Chapter Fifteen
All the serpents in the world could do nothing without leverage. They'd known what they were doing when they chained Ban's arms together, strapping one to the other so that he could call Asclepius as much as he liked, but he wouldn't do anything except rip his wrists to pieces against each other.
He probably had Hevn to thank for that. He'd have blamed her for it, even hated her, but she was so far from the person that he'd thought she was that he didn't even know her enough to hate her. All those years, all those smiles . . . he had to hand it to her, she was an even better liar than he'd thought.
Ban squirmed around on the altar enough to be able to see the ex-Volts fighting their way in. His innate skills and impressive experience in battle enabled him to assess the situation in a fraction of a second.
Fuck. We're doomed.
Not that he was the sort to underrate other people, and he was prepared to admit that under the right conditions those three could be moderately impressive, and they were good at working together, but against the current weight of opposition? Not a chance.
The glint of metal caught at the edge of his vision. He rolled back to see Hevn raising her machete above him.
So this was where it all paid out and where accounts came due. There was nothing in her eyes that he could appeal to. She looked down at him as if he was nothing more than one of the chickens she'd killed earlier, hair blowing back from her face in the winds of the battle, and her lips formed words that he couldn't hear but that made the stone beneath him shake.
Grandmother, is this what you saw --
Her blade came down.
Shadows rose on the other side of him like a crack opening on deepest night, and a flash of red as dark as heart's blood swung round to meet the machete just above his neck. Metal sang against metal in a shriek that cut through the wind and the fighting.
It was Akabane's sword, but Himiko was holding it, a Himiko haloed in darkness and with shadows flowing behind her like a long cape, with scalpels swinging round her free hand like a bracelet, Himiko with death itself looking out of her eyes.
Hevn's hand trembled. "Voodoo Child . . ." her red lips shaped.
Himiko shook her head, once, in a gesture of flat denial, and she twisted her wrist, slapping Hevn's blade away. She swept over the altar in a smooth jump, and her sword came across and down in a single smooth motion, and she ran Hevn through.
Hevn screamed. There was another scream at the same moment from across the room, and Ban couldn't see who it was, but it echoed Hevn's cry an octave deeper, and it had the same note of utter fury and despair.
Himiko (but it wasn't Himiko any more, it was someone else, Ban could see it, smell it in her like drying blood) stepped closer to the taller woman, driving the blade through her till it stood two handspans out behind her. "I warned you, Madam Negotiator," she said, and Ban could hear Akabane's tones in Himiko's voice, the familiar stresses and choice of words shaping the familiar voice into something different and lethal.
Did you know if you gave yourself to him that he'd use you to kill? he wondered. Did you care?
Himiko turned, dragging her blade free of Hevn, and sliced it once along Ban's body, cutting through chains and bindings in a single smooth motion. Behind her, Hevn collapsed to the ground, still graceful even now; her hands fluttered briefly as she fell, grasping at the air before tumbling open and still.
Ban sat up, shaking ropes and chains away gratefully, and surveyed the room. Kagami Kyouji was coming in fast, in a dazzle of dust and mirrors, but the bar host seemed more interested in Himiko, so he'd let the brat take care of him. He was quite sure that she could.
The air hummed with wind and thunder.
---
Kazuki and Juubei paused for a moment, back to back, as Kagami Kyouji abandoned Toshiki to tear across the floor towards the altar. The air was full of movement and wind, and Kazuki couldn't see clearly what was going on over there without taking his attention away from Miroku Natsuhiko.
And at the moment, that would be fatal.
Light flashed behind him, brilliant and glaring, and threw his shadow on the floor hard and black in front of him. He felt Juubei stagger back against him from the force of an impact, heard his friend groan.
He would have to trust Juubei to be able to hold for a moment longer, trust Toshiki to be able to help, trust both of them to watch his back while he took a chance. He couldn't reach Midou Ban or Kudou Himiko from here, but they seemed to be managing something for themselves, if that was what was distracting Kagami -- but that wasn't the point. The point was that perhaps, just perhaps, he could reach Ginji.
Pivoting in a whirl of strings, he spun round and exchanged places with Juubei in a pattern that they had practiced thousands of times before, and faced Masaki.
Did I ever know you, any more than I knew Hevn?
Masaki had seen him fight a dozen times before. He'd know what to expect. And so Kazuki gave him what he would not expect, a deliberate beginner's move of stepping forward in a straight cross of threads that only a fool would have tried against a frontal assault. A novice could have caught it and used the opportunity against him. But Masaki, so used to his tactics, was taken by surprise and knocked back a half-pace.
It was enough.
Kazuki dived past him in a fluid ripple of motion, somersaulting and sliding across the floor like a wave of the ocean
-- the wave about to break over Mount Fuji --
and came to a pause in front of Ginji, trapped there in a thunderstorm of lightning that threw Raitei's mask across his face but that left him powerless.
From Earth to Heaven --
He spun out a web of threads, casting them from his hands like rain, feeling Masaki behind him like an eclipse, but not having the time to care for that, only hoping that he would have long enough for this.
-- from Heaven to Earth --
The thin silk hissed as it touched the lambent electricity, scorching and burning, but it held for that moment of conduction, that split second of diversion. The power jumped to follow a different pattern, one that led it into Ginji, that gave him the power he needed.
-- falls the shadow.
The light behind him struck him down and he fell, but in that moment he heard the crash of thunder and saw Raitei step free of the wall, the mantle of his power crackling round him brighter than the sun.
---
Himiko was aware of moments, like bright bubbles in an ocean of darkness. She was the foam on the surface, but the presence that moved through her body was the dark currents beneath. She was there and not there, and she had known what would happen when she had let him possess her, she had heard the warning he gave Hevn earlier, she was aware of what would happen and she had not done a thing to stop it.
Would Ginji have tried to spare Hevn's life? Certainly. Would Ban? Possibly.
(Would Raitei? Raitei would have killed her without even giving the woman a second's thought after her death.)
Kagami's face -- she saw it in one of those moments of meaning and sanity -- was twisted in fury as he fought, and he trailed diamond dust like the curves of a whip, filling the air with it and lashing at her till her clothing hung in rags.
Himiko hung suspended in darkness, outside time, outside space.
There was a time when she has wanted to kill Ban because he had killed her brother. Was it the same thing now? Had she wanted Hevn dead, did she want Kagami dead, because they were implicit in her brother's death? Would she bring down the whole of Babylon City because of it?
And the answer was yes, yes on so many levels, because it had only ever been her and her big brother, and then her and her big brother and Ban, and she had nothing in her life except them, and now she knew how huge that nothingness was, born from a glass womb, made to be an empty body, Voodoo Child, puppet, toy, thing. And it had been them all along; hardly Ban at all, only in the most petty sense, only in that he had been the body that struck the blow, but they had been the ones that made the blow necessary.
It would have been easy to let herself believe that Carrefour, or Akabane, or any name she chose to give him, rode her body and acted without her will. But that would have been a lie, and lying is death to true motion, a hindrance to true speed. The truth was that she was going to kill and keep killing until there was nothing left of them. Then she would stop.
Flash of light, flash of darkness, glass against steel, the wheel of the battle kept on turning, the fight went on.
She took full responsibility. She had done for years now. This was her choice.
---
Ginji had been screaming. The electricity had been running over him and round him and past him, a single hair's breadth away from him, too far to use, too close to endure, and through it he had been able to see the room and everything that was going on in it, and he had been able to do nothing, nothing at all.
Kazuki's threads fell through the lines of power as smoothly as rain, as slowly as a blessing. The lightning ran through them and into his veins, filling the gnawing hunger at his centre, and he stepped away from the wall in a shower of burning masonry, free at last.
Raitei flamed inside him, running mad and furious. Raitei was outraged. They had dared -- dared -- to do this. They would be struck down. The Thunder Emperor knew what to do, knew precisely what to do.
Ginji looked at Masaki's face, as calm and precise as ever, and put Raitei aside like a discarded mask. This wasn't Raitei's quarrel. This was his own. "Why?" he asked.
"Because," Masaki answered. Light curdled into a diamond between his hands and flared out in a laser, slicing through the air.
Ginji parried it with a lance of plasma (and it was strange how quickly it came to his hand, how fast and ready it was to his bidding, even though he was not Raitei, but perhaps there was too much pain even for Raitei to carry, and only Ginji himself could bear it in the end) and swept forward with the lightning carrying him.
Solid light danced around Masaki in a halo, flashing in quick blows that Ginji had to ward off before they could touch him. He could feel their pressure against his skin like blows from a rod of steel, could smell the hairs on the back of his arms burning from their heat. "It doesn't have to be this way," Masaki said, voice reasonable and confiding. He was once more the rock that Ginji had leaned on when they were both younger.
But how young is he? How old are any of them?
"Of course it doesn't," Ginji panted. "Stop it."
"No." Light flared again, hurling Ginji three steps back before he could catch his balance. "I have worked for this longer than you have been alive. I have planned this for longer than you can know. This does not stop. This will not be stopped." The air was too bright around him; it burned like a heat haze, like the sky in the desert.
"Are you my father?"
Masaki blinked. "What?"
"You created me," Ginji pointed out with unassailable logic. "If I was born for this, if you made me, then you are my father. And I will not let you hurt my friends!" Rage made the lightning halo him, made it dance and flicker and leap out to ground itself. "You do not own me --"
"Ah, but I do."
"You can't make me help you."
"But I can."
"You will not do this!"
"I can. And I will." Their forces wound together and wove a net of pure light and crackling plasma around them. "Ginji, why won't you help me? I thought you trusted me --"
"After all this?" Ginji shouted, gesturing at the chaos around them.
"Yes," Masaki said, and the light around him pulsed again. "Now and always, for that was how I made you."
---
Ban saw Miroku Natsuhiko at the same time as Miroku Natsuhiko saw him, and they were both moving towards each other at that instant, cutting across the floor of the huge room as though they were partners in a dance.
"Midou," the Miroku hissed. He brought his long blade down in a cut that Ban only just avoided; it left a deep gash in the tiled floor. "At last."
"Natsuhiko." Ban tried a Snake Bite on the other man's arm, but missed his grip; the other's body melted and reformed into Ukyo, the madly smiling tumbler with the wide curved blade, who took a few blindingly fast swipes at Ban before leaping back and returning to Natsuhiko's shape.
"I should hope you remember my name," Natsuhiko snarled. "It will be the last --"
"-- the last thing I hear, yes, yes, I know." Ban yawned elaborately as he ducked a set of swipes, then leaped over a nodachi blow as Natsuhiko was replaced by the stockier Tokisada. "Look, I've been avoiding you all this time --"
"We know."
For a moment the woman of the group was using her spear to try to pin Ban down; he moved in to hamper her at close range, and she shifted to Tsubaki, his teeth showing in a sneer, trying to rip out Ban's stomach with his daggers. Ban hastily backpedalled, circling to keep his distance.
Natsuhiko surfaced again. "We all want to kill you, Midou Ban. Even Yukihiko. However much he cares for your Amano Ginji. He too --"
"Shut the fuck up." Ban gestured rudely. "Listen here, Miroku Natsuhiko. I've let you be because I didn't want to hurt you. I know you've already been hurt enough. But --" He dodged Natsuhiko's blade, flipping backwards across the floor. "But if you force me too far, then I will not hold back."
"You'll kill me?" Natsuhiko's laugh changed as his body did, rising in tone to match Yukihiko's lighter body and smaller build. "Is that meant to scare me?"
"Fuck, no." There was lightning inside the room. Raitei must be loose. Ban was running out of time. "I'll do worse. Last warning, Miroku Seven. Withdraw or suffer the consequences."
Yukihiko frowned in concentration. Darkness began to orbit him in spinning circles, eating the light and heat from the air. "We have come too far to withdraw," he said calmly. "I regret what this will do to Ginji, but he will be better off without you. Once we are done with you, I will --"
Ban focused. The Jagan came to him in a eager swirl of power.
Yukihiko was gone, and Natsuhiko stood there instead. The spheres of darkness vanished; instead, Natsuhiko held a long katana between his hands, one that shone as if it had been forged from moonlight. "Did you think we didn't know you'd try that? There are seven of us and you can only do that three times. Go on. Try twice more. The rest of us will kill you."
"That's not it. I wanted you." Ban took a step forward. "And I knew you'd come up to protect Yukihiko. Any of you would. I'll say that much for you."
"So?" Natsuhiko readied the blade. It was sharp enough that the wind seemed to part around it and recoil in different directions.
"So you want to kill me, don't you?" Ban smirked, lowering his hands, feeling Asclepius around his right wrist as tight as a lover's grasp. "You want to feel my blood on that sword. Don't lie."
Natsuhiko didn't answer. He brought his sword around in a precise and absolute cut, a demonstration-perfect move that would slice a body like a bale of straw.
Ban caught it in his hand. Blood ran. Asclepius screamed.
"Look at me, Miroku Natsuhiko," Ban said, and called up the Jagan once more, meeting the raging Natsuhiko's eyes and knowing that Natsuhiko wouldn't break the gaze, not even to save himself, wouldn't let anyone else have Ban when he was his own to kill. Why is it I get so many people -- never mind. "It's you who needs to see this."
Natsuhiko stiffened as Ban's blood ran down the blade of his sword.
Three children playing. They're all supposed to be geniuses of combat. They take stupid risks.
"Eris," Ban whispered.
Three children playing and one child falls and there's blood on all three of them but only one of them is holding a sword.
Natsuhiko's lips moved. The howl of the wind and the crackle of the lightning stole his words.
It is your fault, cries the boy holding the sword, your fault, your fault, your fault, and something in his eyes splinters as he screams.
Ban's hand tightened on the blade of Natsuhiko's sword. "It wasn't anyone's fault. Look, you want my blood, take it -- but stop this shit. You hear me, Natsuhiko? Look me in the eyes and kill me if you can."
And the boy with the sword says that a monster killed his sister, and it was Midou Ban's fault --
"It isn't that simple," Natsuhiko whispered.
-- the monster's fault --
"It is." Ban's blood had reached the hilt of the sword. "It was an accident and it was my fault and your fault and her damn fault too. And everyone's got the right to go to hell in their own way, but not to take anyone else with them. So tell me, Natsuhiko --"
-- not his fault --
"-- all those people in there, if they can see this, hear this -- they gonna let everyone else die because of you?"
-- and the blood ran down his sword . . .
Natsuhiko trembled as the blade fell from his hand. It dissolved into shards of light as it struck the floor, melting into nothingness. He looked away from Ban's face, his gaze falling to his bloodstained hand. "Liar," he said quietly, and it was not clear to whom he was speaking.
"Just one minute. Was it a nice dream?" Ban asked, with all the poison of his patron god behind his tongue, eating through his words like acid. "Did you see what you want to see?"
Natsuhiko screamed, pressing his bloody hands against his temples. His face rippled as though it were underwater, changing and reforming and unable to remain still, other features briefly appearing and dissolving again, hair morphing from dark to white and back to dark, the lines of his body shifting under his long white coat. His scream grew louder, strangely multitonal, several voices screaming at once through a single mouth, from a man's cry of agony to a woman's shriek of betrayal.
Ban just stood there. He could feel the sword's cut in his hand, but only as a line of warmth, not as the pain it would be later. For years he had run away from this, because it had been an accident and Natsuhiko hadn't deserved to suffer for it any more than he himself had --
but we're all sinners, Midou Ban, you should know that
-- he'd tried, he honestly had tried, but Natsuhiko had forced the situation and left him no choice.
As the scream cut off and Natsuhiko crumpled to the floor, now Yukihiko instead, tears streaking the youthful face, he wondered if it would have been kinder simply to finish the Miroku off and let them die believing they were innocent.
He turned away to gaze into the lightning.
---
Juubei and Toshiki stood back to back over Kazuki's body. He was still breathing. That had been the first thing Juubei had checked, the first thing that Toshiki had known from Juubei's stance.
Teshimine stood opposite them, but he didn't move to attack. Beside him was the little girl with blonde curls, a doll still cradled in her arms, age heavy in her eyes.
"Well?" Toshiki asked sharply. "Come at us, then, if you are coming --"
Teshimine cut the words off with a shake of his head. "No. Just . . . if we both stay out of it. Right?"
"Do you expect to win?" Juubei asked.
"Masaki can't lose," Teshimine said, and there was such a weight of pain and self-loathing and desperation in his voice that Toshiki felt a moment of sympathy for the other man, however much he had betrayed them, however much he had lied to them. "Masaki can't lose and Ginji can't win. I'll try and get you three out of here alive."
"Agreed," the little girl said, her inflections those of an adult. "Further deaths will serve no useful purpose."
"Perhaps you should have thought about that before you started this," Toshiki said. He had enough strength left to dispose of this pair.
Juubei held a hand up. "Wait, Uryuu. They are right about one thing. Ginji or Masaki, they will decide the battle."
Toshiki turned to flick a gaze across the room for a moment. Miroku was down. Kagami and Himiko were fighting and Kagami wasn't winning. "And what if Masaki wins, and then tells you to kill us?"
"I'll kill you," Teshimine said. There was no hesitation to it, no second thoughts. "You ought to understand that."
Toshiki nodded, once, and kept himself in position, waiting for the rolling light and thunder to resolve into a single figure.
---
Himiko ran with Kagami across the floor and halfway up the wall, moving with unaccustomed speed and lightness, as though the shadows around her buoyed her up and swept her onwards.
There would be a price to pay afterwards, she knew. It didn't matter.
Kagami's eyes were as pale and cold as shards of diamond. The playfulness was all stripped away, leaving nothing but hatred behind it.
My brother, your sister -- where does it stop?
A moment ago she'd wanted them all dead. Now -- now she wasn't sure what she did want, and she felt the presence inside her tremble at the thought, a flame shaken by the wind. It had been easy to fight Kagami, that time before in Mugenjou, when it had been a simple matter of him against her and Ban, and him trying to kill her because he'd been ordered to do so, and her striking back because of the lens and the bomb and everything else.
But now it was personal, and that made everything different.
They raced back across the floor, sweeping in a wide arc round the ball of light and fury where Ginji and Masaki faced each other, and his fragments of razor-edged glass rattled again her scalpels -- no, Akabane's scalpels -- like the drums that should be beating for her, for all of this, for the end of the Voodoo Child.
She knew that the loa riding her wanted to kill Kagami. Face him. Fight him. Kill him. For a moment it held back, letting her make her own choices.
It would be enough to stop him, she thought, and hated herself for ending it that easily.
But she could still smell Hevn's blood. And it didn't matter if the woman had been a traitor and never a friend, that everything she had ever said had been a lie, that those moments of amusement and even understanding when they had worked together had been nothing but deceit, it didn't matter, it was over now, and she could understand the anger and grief that made Kagami's face a mask. She could understand what it meant to lose someone you loved. She could understand wanting to kill for it.
And Kagami threw himself at her in a blatantly suicidal attack, unexpected and impossible to survive, which no sane fighter would have expected. She reacted automatically -- step, balance, lunge -- and as the sword punched through his chest, he pulled himself towards her on it and slashed downwards, the edged sparkle in his hand slicing through clothes and flesh. He cut across her body, a fraction of a centimetre below the big vein in the side of her neck, and down in a slow movement that pulled blood behind it, that would have killed her if she had been a moment too slow to sway backwards, an instant too late to strike him down.
Blood trickled from the wound across her torso, a line from neck to hip.
Kagami looked at her for a moment, his eyes meeting hers, as empty as dirty ice, and then he slumped forward. She could feel his heartbeat slow and die through the sword in her hand, feel his breathing stop; he was gone.
She tilted the blade to let him slide away. So what had he wanted, in the end? To kill her, or to join his sister?
You cannot save those who will not be saved, Lady Poison, a familiar voice whispered in her heart. But I am glad that you have chosen to save yourself.
---
Ginji was conscious of the other fights coming to their respective ends, of the sound of screams and dripping blood, but it all came through the whirl of lightning and illumination as softly and gently as if he was underwater.
Masaki's hands closed on his shoulders. The other man was taller than he was. He shook Ginji as if he were a disobedient child. "You idiot! Don't you realise what you're doing?"
Ginji braced himself. "You don't -- see that anything is wrong -- do you?"
The light hammered down on him, suffocating him under its weight and pressure. "My will is what is right," Masaki said, the words intimate and distinct. "You are all toys. I created you. I can destroy you and make you again. This time I will make it right."
"Make us, make the world, make it right -- we're not puppets!" Ginji grabbed Masaki's shirt, knotting his hands in it, and for a moment he was a child again, demanding to know why the adult didn't understand. "We're not just --"
"Just what?" Masaki asked. "Illusions? Constructs? Virtual like Ren? How do you know this hasn't all been virtual? I can flip a switch and you'll go out -- like that!"
Ginji frowned, working that through in his mind. "That's still murder," he said stubbornly. "If we believe we're alive --"
"But you're not." Masaki smiled. "I am."
But if we believe we're alive, if we think we are, if we feel as if we are . . . The thoughts ran around in Ginji's head like shadows, impossible to fully formulate.
"None of you are real," Masaki said with calm certainty. "I can wipe you all away like dust."
The light intensified. It was hard to breathe. It was round him like a physical presence, pulsing like a heart, crushing him.
. . . and if we're all illusions, even me, even Ban . . .
"Out," Masaki said, "like a candle. Make a wish, and blow . . ."
. . . but I believe that Ban exists, because we're the Getbackers, and there are two of us and that's why there's an S in Getbackers, and I believe in Ban, and Ban believes in me, so I exist too, and . . .
". . . and you're gone."
The light hammered Ginji down to his knees and clogged his throat and bent him backwards until his spine ached.
. . . and either none of it's real or all of it's real . . .
He called the lightning and it came, wild and real and vital, fire which ran through his blood and let him raise himself from the ground, let him stand there facing Masaki, crowned with lightning and with plasma arcing around his hands. "Make me," he said.
Light broke against him in rolling wave after rolling wave, searing the floor away beneath his feet so that he stood on a small island, a pedestal surrounded by molten stone. Light blazed furious white, stark enough to burn his shadow into the walls. Light ripped and tore at him, deliberate malice and solipsism given form to destroy and break down and eradicate.
His lightning was alive. It existed. It held back the light and mocked it and outshone it.
Slowly the room paled into reality again, as the fires died away. Through the shadows and the smoke, Ginji looked down at the unmoving body at his feet.
It was strange how much older Masaki looked, now that the vitality had gone from his face and the light from behind his eyes.
---
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