Blue Stone Town: The Clarity of Martial Arts!
"Die, die, die, die, die—!!!"
Tetsusai's reason had burned away in jealousy, fear, and madness that had reached their peak.
He no longer cared about technique or how much energy he spent. Only one thought remained in his mind:
To blast the figure before him, who struck him as utterly absurd, to pieces!
"Blood Demon Art—Steel Fist Seal—Hundred-Crack Collapse!"
He threw back his head and roared. His burly body swelled another size, and dark golden arcs of electricity raced wildly across his skin, roaring and crackling with a piercing hiss.
His arms became a blur in an instant, unleashing dark golden fist seals imbued with the destructive power of "steel bone" like a furious storm!
One... two... ten... dozens!
The fist seals looked a little insubstantial because they had been unleashed so violently, but their numbers made up for everything.
They varied in size and followed fiendishly tricky paths. Some blasted straight ahead, some curved around from the sides, some smashed down from above, and others skimmed the ground to cut off his escape!
Like a metal storm made purely of destructive energy, sweeping in from every direction at once, they covered the entire area for dozens of meters around Giyu!
The air was torn apart and compressed, letting out a whimper as though it could barely hold together.
Giyu merely lowered his eyelids slightly.
Blood was still trickling down from the wounds on his temple and cheek, blurring his vision a little.
But now, the pain and weakness of his body, even the interference with his vision, no longer mattered.
Through the perspective of the Transparent World, everything changed.
In his perception, the paths of the dark golden fist seals filling the sky became exceptionally clear, and they were "very slow."
It was as though someone had put the whole world in slow motion.
Only his mind worked on, calculating calmly and swiftly.
Then he moved.
Turning sideways, ducking, twisting his waist, lifting a foot, gliding forward, turning around...
Every movement was utterly economical, without the slightest unnecessary motion or trace of panic.
His body seemed to become a stream of unparalleled agility.
His tattered red haori snapped in the wind from the punches.
And so, step by step, he walked into the storm of destruction toward Tetsusai, who was still roaring.
His steps were steady, his rhythm clear, carrying an indescribable cadence.
"No... impossible... this is impossible!!!"
Tetsusai's roar carried an undisguisable tremor and despair.
He had practically set his demon blood alight, squeezed every last bit of strength from his body, and unleashed the wildest, most relentless attack of his life, yet he couldn't even make his opponent stop for a moment!
The feeling that everything was under his opponent's control threatened to tear apart what little reason he had left.
"Why can't I hit you?! Why?!"
"I clearly... I clearly already have this kind of power!!"
As he watched Giyu move so calmly among the fist seals filling the sky, even seeming to regard him with cold scrutiny, fear spread wildly through his heart like a poisonous vine.
"You can see... you really can see it!!"
Tetsusai's voice turned shrill.
"The Transparent World... you actually...!"
At that moment, the despair of seeing a century's obsession vanish like a bubble, jealousy, and a bone-deep chill finally shattered the last of Tetsusai's will to fight.
Just as Tetsusai reeled and his assault faltered for an instant from fear and despair—
Now!!!
A brilliant light suddenly flashed in the ice-blue eyes of Giyu, who had remained as calm as water!
His advancing figure abruptly blurred in Tetsusai's scarlet, terrified eyes, then... vanished completely!
His aura, his presence, even his killing intent—all were suppressed and concealed!
It was as though he had merged with the drifting smoke and dust, the falling petals, and the flickering light and shadows of the lanterns, becoming one with the battlefield he had seen through.
Tetsusai's senses screamed a warning, but both his vision and his demonic intuition found only a suffocating "emptiness"!
He couldn't find his target!
In the next hundredth of a second—
A bone-chilling sound of something slicing through the air exploded almost beside his ear!
A figure appeared directly in front of him without the slightest warning, like a blood-red phantom flashing out of nothingness!
It was Giyu!
The blood on his body trailed red afterimages as he moved, and his tattered haori streamed behind him like the tail of a flame.
On his youthful face, not even the blood and grime could hide the absolute calm and focus in his ice-blue eyes.
Both hands gripped the broken half of his sky-blue Nichirin Blade steadily.
The water-ripple pattern on the blade, which had already dimmed, now erupted with an unprecedented azure radiance, concentrated to its utmost!
The blue light of the broken blade, so close at hand, filled Tetsusai's vision.
He saw his own terrified, twisted face reflected in Giyu's pupils.
He also saw the path of the broken blade's swing.
"No—!!!"
Tetsusai let out a roar of utter despair. He tried to block, tried to dodge, but his body was a fatally slow beat behind.
Giyu's arms swung steadily through.
The broken blade's azure light traced a beautiful, deadly line of watery blue through the air.
"Swish!!!"
The soft sound of the blade cutting through flesh rang especially clear and piercing in the brief quiet after the fury.
Time seemed to freeze at that moment.
The expression of madness, fear, and astonishment on Tetsusai's face froze completely.
His wide blood-red eyes reflected Giyu's calm figure as he lowered his blade and stood still,
and the cut that had suddenly appeared across his own neck, smooth as a mirror.
The next moment—
Spurt!
Dark red demon blood shot skyward from his severed neck like a fountain!
His enormous, hideous head left his body, tumbling through the air in an arc.
The expression on his face still held the utter astonishment and bewilderment of the moment before his death.
Lower Rank One, Tetsusai, had been beheaded!
His headless, burly body stood rigidly for a while, then pitched forward and crashed onto the pockmarked flagstones, raising a cloud of dust.
Blood gurgled from the severed neck, quickly staining the ground red.
As the airborne head tumbled through the air, the madness and fear slowly faded from its eyes, replaced by a clarity like a final flash of lucidity.
It saw the boy below, holding a broken blade, covered in blood yet still standing.
The boy's red haori swayed gently in the night breeze. His ice-blue eyes watched it all calmly, without sadness or joy, holding only the silence that followed the end of everything.
The head had yet to hit the ground, and consciousness had not completely faded.
At the moment of death, a hundred years were compressed, and countless images flashed through Tetsusai's final thoughts.
He saw a martial arts school courtyard in the suburbs of Kyoto a century ago, bathed in bright sunlight.
His younger self, though not as burly as he would later become, stood straight as a pine.
Bare-chested, his bronze skin covered in sweat, he meticulously demonstrated a fierce and powerful sequence of punches to dozens of students of different ages.
The students sat in a circle around him, their eyes full of awe and longing.
A few little ones in particular had faces flushed red with excitement. They copied his movements, calling out in their childish voices.
That was when he, Tetsusai, "master of Shimizu Hall," had been at the height of his glory.
After lessons, he would sit cross-legged on the veranda, watching the setting sun stretch his students' shadows and listening to them laugh and play, arguing over who had been scolded the most that day and who had nearly mastered the Mountain-Collapsing Shoulder.
One particularly mischievous young student would even sneak a heaping spoonful of sugar into his tea after it had gone cold, only for him to catch the boy and tap him lightly on the head with a wooden sword, laughing.
Those peals of laughter, that youthful vitality smelling of sweat and earth, had once been the light of his world.
It was in that light that the desire to pursue the Transparent World had taken root.
Late at night, with no sound to be heard, he practiced his punches alone in a courtyard where moonlight lay like water.
He was no longer doing it to teach his students, but to seize that faint, elusive chance.
His longing then, though urgent, had been as pure as freshly quenched steel.
Then the images suddenly turned cold.
In a bamboo grove beneath the moon, Akaza's powerful, pure figure, seemingly born for battle, brought the temptation of a path to "eternity" and "the supreme."
The moment he became a demon, he felt no fear, only boundlessly swelling hope.
At last, he had endless time to knock on that great door!
He had even thought that one day he could use a demon's body to nourish martial arts in turn, and create principles of fist fighting never before seen.
But after that... his memories turned bloody and blurred.
He clearly remembered the first time he deliberately killed someone: a woodcutter on his way home at night.
Once, twice... the line he would not cross receded step by step.
The school gradually fell into disuse. Some students left in disappointment; others woke one morning to find their master gone.
The courtyard that had held so much sweat and laughter was eventually covered in weeds and dust.
He grew farther and farther from the Transparent World, and farther and farther from "Tetsusai, master of Shimizu Hall"...
He became Lower Rank One, knowing only how to devour and thirst for power, a monster who had nearly forgotten what he had originally looked like.
Until tonight, until the boy named Giyu Tomioka used a broken blade to cut through a century of his delusions and sins in a single stroke.
The tumbling head's vision grew darker and darker.
The last thing reflected in its "eyes" was the lonely moon in the night sky, exactly the same as the one he had seen while training so arduously a hundred years ago.
And below, Giyu's gradually blurring figure, standing with his blade in hand.
Heh...
Before his consciousness vanished, a very faint sigh, sounding both relieved and infinitely regretful, echoed through Tetsusai's remaining thoughts.
So... was I wrong... from the very beginning?
If you climb toward power by stepping on the flesh and blood of others, all you build in the end is a ladder to hell.
I threw away the martial arts I practiced as a human, chasing nothing more than a phantom built from demon blood.
The true "supreme" may never have lain in devouring and plundering...
This boy... the conviction he protects, his will as clear as water, may... be closer to the essence of "transparency," perhaps?
Thank you... Giyu...
For using your blade to cut short this pitiful cycle of mine...
Now... my soul, so full of sin... should go to hell... and repay its debts...
The head finally landed, rolled a few times, and came to rest faceup amid the ruins.
The last glimmer in those red eyes faded completely,
and then, along with the headless body below, it rapidly turned ashen and shriveled, finally becoming a great cloud of rustling, drifting ash.
The night breeze swept through, carrying away the ash and stirring the torn edges of Giyu's clothes.
At last, he was the only one left standing in the training ground.
Covered in wounds and bathed in blood, he stood with the broken blade in his hand.
And so the brutal fight to the death with Lower Rank One came to an end.