The red ominous glow covered the surface of the water.
Large fins were the first things that broke the surface of the river. They stood out, sharp and menacing as they lined the demon's head. It started from the demon's brow as it grew to its head and followed along the demon's spine till it disappeared beneath the water's surface. They were a disgusting green that one would assign to the undrinkable swamp water. Shorter fins lined along its forearms aswell.
The demon's skin was covered in fish-like scales. They held no lustre; the light hit the aquamarine surface and didn't reflect. It was as if the light got trapped in the scales. They continued from its face to its shoulders, which branched out far and wide. They rested on the rest of the demon's torso, which held back extremely well-defined muscles. Each part of the demon's arms and chest screamed of untrained martial prowess. Until the scales, like the fins, also fell beneath the water surface.
It was towering, the size one would compare to trees. And this was only the part that had surfaced from the water. Who knew truly how big this demon was.
Akuru was instantly attracted to the demon's face. Not due to its beauty, but because it was a mess that Akuru couldn't have ever possibly imagined.
Where one would expect ears were horns that looked as rigid as bones. They held the same colour as the fins. They looped onto themselves along the same axis, horns one would find on a Markhor. As Akuru's eyes followed the horn's loops, the horns began to become less opaque; they slowly seemed to lose the hardness that could be seen from distances away as they got closer to the tip of the horn. Under Akuru's eyes, they almost seemed to resemble the webbing between the fingers of a frog's hands/legs. The tip of the horns let light through without struggle.
But that wasn't what Akuru's eyes were caught on. As his gaze moved lower on the demon's face, his sight passed over the fish-like eyes and the nose that only depicted nostrils and held nothing else like one would find on a snake. It finally landed on the demon's mouth. Or what was meant to be the mouth. As Akuru was staring at the mouth, all he could find was the bone structure of a jaw holding teeth sharper than one would ever find in a shark. No skin, definitely no scales, no tongue, and no muscle. Only bone.
But if it were only bone, then it wouldn't match what Akuru saw.
The bone was encompassed in an ever-changing orb of water that seemed to glow under the baleful shine of the moon. It gave the demon's jaw the effect of shapelessness. The orb of water seamlessly connected with the demon's scale-like skin so well that Akuru couldn't truly pinpoint where the water started and where it ended.
Akuru had a suspicion that a demon might hold a blood demon art that involved water. After seeing the jaw, he was quite confident in his suspicions. He was already lamenting fighting a demon that could manipulate water, that was fighting from inside a river.
He looked back at the town. It was far enough away and hidden behind a small hill that even with the demon's towering figure, he doubted that any of the townsfolk would realise its existence as long as they didn't run over to the river. Akuru knew that he had to finish the demon before that could happen; explaining something like this to the townsfolk would be far more of a struggle than slaying this demon.
Akuru finally slid his blade out from its sheath. The white shine almost looked to fight the red glow from the moon. He slowly let rest the sheath on the ground beneath him, making sure to touch the tsuba that had cloth running through its centre once.
As he did so, the demon seemed to notice his actions; it opened its skinless jaw as the water seemed to move to complete the work that muscles would normally achieve. Its chest puffed out and fell, its shoulder quickly rising like one would before they screamed. But what came out wasn't a scream. It was as if rough waves were crashing against a rock. This demon couldn't screech, but it could most definitely make noise.
Its hands, which looked like some human fish hybrid, reached out to him. The demon's reach was going to fall short of him, but it suddenly lunged forward. The water behind it went up into a huge splash as its chest was mere centimetres from the river. It was heading closer to him like an arrow from a bow.
Akuru could only sigh. Clearly, this demon was a strong swimmer as well. That made this fight a lot more difficult.
By the time the demon had reached near the riverbank, Akuru was already ready.
His form in a picturesque position that would make fencers jealous.
He breathed in, letting the air fuel every cell in his body.
And then he simply thrust forward.
Sky Breathing Fifth Form: Piercing Noon
Everything that was directly in front of his blade shone. For a heartbeat, the moon's bloody haze was fractured by a spear of pale brilliance, gathered and focused into the single point of Akuru's thrust. The air bent around the strike as if folding toward the light, pulled into a narrow corridor where shadow didn't exist. The momentum didn't roar, didn't crack. It simply erased, parting the river mist and the demon's lunge with the quiet inevitability of noon sunlight breaking through cloud.
The demon's surge stopped halfway. The thrust pierced the demon's arm, missing its jaw by only a metre. Its arm and a large chunk of its chest disappeared into a brilliant glow, and even the river seemed to kneel to the strike, ripples spreading as it bowed toward the direction that the air from the thrust travelled.
The demon's water jaw expanded like a balloon; it seemed that the demon was screaming in pain. But the only sounds that echoed around the river were the sounds of roaring waves from both the jaw and the demon thrashing around in the river.
Akuru was out of breath; that attack might have seemed to come as easily as breathing to him, but he had gone all out for that attack. The demon had dodged just before his attack could pierce its neck. Akuru was now worried that the demon would rush back into the river before he could finish it off. He also had the added worry about the townsfolk stumbling on the battle, adding another factor he would be forced to consider.
The demon, unfortunately, didn't want to just roll over and die. Where the wound had opened, water steamed over it, hissing and pulling itself together. The injury knit itself not with flesh but with liquid water curling and twisting, the surface tension re-sculpting an arm. It began as a slick, transparent column, and then as tiny filaments of spray braided together; then the new limb lengthened. Narrow at first, then widening as it found form in a tendril-like shape. Steam rose from its surface, rising in sickly blue wisps; whatever heat Akuru's strike had invoked on its scaly flesh now met the cool, living hardness of river-water attempting to take shape.
That new arm was more a stalk of water than an arm, a living lash composed of ripples and glass-sheen, curling in on itself. The tendril flicked, and droplets flung like shards of glass. Where it met the demon's shoulder, scales shivered, and a patch of greenish flesh steamed into a smoky translucence before hardening into muscle again. It was an ugly, noisy healing.
The water-tendril, newborn and still fuming at the seams, whirled in a crazed arc. It made up for the missing limb with fluid, almost serpentine precision. And then the demon's remaining true arm came up, striking forward. The two attacks coming in different cadences. The first, a normal arm was a blunt and forceful attack, normal but effective; the second, a whip of water, sharp, slicing, flexible as a spear of blown glass.
Akuru danced backwards. He had to; there was no room to stay put. The heavy arm smashed the bank stone where he had stood the moment before, sending grit and stone into the air. The water tendril snapped toward his face in a zigzag, and he felt the wetness hiss past his cheek as the lash missed him by a hair. His feet found stable ground on the saturated soil and scattered pebbles.
He dodged, rolled, and planted himself again and again. Each movement, each step threatened a slip. He kept his blade low, angled to intercept, to shatter the liquid lash into a thousand beaded drops. The white metal met the tendril, and for a second the water held, surface tension clinging to the nirichin metal as if reluctant to be cut. Then the tendril seethed and reformed a hair's breadth away.
Anger flared in the demon. Its eyes narrowed to slits. Its jaw filled now with foaming water that hid the bone, started to smell faintly of brine and rot. The river moved with the demons' rapid movement, throwing up sheets of spray that spattered on Akuru's skin and slicked the ground at his feet.
There was no room for finesse against the demon's sudden rate of regeneration. He needed a strike that breaks its pattern, not simply follows it. He drew in a breath that tasted of damp mud as the knot of exertion in his chest began to pull tight. Then he stepped into motion. His mind calm.
He vaulted.
Feet left the saturated ground. He rose above the demon and water, and for a moment the world was all sky and the aching red eye of the blooded moon.
Sky Breathing Ninth Form: Sorrow Downpour
It started like the first inhalation of a storm.
A rise, a poised pause high enough that earth's pull felt optional. From that stillness, he launched his blade downward and again, each thrust a droplet transformed into a spear. The strikes did not come as a single sword but as a curtain of piercing points, a cascade of metal that fell through the gap between wind and water. Every thrust was an ocean compressed, instantaneous, and relentless as rain hitting a roof. Akuru's body moved like condensation made visible. He thrust and retracted, pivoted in the arc of a downpour. From his chest, the breath that fed the form became the storm itself.
The blade struck, and the river was punctured by a thousand silver needles that stung like hail. For those breaths, the swollen fire of the moon was muted into the sound of falling water, and Akuru was the storm that sent it.
The first of those thrusts blew clean through the smoky tendril. The second punctured the green scales along the creature's flank and sent a geyser of dark fluid from the demon. The third slid between the demons shoulder and neck, and for a breath, the world registered the demon's pain as a single long cracked wave.
He could feel the rhythm of the technique in his arms, a metronome of grief and release.
But as Akuru followed through his technique, the orb around the demon's jaw swelled outward. Uncoiled tendrils, thin as tentacles and brimming with pressure, spilled into the air with the same unexplainable motion as an octopus throwing its limbs. They shot towards him with malice, curving through the space between him and the demon. One weaved through his blade and smashed into him like a whiplash of wet rope and collided with his ribs.
Pain burst like a struck bell. He tasted iron; the blow drove the breath out of him. He was thrown sideways and slammed onto the wooden pier, the impact stabbing fire across his chest. For a second, he saw stars skitter along the edge of red light. The taste of blood was already warm on his tongue. The bones at his side sang with friction. He spat; small red threads stained his lower lip. The river roared behind him, a furious living throat.
Akuru's vision blurred around the edges, but his hands steadied on the wood. The ninth form hadn't been wasted. He had carved into the demon. Unfortunately, he didn't know that demons jaw could act like its water-arms and had found a gap in his rhythm. He should have know, and now his body had to pay the price of his lapse in judgement. He fought to inhale; the breath came shallow, searing. He pushed himself onto his knees, each motion a negotiation with pain.
He couldn't lie there bleeding. The town banked across the next rise; the pier creaked with the weight of spray and threat. If the demon turned its attention fully to the town, it would lay wake to slaughter. He pushed himself up. The pier ached beneath him; a plank cracked with a complaining groan. He took care to step off where the splintered wood wouldn't give way into his skin.
He began to run back onto the riverbank.
Just as he did, his feet slipped on slick stone as he ran along the river's edge, his knees hit the rock hard, sending a jolt straight through his legs. Adrenaline was the only thing that still let him stand on his own.
The demon was fully enraged now and began smelling victory. It didn't need retreat when it was so close to killing the human in front of it. It began commanding the river itself. Walls of water rose like sudden cliffs along its spine and condensed into multiple arms that lashed outward.
The current swelled, and undercurrents formed that tried to sweep Akuru's feet loose from their hold on the bank. He skidded once again on wet stones; one misstep sent his other leg slamming sideways. Pain flared in his hip as his heel ground into a slick pebble, and for a moment the world tilted. His hands found rock and riverweed; the adrenaline could only do so much to keep him up.
Frustration flared hot and ugly inside him; he had known better. Overthinking had been his downfall. He had knocked himself into a corner. The demon seemed to mock that hesitation. It bared the empty grin of its bone-jaw, the water around it churning like a living mouth.
Akuru steadied his body. Anger transformed inside him from fury to an exacting focus. He didn't have the luxury of frustration. The chill of the water, the ache in his ribs, the hot trickle of blood; these became part of an equation and not an excuse. He let his breath lengthen, drew air into his belly and felt his chest uncoil. The river's sound receded into a duller drum, and the moon's red burn became an overhead sheen. In that small clearing of thought, he found a cadence. He tested his feet; stones stood, not slid. The world tipped into a slow, deliberate sequence as if every motion had been prewritten and now only required his consent.
The demon came at him again, thinking it would end him once and for all. It closed the distance in a flash, water fists colliding with his frame. Akuru stepped in, feeling the cool sting of water against his skin, and then he moved into the posture he had saved for the last possible moment.
Sky Breathing Sixth Form: Sunset Divide
He threaded his breath into the movement like a sapling bending toward the sun. The form unfolded from his shoulders. He raised the white blade high, the motion igniting with a blaze. Where the ninth form had been rain, this was a single, searing column of dusk. Sunset concentrated into steel. It did not sweep; it cleaved. A sudden, living warm gold that gouged a line in the red air. His body translated the colour of dying light into motion, slow, heavy, inevitable. The blade tracing the descent of a molten star dropping through water; heat and water met and spat like iron into the ocean. Each muscle pulled taut, every tendon a rope of intent. As he brought down the sword, light did not merely reflect. It pooled along the edge, a rim of incandescent orange that made the world seem to sag away from the cut. The strike was the memory of sunset, the precise instant it slices the last of the horizon, the brilliant last gasp that leaves nothing ambiguous.
He drove the arc straight at the swelling neck of the demon. Water sprayed high. The blade hung between the sun and the river. Fiery light on one side, liquid water on the other. The contrast was gorgeous. Where the steel met water, steam rose, as the demon's reflection warped. The force of the blow cleaved through a wall of water and struck into the monster's neck, the sound more like a bell clanging than a body breaking. For a breath, the world held, caught between two opposing elements.
But the demon had moved once again. The water orb around its jaw bulged, the tentacle-arms flailed like a startled squid. Akuru felt bones softly crunch beneath the strike.
But Akuru knew that the demon was most definitely on the losing side of the exchange.
It wasn't the clean end the demon had planned. The demon pulled its ruined arm closer with a backward lunge and dove under, smashing into the river with the impact of a boulder. Water swallowed it, white and scalding, and the creature sank into the dark belly of the river.
For a moment, there was terrible silence.
The red sheen of the moon seemed brighter where it had caught Akuru's blade. He had given everything to that strike; his shoulders shook with tired tremors. His breath came ragged, shallow. Pain had become a map on his chest and his arms.
The demon had decided to retreat.
He watched the spot where the river had closed over the beast. The water boiled and then stilled. He waited, expecting. Hoping that the demon would rise again so he could finish what he started. Surges under the surface strengthened; the water moved like a living thing, shaking itself.
For a moment, Akuru's mind betrayed him.
A loop of 'what ifs' and 'if onlys'.
What if he hadn't misjudged the angle of the neck? What if the townsfolk woke and tumbled to the bank? What if one more failure meant the town fell?
What if he couldn't kill the demon today?
Each thought blurred into a frantic circle. He began pacing, his breathing uneven, his hands clenching, his entire body complaining.
This was not the place, he told himself, that he could afford such spirals.
Not now.
DAMMIT.
IF THAT DEMON WANTED TO STAY BENEATH THE WATER THEN FUCK IT, I JUST NEED TO CUT THE ENTIRE FUCKING RIVER.
Then, as if the world offered a hand, he paused.
He drew one long, measured breath and did not let his mind fill it with doubt. The breath lit something inside him. The noise of the water, his breathing, and wind, all of it folded down into a single fine thread. His vision narrowed, but not in the way that took away sight; rather, the world slowed and laid out its currents before him. He saw not just forms but flow. The way the river tugged at the bank when a fish moved; how footsteps might send a pebble rolling into a loose pattern; how every life around him tugged at the hems of motion like little stones in a stream.
Akuru could not name what this vision was. He did not learn to read the world as a set of flows from anyone else. It came to him. The invisible architecture of movement.
In the hush of this perception, the panic that was encompassing him just before evaporated into cold clarity. He raised his sword. The white nirichin metal seemed to collect the red moon's light at the edge of its face, like frost gathering along a blade.
His mind had reached a level of calmness he couldn't claim to have ever reached before.
He did not have a name for what he was about to do. He drew all his breath and focus and the new, strange vision together into one point, and the technique came into being as if it had always waited on such a moment. The red moon shone behind him.
Sky Breathing Eleventh Form: Blood Moon
He stepped forward until the world's fine flows threaded him with the river itself. The moon hung vast and close, an accusing, watchful eye, and it seemed that all the red of the night wanted to be remembered. The white blade still lifted in the air. Everything around him anchored into the single line of his arm. A blade as the eye of a malicious blood-red storm.
Then the blade fell.
It was not a sweep but downwards, absolute, like a meteor's last honest arc. The blade did not cut water so much as it divided it. The river let out a gasp, and the force of the stroke split water from bank to bank. Water rose in twin walls on either side of the blade, an impossible corridor of glinting, suspended motion. Two twin blue walls holding back a river as if it were a curtain, tremulous and sparkling with stray moonlight. The sound was a paused silence. Akuru's blade-edge burned with a strange red halo. No mere reflection, but where moonlight and metal answered one another. The blade shone white at its spine and a living film of red at its lip as if the moon had lent its blood to steel. He drove it through the demons entire body.
The blade entered the watery mass without sound. For the demon, the strike was inevitable. Falling along the line of the blade. The demon seemed to float in the air as all the water stood aside and watched its demise. It was cut in half one second, and then the next it blew up in a plume of ash.
Completely dead.
For one impossible stretch of a second, the moon's red shone against the blade and all the world seemed to hold both grief and release at a pause. Then the river closed in. The twin walls of water thundered back, rushing to fill the void with an appetite that swallowed the last of the demon's shape.
The sound of the river rushing back to hide any form of division took over all other sounds of the night.
Water smashed across Akuru's feet and rose over his calves, cold and insistent. Foam and ash slapped against him. The force drove him to his knees; it knocked the breath from him in a great, wet wind.
After a long thunder of the water crashing, it finally began to calm.
There was no more thrashing; the red eye of the night was content to watch. Akuru lay there as the river reclaimed itself, drenched end to end.
The moon hung above. Slowly, so very slowly, the red began to thin at the edges as if pulled back by the world's own will. The intensity relinquished a fraction of its hold; the colour cooled in the sky. Dawn was still hours away, but the blooded heat on the moon's face eased as if breath had been returned to the world.
The demon was dead, and the blood moon seemed to be ending.
As he stared up at the moon in exhaustion, he saw a shadow fly across the night sky.
Huginn landed near his shoulder, damp and indignant. The raven cocked its head and peered at him with the small, clever eyes of someone who had always believed in the boy.
Akuru's chest rose and fell in exhausted, grateful rhythm. He tasted nothing but river water and the metallic tang of his own blood. The roar of the river became a hush.
The moon, finally, began to revert to its normal silver surface, as if the sky itself had decided that the night had done what it came out to do. Akuru sat up with a groan that was part body and part soul. He looked to his side as the red withdrew from his blade back to the glimmering pale snow white.
Akuru decided to find a tree that he could hide behind the rest of the night. He didn't want to deal with any of the townsfolk that would definitely rush over to check the sound that had echoed across the village. Akuru especially didn't want to deal with the people he had talked to that morning not wanting them to treat him any differently, and saving himself from an awkward conversation.
Huginn hopped closer and tucked his beak under his wing, satisfied. Ready to look out for him during the night as he rested.
Akuru shut his eyes and, for the first time since the moon had taken its strange colour, let tiredness seep in that was more than the rending of ribs.
The night finally came to peace.