—Broadcast—
Nefertari Cobra was still breathing.
That was the only good thing that could be said about his condition. He was in Vivi's arms on the floor of the mausoleum, and he could not move, and the weight of everything that had happened — the extraction, the clone's intrusion through his memories, the knowledge taken out of him like something physical — had reduced him to a stillness that looked, from a distance, like the thing that came after breathing.
Vivi knew they weren't leaving this place. She had understood it when Naraku followed them in and the entrance closed behind them, and she had chosen not to spend her remaining time on the calculation of how to escape something that couldn't be escaped. She held her father and kept her eyes open and waited.
Goshinki's patience had limits.
The clone — nearly ten meters of it, appetite undiminished by the work it had already done tonight — looked at the father and daughter on the floor with the specific interest of something that has been told to wait and is no longer interested in waiting. It had a preference for women, and what Cobra's old bones could offer was adequate at best.
"Lord Naraku." Its voice carried the formality of hierarchy wrapped around something that wasn't formal at all. "Are these two still of use to you? If not — I would like to eat them."
Rengoku Kyojuro stepped in front of Vivi.
He did not have an order from Naraku. He had a compulsion that sat below the level of the demon-form's control, something structural in him that the demonic power had not reached, and it moved his transformed body between the princess and the clone before the decision had fully formed in whatever part of him was still making decisions.
"Whoever comes first is my prey." His voice came out wrong — too flat, the demon's register — but the words were entirely his own. "If you want to eat something, go find it outside."
Goshinki looked at him with the expression of something that has just been told an interesting lie.
"You are neither demon nor devil." It did not need to search his thoughts — the answer was obvious from the surface. "I can see exactly what you are. And your status is below mine." It took one step forward. "Standing up for food deserves punishment."
The confrontation didn't resolve. Naraku's attention had moved.
He stood before the Poneglyph.
His fingers moved across the surface of the stone with a quality that was not quite reverence and not quite anything familiar — the attention of something that had outlasted the era that produced what it was touching, and understood what it was reading, and found in that understanding something it hadn't expected to find.
The stone was old in a way that made the mausoleum around it feel recent. Every carved character had been placed by hands that had been dust for a thousand years, and the content of those carvings had been protected, transferred, memorized, and died for across the full span of the time since. The Nefertari had given up their place among the Celestial Dragons to stay on the ground with it. Kings had carried it alone to their graves.
Naraku read it.
"A pity to leave it here," he said, quietly, to himself or the stone. "All thirty pieces gathered together would produce something that goes beyond written records."
His tentacles emerged without urgency and enclosed the Poneglyph from every side simultaneously. When they withdrew, the stone was gone — absorbed into the body of the great demon for transport, compact and accessible, removed from the tomb where it had stood for centuries in an action that took less than a minute.
The space where it had been was just space now.
Vivi's tears fell on her father's face and Cobra came back.
Not fully — his eyes opened with the effort of something working against its own conclusion, consciousness finding a thread and pulling on it because there was something unfinished. He looked at his daughter's face above him, blood-streaked from the splatter of earlier, and managed an expression that was entirely Cobra and nothing else.
"Father." She pressed her hand against his face. "You almost—"
"I know." His voice had almost nothing behind it. What it had was sufficient. He looked at her for a moment just to look at her.
Then he turned his head toward Naraku.
"You took the Poneglyph," he said. The words came slowly, but they came in order. "This isn't the first time you've taken one. What use is a human record to something like you?" He stopped to gather the next sentence. "The ancient text is ours. It belongs to human history. The people who carved it were human. The people who died protecting it were human."
Naraku turned from the empty space where the stone had been.
"You're right," he said. "The records are human work. Entirely. Your species has a talent for preservation — carving truth into stone rather than trusting it to memory or blood." Something moved in the red eyes that might have been acknowledgment. "But before I became what I am, I was also human. And what your kind in power does with the truth — hiding it, hoarding it, deciding who is permitted to know what — you are not worthy of keeping it."
He looked at Cobra a moment longer, then looked away.
He did not look at Goshinki. He simply moved his eyes toward the clone in the way of someone indicating a direction.
Goshinki understood immediately.
"No—" Vivi pulled her father tighter. "Let him go, let him—"
The clone moved faster than her arms could compensate for. It took Cobra from her grip without particular effort, the strength differential absolute, and she was left with empty hands and her father already gone from her reach. She got to her feet and ran toward the clone and there was nothing she could do — Rengoku was between her and it in the next moment, not stopping her, but also stopped himself, his transformed body refusing the order his mind was sending, the compulsion toward intervention real and insufficient.
Goshinki opened its mouth.
What it did to Nefertari Cobra was not quick. It was not meant to be.
Blood reached Vivi's face in the first moment. She did not close her eyes. She had decided somewhere in the last hour that she would not give these things the satisfaction of her looking away from anything they did, and she kept that decision now even as her face changed into something that had no name she recognized, beauty and blood occupying the same space in a way that neither belonged in.
She could not move. She could not stop it. She could not help.
Rengoku Kyojuro stood beside her and was equally useless, and the two of them together watched Nefertari Cobra die in the royal mausoleum of his own family, in a country that had never harmed anyone, because the strong found the weak and consumed them and the gap between the two did not negotiate.
The weak were food. That was the ecology of this room, tonight.
The mausoleum was very quiet when it was over.