「Ugh—!」
Tomie let out a strangled grunt of pain, and the force of her block scattered in an instant.
The pressure eased from Amamiya Rin's right hand. The tachi slid smoothly to the side, not only shedding that enormous force but carrying its momentum further — the blade's edge tracing a fresh cut along Tomie's arm as it passed.
「You know my Shinkage-ryu inside and out — but you've never seen the Hayashizaki-ryu Iaijutsu.」
Amamiya Rin spoke without urgency. If he relied on Shinkage-ryu alone against a Tomie who knew his every move, his odds of winning were no better than ten percent. But in the time since, he had immersed himself in the Hayashizaki school's Iaijutsu — and its greatest gift to him was the scabbard-strike.
An Iai technique built for one decisive kill — if that kill failed, the only answer was to follow through with the scabbard at maximum speed.
The opening the scabbard-strike carved lasted only a heartbeat. For Amamiya Rin, that was enough.
His footwork never stopped. He slipped sideways, gliding from Tomie's front to her flank in one seamless motion.
The tachi turned lightly in his grip — the sweeping stroke shifting to a thrust — and the tip drove like a hornet's sting toward the gap beneath Tomie's ribs, exposed by the blow to her arm.
The impact on her wrist had cost Tomie some force, but the ferocity born of blood-deep instinct — and her bone-deep familiarity with Amamiya Rin's swordsmanship — had not dimmed in the slightest.
Against the blade driving at her ribs, she wrenched her core in mid-stumble, twisting hard enough to pull the vital point clear at the last possible moment.
At the same time, her left hand — the one the scabbard-strike had not touched — spread wide, five fingers fanning open, and raked back toward the wrist of Amamiya Rin's sword hand with a shriek of parting air. A pure mutual-destruction gambit.
Amamiya Rin's gaze sharpened. Without a moment's hesitation, he retracted the thrust, let the blade sink, and met the raking claws with his sword guard. His feet slid again, reopening the distance.
Tomie was on him like his own shadow — she gave him no room to breathe.
She seemed to feel no pain at all. The angry welt on her neck from the scabbard-strike and the gash along her arm did nothing to blunt that beast-quick speed.
This time, her lunge came in a straighter line. Both claws spread wide left and right, sealing off any sideways escape, forcing a head-on collision.
Amamiya Rin's gaze hardened. His right heel snapped inward, killing his retreat — but his center of gravity shifted in an uncanny glide forward-left, just half a step, carrying him precisely inside the inner edge of the arc her claws commanded.
In the same instant, the tachi drove out horizontally from his hip, the tip aimed directly at the base of Tomie's sternum, bared by her outstretched arms.
But Tomie seemed to read the vicious thrust before it arrived. Her right claw snapped back, five fingers pressed together like a spike, and she hammered down onto the blade's midsection — raw force aimed at deflecting it, or shattering it outright.
Her left claw kept coming, unslowed, raking toward Amamiya Rin's right ribs.
Amamiya Rin's pupils flared. He sucked in a sharp breath — and in the exact instant Tomie's right claw crashed down onto the blade, his sword hand rotated with minute precision, tilting the flat of the blade to a horizontal angle and letting it give way downward with the blow's momentum — like a leaf knocked from a branch, falling naturally half a foot — clearing the path of the full impact.
At the same moment, his left shoulder dipped, his right ribs pulled back, and the raking left claw grazed past by a hair's breadth — the tips shredding his shirt, leaving a burning line of scratches along his skin.
This is getting a little dicey.
Amamiya Rin noted it inwardly.
Tomie had lost most of her reason — but she knew him too well. That very familiarity made her nearly impossible to suppress even with his swordsmanship.
And yet… he could still win.
Amamiya Rin narrowed his eyes. An idea had come to him.
The downward momentum of the blade, guided by the fine control of his wrist, curved from a falling drop into a rising sweep from below — the edge swinging toward the inner side of Tomie's right armpit, exposed by the hammering motion of her arm.
The feint came fast and low, flowing out of the yielding drop — born from reflex rather than intention. Tomie's right arm pulled back instinctively to guard; her left claw folded inward to protect her torso.
But that rising sweep was a feint as well.
The instant Tomie's arms drew back and her attention was pulled to the high line, Amamiya Rin's left leg — already coiled and waiting — lashed out like a whip and drove hard into the outside of Tomie's forward knee.
「Thud!」
Tomie's body lurched sideways.
Amamiya Rin used the kick's recoil to skip back half a step, reopening the distance. The tachi settled into a middle guard, tip trembling slightly, leveled at his opponent.
Tomie steadied herself. A dull ache throbbed through her knee — but it only called up something darker from inside her.
She snarled and lunged again, claws slashing in wider, wilder arcs.
「Marvellous Sword!」
Amamiya Rin held his breath and gathered himself. The blade-light moved with his footwork, weaving a curtain of steel across the space before him.
He stopped chasing a single decisive cut. Instead, he worked in light, probing thrusts and slashes — testing, harassing — occasionally deflecting her strikes with the flat of the blade, but more often simply slipping out of reach on nimble feet.
Feint and substance, woven together without end.
Every full-force blow Tomie threw seemed to land in cotton — turned aside, redirected — while new cuts appeared on her own body, none deep, but accumulating.
The wounds were closing slowly, but the pain and the mounting sensation of being toyed with fed something darker into her instincts. Her attacks grew straighter, more direct, and the gaps in them grew wider and plainer.
Amamiya Rin's breathing stayed even. His eyes, though, grew brighter with each exchange. He could feel it — his opponent's rhythm was beginning to fracture.
That's it.
No matter how well Tomie knew his swordsmanship, what she knew were fixed patterns — rote forms. The Marvellous Sword was different. This style of fluid feint and substance demanded judgment above all else. No matter how well she knew him, without that judgment, she could not tell which strike was hollow and which was real.
When Tomie launched a full-force lunge — both claws spread wide to seize him around the waist and tear him apart — Amamiya Rin suddenly charged straight in, as if he meant to crash into her head-on.
The red light in Tomie's eyes blazed. Her claws drove forward harder, faster.
But Amamiya Rin's forward momentum stopped dead in the final step — his body wrenched as if yanked by an invisible rope, lurching left, tumbling past Tomie's flank by a razor's margin.
A full-force blow that struck nothing. Tomie's body pitched forward, stumbling.
A rare opening — and at last, one he could take.
Amamiya Rin spun behind her, the blade-light following his body, carving a savage arc through the air.
In this moment, all the spirit and concentration he had kept sealed and restrained surged in an instant to its peak. The aura around him changed — sharp as a bared killing blade, and yet carrying within it an absolute stillness, like the silence of deep Dhyana.
In that same moment, his breathing reached the theoretical limit of Crimson Lotus Breathing in a single heartbeat. His sympathetic nervous system was forced to its ceiling by sheer will. Adrenaline flooded his bloodstream, driving surging power into every inch of muscle, every thread of nerve.
「Peerless Swordsmanship!」
No wind-up. No telegraphed buildup.
Only the simplest, most direct, most fundamental stroke — a straight downward cleave.
Step. Twist the waist. Swing the arm. Bring the blade down.
「Sword and Zen, One and the Same!」
With a battle-cry that made the very air shudder, every ounce of power poured into the strike in perfect unity.
The blade split the air — tracing an arc so concentrated, so refined, it seemed capable of cutting sight itself — a cold flash, high to low, gone in an instant.
As the blade-light vanished, Tomie's head slid from her shoulders.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Uchiha Reborn in Jujutsu Kaisen: The System Thinks I'm in Konoha, but I'm Not
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone