Naoya moved first.
The street was empty enough now. Concrete, low walls, old utility poles, dead vending machines humming faintly in the distance, a narrow drainage channel running along one side. The city still existed around them, but here it felt held at arm's length. Quiet. Compressed. Ready to break.
And then Naoya became a blur.
Oden only barely got his guard up.
The hit crashed into him from the side with enough force to tear his footing clean out from under him. He was sent backward, shoes skidding, shoulders twisting, hood snapping in the wind. He dug his heels into the pavement and managed to keep from rolling.
Naoya smiled.
A thin, pleased smile.
"Well," he said, "you're sturdier than I expected."
Oden straightened.
Behind the blindfold, his Serpent Eyes drank in what little they could through cloth and cursed energy awareness. It wasn't enough.
Not against this.
Naoya took one lazy step forward.
"Naoya Zenin," he said. "I'm here to kill you."
And before Oden could answer—
Naoya vanished again.
This time the strike came high.
Oden turned too late.
A fist hammered into the side of his head and sent him crashing through the nearest wall in a storm of concrete dust and splintered frame wood. He hit the interior floor hard, rolled once, then kicked off the ground as Naoya came through after him like a bullet with a grin.
Oden blocked a kick with both forearms.
The impact still drove him through a table.
He clicked his tongue.
Fast.
Not ordinary fast.
Not merely "hard to track."
This was the kind of speed that seemed to skip natural movement and substitute something cleaner, crueler, more mechanical.
Naoya's voice drifted through the dust.
"What's wrong?" he asked. "I thought the weird blindfold was supposed to make you look cool."
Oden stood.
Then, in one smooth motion, he took the blindfold off.
Naoya saw the eyes beneath and paused for the briefest fraction of a second.
Then laughed.
"Those are creepy as hell."
The words didn't matter.
What mattered was sight.
Real sight.
The world sharpened immediately.
Heat bloomed across surfaces.
Residual footprints of motion lingered in space.
Tiny muscular shifts became obvious.
The drainage of body warmth through fractured wall dust. The hot line of Naoya's right shoulder loading before movement. The strain in his calves. The buildup of cursed energy.
Oden exhaled once.
That was better.
Naoya tilted his head.
"Oho?"
Then he accelerated again.
Oden saw more now, but still not enough.
Naoya's first reposition happened inside one beat. His body moved in a way that looked almost segmented, like reality itself was skipping through selected moments instead of filling in the transitions. He struck Oden in the ribs, then the sternum, then the jaw, each hit coming at an angle that made immediate retaliation feel impossible.
Oden smashed through a door frame and landed in the alley behind the building.
Naoya followed, heels barely touching the ground.
"What happened to all that confidence?" he asked. "You were mouthy with my father."
Oden wiped blood from the corner of his mouth.
"You move strangely."
Naoya smiled wider.
"Thanks."
He came in again.
This time Oden used Snake first.
Three black serpents burst from his shadow at ankle level, darting across the pavement with precise vectors. Naoya didn't even slow. He stepped around one, over another, and used the third as a pivot point, changing direction off its body as though it were part of the environment.
Then his palm touched Oden's shoulder.
And Oden froze.
For one full second, his body locked inside the shape of his own movement, caught like an image trapped in glass.
Naoya's grin sharpened to pure contempt.
"There it is."
The kick that followed broke two meters of pavement under Oden's back and sent him bouncing into the drainage channel wall hard enough to crack it.
Pain flashed.
Sharp.
Dense.
Informative.
Oden rose slower this time.
His mind was already moving.
Palm contact.
Then the freeze.
Not just speed. It also has rules.
Naoya, mistaking the silence for helplessness, kept talking.
"That's the problem with trash," he said. "You see one flashy thing and assume you're special."
He blurred again.
Oden forced himself not to chase the movement.
Instead, he watched the setup.
Field of view. Entry line. The way Naoya's body always seemed committed a fraction before he arrived. Not improvising in the middle of motion.
Predetermined.
A path.
Naoya struck.
Oden moved with it this time. Not enough to avoid the hit entirely, but enough to let it clip instead of crush. The follow-up palm came for his chest.
Oden slapped it aside with the flat of his hand.
No touch.
No freeze.
Naoya's eyes narrowed.
"Lucky."
Oden did not answer.
He launched Rabbit next.
The small shikigami detonated from shadow in a white-black blur of murderous acceleration. Naoya actually had to tilt away this time. The impact missed his face by a hair and exploded through a concrete support behind him instead.
Interesting.
Naoya clicked his tongue.
"You've got tricks."
Oden was seeing it more clearly now.
Naoya wasn't merely moving fast.
He was dividing movement.
Scripting it.
Twenty-four slices in a second, perhaps. Enough structure to make the transitions unnatural, enough freedom to look impossible to anyone who couldn't observe the starting logic.
And if touched—
the target had to obey the same logic or get trapped.
Oden's golden-red pupils thinned further.
So that's it.
He began changing his defense.
Less reaction.
More placement.
He stopped trying to catch Naoya wherever he appeared and started filling the spaces Naoya was likely to need. Snake at ankle height. Tiger phantoms at shoulder level. Ground pressure through Dog beneath broken pavement to shift footing half an inch where Naoya wanted clean traction.
The alley became hostile.
Naoya noticed.
He also noticed that Oden still looked like someone barely holding on.
Which pleased him.
That arrogance cost him the first real opening.
He accelerated down the alley wall itself, planning to rebound and strike from above. Oden's Serpent Eyes caught the heat bloom of Naoya's calf before launch and the shoulder tension before the turn. Dog had already loosened the wall's edge beneath that point.
Naoya pushed off—
and lost half a frame of precision.
That was all.
Rabbit hit him in the side.
Naoya was launched through a row of metal bins, hit the ground, rolled, and came back up with surprise visible for the first time.
Oden was already there.
Not with a shikigami.
With his fists.
He drove a straight punch into Naoya's abdomen, twisted off line to avoid the inevitable palm, then hammered an elbow into the side of Naoya's neck.
Naoya skidded back, eyes widening.
"You—"
Tiger came next.
Three false manifestations fanned around Naoya's peripheral vision. He dismissed two instantly and chose the wrong one to attack. The real Tiger's claw tore across his shoulder and marked him.
Naoya's face changed.
Only slightly.
But Oden saw it.
Annoyance turning into concentration.
Good.
The tide was turning.
Naoya still held the speed advantage, but Oden understood the shape of it now. Projection movement wasn't freedom; it was commitment. Once Naoya picked a motion route, his options narrowed inside it. That made him terrifying against people who couldn't read the pattern.
Unfortunately for him—
Oden's eyes were built to read patterns.
Naoya attacked again, palm first.
Oden rotated through a narrow slip, forcing the hand to miss by less than a centimeter, then drove his knee into Naoya's inner thigh. Before Naoya could reset, Ox erupted behind Oden in a wave of spiritual heat, not as a full deployment, but as pressure, just enough flame and oppressive force to cut off the retreat lane.
Naoya had to shift right.
Tiger was already there.
Rabbit cut low.
Snake shot from the drainage channel at wrist level.
For the first time, Naoya looked boxed in.
He broke through it by raw violence, slamming cursed-energy-coated fists through Tiger's fake body and stomping Snake into the wall, but he came out bleeding.
Oden did not let him breathe.
Now he was the one pressing.
When Naoya needed distance, Oden used Rabbit.
When Naoya needed clean lanes, Dog broke terrain underfoot.
When Naoya's attention narrowed, Tiger split it.
When a direct line became risky, Oden switched to hand-to-hand and forced the exchange into the pocket, where reading micro-movements mattered more than travel speed.
Naoya was still fast.
Still dangerous.
Still fully capable of killing most sorcerers in under a minute.
But Oden had solved him.
And once Oden solved a thing, he became merciless.
Naoya came in with a high-speed hook.
Oden ducked beneath it, grabbed the attacking arm before the palm could align properly, and slammed Naoya headfirst into a parked car hard enough to cave the door inward. Metal screamed. Glass burst.
Naoya rebounded on instinct.
Oden kicked him in the chest and sent him through the windshield.
The alarm began shrieking instantly.
Naoya burst out of the other side in fury, blood trailing down his face.
"You little—!"
Oden met him in the open street.
No hesitation.
Only those black-and-gold eyes, slit red at the center, fixed on him like a predator deciding how best to end a wounded animal.
Naoya swung.
Oden weaved.
Naoya palmed for the freeze.
Oden trapped the wrist with both hands, turned under the arm, and snapped a kick into the back of Naoya's knee. As Naoya dropped, Snake looped his ankle and yanked just enough to ruin balance.
Then Oden struck him across the face with the flat of his forearm.
Naoya spun and hit the asphalt.
Hard.
He tried to get up.
Oden kicked him back down.
Naoya coughed blood.
Oden walked toward him.
Calmly.
Naoya, for the first time, looked like a man who had realized his assumptions were fatal.
Oden stopped over him.
Then said, in an almost conversational tone:
"You tried to kill me."
Naoya glared upward.
Oden continued.
"So it should be fine for me to kill you, right?"
His hand lifted.
Snake rose behind his shoulder.
Naoya's pupils shrank.
And then—
the ground exploded upward beneath Oden's feet.
Stone wrapped his legs, then his torso, then the entire space around him in a violent column. Earth surged like a fist from below and launched him straight into the air. The street dropped away instantly.
Oden twisted mid-rise.
Looked down.
Chojuro Zenin stood with one hand pressed to the shattered pavement, cursed energy feeding through the ground in thick pulses. His earth sorcery had raised Oden high above the battlefield in a brutal pillar of stone.
At the same moment—
another figure blurred into motion.
Jinichi Zenin.
He reached the heavily injured Naoya, slung him up with practiced efficiency, and leapt clear of the ruined street before Oden's shikigami could descend properly.
Oden stood atop the earth column, hoodie snapping in the wind, eyes narrow and unreadable.
Below, the Zenin had already disengaged.
Retreat.
Extraction.
Oden watched them vanish across the rooftops and through the cracked streets.
Then, after a beat, said to himself:
"…They ran away, huh."
He then revealed a sinister smile.
"Do they think I'll let them!?"
The city answered with sirens in the distance.
---
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