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Chapter 111: Unhealthy Obsession (Part 3)
🕑 Added 2025-08-20 13:22:15 +0000 UTCClick
The note was as clear as a tipping metronome, followed by the sound of steel leaving its home.
Then Hannya’s body vanished.
The afterimage of her veil and white sleeves blurred away like a fading mist; the next instant her blade was where his neck had been, the edge a hairs breath from supreme flesh. It was a clean arc for murder, a speed taught to her by the dream eating warlord until her hands could do it without thinking.
Vainglory’s hands, however, met her blade first.
Gold danced over his knuckles, tight and thin, a testament to total control. His right palm met the spine of her blade, his left knifed under the flat of the serrated edge. He caught the slice, rolled it, and led the momentum into a harmless flare that shaved a line through his one remaining pauldron instead of his throat.
Sparks lit up the abyss.
Hannya landed light on the balls of her feet, the cursed katana flowing with her like a part of her. Her laugh came quick, bright, and just as edged as the blade she swung.
“Kikiki! Even with no heart and no mana, those eyes are still a bother.” The petals in her irises spun, fast enough to blur. “But don’t worry, love always finds a way.” She cooed, tilting her chin, her veil curving. “I’ll take your head one way or another.”
Her body blurred again. The pattern of her steps sank and lunged, just below normal sight and came back as a low, gliding bite toward his flank. The cut that followed came from behind, not from the front, it rode the afterimage of her vanishing form, keeping the strike real where the attacker no longer existed.
Vainglory’s eyes kept up.
The three rings inside each gray-gold iris turned, measuring. His golden aura stayed close to the skin, keeping it small to avoid more excess bleed. He slid inside the cut and met it with his forearm, turning the steel with bare strength. With a twist of his wrist, he caught the serrations without letting them hook.
The counter came next, a swift palm flew toward her elbow, the landing point met the flat of her blade and pushed it off kilter.
She pivoted cleanly, using his deflection to set up her next angle.
In the ten frames between first and second step, his eyes finished their first full survey. Her height, her weight, the reach, the cadence. Each micro-tell, each joint flex pattern; even the blade geometry.
But then his spherical vision caught something he hadn’t expected.
On the smooth plane of Hannya’s upper back, just visible when her dress shifted low when ducking under his guard, ink-black stars sat in a ring.
Six of them.
All full, all thrumming with power.
His footwork never faltered. Inside, however, something cold, exact, yet… different slotted into place.
‘She’s like me.’
A devil of his realm of power and a Supreme. And yet she wore a priestess title unashamed. It did not fit any story he knew.
‘Focus!’ Parallel Opinion snapped, urgency backing his words. ‘Six stars. All full. If she makes a wish mid-combat, it’ll be a catastrophe! Don’t let her talk. Don’t let her finish a single sentence!’
‘...’ He didn’t let his thoughts slip through.
Vainglory stepped back once, just enough to make space, and let his voice carry across it.
“So,” he said, calm and measured, “you’re like me. A Supreme. Yet you still choose to slay me, sister?” He shook his head a fraction, feeling…confusion? Disappointment? He didn't know.
“The surface really has changed.”
“Sister?” Hannya’s scoff was sharp and venomous. Now he was cowering. “You sound less and less like him with every word. A pitiful attempt to wear his face. Kikiki.”
Her blade sank, a slight tilt, into a new angle for slaughter.
“I’ll just say it now. I won’t be using these stars for your execution. They’ll be reserved for my final wish.”
A final wish.
The term struck like a shattering plate. Final wishes were folklore that cut deep into the world. Long before he was caged, even before he opened his eyes in Superbia’s temple. A six-star’s last wish had birthed the dream realm and the fissures that linked Neel’s planes to it. Even devils today still honored and told tales of that disaster.
‘You heard her…’ PO pressed, its voice thin and grim. ‘Use more essence, you’ve got, what, seventy-five percent? Take her down before this world rots. If she finishes a wish like that, it will be bigger than both of you. Neel's other planes could be at risk now.’
For the first time, Vainglory’s face shifted from cool calculation to something like iron. He raised one hand, fingers curling into fists, the gold aura tightening over his bones a shade thicker. “Come,” he said. “Let’s end this talk.”
Hannya’s muscles flexed in her arms and thighs, willing to comply with ending the talk. “Kikiki, You look like you're trying to play the hero now…” She grinned. “Out of character once again!”
The two devils shot forward.
They met in the middle.
Hannya slid low, her hips open and knees soft. The blade drew a merciless crescent from below, hunting for hamstrings and hips.
‘Second Form: Moonlit Memory.’
It was a form he recognized by shape, even if not by name, a cut designed to flow easily into a second slice if parried.
Vainglory dropped his weight just as low and turned his shin outward. His gold aura hardened over skin the moment before her steel reached it; the edge kissed aura, sliding smoothly across. A perfect parry.
His counter followed bare-handed, right hand wrapping over the guard. He let her own momentum carry her past his body and took a step inside, his elbow angling for her ribs.
Her shoulder dropped, elbow tucked, the blade slotting vertical to wedge between the gap. The serrations scraped his forearm deep; he felt skin part and heat flare. He answered by rolling the forearm and closing the wound with a sheet of gold.
‘Note,’ He filed the exchange inside his mind. ‘Serrations eat glancing blocks, but the guard is small. Punish the tsuba when she commits.’
They broke quickly and re-joined even quicker.
Hannya’s sword edge turned flat as she snapped her wrist forward.
‘Fourth Form: Vanishing Thought.’
The blade made no sound, the cut coming from a silence that tried to erase the warning. She went high for the neck again, then vanished an inch, reappearing on his right to drag out a kidney.
Vainglory’s left hand caught the soundless cut with the heel of his palm. He slid under it and drove a short, ugly strike at her wrist. She turned her hand at the last possible fraction of a second, the strike hit bone instead of joint; the impact made a spine chilling popping sound in the air like knuckles cracking. He followed with a knee toward her solar plexus, but unexpectedly stopped by the flat of her scabbard; which she used as deftly as the blade.
‘Note, she’ll use both tools live. Scabbard is a second limb. Don’t over-chase the wrists, attack her stance.’
Their wounds were minimal, a thin line on his forearm, a bloom of black-purple at her wrist bone. Both were already rapidly fading.
‘Fifth Form: Soft Curtain Fall.’
Hannya stepped in on the angle, blade low, and then rose. An upward draw that began soft and ended savage, meant to lift a rib or open a throat. Her speed was ridiculous. It didn’t look fast; it felt like the world just skipped slots in time, frames stepped over with no resistance.
Vainglory rotated into her, left hand bracing his right forearm as he brought it down like a hammer. Steel rang against hardened gold. The force of the clash waving outward. He then pivoted into a short right hook that would have shattered a human jaw. But the inhuman Hannya was already moving, let it cut through the air and rewarded him with a flick of steel across his ribs, shallow but unmistakable.
Gold flowed there instantly, sealing it until it healed.
The wounds he took didn’t rattle him in the slightest, on the contrary, he could already feel it.
He was gaining on her.
The [All-Seeing Eyes] were slowly digesting a style he’d never seen. He could feel it processing, two more clean exchanges and he would own the tempo, robbing it of surprise and purpose. He thought of reaching for [Guiding Hand], the skill that would have made his adaptation immediate.
‘Don’t!’ PO snapped. ‘Without your heart, you can’t transmute mana into core-aligned laws. You’ll just burn your Glory too quickly and you’ll end up dead within the minute. We don’t take risks!’
Vainglory let the impulse die. He would do this the slow way. The safest way.
“Two more…” he said under his breath, to himself.
The thread pulsed.
And Hannya heard anyway. “Two more what?” she sang, sweet and mocking. “Strokes? I hope not. If I wanted a man who can’t do at least this much, I might as well seek a woman.”
She slid past him again, her blade flicking for a tendon.
Vainglory’s brow twitched at the line, not in confusion this time, but in the unfamiliar little sting it left deep down.
Women, by Hannya’s transmigrated bigoted standards, were delegators. They were the brains, planners, owners of the horizon. And men? Men were workers. Heavy lifters, doers, bodies that one deployed. You weren’t a man if you didn’t carry; you were a woman without the portfolio.
Even though Vainglory didn’t know that, it was clear she meant it as an insult. It landed as data in his mind…
…followed by a small coil of anger he hadn’t felt before.
Humiliation? It seemed his own blood didn’t want to ignore the opinions of another Supreme.
Especially one in his realm. This was… new to him.
Still, he swallowed it like he swallowed pain and let it sharpen him for now.
Hannya continued her assault.
She came in with a string of lucid sword forms, piled on top of each other. First and second for an angle, fourth for a chained rise, a stolen tenth-step footwork she shouldn’t currently have, and dream-like turns that took advantage of his perfect parries to put her somewhere he didn’t want her to be.
His defense didn’t look like it should have worked. He used his elbows, wrists, and the palm of his hands, no showy blocks, no big swings, save for the golden glow that sprang free every shift.
Every time steel would have opened him up, gold was there first, thinner than skin and stronger than granite. Every time her blade tried to eat his aura with cursed despair, he rolled the contact so the serrations took nothing they could keep.
He countered with his body and small leverage. He tapped the tsuba, he trapped the scabbard for a few breaths, he nudged her ankle with his shin at the moment a good stance needed it most. Once he palmed the flat of the blade so precisely her cut died without her even feeling it, and he touched her throat with two fingers before she swayed away and the moment was gone.
Both bled, but not much. His ribs wore new bright lines; her hip wore a bruise that would have crippled anything less than a devil. Both healed as fast as the wounds opened, something only devils with black blood could get away with. Between the two Supremes, the air tasted like iron and something sweeter, a subtle static of charm laws cycling, growing.
“You’re lacking,” Hannya taunted between forms, breath steady. “Weak. Typical man.” Her eyes were bright and twisted. “What are these limp blows and pitiful thrusts? Where's the power? You think the real Vainglory’s strength would release such a meager load? Pathetic!”
He didn’t answer, but he felt his fists curl a little tighter. Somehow her words were annoying, sideways somehow, even though he knew his strength outmatched hers.
But he kept his annoyance bottled, his eyes were almost done reading her.
He felt the mental map snap together. The lucid forms she knew, nine of them in total, had patterns under patterns. She layered them with improvisational slips and feints that were hers alone.
Ankle-flicks, wrist-feints that counted on her serrations to discourage certain parries and bait certain swings, a specific overuse of the scabbard when she wanted to slyly reset her breath. He could see it all.
Then he changed.
He opened his palm and lowered his stance, weight over his midsection, a foot angled in to kill her favorite outside cut, his shoulders floating instead of staying braced. His hands spread just enough you could have thought he was planning to catch rain. He was taking away every angle her nine forms needed to start.
Hannya saw the stance and laughed. “Kikiki! Oh? Do you take me for a useless woman?” The charm in her voice came out like velvet, warm, soft, and coaxing.
A dense law began rolling off her skin and into the space between them. “I’m more than some basic beta delegator.” She slid two fingers slowly along the outside of her thigh…
Rip
…and tore the side of her white kimono skirt. Pale, toned skin flashed and freed; the slit gave her hip more room to open, footwork wider. She crouched low, blade angled in a stance he didn’t recognize.
More flexible, more feral.
The charm thickened, like honey and flowers, hiding something sharper. The [Quantifier] behind his eyes pinged.
DING
[
High Charm Law Influence Detected
Sanity Check: Normal
Status Risk: Charmed (Low)
]
Hannya reached up, hooked a finger under her veil, and ripped it free. She smiled at him without it. Too bright, too wide, gilded canines flashing like a predator ready to eat.
His notifications pinged again, rapidly this time.
DING
[ Status Risk: Charmed (High) ]
DING
[
The [Platform of Chaos] gently requests you be kind to [ Six-star Heart Devil ].
Sanity Check: Normal.
]
DING
[
The [Platform of Chaos] gently requests you hug [ Six-star Heart Devil ].
Sanity Check: Normal.
]
DING
[
The [Platform of Chaos] gently requests you accept [ Six-star Heart Devil ]’s feelings.
Sanity Check: Normal.
]
DING
[
The [Platform of Chaos] gently requests you copulate with [ Six-star Heart Devil ].
[ Six-star Heart Devil ] is a perfect match for [ Six-star Glory Devil ].
The [Platform of Chaos] gently requests you look at [ Six-star Heart Devil ] favorably.
Sanity Check: Normal(?).
Sanity Check Integrity Compromised.
]
Before he could understand what was going on, Hannya began to change.
Her body began to blur. The outline of her torso held, but the edges of her limbs and hair loosened into black mist. She was half-solid and half-not. The mist crawled up her forearms and down her calves, gathering around her blade and ankles like living smoke.
Her eyes continued to spin. “Nightmare style…”
She said it softly. Not the form of the Dream Knights. A Hannya form. Her modification to Baku’s serene, sleep-honed strikes, a version with her own clingy and manic grace sewn in.
She then moved.
She didn’t vanish with speed, it was like she turned off, as if some of her stopped existing long enough to get past his guard and then remembered to be a person again on the other side. The first cut of a Nightmare did not come from a place, it came from between places. The steel testing the limits of reality and finding it willing to cooperate still.
Vainglory’s eyes kept up… and then almost didn’t.
The physics on her disobeyed the rules, law flowed through the intangible movement.
Even when he raised a hand to intercept, it was useless.
Her blade found his shoulder anyway, drew a line, and was gone, reappearing at his knee; he dropped, the cut stung through him. His hand shot out, it flew under her ribs, a palm going to her core.
Except, she wasn’t there, just mist. The woman was two feet to the left, laughing, eyes feverish and glowing.
He adapted.
He stopped thinking of her as a singular body in a singular place. It was clear this style didn't require that. He stopped trying to beat speed with speed.
His hands spread wider, his aura crawled a little farther from skin, fingers reading the air as much as the steel. He let her move through him and punished the end of every phase where she had to be mostly real to strike.
She took a slice along the inside of her elbow. A second later she gave him a matching line across his thigh. Blood warmed the air; both lines closed with equal spite.
“Two more.” he told himself again, he would learn this too.
She cut through like a rolling storm. He met her like a steady harbor, not resisting the wave, but shifting his weight to take its power away. Her Nightmare style was not endless, like everything, it had rhythms, patterns. Little pockets of reality you had to stand in to breathe and think, tiny windows where the person replaced the phantom. He found them. He put fingers, elbows and knees in those windows and made her pay the price.
“Useless,” she sang between breaths, masking the strain under sugared venom. “Weak! Slow!”
He did not give her an answer she could turn into a weapon. He simply gave her the next parry, and the next, and then a quiet, neat counter that made a gash down her outer thigh where the kimono tore.
Her grin widened, mad and delighted. “That’s more like it,” she hissed. “Work.”
He slid his right foot a half-inch, sank another half, and changed the way he breathed. It was small enough no one without his eyes would have seen it. It meant a different fight, one where her favorite first steps had nowhere to land.
And yet…
She knew anyway. She felt it.
Hannya’s laugh climbed up another note. Her aura surged, the charm laws roiling in thick waves, her black mist increasing, rolling off her shoulders and waist, fingers tapering to smoke at the knuckles. The gilded canines flashed again as she tilted her face up, and for a heartbeat he saw the girl under the devil.
The one who had practiced in front of a mirror saying ‘I can do it all for my man’ until the words sounded like truth and not a hunger.
“Nightmare Style, Second Form: Second Wake,” she said, voice low. The blade rose, teeth glinting. “Kikiki. Watch closely, Samael!”
He set his stance.
He wasn’t chasing anymore. He was inviting now.
The next cut came from nowhere and from her body all at once. He caught it bare handed; the only other alternative was wearing it. Gold aura strained under the serration; he held anyway, he felt skin part and quickly close, he felt bones threatening to break and then refuse.
But he took the opportunity to make his move.
His left hand snapped to her wrist and his right elbow fell toward the inner elbow of her arm. But she wasn’t there a heartbeat later, mist then woman just outside his reach, blade already turning back for his throat.
He bowed his head a fraction. Steel flew over his horns. He straightened and touched two fingers to her jaw. As light as a kiss, and as hard as a hammer. Her head snapped sideways and brutal speeds, but she only laughed, black blood in her mouth.
“See?” she breathed. “You can carry.”
Vainglory didn’t answer. His aura tightened over his knuckles; his breath stayed slow and measured, the map of her movements settling into place in his mind.
Hannya licked a line of blood from her lip, and smiled. “Too bad it’s not enough.”
Her stance dropped a fraction, hips open, shoulder shifting forward. The charm in the air thickened like syrup. Mist climbed her forearms to the guard and pooled along the serrations like ink finding its grooves.
“False Dawn.”
She vanished without vanishing, half of her turning to smoke, half remaining in reality to anchor the strike. The katana arrived twice, once as a visible arc for his eyes to catch and palm, and once as a ghosted after image that bloomed out of the mist a fraction later, riding the path his parry had just made safe.
His right hand met the steel, his left twisted her wrist, and the first cut died out with a resonant ring.
But the second found rib.
Deep and viscous.
His body screamed under the teeth. Serrated steel bit through aura and skin and opened him up from the back of shoulder to floating ribs with a clean, sawing kiss that set the Abyss flashing white in his eyes. He moved the wound quickly, turning so it missed the lung, and paid for it with a deeper slice along the flank.
He stepped in anyway, a large hand hunting her throat. She was already elsewhere. First mist, then woman at his three o’clock. The blade snapped again, this time for the tendon above his knee. He plated gold down the leg and took it with his aura, but the edge still found a piece of meat. His knee faltered but held, barely.
Hannya laughed loudly, breathless and thrilled. “Kikiki! There it is. Bleed for me, impostor!”
He straightened, blood slicking his side, eyes still focused and exact. The charm pressed hard; the spiral behind her keened like a whetstone. She lifted the blade one-handed, the other hand opening toward his face as if to bless him.
Unfortunately, she was a devil.
“Guillotine Petal.”
The mist at her ankles burst outward in a ring, tripping his stance by a hair. The katana rose past him, the point grazing the air above his ear as though she’d missed, but then it fell in a back-cut that didn’t travel through space so much as it purely arrived where his neck had chosen to be a second later.
He caught it, bare-handed again, gold aura flaring and teeth grinding.
Then the echo-cut followed.
Pain roared again. A black line of devil blood exploded across his chest, diagonal, deep enough that his breath broke and the gold pendant thumped against exposed bone.
Hannya leaned in, eyes blazing and rotating, gilded canines bright and sharp. “One more,” she whispered, shivering and delighted. “Then I take back what’s his.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Blood now truly dripped in steady ticks within the lightless abyss.
Comments
Crowny 66
Note, she'll*
Wintermelody
Thanks for the chapter
