Kobuchi covered the distance in a dead sprint, his left leg misfiring with every stride, muscle torn and slick with blood inside his boot. The Living Armor hummed around him, a dense vibrating sheath of bees packed so tightly together they felt less like insects and more like a second skin. Chakra ran through the formation in controlled channels, locking each body into place.
He drove both palms forward as he closed and released chakra into the stone beneath Kokushibo's feet. "Earth Release: Fault Collapse," he said.
The floor buckled and dropped.
Kokushibo adjusted the same way he had before, stepping up instead of down, letting the shift in elevation become momentum rather than imbalance. But this time Kobuchi was already inside the guard, and he drove his right elbow into Kokushibo's jaw with the full weight of his sprint behind it.
The impact was like striking an anvil. Pain shot up his arm even through the bee-armor. Kobuchi felt bone protest under the force of it.
Kokushibo's head moved. His body moved two steps back.
That fraction of stagger was all Kobuchi needed. He planted both palms flat against Kokushibo's chest and poured everything remaining into the stone above. "Earth Release: Pillar Collapse," he said.
The ceiling came down.
Not the entire structure, just the section directly above them, blocks the size of men breaking loose and plummeting ten feet straight down. Kobuchi threw himself sideways out of the column's path, rolled hard over rubble, and came up against the corridor wall with his shoulder taking the impact badly and something shifting inside it.
The ceiling struck Kokushibo, and the crash was enormous, deep and concussive, shaking the remaining walls and erupting dust outward in a choking wave.
Kobuchi lay against the wall and breathed.
The Living Armor dissolved as his concentration broke, the bees peeling away in a slow, confused spiral. He felt the emptiness in his chakra network immediately, a hollowed-out space where fire had burned too long. His chakra was not low. It was gone.
His left leg had stopped hurting, and that worried him more than the pain had.
Daishin was beside him, one hand braced against Kobuchi's shoulder to pull him upright. The boy's face was pale beneath the mask of drying blood from his eye wound.
The dust settled, and the rubble shifted.
Kokushibo stood up through it again. Stone slid off his shoulders. The dark hexagonal robes were torn across the chest and one shoulder, and the flesh beneath was visible for a moment before it knit itself closed. He lifted a stone block the size of a man's torso from his shoulder and set it aside carefully.
He looked at Kobuchi.
The corridor was so quiet that the drip of blood from Kobuchi's calf onto stone marked time between heartbeats.
"It's getting repetitive now," Kokushibo said, and there was something almost like annoyance in his voice.
Kobuchi saved his breath and said nothing.
"I was enjoying the battle," Kokushibo said. "Now, the time to end it has come." He glanced down at his restored chest. "But I shall remember you, shinobi."
Daishin moved. Kobuchi felt the shift before he saw it, the hand leaving his shoulder, the sudden absence of contact, and Daishin covered the distance with everything he had left, a tanto in each hand and no hesitation in his stride.
He drove both blades toward the gaps in the torn robes where flesh had been exposed moments earlier. The right blade found the gap at the collarbone and sank in two inches.
Kokushibo looked down at the blade. Then he looked at Daishin.
Daishin held the blade in rather than pulling back. He was seventeen years old, and Kobuchi had known him since he was twelve, had watched him train, had recommended him for this assignment because of his steadiness under pressure and his instinct for earth techniques and that particular quality of courage that didn't announce itself.
It announced itself now, at the end, in the refusal to retreat.
Kokushibo raised his sword. "Moon Breathing, Second Form: Pearl Flower Moongazing," he said.
Three tightly grouped crescents moved in overlapping arcs. They struck Daishin squarely, and the tantos fell from his hands and clattered against the stone, and then Daishin followed them down. The sound he made going down was small and very final.
Kobuchi pushed himself upright with his back against the wall. His left leg nearly folded under him. He caught himself with both palms against the stone and forced the leg to hold. He was not going to end this on his knees.
The swarm circled him in slow, disorganized loops, perhaps less than hundred bees remaining, following fading echoes of his chakra the way they follow a fading scent.
Kokushibo walked toward him without raising the sword.
Kobuchi knew he could not stop him. But he can't give up. Not now.
He thought of his son, not of the grief that would follow or the political machinery that would grind into motion, but of something smaller. The morning he had left, his few years old son had stood at the gate and watched him go, and when Kobuchi had looked back from the road his son had still been there, still watching, and he had not moved until Kobuchi disappeared around the corner.
Kobuchi pressed his palms harder against the wall behind him, feeling the stone solid and slightly rough against his skin.
Kokushibo stopped three feet away. Six eyes regarded him with something almost like respect.
"You fought well," Kokushibo said.
"Why?" Kobuchi asked, keeping his voice even and his breath controlled. "Why stand against the Kamizuru? What feud do you have with us?"
"Kamizuru Ishikawa, was it?" Kokushibo said. "He will soon join you in the afterlife. You can know the answer then."
"You bastard!" Kobuchi shouted.
Kokushibo raised his sword, and the crescent markings along the blade flared bright enough to cast shadows across the corridor walls, and the eyes embedded along the scabbard opened wide all at once, every one of them.
Kobuchi pressed his back harder against the wall. He kept his legs under him. He kept his eyes open.
"Moon Breathing, Fourteenth Form: Catastrophe, Tenman Crescent Moon," Kokushibo said.
The form bloomed outward from the blade in every direction at once, a vortex of crescent projections radiating outward simultaneously, filling the corridor in a wave that found every surface at the same moment, walls and ceiling and floor and the air between them.
The last thing Kobuchi felt was the stone against his palms, still faintly warm from the chakra he had put into it, and the bees pressing close around him, doing the last thing they knew how to do.
The corridor went quiet.
The torches along the walls kept burning. Smoke curled upward from broken stone. The air held the metallic scent of blood and the faint sweetness of crushed bees.
Kokushibo lowered his sword and stood alone amid the ruin for a moment, and then turned and walked down the corridor at an unhurried pace, robes brushing lightly over debris.
Behind him, the torches burned on.
...
Somewhere in the palace, glass shattered.
Hachiko hit the outer wall hard enough that her shoulder nearly dislocated. She caught the edge with both hands and scrambled for purchase against the carved stone with her boots, her side burning where blood had soaked through her robe.
Below her, the palace grounds fell away in dark terraces lit by lanterns.
She pulled herself up, rolled onto the narrow outer ledge, and ran.
The night air cut cold against the blood soaking her side. Each breath burned, and each step jarred the wound open a little further, but she kept her pace and didn't look back.
She crossed the outer gardens and hit the gravel path running, her boots loud against the stones, and went over the low wall separating palace from town without slowing.
The city beyond the palace walls was quieter than it should have been.