No, Aoyuki didn’t care what she had to do to be useful to Light. If he so ordered, she would kill another member of the Abyss without a second thought, nor any lingering emotions. If he commanded her to kill herself, she would take her own life without flinching or hesitating for a moment. Yet she had flinched on her first attempt to collar the fake C, worrying more about her own safety than faithfully carrying out her mission. This single act of cowardice was enough to injure Aoyuki’s pride as a loyal retainer of Light, and the self-loathing radiating from her was so overt, it even caused the Level 9000 Fenrir to shrink back.
“You will pay for throwing mud on my fealty!” Aoyuki yelled at her foe in an uncharacteristically shrill voice. She mustered up all of her brute strength to yank the fake C out of the hardened lava, and as he flew toward her, she wrapped one end of the Beast Chain around her left arm while preparing her other fist to clobber him. Although the Master was quick to put up his guard, the punch still packed enough propulsive force to drive him through the arena wall again, the sound of the impact louder than if several stagecoaches had crashed into one another. But Aoyuki’s anger had yet to be sated.
“This isn’t over,” she said darkly. Using just her left arm, she heaved on the Beast Chain to arc the fake C through the air again, then smashed him into the arena floor. She repeated this full-body bludgeoning over and over, pulverizing the ground with the supposed Master as if he were a mace.
At first glance, it seemed like Aoyuki had the upper hand, but in reality, the fake C’s malice was still being channeled through the chain at such a dangerous rate and intensity, she would be overwhelmed and driven insane if she even lost focus for a moment.
A smarter approach would have been to let go of the fake C, maintain some distance, and join her mythological monsters in burying the Master with ranged attacks, yet the Genius Monster Tamer was choosing the far riskier option of exposing herself to his poisonous hatred by using her Beast Chain. In her mind, if she released the weapon from around his neck, it would be tantamount to admitting that the fake C’s malice was greater than her loyalty to Light. In short, Aoyuki was choosing pride over logic, because she felt she would be unable to live down the ignominy of breaking her hold with the Beast Chain.
But no matter how many times she smashed the fake C into the arena floor, he would jump up again and continue his unintelligible rant, which then amplified the malice coursing through the chain. This approach implied he understood perfectly how to counter Aoyuki’s stubbornness, and the stronger blasts of malevolent energy he sent toward her were steadily corrupting and blackening the hand and arm grasping the chain. Aoyuki gritted her teeth as she struggled to resist the extreme levels of bitterness and insanity that were driving through her, and this caused C to laugh, a spectral trill filling the air, believing his malevolent properties were winning out.
“Do you really think I’d yield to this trifling amount of madness?” Aoyuki growled with fire in her eyes. “Know that you will never take over my soul with your lunacy, for my soul only belongs to one master!”
Her loyalty to Light was every bit as crazed as the fake C’s pure lunacy, to the point where the two fighters were corrupting each other with their energies. Aoyuki’s monsters decided to play it safe and shrink back from the pair even more, just as Aoyuki dashed toward the fake C with her fist raised and without even bothering to yank on the Beast Chain. The supposed Master spewed yet more gobbledygook and manifested another dark energy lance.
“Shut up! Just be quiet!” Aoyuki yelled. She dodged the lance thrusts as nimbly as a cat, then landed a sharp jab on her foe. The Master recovered quickly and swiped at Aoyuki with his lance, but she ducked and buried her fist into his abdomen this time, while the Beast Chain rattled around like it was an instrument providing a soundtrack for the battle.
The fake C pulled on the chain in an attempt to make Aoyuki lose her balance, but instead of resisting, she let herself be yanked toward him, and he saw his opportunity to punt the cat-eared fighter into the stratosphere.
“Rroww!” The kick didn’t land, however, because Aoyuki used the fake C’s foot as a launchpad to go airborne, and when she reached the apex of her leap, she aimed a dropkick of her own at her foe, weaponizing the speed of her freefall. The fake C just about managed to block the incoming kick in the nick of time, keeping him in the fight. The battle between the pair continued to rage furiously, as if they were two primeval animals whose only thought was to slaughter each other. Even fights between monsters up on the surface world were less vicious.
After a seemingly endless tussle, the fake C eventually squawked and ran from Aoyuki, instinctively knowing that if he continued their hand-to-hand combat, he would lose decisively. Once he’d created some distance, he shoved his lance into the ground, and because Aoyuki was busy basking in the premature victory of her fealty over the fake C’s madness, it took her a moment to react to the Master’s unexpected move. But one moment was all the fake C needed. A black shadow spread out from the lance buried in the ground, but that wasn’t all.
“There’s a presence above me?” Aoyuki mumbled. Black shadows started spreading out across the walls and ceiling of the arena. When the fake C had stabbed the Phoenix with his mist-soaked hair, some of the strands had attached themselves to the ceiling, and it was these that were producing the shadows above their heads. The same thing went for the wisps of black mist that remained on the walls after the fake C was repeatedly smashed against them.
The fake C shrieked in distorted octaves, suggesting that this move was draining his life force. The widening shadow on the ground suddenly manifested within it a whole bunch of eyeballs the size of sparrows’ eyes. The eyeballs were nowhere near as big as the ones that had appeared on the fake C’s body when he stole life energy from Cerberus and the Phoenix earlier on in the fight.
As soon as the tiny eyes appeared, the Phoenix screeched and Cerberus yelped, then both creatures involuntarily dropped to one knee on the ground. Due to Cerberus’s lower power level, it knelt first. The shadows spreading throughout the arena were filled with the fake C’s malice and insanity, and even more than that, the madness in the shadows that expanded across the floor, walls, and ceiling resonated mutually, amplifying itself.
The fake C realized he couldn’t outmatch Aoyuki’s fealty to Light, so he had decided to sacrifice life energy in exchange for making Aoyuki fight with him in a psychologically toxic arena. This gambit had already worked on Cerberus and the Phoenix, causing them to drop to their knees.
Aoyuki flinched as the air around her warped and physically buffeted her. The three-dimensional space around her was seemingly unable to withstand the fake C’s insanity and was starting to contort itself in ways that defied nature. Similar phenomena were affecting the gaseous ether, the ambient temperature, and even the floor itself. It seemed like all of them suddenly had lives of their own and were intent on attacking Aoyuki and her monsters.
The fake C ranted some more, intensifying the resonating lunacy in the arena, and successfully forcing all of Aoyuki’s creatures to concentrate all their energy on weathering this newly twisted world on their knees. Aoyuki tried to yank the Beast Chain to reel in the fake C and punch him again, but she huffed in frustration when the Master didn’t budge an inch. Along with his lance, he remained stuck in the ground, as if the black shadow had taken root underneath him.
Aoyuki decided to switch gears and run straight at the fake C with the intention of pummeling him, but the black shadows on the ground transformed into lances that tried to impale her as she zipped along. The monster tamer immediately took evasive action to avoid the spearlike protrusions, because she couldn’t afford to be stabbed by any of the spikes that would no doubt siphon off her life force and feed it to the fake C. The lances were persistent in their attempts to skewer Aoyuki, and it wasn’t until she finally decided to put some distance between her and the fake C that they eased off a little.
Drunk on his own life-ending madness, the fake C bellowed triumphantly at his foe, thinking he had finally turned the tables. Aoyuki wasn’t able to yank C or his lance toward her using her Beast Chain, and she couldn’t approach the Master to engage him up close, because the shadow spikes were protecting him. She needed to do something, however, because the shadows were close to covering the entirety of the arena, and they were draining C’s life force in the process. If she couldn’t reverse the process quickly, the shadow spikes would soon impale the effectively paralyzed Fenrir, Cerberus, and the Phoenix where they lay and suck their life force from them freely.
It was likely that the fake C’s gambit would eventually run itself out naturally, since he was burning through his life energy fast, but Aoyuki didn’t really have the luxury of testing that theory. C’s corporeal lunacy seemingly had the power to warp space itself, and if his madness magnified further, Aoyuki would end up being rendered immobile too. In the eyes of the fake C, Aoyuki was trapped with no way out.
The supposed Master started babbling away again, confident of victory, but the Genius Monster Tamer seemed perfectly calm about the whole situation. She sniffed in the manner of a highly ranked fighter gazing down at an amateur in the ring.