The mist on the battlefield thickened, smelling of ozone and wet ink. The ten swordsmen and ten archers, despite their flawless samurai armour and disciplined formation, looked like children's toys compared to the nightmare wall of power standing before them. Twenty ink-born warriors stood against twenty-four legends of myth and malice.
The clash began with a violent, jarring speed. The guardians lunged first, their weapons whistling through the air with the weight of falling mountains. One guardian, a hulking beast with the head of a lion, swung a massive blade that cleaved a lead ink-samurai in two. But there was no spray of blood. The ink body simply dissolved into a viscous liquid, the weapon passing through it as if striking a shadow. Before the creature could recover, the ink pooled on the ground, surged behind it, and reformed into a warrior who drove a katana deep into the beast's neck.
Amidst the screaming battlefield, that woman came. She perched calmly atop the massive stone lintel of the gate, looking down at the man commanding the ink.
"You're leaking," she said, her voice cutting through the din.
He didn't look up, his fingers twitching as if pulling invisible strings. "Excuse me?"
"Your power," she clarified. "It's exploding out of you. You're trying to drown them in raw force, but your body can't handle the load. Control it, or it will burn you from the inside out. You'll lose before they do."
The man wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, but with a calmly smile face. "What kind of creatures are these? They feel...."
She scanned the field. "The lineup of hell and heaven. They are the dark mirrors of gods, though these are just fragments and husks of their true forms."
He let out a dry, short laugh. "You're right. They're stone puppets, aren't they? All of them being danced around by those two doragons over there." He pointed toward the two massive, coiled drakes overseeing the carnage.
She laughed at him. "Doragons? You have a strange way of naming. But you aren't wrong. They are the anchors. However, even as puppets, these twenty-four will slaughter your ink soldiers."
The Twenty-Four Guardians.
That woman said about the enemy line up.
The Twelve Hells-Born guardians:
The Shadow-Stalker: A demon that flickered in and out of existence.
The Flesh-Eater: A bloated, pale humanoid with a jaw that unhinged to his chest.
The Ghost-Knight: An armour-clad spirit that radiated a soul-chilling frost.
The Earth-Cracker: A mountain-sized brute with skin like jagged granite.
The Serpent-Queen: A woman from the waist up, trailing a hundred feet of viper tail.
The Blood-Witch: A floating figure draped in red silk that moved like liquid.
The Pale Staring One: A creature covered in unblinking eyes that paralyzed with a look.
The Bone-Collector: A skeletal entity carrying a bag of screaming skulls.
The Void-Dragon: A wingless drake that breathed a mist that dissolved reality.
The Abyssal Drake: A twin to the first, wreathed in black, unquenchable fire.
The Chimera-Lord: A beast of three heads—lion, goat, and snake—each spitting venom.
The King of Ash: A charred, towering warrior wielding a blade of hardened lava.
The Twelve Corrupted Celestials guardians:
The Silent Dancer: A celestial woman with razor-sharp fans and hollow eyes.
The Golden Ape: A warrior with fur of sunlight wielding a staff that lengthened at will.
The Sky-Sovereign: A humanoid bird with wings that created hurricanes with a flap.
The Thunder-Drummer: A blue-skinned giant striking drums to summon lightning.
The Wind-Bringer: A twin to the drummer, carrying a bag that exhaled typhoons.
The Sea-Stalk: A scaled warrior with a trident that commanded the moisture in the air.
The Holy Boar: A massive, tusked deity that charged with the force of a meteor.
The Star-Stag: A glowing deer-like creature whose hooves turned the ground to glass.
The Moon-Archer: A centaur who fired arrows of pure, piercing moonlight.
The Six-Armed Titan: A three-headed monstrosity wielding six different celestial blades.
The Iron Sage: A swordsman in heavy, divine plate armour that no blade could chip.
The Grand Chimera: A fusion of man and beast, radiating an aura of blinding white light.
The man watched as the Six-Armed Titan crushed three of his archers under a single downward strike. "You're right," he muttered, his voice sounding more strained. "I need to finish this. It's taking too much time, and the heat is starting to crack my ribs."
He glanced up at her. "But why did you come back? Why are you sitting there watching me?"
She met his gaze, her expression softening. "The energy there is too volatile. Also from their attacks too much energy is leaking. So, I came here to protect you in any case."
He scoffed, though he didn't look away. "So, the great protector returns. Is it really necessary? Or is it the other way around? Don't worry, I'll be the one protecting you."
"Not entirely true, but think what you like," she replied, hopping down from the gate. "Look at the battlefield. Their energy strikes are shearing the very banks of the river away. I needed a position where I could safely replenish my own energy while the world ends around us. And you should stop talking, your ink isn't holding."
The man's lips curled into a sly, lopsided grin. The ink-soldiers were indeed being pulverized, turning back into useless puddles under the onslaught.
"Is that so?" he whispered.
He didn't look at the monsters anymore, nor at the dragons. He simply stared at the centre of the battlefield and moved his hand in a slow, sweeping arc.
"Watch closely," he said, his eyes glowing with a dark, liquid light. "The play is only just beginning."
..........
The air grew thick with the smell of iron and old parchment. As the man's hand moved in the air, a spectral brush seemed to follow his fingers, tracing invisible calligraphy against the backdrop of the dying sky. The woman watched him, her eyes flitting between his intense, heartless smile and the meat-grinder of the battlefield below.
The ink warriors were no longer just soldiers; they had become a fluid, cohesive force. Every time a guardian's blade shattered a samurai, the ink didn't just fall—it surged. Puddles of black liquid rushed together like magnetic mercury, merging and reforming in the blink of an eye. Two fallen swordsmen would melt into the earth only to rise as a single, hulking monstrosity with four arms, or a wall of obsidian spikes that impaled anything caught in the transition.
The archers, too, had abandoned their traditional bows. They pulled long, viscous strands of ink from the air, shaping them into massive, jagged bolts that whistled with the sound of screaming ghosts as they tore through the guardians' ranks.
The Cycle of the Undead
It was a stalemate of attrition. A samurai would take the head of a demonic dragon, only to be crushed an instant later by the Six-Armed Titan. But as the man's ink soldiers reformed, something shifted in the enemy.
As the broken bodies of the guardians began to fall toward the churning water below, they didn't splash. An invisible, gravitational force caught them in mid-air. Limbs of stone and wings of shadow began to knit together, bone fusing with divine gold.
"Don't get too confident," she warned, her voice strained as she sat in a meditative posture, a soft glow surrounding her as she forced her own internal energy to knit her wounds. "They have the same undead resilience as your ink. They are built from their primordial clay, half-divine, half-demonic. They can't die so long as the dragons live."
The battlefield was now a horrifying mosaic of fused flesh and ink. The twenty-four guardians had compressed their essence, merging their powers. A celestial archer now had the wings of a hell-drake; a demonic giant wielded a sword made of frozen starlight. Their combined energy lashed out in a wave of raw destruction, vaporizing a dozen of the man's constructs in a single blast.
The Assassin's Rise
The man didn't flinch. His smile grew wider, but it remained cold, a predator's grin that lacked any human warmth.
"Gaining power from me, are they?" he whispered, his voice a low hiss. "Let's see if they can stomach it."
His ink army began to collapse inward, sacrificing numbers for terrifying quality. The ten swordsmen merged until only five remained—towering, knight-like figures draped in capes of flowing ink. The archers vanished entirely, their collective essence pouring into a single figure: The Assassin.
This new creation was a shadow given form. It wore no heavy plate, only sleek, midnight-colored leather that seemed to swallow the light. A dozen "whistle daggers"—blades that shrieked as they cut the air—orbited its body like a lethal ring of Saturn. With a flick of the Assassin's wrist, the daggers would expand to the size of broadswords, decapitating guardians before retreating back into their spinning orbit.
A Symphony of Elements
The clash escalated into a divine disaster. Every swing of a guardian's weapon summoned natural catastrophes—torrents of fire, jagged bolts of crimson lightning, and gusts of wind that could flay skin from bone.
But that boy was no longer just throwing ink; he was mimicking her.
Using the fluid potential of his medium, his five knights began to execute sword techniques that belonged to the woman watching from the gate. They moved with the grace of the Plum Blossom Sword, their strikes leaving trails of ink petals that exploded on contact. They shifted into the Moon Maiden's Stance, their blades flickering like moonlight on water, bypassing the guardians' heavy armour entirely.
"You're a heretic," she muttered, watching him copy her life's work with such effortless cruelty. "Using my skills through those... things."
He chuckled, a dry, rhythmic sound. "Try to mimic me, then," he directed at the guardians. "See if your stone bodies can handle the rhythm of a heart that doesn't beat."
The Desperation of the Dragons
The tide began to turn. The twenty-four guardians had been whittled down to ten. But these remaining ten were the elite, larger, swifter, and radiating an aura of pure malice. They moved with a desperate, frantic energy as they realized their numbers were failing.
High above, perched on the crown of the Great Gate, the two "doragons" looked down at the carnage. Their scales rattled with a metallic sound as they spoke in a tongue that vibrated in the marrow of the man's bones.
"What a terrifying intent," the first dragon hissed, its eyes like burning coals. "He has tapped into the true potential of the ink. He is a heretic of the highest order. At this rate, he will dismantle the gate's defences."
"Our time in this realm is limited as our energy," the second dragon replied, its voice a low rumble of thunder. "If we do not stop him now, the seal will claim us again, and we will be trapped in the stone for another thousand years."
The first dragon looked at the man, then at the woman healing herself nearby. "How do we kill something that has no heart to pierce?"
The second dragon's eyes narrowed, a cruel light flickering within. "Do not worry. We still have the last weapon. The fail-safe of the gods."
Both dragons nodded in grim unison. Below them, boy continued his dark conducting, unaware, or perhaps simply uncaring that the architects of this hell were about to flip the board entirely.
Those two dragons perched atop the gate finally understood: brute force was a failing currency. They exchanged a look, their ancient minds communicating in a silent flash of intent. They began to channel something unseen, a hidden desperation humming through the air, but that boy was already three steps ahead of them.
He closed his eyes. The world seemed to hold its breath.
The tip of his spectral brush dipped, striking the empty air as if it were the surface of a still lake. A ripple expanded outward, visible and violent, shimmering with a distorted light. The woman, still focused on her own recovery, gasped as she felt the atmospheric pressure shift. She looked at him and saw a terrifying transformation: within that ring, six ethereal lotus flowers bloomed like a celestial headband.
On the battlefield, his remaining ink constructs, he five knights and the shadow assassin, did not charge. Instead, they collapsed into one another, their forms liquefying and stretching until they forged a single, titanic blade of pure, obsidian ink. The sword hung in the air for a fraction of a second before swinging in a massive horizontal arc.
The "Burst of the Void" followed.
The remaining guardians were caught in the wake of the ink energy. The strike didn't just cut their stone and spirit bodies in half; it infected them. Where the ink touched their wounds, it began to erode them like acid eating through silk. Several guardians hacked away their own infected limbs to survive, but three were too slow. They were swallowed by the black rot, dissolving into nothingness before they could even hit the ground.
The Great Dissolve
The man opened his eyes. The deep, liquid black was gone, replaced by a haunting, dead ash colour.
From that Torii gate, a thick, fog began to pour out. It moved like a flood, submerging the samurai, the guardians, and the very ground they stood upon.
"What is this?" the first dragon hissed, its vision obscured by the swirling haze. "This black fog... it's choking the light."
The second dragon narrowed its eyes, its divine perception straining. "It isn't black, brother. Look closer. It's white. Pure, blinding white."
"An illusion?" the first recoiled. "He's weaving black and white together to blind our very souls. I can't feel the guardians."
The fog was a sensory vacuum. It stripped away the sound of the wind and the scent of the blood. Then, a low, tectonic rumbling began, the sound of something massive rising from the depths of the void.
As the fog began to dissipate, the dragons and the surviving guardians found themselves no longer on the riverbank. They were standing in the basin of a gargantuan valley that hadn't existed minutes ago. Jagged, impossible mountains rose on all sides, boxing them in.
The layout was a twisted mirror of two worlds. On one side stood the Guardians' gate, perched precariously on a high plateau with stairs of divine gold and bloody pitch. On the opposite side stood Torii gate, grounded firmly on a field where plum blossoms fell like black and white snow.
Then came the sound of rushing water.
It started as a trickle from the base of the Torii gate, then exploded into a deluge. In an instant, the floor of the valley was swallowed by a vast, silver pond. From the peaks of the newly formed mountains, colossal waterfalls plummeted downward, the roar of the crashing water filling the basin.
The man stood atop the gate.
"Clause Two: Infinite Bloom Upon the Heartless Sea."
The silver water began to churn. A single, vibrant green leaf broke the surface, followed by another, and another. Then, a tightly wound bud emerged, emerald and pink. It trembled for a second before blooming with a violent, beautiful suddenness.
Within heartbeats, the entire "sea" was a carpet of thousands of blooming lotuses. The valley was no longer a battlefield; it was a garden of silent, overwhelming beauty.
The two dragons looked down from their heights, their hearts thumping with a primal fear they hadn't felt in eons.
"There is no killing intent," the first dragon whispered, its voice trembling. "I feel no malice. No anger. Just... emptiness. Why is it so big? Why can't I feel the edge of his power?"
"Something is wrong," the second dragon roared, its scales standing on end. "This isn't just an illusion. Use the Divine Eye! Peel back the layers! We need to see what lies beneath these flowers before they swallow us whole!"
The woman stood by the man's side, staring at the endless flowers. She realized then that his "heartless" smile wasn't a choice but it was a requirement. To command a sea this vast, one had to give up the very thing that made them human.
To be Continued...