Her hand fell with the force of a lightning-bolt, and the two spears flashed forward—

"Even the Buddha has not the patience to permit three strikes."

and then they was gone.

The ice spears had vaporized, and her right arm was gone, missing, amputated, and Natsuki was standing between us, holding aloft only the hilt of a sword in her left hand.

Lianying leaped back and pressed down on her shoulder to contain the bleeding. She could barely contain her pain with a hellish grimace.

"Natsuki... why? You didn't need to..."

"Didn't I tell you, Chunxue?" she whispered, without turning to face me. "I do not enjoy watching you suffer."

I nodded, embarrassed. I still thought that it would have been better for me to take the hit, for Natsuki not to reveal herself thus. Yet I could not help but be thankful that she had appeared. Thankful for, if nothing else, her feelings.

Lianying's arm had somehow been cut off and had fallen to the side. Natsuki kicked it back to her, and then pointed her sword— her sword-hilt— at her.

"Reattach your arm. Then I will kill you, and I will call it justice."

Groaning, Lianying reattached her arm, and only a few moments later she was again able to move her fingers.

"Fucking foreigner...!" she growled. "I never trusted you in the first place. I always knew you'd pull some stunt like this."

"Stunt?!" Natsuki scoffed. "Gu Lianying, you are the one who has insulted me in front of all Kangtian. I am giving you face by offering you the opportunity to die an honorable death, and you call it a stunt? How ungrateful! Do not forget that I could have taken your head instead of your arm just one minute ago!"

"That's the foreigner?" someone in the gathering crowd whispered.

"Yeah, apparently. I can't believe she would just attack Gu Lianying unprovoked. Isn't it barbaric?"

"I mean, she seems to be Bai Chunxue's friend, so it's actually self-defense."

"I guess so. But anyways, what happened to Gu Lianying's arm?"

"I thought the foreigner cut it off with her sword, but she doesn't have a sword."

Natsuki held out her sword-hilt to the side, and then it began burning. The sword began burning, the blade of the sword that was not there began burning with an impossibly dark black flame, a flame in which danced violet sparks as ephemeral as twinkling stars! I could not see the sword, but I could see the aura of death circling it like a curse!

"Come," she hissed. "Raise your sword."

Purging the pain from her face, Gu Lianying unsheathed her sword. "Arrogant bastard! I'll make you regret not killing me when you had the chance!" She raised her sword in an Ox stance and, dashing forward with the speed of a panther, cried out,

"Seven Exterminations, Sever—"

For a moment it seemed as though everything was frozen in place,

and then there was a flash.

As if Natsuki herself were at the tip of a god's sword, she flashed forward in a soft yet perfect arc, an arc that left a wave of black and purple will-o-wisps glistening like snow-crystals in its wake, an arc that passed right through Lianying's chest and ended only half a foot behind her. Natsuki, now standing back-to-back with Lianying, sheathed her burning sword, and then the sheath entire faded out of existence, like dust in the wind.

Stolen story; please report.

Lianying collapsed to her knees, and her sword arm swung down like a pendulum, sending her sword clattering to the ground. Deep and sharp cuts split open along the full length of her sword arm and the back of her legs, from which burst blood that burned with black blazes. She pressed her hands to her wounds, but they did not heal, not under the watch of the black flame!

Natsuki walked back around her and tossed a dagger at her knees.

"I am not familiar with your customs, but this is how we handle such offenses on the archipelago. If you wish to retain a whole corpse, then use this dagger to cut open your stomach, and I will sever your spinal cord before you bleed to death. Otherwise, I will tear off each of your limbs and feed you alive to my crows. How you die is up to you."

Natsuki extended her hand, fingers splayed wide, out to the side, and the boulevard fell into shadow.

"One devours the sun, yielding two to blacken the sky, four to rend the earth, and eight to seal the heavens."

At first I thought there was merely a passing cloud covering the sun, but when a screeching caw from above clattered through my very bones, I turned my head up to see a great three-legged crow, its wingspan so wide it seemed to cover the entire sky, its feathers a deep shimmering violet without a single trace of gold. As it descended, its body shrunk and split, first into two, then into four, and finally into eight crows that ultimately landed on Natsuki's outstretched arm, each latching one leg around her sleeve and hanging the other two behind.

Through clenched teeth Gu Lianying screeched in pain, but there was nothing she could do. Three of her limbs did not function, and a cut through her deltoid ensured that she could not raise her one remaining arm at the shoulder. The black flame sucking at her blood like leeches ensured that she would not heal. She could not even scream louder than the cackling jeers of the crows. There was nothing she could do other than take the dagger and plunge it into her abdomen, as Natsuki ordered!

But she did not. She turned her gaze, her gaze full of anger and rage and hatred, up at Natsuki, and sat there motionless, almost as if in some kind of protest against a greater power!

But what do gods and demons care for the protests of humans?

"—Then I shall cut off your good arm first, so you do not regret your decision."

The crows cawed once more, and this time it almost sounded like laughter. They leaped off Natsuki's arm and, now sixteen, now thirty-two, now sixty-four, began circling low overhead.

Natsuki raised her left hand to the sky, her fingers splayed, and the sword-hilt appeared once again there in her palm. When she tightened her grasp on it, the black flames burst from it once more.

She placed her right hand below the left, then brought the sword down with the fury of a lightning-bolt.

—But she did not cut through Lianying's arm.

When her sword dropped to but four inches above Lianying's shoulder, it was repelled by an invisible force, a force that screamed like the crushing of rock against rock that sparks earthquakes and births mountains, a force that pushed even Natsuki several meters back. For a moment she simply stood there, confused, before she clutched her chest and began coughing up blood, though as soon as the blood hit the ground it caught flame and burned, and every time she coughed, the blood became blacker and blacker and thicker and thicker, but it did not stop burning until she lost her balance and collapsed upon it, smothering it. With some effort she pushed herself up on her hands and knees.

"Gautam-ji...?! Why?!" she shouted, though her voice only came out as a hoarse whisper, dry, crackling, as if all the flesh had fallen away from the inside of her throat.

—Witness that thou art, intervention is not permitted thee.

Struggling against the indelible force of gravity, she attempted to raise her arm, to reach her hand towards Lianying's neck, but for every centimeter that her arm lifted from the ground, an inch of her flesh starting from her fingertips melted into boiling black tar, that as it hit the rocky pavement bubbled and sputtered like water in hot oil. Beneath her dissipating flesh her bones seemed to rot away like the bark of a diseased tree, brittle, so brittle that even gusts of wind carried fragments of it away! Her crows fell, two by three, out of the sky, crashing soundlessly into the pavement and fading to ash. Then her other shoulder snapped, and she collapsed, her skull flattening as it smashed into the ground and her horns shattering like glass.

—Thy sins may be forgiven, but thine eternal refusal to be carried by the current of samsara may not.

"Natsuki!"

A sharp pain in my heart unthawed my frozen limbs, and I dashed to her side. I tried to reach for her, to pull her up, but the air around her burned, it burned with such fury that I could not see the flame, that I could not even feel it, that I could only see the skin of my fingers turn black and flake away like snow when I brought them towards her. My hands burned, they burned with such pain that I could not move them, neither closer nor farther, from that point some thirty centimeters from her dissolving body.

—Therefore, the karmic ties that to this transient plane tether thee...

"Chunxue!" she rasped, with only terror in what remained of her eyes, their brilliant white halos warped into mere gray blobs. "I will not die! Even he cannot kill me, as long as you do not forget—"

—...hereby, I declare them severed.

The burning stopped.