Mera had the power to split herself as much as she liked, right down to the cellular level, meaning the droplets of blood that had landed on Goh were presently serving as a type of living spawn that she could sense the location of at any time and at any given distance. The only way Goh could have broken free from Mera’s watchful gaze was if he had scrubbed his entire body clean.
“Even if ya run, ya can’t escape!” Nazuna declared, swinging her Prometheus. “Stay where ya are so I can squash ya!”
Goh sucked his teeth. “Goddammit!” He barely managed to jump out of the way in time as the blade cleaved the ground in two, the shock wave ripping out trees until an entire section of forest had been cleared out. It was only Goh’s keen senses that had saved him from taking a direct hit, although he hadn’t escaped entirely unscathed. The breakneck speed of the Level 9000 warrior’s dodging combined with the devastating reverberations from Nazuna’s sword strike caused the Bracelet of Deception to break apart, exposing Goh’s true form.
“Prometheus! Bend my reality!” Nazuna chanted, inviting the mythical-class sword to interfere with the natural order of things by making five exact copies of the Vampire Knight. Goh’s eyes darted this way and that in disbelief while the five Nazunas shouted threats at him.
“Just you watch! I’m gonna smash ya to smithereens!”
“But we shouldn’t kill him since we need him for information.”
“So we’ll just tear off his arms and legs?”
“Won’t he bleed to death if we do that?”
“Then, let’s just smash him to smithereens without pulling off his arms and legs!”
Once they had agreed upon what they thought was a workable solution, all five Nazunas rushed at Goh like a pack of wolves.
“Great idea! I’m a genius!” they all announced in unison.
Goh could feel it in his bones that the sight he was witnessing was not an illusion. He was definitely facing five overpowered berserkers, each of whom outleveled him by a dangerously wide margin. Cold sweat formed on his brow for the first time in ages, and he reflexively spluttered a torrent of obscenities to the air around him.
“What the hell kinda shit show is this?!” he screamed. “Where’d that damn witch find you dumbshit short stacks, anyway?! Nobody told me about this! This is bullshit!”
“Hey, don’t call me a ‘shit’! My name’s Nazuna!”
“You’re not supposed to call a girl the S-word, ya know!”
“I seriously don’t like this guy!”
“He makes me so mad, I wanna blast him into the middle of next week!”
“Anyways, I’m gonna hit him first!” declared the last Nazuna to speak.
All five copies swung their swords at Goh, staggering the timing of their approaches. The Master managed to dodge four of the strikes through reflex alone, but there was no way he could avoid the fifth. However, before the sword could connect with his cranium, he somehow stopped the blade mid-swing by clapping it between his palms. In other words, he used the classic bare-handed blade catch technique. Even so, the force of the swing was so powerful, the shock reverberated through Goh’s body and legs, and a crater formed beneath him. If he had been a run-of-the-mill fighter, the force of the blow alone would have been enough to flatten him and leave him as a bloody pancake, even if he had succeeded in catching the sword like he had just done. But despite grunting in pain, he even managed to maintain his poise to the extent that he could engage in some mean-spirited banter with the last Nazuna.
“How can a little girl hit this hard?” Goh spat. “I don’t care what your level is—are ya sure ya weren’t a gorilla in a past life?”
With the blade still clasped between his palms, he twisted the Prometheus to one side and threw Nazuna off-balance. Like Miki had said, Goh wasn’t the leader of her clique of Masters for nothing.
“Huh? Why’m I kneelin’ on the ground?” the astonished Nazuna blurted out. Goh had planned to use the sword and the attached Nazuna as some sort of improvised mace to beat back the other assailants, but this particular Vampire Knight had other ideas.
“So this is the weird trick Mera was talking about, huh?” the Nazuna said. “Don’t know why I can’t stand even though yer not pushin’ me down. But it doesn’t matter to me anyway!”
Still kneeling on the ground, the restrained Nazuna hollered a war cry, then used brute strength to lift both her sword and Goh into the air.
“What? Are ya shittin’ me right now?!” Goh screeched. “How the hell’d she brute-force her way out of my kuzushi? Where’d this midget get all of her power? Crap!”
“Kuzushi” referred to the martial arts technique of throwing an opponent off-balance and completely wrecking their ability to regain it. In Goh’s case, he had perfected the technique to such an extent, he had been able to completely incapacitate Mera’s spawn using just two fingers and with no extra exertion. But facing Nazuna, she managed to break through his kuzushi by dint of her herculean strength. If the whole overarching motto of judo was “the soft conquers the strong,” then Nazuna was completely upending that notion at present.
She swung the sword down toward the ground again, ready to create another crater with Goh at the end of the blade. “I’m gonna smash ya like a hammer!” the clone yelled.