Devouring the Demon King's Mana

Chapter 4

Ren came awake by degrees. First there was the taste of old metal in his mouth, then a stiffness in his neck, and finally the understanding that he was sitting upright when he should have been lying on a road. He opened his eyes onto a darkness so complete that for a moment he wondered whether they were open at all.

Where was he? The last thing he remembered was the path outside the city, the trees parting, and three figures in grey robes with a crest stitched on their chests. He remembered telling them no. He remembered a pressure slamming into him, and then nothing.

He tried to lift his hands and found that they wouldn't move. Something held each wrist against a hard flat surface, and when he pulled, straps bit into his skin and stayed where they were. He was sitting in a chair. He was tied to it.

"Hello?" His voice came out thin and small. "Is someone there? Where am I?"

Nothing answered him. He thought of Master Ishida at the orphanage table with his cap beside him, waiting for a boy who would not be coming, and his throat tightened.

Then a light snapped on overhead. A single spotlight fell straight down from somewhere above, white and hot, and Ren screwed his eyes shut against it. When he dared to open them again he could see nothing past the edge of the circle, except for one thing: just inside that edge sat a pair of crossed legs, a man's boot resting easily on his knee.

"There he is," said a voice from above the legs, low and unhurried. "I was starting to think you'd sleep through the whole thing."

"Who are you?" Ren demanded, trying to sound braver than he felt. "Where is this place? I passed the exam. I'm supposed to be going to the academy."

"We'll get to your questions." The boot on the man's knee bounced once. "Manners first. My name is Sakaguchi. Kenzo Sakaguchi."

Ren blinked. Sakaguchi. He had read that name three times on the board outside the arena, at the very top of the list, next to a boy he had never seen before. He stared at the legs and waited for more, but the man offered nothing further.

"Now," Kenzo Sakaguchi went on. "Let's talk about how a boy with no mana becomes one of the top five in the district in a single day."

Deny it, the voice said inside Ren's head, calm and close. All of it. Not a word about the shore.

Ren swallowed. "I don't know what you mean. I got lucky."

"A boy who ran out of the arena on Thursday kills a kegare with two fingers on Friday. You'll have to do better than luck."

"I practiced," Ren said quickly. "All night, by myself. There's a yard behind the orphanage where I..."

"A night of practice doesn't build mana out of nothing, Hoshino."

"Then I don't know!" Ren pulled uselessly at the straps. "I'm telling you the truth. One minute I was on my knees in that arena, and the next it was over. I don't understand what happened, and I'm sorry, but I don't."

"Try again."

"There's nothing to try. I've told you everything I know."

"Once more."

"I got lucky. I swear it. I don't know anything else."

The man let each answer hang in the air before he asked the next question, and after the fifth denial the crossed legs shifted.

"Your power can't be trusted," Kenzo said. "Nobody wakes up overnight. We watched what you used in that arena, and it doesn't match any family in this district. It matches the Tsukikage clan, Hoshino, the descendants of Shuten."

Ren felt the blood leave his face. "I've never even heard of them."

That much was true, but everyone had heard of Shuten. Even the orphans knew the name. Three hundred years ago the Demon King had ruled with a terror so complete that the stories were still used to frighten children, and that terror had never truly ended. It had only gone quiet. For the last twenty years there had been no sign of him, no attacks and no rumors, and the quiet had started to feel worse than the fear. Everyone believed he was coming back. That belief was the reason the academy existed, and the reason it trained its students like soldiers.

"Nothing more to say?" Kenzo asked.

Ren's hands were shaking against the straps. He had been awake for almost two days and scared for most of them, and the spotlight was hot on his skin, and the voice had told him to keep quiet. But the man sounded certain in a way that made lying feel pointless, and something in Ren simply gave out.

"I swallowed it," he blurted. "There was a body on the shore, an old man, barely alive, and there was a red mana core in his mouth. I swallowed it. That's the only thing that happened."

You fool, the voice hissed.

The crossed legs came uncrossed. Kenzo rose out of the dark and stepped into the light, and Ren saw him properly for the first time: tall and slim, his hair cut short with a faded edge, a black patch over his left eye, his chest bare and covered in pale scars that overlapped each other in ridges. He crossed the circle in two strides, seized Ren by the collar, and hauled him halfway out of the chair.

"You did what?!"

"I didn't know what it was," Ren stammered. "He was dying, and the core was still alive, and I'd just failed the test, and he was so old. His skin was like paper. I only wanted to be strong. That's all I wanted."

Kenzo stared into his face for a long moment. Then he let go and stepped back, and Ren saw his visible eye widen, because it was looking at something behind Ren's own eyes.

"Shuten," Kenzo said.

Ren had never heard the name spoken like that, flat and certain. Inside his head the voice did not argue, and the quiet where an argument should have been told him everything he needed to know. Kenzo raised one hand, and the air around it began to bend. Pale light gathered in his palm, thin and bright and shaped like a spear, and he spoke without any hurry at all.

"I'm sorry, boy. I can't let you leave this room."

I need you alive, Shuten said, and for the first time Ren heard something frightened in that voice. I can't spend another twenty years soul searching!

The numbness swept over Ren from scalp to heels. The straps tore off the arms of the chair with a ripping sound, and Shuten was already moving when the spear crossed the room.

It passed over his shoulder close enough to singe Ren's shirt and struck the ceiling, where it sliced through a row of lamp crystals that had hung there unseen. They flared on all at once, and the whole chamber filled with white light. It was a bare stone room with no windows and one iron door, and it was much smaller than it had seemed in the dark. Shuten didn't spare it a glance. He dropped into a crouch, slid a step to the left, and let Kenzo's second spear go wide of his ribs.

Kenzo's third strike came as a spread of three, fired from the same palm in a fan, and Shuten read the pattern before it finished forming. He bent backward until his shoulders nearly touched the floor, felt the light pass an inch over his face, and kicked off the stone to turn the fall into a roll. Ren watched from the back of his own head, numb and weightless, as his body moved with a grace he had never owned.

"Fast," Kenzo muttered. "Faster than a boy should be."

He slammed his palm into the floor, and a wave of pale light rolled outward across the stone, knee high and widening, moving faster than any man could run. Shuten leapt it cleanly, tucked in the air, and landed on the far wall with one foot braced, his coat flaring around him. Then he pushed off. The air split around his body as he crossed the room in a flash of Shukuchi, and he arrived beside Kenzo with two fingers already leveled at the man's jaw.

"Tsuranuki."

A needle of compressed mana punched out of his fingertips. Kenzo jerked his head aside at the last instant, and the thread of force tore a line across his cheek and drilled a hole the width of a thumb through the stone behind him. Blood ran from the cut. Kenzo backed away, wiped it with his wrist, and for the first time there was something like respect in his one good eye.

Shuten did not let him recover. He pressed his palm to the floor, and the stone began to hum. "Ibara." Black thorns burst up from the ground in a spreading line, each one as long as a spear and ringed with smaller barbs, and they raced toward Kenzo in a wave. The man gave ground, then turned and cut at them with blades of pale light summoned from both hands, slicing through the first ranks and hacking his way backward. But the thorns kept coming, sprouting new branches as fast as he cut the old ones, and one raked across his thigh and opened a long red line.

Kenzo snarled. He stamped down and raised a flat white wall of light in front of himself, and the thorns crashed against it and stopped. For a moment he had breathing room. He used it to gather the largest spear yet, a lance as long as his arm, blazing so hard that the shadows in the room jumped.

Shuten only smiled. He closed his fist, and something tugged. "Hikiori." The air itself dragged, as though invisible chains had caught the wall and pulled, and Kenzo felt his body slide across the floor toward the thorns despite the boots he dug into the stone. He roared and drove the lance down into the ground to anchor himself, but the white wall buckled and the thorns poured through the gap, and he threw himself sideways at the last moment and rolled across the stone with spines snapping off against his shoulders.

He came up bleeding from a dozen small cuts, breathing hard. Shuten walked toward him without hurry.

"You've done this before," Shuten said, and Ren heard his own mouth form the words, strange and colder than he would ever have said them. "You're better than I expected. But I was fighting wars when your grandfather's grandfather was still learning to walk."

"Then keep talking," Kenzo gasped, and flung the lance.

It struck Shuten full in the chest, and the room went white. Ren felt nothing, but he saw the ground fall away and his body skid back across the stone on its heels, smoke rising from his shirt. A long burn ran across his ribs. Shuten looked down at it, then up at Kenzo, and the red haze around his body deepened to crimson. His eyes burned a bright, flat red.

"That," Shuten said softly, "was a mistake."

He raised both arms. The mana that poured out of him was not the thin thread of Tsuranuki anymore. It was a tide, so heavy that the lamp crystals flickered and the floor groaned, and Kenzo's boots skidded backward without his moving them. "Tenbatsu." The air above Kenzo turned red, and a pillar of condensed mana the width of a doorway came down on him with a roar that shook dust from the walls.

Kenzo threw up everything he had. White walls sprang from the floor in three layers and the pillar went through the first two as if they were paper. The third held for a breath, then buckled inward, and the force of the blow drove him to his knees in the middle of the room. Dust rained from the ceiling. Stone split from wall to wall. His arms shook above his head and then fell, and he knelt there bleeding, panting, finished.

Shuten stepped up and raised his right hand, two fingers leveled at the man's chest. The mana gathering there was dense enough to bend the light around it.

Then the red went out of his eyes.

The numbness drained from Ren all at once. He staggered, blinking, and found himself standing in the middle of a wrecked stone room with his hand raised and two fingers pointed at a scarred man on his knees. "What..." he gasped. "What's going on? What did I just do?"

He looked back at the chair. The straps hung torn on the floor beside it.

Kenzo saw his chance. Even bleeding, he slammed his palm against the stone, and pale walls of light rose on every side of Ren and sealed above his head, forming a perfect cube. It hummed. Ren could feel it pressing against the air inside, and it made his ears pop.

"Cube barrier," Kenzo panted, hauling himself to his feet. "Nothing gets out, not energy and not mana. And every time something inside tries to fight back, it shrinks."

Ren's instinct took over. He threw a burst of mana at the nearest wall with everything he had, a clumsy, shaking wave of heat, and the cube flickered and drew inward as though it had taken a breath. The space around him tightened by an arm's length. His heart jumped into his throat, and he raised his hand to try again.

Stop, Shuten said, weak and strained, as if from the bottom of a well. Do not do that. Look at it.

Ren looked. The walls had crept in so close that he could nearly touch them on both sides, and he understood what they would do if he kept pushing. He lowered his hand.

Listen to me, Shuten went on, and he was quieter now, almost out of breath. My mana is far too strong for that body. You are not built to carry it. The more power I put out, the less time I can stay on the surface before it tears you apart. That is why I had to stop. A moment longer and you would be dead.

Ren stood very still inside the cube. The barrier hummed around him, tight and patient, and he understood why Shuten had fought so hard to keep him alive.

Kenzo wiped blood from his mouth and walked up to the wall of light until they were nearly face to face. He looked at Ren with his one good eye, and it held no kindness at all, only a dirty, exhausted contempt.

"No way you're surviving after this," he said.