He spoke with a voice so thin and quiet it seemed like a secret, as if a sudden breath might shatter the fragile clarity hanging between them.
"I can't grasp the flow of your technique," he admitted. "The energy... I don't know how to grasp it."
She watched him, her brow furrowed with a genuine, gnawing curiosity.
"I can see that," she said softly. "So, if not my way, then what did you do?"
He let out a long, slow breath, his gaze wandering to the horizon where the sky met the water in a jagged line of static. "I tried everything. I tried to force it, to mimic your technique, to borrow that power... but it all felt like a borrowed coat that didn't fit. So, I stopped trying to be a warrior." He looked at his hands, which were stained with the faint, ghostly scent of dried pigment. "I decided to be what I actually am."
She tilted her head, the wind whipping her hair across her face. "What? A swordsman? A hidden heir to some ancient bloodline?"
He laughed, a small, childish dry sound that was lost in the roar of the distant tide. "A painter. My mind is a disaster, chaotic, layered, far too vast for my own good. I just... let it spread. From that ink, I sketched a beginning. This is the first technique of the first chapter. But," he added with a sheepish shrug, "I've only mastered a few strokes so far."
She looked around that gate, looking for the weight of its power. "I don't feel it. There's no pressure, no killing intent. It's... empty."
"Does a drop of ink have the heart to kill?" he asked, his voice playful.
"In the right hands, it can topple empires," she countered instantly.
"Exactly," he said, lifting a finger as if testing the wind. "I simply didn't let you feel the weight. No rage, no thirst. If you don't pour emotion into the brush, the paper stays cool. That's why you sense nothing."
Her skepticism began to melt into a wary, sharp-eyed caution. The air grew heavy with the smell of old parchment and ozone. "What do you call this art?"
"Sage Art," he replied.
"Sage Art..." she echoed, the name tasting like ancient dust on her tongue. "Is that your own definition, or did you find it in a book?"
"If I took it from a book, it wouldn't be mine," he said simply. "It would already be a copy."
He gestured to the massive structure behind them. It loomed like a redwood, half-wood and half-glowing scripture, a torii gate that seemed to be a wound stitched into the very fabric of the realm.
She glanced at the towering tree behind them, its form unnatural, half-symbol and half-living scripture."So that tree… it rose from your idea?"
"Yes. Though it's not truly a tree," he replied. "It's a torii gate. A threshold. I shaped it using the outline of your intent."
"My technique doesn't create gates," she snapped.
He looked at her calmly. "Your last technique; you use it."
She froze, her heart skipping a beat. "How could you possibly know that? You were locked in your own mind. You shouldn't have seen—"
"In this state," he interrupted gently, "everything connects. Intention leaves a trace. Thought bends space before action does. I can feel everything." He frowned slightly. "But this form won't last long."
Silence stretched between them.
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the rhythmic, thundering pulse of the rising gate. Finally, she asked the only question that mattered: "If this is all just imagination... how do you plan to fight?"
He didn't answer with words. He simply turned toward the gate.
The gate groaned, a sound like a thousand lungs exhaling at once, shivering with a deep, tectonic vibration. Then reality split open. From the void beyond the gate, a nightmare poured out—a deluge of shadow, bone, flame, and ancient scripture.
The scenery transformed into a hellish kaleidoscope. Godly soldiers fell from the clouds like shards of a broken sun, their armour bleeding a light so gold it was blinding. They carried wheels of law that spun with a deafening hum, and staffs that sparked with the violet fire of condensed thunder.
Behind them, the demons crawled out of the sea. Skeletal giants, held together by black thread, dragged chains that smelled of copper and old death. Flesh-monsters, bloated and pale, hauled themselves across the sand on hooks made of bone, their many eyes blinking in the harsh, golden light. Floating skulls bobbed in the air like gruesome lanterns, whispering curses that made the very air feel thick and poisonous.
The sky tore wider, revealing six-armed angels who descended like executioners, their hands filled with fire and mirrors. Fairies with steel-veined wings circled overhead, their laughter like the sound of knives sharpening on stone. From the depths of the mercury sea, leviathans rose, their backs carrying the ruins of sunken cities, while kings with rusted tridents stood on the heads of air-breathing sharks.
Millions became an infinite, crushing ocean of steel and malice. The oppression was physical; it felt like being buried alive under the weight of a mountain.
She stumbled back, a thin line of blood running down her chin, her face pale with terror. "This... this is impossible," she whispered. "They're stronger than anything I've ever seen. I can't... I can't help you against this."
He turned to her, and for a moment, he looked almost annoyed, like a child whose drawing had been interrupted.
"Okay, liar," he said, his tone blunt and oddly grounding. "Go sit down over there. Heal your wounds and stop asking so many questions."
She blinked, stunned into silence. "What?"
He waved her off with a flick of his wrist, his eyes already returning to the golden-and-black horizon. "Just sit. Watch. You wanted to know what Sage Art is?" He watched the first line of godly soldiers raise their thunder-staffs, his expression as calm as a summer morning. "Then look carefully."
The ink in the air began to swirl, forming a slow, hypnotic spiral around him.
The air around them was thick with the scent of ozone and copper, a heavy, metallic weight that pressed against the lungs. Above, the sky remained a bruised masterpiece of charcoal and violet, while below, the mercury sea hissed against the jagged shore. He was poised to move, his body a coiled spring of silent intention, when her voice cut through the thundering heartbeat of the realm.
"Wait," she breathed, her voice small against the backdrop of a million screaming demons. "What about a brush? You can't paint without a tool."
He stopped.
For a long, hollow moment, he simply looked at her. His gaze was on the on head. Then, his lips quirked into a ghost of a smile.
In that instant, understanding struck her like a bell.
But she could even gasp, he vanished. Where he had been standing, a sudden flurry of pale plum blossoms unspooled into the air. The petals swirled in a frantic.
Suddenly a sharp, electric sting flared at the back of her head. She spun, her hand flying to her hair, but found only the empty, salt-cracked air. She turned again, stumbling, and there he was, standing exactly where he had started, as if he had never moved at all.
Between his long, ink-stained fingers, he held a thick lock of her hair.
She gasped and clutched her head. A portion of her hair had been cleanly cut, some strands severed, others carefully folded together, braided with a thin black rope bound them, its surface glistening like wet ink. When she touched it, the rope loosened on its own and slid through the air into her hand.
Her breath caught.
The black rope dissolved, spreading and thickening, turning into black fluid. He tore his own long hair. He fused them together. Suddenly from his hand, black and white energy came out and they condensed in air, darkened, compressing into a solid form, becoming the handle, smooth, etched with faint runes that appeared and vanished like thoughts half-remembered.
She stood frozen, her heart hammering against her ribs.
He lifted the newly birthed tool and made a single, sweeping stroke against the empty air, ink gathered. The gesture was careless, almost lazy, but the reality in front of him buckled. A painting bloomed in the void, jagged, ink-wash mountains that looked sharp enough to cut, and a river that seemed to flow with the weight of centuries. For a second, the scenery of the battlefield was replaced by this monochrome paradise, serene and terrifyingly vast, before it shivered and dissolved back into the gray mist.
It was only then, as the ink-mist cleared, that she saw the true horror of his progress.
Hovering behind his shoulders were another small, faint ring.
Her lips trembled, the words barely a whisper. "The intent of ink... at this age... and he hasn't even touched a single drop of energy..."
He didn't look back. He kept his eyes on the horizon, where the first rank of the godly soldiers was finally beginning to move.
.......
He stood atop the precipice, looking down at the crawling mass of soldiers beyond the gate. Their killing intent wasn't just a feeling; it was a physical weight, a black tide that smelled of ozone and ancient, rotting grudges. In the face of it, he didn't flinch. Instead, a small smile touched his lips. He turned his head slightly toward her, his voice as light as a breeze through a mountain pass.
"Go rest," he said, his eyes fixed on the horizon. "I will take care of the scenery here."
She hesitated, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. But she nodded and descended toward the ground, retreating to the shadows, though her gaze never left him.
The soldiers didn't wait. Sensing his momentary distraction, they surged forward with a collective roar that shook the very foundation of the mercury sea.
Before the first divine spear could cross half the distance, the world buckled.
The torii gate didn't just appear; it slammed into reality. The pillars, carved from obsidian-ink and bleeding a pale, ghostly light, cracked the earth where they landed. A sound erupted from within the archway but the overlapping voices of a thousand ancestors, a tectonic groan of weight and history. The shockwave hit the charging vanguard like a physical wall. Men in golden armor were lifted like autumn leaves, their breastplates shattering into brilliant shards before they were flung back into the churning waves.
From the heart of the gate's shadow, a lone figure stepped out.
He was a samurai clad in armour of lacquered bone and obsidian, polished to a mirror finish. His helmet was a featureless void, save for the faint, glowing runes that drifted across its surface. He walked forward with the deliberate, rhythmic pace of a man taking a morning stroll. When his hand came to rest on the hilt of his katana, the screams of the battlefield suddenly went mute.
The blade slid free, and the world died.
A flash of monochrome light, half-ink, half-starlight, sheared through the air. It wasn't just a slash; it was a deletion. The soldiers in the front rank didn't have time to bleed. They were simply erased, their physical forms turning to grey ash that drifted like snow before their minds could even register the end.
The Samurai moved.
A downward stroke: the ground split in a jagged trench, the sheer pressure of the intent pulping the demonic beasts into a soup of black ichor and bone.
A forward thrust: a divine captain's shield, forged in the heavens, shattered like cheap glass, the blade passing through his chest and continuing for a hundred yards, carving a path of silence through the crowd.
It was the most basic of forms.
Above the slaughter, he sat atop the torii gate. His legs were crossed in a perfect meditation pose, his eyes closed to the carnage below. His breathing was slow, a deep, rhythmic pulse that seemed to steady the very air. Only his right hand was active, guiding the brush through the sky in gentle, fluid strokes. He was painting a masterpiece in that bloody battle, and every drop of ash spilled below was just more pigment for his brush.
As his hand flicked upward, the landscape itself began to rise.
Stone and soil surfaced from the void, forming an island suspended in the charcoal clouds. Ink-lines hardened into jagged, vertical cliffs that wept black waterfalls into a sea that now mirrored the violet sky below the Torii gate.
Ten more samurai emerged from the gate, their steps synchronized, their twin blades catching the pale light. Behind them, archers took form, their bows bent into perfect crescents. When they released, the arrows screamed. Each ink-bolt struck with the weight of a falling star, exploding into clouds of killing intent that dissolved anything caught in the blast.
The enemy's discipline broke. The demons, scrambled over each other to escape the encroaching wall of monochrome death. The "Godly" soldiers, their halos flickering and dim, fell back in a blind panic as the obsidian samurai advanced without a single word.
High above, his's brush paused for the first time.
"Battle," he murmured, his voice carrying through the roar of the wind, "is only philosophy written with bodies. When the intent is clear, the form follows. When the form is pure, destruction is as effortless as a single breath."
The survivors turned to flee, but the ground beneath them suddenly groaned and buckled.
The twenty-four guardians were waking up.
One by one, eyes ignited in the darkness, burning gold, abyssal crimson, and cold, lunar silver. Huge stone bodies, etched with forgotten clan crests, began to grind and shift. Ancient joints, rusted by time and silence, shrieked as they moved. Each guardian radiated a pressure so immense that the mercury sea stopped its churning and went as flat as a sheet of lead.
The battlefield fell into a hollow, terrifying silence.
His opened his eyes. They were no longer human. One was a void of black ink; the other, a brilliant, star-flecked white. He lowered his brush to the "paper" of the air once more.
"Second Clause," he whispered. "Infinite Bloom upon the Heartless Sea."
To be Continued...