Ryu felt it immediately.
The shift.
There was no warning, no declaration. Just pressure.
Ryu ducked under a wide swing, the air splitting where the entity's fist had been a heartbeat earlier. Before he could counter, cloth screamed past his ear, burying itself into the stone behind him with enough force to crack it.
He spun, tearing another strip away from his ankle just as it tightened, the fibers biting into his skin like wire. He lunged forward anyways, his fist slamming into the entity's ribs.
The impact should have broken bone, but instead, his knuckles sank into something soft and wrong, the body giving way like rotting meat wrapped around a frame that refused to collapse.
The entity barely staggered. It answered immediately, a brutal elbow crashing into Ryu's chest and knocking the breath from his lungs. Ryu skidded back across the ground, boots carving lines into the dust. He forced air back into his lungs, shoulders burning, legs screaming at him to slow down.
The entity didn't.
Cloth surged from all directions, no longer just probing. It wrapped around his forearm, his thigh, yanking him off balance. Ryu slammed his heel down, snapping one strand, then tore another free with sheer force.
A third slipped past his guard and stabbed into the ground inches from his side, the tip quivering.
Too close.
He jumped back again. Too far this time.
The entity's arm snapped upward and the cloth followed, coiling around his torso midair. Ryu twisted desperately, ripping himself loose as he landed hard on one knee. Pain flared through his leg, sharp and immediate.
He didn't have time to acknowledge it.
The entity was already there.
A fist crashed down. Ryu barely raised his arms in time, the blow driving him into the ground with a sickening thud. Stone fractured beneath him. His vision blurred, ears ringing.
He rolled just as another strike pulverized the spot where his head had been. As he pushed himself up, breathing ragged, it finally sank in fully. Before, this thing had allowed space, had watched him think, had listened.
Now, there was no space at all.
Every movement he made was answered twice. Front? Fists. Back? Cloth. Close? Blunt force. Far? Restraint and execution. It wasn't adapting anymore. It had already adapted.
Ryu wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, eyes locked onto the entity as it advanced again, unhurried but relentless. There was no malice in its expression now. No curiosity, just impatience.
It wanted him gone.
Not because he was a threat, but because he was taking too long to die.
Ryu planted his feet, muscles trembling, and raised his guard again. "Yeah," he breathed, forcing himself to stay upright as the cloth began to rise once more. "I get it."
The realization cut deep.
It wasn't fear that he was filled with. Not despair either.
But pride.
That this thing saw him as expendable. Something to be finished and forgotten, burned far worse than the pain in his body. It didn't break him, but sharpen him. Ryu surged forward again, stronger this time.
He drove his fist into the entity's jaw, twisting his hips into the strike. The head snapped to the side, flesh tearing open along the cheek. No blood followed. Just torn, lifeless matter peeling away from a grin that refused to disappear.
Ryu followed with an elbow to the chest, then a knee that caved the torso inward. Each lit landed solid. Each hit meant something. And each one meant nothing. The entity barely reacted.
It stepped in, cloth snapping around Ryu's wrist mid-swing and yanking his arm sideways. A fist slammed into Ryu's ribs, cracking something deep inside him. He coughed, staggering back as another strip wrapped his ankle and jerked his leg out from under him.
He hit the ground hard. Before he could rise, the cloth tightened, pinning one arm and one leg. The entity leapt. Not jumping, but laughing itself, its straps anchoring to nearby walls and debris, forming taut platforms that it pushed off from.
It came down like a falling weight, driving a punch into Ryu's shoulder that shattered the ground beneath them. Ryu screamed, not in pain, but in defiance, tearing himself free by ripping the cloth apart at the cost of skin and blood.
He rolled aside as the entity boosted again, straps pulling it upward, sideways, everywhere at once. It moved like a spider with too many legs, never touching the ground longer than it had to.
Ryu forced himself up, vision swimming.
He charged.
They collided again. Fists against flesh, bone against rot. Ryu carved chunks out of it with every strike, tearing through muscle, crushing joints, breaking what should have been vital. The entity's body deformed, twisted, reassembled itself through cloth and stubborn will.
Ryu, meanwhile, bled.
Cuts lined his arms, his side, his leg. Each wound stole strength, each breath heavier than the last. His movements slowed by fractions of a second, and the entity noticed every one.
A strip of cloth wrapped around his chest, squeezing the air from his lungs. Another caught his neck, not choking, just threatening. The entity yanked him forward and slammed him into the ground, then boosted itself upward again, using its own bindings as a springboard before crashing a knee into Ryu's back.
Something inside him gave. Ryu lay there for a moment, teeth clenched, body screaming at him to stop. He knew it then, if this continued, then he would end up dead. Not because he lacked resolve. Not because he was weaker.
But because this thing did not bleed.
Did not run out of breath.
Did not feel exhaustion creeping into its limbs.
I can't beat it like this.
The entity advanced, cloth already rising again, preparing to bind him, finish him, move on.
Ryu's mind raced.
If it wouldn't bleed… then hurting it wasn't enough.
If it wouldn't tire… then overpowering it is pointless.
He needed something else. Something final.
Ryu staggered back, heel catching on broken stone, breath hitching as another wave of dizziness rolled through him. Blood ran freely now, streaking down his arms, soaking into torn fabric, dropping onto the ground in uneven rhythm.
Every movement pulled at open wounds. Every breath tasted like iron. The entity pressed forward, unhurried. Cloth pinned one path of escape. Another wrapped around debris around him, forming a false wall.
There was no true corner, only the certainty that there was nowhere left to go.
Ryu's vision swam.
Focus.
He roared and launched himself forward anyway, throwing everything he had left into it. His fist crashed into the entity's torso, then again, then again. Each strike driven by desperation rather than precision. The entity answered with its own blows, but Ryu didn't slow. He couldn't afford to.
He caught an opening.
With a final surge, Ryu grabbed hold of one of the entity's arms and twisted with all the strength his failing body could muster. There was a wet, tearing sound as the limb ripped free, cloth snapping and flesh splitting apart.
The arm hit the ground with a dull thud. Ryu stumbled back, chest heaving, barely staying on his feet. For a fleeting moment, just a heartbeat, hope flared.
Then his legs gave out.
He dropped to one knee, then the other, hands shaking as they pressed into the ground to keep him upright. Blood dripped from his fingers in steady drops now. The world tilted.
The entity looked down at its severed arm.
Then it smiled.
No flinch. No anger. No pain.
Just the same rotten grin, wide and satisfied, as if Ryu had proven nothing more than persistence. The cloth along its shoulder stirred, already twitching, already preparing to replace what was lost.
Ryu looked up at it, breath ragged, body failing, but his eyes still burned. And the entity, whole in spirit if not in form, stood over him unbothered, unbeaten, and waiting for him to fall completely.
But Ryu's grudge didn't fade.
It festered.
Every second the entity remained standing, smiling, unmoved, fed it. He glared up at the thing, chest riding and falling in uneven gasps, vision blurring at the edges. Wherever his eyes landed, there was proof of how pointless the fight had been.
Torn flesh hung loose from its frame. Bones showed through split muscle. Chunks were missing completely.
And yet it stood.
No blood. No weakness. No consequence.
Ryu clenched his fists, nails biting into his palms.
He hadn't been raised to understand things like this. There were no lessons for the impossible, no lectures on how to dismantle something that refused to obey the rules of life. His childhood hadn't been spent behind desks or buried in books.
It had been spent bleeding.
Training equipment instead of textbooks. Calloused knuckles instead of ink-stained fingers. Martial forms drilled into muscle memory, not formulas memorized for exams. When something stood in his way, he didn't analyze it.
He hit it.
When words failed, fists spoke.
When reason broke down, violence finished the argument.
That was all he knew.
So what was he supposed to do when violence did nothing?
When the enemy didn't die.
Didn't bleed.
Didn't even care how broken its body became.
Ryu's breathing slowed. Not because he was calming down, but because something else was taking hold. His thoughts spiraled, circling the same question over and over until it stopped like a question at all.
How do you kill something that isn't alive?
A faint crackle answered him.
At first, he thought it was his vision failing. Spots of color flickering at the edge of his sight. Then he felt it. Heat. Subtle, pulsing, crawling up from his chest and along his arms.
Tiny sparks of a red flame blinked into existence around him.
They flared for a split second, vanished, then returned. Stronger. Like embers struggling to catch. The air around his fists shimmered, the heat sharp and unfamiliar, yet deeply his.
Ryu stared at the flames, breath hitching. He didn't know what they were. Didn't know why they were appearing. But one thought finally cut through the chaos in his mind, raw and instinctive.
This is the answer.
As the moment stretches thin, the entity moves. Cloth surges, spearing forward, closing at the last fraction of a distance between them. Ryu's body refuses to respond fast enough. His muscles fail him. His vision dims.
Death is a breath away.
And then…
Something answers.
Not thought. Not will.
Instinct.
A colossal surge of red flame detonates outward from Ryu's body, a roaring wave of heat and force that tears through the air like a shockwave. Stone shatters. Debris is hurled aside. The cloth recoils violently, snapping back as the entity itself is thrown away, skidding across the ground in a violent tumble.
Ryu rises.
Not by effort.
By inevitability.
The flames coil around him, vast and feral, yet impossible controlled, as if they recognize him. His body lifts slightly from the ground, blood still dripping form his wounds, but no longer falling.
His eyes open.
They burn.
Red threaded with gold, glowing faintly, unfocused. Elsewhere. He isn't fully present anymore. His consciousness sinks beneath the surface, submerged in something older, deeper, operating on instinct rather than intention.
The village answers him.
All around, blood begins to move.
At first, it's subtle. Thin rivulets peeling themselves off stone, droplets trembling where they fell. Then it becomes unmistakable. Blood lifts from the ground, from walls, from shattered corpses scattered across the village streets.
Not just near him.
All of it.
Streams rise into the air like reversed rainfall, drifting upward in slow, spiraling arcs. They weave together, separate, then merge again, drawing by a singular pull. Above Ryu, the countless streams converge, forming a massive, swirling mass that hovers and churns, thick and heavy with iron and memory.
Then it descends.
The blood pours onto him. Not soaking, not dripping, but shaping. It spreads across his face first, tracing sharp, deliberate lines along his cheekbones, across his brow, down the bridge of his nose.
From there it flows outward, branching and interlocking, crawling over his neck, shoulders, chest, and back in intricate patterns. The patterns were angular, deliberate, and ancient in design.
It reaches his arms, wrapping around muscle and tendon, spiraling down to his hands. It traces his legs, his feet, every extremity marked with the same interconnected pattern, as if mapping his body into something complete.
As more blood is absorbed, the markings darken. Deep crimson turns heavier, richer, almost black at its core. It glowed faintly beneath the surface of his skin. The flames around him intensify in response, flaring brighter, hotter, yet never touching him.
When the last stream of blood is pulled into place, the air falls silent. Ryu stands at the center of it all, marked, burning, no longer fully himself. And across the ruined ground, the entity looks on, its grin faltering for the first time.
The raging red flames that once drowned the battlefield recede, shrinking from roaring waves into a steady, controlled burn. With the heat no longer blinding, it could be seen that the fire raged from the markings.
The patterns etched across Ryu's body glow faintly, pulsing like embers buried beneath skin. Each line breathes heat, feeding the flames in slow, deliberate rhythms. Where the designs overlap, the light burns brighter, red deepened with veins of gold, as if something circulatory now exists beneath them.
Ryu stands motionless, head slightly bowed.
He does not look at the entity.
The entity shifts.
For the first time, uncertainty bleeds into its posture. Its cloth stirs defensively, coiling closer to its body, no longer lashing outward with confidence. Whatever it sees in Ryu now does not fit into its understanding of life or death.
"...Do you think it changes anything?" it asks, voice slightly wavering. "You're still fighting something that's already dead," it continues, forcing the grin back onto its face.
"No blood. No end. Unkillable."
It gestures vaguely at its own ruined form.
"No matter what you become… you can't kill what doesn't live."
The words hang in the air.
They never reach him.
Ryu does not react. Not to the voice, not to the challenge, not to the claim of inevitability. His eyes remain unfocused, glowing softly, fixed on nothing and everything at once. His breathing is slow, deep, perfectly measured.
He is no longer thinking.
The awakening has taken over completely.
Power ripples beneath his skin, untamed and instinctual, surging without direction yet guided by something far older than intent. The markings pulse faster, heat intensifying with each beat, as if responding to a threat Ryu himself no longer consciously recognizes.
Only the subtle shift of the air around Ryu could be heard. And in that silence, the entity realizes something it never accounted for. Whatever Ryu has become is not trying to kill the dead.
It is about to erase it anyway.
Ryu moves without hesitation. His body blurs forward, the patterns along his legs flaring bright as he drives off the ground with force no human body should withstand. The earth detonates beneath him.
Before the entity can reach, Ryu's hand is already buried in its torso, fingers locking into rotten flesh and cloth alike. He drags it, the entity's body scraping violently across the ground.
The stone in his way shattered, trenches carving themselves behind them as Ryu pulls it like dead weight. The markings along his arms ignite brighter, heat rippling outward as his grip tightens beyond anything his muscles were once capable of.
He hurls it upward. The sky catches the entity for a single heartbeat before Ryu follows, launching himself after it. His tattoos blazed along his spine and legs as the air booms beneath him.
He overtakes the entity mid-flight, twists, and drives it back down with bond hands before making impact. The ground caves inward as the entity is smashed into it, a crater blooming outward from the point of contact.
Shockwaves tear through nearby ruins. Dust and debris are thrown skyward. The entity twitches, confirming that it could still move even after all that. It began to move its mouth, trying to speak.
Ryu doesn't allow it.
He seizes its head, fingers digging in as the markings across his shoulders and forearms flare violently. With a brutal wrench, he tears its jaw apart, flesh and cloth ripping in opposite directions.
The mouth hands uselessly open, ruined beyond speech. The entity thrashes, cloth lashing wildly now not to attack, but to escape. It wraps around Ryu's limbs, tightens, pulls.
Ryu easily tears free, lifting the entity again and rips. His hands pull in opposite directions, power surging through his arms as the markings blaze blindingly bright. The entity's body resists for a fraction of a second, then gives way with a sound like fabric rearing soaked meat.
The corpse splits in half. And for the first time, something changes. Between the severed halves, suspended and pulsing, floats an orb of brown flame. It flickers erratically, unstable, casting sickly light across the ruins.
The moment it's exposed, the entity reacts. Not with mockery, not with confidence, but with panic. Its remaining cloth flails desperately, trying to pull itself back together, trying to shield the core.
It finally began to fear for itself.
Ryu tilts his head. The markings along his chest and hands burn hotter than ever, responding instinctively to the threat before him. The air around the orb distorts, drawn toward him as if it recognizes what stands before it.
The entity was never truly unkillable. It has just never been faced with something willing, and able, to tear it apart far enough to find what mattered. And Ryu, still lost in his subconscious state, closes his glowing eyes for a brief moment.
Ryu doesn't hesitate. His hand plunges forward, fingers closing around the orb of brown flame. The moment he touches it, the patterns across his body erupt, every line blazing at once as power surges through his arm.
He squeezes.
Not snuffed gently, but crushed, violently extinguished as if starved and torn apart at the same time. The orb flickers wildly, spasms, and then goes dark. The entity lets out a shriek.
It isn't loud in the way screams usually are. It's thin, stretched, warped, like something being dragged out of existence against its will. The sound cuts through the village and then abruptly stops.
The body goes limp.
No twitch. No movement.
Dead. Finally, irrevocably.
Ryu shakes it once. Then again. Roughly, almost irritated, as if expecting it to resist, to rise, to do something. When it doesn't, frustration ripples through him. With a snarl he hurls the corpse away like a discarded doll.
The body sails through the air–
And stops.
A hand catches it.
One hand.
Fingers clamp around the skull effortlessly, arresting all momentum as if the corpse weighed nothing more than a ball tossed in play. The figure doesn't even stagger. Ikra looks at what he's holding, then up at Ryu.
"...Huh," he says lightly. "Is this your way of greeting your father?" Ikra gives the corpse a small shake, amused. "Playing catch with me now, are you?"
Ryu doesn't answer.
He can't.
His eyes, still glowing faintly red and gold, lock onto Ikra with raw, unfocused intensity. There's no recognition in them. No relief. Just the same predatory stillness he'd given the entity moments before.
Ikra blinks, then laughs. A real laugh. Warm, almost proud. "Well," he says, rolling his shoulder, "guess I picked a bad time to show up." He glances sideways. "Iyu. Stay hidden," Ikra asks casually, though his eyes sharpen. "As hidden as you can."
Iyu stiffens, nodding at Ikra's words.
Then, without another word, Ikra throws the corpse back. Ryu reacts instantly. Annoyed more than threatened, he swats it aside with the back of his hand, sending it spinning away in a blur of motion.
For a split second, his view clears.
Ikra is already there.
Closing the distance in a blink, fist drawn back, power coiled tight. The air around his punch ripples, his knuckles only a few feet from Ryu's face. Ikra grins, eyes bright. "Lets see," he says, voice low with anticipation, "what kind of awakening you've really got."
And then his punch goes down.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hanagome moved carefully through the underground passage, each step echoing faintly against metal floors that clearly didn't belong beneath a village this old. The walls were lined with conduits, glowing panels, and machines humming with a quiet, constant energy.
The technology was so advanced that he couldn't even begin to name half of it. He didn't need to understand how it worked. He only needed to know what it was connected to. The elder's words rang in his mind as he descended further.
The heart lies below.
The deeper he went, the stronger the sensation became, like pressure building in his ears, like the air itself was charged. Whatever this place was, it wasn't abandoned. It was alive.
At what seemed to be the lowest level, the passage opened into a wide chamber. Hanagome slowed, eyes scanning the room. There, on the floor, were torn strips of cloth.
He crouched and picked one up. The texture sent a chill through him. It was unmistakable, identical to the material the entity had wielded. Only this time, it was shredded, ripped apart violently, as if something far stronger than it had torn through.
"So this is where you came from…" he muttered. The realization settled heavily in his chest. This wasn't just connected to the shield. It was connected to that… thing. Hanagome stood and continued forward, drawn toward a wall filled with monitors.
Lines of data scrolled endlessly across their surfaces. Graphs, symbols, shifting readouts. He didn't understand the language, but some things were clear enough.
The shield was active.
Stable.
But then, another set of indicators caught his eye.
Repeated alerts. External interference. Failed breaches.
Someone was trying to get in.
Hanagome sucked in a sharp breath, relief washing over him so suddenly his knees almost buckled. He hadn't even realized how badly he'd needed that confirmation. They weren't alone. Someone out there knew what was happening, or at least knew something was wrong.
Rescue.
Hope bloomed in his chest, fragile but real. "Okay… okay," he whispered to himself, straightening. "That means we just need to open it from the inside." He leaned closer to the machinery, fingers hovering uncertainly over unfamiliar controls.
He spoke aloud as he worked, grounding himself. "If this feeds into the shield's power loop… then cutting this connection should… Wait, no…." He adjusted his approach, following cables with his eyes, piecing together logic from intuition rather than knowledge.
Sweat beaded on his brow as the system responded. Lights flickering, a low warning tone beginning to rise. "I'm close," he breathed. "I'm really close." His hand reached forward.
The warning tone spiked…
And the world exploded in white.
Pain blossomed at the back of his head as something struck him hard. His vision shattered into sparks, hope collapsing into disorientation. He staggered forward, fingers brushing uselessly against the console.
Then darkness took him. Hanagome hit the floor, unconscious, just seconds away from bringing the shield down, unaware of who stood behind him, or how close salvation had truly been.