God Obliterating Vajra [Esoteric Dark Fantasy]

"Limits are a cage built with the bones of the dead. The Real is a fist, opened."
— The Gutter Sutras 2:21, as recalled by a dying monk.

The world, after, is a different shape.

To think of Sintra Kennin, defeated... a new fact for the universe to digest.

He lay in the moongleam. A war-dragon of legend, become a sculpture of fallen stone. His great lungs pumped, shallow, stirring the dust of the crater he had made. This was the new shape of the world: a man-shaped pit.

Then, a rustling. Not from the wind, but from the memory of the forest.

A woman stepped into the light. Her body was a promise, or a threat. A sundress of conjured light clung to her, a fragile ghost against her skin. Her hair was the color of things that live in the deep, nigh-jade, stringy with salt or sorrow.

She stood, and her silhouette drank the moonlight.

"Brother," she said. Her smile was a small, sharp thing. "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"

Sintra Kennin had no breath for words. His consciousness was a tide, pulling out. The last thing he knew: the cool kiss of river water rising, a shroud she summoned to carry him away.

Will I be returned to…

Father?

———

Elsewhere, a different breaking.

Steel, meeting a thing that was not steel. A conflict of solid and anti-solid. Sparks were born, lived as fireflies, and died in the same instant. There is nothing more to be said. The argument is over. Only the punctuation of violence remains.

Trasan's Dark-Hand unspooled across fifteen feet of air. A rope of solidified shadow. Raxri stepped forward to meet it, their blade, Puksa, a silver tooth in the gloom. Akazha floated backwards, her body a leaf on the wind of her Light Body Technique. Her fingers danced, her voice a low chant, stitching a new law into the world.

The steel of Puksa rang against the paraphysical materialism of the Dark Hands. What devil-science was this? What blasphemous physics had Trasan grafted onto his soul? More hands bloomed from him, and Raxri became a wall, a storm of parries, trading blow for blow with the phantom limbs.

Trasan walked. Each step was deliberate, a nail in a coffin. His real hands performed the sacred seals, each gesture a theft of silence.

"AHOM! PURA ETOM POETI KA!" Akazha's voice broke the night. From her fingertips, five missiles of fulminating Dark were born. They did not fly; they danced. A laser circus of hungry shadows, before remembering their purpose and converging on the man who was their father.

Trasan had a choice: to interrupt his own prayer and suffer the heresy of an unfinished thought?

Or to let the darkness bite?

He chose the bite.

He finished his incantation as the black bolts found his flesh. He winced. A body is a body, no matter how much enlightenment you stuff into its pockets. It remembers how to hurt. But his flesh was a ledger of old pains, and this was just a new entry.

"AH JING SAKATANA BHAT!" Darkness pooled in his hand, became a blade. "Surrender. The world must converge upon your head yet! Mother Dark Flensing Father Light!" The blade was not a thing that moved; it was a line of erasure, ripping through the earth toward Akazha, ignoring the space where Raxri stood.

Raxri cursed. They tore free from the grasping shadows and dove. A reflex: Heavenly Lightning Deflection. Puksa met the blade, caught its meaning, but the text was too profound for Raxri's Enlightenment. The darkness did not cut through them, but it cut them nonetheless. A wound of absence. It threw them back. They rolled, a broken doll, and when they stopped, smoke rose from their unconscious form like a soul unsure of the way out.

"Raxri!" The name was a torn piece of Akazha's throat.

"Hup. Stay." Trasan's voice was flat. Another Blade of Dark shimmered into being, smaller, a shard of darkglass that pointed at Raxri's heart. "If you don't want them to be impaled."

"Leave them be!"

"You know I cannot. That is not what I Want."

"Then what do you Want?" Akazha's desperation was a cold stone in her gut. In the back of her mind, she was already summoning the blade.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"To take Raxri. To bring them to Heaven. Where they belong." He said it like a blessing. Like a sentence.

Tough chance, she thought. A quick mudra. A yelled mantra: "GING GING!"

Icicles bloomed before her, a wing of frozen tears. She sent half humming toward Trasan.

The crooked man waved a hand. A bloom of flame. The icicles exploded into diamond dust, a veil of a million tiny suns.

"That's enough."

Akazha shot forward through the glittering veil.

—Trasan's Third Eye saw her, a bright fish in a diamond stream—

It didn't matter. Her hands were already speaking a darker tongue. "ZUN RANG KA RIM RAN!" Thrice, a ululation.

Trasan's darkness twisted into a reaping sickle—

—a blade of darkness erupted from Akazha's own heart. A handleless, wicked thing. She seized it. Let her blood, the real and the red, feed the Want of the Dark. If I must win, then all things must be wielded. Even the wound.

"You think I can be caught by such cheap trickery!" Trasan swung. The sickle cut the diamond dust in half, a curtain parted to reveal an empty stage.

But Akazha was not there.

"ADAMANTINE SWORD: SELF-CARVING GOD FLASH!" Her voice was half-scream, half-prayer.
She had thrown the Dark Blade away, a discarded thought. Then, she was the thought, flickering to where it landed, above him.

She swung.

The blade kissed skin. Then, a carapace of Dark. Then, it slammed against the hard truth of his Dark Hands.

Evermore, the violent dance. A vexation of wills.

Trasan hurtled back. His Dark Hands clawed the ground, scoring deep furrows, holding him fast. On his face, a vertical red smile. Blood began its slow pilgrimage downward.

Got you, she thought. May Emmara Senje make this quick.

Raxri saw. Saw the opening. Their hand formed a seal, their Spirit flexed, unlocking the special heart within their blade.

"ADAMANT SWORD: HEAVENLY LIGHTNING SABER!"

Three blades of light, ripping the air.

Trasan grunted. He moved forward, three Dark Hands swatting the light away. The third blade severed the third hand. It fell, a dying animal.

Akazha moved. Trasan saw the flanking maneuver. He seized the severed hand from the air, uttered a curse that was a suture, and it morphed, melded, became a Dark Scythe.

They came from both sides. Puksa of the Light. Akazha's Blood-Dark Blade. A dance of steel. A rhythm of stab-cut-slash-parry, a language they both spoke, driving the willow-thin man back. He was a storm-centre of scythes and hands, parrying, blocking, his own body a still, crooked tree in the hurricane.

A flurry. A draining.

Akazha could feel Trasan tiring. But Raxri was relentless, a wellspring of fury. Puksa was lightning in their hands. Akazha was slower, more deliberate, reading the spaces between his breaths.

...there.

A missed parry. A double-cut from Raxri. Akazha sank into a blade-cutting meditation, a Basic Ability of her style. Her darksteel dove in.

It sank into the meat of Trasan's bicep. He did not wince. He scowled.

And then, his flesh—his flesh made of Dark—devoured her blade. "Do not presume," he said, indignant. But his voice was a fraying rope. His seals wavered. His syllables slurred.

Cursing, Akazha flung herself back. A hand seal. A star of fire bloomed above her. A second seal. The star became a comet, a dragon, darting.

Raxri came in, a silvered tiger. A feint. Puksa bit into Trasan's side. Drank his blood.

"ADAMANTINE SWORD: ADAMANTINE LIGHTNING STRIKES!"

Four cuts; one second. The sound of thunder against his mantra-garland shield. Spiderwebs of light spread across the invisible barrier. The fourth blow would have shattered it.

But—

Trasan's face became a mask of divine wrath. "BLADE OF THE UNCONQUERABLE MAIDEN: DEATH REAPS THE CENTRAL PLAINS!"

He moved like a dervish. The scythe swung, redefined the horizon like bloody brush stroke. Raxri, overcommitted, was too slow. Jump or duck? They were neither.The scythe's edge painted a wicked, horizontal line across their chest.

They made no sound. Pain is a temporary tenant. They flew back, struck the earth, the impact a bone-cracking poem. They rolled, found their feet, a testament to will over flesh.

Akazha grunted, soared skyward. The three Dark Hands reached for her. She summoned another blade, a child of her pain, and in mid-air, deflected the grasping shadows.

Too oppressive, thought Raxri. His defense is a sealed tomb.

Trasan turned to them as Akazha was kept busy. "I will be killing the bitch in a few moments."

Raxri's scowl was their only answer.

"Submit to me," Trasan said. "Come to Heaven. And no one else will have to suffer on your behalf."

A scream. A Dark Hand had breached Akazha's defense. It ripped. Then, it dug into the wound, a miner seeking ore. It pulled her close. Close enough for Trasan's real hand to rise, to seize her scalp, to pull her head back. Her neck glistened, a offering. "Isn't that right, witch?"

Akazha could only squirm. A fish on a hook.

Raxri was tired. Tired of the geometry of guilt. "Stop! Stop I... I submit!"

"Raxri, no!" Akazha's voice was a final, desperate currency. She flung her blade away, performed the Self-Carving God Flash, flickering to its side, tearing her hair from his grasp.

Trasan did not care. His focus was on Raxri. "Good boy," he said, the words a pat on the head. "Lay down your arms." A Dark Hand turned from Akazha, reached for Raxri instead.

Raxri rose to meet it. This is how martyrs are made. How messiahs are devoured.

"Raxri! You promised!" Akazha's voice quivered, on the verge of tears made of sorrow and frustration.

But Raxri was dead set on sacrifice, the only algebra they knew to absolve a debt they never owed.

The Crimson Haired Heaven Dancer stepped forward.

Akazha knew one last magick. The Red Magick of Eschatonism. The one that scours. The one that costs.

She planted her feet. The Dark Hands swooped. She calculated she had time. Just enough.

Twelve hand seals. Seed. Earth. Grass. Root. Flower. Tree. Mountain. Sky. Heaven. Clear Light. Thunderbolt. Wrath.

Then, twenty-one times, a rapid, breathless chant: "AHOM! PUKSA SAKNA WAJRA KROMA NAGMI HOMA!"

By the twenty-first mudra—

—the Dark Hands' fingers singed the tips of her hair—

—as Raxri reached out to take the hand of their martyrdom—

—as Akazha kicked off her shoes, her bare feet clinging to the soil, needing its truth—

—as Trasan turned, bewildered by the scent of annihilation—

—Akazha announced: "May all under heaven wither away by my Will! ESCHATONISM: SCOUR!"

The demon-slaying gesture. Fingers thrust out, a final argument.

From her fingers, a beam of pure annihilation. Not light, but the end of it. A cylinder of pureblack, so dark it denied volume, texture, hope. A void eating existence.

It ripped through the ground. It crashed against Trasan's Dark Hands. It was not an impact, but a consumption.

It grew. Swallowed. Devoured Trasan and the world behind him.

He screamed.

And the scream turned into laughter.

A sword, somewhere.