Chapter 130 Passing the Torch

Su Yao’s Tide-Cutter scraped across the beast’s scales, the blade’s edge skidding where it had bitten deep before. The Keyblade’s conceptual lock tightened against its flesh, then slipped free. The beast shifted beneath the attack, its scales already thickening against her technique.

She drew back, knowing another strike like that would not be enough.

Her nine tails drew inward, forming a sphere around her. She pulled energy from the world around her, drawing from Gehenna itself. The hellscape answered. Twisted ley lines of suffering and brimstone surged toward her. The energy writhed and shrieked as she compressed it.

In the world of Assiah, this technique would gather serene mountain chi and calm river energy. It would form a sphere of purging sunlight to erase corruption.

But here, the energy coalesced into a swirling orb of black and crimson lightning spitting fragments of solidified torment.

The air crackled with unnatural hues. Reality groaned around her.

“Barrier!” Jeon Woochi shouted from the trench. “Maximum strength! Now!”

He threw his hands forward. A lattice of green Daoist script flashed into being before the trench line. Sitri added a dome of golden geometry. The lesser demons and freed magecraft division prisoners joined, layering shields of light and hardened air.

Su Yao released the gathered energy.

A sphere of annihilating light swallowed the D’yavol Tron.

It consumed the ground for fifty yards in every direction. The shockwave hit the layered barriers. Cracks raced through the golden dome as the Daoist lattice shattered and the prisoners’ shields evaporated. The combined force held for one second before failing, redirecting the blast upward and around the trench.

The concussion thrown everyone to the ground. Dirt and blackened scales rained down for ten seconds.

Silence returned.

Su Yao lay in the center of a glassy, smoldering crater. Her nine-tailed form had collapsed. She was Xiao Ling again, curled on her side. Her clothes were torn. Blood seeped from her nose and ears. One of her arms bent at a wrong angle.

Jeon Woochi was the first to climb from the trench. He ran to her, skidding to his knees in the hot ash. “Xiao Ling!”

She coughed. “Did we get it?”

They looked at the crater. Sitri approached, her eyes scanning the emptiness. “The blast was… comprehensive.”

From his perch on a broken sandbag, the crow surveyed the scene. “The D’yavol Tron is gone.”

Su Yao tried to push herself up with her good arm. Pain lanced through her ribs. She collapsed back into the ash. “Good,” she rasped. “Now someone help me up before the bastard sends a bigger snake.”

A cracking sound rose from the glassy crater, and a web of hairline fractures spread across the vitrified earth. Tendrils of black smoke seeped out from the cracks. They coiled together in the crater’s center, knitting into flesh and blood.

The creature that formed was a third of its original size with only three heads. It shook its smaller bodies, orienting its three sets of eyes on Su Yao lying in the ash.

The crow’s eye narrowed. “It regenerated from total annihilation.”

Jeon Woochi helped Su Yao to her knees. She stared at the smaller D’yavol Tron. “That blast cost it mass. It’s weaker.”

“Is it?” Sitri asked, her eyes narrowing. “It’s concentrating its nature. This form may be more dangerous.”

On the distant ridge, the commissar lowered his megaphone. He watched as his familiar evolved.

The three-headed D’yavol Tron advanced, its heads moving in perfect synchronization. It had learned the cost of her full power, leaving no openings.

“Fall back!” Jeon Woochi commanded. “All of you. Get her to cover.”

He stepped between Su Yao and the advancing three-headed beast. The D’yavol Tron paused, its six eyes shifting to this new obstacle.

“Gehenna’s energy is chaotic,” Jeon Woochi continued. “It poisoned your technique. You need time to purge it and rebuild your strength.”

Su Yao coughed. “The snake—”

“Is a familiar,” Jeon Woochi interrupted. “It draws power from its master. As long as the commissar feeds it, it will keep regenerating. We can cut off a hundred heads. It will grow a hundred more. The only way to kill it’s to kill the commissar.”

He reached into his robe. His hand emerged holding a fox bead, glowing with a milky luminescence. He pressed it into Su Yao’s uninjured hand. “My mentor, the Thousand Years Fox Yeohwa, left me this. It contains a focused essence of healing and clarity. It will help you cleanse the corruption and accelerate your recovery.”

The bead pulsed in Su Yao’s palm. A wave of coolness traveled up her arm, cutting through the pain and the fever in her veins.

“The plan changes now,” Jeon Woochi said, turning to face the D’yavol Tron. It coiled, preparing to strike. “I will occupy the familiar. You will recover. Then you will go straight to the commissar and end this. That is the only path to victory.”

He clapped his hands once. The air around him shimmered with dozens of unfolding paper talismans. They formed a rotating ring around him.

The crow fluttered down to Sitri’s shoulder. “His logic is sound.”

Colonel Rachmaninoff and Sergeant Takeru moved. They helped Su Yao to her feet, supporting her weight. “We have a bunker in the rear trench,” Rachmaninoff said. “It’s fortified.”

Sergeant Takeru handed his rifle to the nearest soldier. He drew his officer’s sword with a soft shing. “I will assist Tenkuji-Taichou. I have experience with large serpents.”

He stepped forward, falling into stance beside Jeon Woochi’s ring of flaming talismans. The D’yavol Tron’s three heads tracked this new threat.

“This isn’t the Kusanagi,” Takeru said, his eyes fixed on the central head. “The true Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi rests in Atsuta Jingu.” He adjusted his grip. “But a swordsman makes a blade dangerous. The sword itself is just a tool.”

“Yamata-no-Orochi required eight vats of sake and a clever trap. This one requires a different distraction.” Takeru eyed the creature’s coordinated movements. “Tenkuji-Taichou, if you can bind its attention for three seconds, I can remove a head. It may grow back. But it will cost the beast focus.”

Jeon Woochi nodded. He clapped his hands again. The paper talismans shot forward, wrapping around two of the three necks. The entangled heads thrashed.

Takeru sprinted across the broken ground. He leaped onto the scaled back of the third head and drove his sword straight down through its skull, pinning it to the earth. The head spasmed and fell still.

As the other two heads tore loose from the talismans, he yanked the blade free and jumped clear. The slain neck began to bubble. A smaller fourth head pushed out from the wound.

Takeru landed beside Jeon Woochi. “It adapts. But it must split its power each time. We make it weaker with every regeneration.”

Su Yao clutched the fox bead. She gave one last look at Jeon Woochi’s and Takeru’s backs as the D’yavol Tron lunged and the talismans ignited a wall of fire. Then she let the other soldiers pull her away toward the trench.

They half-carried her through the zigzag trench. The fox bead pulsed in her palm like a second heart. Its warmth spread up her arm, cutting through the mud of Gehenna’s poison in her veins. Each throb pushed back the dizziness, each thrum strengthening the beat of her own heart.

He gave me his teacher’s legacy.

Colonel Rachmaninoff shouldered open a reinforced door set into the trench wall. The bunker inside was cramped, lit by a single chemical lamp. They helped her onto a low cot.

“Three minutes,” she said. “I need three minutes.”

Sitri followed them in, the crow perched on her shoulder. It watched Su Yao clutch the bead. “Yeohwa’s essence is potent. It will accelerate your natural healing. Your body will still demand a cost.”

Su Yao closed her eyes. She focused on the bead’s rhythm. Cool clarity washed through her meridians, seeking the clinging shadows of the hell-energy she had harnessed. It found them. The fox essence unknotted the corruption, dissolving it into harmless static.

A memory of a mountain under a silver moon and a fox with fur like spun starlight dipping her paw into a spring surfaced from the bead’s essence. The water glowed where she touched it. This was the purity Jeon Woochi had carried for centuries.

Her fractured bone ground together. She bit down on a gasp. Muscle fibers twisted and restitched themselves beneath her skin. The process was fast, orchestrated by the foreign power. Sweat soaked her torn clothes.

Her body trembled on the cot. Though muffled, the battle continued. Jeon Woochi’s talismans crackled outside. The D’yavol Tron hissed. Takeru’s sword rang as it met scale.

“You’re thinking of the debt,” the crow observed.

Su Yao opened her eyes. The pain was receding. “I’m thinking he expects to die out there. This is a passing of the torch.”

Sitri knelt beside the cot. Her eyes scanned Su Yao’s realigning arm. “He buys you time with his life. It’s a logical transaction. Your potential value exceeds his remaining lifespan.”

“Is that what you see?” Su Yao pushed herself upright. The world tilted and then steadied. In her hand, the bead’s light was already fading, its power spent.

“I see a soldier making a tactical choice,” Rachmaninoff said from the doorway, his gaze fixed on the trench outside. “He holds the line. You break it. This is how wars are won.”

Su Yao stood. Her legs held. She flexed the fingers of her healed hand and they obeyed. The corrosive wrongness was gone. Her own spiritual energy began to circulate again. It was weak, but it was hers.

She looked at the empty doorway, toward the sounds of struggle. “His life is his own to keep. His teacher’s gift requires my survival to honor it.”

The crow fluttered to the ground, becoming Malphas. She leaned against the dirt wall, her form shimmering. “Sentiment is a luxury. Use the time he gave you.”

Su Yao walked to the bunker entrance. She paused, her silhouette framed against the flickering light from outside. “I will. But I’m ending this my way.” She looked at them. “Jeon Woochi was right. If I cut the snake, it grows a new head. But if I kill the commissar, the snake turns to dust. The solution is simple.”

She stepped out of the bunker and into the trench. The sounds of battle grew clearer as she turned her head toward the watching figure with the megaphone and began to walk. Her steps were slow at first, then steady. She would give the commissar a duel.

The damp trench wall scraped against her shoulder as she moved. Each step forward was a conscious effort. Her breathing sounded loud in her ears, pushing back the distant clash of combat. Then, a new sound arose beneath that rhythm.

It started as a low hum vibrating in the back of her skull before resolving into words. The voice was different than the calming river of Yeohwa’s essence.

Little sister. You walk so slowly. The good meat is getting cold.

Su Yao froze. Her grip tightened on the empty fox bead.

Don’t be rude. I shared my power. Now you share the battlefield with me. We have such similar tastes now.

The voice giggled. A phantom taste of torn liver filled Su Yao’s mouth.

“Yeohwa?” Su Yao whispered the name into the dank air.

A name is a shape. Shapes can be remade, the voice said. They called me a monster. The king, the one with the crown of tears… he had them grind my bones to dust. Dust is a shape too. It gets in everywhere.

A fleeting memory of unimaginable pressure lanced through Su Yao’s own bones. She leaned against the trench wall, her breath catching.

People change, little sister. Would you like to see?

An image of a dark pit flashed behind Su Yao’s eyes. A glowing fox eye stared out from the depths.

But I’m still a fox. At the center, where it matters. I help my own. You want the little man on the ridge? The one who thinks he is a god? I want his slippery, scheming liver. You can have the rest.

“Your student believes he carries your peace,” Su Yao said.

He carries my memory. A lovely lie. It helped him as it helps you. Now, the truth helps us more. Do we have a deal?

Su Yao looked toward the ridge. The commissar was a dark smudge against the hellish sky. She pushed off from the wall.

“We have a deal,” she said aloud.

The voice in her head crooned. Good. Then let us go hunting. I will show you how to cut so the liver stays fresh.

A chuckle echoed inside her skull. The sound shifted, shedding its jagged edges. It softened into something warm.

Your face. I wish you could see your own face right now.

With the phantom ache gone, the copper taste of blood dissolved into the clean scent of mountain air that lingered in the bead’s fading imprint. The voice followed suit, becoming playful.

Your pulse spiked. I felt it. Yeohwa laughed. Forgive the theater. You were moving like a wounded rabbit. I thought you needed a spark.

Su Yao stopped walking. “A prank?”

Think of it as a nudge. My foolish student is out there. I can’t watch him be digested. Yeohwa said. I have no body to eat a liver, little sister. I’m a memory in a stone. Unless you wish to lend me your fingers and teeth?

An image of her own hand plunging into a ribcage and pulling out a dripping organ formed in Su Yao’s mind. Then it dissolved.

I don’t want that. For now. My point is simple. Stop contemplating and move. Kill the man on the ridge. His familiar will fade. My student will live. This is the only transaction I want.

Ahead, a geyser of dirt erupted near the crater. Jeon Woochi’s silhouette staggered back from the blast. One of the D’yavol Tron’s heads snapped at the space he had just occupied.

See? Yeohwa said.

Su Yao’s body moved before her thoughts finished. She broke into a run. Her feet pounded the trench floor. The commissar’s silhouette on the ridge grew larger. He lowered his megaphone, watching his creature’s work.

Good, Yeohwa murmured. Speed is a kind of power. Use it.