She could not stay here any longer.
She had not met her objective. The thought circled through her mind like a trapped bird beating against the bars of a cage. She had not found what she came to find. She had not done what she came to do.
The twin horned elegant woman stood up from her seat. Her movements were fluid and practiced. She walked close to Ayame, close enough that the heat of her body could be felt through the cold air of the chamber.
"You shall train until your very bones break," the woman said. Her voice was silk but also sharp "Until your flesh becomes strong as forged metal. Until your resolve is strong enough to take on the world."
She circled Ayame slowly, her footsteps silent on the woven mats.
"The heiress is supposed to lead her clan, is she not? After Yomigahara, we will enter the Transcendence. You will contend. And you will bathe in all of their blood. After we have carried out ritual."
Ayame observed the tall woman with her younger form. The figure before her was imposing indeed, a monument to everything the Oni were supposed to be. Strong. Unyielding. Terrifying.
But fear was a thing she had long since stopped feeling. There was nothing to be afraid of. She did not know why, but when she thought about him, when she let his face drift through her mind, fear became something small. Insignificant. A pebble on a road she had already walked a thousand times.
She could not stay here.
She still had to reach the twin moons. But under a different guise. Under a different cause. Under a different path. Under a different goal.
In a brief moment, Ayame manifested a blood blade. The weapon formed in her grip without sound, crimson and slick, the edges sharp enough to separate bone from joint. She drove it through the woman's abdomen. The blade sank deep, tearing through fabric and flesh and the soft organs beneath.
She stepped back.
The woman's eyes went wide. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Her hands moved toward the wound, toward the blood that was already soaking through her robes, but she did not fall. Not yet.
Ayame was rushed by the lean shaven elder. He grabbed her nape with fingers like iron hooks and slammed her face into the floor. The wooden boards cracked beneath the impact, splinters flying outward like shrapnel.
She summoned a short blade, barely the length of her palm, and cut the tendon of his wrist.
His grip instantly loosened. She spun forward, putting distance between them.
"I have long since decided," Ayame said. Her voice was steady despite the blood dripping from her split lip. "That I will fulfil my legacy in my own way."
She moved to the side just as a kick swept through the space where her head had been. The force of it would have caved in her skull if it had connected.
The woman she had briefly caught off guard pushed herself up from the floor. Her hand pressed against the wound in her abdomen, but the bleeding had already slowed. Oni healed fast. Too fast.
"Traitor," the woman hissed.
Ayame regarded her. Her eyes were wide, not with fear but with assessment. She did not finish the fight. She thought maybe if she could briefly step close, catch her off guard, she could kill her. But no. That was not enough. This woman was the highest ranked fighter within the clan. A duel would take time Ayame did not have.
A fist met her face. A blade stabbed her shoulder. Lucky it was her shoulder and not her throat.
"We do not want to kill you," the woman said. "Your parents are dead. We cannot birth another heir. Be wise."
Ayame steadied herself and surveyed the chamber.
Prudence.
The word lingered in her thoughts.
Prudence had always struck her as a polished way of demanding obedience, a cleaner word for compliance, for accepting what was placed before you without protest, for silencing doubt and carrying out what others had decided. She remembered her former mentor speaking of prudence and patience with unwavering conviction, as though restraint alone could shape the right path. Yet if her time within the organization had taught her anything, it was that waiting solved nothing. It merely delayed what was bound to come.
Waiting inside a rift. That was suicide.
She would get out.
Her eyes grew red. The transformation came over her like a wave crashing against the shore. Her old form came back, and with it she seemed to manifest twice her usual size. Her veins throbbed beneath her skin, dark and visible. Her eyes grew more intensely red, the color of fresh blood spilled on snow.
She wove a blade from blood. This one was darker, thicker, heavier than the ones she had summoned before. I
She believed that it never had to be this way. She believed that her father and her mother were right in giving her up for the twin moons. But at what cost? At whose expense? At the bottom of which grave would she finally decide that the price was too high?
Immediately, she drove the blade through the neck of the bald man and cut his head from his shoulders. His head fell to the floor. His body followed a moment later, collapsing like a lifeless doll.
She thought of Lucid in that moment. How he had been so quick to save her. How he had always been firm in his ideals, unshakable, unmovable. Like a mountain that did not care whether the wind blew or the rain fell.
She spun on the back of her heels, dodging a katana twice her length and another slash from the left. The blades cut through the air where she had been, close enough that she felt the wind of their passing against her skin.
The katana slashed through the midair. Its course twisted. Ayame stepped inside its trajectory, close enough to see the individual threads in the woman's robes.
She did not need a blade.
She grabbed the throat of the twin horned woman and pushed her down to the floor. The impact cracked the wooden boards beneath them. She snapped the woman's neck with a twist of her wrists. The sound was sharp and final, like a branch breaking under weight.
The woman was dead.
She had been something else in that moment. She was no longer the unawakened Ayame, something seemed to be infused with her thread of fate.
She did not care.
She needed to get out of here.
She needed to go back to him.
The remaining elder, the one who had seemed wise with age, sat looking at her. His face was unreadable, a mask of wrinkles and centuries that revealed nothing of what lived beneath.
"You are making a mistake," he said.
Ayame spoke. Her voice was cold. "If Strength is the only right thing in this clan. Then why shall my authority be tested?"
The elder glanced past her at the lifeless body of his most highly ranked fighter. Then at the second most ranked fighter, also dead. His gaze lingered on them for a long moment.
He sighed.
Ayame wove a blood knife, a dagger sharp enough to pierce bone. She lunged toward the man.
Or so she thought.
Her left hand was severed from her arm. The blade had not even registered in her awareness. One moment her hand was there, gripping the knife. The next, it was on the floor, fingers still twitching, blood spraying from the stump where her wrist had been.
She stepped back. The man had stepped out of his robes, revealing a tall, muscular body. Every muscle was defined. Every vein stood out against his skin.
"Ayame," he said. "My strength is more superior than yours."
She reacted immediately. She tried to attack him with a blood-woven long blade shaped like a huge odachi. The man took it with his palm and shattered it like it was made of glass.
She could not believe it. The disbelief was not in his strength, she had seen stronger opponents like the S Ranked Wolf in the red mountains, but in the casual way he dismissed her attack, as if she were a child swinging a stick. This might have been true strength.
He closed in, grabbed her in quick succession and took the stump of her elbow, where he had cut her arm earlier. She struggled, but another hand settled firm on her shoulder and collarbone, pinning her in place against a nearby wall.
He pulled.
Ayame stood like a lifeless body being torn apart by the elder. Her very left side was torn from her body, ripped from the shoulder socket. The audible sound of cartilage tearing and flesh ripping apart echoed through the chamber. Blood sprayed across the floor, across the walls, across the elder's face.
She screamed for the very first time in years.
The sound tore from her throat, raw and ragged and filled with a pain that went beyond the physical. It was the sound of someone who had been broken.
The man threw her away, holding her severed arm in his hand. He took a bite out of it, chewing slowly, deliberately, savoring the taste.
"Delicious," he said. His voice was contemplative, almost conversational. "Your lineage has delightful blood. It reminds me of Lord Ongiashira Gensai."
"He was noble in away..."