The ruins of the Lugh-Grange were a frozen, shattered amphitheater to a god's duel. In its center, the Genbu, Pier Dorian, stood as a living mountain, his shell a continent of black iron, his serpentine neck a coiled tower of scaled muscle. Circling him like vengeful storm clouds were the nine Grim Reapers of Marya's Awakening. Chains of spectral ice and screaming soul-smoke lashed out from the Hell's Executioners, attempting to ensnare the colossal limbs. The links, which could freeze a giant's heart, screeched harmlessly against the ancient, glowing runes of the Genbu's shell, failing to find purchase.
The serpent head swayed, opened its maw, and unleashed a torrent of blue-white frost, a breath that could flash-freeze a sea. It washed over the advancing Heaven's Heralds. They did not slow. The frost passed through their nebulous robes as if through mist; their hellish constitution, born of the underworld's own cold, rendered the attack meaningless. They drove their starlight scythes forward, scoring thin, glowing lines across the shell that sizzled like acid.
Marya hovered above the frozen swamp her power had birthed, panting. Sweat and freezing mist matted the hair that dissolved into void-stuff at its ends. Her arms trembled not from fatigue, but from the strain of channeling so much Haki into maintaining and directing her spectral army. Each coordinated dodge of the Genbu's sweeping tail, each synchronized strike, was a thread of her will stretched taut.
Let me out… The voice of Igutoshi was a worm in the apple of her mind, a seductive rot. Release the cage… I will give you the power to break the mountain…
"It has been a long time," Pier's dual voices boomed, amused, as he watched a Purgatory Arbiter's mirror-blade shatter against his foreleg, "since anyone has had the stamina to keep up with me. Your father could, for a time."
Marya gritted her teeth, shaking her head as if to dislodge a physical insect. She silenced the voice, forcing her breathing into the rhythm of focused Zen—the empty mind. She needed clarity, a flaw in the fortress. Her golden-and-hellscape eyes scanned, searching not for weakness in the shell, but in the being within it.
Pier, sensing the subtle shift in her aura—the retreat of frantic effort, the focus of gathering intent—snapped both his tortoise and serpent heads to look directly at her. A grin split the monstrous faces. "Oh? Are you figuring something out? A new move to show me?"
Marya didn't answer. Her eyes closed. She pulled her hands back, and the nine Reapers dissolved into wisps of mist, rushing back to flow into the tripartite halo above her. The energy they returned was immense. She drew it inward, compressing it with her Conqueror's Haki into a denser, fiercer core. Around her, the air began to warp. The frozen swamp cracked. She began to levitate higher, and as she did, her form expanded. The funeral shroud robes flowed, the halo blazed, and she grew, matching the scale of her adversary, a eighty-foot-tall goddess of the threshold.
Pier's chuckle was the sound of continents grinding. "It appears you are ready! Don't keep me waiting! Show me the climax of this little drama!"
Marya's eyes opened. She took a final, deep breath that sucked the mist from the air around her. In her hands, the Key of Thresholds hummed with pent-up oblivion. Then, she moved.
She didn't run; she unfolded through space. One moment she was hovering, the next she was a blur of starlight, shadow, and glacial fury directly before the Genbu's chest. She swung the Key not as a blade, but as a lever to pry open reality itself. A devastating arc of black-and-gold energy, shaped like a colossal, spectral door, manifested around the strike. This was Death's Knell Toll concentrated into a single point—not to summon, but to banish. The very air inside the arc shimmered, promising not death, but erasure.
"OH! VERY GOOD!" Pier roared, genuine exhilaration in his voice.
The Key was a hair's breadth from connecting with the central rune on his shell. The spectral door began to swing inward, revealing a howling, lightless vacuum.
Then, Pier's right foreleg lifted. It didn't move fast; it moved with the infinite, terrible certainty of a plate tectonic. He stomped it down.
The shockwave was not sound or force alone. It was Fudō, the concept of the Immovable expressed as a physical law. The ground didn't just quake; it became still and heavy for a fraction of a second, negating all motion, all energy. The wave struck Marya's core.
THUUUUM.
The spectral door shattered like glass. The arc of energy snuffed out. Marya's colossal form contorted, every ounce of her gathered Haki and breath violently expelled. She plummeted from the sky, crashing into the frozen swamp with an impact that sent geysers of black sludge and ice shards a hundred feet into the air. She shrunk back to her normal size, coughing, gasping, her body a map of agony.
The Genbu's serpent head descended, its breath smelling of deep earth and cold stone. It peered down at the broken form in the crater. "Had enough?" the voice rumbled.
Forcing herself to her hands and knees, Marya glared up, blood and freezing muck on her lips. Her golden eyes burned with defiant fury.
"Stubborn," Pier mused, the tortoise head tilting. "So stubborn. Bet you were never quite good enough for him, were you? The great Hawkeyes. Could never measure up."
The words were a dagger, her fatigue sharpened. And in that moment of piercing frustration, the cage within her rattled.
RELEASE ME!
The command from Igutoshi was no longer a whisper. It was a thunderclap inside her skull. The sword in her hand vibrated, hungry.
Exhaustion, pain, and a deep, old resentment forged a single, catastrophic thought. Fine.
"Fine," Marya muttered, the word lost in the wind.
She planted Nisshoku's tip into the frozen earth and gripped the hilt with both hands. She didn't push her Haki into it. She did the opposite. She relaxed the spiritual barrier she'd maintained since the blade became hers—the cage Law and the reforging had built around the ancient spirit within.
Her eyes changed. The left, which showed Elysian Fields, clouded over into a milky, blind white. The right, the window to Naraka, deepened into a pool of absolute, lightless onyx. A symbol ignited on her forehead, glowing with a sickly green-gold light: a scarab beetle, its pincers sharp.
Pier blinked, his massive eyes narrowing. "Still have tricks in the box? Let's see them, then!"
From the sword, a torrent of corrosive, ancient will surged up Marya's arms. Igutoshi, the original, hungry spirit of the blade, unchained. It was not possession, but a violent merger. The black void-veins on her arms swelled and pulsed like angry rivers, connecting directly to the runes on Nisshoku, which now glowed with a malevolent, intelligent crimson.
Marya's body stood, but the movement was all wrong. It was too fluid, too casually powerful. A low, double-toned chuckle echoed from her throat—her own voice layered with a dusty, millennia-old baritone. "Yes…," the shared voice sighed. "Finally."
The fight that followed was not a duel. It was an exorcism in reverse.
Igutoshi-Marya moved. She was a phantom. She didn't clash with Genbu; she flowed around it, Nisshoku licking out to scrape against the Genbu's shell in places Pier's guard couldn't cover. Where before the shell repelled all, now each touch left a smoking, corroded mark that seeped a viscous shadow, eating away at the glowing runes.
Pier roared, serpent lunging and attacking, island-consuming attacks. Igutoshi-Marya would be there, then not, reappearing to drive the Key of Thresholds into a joint. The blows didn't aim to cut, but to sever—to disconnect the spiritual anchor of the limb. For the first time, the Genbu staggered. An attack meant to bisect her, passed through an afterimage, and Nisshoku's edge bit into the serpent's neck. No blood flowed, but a line of darkness spread from the wound, and the great head recoiled with a hiss of real pain.
"What is this?" Pier bellowed, a note of confusion and anger beneath the thunder. His Hajō nullification aura flared, but the Igutoshi-energy fed on the very attempt to nullify it, growing darker and sharper.
Igutoshi-Marya laughed, a horrible sound. She gathered the frozen swamp's energy, molding it not into Reapers, but into a single, colossal spear of jagged black ice and screaming souls. She hurled it, and it punched through the Genbu's defensive Haki, embedding deep in the tortoise's shoulder. Pier's colossal form shuddered, a deep groan of straining stone echoing from within.
He was being pushed back. The immovable object was being eroded.
Just as Igutoshi-Marya levitated for a final, concentrated thrust aimed at the central rune—a strike that promised to crack the shell and the will within—a new sound cut the chaotic frequency.
CLAP.
It was not a loud sound, but it was definitive. Six hands, manifesting in a flash of emerald light, came together in a single, percussive union. The Three-World Tremor.
Paula Cupcake Pope stood at the edge of the shattered dome, her Hybrid Form's six arms now lowering, smoke trailing from her pipe. The clap had emitted a high-frequency vibration, a tuning fork struck against the fabric of the battle's spirit. It sliced through the resonant harmony between Marya and Igutoshi.
The effect was instantaneous. The scarab symbol on Marya's forehead flickered and cracked. The double-toned cry that tore from her throat was one of agony and rage—both her own and Igutoshi's. The dark veins receded like frightened eels. The milky white and onyx black drained from her eyes, revealing only the whites before they rolled back. The Key of Thresholds clattered to the ground, reverting to Nisshoku. Marya followed, collapsing into the frozen muck, utterly still.
The silence was absolute.
Pier's form shimmered and shrank, the Genbu melting away to reveal the man, breathing heavily, a line of dark energy sizzling on his arm where the spear had struck. He stared at his wound, then at the fallen Marya, and finally at Paula. His violet eyes blazed with pure, unadulterated fury.
"YOU," he breathed, the word colder than the swamp.
Paula reverted to her normal form, taking a casual drag. "The prisoners are secure. Archibald's putting the pretty cuffs on them now."
"I had it," Pier growled, stepping toward her, his presence somehow more threatening than the Genbu's. "I was learning it. I was about to see its depth!"
"Looked like it was about to see yours," Paula replied dryly, unflinching. "That wasn't the girl anymore, Pier. That was the thing in the sword. It was winning."
"I DO NOT CARE!" he roared, the sound making the remaining pillars tremble. "You do not ever interfere in my fight! Not you, not Archibald, not a Buster Call! Is that understood?"
For a moment, Paula held his gaze. Then she gave a slight, insolent nod. "Understood, boss." The apology was in the words, but her tone and the slight lift of her chin said she wasn't sorry at all. She'd seen a threat to the foundation of their territory and removed it. That was her job.
Pier glared at her a moment longer before his shoulders slumped a fraction. The rage banked to a smolder. He turned his back on her, looking down at the unconscious Marya, at the cursed sword lying beside her. The duel was over. Not with a victory, but with a disruption. And the unsettling, corrosive power of Igutoshi was now a known variable, loose in his domain.
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