Bitter regret and terrible sorrow. Cries of agony upon the dying lips of those she loved but could not save. The dreadful grasp of helplessness as she ran away, impotent to do anything but desperately flee for her life.
Cold, toxic rage. Pain...
Pain.
‘Where are you right now?’
The question had been asked in Japanese, and it took her a few seconds to fully process it in her disorientated condition.
Evelyn spluttered on the floor as she tried to recover her breathing, wincing as she nursed her head where she’d just been struck. She looked down at the padded mat she was hunched upon, barely seeing its dark green colouration in the dreary half-light of the dojo. Her arms and legs felt bruised where she’d just exchanged blocks and counters with her opponent. Her right fist was trembling with a slight palsy. She could feel the cool sheen of sweat that coated her entire body, soaking her light sportswear and causing it to stick to her flushed skin.
She slowly raised her head, brushing her short blonde fringe away from her eyes as she looked up at her opponent. No lights were on within the dojo, leaving the pale moonlight from the windows as the only source of light to work with, and in the poor lighting she could only just make out the powerful form of her opponent.
Swathed in the shadows of the dojo, Shingen Kamura looked down upon her, his expression cold and unreadable. In stark contrast to Evelyn, he stood stone-still and unaffected, giving no sign he had exerted himself at all.
Evelyn frowned, trying to blink away the spots that swam in her vision as she recovered herself. ‘What do you mean?’ she answered in English.
‘It is a simple question,’ her master persisted in Japanese, ‘Where are you?’
She rocked herself backwards into a sitting position as she continued to try and catch her breath, this time answering in Japanese, ‘I’m here. Obviously.’
Kamura shook his head, ‘No, you aren’t here. If you were here, you wouldn’t have received such a simple strike. Where did you go? The past? The future?’
Evelyn growled with frustration, ‘Simple? Are you freaking kidding me? I’ve never seen you do that move before, you condescending bastard – there was nothing simple about it. I was right here,’ she shrugged her shoulders, ‘I just couldn’t do anything about it.’
It wasn’t a technically correct statement. If she were allowed to use her powers then she could have probably done something to stop the blow from falling, but for these sparring sessions Kamura had forbidden her from using her meta talents.
Her mentor shook his head once more, ‘Untrue, Eve-kun. If you had been in the moment, if you had been in the fight, then you would have evaded it and we would still be fighting even now. But your mind went elsewhere. I want to know where was more important than here.’
Evelyn stared up at him angrily for several long seconds before she answered, ‘I... I was just thinking that this isn’t fair.’
An imperceptible smile curled the edge of Kamura’s mouth, ‘You left the fight so that you could reflect on fairness?’
‘Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?’ Evelyn shot back at him, returning to speaking in English, ‘You’re gonna stand there and make fun of the teenage girl you just punched in the face - I hope you’re proud of yourself.’
The smile widened, threatening to break into a laugh, ‘If I had known that was what you were thinking, I would have hit you harder. Tell me, why were you daydreaming about fairness?’
Evelyn glared at him, ‘Because this just isn’t possible - fighting you is impossible. What is the point in it? It’s completely unfair.’
Kamura raised his right hand to thoughtfully stroke his short-trimmed goatee, ‘Explain why.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ Evelyn pouted, ‘You are far stronger than me, far faster than me, you weigh far more than me, you have far more experience than me, you are far smarter than me, you’ve got far more stamina than me.’ She raised her hands in exasperation, ‘You freaking trained me, so you know literally everything I am capable of and everything I’m trying to do. You’re a grown man; I’m a girl. Evolution has worked to make you the most capable at hunting and conquering – where evolution just gave me a whole load of crap to make and nurture babies.’
She clenched her fists and punched them down into the mat, ‘In a physical fight I will never, ever, ever, stand a chance against you. It doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I train, how gruelling a fitness regime I live by – I will never beat you. It’s freaking hopeless.’
Kamura inclined his head as he studied her, ‘Do you really believe that, Eve-kun? Or are you just trying to excuse surrender?’
Evelyn shot back to her feet, somehow incensed by the suggestion. ‘Have you ever, in your whole life, lost a fight?’
Kamura shrugged, ‘No.’
‘But you think I’m capable of ending that streak? Really? A teenage girl?’
‘Not if you keep on behaving like such a brat, no,’ Kamura allowed.
She took a threatening step towards her master, ‘If I’m a brat then you’re a bully. At least have the decency to admit that this is a fight I could never win.’
Kamura held her gaze as silence descended over them again for a few tense moments.
‘Do you imagine,’ he said at last, ‘that I was advantaged against all of the opponents that I defeated?’
Evelyn took a breath to answer, but held it as she considered the question more carefully. She saw amusement in Kamura’s eyes as he watched her weigh it up.
‘I have faced many adversaries with greater abilities than me, on one axis or another, but their advantage did not bring them victory – do you know why?’
Evelyn pursed her lips, ‘Because you had the initiative?’
He shook his head, ‘Because they were wasteful and I was not. Because I took risks when they were necessary, and committed myself completely to the contest – and they did not.’ His impassive gaze bore into her, ‘They squandered precious moments thinking about the past or the future; considering such useless concepts as fear, regret, or anger. They were not wholly in the moment, and so their advantage was rendered useless to them. They hesitated; I did not.’
Kamura shifted his weight on the spot, adopting a casual hapkido stance, the small gesture enough to make Evelyn tense and take a wary step backwards.
‘I remain in the moment, and I don’t distract myself with petulant thoughts that only blunt my purpose.’ He edged forwards, ‘If you do not do the same then you truly won’t stand a chance of overcoming me. Now, come at me again – and this time keep your focus here, where you have agency.’
Evelyn sighed with frustration as she rolled her joints in readiness to spar once again, ‘But I’m tired...’
‘Everyone is tired,’ Kamura interrupted sternly, ‘We are all born tired, we all live tired, and we all die tired. What is it you Americans like to say?’ He shifted briefly to speaking in English, ‘Suck it up.’
She giggled as she lowered herself into a fighting stance, returning to addressing her master in Japanese, ‘Using my own culture against me? You monster.’
‘If it is an effective weapon, I will use it,’ Kamura replied dryly, ‘Take more risks this time – you need to. There is no room for doubt.’
Evelyn began to circle him, placing herself so that her back was towards where the moonlight crept in from the windows. ‘That’s my problem, actually – I don’t doubt that you’ll crush me again.’
Kamura’s subtle smirk returned, ‘One day, Eve-kun, you will doubt it, and on that day all of these hidings will have been worth it. I will make a blade of you yet, and then there will be no stopping you. Now... begin!’
The two figures flashed towards one another in a blur of movement, coming together in a kinetic, fluid exchange of blocks and counters as they danced around each other.
Where are you right now?
Time itself seemed to slow; the inevitability of what was coming making it seem a lifetime in unfolding.
The storm had come to a brief, exaggerated, calm. The black clouds that surrounded the dark skies were beginning to turn grey on the eastern horizon as the dawn light struggled to break through. While the rooftop was still lashed by rain, the roaring wind had died down almost to nothing, leaving a serene silence in its wake, punctuated only by the constant pattering of the rain.
Smoke still danced around the periphery of the rooftop, shrouding everything in defiance of the storm’s wrath as it billowed in great black plumes from the fires still burning around the tower. The ghost-mist of the Shadows had thinned and cleared around most of the rooftop, revealing the flickering, cavorting silhouettes of the Shadows as they each paused to direct their attention toward the top of the helipad.
Battered, unconscious bodies littered the walkways, forgotten by their comrades and lying in mute testament to the quality of the man that was about to die.
Amongst the defeated forms lay the sizzling, sparking ruins of eight of the ten dragons, each riddled with the manifold blows that had been necessary to put them down. Their unambiguous hostility ringed the rooftop with countless craters and bullet holes.
The access elevator still burned brightly, lighting up the majority of the rooftop in hues of angry orange as it vomited up yet more black smoke into the night sky. Cypher and Tigra’s shattered forms were still visible at the foot of the furnace, still locked in their forlorn final embrace as the flames licked at their charred bodies.
And there, at the top of the helipad, wreathed in cackling flames and flanked by the supine forms of Tengo and Kabuki, knelt the heaving, beleaguered form of Shingen Kamura. The great man’s body was covered in flesh wounds, his suit of armour torn and shattered in multiple places, clearly powered down in the face of its extensive damage, and he cradled his broken arm as he struggled to cough up the blood that blocked his airways. His blood pooled onto the ground beneath him, leaving his body in cruel gouts as he laboured even now to recover.
It was the saddest, most painful thing that Evelyn had ever seen – and she knew it was yet to get worse. She had seen the great man overcome overwhelming odds in the past, coming back from terrible injuries and defeating what seemed to be impossible foes, but she knew that this time was different. His injuries were never this serve; the odds never this overwhelming. Though her heart wished dearly to deny it, her training told her that Kamura’s injuries were already fatal. No doubt Kamura was already aware of the same stark reality.
Evelyn’s heart sank in her chest as she watched each second pass into the next. The remaining two dragons stalked around the edges of the helipad, like a pack of wolves as they patiently regarded their adversary’s demise. Azuka and the rest of the chosen Shadows pulled back a few paces from Kamura as they made way for the Hydra lord to finish his work, snapping into sudden stillness as they prepared to watch the same inevitable moment as Evelyn.
They had waited so long to witness this.
Azul, the Hydra lord, loomed largest of all on the helipad as he stepped up purposefully behind the fallen hero. His mechanised augmetics hissed as he moved, venting grey fumes from the exhaust pipes extending out from his shoulders as they powered his hulking body. The six black mechanised tendrils protruding from his back snapped and screeched around Kamura, each sharp face seeming to want to enact their own malicious will as if separate from Azul, before instead curling in a wide arc around Kamura as if trying to create a giant cage around him - or perhaps as some kind of symbolic embrace. Azul himself smouldered with residual heat, still giving off flecks of embers that cascaded out into the still night air, and the rain hissed and evaporated off his form in constant little puffs of steam. He flexed his clawed fingers impatiently as he stood over his defeated opponent, unconsciously summoning swirls of flames, as his glowing augmetic eyes locked on Kamura, savouring the moment as much as Evelyn despaired at it.
Kamura’s bloodshot eyes momentarily scrambled about in his head as his mind raced to respond to his circumstances, before the tension fell from his face and was replaced with a calm look of acceptance. In that moment, his serene gaze swept up to meet Evelyn’s despondent one. He looked knowingly back at her, making his visage briefly appear as measured and unfazed as the master had ever looked; for one last time appearing to Evelyn as the embodiment of goodness in a world of cruelty and madness.
The ghost of a smile touched his lips as he looked down on his protégé. It was a smile that would haunt Evelyn for the rest of her life, wondering what the great man had been thinking in these final moments. Had she made him proud? Was he amused? Was he hallucinating? Was he simply trying to offer her comfort? She would never know.
It was barely more than a second, but for Evelyn it felt like a lifetime.
Then the moment was cut short as Azul’s metallic left hand grabbed a fist-full of Kamura’s hair and yanked backwards on his head, partially lifting the exhausted hero and completely exposing his throat.
Evelyn stepped off the unconscious form of Razer as she moved to respond, feeling her own fear making her clumsy and slow as she tried vainly to stop this nightmare from unfolding. Azul’s menacing red eyes moved up from Kamura to lock on to her as she moved, glaring at her as he
brought his right hand around to grip Kamura’s bare throat. The great man winced in pain as the tender skin of his neck began to boil and blister under the intense heat of the Hydra lord’s power, but still Kamura kept his composure.
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ Evelyn muttered to herself in a panic as she continued rushing up towards the helipad, feeling a squall of emotion erupting within her chest that threatened to topple all the years of training that Kamura had instilled in her.
Azul’s scratchy electronic voice bubbled from the grill of his mouth, ‘You have cost me much, Shingen, but I will cost you far more.’ His grip tightened on Kamura’s throat, ‘Men like you have no place in the new age, Shingen. You are the past; I am the future.’
Evelyn stumbled as she ran, her desperate haste making her miss her footing as she reached the stairs of the helipad. Her gaze remained locked with Kamura’s, her eyes pleading him to save himself; pleading him to make everything alright so that she wouldn’t have to face the terrible pain that was coming.
Azul lowered himself so that his face was right behind Kamura’s right ear, ‘Know this, fool: I will make your girl scream in agony until her lungs fail her before I permit her wretched existence to end. She will burn and bleed, and cry and beg – for days – and I will laugh. I will visit such abuse and indignity upon her that she will forget all virtue and reason. I will break her and reshape her, over and over again, until the last thing she ever knows, the only thing she even thinks, is how much of a pathetic fool Shingen Kamura was.’
The grip constricted further, the talons of Azul’s fingers beginning to burrow into Kamura’s neck, ‘Let that be your final thought, Shingen.’
Evelyn openly sobbed as she watched it happen, ‘No! Please, no!’
Kamura’s body convulsed and he gulped in his last lungful of air. With monumental effort, he managed to compel his body into one final act.
He spoke his last words.
‘It’s okay, Eve. You... are... ready.’
Azul growled with dissatisfaction that his foe didn’t even deign to respond to his taunts, and swiped his smouldering hand back and away from Kamura’s throat.
Tearing the seared flesh away with his hand.
‘No!’ Evelyn screamed, falling to her knees and skidding to a halt as she watched the life fall from Kamura’s glazed eyes. She felt a sudden exhaustion, like her body had become disconnected from what was happening, and she sagged in on herself as she cried uncontrollably, still unable to tear her gaze from her broken master.
Azul basked in the moment of his victory. He stared down at the hysterically weeping woman at the foot of the stairs, enjoying the ruptured composure from her that he had sought to attain from Kamura. He callously discarded the ruined hero, hefting his limp body and throwing it to land in a heap at the top of the stairs.
At his back the two remaining dragons flanked their master in readiness for his next command, and the chosen Shadows each turned their gaze from Kamura to his pupil. Around the rest of the rooftop the remaining Shadows, too, were turning their attention towards Evelyn.
‘Foolish girl. You should have run while you had the chance.’
Evelyn barely heard him. She was too swept up in her own grief to acknowledge much beyond the sight of Kamura’s dead body. She clung to herself as she tried to contain the wave of emotions.
The only man that had ever made the world make sense to her was gone, and she had failed to save him.
She lowered her gaze from Kamura and sank her head into her hands as she struggled to process it, her tears wracking her body as if in a violent spasm. Years of suppressed emotion were finally rising to the surface as Evelyn’s training and composure slipped entirely.
Azul stepped forwards, causing his assorted minions to tense and ready themselves to return to action. ‘Are you afraid, girl?’ he rasped in amusement, ‘Does it trouble you to be all alone again? Does it frighten you to face me without your master’s shadow to hide in? How many times did he save you tonight?’
The Hydra lord was badly misjudging the reaction Evelyn was having.
The tumult of emotion was changing. The regret and the sorrow were momentarily becoming checked by the ascendance of an even greater feeling. The pain and fear were withering away as they were fed upon by something even more familiar to Evelyn.
Rage.
Azul barked with cruel laughter as he looked down on Evelyn’s huddled form. ‘Take her.’
The Shadows from around the rooftop were in sudden, blurring motion as they snapped into action to finish the fight. The moved noiselessly as they leapt and flipped over the walkways and ventilation ducts of the rooftop towards her, converging from all sides.
Evelyn opened her eyes, feeling her seething anger quell her mind and focus her thoughts. Sharp blue light beamed from her gaze as she bolted back to her feet in readiness to resume the fight.
I’ll kill you.
As her whole body began to pulse with the blue light of her powers, she looked up to meet Azul’s gaze, her fiery blue eyes meeting his baleful red ones.
I. Will. Kill. You.
She was a sudden tidal wave of lightning-fast movement as the first of the Shadows reached her, flowing around the ninja like water as she outmanoeuvred his strikes and slammed his head down to the first concrete step.
In that moment the calm of the storm passed, and the true force of the tempest arrived in earnest.
Evelyn was violence in motion as she powered from one assailing Shadow to the next. No attack came unseen and no misdirection found any effect on her as she defeated one assailant after another. Impatient that they weren’t arriving on the ends of her fists fast enough, she reached out with her mind and enveloped the furthest Shadow in a ball of force before summoning him to arrive at her spinning kick like a missile. Even as she acted, she fired off multiple balls of force that rippled off of her like a barrage of rockets that connected with the ninjas with percussive booms that matched the intensity of the surrounding thunder.
Her cloak coiled and danced around her as if with a life of its own, striking with eye-blink speed at any Shadow within its reach or grappling them in quick, jerking motions that threw them or pulled them into a vulnerable position to receive one of her strikes. The fabric also protected the wrathful girl like a guardian angel, parrying attacks and shrouding her from projectiles with preternatural ease.
Azul inclined his head as he watched the impressive spectacle. The girl had been notable earlier, exhibiting skilful training and a truly formidable meta talent, and all the assembled members of the Black Hydra had already come to respect what she was capable of.
But she had never been like this.
Her every move and counter was perfect, immediately reminiscent of Kamura. Her use of her power was masterful, towards a level that Azul had seen only rarely from other metas, and the power itself was an awesome, beautiful thing to behold. Her reflexes and rapid-paced decisions placed her one or two steps ahead of the henchmen she was dispatching at every turn.
It was magnificent to witness.
As her movement increased even further, she was beginning to swipe at Shadows that weren’t even within reach yet, but a blue-lit silhouette of the girl would momentarily blink into existence before them and strike them in the same way as she was moving, before blinking back into nothingness.
Blood was beginning to fall from the girl’s nose, giving evidence to the terrible toll the exertion of her abilities was taking, but she was heedless to it as she turned her animosity towards the helipad. She flicked out behind her and suddenly she was enveloped in thick, swirling smoke similar to the ghost-mist that the Shadows themselves were using. A mere heartbeat after that, discs of blinding white light exploded around the exterior of the smoke, canvasing the bottom of the stairs in debilitating noise.
All except for Azul shielded their eyes from the unexpected ploy.
Then she shot out of her smoke-screen, unaffected by her own ruse as she charged up the stairs to face the Hydra lord.
Azul opened his arms in a beckoning gesture, ‘Come. Show me your power, girl.’
Evelyn’s charge up the stairs was interrupted by the chosen Shadows descending the stairs to
face her, meeting her in a flurry of blows and parries from their gauntlets and weapons.
Perhaps if the chosen Shadows hadn’t been so grievously worn out by their fight with Kamura, or perhaps if they still possessed their full armaments with which to fight the enraged girl, they would have given her a challenging fight.
Perhaps.
As it was, they succeeded in stunning her with a couple of hits before she cried out an animal shriek and released a wave of force from her body that enveloped a full metre around her, making the air resistant to any attempt to move through it. The chosen Shadows flailed as they tried to move through the glowing air that surrounded them, making them look almost like they were moving underwater, while the girl moved unhindered within the bubble of force.
She struck around herself in a frenetic series of attacks, building up a ball of force in each palm before explosively releasing them with each impact she made on her ensnared opponents. Blood misted the night air around her as she inflicted terrible internal injuries on them.
As suddenly as she released it, the bubble of force popped and the chosen Shadows captured within it simply fell limp and unconscious to the floor, spilling down the stairs one after the other.
Azul laughed, the noise leaving his augmetic grill as a harsh buzz. It had been a long time since he had ever seen another meta use their power to the same level as he could. He backed up a step as Evelyn launched herself back into motion up the stairs.
The remnants of the chosen Shadows met her at the top of the stairs, led by Azuka. They moved more cautiously than their fellows had, now more appreciative of the risk posed by the rampaging girl.
They exchanged blocks, counters and dodges as their martial and physical training was tested to the limit. There was a rapid series of flashes as the foes each attempted to use their tools for misdirection against each other, and the fight was soon enshrouded in smoke as both deployed their
ghost-mists to add further complication to their fight. Shadow fought with shadow within the dark cloud.
Evelyn fired a number of bolts of force, but each was evaded by her cunning adversaries as they sought to finally lay a decisive blow on her with their poisoned blades.
The brief stalemate might have gone on, if not for Evelyn’s cloak.
Her control over the weapon gave her an edge that gradually tipped the fight in her favour as the chosen Shadows were foiled by its defence and then, one by one, were caught off guard by its sudden movements to strike or grab them from unexpected angles.
After a frantic exchange that lasted mere moments in real-time, but had passed like an age to the combatants, Azuka was the last of the Shadows still standing.
The younger girl was panting with exhaustion as she staggered backwards from Evelyn.
‘It must be nice to wield the weapons of a god,’ the girl hissed, speaking in her native Japanese.
Evelyn didn’t even answer back. She was beyond caring about these exchanges. Instead she took advantage of her opponent’s attempt at stalling the fight. Building up a ball of intense force between her hands, she changed forwards and fired it, not at Azuka directly, but at Azuka’s feet.
Azuka’s eyes widened as she realised that she couldn’t evade what was coming. She cried out and attempted to fire off the shuriken from her gauntlets, but it was too late.
The ball hit the ground in an explosive release of energy that lit the helipad in brilliant blue light, and the concussive force lifted Azuka vertically into the air - where she could do nothing to control her movement. Evelyn arrived carrying her momentum into a spinning kick to the girl’s stomach, forcing Azuka to double in on herself to mitigate the blow and leaving her open to a final strike from Evelyn’s cloak-tail. The tail of her cloak coiled over her head and struck down at the vulnerable girl, smashing her between her eyes like a fist and sending her instantly unconscious.
Evelyn whirled around immediately afterwards, facing the oncoming attack of Azul’s dragons as they finally released their wrath upon her.
The cloak uncoiled and spread itself before her as a shield to meet the rapid cannon fire of the dragons, their shots blanketing the rooftop in a deafening roar. The first of the obsidian machines propelled itself around her side, continuing to release its guns on her, but Evelyn had heard it coming and was already prepared to meet it.
These were machines. Everything that Kamura had taught Evelyn about holding her power back to preserve life did not apply to them – so she was going to hold absolutely nothing back.
She thrust her hand out as if to strike at the dragon’s gun-arm, and a spectral blue silhouette of her blinked before the dragon carrying the same movement, knocking the arm enough to deflect its aim from killing her. She followed up almost simultaneously, giving a primal bellow as she summoned a giant ball of force from her other hand, firing it at the dragon before it could recover its aim. The ball of blinding blue light impacted the machine on its chest plate and explosively released its energy, ripping a hole in its chest and sending it hurtling off the rooftop.
She unclasped her cloak and turned to face the other dragon as it boosted towards her, seeking to close down with her enough to use its more powerful melee attacks. Her black cloak glowed brilliant blue as she fully empowered it with her telekinetic will, and she cast it at the machine. The nano-bonded fabric trailed forwards like a more literal dragon from Asian myth and collided with the machine like a diamond-hard spear, cleanly burrowing right through its torso.
The dragon faltered as the damage robbed it of forward momentum, but still it would not relent. It rearmed the cannons of its gun-arm and tracked the girl with its shoulder-mounted railgun, immediately favouring its ballistics while she was without her shield.
But Evelyn’s attack was far from over. She flicked her hands in a commanding gesture, and her cloak, still lanced within the dragon, snaked itself around the dragon’s body using both its tail- edge and hood-edge. Then the leviathan weapon constricted itself around everything it had ensnared, pulling the dragon’s limbs down and crushing it within its hold. The dragon strained as it resisted the physical force of the cloak, but its hydraulic actuators couldn’t compete with Evelyn’s telekinetic will and it gradually succumbed to the complex tourniquet that encircled it.
At length, the dragon finally collapsed, and Evelyn snapped back her hand to summon the cloak back to her. The cloak responded immediately, jettisoning itself back to her, tearing its way through any piece of the dragon that was in the way of its return journey. The dragon’s crushed body came apart into multiple uneven pieces as it released the streaking cloak, and clattered to the ground as useless junk.
The cloak spiralled around Evelyn and settled back onto her shoulders as she re-sealed the clasp around her neck and turned to face the waiting Azul, the blue light gradually fading from the fabric to return it to its black aesthetic. The howling wind tore at the fabric, making it flutter almost horizontally in the air behind her.
Azul had stood by patiently, content to watch Evelyn in action as she made her way through the last of his followers. His red eyes regarded her clinically, as did the cyclopean red eyes of the six metallic tendrils extending out of his back, dispassionately studying her. Spontaneous bursts of flame flickered around him and the metal augmetics of his body began to glow a faded orange as his temperature rose, giving off a heat wash that made the air shiver around him.
Evelyn stared angrily back at him, her eyes still engulfed with fiery blue light. She was growling with each heavy breath she took, her whole frame rising and falling as her body struggled to keep up with her demands of it. Her nose was bleeding freely, running down her face, around her mouth and dribbling from her chin. The capillaries of her eyes had also ruptured, with blood now beginning to seep from her glowing eyes and flow like red tears down her face.
In that moment, as the two meta-powered fighters faced each other in the eye of the storm, it would have been difficult to say who looked like more of a monster.
‘Impressive,’ Azul began, ‘But...’
She didn’t care what he had to say.
Raising her hands, Evelyn screamed and fired off a deluge of force missiles at the Hydra lord. The tendrils at Azul’s back moved rapidly to intervene, getting in the way of each projectile and weathering their loud impacts seemingly without taking too much damage. Azul himself remained unmoved, seemingly oblivious to Evelyn’s attacks as the serpentine devices from his back moved independently of him to protect him.
‘...Not impressive enough.’
Now Azul acted. He raised his own hands, conjuring multiple swirling balls of flame that
boiled into existence from the tortured air around him, and fired them like giant bullets at Evelyn.
Her cloak unfurled itself in front of her to defend against the fireballs and was rocked with each explosive impact as fire engulfed the very air around Evelyn. She leapt out from the flames, breaking into a blistering run around Azul as he tracked her movement with an unending cacophony of fireballs.
‘You aren’t like me, girl,’ Azul called after her as he continued to chase her around the helipad with his rapid-firing bolts. ‘You haven’t given yourself over to your potential yet.’
As she ran, Evelyn fired back with more of her own force missiles, but still they were snatched out of the air by Azul’s tendrils. Every now and then she would chance a telekinetic strike at him, summoning an astral projection to punch him or otherwise disrupt him, but still the tendrils would act fast enough to block her efforts.
‘You haven’t committed yourself to true power,’ Azul continued, ‘You still cling to your humanity, too scared to take that path which nature itself has laid before you. You could never be my equal like this.’
Evelyn gritted her teeth as she felt her skin prickle under the heat of the fire that chased her. She cried out as she built up and released more potent balls of force at her adversary, this time being rewarded with Azul having to at least hop out of the way rather than risk damaging his tendrils in blocking them.
‘Look at yourself, ́ he tutted, ‘You’re killing yourself to do this. Your own efforts will end you before I even get the chance.’
Evelyn was barely listening to his words. She released another ball of focused power at Azul, causing him to once more confidently hop to the side, but this time she was ready with more. The moment his feet left the ground she had released her smaller missiles to attack him, causing his tendrils to intervene in his defence again. As they moved to act, Evelyn swept her body into a kick and conjured the attack as a telekinetic projection behind Azul’s back, where his eyes and the eyes of his indisposed tendrils wouldn’t see it. The blow landed, knocking Azul forwards in the air and ending his stream of fire bolts.
The Hydra lord gave a surprised grunt as he was knocked, and Evelyn followed up by turning herself to run directly at him.
‘Hmph, your master taught you well.’
Azul recovered quickly, landing on one knee and immediately pushing himself back to his feet to face her, but Evelyn was on him before he could restart his attack. She dived at him, apparently fearless of coming within range of his tendrils, and he met her aggression with his own without hesitation.
Azul’s tendrils stabbed out at her, but she flowed around them and fired her own jabs at Azul, forcing him to block and counter with his own limbs. Azul growled in frustration as he was left with no option but to match the girl, blow for blow, as they swirled around one another on the helipad.
His tendrils rapidly duelled with her cloak-tail, his imposing strength sparred with her sheer speed, and his lifetime of violent experience matched up against her decade of tutelage under Kamura. Above it all, his furious command of fire matched against her telekinetic might, creating an explosive display of orange and blue luminescence that was visible for miles in all directions. They dodged around the other’s projectiles, occasionally using their power to deflect the power of the other, and were often left with no choice but to endure some of the more close-range attacks.
With so many moving parts and angles to consider, their fight was like a rapid-fire game of chess within which they were striving to outmanoeuvre each other. All they needed was one clean hit on the other to end the fight.
Evelyn weathered the exceptional hostility of her fight with Azul, growling with each new laceration he inflicted with his talons. As desperate as the fight was up close with the Hydra lord, she knew that it was preferable to trying to fight him again at any kind of distance, where his greater power could be brought to bear once more. She stuck with the Hydra lord like his shadow, always
staying within the perilous reach of his tendrils, constantly using her cloak-tail to parry and snare them to keep her from death. Her skin burned, the heat of being so close to Azul’s attacks, as well as just being so close to the man himself while he was powered up, making each second horrendously painful to tolerate.
Yet she persisted. She channelled her pain into her anger, focusing everything on this fight, on being an effective weapon just as Kamura had instructed her to be. She didn’t care if she died or if she was horribly disfigured – she cared only about avenging her mentor.
For his part, Azul was beginning to get flustered by her tireless perseverance. Repeatedly he tried to catch her out by jetting cones of white-hot flames, but she was always moving around him in those moments, staying just outside the inferno and forcing him to act in his own defence before he could swipe the cone around on her. At so close a range she was able to utilise her telekinetic powers more effectively, and he was forced to be hyper vigilant in evading her force missiles. Increasingly, he was being caught out by a sudden telekinetic projection that would block or strike out at him, and the girl was beginning to land more and more blows upon him.
The two combatants swept over the helipad in a tide of frenetic conflict, pushing one another to new heights of ingenuity to avoid defeat. The fight was like a living thing as it made its way, inexorably, towards the edge of the rooftop.
Azul’s composure began to crack as Evelyn succeeded in crushing one of his tendrils within the vice-like grip of her cloak-tail. ‘Gah! You think I will be checked by a mere girl?’ he spat, his aggression surging to new levels as he unleashed increasingly wide-reaching bursts of fire. ‘You think any of the damage you and Shingen have inflicted here tonight will matter? No! I will recover, rebuild, and resume the work! I will not be denied! I cannot be denied! I will usher in the new age!’
The Hydra lord’s powers intensified to match his rage. Veins of orange light pulsed through his body, his very blood becoming like magma as he delved deeper into his pyrokinesis. Sudden flares burst from his body intermittently, forcing Evelyn into acrobatic leaps around him to avoid the mini-explosions. Azul trailed white fire as he moved even faster than before, lunging after Evelyn in a blur of frenzied attacks.
Evelyn was forced to draw upon everything she had to keep from being overwhelmed. Even successfully evading his attacks, smouldering heat still licked all over her body, consuming her in a bubble of burning pain. Her leaps and pirouettes around Azul were becoming easier for him to read as he limited her options with the flares, and it forced her to block as much as dodge. Her forearms bruised and cracked as they received his crushing blows, making each successive block more unbearable than the last.
But Evelyn didn’t flinch, nor did she let up her own aggression. Her pain was fuelled right back into her focus, pushing her own powers to new levels. The air around her fizzed and cracked as it warped according to her will. Her spectral projections became more frequent, popping in and out of existence around the Hydra lord so rapidly that they began to overlap with one another as they struck at him or defended Evelyn. She built up and released powerful blasts of force within each of her strikes, creating dazzling blue explosions with each connection that hammered Azul’s defence. Evelyn moved and fought with perfect clarity, manipulating their combat as if Kamura was there by her side, guiding her every move.
The very air around both combatants was at war with itself as it manifested the competing powers of the metas. Each heartbeat within the exchange was a do or die moment of pure instinctive action, and momentum shifted erratically back and forth between them.
Then the moment came, as Evelyn knew it would.
A sweeping series of kicks opened up the Hydra lord's guard and allowed Evelyn to connect a clean roundhouse kick to his face, cracking his right augmetic eye - and sending his frustration over the edge. Azul’s patience all but spent, his body quivered as he summoned all his power into a constant explosion of fire centred around himself, engulfing everything within ten metres of him. Evelyn’s cloak responded instantly, fully wrapping around her body to shield her from the inferno, while she focused everything she had into her own powers.
She held her ground within the blaze, summoning as much telekinetic power into her hands as she could muster and using it as a wedge to drive back against the torrent of flames.
Azul increased the intensity of his flames, making them rush from his body like a mini super nova as he sought to overwhelm Evelyn’s defence. He roared as he neared the zenith of his incredible power, turning the concrete to liquid at their feet.
‘Enough games! Die! Just die!’
Evelyn screamed in anguish as her super-heated cloak began to sear her body, but she continued building her focus towards her hands, continuing to resist the firestorm. If her resistance ebbed even a little bit, she knew she would be immediately incinerated.
‘Argh!’ she drove her fists forwards, pushing back the flames in their way with the telekinetic brilliance they wielded, and punched both hands against Azul’s chest before releasing all of her gathered force. All of her focus, all of her sorrow, all of her rage, all of her training and experience – she unleashed all that she was.
For a split-second everything was light and noise and fury.
And then the conflagration abated.
Azul wobbled on his feet as he looked down on the charred girl that had defeated him. His glowing gaze fell to where her palms rested against his chest, to where she had imparted her telekinetic will into him. His own body now glowed a dim blue, giving evidence to its connection back to the girl’s will. His tendrils collapsed to the ground lifelessly, no longer connected to the command of his mind and no longer receiving any power from the destroyed power core within his chest. After another moment even the light from his augmetic eyes faded as they too stopped receiving any power.
‘I... don’t... believe... it...,’ Azul rasped, his voice sounding strange as his grill began to fail. ‘It... isn’t... possible...’
Evelyn brought one hand back to pull the sizzling cloak from her body and cast it down to the ground at her side, savouring the cooling effect of the wind and the rain from the storm. She looked up at Azul’s malfunctioning eyes, her lips trembling with restrained anger.
‘Are you afraid?’ she asked, her shaky voice barely carrying over the sound of the storm. ‘I...,’ Azul tried to move but found his broken body would do nothing he asked of it, ‘No...
never.’
Evelyn took a step forward, pressing her palms against Azul’s stocky chest and glancing over
the side of the rooftop at the fall from the Tsen Yun building.
Virtually every part of her wanted to kill him. Almost every consideration going through her mind concerned how she was going to kill him. It had been a minor miracle her final blow had merely crippled the man, rather than detonating him.
Kamura’s training had been so engrained into her that she had measured her wrath, even at the end.
‘Go on, then...,’ Azul heaved, ‘Kill me... Finish...it...’
The dawn light was finally breaking through the cloud cover in the east, beginning to light the skyline of Hong Kong in the first rays of yellow sunlight, banishing away the darkness of the night. The storm that had ravaged the city in the night was also beginning to ebb, the clouds overhead waning and becoming less threatening. Down in the city below Evelyn could see the sirens of oncoming police cars and the distant approach of two police helicopters. No doubt far more governmental vehicles were approaching the tower less conspicuously.
‘I could kill you,’ Evelyn observed, almost to herself, ‘Everything you stand for could stop right now.’ She tightened her grip, ‘I could make it so painful.’
Her rage wrestled with her teachings. The woman Kamura had taught her to be fought with the animal he feared her to become. Retribution and punishment weighed against integrity.
She glared up at Azul’s unseeing eyes, ‘But it wouldn’t be justice... It wouldn’t be his justice.’
She couldn’t do it. To kill, now, in Kamura’s name, would be the most disrespectful thing she could do to her teacher. She wanted to scream and cry with frustration, but she contained herself, as the great man had taught her to do.
Azul growled, spluttering blood, ‘Cow... Coward...’
Evelyn tensed, Azul’s goad nearly succeeding in pushing her over the top, but she relaxed and took a step backwards from him.
‘You’re done,’ she said simply, her words dripping with contempt. ‘You, and everything you have built, has been broken. You’re a helpless wreck, and the Chinese will try you for your crimes. I’m sure they’ll grant you the execution you seek soon enough.’
‘No...,’ he rasped, ‘No... I am the Hydra Lord...’
‘You are nothing,’ Evelyn interrupted coldly, ‘Welcome to the new age.’
The Hydra lord made as if to respond, but she didn’t give him the chance. She flexed her hand and compressed his skull, commanding his own body to move according to her will. With a futile gasp Azul was knocked into a coma from which it would be a long time before he awoke.
A very long time.
Evelyn released her hold on the hulking lord and dropped him to the edge of the rooftop, finally letting go of her own abilities, causing the fierce blue light to fade from her eyes. She sank to her knees as the demands she had forced upon her mind and body finally made themselves felt in earnest, and vomited up the contents of her stomach. Her mind felt like it was on fire, and her skin reported the same pain far more literally.
She quivered on the ground, nearly overcome with exhaustion and pain, and came perilously close to passing out. Were it not for the constant rain in her face, she may well have done, but as it was she knew she had to move before the authorities locked down any way for her to escape.
With great effort, she pushed herself back to her unsteady feet and retrieved her still- smoking cloak. She brought her hands up to her face and, with aid from the rain, wiped away her own blood. Then, reluctantly, she turned her gaze upon Kamura’s body, still lying at the top of the stairs.
She gulped back more tears as she limped over to her fallen master. There was no way she was leaving Kamura here. Even if it cost her everything to attempt it, she would do anything to make sure she left this building with his body. Leaving him here was utterly unacceptable. She knelt by his side for a second, trying to work her way through her tangled feelings about her situation.
A large part of her simply didn’t want to proceed from this moment. What point was there in going on without him? It was a great effort of will just to keep from weeping.
She let out a shuddery breath and then leaned forward to close Kamura’s eyes.
‘Come on, Kami-san,’ she whispered, wrapping her cloak around his body and forcing her exhausted telekinetic will to lift him.
She groaned in pain from the effort, sounding like a plaintive, injured animal. ‘Let’s go home.’