In which case, Setsura was well aware, Gento lying on the earth and entrusting his body to the spells and incantations would “educate” him all the more. He had once heard such things from his father. Which is why he came here to destroy it.
For the same reasons, Gento Roran had so impatiently desired the casket to be excavated as quickly as possible. This wooden casket held the key to both of their fates.
“There are battles and then there are battles,” Setsura said, closing the lid of the casket. “What would I be fighting for? The seal?”
“No,” Hyota shook his head.
“To seize control of the new world order?”
“No.”
“For the possibility of world domination?”
“No.” The answer was always the same.
“Help me out here. What’s this chip on Gento’s shoulder? Is he carrying on the fight because his father told him to?”
“Love and hate, joy and sadness—the two of you are quite apart from emotions such as those.”
“So this is a battle fought without the ends in mind or even the desire to sally forth?” Setsura laughed without making a sound, a smile so dreadful that it froze Hyota momentarily in his tracks. “In any case, I will fight. Which means your death, Hyota.”
“As well I know,” Hyota nodded, in the manner of an old sage coming to inevitable blows with his star pupil.
War was hell, so the saying went. But never a literal hell like this. A war fought without the will to fight. A war won without a fight. Together they faced an inevitable showdown with death. How would Setsura strike and sever? How would Hyota die?
And yet there wasn’t a speck of tension between the two. When Setsura’s hands moved as well, it appeared as the most casual and ordinary of movements.
Hyota’s body glowed as if reflecting every last ray of light left in the room. A split-second before the devil wires reached him, the oils erupted from his pores and covered his body.
These mysterious oils once again turned the cutting powers of the sub-micron titanium threads into butter knives.
Hyota took off running. The fissure yawned between them. He crouched down at the edge and tossed Byori’s head with an underhand throw. Dripping with the poisonous blood of the serpent and radiating a demonic aura, the ordinary human teeth flashed like the mouth of a piranha as it sailed at Setsura’s throat, propelled by its own will.
A dozen feet in front of Setsura it split apart lengthwise, falling like two leaves caught by a brisk gust. The serpent’s blood had eaten away at that implacable will as well. Though Setsura still had to take a flying leap backwards.
Bounding over the fissure at the same time as Byori’s head, Hyota waved his arms. A tiny hole—that only Setsura’s eyes could perceive—opened up in the concrete floor. And only Setsura understood that this was the work of an equally tiny needle, a mere thousandth of a micron in diameter and two inches long.
When handled by Hyota, however, they became bewitched darts that could puncture steel.
Changing directions in the midst of his own flying retreat, Setsura’s slicker flapped and shuddered. Hyota’s needles needn’t shoot in a straight line either. Batting them out of the air, Setsura landed on the stage and ducked beneath the thick planking, fallen in like broken timbers.
Ripples ran across the surface, the impacts gouging out fist-sized holes. Hyota’s footsteps came closer and stopped.
Echoes of laughter that couldn’t possibly be laughter floated up from beneath the flooring. A ghastly sort of humor that would make the dead shake with fear, to say nothing of Hyota or any other living thing.
“Splendid, Hyota. You caught me. That’s as far as you’ll get.”
It could just as well have been a bluff. But Hyota retreated.
A soft ping rang out. A dark shadow engulfed Hyota. The lighting rail fell from the ceiling and struck Hyota across the shoulders. It almost immediately slid off. Following the slight slant of the floor, it slid toward the fissure.
“I can’t cut you, but what about a little poking and prodding?”
In concert with the question, the skeletal shaft of the posts and lighting rail swung back into the air on invisible strings like the teeth of a giant rake.
Hyota didn’t move.
This new weapon rushed toward his small frame. The phalanx of jutting spears all skidded off him and vectored away in a different direction.
In simple physical terms, striking Hyota dead center and square on, the posts and lighting rail should have shot straight through his body, despite whatever oil he was coated in. Moreover, considering the contours of the human form, if Hyota was even close to the center of movement this became an impossible feat.
“Is that all, Setsura-sama?” he asked blithely. He might have even sounded a little sad.
There was no answer.
“Well, then. Say your prayers.”
He stretched out his hands, still full of those fearsome needles. A red line circumscribed his stout neck. It grew thicker, blood spraying out in all directions an instant after that.
As the head slipped off his shoulders, Hyota reached up and returned it to where it belonged. It was one thing for a skilled surgeon to reattach a severed head, but a headless—
In Gento’s hideout, a similar trick had been performed on the giant. But that was the combination of Gento’s necrodancing and Mephisto’s medical skills.
There were men of magic here too.
“Splendid—work—Setsura—sama—but—how—?” Hyota asked in a strangely hoarse voice, the result of forcing his severed organs back together again.
Setsura’s hand jutted out from the planks. “I gave this a try.”
He held up his right wrist, the teeth marks still showing. The increased sharpness of the devil wires in the dominant hand, that he’d refrained from using to be on the safe side, had finally broken through the sheen of oil.
However they might lock horns, he’d loved him from the time he was a child. His heart filled with grief, and up to the moment they engaged he had wept over his fate.
To then take his head without hesitation—Setsura Aki, that beautiful genie, was truly a destroying angel. Without a second glance at Hyota, he turned toward the casket. The final coup de grâce still awaited. The game-ending shot.
Blue-white flames licked at his feet. Setsura dove backwards as the wall of fire whooshed up. The gasoline from the taxi cab the serpent had smashed. The roaring conflagration swept back his hair and ruffled the sleeves of his slicker.
Beyond the fissure, he saw two figures standing at the door. The girl writhing in pain, wearing a white blouse and skirt was Kotomi. The man standing next to her, his arm around her waist, wearing a beguiling smile and an Inverness topcoat—
“So the favorite’s decided to throw his hat into the ring,” Setsura called out to him.
“Precisely,” Gento Roran answered with a broad smile. “The time to settle things has arrived sooner than expected.”