Swordmaster Tomie's figure became a whirlwind of death, red and white braided together, tearing through the crowd.
The short sword's white light carved a lethal arc ahead of her, blasting a ballistic shield apart with contemptuous ease. The soldier behind it took the blow head-on and jerked like a man struck by lightning, his body armor visibly caving inward as he was flung backward, blood spraying from his mouth.
The tachi's cold gleam roamed at her side, singing a shrill, mournful note. The soldiers who heard it felt a chill crawl across their necks, and their movements locked up for half an instant. That half-instant was all the real edge needed.
Shk!
A helmeted head sailed high into the air, blood jetting half a meter out of the open neck.
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Swordmaster Tomie spun. The short sword swept horizontally, white light flashed, and three soldiers firing shoulder to shoulder were cut clean through at the waist, rifles and all.
Their upper halves slid free. Organs poured out. The stench of blood detonated in the air.
Her feet never stopped. She moved through them like a dancer performing a waltz of death, and wherever she passed, severed limbs and corpses went flying, blood drawing brief red lines through the air before her sword-qi churned them into a thick, drifting mist.
The iron reek grew sickening, mixing with gunsmoke and the smell of burning into something that belonged to hell itself, until even the moonlight turned dim and red.
Swordmaster Tomie's silhouette flickered in and out of that crimson fog, and the colors of the two blades in her hands changed with it.
The short sword's white glow had gone blood-red, the crimson light breathing along its length like something alive, each pulse seeming to drink in the blood and the lives around it. The tachi's edge and the blood groove down its spine were saturated, and the droplets it flung off, the steam rising from it, wrapped the weapon in an ominous red halo.
The soldiers broke.
Against a stronger army, discipline and training might have held them together a while longer.
But against this devil butchering them with the most primitive of weapons, and doing it with terrible efficiency, the last of their nerve dissolved.
This was not a battle.
It could not even be called a fight. It was a harvest, entirely one-sided.
"M-monster! She's a monster!"
One young soldier finally cracked, threw down his rifle, and ran.
"Run! Run for it!"
One man led, and the collapse spread like plague.
"Don't kill me! Please! Stay back! I surrender!"
More of them dropped their weapons outright, some dropping to their knees with their hands laced behind their heads, others simply fleeing with the crowd.
Screams, sobbing, hysterical begging, and scattered gunfire wove into a single sound.
The survivors had no will left to fight. One thought filled their skulls: get away from that blood-soaked figure, and the farther the better.
Ruined bodies, groaning wounded, shrieks of panic, the clotted red mist. The place had become hell, and Swordmaster Tomie walked through it without seeing any of it, her feet sticking in congealing gore, stepping over severed limbs and spilled entrails as she advanced, turned, and cut.
The one who laughed was not Swordmaster Tomie. It was Mara Tomie, still seated in the main hall, watching the garden through the broken sliding door.
She rested her cheek on one hand, a strand of black hair curling around her fingertip. Her face was smiling. Her eyes held nothing at all.
Like the Swordmaster Tomie killing out there, this abattoir of a scene could not stir so much as a ripple in her.
There was only one person they cared about. Every other human being, alive or dead, screaming or begging, was no different to them than a pebble on the roadside, something you kicked out of your way.
"You wouldn't run when you were told to run, and now you want to? That girl already gave you your excuse - she's not going to let you off now~"
If they had scattered earlier, Swordmaster Tomie truly would not have chased them.
But now, anyone still standing on this battlefield was an enemy who had to die - and material to grind her Sword Force against.
Swordmaster Tomie, who regarded every life other than Amamiya Rin's with indifference, had no reason and no inclination to spare a single enemy who had fired on her.
Those who chose to fight would bear the ending that fighting brought.
Even if Amamiya Rin had been standing here, he would not have stopped her.
These soldiers were not madmen robbed of their reason by Tomie's charm. They were men who had watched Swordmaster Tomie's power with clear heads, who had been told they could withdraw, and who had chosen to open fire on her anyway.
So being answered, being cut down - no logic in the world could fault that result.
The slaughter went on.
Steel danced, and with it came severed arms, ragged stumps, headless torsos, body armor split in half along with the flesh beneath it. Broken pieces of men and sprays of blood flew outward from her without pause.
The dark garment she wore had long since soaked through and clung to her, tracing lines that were somehow both balanced and beautiful, a female asura risen out of hell. In the depths of those eyes, what pulsed was no longer any normal emotion. It was pure killing intent, an intent to cut and cut again, reflecting an endless field of red.
The Superintendent-General's eyes were fixed on that crimson hell in the distance, the veins at his temple jumping wildly.
He was watching the elite force he had brought here be butchered like vegetables on a chopping board. Humiliation, terror, and a crushing sense of helplessness scorched away at his reason.
"It's over. It's all over," the Deputy Superintendent-General mumbled, slumped against the side of the vehicle, his face as white as a corpse's.
To lose this many elite tactical officers in one night - if the target were killed, they might at least sell it to the public as a necessary sacrifice, and their superiors would reward the achievement. If they failed, though, he and the Superintendent-General together could not shoulder responsibility on this scale.
"No!"
The Superintendent-General snatched up the radio, the last flare of madness before despair showing on his face.
"Helicopters! All helicopters! On my order - drop altitude! Target: that monster below! Saturation fire with the cannons! Now! Immediately! Kill her! Kill her!"
His roar carried over the airwaves to the three helicopters circling above.
The pilots and weapons operators froze.
Saturation fire? What insane order was that? There were still dozens of living colleagues down there!
"Sir! Our own people are still in that area!" one pilot said urgently.
"Execute the order! This is a top-level directive! If she doesn't die, all of us die! Open fire! I'll take full responsibility!"
The Superintendent-General's eyes had gone bloodshot.
Our own people? In the end they were just commoners. So long as the target died, even if every one of them was wiped out, the credit would still be his.
He was close to losing his mind entirely, fear and rage burning through whatever reason he had left.
In this moment only one thought remained: destroy Swordmaster Tomie.
He would sacrifice anything to accomplish it. Anything that wasn't himself.
All three pilots hesitated.
It was impossible not to. This was the twenty-first century, not the old empire. To treat your own comrades as cannon fodder, to blast them apart along with the enemy - even if they could talk their consciences into it, they could never carry the weight of killing their own.
"Did you not hear me? Do you want to die? I already told you! Fire, now! Every consequence falls on me. Keep your mouths shut, and once that woman is dead, you'll get everything you've ever wanted."
The Superintendent-General's voice came again. Not a roar this time - threat wrapped around a bribe.
Faced with that order, the pilots hesitated only a moment longer. Their faces drained paler still, but none of them refused.
Noses dipped. Engines howled as the aircraft dropped. Three multi-barrel cannons swung slowly into alignment and locked onto the blood-red figure below.
The Gatlings began to spin up, a rising hum like the hum of a reaper's scythe swinging through a field of lives.
Below, Swordmaster Tomie had just batted away a stray round from somewhere with her short sword when a violent sense of danger seized her mind.
She obeyed the instinct and looked up. Three helicopters had descended to under a hundred meters, their black muzzles aimed at the ground she stood on.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!
The next instant, deafening cannon fire ripped the sky open. Three thick chains of visible flame poured down from three different angles, crossing as they fell.
Twenty-millimeter shells hammered the earth at thousands of rounds a minute. In a heartbeat, the ground where Swordmaster Tomie stood and everything within ten meters of it vanished beneath the barrage.
There was no other word for it than annihilation. Every shell that struck blew a crater the size of a bowl, and dirt, gravel, severed limbs, broken rifles, even fragments of abandoned vehicles were thrown up by the blasts and shockwaves.
"No - !"
The soldiers who hadn't cleared the impact zone in time screamed their last, bodies torn to pieces by explosions and shrapnel.
But Swordmaster Tomie had already vanished from where she stood, an instant before the fire arrived.
The Crimson Lotus Breathing Method was driven to a limit she had never reached before, and the vast life force inside her surged at a speed she had never reached before, granting her an explosive power beyond the body's ceiling.
For those few seconds her body became a smear of afterimages, threading, doubling back, and rolling through the gaps between detonations.
No pattern. No warning. Her ghostlike shifting and weaving left that storm of bullets, denser than any rainsquall, trailing behind her.
And more than that, her body was changing.
The slender, balanced frame began to swell as if inflated, the dark cloth stretching tight over the ridges of building muscle.
Her shoulders broadened and thickened. The muscles of her back spread like wings. Her arms and thighs surged with explosive mass.
In the span of a few breaths her height climbed by more than thirty centimeters and her whole body grew a size larger, a graceful woman's shape becoming the powerful build of a female giant.
A layer of tough, dark material surfaced across her pale skin like exoskeletal plating, laid over the lines of muscle and the key points where force would land. Bone density spiked. Fascia reinforced itself. The multiplied hearts beat heavy as war drums, driving energy far past what any human could carry, and her doubled lungs expanded her capacity, making the Crimson Lotus Breathing Method stronger still.
Against cannon fire, Swordmaster Tomie had no choice but to enter her strongest state.
With her strength pushed to its absolute peak, every step she took cracked the concrete into the shape of a footprint. She was a tank charging headlong through the field - but far more agile than any tank.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The cannon rounds chased her, plowing trenches of death around her body.
Soldiers who couldn't escape in time were shredded by that indiscriminate fire and burst into a rain of blood, their screams swallowed by the roar of the guns.
Farther out, the men still beyond the impact zone watched it all happen and let out cries of despair. Those were their colleagues, men who had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with them a moment ago, and now they were being ground into paste by friendly fire. Rage, fear, betrayal - all of it spilled over, and many of them turned toward the command vehicle with murder in their eyes.
"Bakayarou!"
"My brothers hadn't even gotten out yet!"
"Damn it. A government like this..."
"Bureaucrat bastards!"
...
Being killed by the enemy was one thing. Being written off by your own superiors as an acceptable cost was something they could never accept.
This kind of thing should have died out decades ago.
But their snarls were buried under the cannon fire. The Superintendent-General never heard a word of that fury. He was grinning, a savage twist of a smile.
"It's working! We're about to kill her! Hahahaha! My position is safe!"
Even Swordmaster Tomie could not easily stand against a storm of destruction falling from the sky.
The three chains of fire converged as though they were alive, sealing off any wide movement. Scorching blast waves and razor fragments kept grazing her, leaving burn marks and tears in her blood-soaked clothes, and now and then a fragment buried itself in her hardened skin and carved a piece of flesh away.
The impact of those cannon rounds was too great. Even with her speed and her sword-qi barrier, she could not dodge everything, a graze still wounded her, and a direct hit would cripple her.
She needed a stronger means of attack.
Swordmaster Tomie's breathing grew deeper and longer, and the Crimson Lotus Breathing Method and the surging life force within her reached a resonance she had never achieved before.
With each breath, with each swing of her blade, the thick blood mist saturating the air began to turn around her body, drawn by some invisible pull.
Little by little, a vague outline started to gather in the mist behind her.
It was the shape of a four-armed humanoid, roughly ten meters tall.
She could dimly make out a cross-legged posture, eyes glaring wide, muscles knotted, radiating boundless power and authority, like a Nio Guardian King, the guardian deity of Buddhism. But this Nio Guardian King was not gilded in radiance. It was made entirely of roiling blood mist and scarlet light, its features indistinct, with only two smoldering dark red points burning where its eyes should be, a stare out of hell.
The crimson guardian, that Nio Guardian King of blood, stood behind Swordmaster Tomie with a sword in each of its four hands.
The helicopter pilots above saw the impossible thing forming and went cold with terror. The Superintendent-General only grew more furious.
"Keep firing! Don't stop!"
At his roar the pilots stopped hesitating. The three helicopters adjusted angle again into a crossfire net, and an even denser rain of cannon rounds came down - but the eerie giant seemed to have no substance at all, and let the bullets pass straight through its body.
____
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