Kenji struggled to sit up, his lungs burning with every shallow gasp as he let out a jagged, rattling groan. He shook his head violently, a shower of dust and dried blood falling from his hair, trying to rattle his brain back into its proper place within his skull.
Everything hurt.
'What the hell just hit me?' he thought, his internal monologue sluggish and slurred as every movement caused him excruciating pain. He spat out a thick glob of blood, and His mask was broken and falling off his face.
His vision was swimming in a disorienting sea of grey and red, the tall, building ruins of Blüdhaven tilting at impossible, nauseating angles.
"God… that hurt," he wheezed, the words barely audible over the distant noise all around him.
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the ash-choked sky. Was that what it felt like to be hit at the speed of light.
He could feel his regeneration working as he healed, it was a sensation of itchy, searing heat as muscle fibers knitted together and fractured ribs snapped back into alignment with audible pops slowly.
But it wasn't fast enough, not with three god-level threats circling him like vultures over a fresh kill. With a shaky hand, he pulled out a high-grade health potion from his inventory and downed the glowing crimson liquid in one desperate go.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. A wave of cool warmth surged through his veins, the fog in his mind clearing as his stamina ticked back. He pushed himself to his feet, leaning heavily on the Yamato as he surveyed the absolute carnage of the intersection.
The first thing he saw was the suit. It was absolute havoc incarnate. It had turned its attention to Shazam, and the sight was unsettling in its clinical brutality, seems it could not tell friend from foe, which was at least a little good in this situation.
The suit was beating the ever-living shit out of the Champion of Magic, but it wasn't a normal brawl. Billy was suspended in the air, his limbs moving with the agonizing slowness of a fly trapped in thick, sun-warmed amber. Every punch the suit landed sent out a shockwave of golden light that seemed to ripple through the air itself.
Kenji realized the truth then, after watching the suit, noticing the golden lightning like dome, his mind finally caught up to what it was doing.
The suit wasn't just fast in the traditional sense, oh dont get him wrong it was fast faster than him even but what it was doing that gave it an advantage was, It was creating a field where It was literally stealing the momentum and kinetic force of everything within, draining the very concept of motion from the world around it to further fuel its own impossible velocity. It wasn't just moving at light speed, it was forcing everyone and everything else to move in a personal hell of slow motion, making the gap in velocity insurmountable.
'That's why my Law failed earlier,' Kenji realized, his eyes narrowing behind what remained of his mask. 'Even if I set a limit like Mach One, it doesn't matter if the suit siphons my momentum until my maximum effort produces the speed of a toddler. It's a conflict of conceptual priorities.
He stayed back for a moment, his Spatial Awareness mapping the boundaries of the suit's influence. He watched as Superman tried to intervene, rocketing forward with a snarl, only for the Man of Steel to also fall prey to the sluggishness the moment he entered the golden aura. Clark's fist, which should have shattered mountains, was reduced to a drifting, harmless arc.
His eyes brightened. Just like his own Law domain, the suit's kinetic absorption had a limit. If he stayed outside that bubble, he had a chance.
Granted, keeping distance from a Speed Force-adjacent war machine was easier said than done. It was like trying to outrun a thought or a shadow.
But it was his only play. He didn't really have a better plan in mind at the moment.
He immediately summoned dozens of dark, golf-ball-sized orbs into the air around him, each one a concentrated knot of gravitational collapse. "Black Hole," he whispered, launching them in swarms designed to catch the suit no matter which way it flickered.
The suit sensed the attack instantly. It abandoned the two vampires, flickering through the air with jagged, lightning-fast jumps to dodge the orbs. It didn't retreat, though, it rushed straight for the source of the annoyance.
It appeared in front of Kenji in a burst of static, the air screaming as it was displaced, but Kenji had been waiting for that exact predictability.
"Fourth Stance… Heaven Cutter."
The Yamato flashed with a cold, blue light. Seven vertical tears appeared exactly where the suit had been standing a microsecond prior. The ground behind the armor was carved into deep, perfectly parallel slashes that extended for twenty yards, cleaving through asphalt and bedrock alike.
The suit managed to shift just enough to avoid a killing blow, but Kenji heard the screech of metal on metal. A nick. A spark of blue circuitry flew from the suit's shoulder, hissing as it hit the ground.
Suddenly, he felt himself slow down as the armor retaliated with a roundhouse kick that carried the force of a falling skyscraper. Lucky Kenji had already raised the Yamato to block any counter, allowing the sheer force of the hit to launch him backward out of the range of the field again.
He used the momentum to create the distance he needed, then slammed his hand down, flattening the earth around the suit by increasing the local gravity to ten times Earth's norm.
Superman chose that exact moment to lunge from the side, his eyes glowing with heat vision. Kenji didn't even turn his head. He summoned the kryptonite mace from his inventory mid-dodge, slipping under the Man of Steel's desperate punch and swinging upward with every ounce of his strength.
The mace caught Clark square in the gut, the green radiation flaring brilliantly as the vampire god was sent tumbling through a storefront, buried under tons of masonry.
Shazam came flying in, too, but the suit was faster. It grabbed the magical champion by his tattered cape, spinning him with such terrifying velocity that Billy became a blur of red and yellow, looking like a mini-tornado before the armor drove him headfirst into the pavement, cratering the entire intersection and snapping the nearby water mains.
Before any of them could regroup, a powerful, screaming gale swept across the street. Kenji's Wind Spirit manifested beside him, its translucent, ethereal form howling as it unleashed compressed blades of air.
The magic-infused wind was sharp enough to actually carve shallow, bleeding grooves into Superman's supposedly invulnerable flesh as he emerged from the rubble.
"Magic… you just have to love it," Kenji smirked, tasting blood in his mouth again from that hit he took. He ordered the spirit to keep the pressure on the Kryptonian while a deep, resonant blue light began to pulse along the length of the Yamato.
He rarely used the Yamato's true ability, the power of separation, because he didn't really know how it worked as it was normally used to separate man from devil in DMC, so he didn't know if it was just separation of anything or just that, and not to mention the mana cost was astronomical, but the time for holding back had passed.
If Rebellion was the power to merge and unify, then let's go with Yamato, which was the power to divide and isolate.
Kenji moved, igniting his mana. He was on the suit in an instant. The machine discharged a massive wave of lightning, trying to re-establish the kinetic siphoning field to slow him down, but Kenji struck first. He cut the very air in front of him, severing the connection between the field it was creating and the surrounding space.
For a heartbeat, the "slow-mo" effect vanished as the local space was isolated from the suit's influence.
The suit realized what happened and tried to flicker away, but Kenji brought down the full might of his Gravity Manipulation, pinning the armor to its knees. He appeared above it, his blade descending in a vertical killing arc meant to split the machine from crown to crotch.
The suit raised its right arm to block so fast, its internal gears whining. The metal plating shifted, sliding open like a weapon pod.
'Is that a rocket?' Kenji thought, his eyes widening.
The explosion detonated point-blank. Kenji threw up a mana shield and pushed forward as he brought down his sword.
Everywhere exploded as they met.
The force of the blast sent him flying backward, smashing through a brick wall and skidding into a pile of jagged rubble.
He groaned, lucky the mana shield protected him from the worst of the damage. shaking off the debris as he stepped back onto the street, his clothes torn and smoking.
He was bleeding from a dozen small nicks, but he smiled when he saw the suit. It had survived, but it was hobbled. Its right hand was gone, and a massive chunk of its right torso had been torn away, revealing the humming, jittery core and what he could only assume was a person inside the suit.
"Good enough," Kenji sighed, his breath hitching. He downed another potion, lightened his body with gravity, and gripped the Yamato again, summoning the mace back to his hand.
Superman and Shazam were back on their feet, their costumes shredded and their eyes glowing with a rage and hunger that had long since replaced their heroic souls. They seemed to have realized that the suit was no longer a threat to them, too, and so they turned their sight back to the main problem, the human man in front of them, and it seemed the suit, too, seemed to focus on him, too, at that moment.
They were going to gang up on him, three-on-one.
"Fine. No more playing around. I've got places to be," Kenji said, his voice dropping into a cold, flat register.
He sheathed the Yamato, his hand hovering over the hilt as he took a stance. He took a low stance, the ground cracking beneath his feet as he planted his feet and stared at them. He could see them tense, sensing the sudden, terrifying shift in the atmosphere.
"First Stance… Sword Draw," he called out, fast as he drew his sword and slashed.
His blade flashed. As expected, they were too fast to be hit even by his quick draw technique, they were just too fast for something like this, but it was expected.
All three enemies dodged and charged simultaneously, converging on him from three different angles to crush him in the center.
Kenji's Spatial Awareness tracked them with crystalline clarity, a 360-degree map of impending death. He felt his Wind Spirit blasting at them, slowing Superman's flight by a fraction.
He ducked under the suit's swing, redirected a lightning blast from Shazam with a gravity bubble, and met Clark's punch head-on with the kryptonite mace. The impact shattered the remaining bones in Kenji's hands, blood spraying from his knuckles, but he didn't flinch.
In the next instant, he slammed the Yamato into the ground. "Law: No Man Can Move."
The world froze.
The Law was absolute, it affected Kenji, too. He felt his body lock into place.
But the suit... the suit was still moving after all he had only said MAN, and he was assuming that it wasnt a man that was controlling it.
He moved towards him, and it managed to reach him, ready to strike him.
It didn't matter, though. Kenji was frozen, but that did not mean he was helpless. Kenji didn't need his muscles to move to win.
Just as it appeared in front of him, a miniature black hole manifested directly in front of its chest and fired straight, point blank. The singularity tore through the suit's chest at point-blank range, tearing through it as it fell down onto the ground.
At the same time, his Wind and Fire spirits, which he had summoned and commanded just before the Law took effect, converged on the vampires. They were extensions of his will, not "men," and thus exempt from the Law.
They surrounded Superman and Shazam, blasting them with a concentrated vortex of elemental fury. Superman roared, as magic fire roasted him alive, well, more like undead, but even then, the kryptonian was not one to go down just like that, with a loud roar, a soundless vibration in the frozen air, his muscles bulging until they began to tear as he tried to break the LAW.
He broke free seconds later, a feat of strength that shouldn't have been possible for anyone not Superman, but seconds were still a lifetime in a battle of this scale.
Hundreds of Small, golf-ball-sized black holes riddled both him and Shazam, punching through their hearts and brains again and again as they were held in place just as the Man of Steel broke free.
Kenji watched the last flickering light of defiance leave their eyes before their bodies, unable to sustain the damage, finally crumbled into ash that scattered in the wind.
Kenji dropped the Law and collapsed to one knee, gasping for air as if he had been underwater for an hour. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, and his vision was fringed with black spots.
"That… that was hell," he muttered, wiping sweat and blood from his brow with a trembling hand.
Then, his head shot up. The top of the distant skyscraper, Nightwing's palace, exploded in a pillar of brilliant, ethereal light that pierced the smog and reached for the heavens.
His Chaos Compass, tucked inside his vest, began to glow with a blinding intensity.
There it was.
Shining at the top of the tower like a star.
Kenji watched as a familiar figure stepped forward at the very edge of the rooftop, silhouetted against the blinding light of the artifact.
He grimaced, a bitter, iron-tinged, and felt a burst of happiness as realization settled in his gut.
Barbara Gordon had finally made her move. She had summoned the Shard.
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