The first razor-thin rays of the morning sun sliced through the thick fog hanging around the towering walls of the tournament complex. The air was ice-cold, carrying an oppressive, almost tangible silence with it. It was the infamous calm before the storm.
Inside the walls of the complex, Jeshua slowly opened his eyes. With a deep, controlled exhale, he broke his hours-long lotus position; the spiritual storms within him had been tamed and perfectly balanced. A door down, Aurelius stretched his muscles until they popped, while Silarias checked the final buckles of his gear with mechanical precision.
“Is everyone on the same page?” Silarias asked in a monotonous, cold voice as he snapped his armguards shut.
Aurelius grinned broadly, his hand resting on the hilt of his weapon. “Always. As long as we make it to that gate before they lock the place down.”
Kaelid joined them in the hallway with a silent nod. “Then we need to move now.”
They cast one last glance at Beat and Blitz’s bed. The two were still sleeping like lifeless blocks of concrete. Their bodies were so deeply exhausted that they didn’t budge an inch, though faint, cobalt-blue sparks of static electricity still crackled across their sheets, the final remnants of Raijin’s otherworldly energy.
Before anyone could shake them awake, the silence was brutally torn to shreds. A shrill, metallic screech squealed through the loudspeakers, followed by the booming, theatrical voice of the Hype Man echoing across the massive grounds.
“TWO HOURS LEFT, fighters! The hourglass is running out! In exactly one hundred and twenty minutes, the monumental outer gates will close irrevocably. Anyone still on the wrong side of the wall by then is relentlessly out! Get yourselves inside!”
Outside the safe walls, deep in the shadow of the outer ring, the situation had already escalated to the boiling point.
Izanagi and Izanami stood back-to-back on an open, frost-covered square. Their breath formed dense clouds in the cold air. Around them, a massive, impenetrable wall of people had formed. Dozens of rival dojos, bloodthirsty bandit clans, and bounty hunters had secretly joined forces for this exact moment. The atmosphere was pitch-black and charged with murderous intent.
At the front, the leaders of the hostile alliance stepped forward. With a synchronized, terrifying sound, they unsheathed their shining katanas. The steel reflected the pale morning light.
“Do you really think you’re walking out of here alive?” sneered a scarred bandit leader, gripping his sword firmly with both hands. “We’re going to show you what happens when we wipe the Shinto Dojo completely off the map! Today, your legend dies!”
“Big talk for a gang of vultures that needs to show up in the hundreds,” Izanami retorted, her voice cuttingly cold as she held her sword horizontally.
Izanagi’s ruthless gaze swept over the crowd. “They talk a lot, sister. But their footsteps betray their fear. Let them try to break our dojo.”
“We’ll tear you apart! Attack!!” the leader screamed, his eyes wide and possessed.
The encirclement closed in with an explosive sprint. But Izanagi and Izanami didn’t yield a single millimeter. They both took two synchronized steps backward, pressing their backs even firmer against each other. Their swords were at the ready.
Just as the hostile mob was about to wildly swing for the first lethal strike, the lead attackers abruptly caught their breath. Time seemed to slow down for a fraction of a second. Izanagi and Izanami felt the sudden, soft texture of fine silk robes brush against their flanks and backs.
“Work smart, not hard, right?” a deep, calm voice suddenly sounded in their ears.
Two figures had stepped silently out of the shadows, right beside them. It was Malaka and Kali. But they hadn’t come alone; right behind them, the treeline broke open with a hellish racket. A wild, possessed horde of hundreds of corrupted monks charged onto the square, their faces disfigured by dark veins, armed with heavy staves and rattling chains.
“Malaka?!” Izanami blurted out in utter disbelief. “What are you doing here?!”
“We actually wanted to go for a quiet walk,” Kali joked, loosening her shoulders. “But these unfriendly, possessed monks just kept following us.”
Two completely separate conflicts had merged in a single instant into one massive, chaotic whirlpool. The rival dojos and the corrupted monks nearly collided with each other in the outer ring, but quickly recovered their formation around the four of them.
Izanagi and Malaka looked at each other. Their eyes met with an intensity that made the air sizzle.
“Brother...” Izanagi murmured. For a fraction of a second, his icy mask thawed. His eyes flicked briefly, almost nonchalantly, toward the terrifying sight of Kali, and he offered a brief wave of his free hand. “Sister-in-law.”
Immediately, he locked his gaze back onto Malaka. A bitter yet proud smile played around his lips. “Alliance? Little brother... for old times' sake?”
Malaka looked at the encroaching walls of enemies, swallowed the old family disputes, and broke into a short, raw, deep laugh. “Just this once then, Brother. Just make sure you don't get in my way.”
Meanwhile, the women completely ignored the murderous atmosphere surrounding them. Kali looked sideways with a sparkling, almost cheerful expression and waved enthusiastically at Izanami. “Hey! Let's catch up properly after this fight!”
Izanami’s serious posture melted away instantly, and a broad, radiant smile appeared on her face. “Oh yeah, it’s really been way too long! We definitely should. Drinks are on me!”
“Stay focused, they’re coming!” Malaka warned, as the horde of monks and the rival dojos charged forward simultaneously with a blood-curdling roar.
“Let them come,” Izanagi hissed. “We’ll wipe them off the map.”
Then, the mood shifted into absolute, terrifying focus. The playfulness vanished like snow in the sun; the four elite fighters inhaled in unison and began driving their destructive powers to the absolute boiling point at the same time. The visual escalation that followed defied the laws of nature.
“Izanami, unleash it!” Izanagi shouted.
“With pleasure!”
Malaka brought his hands together lightning-fast. His fingers moved in intricate, fluid hand gestures, locking one mudra after another with the speed of a machine gun.
“Seventh divine gate... UNLOCK!” Malaka roared.
At the very last, brutal spiritual seal, a shockwave of pure, raw energy erupted from his body. His eyes lit up fiercely like two burning torches. The marble tiles under his feet shattered with a loud crack and shot meters into the air, where they simply pulverized under the immense pressure. The gold-white energy literally flowed like a roaring, fire-breathing aura with sheer force from his palms and the soles of his feet. The wind he generated was so intense that the front row of charging bandits was blown back meters.
Beside him, Kali took a smooth step back.
“My turn to dance,” she whispered with a dark smile.
Without looking, she let herself fall backward, straight into her own pitch-black shadow on the ground. The shadow immediately began to churn wildly, growing larger, and flipped into a liquid, dark mirror of pure void. With disappearance-like speed and an explosive upward force, Kali shot back up out of it, transformed into her true, divine battle form: four arms. In each hand gleamed a razor-sharp, curved sickle or dagger. Two of her hands began to glow mysteriously, as if she were holding massive spheres of pure, concentrated light.
“Don't stare into the light for too long, gentlemen!” Kali laughed, while the scorched air rushed sizzling and crackling between her fingers, causing optical illusions and terrifying afterimages of herself to flash through the area.
Izanami gave a brief nod to Izanagi and slammed her foot into the frozen earth with a heavy impact.
“Shatter, fluid world!” she shrieked.
The impact resonated hundreds of meters deep into the surroundings. All water jugs, barrels, fountains, and underground water sources in the wide area exploded simultaneously into gigantic geysers. The water shot dozens of meters into the air like colossal, liquid tentacles, but instead of falling back down, every single particle hung dead-still in mid-air. The entire square was now surrounded by a floating ocean of billions of sharp water droplets. The rising morning sun reflected within them, creating a blinding, mesmerizing prism of light.
With a brutal, sawing motion of her hand, Izanami pulled all the floating water toward her sword in one all-consuming draw. The water froze instantly upon contact. Her own arms became completely encased in thick, crystalline ice armor that snapped tightly around her muscles with a loud crunch, as if she were wearing winter itself as an impenetrable suit of armor. She raised her massive ice-counterpart sword, forged from pure, gleaming ice, high above her head, ready to hack the enemy into frozen shards.
Izanagi wielded his sword with a reverse, lethal grip.
“Melt away into the abyss,” he spoke in a chillingly calm voice.
With a raw cry, he drove the blade straight into his own shadow until only the hilt stuck out above the surface. The shadow beneath him opened like a bottomless pit. When he yanked the weapon back out with a brutal, slow pull, the sword had changed beyond recognition. It was completely enveloped in a thick, pulsating, dark hellfire so intensely black that it simply swallowed all surrounding light and drained the color from the environment.
He held the gigantic black flame vertically in front of his face, focused his spiritual energy with two fingers on the flat side of the resonating blade, and called out in a voice that shook the ground:
“BREAK!!”
With a loud, metallic screech that made the attackers' eardrums bleed, the dark sword tripled in length. It was now a gigantic, meters-long pillar of black fire. The air around the colossal weapon began to resonate with a terrifying, high-frequency vibration. The vibration was so powerful that the rattling chains of the corrupt monks spontaneously shattered apart, and the marble ground beneath the feet of the charging rival dojos began to surge, crack, and pulverize into fine dust before the sword had even swung.
Deep in the enemy ranks, motivation abruptly turned into pure, paralyzing dread. The charging dojo leaders tried to check their leap into the air, but their momentum relentlessly carried them forward anyway.
“What... what kind of monsters are these?! This wasn't the plan!” screamed one of the enemy swordsmen, dropping his weapon and clapping his hands over his ringing ears.
“Too late to turn back!” Malaka bellowed, his gold-white aura casting half the square in a divine light.
The camera zoomed out at a breakneck speed into a gigantic, epic wide-shot of the battlefield.
In the absolute center of the square stood the four legends of the Shinto Dojo and their unexpected allies, back-to-back, fully transformed into their most terrifying and destructive forms. Malaka pulsating with raw, all-blinding energy; Kali with her four deadly arms and spheres of hissing light; Izanami with her frozen ice-sword and gleaming armor breaking the sunlight into thousands of shards; and Izanagi with his giant, terrifyingly resonating hellfire-sword seeming to warp gravity itself.
And around them, the trap closed definitively. Merciless and blind with rage, the rival dojos and bandits charged at them from the left with drawn katanas, refusing to give up, while from the right, the hundreds of corrupted monks dived down from the trees and rooftops with a blood-curdling shout. The four heroes moved their weapons back in unison, ready for the first devastating blow. The clash about to follow was on the verge of pulverizing the entire outer ring of the tournament to ash and dust.