Blood welled from the cut on Bankei's forearm, slow and deliberate.
"Feel the flow of energy," Bankei said. "Do you see the disturbance?"
Merun leaned closer. He could, actually. The glowing energy around the wound was choppy — fraying at the edges like cloth pulled in too many directions.
"Now." Bankei's voice was patient, the way stone is patient. "Remember how your own energy moves. What we are doing is not healing directly. We are only stabilizing. Accelerating what the body already wants to do — by filling the disrupted flow with our own." He paused. "You call it Ki. Yes?"
Merun nodded.
"Good. Give it Ki slowly. Like pouring water into a cracked bowl. Remember, not with force but with care."
Merun placed his palm over the cut and closed his eyes.
He could see it — his ki, a steady light blue, running clean through his arms and pooling into his palm. Moving it outward felt natural. Too natural, honestly. He'd always had a knack for this. Control came easy to him in a way that made Bankei raise an eyebrow the first time he'd demonstrated it.
The previous day, He could immediately do the "Shadow Dragon's Arts" which is basically just Ki control. To think these people actually had learned to use their innate energy, which was truly impressive! But they marketed it and used it to make a cult so yeah it makes it a little less impressive.
Saiyans were born to wield Ki. As soon as Bankei taught him how to feel Ki, it was like Merun became a dried sponge, and Bankei's knowledge was the water he needed. Each technique taught was instantly absorbed and reproduced. He could even fly now!
But healing... healing is a whole different beast.
He pushed gently.
The ki crossed over.
There. That's—
A soft sizzle.
Then the sharp smell of something burning.
Bankei pulled his arm back with a quiet hiss. A thin line of smoke curled from the wound, which was now notably worse than before.
Merun opened his eyes.
"...Fuck. I did it again."
"You did it again," Bankei confirmed.
They both sighed at the same time.
Merun stared at his palm like it had personally betrayed him. "It starts fine. I can feel the difference, I know they're not the same thing. But then something just... tips."
"Somehow... your ki is aggressive by nature," Bankei said, wrapping the forearm himself with the calm of someone who had done this many times in the last hour. "It does not wait. The moment you give it direction, it wants to commit. Healing requires you to offer, not direct."
"Offer?"
"You are not filling the wound. You are visiting it."
Merun chewed on that. "That sounds insane, Master."
"Most true things do, young Merun."
He was about to try again when boots sounded in the corridor — unhurried, but distinct. Both of them heard it at the same moment.
Merun was already on the ceiling before Bankei had finished looking up.
The guard appeared at the bars.
"It's time," he said.
Bankei rose without a word, setting aside the cloth he'd been using. He moved to the cell door, and Merun watched from above as the guard led him down the corridor.
Merun dropped soundlessly to the floor once the footsteps had faded enough and followed at a distance, keeping to the shadows along the upper walkway.
————
The waiting room was a low stone chamber. No windows. A single torch.
Merun slipped inside through a crack in the upper wall and crouched where the ceiling met the arch.
Below, Bankei stood still. Eyes closed. Breathing in a slow, measured rhythm. He could choose to be calm almost at will. Merun had watched him do it before. It always made him feel something he couldn't name.
"Master."
Bankei opened one eye.
"Let me break you out. I can do it tonight. We'd be gone before Mangūsu even knows."
The eye closed again. "I told you no."
"I know you told me no—"
"Then why are you still talking?"
Merun shifted. "Because it's a bad answer!"
A long silence.
"Mangūsu would find us," Bankei said. "And he would not be alone too. You are quick and you are clever and against any reasonable opponent you would be fine." He exhaled slowly through his nose. "Mangūsu is not a reasonable opponent. You are an ant compared to a Martial Master."
Merun said nothing.
He thought about his tail. Curled it once, quietly, against the stone.
I still have something left, he thought. Something he hadn't used yet. Something that, when it came to raw scale of destruction, had very little to do with skill or realm or the careful architecture of martial arts.
ᴍᴏɴᴋᴇʏ...
He smiled to himself.
"...Wait until the moon rises," he said.
Bankei opened both eyes this time and looked at him with the expression of a man who had decided not to ask.
The doors beyond the chamber rang — heavy iron against stone, the sound of a crowd bleeding through from the other side.
"Goodluck, Master," Merun said quietly.
Baneki slowly walked outside.
———
The arena was carved from black stone and sunk deep into the earth, open to the sky above in a wide circle. Spectators lined the tiers — merchants, martial artists, peasants pressed to the outer rails, and people from outside the clan whose reasons for being here were their own business.
Merun found a gap in the upper stonework and looked down.
Some of the crowd were praying. Quietly, heads bent, lips moving. How many times had Saint Bankei been brought down here? How many rounds had they watched him survive? The prayers had the texture of something worn in — people who had run out of hope but hadn't stopped coming.
The martial artists in the crowd were different. They leaned forward. Some yelled, voices raw—
"The demon! Bring us the demon!"
"Bankei the Demon! Show us your strength once more!"
"Make him slaughter again!"
On the far side of the arena, raised above the common tiers, a balcony. Stone-faced men sat there in formal arrangement. Martial Masters. Seniors of the clan. Merun scanned them until he found Mangūsu — long hair slicked back, posture easy, expression doing nothing at all.
Watching like a man watching weather.
The announcer spoke without flourish. His tone was solemn as this was all framed as sacred, Merun remembered. An execution dressed in ceremony. A judgment rendered by the Shadow Dragon.
He named Bankei's opponent.
The man who emerged from the far gate was bald, broad through the shoulders, wearing robes in the Oni Clan's colors and a heavy mask carved to look like something between a demon and an orc. He carried himself with discipline. A trained fighter, clearly — the way he walked said so.
Bankei was brought into the arena from the opposite gate.
The crowd erupted. Prayers and screaming layered over each other. Bankei walked to the center without looking at the tiers, his expression carrying nothing, giving nothing.
They bowed to each other.
The masked man attacked.
He was fast. Committed. His strikes came with genuine intent and enough force to make the air move.
Bankei didn't move his feet once.
His ki rose, quietly settling of himself into something immovable. His body was covered in a thin film of white Ki. The strikes landed against it and accomplished nothing. The man adjusted. Tried angles. Tried combinations. Kept at it long past the point where most fighters would have started asking themselves a different set of questions.
Then he stopped.
He stood across from Bankei, breathing hard. After a moment, he reached up and removed the mask.
The face underneath was not the face of someone who had wanted to be here.
Bankei went still in a way that was different from before.
The man's jaw worked. He looked at the stone floor, then back up.
"I know you," Bankei said. It wasn't a question.
The man bowed — not the formal pre-match bow, but a low, broken thing.
"Saint Bankei, you healed me," he said. His voice was rough. "Three years ago. The wound that should have killed me. You healed me."
The crowd had quieted in patches. The non-martial artists couldn't hear him from where they were, but it was clear to the Martial Artists watching. His next words came out steady only because he was forcing them.
"They took my family." He didn't raise his eyes. "My wife. My children. They said one of us has to die. If I kill you, they'll be freed. If neither of us dies, my family goes to the experimentation rooms."
Silence.
"I tried," the man said. "I tried to do it. I told myself it was the only way. I told myself—"
He stopped.
When he looked up, his eyes were wrecked.
"Thank you," he said. Loud enough now that the sound carried — up the stone walls, into the tiers, reaching the praying and the shouting alike, silencing them by degrees. "Thank you for my life. For the years I had. For my children."
He said it like he was finishing something. Closing a door he'd left open.
"Thank you very much for everything, Saint Bankei."
Bankei stepped forward.
He was too slow.
The man gripped his own head with both hands and wrenched. The crack was clean and complete.
THUD.
He was on the ground before Bankei reached him.
The arena did not cheer. The arena did not pray.
For a long moment, it made no sound at all.
Bankei knelt beside him. His face had finally moved — not into grief exactly, but into something older and harder to look at. He stayed there in the black stone dust, one hand resting near the man's shoulder without touching it, as though proximity was the only thing left he could offer.
Above, on the balcony, Mangūsu's expression still did nothing.
He reached for his tea.
"Another one killed themself for the Demon Bankei huh?"