MIZURI

Mizuri didn’t really know what she was doing. It was a jerky combination of moves that barely resembled a dance, and she felt she didn’t do it justice.

She wouldn’t be doing her bullet-propulsion dash this time, though she noticed he was about to do just that. He had a foot planted and slowly brought one foot forward, making a semicircle until it ended behind him.

Showoff.

Mizuri cracked her kusarigama on the concrete around her, and she smiled a little when they cracked and melted.

Then, suddenly, as if something clicked inside her, she forgot about the panic she had felt when she’d smelled the rain. She laughed as she cracked the kusarigama’s blade again and again on the concrete around her. Once more when she slowly rose off the ground.

This move she’d only done once before, only when it had been taught to her. As she was used to by now, she had no recollections of the person who’d taught the move to her.

Hovering exactly one foot off the ground, Mizuri once again started the guiding the fire around her, but this time, much to her own surprise, she did so with such grace that she did so in a daze, seemingly feeling and watching her own body move in third person.

Her flames slowly swirled around her, gathering in a ball.

She couldn’t see the sun anymore. Dark storm clouds had covered the sky over the entirety of the Higashi Academy, and maybe the whole Floating City itself, and it was only a matter of time before--

Well, here it comes, she thought to herself, as the rain finally started pouring.

Mizuri looked across the expanse of the concrete at her opponent, who stood as still as a statue, except for his hands, which expertly swished in controlled arcs. His eyes were unfocused.

She took that to mean he was probably waiting for a cue from his music.

Mizuri smiled to herself. This guy’s really got it all together, huh? After all, for all she knew his music was actually synced to the storm. She couldn’t match such thoroughness.

I won’t make a mistake. Somehow Mizuri knew that her ball of fire was complete, so she stopped her movements and wrapped her kusarigama around her right fist, gripping the sickle-like blade in her hand.

My fist’s gonna connect this time.

She waited just a little bit more. Now wasn’t the time to strike yet.

There was something else bundled together with her freedom if she lost this duel. That was that whoever beat her would be able to command her to do one thing, and that one thing carried divine weight. She had to do it, or she’d suffer a worse fate than death. She’d read up on fates worse than death before, and she wasn’t anxious to try them out.

One command form... Oh, she’d forgotten to ask for his name. Oh well, she’d have time to do that after the duel.

Mizuri didn’t even have to use her superhuman reaction speed this time. She knew the moment she accelerated forward that he’d moved at the exact same time.

Time seemed to slow down.

Mizuri almost instantly felt an intense pressure at the front center of her fireball. It was a much stronger blade of wind than the others before it, but it didn’t hold up. Mizuri’s fireball engulfed it, and just like that, it was gone.

Next came the harder part. Mizuri could follow his movements now, and though her body reacted perfectly, she noticed that she was still much too slow to pose a threat to him in a battle of speed.

Her eyes caught on the glint of metal in the background.

Oh, crap. Tuning fork.

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She braced herself for anything, accepted that she could very well be frozen, but nothing happened to her.

By now he was close, but time moved slowly enough for Mizuri that she had enough time to regain her composure.

But that didn’t do her any good. His blade had already slashed at her arms thrice before she was able to parry the fourth slash with her chained fist. She stared down at her bleeding arms.

They wouldn’t bleed for long, she knew, but it was painful nonetheless. She had a unique defense barrier, after all. In exchange for the pain reduction function of most defense barriers, hers was fully defensive. Which meant she experienced all the pain of those three slashes.

But she wasn’t gonna go down. Not yet. Mizuri grit her teeth and forced a quick jab at his stomach.

Clearly he didn’t expect it, and for the first time, he reacted a little too late. Mizuri’s red-hot chain impacted his left side.

He flinched, and though it was only a moment, the moment of bliss coursed through Mizuri’s veins, nullifying the pain from the slashes.

For just really a moment, they stayed locked in one position, his blade off to the side, Mizuri’s fist now just beyond his left side.

His left eye was the impossible-to-ignore electric blue. His right eye, now open, betrayed pain.

Of course he’d feel pain. There’d been a crunch when Mizuri’s chain had caught him. And she knew that if his defense barrier was any weaker than hers, he’d suffer several broken bones and a third degree burn for sure.

She started to smile. Surely she’d just won.

But something itched at the back of her mind. Something was missing. Something...

Crap. Electric blue eye. Electric. Storm.

Which meant--

He leaned close and whispered something, and impossibly, the wind carried the words to Mizuri’s ears just in time.

“My name’s Naoki Yanatake.”

Lightning, Mizuri thought, as a zillion volts arced down from the sky above and struck her down to the ground, decimating her defense barrier and a circular space with a hundred-meter radius.

The little frozen moment ended, and Mizuri found herself crashing on the ground and into the trees close by at mach 5. She tore through the forest, uprooting countless trees, before her hastily-made second defense barrier finally failed her and broke in a million magic pieces.

She finally rolled to a stop almost a whole kilometer away from the contact point. She couldn’t move. Her fingers twitched, but not when she wanted to.

Ahh, she thought. My second loss.

She barely heard the thunder when it finally arrived a few seconds later—her ears were ringing too loudly.

Ah-ha-ha. She just managed to mentally laugh. Why had she thought that that was it? It should have been clear—his left eye had basically said it all.

Mizuri looked up and found that she was facing in Naoki’s direction. She could just barely make him out from among the leaves fluttering about in their crazy trajectories.

He was smoking and sparking. His headphones had split in half, and his white hair was standing straight up.

Standing...

He was standing.

His right hand still has his katana in a decent grip. Mizuri couldn’t feel her own hands, but was almost sure that her kusarigama had flown off somewhere during her crash.

He brought the blade up and turned it ninety degrees, and Mizuri mentally gasped. From the blade, extending all the way to where Naoki had started, was a pink aura of sorts. Had that come from the blade?

Mizuri caught a glimpse of his left eye reflected in the perfectly smooth surface of his blade. The electric blue was gone, replaced by lifeless white.

He sheathed his blade in one swift motion.

When she could finally move again, after maybe ten seconds of twitching on the ground, Mizuri looked at her arms, where the slash wounds were already healing. There would be no permanent damage, she knew, but she’d lost.

Naoki Yanatake, huh? She’d lost so completely that there might as well have been no comparison between them.

And it all hurt. Somehow she’d thought getting struck by lightning would numb her nerves, but she guessed it was the defense barrier’s fault. It had protected her body from permanent damage, but that meant she could still feel.

Pain screamed at her from every part of her body, but even that was quickly fading.

And as she drifted into unconsciousness, two things stayed clear, despite the rest of the world fading.

The first, seemingly written in the wind: Kamaitachi.

And the second, written on the clouds, so visible that Mizuri swore even people who didnit share her ability to see moves’ names would have been able to see it.

Raikiri.