Chương 83: Book 1, Chapter 83: Regeneration

Yuki bristled as she curled her tails protectively around her mortal. Her sister didn't have the good grace to stay down, unfortunately. It seemed her flesh-warping gave her an unnatural resilience surpassed by few, even if the damage to her soul from their clash evidently still lingered. She watched the blood creep up the legs of the spider, the rest of her sister's fake corpse liquifying to follow.

At first, the Greater Nameless stared gormlessly at the unnatural sight, examining it less as an existential threat and more like a particularly clingy mold. Then, of course, Kiku reached the open wounds and crawled inside, and it wailed like ten men pierced straight through upon the same spear.

Yuki didn't quite understand her sister's plan beyond subverting the creature from within, but she would be acting alone if she struck now; she could feel the rapid beat of John's heart as her poor, injured human stared in absolute horror at the ghastly sight before them. For her part, Yuki felt only rage at her sister and disappointment in herself. It had been foolish of her to let the Nameless move.

She should have torn it to pieces once she realized where it was fleeing to and left it barely alive for her to collect at her leisure. She should have trusted John more, let him take care of himself! He was terribly injured, and a lesser man would be curled up in a ball from the extreme burns. She longed to wrap him in bandages and coo that everything would be alright, but he had clearly more than held his own. Perhaps she would have shown up a few minutes later, but John had all but won.

Had she not given her sister a chance to act, they could have sealed her away in an improvised casket and carried what remained of her back to be buried deep below. Still, there would be time to ruminate on her own failures later; for now, she had a problem to solve: Kiku might be able to disguise the formation of Transcendent Alchemy like this. If she managed to commit it without contest while Yuki was up close, Kiku would have a serious advantage in the ensuing struggle for control of local reality.

If she didn't conclusively win any such clash, Yuki was sure it would doom both her and John. The beast's eyes met hers, wide and maddened as before, but now searching, as its legs fell out from under it, collapsing with a great crash that cracked the enamel floor below. Did it desire mercy as an alien force subverted it from within? How ironic. She ignored the creature's wordless pleading and calculated her next move instead, taking this brief reprieve to figure out her sister's plan.

Was this material to heal herself with, perhaps? Her body had seemed gaunt, damaged from last time, and whatever John had done left her reeling. While melee was out of the question, it might be worthwhile to fill the beast's rotten hide with holes in hopes of damaging her sister more, but that ran the risk of destroying her outright, which she would only consider as an absolute last resort.

Even putting that aside, the damage to the Nameless might just lead to her having to expend less energy to take it over, and Yuki had no way of easily hitting a pocket of Kiku in its organs. Then again, it might leave her with less usable flesh to work with, although the exact balance of this equation was unclear to her. Something about this felt wrong, but experience told her that inaction would serve them poorly.

John raised his gauntlet, and Yuki followed his lead, readying a javelin of softly humming light in her hand, its sun-like glare casting strange shadows across the darkened halls. All of a sudden, the beast's incessant shrieking stopped, its eyes going dim as its whole body started to contract, as though it were a husk shrivelling in the sun. Crack. An eye fractured before getting sucked back into the skull, and a limb curled up, sticking out at an awkward angle as the beast continued to fold in on itself.

Its shell lost its cloak of shadows, no longer seeming to be pure darkness but instead taking on the appearance of grey slate. Ah. That might prove troublesome. Yuki threw the javelin into its body all the same, detonating it into shrapnel which sprayed viscera far and wide. John wordlessly followed her lead, riddling its carapace with burning holes and obliterating what remained of its head into faintly smoking slag, but, frustratingly, nothing they did seemed to stop the process that had begun.

The body still twitched and writhed, whatever consciousness it once possessed gone as its death spasms tiredly played out.

"My sister appears to be consuming its soul and flesh alike with her flesh sculpting, and is likely to emerge from its corpse in a new form soon. She might be able to harness some of its abilities in some way," Yuki noted, carefully keeping the heavens-shaking fury from her voice, lest she terrify her companion more than he already was.

"The Greater Nameless could emit unnatural shadows that smother all the senses, and its webbing could do the same. Has Kiku displayed any capabilities that were new to you?" Yuki doubted she'd use the whole carcass, in any case. They'd be able to act before she was ready, free to bombard Kiku with impunity once they were sure the whole mass was becoming her. John tore his eyes from the horrible sight, focusing on Yuki instead, just as she desired.

After all, if he were thinking about what her sister could do and how to counter it, terror would have less time to find purchase in his psyche.

"I, uh, she can manipulate the environment?" John spoke uneasily, waving his hand towards the bone walls and flesh ceiling, the lantern on his head shining brightly.

"There's mouths hidden in the walls for her to speak through, and I think she can sense pressure on the floor, and she definitely has ears hidden somewhere. She also nearly crushed me between some walls, tried to impale me with a bone spike she shot as a projectile, and swam through the meat to try to surprise me. She can twist things in a way that's slow enough to fool my Sentinel System, but she needs more time to do that, and I don't know if you could still sense it.

Oh, and I almost forgot: she dispensed some sort of gas to make me paranoid and jittery. Probably going to start doing numbers on me with my warding down." Yuki frowned. Annoying, but still workable. At the very least, even if she was utilizing the monster's abilities, Yuki doubted she'd be able to use them at full capacity. Still, she might be able to use a thin sheen of darkness to cloak her movements.

"Oh!" John interrupted her thoughts, sounding uncharacteristically pleased with himself despite the situation.

"I also figured out how to kinda fly by grabbing onto the environment and flinging myself, but without my warding working, that's an emergency move at best." Now, that was a pleasant surprise at least. If Yuki had been thinking more clearly, she would have brought his flying disc along to help her human, but the kitsune had thought of little but the most expedient path to him. At least this would blunt the impact of her carelessness.

"You keep her off me, I lay into her?" John questioned. A smile threatened to creep back onto Yuki's face.

"Perhaps we should change things up. I think I can handle hurting her if you can duel her for a while," she joked. The chuckle she got was a good sign of her friend's mood, at the very least. Then, he stilled, eyes wide and unseeing for a heartbeat before he snapped back to himself.

"Dodge!" he abruptly shouted, muscles coiling like springs as he threw himself back into Yuki's grip. Tick-tick-tick. Yuki wrapped her tails even more tightly around him and surged backwards, following his lead as she cleared two dozen shaku with a backwards leap. She only sensed the attack a few moments later as Presence flared and the air soured.

The ground where they once stood churned, meat below forming hinges before the enamel sheets shaped into a thousand maws, frantically snapping for prey that was no longer there. Yuki cautiously kicked off the air and adjusted the angle she was soaring at, paranoia driving her not to land at the spot where she was about to. How did John sense that? Some newfound instinct from fighting Kiku for so long without support? Something deeper? If they both made it through this intact, she'd have to probe further.

As they soared through the air, Yuki summoned yet another javelin of searing light, ignoring the blistering headache that threatened to spread through her skull. Tick. From the ground burst forth a silhouette of shadows and chitin, swinging a massive bony blade the size of a man where they should be. Unfortunately for her sister, Yuki had known about her ability to sense vibrations through the floor and guessed she might have been able to approximate their landing spot.

Such methods, however, were useless against a foe who could change directions in mid-air. Her sister was… different. Kiku was still far more gaunt than she had been; her limbs were still far too elongated to be natural, but she had partially returned to her original shape, yet even that was twisted by her newest additions. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. The most obvious difference was her armour.

She was coated in a series of thick, blackened plates and sharp angles, akin to a samurai coating themselves in the trophies of slain monsters past. Yet, there were no joints, no hint of the pinks and purples that should hide underneath. The only thing Yuki could see of her sister were the blue flames that took the place of her eyes, beaming out from behind glassy black sheets. Breathing in, Yuki focused, casting her senses out as she examined the protective suit and… it disgusted her. It was alive.

What her sister, what Kiku, what a part of her very own soul had done was tear out everything that made the Nameless itself and break it, fashioning it into a suit of armour before weaving it into her very body! She could see around her eyes where her flesh and the plating met, veins interlocking into one disharmonious whole. They were one now, the Nameless, her "ally," very much alive but woven into her being. No thoughts, as its heart beat along with hers. No will, for its Presence flared only as Kiku's did.

Yuki hurled the javelin directly into her sister's chest without a second thought. It should have struck an Aegis. It should have impacted her, driven her back into the ground, maybe even sent her flying down the hallway if she didn't extend her reinforcement to the air around her in time to absorb the shock. Instead, the javelin punched straight through her cursed sibling, flesh, chitin, and bone alike crumpling like a paper lantern as the projectile passed through her as if she weren't there.

Yet, she still moved. Kiku surged off the ground like a loosed arrow, soaring towards them, brandishing a wide, brutish blade that was more like a monumental grave marker carved out of whalebone than anything sane. Yuki recognized the gambit, eyes widening as she watched her sister's flesh bubble and warp, generating new meat from nothing to repair the gaping wound that punched a pot-sized hole out where her heart should have been.

"Brace!" Yuki ordered with a snarl. Unwrapping from around John, Yuki pushed him downwards as gently as she could, getting him out of the way before grabbing onto either edge of the monument of bone, kicking off the air once more to send her and Kiku tumbling down the hall. The flat of the blade twisted and reached, tiny, knife-like fingers creeping up to try and grab onto her hands, to hold them in place, forcing Yuki to continuously shift her grip to avoid being entrapped.

Kiku believed that she could more effectively heal through the damage rather than protect herself from it, and she allowed the attack to pass through whatever her Aegis had remaining unbothered. Her sister was on death's door, how could she have— The Greater Nameless. It harnessed the power of wealth, did it not? With their bodies and souls tied together, Kiku could likely tap into the same power and was likely tapping into the metaphysical energy of the stored wealth to fuel her ability to heal herself.

It made Transcendent Alchemy far riskier, too; she'd have a massive advantage in any collisions. There had to be a reason she hadn't done it already, then? Was she worried about killing John? In any case, they had to either kill Kiku outright, separate the Nameless from her, cut her off from the wealth… or outlast her stores, however vast they may be. The pair landed, rolling across the rough ground. Meat surged up to soften Kiku's fall, while the edges of sharp teeth scraped across Yuki's Aegis.

"I can't get a clear shot!" John frantically shouted in the background. Yuki could do little beyond give him a grunt of acknowledgement as she plotted how to hold her sister in place long enough. Baring her fangs, Yuki swung mid-roll with a crushing strike towards the side of her sister's skull, but her neck suddenly lengthened with a disgusting crack, so she merely carved away a chunk of flesh and chitinious plate instead, splattering the walls with a mixture of black and red.

Before Yuki could adjust, though, her sister's grotesque form lunged forward; whip-like neck allowing her to close the distance like a starving serpent and clamp her jaws down upon Yuki's shoulder. Her Aegis flared, holding strong even under forces that mortals would associate with a rockslide rather than a bite, but she'd lost the initiative, and the extra grip allowed Kiku to spin her around and slam her into the floor.

The air rushed out of her lungs, and the kitsune barely had the time to put her arms up before Kiku sprang to her paws and brought down an executioner's strike with that cursed sword.

"Yuki!" John called out, and two heads pivoted to see John aiming at the duelling pair from down the hallway, aiming down the notches on top of his gauntlet. Kiku tried to dodge, of course, but Yuki was faster and summoned up shadows to bind her sister's ankles in inky black shackles. It would only hold for a faint sliver of time, but that was enough.

She felt the ambient magic in the air stir, roused by his silent command before a lightning bolt spat from his gauntlet with an almighty crack, blowing one of Kiku's hands off with a beautifully blinding white beam of pure heavenly fury. As the blade tumbled freely through the air alongside a pair of half-popped hands, Yuki slammed a paw into her sister's legs as the shackles dissolved into a puddle of corrosive, all-erasing darkness.

Before Kiku could blink, Yuki had rolled onto the top of their tumble and grabbed her sister by the back of the head, driving her muzzle into the ground as hard as she could. Crack. Teeth fell astray as the nogitsune's head was driven into the darkness before dissolving into the shadows below, her tails wildly whipping to try and throw her off, but the armoured tails smacking into her head and limbs did little more than annoy her. Crack.

Yuki felt her sister's skull fracture under her grip as she drove her into the ground again and again, more and more shadows sticking to her face by the moment, eating straight through her armour. It was a shame Kiku had the foresight to seal the mouth and was actually using her Aegis to defend herself; Yuki would have poured her power straight down her sister's throat to eat her from the inside out. Crack. Sizzle…

This time, Yuki held her down in the darkness, trying to crush her sister's skull with both hands as the darkness ate through the far side. She was getting closer; she could feel the armour starting to crack now. Destroying her head shouldn't kill Kiku on the spot, but it would disorient her enough for Yuki to bind her in a way she couldn't easily recover from.

Chopping her into pieces and submerging her in carefully tuned corrosive darkness would be the easiest way to counter her ability to heal, simply dealing damage at the same rate she regenerated until they could excise the Nameless from her soul. The next thing she knew, Yuki was driven into her captive, her vision spinning wildly as her Aegis flared once more, reserves draining disconcertingly rapidly from that singular strike alone. Crack.

The armoured shell split open underneath her and revealed nothing but an empty, howling void, the reinforcement of an Aegis disappearing all at once as it shattered into a thousand chitinous pieces of shrapnel. Glancing up, Yuki saw a massive tooth driving itself straight into her spine, and a pair of walls slamming shut mere inches behind John, cornering him. John pointed towards the roof and sent himself soaring towards Yuki, rushing towards her side for safety.

Yet, Yuki realized the trap for what it was only a fraction of a second too late.

"John, get down!" she hurriedly warned, her heart speeding as she shattered the fang above her with a kick, summoning up a javelin of light in her hand as she rushed to her feet, flaring her Presence to create a bubble of relative safety. Then, numbing, suffocating darkness. It lost not an ounce of the potency the Greater Nameless once possessed as it smothered the area, snuffing out the light John wore like a candle. She didn't have much time. Yuki carefully aimed, tracing the path that John should have flown.

If Kiku wanted to kill him, he was likely already dead; there was no place for an unprotected mortal, no matter how skilled, in a clash between kitsune. Yuki had to trust that Kiku still desired him. With the Nameless shattered one way or another, the nogitsune needed some way to rebuild her power base. Yuki took a deep, steadying breath in, then she threw her holy bolt through the depths of the darkness.

"Sorry, John," she whispered breathlessly. She had to be absolutely sure of her timing, lest she lose him and—She couldn't, wouldn't lose him. Never. Then, she destabilized her projectile, not in shrapnel, but in pure light. For a brief moment, it was as if she had brought the sun in all its glory deep underground. Yuki first saw John, eyes wide and unseeing from the flash. Then, she saw the parasite clinging to his back, and her blood boiled.

Kiku, whole and undamaged once more, dug her talon-like claws into his shoulder, eyeless sockets glaring at her sister even as she gave a command to her unwilling puppet. Yuki surged forward, muzzle contorted in a snarl while glittering shards of her weapon drifted through the air, illuminating the area just barely enough. Yuki would ensure her sister suffered for that. A few years of being crushed under rocks and picked apart by insects would be a good start, before she got into the meat of it.

Fortunately, a temporarily blinded John could not aim, and Yuki ignored the lightning bolt exploding wall next to her into a shower of bone and blood as she closed on them with a single leap. Anger carried her far faster than she had any right to move, and she pried Kiku's hands off from her favourite mortal's shoulders, bones creaking under her grip, before the accursed wretch could get a better hold. Then, Yuki spiked her into the ground with righteous fury.

With a mighty crash, the floor splintered into countless enamel fragments, forming a deep crater. Then, Yuki summoned up more of her own darkness, once more ignoring the pain, before driving it into her sister's downed form, crumpling her armour with a barrage of nail-like spikes before they melted, soaking into the open wounds. The scream her sister let loose was admittedly gratifying, like the divine chorus of a thousand ancient tengu. Grabbing her mortal, Yuki curled around him protectively as she landed.

He moved so slowly and felt so terribly fragile in her arms as he slowly blinked away the effects of her sister's entrancement and the blinding flash.

"Yuki, I…" he began as his thoughts all too slowly returned to him.

"Where's Rin and Yosuke?"

"We're leaving," Yuki said, glancing towards the pit where, even now, her sister was quickly pulling herself back together, stumbling back to her feet.

"We can't fight her here; we need to get to the surface."

"Aw, done so soon?" Kiku teased, a cold, malicious tone cutting away whatever faux warmth she might have once imitated. Yuki noted her legs were still twisted, but they probably only had a few heartbeats before they were whole once more. She would not waste this opportunity. Yuki spun and fled, John cradled gently in her arms as she ran not towards the surface, but to the heart of this accursed place, even as the ground itself reached out with grasping hands attempting to seize her paws and slow her down.

They'd defeat Kiku, once and for all. They just had to deal with the source of her power first.