The crescent came before the swing finished.
Kobuchi had already started moving the moment Kokushibo initiated the form, throwing himself sideways with every bit of speed his legs could produce.
The Seventh Form wasn't one crescent. It was a frontal arc that spawned a second wave of interlaced slashes along the floor, traveling low and fast in the same motion.
Kobuchi cleared the main arc and caught the ground slashes across his left calf instead.
The pain was sharp and immediate, a deep cut that went through muscle and stopped at bone. His leg buckled mid-step. He hit the corridor floor on his side, rolled on instinct, and came up on one knee with heat flooding his lower leg and blood already soaking through his trouser leg in a warm, spreading stain.
Behind him, the mud wall took the remainder of the form's output and exploded outward in a spray of compressed earth and stone fragments that rattled off the corridor walls like thrown gravel.
The delegation was exposed again.
"Spread out!" Kobuchi shouted, forcing himself upright. His left leg held, barely, the muscle protesting every ounce of weight he put on it. "Don't cluster. Don't give him a single target!"
They moved. Genji broke left along the wall, fast and low. Suzume went right, already reaching for seals. Daishin pulled Hachiko toward the junction behind them. The surviving samurai had all gone completely still, Hayato still on the floor with his sword arm limp, Kenji pressed against the wall, Ryota barely sitting upright and staring as though comprehension had failed him entirely.
Whatever they had expected tonight, it had not been this.
Kokushibo watched the delegation scatter, and then he looked at Kobuchi, and the look said plainly that he found the scattering irrelevant. He was not worried about them. He was only watching Kobuchi.
Kobuchi shifted his stance, keeping his weight on his right leg and forcing the left to function anyway. He pressed his right thumb into his left palm and pulled what remained of the swarm back from its dispersed positions, drawing the bees into a tight formation around his own body rather than sending them forward.
They couldn't poison this creature to death. He had established that. But they could serve as sensory extensions, hundreds of additional points of perception distributed across the corridor, and through the chakra connection he could feel air displacement a fraction of a second before it registered visually.
It wasn't much of an advantage. It was the only one he had.
Kokushibo advanced.
Kobuchi formed two seals and drove chakra into the floor in a broad, spreading wave rather than a focused spike. "Earth Release: Tremor Fist," he said, and the stone rippled outward from his palms, the vibration moving fast and low through the corridor floor toward Kokushibo's feet.
Kokushibo rose off the ground with casual ease, letting the tremor pass beneath him, and descended forward rather than back, closing the remaining distance in a single smooth motion. His sword came around in a tight horizontal arc aimed at Kobuchi's neck.
Kobuchi activated Body Flicker and the sword passed through empty air. He reappeared eight feet to Kokushibo's right and immediately drove chakra downward. "Earth Release: Stone Spike," he said, and the column came up fast, aimed at the back of Kokushibo's knee.
Kokushibo cut it apart without looking, the blade moving behind him in a backhand that bisected the stone cleanly, and then he was already turning back, already closing again.
He knew where Kobuchi would appear. Every time Body Flicker activated, Kokushibo's gaze was already waiting at the landing point before Kobuchi fully materialized. He was reading the chakra movement before the technique finished.
Kobuchi formed the seal for Body Flicker again and pushed chakra into his legs, but instead of vanishing he redirected the burst sideways at the last moment and used the acceleration to close distance toward Kokushibo rather than away from him. He came in low and fast, his right hand going for Kokushibo's sword wrist and his left forming a single seal simultaneously for a contact-range technique he almost never used. "Earth Release: Stone Skin," he said, and pressed his left palm flat against Kokushibo's forearm.
The chakra transferred on contact. The stone-hardening technique that Kobuchi normally applied to his own body attempted to push through Kokushibo's skin and into the tissue beneath, trying to petrify the muscle of the sword arm from the outside in.
Kokushibo looked down at Kobuchi's hand on his arm.
The technique was working. Kobuchi felt it moving into the arm, the hardening spreading upward from the contact point toward the elbow. It was slower than it should have been, fighting through unnatural physiology, but it was moving, and gray crept visibly across pale flesh.
Then Kokushibo's free hand came up and closed around Kobuchi's wrist.
The grip was absolute. Not painful, not crushing, just immovable, like having his wrist set in concrete. Kobuchi pulled and his arm didn't move. He pushed chakra into his legs and tried to wrench free through sheer force of motion, and Kokushibo's grip didn't adjust at all.
Six eyes looked down at him from close range.
"Interesting technique," Kokushibo said, raising the petrified forearm slightly. "I haven't encountered that application before."
The stone cracked from the inside, the way ice cracks when water moves beneath it, and the petrified skin split apart in fragments that fell to the floor. Beneath it the arm was unchanged.
He had simply regenerated through it.
Kobuchi stopped pulling. He planted both feet, formed two seals with his free hand, and drove chakra downward. "Earth Release: Rising Fang," he said.
The spike struck Kokushibo's foot and stopped. The stone cracked against his sole and crumbled.
Kobuchi felt the grip tighten a fraction, not enough to break anything but enough to make clear that it could.
"You aren't strong enough to defeat me," Kokushibo said.
"Who knows? Maybe I am," Kobuchi said.
Something shifted in Kokushibo's expression, not quite a smile but the suggestion of one. "You amuse me," he said, and released Kobuchi's wrist and stepped back, and the stepping back felt like a deliberate choice rather than any kind of retreat, which made it more unsettling than a counterattack would have been.
Kobuchi moved away fast, putting ten feet between them, his wrist aching from the grip and his left leg still bleeding. He could feel his chakra reserves thinning. He had been burning hard since the fight started, the constant earth techniques and swarm maintenance pulling on stores that weren't bottomless.
He looked at Kokushibo and the answer to how long this could last was written in every line of the figure's posture. But Kokushibo showed no sign of depletion.
From the left wall, Genji moved.
He came at Kokushibo from the flank, fast and low, three kunai fanned between his fingers and aimed at the gaps in the dark robes at the shoulder and hip joints. He threw two and kept the third, and the thrown ones flew true and hit Kokushibo cleanly in the right shoulder and the left hip. They lodged, the flesh closing around them.
Genji closed the remaining distance and drove the third kunai hard into the base of Kokushibo's neck from behind, putting his whole body weight behind it, the blade going in two inches before the flesh pushed back.
Kokushibo turned around. He didn't swing the sword. He simply rotated, and the motion wrenched the kunai from Genji's fingers. Kokushibo looked at him with calm evaluation.
Genji stood his ground. His face was pale but set.
"Genji, back!" Kobuchi shouted.
Genji was already forming seals, three of them in rapid succession. "Earth Release: Stone Coffin," he said, and the stone around Kokushibo's feet surged upward, encasing his legs to the knee in dense compressed rock. It had held many strong targets before. It was one of the strongest restraint techniques the Kamizuru clan's earth arsenal contained.
The stone reached Kokushibo's knees and stopped rising.
Then it cracked from the inside, splitting outward in fragments as Kokushibo walked forward through it, each step breaking the encasement from below as though the compressed rock were thin ice rather than anything solid.
He reached Genji in four steps.
"Genji!" Kobuchi pushed his legs into a sprint, his left leg screaming at him with every stride.
Kokushibo raised his sword and brought it down once, clean and final, and Genji went down in a diagonal line from left shoulder to right hip. He lay looking up at the corridor ceiling with an expression of mild surprise, trying to say something. Whatever it was didn't come out, and after a moment he stopped trying.
Kobuchi dropped to his knees beside him and stayed there for one second, one only, and then he stood up.
...
From the right side of the corridor, Suzume was already moving, weaving between Kokushibo and the wall and forming seals as she ran. "Kamizuru Style: Thousand Sting Spiral," she said, and the bees from her own supply condensed into a tight rotating formation in front of her, a dense drill aimed directly at Kokushibo's face and eyes.
It hit him full in the face at close range. Kokushibo tilted his head back slightly from the impact, the sheer physical volume of hundreds of bees hitting a concentrated point enough to move even him, and he raised his sword hand to clear his eyes.
In the moment his vision was obstructed, Suzume planted her feet, slammed both palms flat against the corridor wall, and pushed every bit of remaining chakra into the stone. "Earth Release: Collapsing Walls," she said.
The corridor walls groaned. The right wall buckled inward in a controlled collapse aimed directly at Kokushibo's position, tons of palace stone dropping toward him from above and the side simultaneously. It was the largest technique Kobuchi had seen her use. It cost her everything, visibly, her face going gray with the effort and her legs shaking under her as the chakra left her in a rush.
The stone fell on Kokushibo and the corridor filled with dust.
For three seconds there was only the sound of settling stone and the coughing of everyone in the corridor and the low, desperate hum of bees finding their way through the debris cloud.
Then the rubble shifted.
Kokushibo stood up through it, stone fragments sliding off his shoulders. The robes were torn in several places and the flesh beneath was visible where the stone had pressed hardest, already knitting itself closed. He pulled a piece of rubble the size of a man's torso off his shoulder and let it drop, and the sound it made against the floor was enormous.
He looked at Suzume through the settling dust.
Suzume looked back at him. She was breathing in ragged pulls, completely empty, both hands hanging at her sides. She had known what would happen when she did it. Kobuchi could see that in her face. She had done it anyway.
Kokushibo raised his sword. "Moon Breathing, Ninth Form: Waning Moonswaths," he said.
Multiple downward arcs fell close together, overlapping, passing through the same point in space in rapid sequence. The technique hit Suzume before she could move, before Kobuchi could reach her, before anything could be done about any of it.
She fell into the rubble and didn't move.
The corridor went very quiet. Daishin made a sound beside Hachiko that wasn't quite a word. Hachiko had her hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and Kobuchi couldn't tell if she was holding him back or holding herself up.
...
Kobuchi stood between Kokushibo and what remained of his delegation. His left leg bled through his trouser leg steadily enough that the fabric had gone dark from knee to ankle. His chakra reserves were past the point where he would normally start conserving. His swarm was a fraction of what he had started with, the bees lost to the Moon Breathing forms scattered across the corridor floor around him.
He pressed his right thumb into his left palm anyway, and the remaining swarm pulled together around him.
He was still alive. That meant there was still something to think about.
He had moved Kokushibo with the palm strike to the sternum, two full steps backward, using the fault line collapse to break his balance first. The thing could be moved. The thing could be surprised, briefly. Its regeneration was extraordinary but not instantaneous, he had seen it take fractions of seconds to close the deepest cuts.
Fractions of seconds were not much to work with. They were what he had.
Kokushibo was looking at him, patient as always, waiting to see what Kobuchi would do next.
"Let's keep fighting," Kokushibo said.
"What? Are you enjoying this slaughter?!" Kobuchi snapped.
"I feel rather delighted," Kokushibo smiled.
"You... demon bastard!" Kobuchi clenched his jaw.
He looked back over his shoulder. Hachiko and Daishin were both still standing, both looking at him, both waiting. Hachiko had blood on her side from an earlier cut, dark and soaked through. Daishin's eye wound had been bleeding long enough that the whole left side of his face was stained with it.
The arithmetic was plain. There was almost no technique he hadn't tried that was going to change the outcome of this battle. But Hachiko could still run, and someone had to make it back, and the information of this night mattered more now than anything else he could deliver.
He turned to face Kokushibo and spoke without turning back. "Hachiko. The window at the end of the east passage. Go."
"I'm not—" she started.
"That's an order," he said. "Take the information home. Tell my father what you saw."
A pause. He heard her breathing.
"Leader," she said.
"Go," he said. "Now. Don't look back."
He heard her move. He heard Daishin start to follow and then stop, and the stop surprised him enough that he almost turned around.
"I'm staying," Daishin said.
Kobuchi said nothing for a moment. He looked at Kokushibo and calculated the seconds an argument would take, and what those seconds were worth.
"Stay behind me then," he said, and heard Hachiko's footsteps going fast down the corridor and kept his eyes on Kokushibo, and Kokushibo watched her leave and did not move to stop her.
After her footsteps faded into silence, Kobuchi pulled every remaining bee into the tightest formation he had ever maintained, a dense sphere of living mass packed so closely together it was nearly opaque, churning in a slow rotation around his body. He pushed chakra into the formation until his hands were trembling with the effort, compressing the energy until the bees were vibrating at a frequency he could feel in his teeth.
Then he shaped it differently than he ever had before. Not a wall, not a drill, not a dispersed cloud, but a sleeve, a living coating that wrapped his entire body from head to foot in a layer two inches thick, each bee locked into position by the density of the formation around it, the whole mass hardened by concentrated chakra into something closer to armor than to insects.
"Kamizuru Style: Living Armor," he said.
The maintenance cost was more than he had anticipated. He had perhaps two minutes before his reserves gave out and the technique collapsed on its own.
Kokushibo studied the formation with genuine attention, all six eyes moving across the shape of it methodically. "I haven't seen that before either," he said.
"Good," Kobuchi said, and he charged.