past her shoulders while the water on her blade flared brilliant white.
The edge continued through the same line without slowing.
It took Kaede’s sword arm off above the elbow.
The limb spun through the cold air with the relic still clutched in its fingers and hit the floor five paces away with a sound that echoed through a silent arena.
"Wha-"
Kaede dropped to her knees on the ground, staring at the stump as blood sheeted over the stone. The woman kneeling there looked at the severed limb and the demonic sword still gripping it with fingers that refused to let go, and for the first time since the succession, Kaede Fujimori held nothing.
The relic twitched on the ground.
The severed arm jerked once, then again, the fingers tightening and loosening around the hilt in erratic spasms as the blade tried to swing without a body to swing it.
The wrist rolled toward an angle no detached limb should have been able to attempt, and the steel scraped across the ground in short, frantic arcs that went nowhere, a weapon thrashing against its own uselessness while the arm it rode flopped and twisted beneath it like a fish drowning in air.
Kaede watched it.
She watched her own hand obey the sword that had been whispering to her since the day the elders placed it in her grip, watched the fingers she had used to hold cups, brush her hair, and grip her sister’s hand as a child clench and unclench at the command of something that did not care that she was no longer attached.
The sound that left her throat was not a scream or a battle cry or anything that belonged on a duel ground.
It was a sob.
"I’m done," she choked out through the blood and the tears running down her face, her remaining hand pressing against the stump as if she could hold herself together by force. "I surrender... I’m done, I’m done, I..."
Her eyes found the twitching arm again and her face twisted into something so raw it made the nearest rows do a double take.
Was this truly their graceful young lady who was to lead the Fujimori into their golden age?
"Get that piece of shit away from me!" The shriek tore out of Kaede wet and ugly and cracking on every word. "I hate it! GET IT AWAY!"
"I-I... I..."
Whatever was left of the mumbling Duchess of Silverwind collapsed inward, and Kaede curled onto the frost with her knees against her chest and her one remaining arm wrapped around them, shaking so violently that the blood pooling beneath her rippled with each tremor.
The woman who had ruled a duchy, commanded armies, and sold her own sister wept into the stone.
The relic kept twitching five paces away, reaching for a host that wanted nothing more to do with it.
Ayame stood over her sister with her katana at her side, the water running down the blade in thin rivulets that fell against the stone like the last drops of a passing rain, and the duel ground was silent enough to hear each one.
Now, it was time to decide just what to do with Kaede Fujimori.