Marcus…
His sword dangled at his side, slick with Moyako’s blood and with pieces of hair and bone fragments stuck to it.
He stood over her body, waiting for her to get back but decided to back away to give her some space.
As he did, he heard the sound of sparks and crackling, like that of wood burning in a bonfire. Within seconds, Moyako’s head regenerated and she stood up once again to face him.
The fear that was in her eyes from before had vanished entirely and was instead replaced with the resolve to fight that he was trying to draw out of her.
There would be no point to fighting her if she didn’t fight back. It would make it feel like he was beating on a helpless little girl when he knew that she was far more than that.
“Are you satisfied?” Moyako ground out angrily.
“With what?”
“With angering me. With forcing me to kill you like you wanted. You wanted me to fight with all I have to see my goals through...well now I will, and you’ll soon come to regret that,” she said as she glared at him.
“Are you going to show me some of those hidden techniques that Camilla told me about? I’m rather curious to see what you’ve added to the Shura style,” he said gleefully.
A part of him was genuinely interested to see how far she had developed the style and to see it in action, even if it was going to be used against him.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he felt this way or what it was based on.
Was it solely just out of curiosity, or was it something else?
Was it...a feeling of pride?
For what reason would he have to feel any amount of pride for this woman?
He took in a deep breath as he tried to push the thought out of his head as he pulled his revolver from its holster and held it in his left hand.
Watching this, Moyako did something unusual with her sword that caused him to pause.
With a flick of her hand, her sword sheathe reappeared in her left hand with the blade already sheathed inside it.
She then switched the position of her right hand’s grip on the sword handle to be similar to that of an Iai sword draw stance as the blade and sheathe was held in front of her.
What could she be doing now…?
As he pondered over her next actions, a current of wind began to collect around her, flowing around the sheathed blade before being compressed within it. Along with the compressed air, he could sense an extremely dense mass of spiritual energy flowing within the sheathe.
As if to show that she was prepared to attack, she locked eyes with him which caused him to reflexively put up his guard as he held Light Taker in front of him. Her eyes glowed the same bright blue as his own as a small sputtering of flames leaked from her irises.
“Dragon Flash,” she said as she drew her blade to rend the earth asunder.
The arc of compressed air that threatened to split him in half came hurtling towards him so quickly that he barely had time to react as he side stepped out of the wait, yet even as he did, the sheer amount of air pressure was strong enough to cut apart the left side of his body.
He then looked back at Moyako to prepare for her next attack in case she decided to do that same attack again only to find that she had vanished.
Before he knew it, she had already stepped inside his guard as she was stooped low, with her right hand already tightly wrapped around the handle of her blade, ready to draw it.
Oh shit!
From what he could sense, she did not rely on stopping time to try and attack him as that would require too much energy and would have alerted him to her next actions. She also didn’t rely solely on physical enhancement to move as fast as she did, nor did she manipulate the flow of time through her body.
Wait...that burst of flames from her eyes...did she copy me?
Before he could react in time, she drew her sword and said, “Ten Fold Severance.”
As he tried to stop time to allow himself to out of the way, he suddenly felt his ability to do so hampered.
As he watched her unsheathe Kakure Sakura, he noticed something of an afterimage following after her.
He tried to bring Light Taker down to block her attack, yet even as he managed to move his sword in time, her katana seemed to pass right through it as if it wasn’t even there.
Her sword cut right through his chest completely and in the very next instant, she vanished.
A feeling of panic took over as he patted himself down where she struck him but could not feel a single would, nor could he feel any pain registering where she had cut him.
Confused, he turned around to find that she had reappeared behind him, slowly sheathing her katana once again as she looked at him.
As the guard of her katana clicked against her sheathe, her eyes flashed one more time and he suddenly felt the pain of ten cuts all across his body.
His neck, his knees and elbows, his hands and feet, and lastly, his eyes.
Yet even as he felt the pain of being cut, he could still tell that everything was still connected to his body and working.
What the hell…? What did she do to me?
Confused and wary of this unusual attack, he tried to maintain his confidence as he asked, “What exactly did you do to me? You didn’t even manage to lay a single scratch on-”
“Ichi! [One]” she said, and as if in command, his right hand was severed out of no where and fell to the ground.
“I see...so you can mark a person’s body where you want to cut pieces of them off, and then you can command when you want them to be severed, is that it?” he asked but she did not answer.
Irritated with her silence, he decided to ignore her and focus on regenerating his hand.
However, no matter how much energy he poured into regrowing and repairing his hand, nothing seemed to work.
Then it hit him.
She didn’t just sever his hand, she severed its future.
She had, for all intents and purposes, erased the future of his right hand remaining connected with the rest of his body.
He groaned in irritation as he said, “Well isn’t that a neat little trick… Did you pick that up from Artemis, or did you already have a move like that tucked away?”
“Ni! [Two],” she said and his lower left leg was severed at the knee.
Yet before it could fall to the ground as a useless pile of flesh, he created a small patch of Dragon Glass on the severed area and reconnected it.
“A lot of good that will do you if I can reconnect it in a different way,” Marcus said, to which Moyako furrowed her brow in annoyance.
Yet even as he said that, the feeling he had keeping his lower left leg connected was different from before. It felt less like it was still a part of his body and more like he was sending energy into a fake limb. It didn’t feel like it was his anymore.
He could send electrical signals into the areas she had cut to keep them working all he wanted, but if she did that over and over to him, forcing his mind to keep too many parts of himself connected all at once, it could really become a problem.
He flicked his right wrist, making his right hand fly back to him with Light Taker still in its grip, and forcibly reconnected it.
Just to test if things were still working right, he tapped all five of his fingers against the handle of his sword.
Seeing this, Moyako lunged after him once again and launched into a flurry of attacks.
Before her sword could finish its path on its way clash with his own, she tried to lock eyes with him to manipulate what he was seeing, so instead, he closed his eyes.
He knew that she would eventually sever his eyes anyways as a means to open up another attack or hinder his ability to fight, so he decided to take that advantage away from her.
After all, he had other ways to see things around him.
Through Malthael’s extrasensory vision, he could see everything around him all at once and even see better than he would without his eyes.
With it, he moved even faster as he kept up with her attacks, deflecting, blocking, and parrying everything she threw at him.
“What happened to not avoiding any of my attacks like you boasted about earlier, huh?!” she asked, fury in her voice as she put her full weight into her sword.
“I only said that to spur you along...and damn, I’m glad I did because you really know how to fight! I’m impressed!” he said, complimenting her.
“SHUT UP!” she roared as she pulled her leg up as if to kick out his legs.
Marcus increased the gravity around his body to make him heavier and more difficult to move.
But then she said, “San [Three]!”
He felt his right leg get severed at the knee just as her foot connected with it and sent it flying away.
Before he could lose his balance, he twisted his body around and kicked out his severed knee, making a new lower leg out of Dragon Glass, while reconnecting his right foot to it.
He then spun his body back around to kick her away only to hear her shout, “Yon [Four]!”
His right foot was then severed before it could connect with her chin and completely missed her.
Shit! I’m completely open!
“Go! Roku! Nana! Hachi! Kyu! [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]”
With that, his left hand, both elbows, left foot, and eyes were all severed at once.
Before he could try and reconnect them, she plunged her sword into his heart and his body started falling to the ground.
A split second before his head could connect with the ground, she said, “Ju [Ten].”
His head rolled away from his neck as she buried her sword hilt deep in his chest, anchoring him into the dirt.
Yet even while being decapitated, he could hear her heavy angered breathing as she knelt on top of him and asked, “Do you yield Marcus?”
Then, to mess with her further, he forced his mouth to open with his magic, even as it was several feet away from his torso, and said, “Not a chance in hell, Moya.”
She grit her teeth in anger and said, “DO NOT CALL ME THAT!”
He then opened his eyes, even after they had been severed, and lock his gaze with her own, pouring as much energy as he could muster in that moment to halt her thoughts for just a moment.
Luckily, she was stunned by the sight of his severed head speaking to her just long enough for it to be successful as used his lightning magic to collect all of his severed body parts at once and reconnect them.
Just as he managed to put himself back together, he noticed her head twitch as she was resisting his control.
Yet before she could regain her thoughts, he used his magic to move through her body and reappear standing behind her.
He took that brief moment to reverse the flow of time in his body to before she had severed the areas she had cut him, copying Camilla’s method of time based regeneration.
Then, before she could fully regain control of herself, he stabbed her in the back.
She let out a startled gasp as she stiffened up and looked up at him in shock.
“Didn’t I tell you when the match started that I would drive my sword into the base of your spine?” he said, taunting her.
She grit her teeth as she tried to swing her sword at him but he kicked her to the ground.
He swung his sword down, trying to stab her through the back of her skull, but she rolled out of the way only to have his foot slam into her chest and pin her to the ground.
With a snap of his fingers, his revolver reappeared in his left hand as he pulled the trigger and fired over a hundred rounds into her face in a matter of seconds.
He then stopped firing as the bullets had opened up a hole in her head so wide that he was basically drilling into the ground.
In the very next moment, she burst into flames and exploded in a cloud of ash.
Although it wouldn’t have mattered if the ashes got in his eyes, to his shock, Malthael’s vision couldn’t make anything out through it.
She had poured a mass of spiritual energy into the ashes to mess with his ability to see, countering the Archdragon’s ability.
But then, just as he was wondering where she went, she started hearing her rapid foot steps approaching him from behind.
He spun his body around to face her, releasing a burst of energy from his body to disperse the ashes and look in her direction.
She had already sheathed her sword to prepare for her next attack.
He responded by pulling his sword arm back to try and strike her before she could get the chance.
Yet just as his sword was about to split her head in two, she unsheathed her katana and parried his sword up and away from her.
As he watched this happen, he remembered his training with Camilla and how he had developed a counter to this Shura parry counter.
Luckily, he was already holding his sword with only his right hand.
The recoil of being parried had jerked his left hand up to his chest just in time as he raised it in a backhanded stance.
Just before Moyako switched her hold on her sword to bring it down on him, Marcus switched his revolver for his sword, and changed Light Taker from its longsword form into a katana once again.
In one swift movement, he cut off her head with a single slash of his sword before kicking her body away.
His eyes followed her head as it was about to fall to the ground, but he caught it in his right hand and looked down at it.
He stared at it for a moment, and just as he was about to toss it aside, he felt a strange wetness fall from his eyes.
An unusual emotion started to flood his mind as he looked down at Moyako’s lifeless head and his hand began to tremble.
“What is...happening to me…?” he said in a low tone of voice.
Then, without allowing him a moment to think on this any further, Moyako’s head burst into flames and turned to ashes, falling through his fingers.
Her head regenerated on her body that had been kicked away and she looked at him.
Disgust flashed across her face as she asked, “What the hell are you crying for?”
“I…,” he tried to say but trailed off as he rubbed his cheeks and indeed felt tears falling from his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Well...like you said earlier. ‘Wipe away your tears and fight’,” she said bitterly as she readied her sword once again.