Kyoto, Japan.
The photograph of the twins could have been of a mirror and its reflection. Maki and Chizuru Kagura stood cheek and cheek hand in hand, every dimension symmetrical.
Chizuru leans back in her black leather chair. It creaks in a way that would have earned her a scornful reprimand from sister. There would be no such reprimands. Maki was gone. Murdered. It had been almost fifteen years. Chizuru could still remember the smell of burnt ozone and mud from the lightning strikes all around the village, her friends and neighbors running scared into the jungle under the downpour of rain, in spite of the hail, leaving their shelters to face the elements. Anything was better than the man that had come with the storm.
They all had abandoned Maki, who had faced down Goenitz alone. All except Chizuru, who was frozen in terror, paralyzed by the power of the man who, in the end, mocked her sister?s desperate attempts to speak as his fingers crushed the bones of her neck into a pulp.
Leaning over her paperwork, clasping the frame of the photo that dominates what little free space there is on her desk, Chizuru holds the picture up to the light, level with her face as if to get a better look. Not a day goes by that she does not pray at her sister?s shrine. Even today her sister is heavy on her mind, because of this business?
Maki, I avenged you. Goenitz is dead. Orochi sleeps. I?m finally free.
?and how uncertain she feels about her latest decision.
Across the brown and tan checkered linoleum floor of her office, Chizuru?s assistant Kiyone looks up from her keyboard and rises, smiling softly. ?Miss Kagura? If you are ready with those files, I?ll take them down to Nori for processing.?
Chizuru sets down the picture and shuffles through the papers atop her desk until they are in a single stack. ?These seem to be in order,? she comments aloud to herself, and then looks up at her assistant, her eyes softening. ?That would be most appreciated, Kiyone. Say hello to Nori while you?re down there. I haven?t gone down to accounting in a week.?
?Certainly, Miss Kagura,? said Kiyone, collecting the papers and binding them with a paperclip produced from secretarial hammerspace. With that, she sashays to the long end of the office, past murals of Amaterasu emerging from a cave to bring sunlight back to the universe. At her approach, the doors of the private elevator open with a soft ding. Kiyone is still smiling softly when the doors close shut on her, leaving Chizuru in the stillness.
Cars honk and purr somewhere far below. Past one of the high, arched windows that march along the borders of her office, a jet airplane cuts across the Kyoto skyline. Eight clocks tick out of order on a nearby wall, each set to a different time-zone.
Chizuru leans forward, lacing her fingers together, a hammock for her chin, and looks down at some of the papers still spread across her desk.
It seems like a milestone. Like finally closing this chapter of my life.
She had been going through documentation of the old KOF accounts, millions that she had been holding off against the possibility that she might have to run a new tournament. It had been almost a decade since the last, and she was now certain the need would never again arise, that it would be okay to pull those substantial profits from her vaults and apply them to some new effort.
It was a hard decision, but at the same time, it was easy. She ached for it. Because it was like finally saying Orochi is gone. His minions are dead. The nightmare is over, a problem for my great granddaughter three hundred times removed.
She had continued her vigilance for the year after that final battle, and the year after that, and when she realized it was really over, she felt bitterly cheated out of those two years. That life of danger, and training, and praying, of ceaseless struggle, fear, and duty had ended; the life of Chizuru Kagura had begun. She was rich, young, pretty. The world was her oyster.
While Kyo was struggling against NESTS, and clones of the Kusanagi heir roamed across the country, Chizuru danced across it, attending numerous charity balls, functions that helped her to restore neglected shrines across Japan. She found out she had a passion for landscaping, and her designs were used in three memorial parks across Kyoto. She began to sleep in a little later each day. Her perfect attendance at board meetings declined. She was even known to laugh on occasion, and her smile earned her a number of rich and powerful suitors, willing to turn over their fortunes to her on a whim.
In essence it was easy. She was finally free to live her own life.
But it was an equally hard decision because of Maki. She was a part of that old life, too, and this was like closing the door on her memory, saying goodbye.
Stranger still that saying goodbye to the King of Fighters felt almost as painful. But her life was her own now, and it seemed that in the case of both Maki and KOF, Chizuru could finally bear to let go.
Chizuru opens a file on her desk.
On the first floor, a man-shape in blood red robes cuts an imposing figure as it strides across the lobby, its face covered in a cloak, its eyes a pair of red hot diamonds in the shadows of the hood. He pauses directly at the center of the lobby, as people at the nearby food court look up from early dinners suddenly interrupted by the terrible chill of unease coming from the center of the room. Silence sweeps from one end of the plaza to the other.
She should have felt him coming a mile away.
?Sir? Sir, please, we?re going to have to ask you to state your business.? The voice of a security guard, unsteady with rightful nervousness. One of the hulking brown arms of the man-shape sweeps the robe aside to reveal the coal blue gi within. Several security guards are there now, surrounding the cloaked stranger, none daring to touch the tonfas or the tasers they wear on their belts, each desperate to do so, to feel comforted by having some sort of a weapon.
A deep growl rumbles from his chest. The floor trembles.
She should have seen this coming.
The surge bites into her, causing her to grimace and dig her thumbs into the file. At first she takes it for a menstrual cramp, rises from her chair, goes to the stairs across from her desk, practicing her breathing exercises as she goes, focusing her spirit force.
Fresh air, she thinks to herself as she steps out onto the roof of the tower that shares her name. Been at this for twelve hours today.
As the day ends, the sun casts an orange veil over the shoulders of Mount Nishiyama, turning the towers of the Kyoto skyline into a wall of silhouettes.
Chizuru takes in a deep breath, moving along the rail where potted plants stand single file. The sweet scent of flowers drowns out the stink of pollution.
Just a cramp, she thinks to herself, scooping back a few strands of hair that have streamed across her eyes. Her luxurious ebon hair flips in the last gentle wind of the day.
Another surge rises up from the base of the tower, as dark clouds spread like fingers across the blazing orange sky to cover her eyes like the hands of the reaper.
Chizuru screams and falls to her hands and knees, her white jacket fluttering in the air.
Her world has become a haze of red in which something black and terrible bursts and flickers all around her like static from a poor transmission, only this one was coming through loud and clear. Whatever it is, it means to kill her.
She tries to gather her senses. Someone is here to kill her. Someone powerful. Goenitz? No, he?s dead. Stop panicking. Ignore the sweat and this incredible power working to paralyze you. Think! Orochi? No. Not even Orochi feels like this. The intensity is indescribable, like a thousand invisible, intangible fists passing in and out of my body, furious that they cannot strike me.
She throws herself to her feet, gathering her ki between her hands. The mirror keens within her heart, a soft doleful whine of understated magnificence. She rallies to gain control of her mind, her body, her racing heart.
Too little, too late.
?Go Shoryu!?
The lobby explodes outward from Akuma as he lifts off, bodies soaring briefly upward, torn into the air. Unlike him, they slow, curl, and arc downward unceremoniously. His fist strikes the first layer of concrete, and he is gone in the explosion.
Outside the Kagura Building, a line of dust spears straight up the building?s middle, dissecting the tower, blowing every last window out over the city.
Chizuru screams as the dome atop the roof explodes upward in a well of raw purple energy, debris spiraling up around a central figure within the vortex of destruction, turning slowly, lazily, like an angel of death in a dream of endings.
Whatever force that is holding him, turning him to glare down into her eyes, freeze her soul, it is shattered by the interminable look of defiance from his frozen, terrified mark, who rises from the railing to meet his gaze as he spills over onto the roof, landing so hard a crater yawns beneath his feet.
?In my quest for the strongest challenge, I have come for the Beast of Reason!?
?I will never relinquish Orochi to you,? screams Kagura, as she feels the plaza trembling as large broken pieces of its heart come unbuckled beneath her. Her terror in the heart of this siege of killing intent is subsumed by fury, transformed by it into a weapon. Her reflection steps from her body on her left and her right and takes up stance alongside of her.
?You are in the way!? The demon lunges across the ten-foot space in an eye-blink, his first punch striking down all three Chizurus.
Two of them vanish before they hit the ground; the one in the middle never lands, either, speared up from her middle by Akuma?s fist, rising into the air, teetering dangerously over the railing, considering for a moment the possibility of sunfishing, going over the edge, taking her chances with the street? but he moves with ferocious speed, his legs juking, his body spinning, his fist snapping into a vicious backhand that spirals her back over the roof and causes her to bowl over several planters, soiling her jacket.
The flowers vanquished, a stench rises into the air that is not pollution, but the smell of fever and outrage and murder. As Akuma rushes in his aura passes over her like a heat-wave in the instant before he makes contact, like his soul is just seconds from bursting into flames, an inferno that would sweep across the city and swallow all of Japan.
The kick to her ribs throws her to her feet.
She brings her hands up, dances backward in the defense of the thousand crane, legs ignoring the numbing, curling impact to her side. His fist bites into her hands, parting them, and the instant they are down his other fist slices her brow, batters her sternum. He dances around her, a wheel kick, a roundhouse; bleeds into the direction she is falling and catches her with an uppercut.
His hand clamps around the back of her neck as she spins.
She grips his wrist as he twists her through the air and throws her spine-first into the rail, her neck screaming so loud she?s sure it?s going to break, then her back drowning it in protest as it wraps the steel crossbars at the edge of the roof.
By some mercy, years of training cause her to bend with the impact, catching the rail behind her. Briefly, she hangs upside down, exhaling her power into the air as Akuma?s foot speeds in at her head and parts through her skull, dissolving her mirror image and denting the rail outward, hitting it so hard the bolts pop off with the sound of TV gunfire.
The real Chizuru sails in overhead, a crane in flight, knees drawn up, arms back, heels tucked, jacket flowing, and cocks back her hand into the form of the knife; gritting her bloodstained teeth, she casts all her power along the line of her arm, slashing down in an arc, landing behind him, trailing afterimages.
Akuma ducks her slash and leaps into the air, turning like a cyclone, his leg scything for her in a deadly hurricane kick.
Chizuru bows her back under the first revolution, his fluttering blue pant-leg whiffing across the tip of her nose, and flips as the second revolution seeks her spine? her ghostlike shadow rises to strike against the blow and is cut in half; landing, she twists under the third and side-flips with all of her might, floating out over the hole torn in the center of the plaza.
Arcing backward. Falling. Beneath her, paperwork flutters around the center of the hole like a ticker tape parade in Hell. A few inquisitive employees on lower floors look up through the hole to see the CEO momentarily falling backwards into it, only for her to be jerked back onto the rooftop by an unseen hand.
?Thank goodness!? one of them exclaims.
Akuma nearly tears her leg out of the socket as he draws her in by the ankle, whipping his forearm out to cut her in half. Stealing his momentum, Kagura rolls forward, hands slapping off his incoming elbow, causing her to sail through the air and land skidding. She drops into a swooping crane stance, one leg and arm down and forward, the other arm curled above and behind her, her hair streaming against the fire and ash colored sky.
Enraged, Akuma?s foot hits the ground and the building jumps as his ki springs up from his lungs and pours into his arms. He drives his hands forward with murderous force, palms striking thin air, parallel in that legendary frozen moment; parting the air between them like a cannon shot, his Go Hadoken.
Chizuru closes her eyes a moment before impact, gauging its distance not with her sight, but with her power, seeing it in the mirror, reflected, flying away from her. Her body wails in a dozen new agonies as she dances into the path of the fireball, drawing her hand down in an artful circle at the moment it would have struck her.
Akuma draws his arms up to his chest as his own technique is flung back at him with such force that it sends him skidding back to the edge of the hole, growling as the fire washes over his arms, his killing intent searing into his chest and shoulders.
Kagura, seeing her chance to send him over the edge, speeds in. A low blur, her body skidding to a halt, her arms scooping at his feet. Her hands parried aside, she flickers out of existence as the real Chizuru comes in overhead, diving down, her hand a knife; no good, Akuma sweeps one arm up, crossing the back of his wrist with hers, his other fist curling in at his side. He roars into the air with his Go Shoryuken, shredding another of the mirror?s reflections as his fist stabs the heavens.
Chizuru had hoped to lunge in at his back, unleash her Reigi no Ishizue, seal his techniques long enough to get some distance from him, but the blow that struck her reflection did not totally miss her. She took less than half the force of the blow?s translated power. It was still enough to knock her out of a full run. It was like being hit in the chest with a sledgehammer; she arced into the air and fell backward with her legs literally vertical above her, crashing through the crater left by Akuma?s touchdown, shattering the ceiling.
Her world had no more solidity to it. She was spinning through a hail of splinters and flinders and plaster dust. She landed square on her desk, her backside coming down where the monitor would have been if it hadn?t fallen over when Akuma gutted the tower with his Shoryuken.
The legs of the desk pop out like broken stilts on impact, dropping the desk a foot to the floor. She lays there for a moment, blinking up at the hole she?d fallen through with detachment and disbelief, like she was dreaming this or seeing it on television. No way she?d just been driven through her own roof. No way was she laying on the records of KOF ?96, her monthly calendar soaking up her blood.
Her head drops to the side. She sees the shattered glass in the frame, but the picture has been untouched.
The photograph of the twins could have been of a mirror and its reflection. Maki and Chizuru Kagura stood cheek and cheek hand in hand, every dimension symmetrical.
?SHOSH!?
Akuma falls from the hole like an axe, the knife edge of his hand shearing her desk in two. Kagura is not there. She rolls out of the way, falls against the wall, pulls herself up on anything that can hold her. She wants to live. Needs to.
It seems that her battle with Orochi is not over.
A panel falls from the wall as Akuma lunges to his feet, throwing both halves of her desk thirty feet through the air in either direction as he frees his hand. Beneath the panel, Chizuru sees three security buttons. She slaps the one in the middle.
Kiyone staggers up the stairwell as the building shakes and trembles, a few security guards and Kyoto police with her, guns out. They come to the secret door behind the supply closet leading into Chizuru?s office, and as they do, a steel bulkhead slams shut in front of it.
?Oh no. She sealed herself in!? cries Kiyone.
No one else dies, Chizuru decides, throwing herself from the wall as Akuma?s fist plows through her former position and bashes in the panel with a hail of sparks. Kagura can no longer manage a flip, so she spins, dancing under a kick with preternatural grace and spinning into the air, unwinding, her ki lashing all around her body.
?Slow!? snaps the demon as he twists out of the way and leaps upside down, catching her in the chest with the back of his heel, spiking her to the floor. She bounces five feet off the ground with the impact, spitting blood, and takes three consecutive blows from his Go Senpuukyaku, the third spiraling her through the air, past the gaze of Amaterasu.
Chizuru claws her way across the floor like a broken animal dragging itself from a merciless highway. She leaves a smear of blood across the shattered ruins of the floor that was her office; passes over shards of glass and sees that she too has been ruined, her blood and terror reflected in a hundred tiny mirrors.
Behind her, the footsteps of the God of Fists crunch through the debris with slow deliberation, a tortuous last march toward the fatal blow that was sure to come.
?Get up.? A dispassionate command from the man who had once been called Gouki, but had traded his soul for power.
?Stop hitting me,? she whimpers, blood spotting her mouth with each breath. ?I?m already dying.? Her words are no different than those that had passed from the lips of her sister before she was murdered.
?Get up,? says Akuma, his throat choked with brimstone and hatred. A heartless smile breaks the landscape of his face. ?I will release you from your burden.?
Unable to crawl, Chizuru looks up at the elevator doors: steel with an oak finish. The light in the button is out; those doors would most assuredly not open. She looks down at her hands, one on a brown tile, one on a tan tile, and begins slowly, painfully, to rise. Something in her side feels warm, wet, and flowing in the wrong direction. As she places her weight on the floor, her hand slips an inch, and the tan comes away with her skin, revealing the line of a cheek, the corner of an eye, and though she does not know it, she is seeing her reflection.
Light blazes up from the tan tiles, burning away their color to a fine white, as mirrors rise up to fill the shattered arches of the high windows at the borders of her office.
Akuma dives for Chizuru?s spine, but a phantom of the priestess rises up out of the floor between them and spears herself into his chest, driving him backwards. The light rises in columns, and around it, the darkness intensifies. Akuma disappears into a lightless void at the center of the office, briefly lit by a spotlight that shows him a sea of reflections, a hundred Chizuru in every direction. They launch at him from every side and every angle and he unfurls his body into a display of his style unseen in many years, tearing them to shreds, allowing not even a single blow to land.
Chizuru stares at the light flooding into the room, feels the power streaming from her body. But these mirrors? This was not entirely her doing, even though it had to be.
The elevator dings, and the doors slide open. The mists of time spill forth to reveal, briefly, a woman in an elegant purple gown with lavender hair. The lights in the elevator cabin flicker and she is gone, replaced by Chizuru?s own injured reflection, save for two things; she is standing upright, and wears her blood like badges of honor.
It is not herself she is looking at.
?Chizuru, you have to live,? says Maki Kagura, as she reaches down and lifts her startled sister into her arms.
?Maki?!? Chizuru cries. So many thoughts. So many feelings. No words that could contain them, no words that could lay them out in the split second it takes for Maki Kagura to thrust her sister into the elevator and shut the doors.
?Let me handle this,? were Maki?s last words as the doors closed.
Chizuru lunges at them, tapping the buttons on the panel, but they will not open. The elevator begins to sink as she screams for her sister. ?Maki! Wait! Don?t leave me! Don?t leave me again!?
Silence, and the falling of the cabin. The lights flicker, but the elevator continues its descent. Chizuru falls against the doors, her strength flooding out of her, the extent of her injuries obvious in the overwhelming spread of red in a jacket that was once white.
*Maki? Maki, I didn?t even get to say goodbye. Don?t leave me again!
Be silent! And brace yourself, sister. *
Akuma leaps into the air and strikes the floor with his fist, towers of flame slicing the air and tearing huge gouges in the tiles, blowing out the mirrors, knocking out the lights, bursting the bubble of obsidian holding the illusion together and shattering his phantom attackers like a dozen glass dolls.
The illusion dispelled, Akuma fixes his eyes upon his target. She approaches him through the flames, her arms slack, blood streaming from the corner of her mouth, her hair spilling over to hide her gaze, a sick smile on her face as she advances on him like the hungry dead.
?This is finished,? he barks, blurring from his place on the floor to seize her by the collar, lifting her face to his, to gaze into her eyes one last time as the world they share turns to white.
The Shun Goku Satsu tears through Kagura?s body with the sound of a hundred bone-shattering fistblows. In that instant, the killing intent swells to levels intolerable to life. Birds fall from the sky. Anyone still in the building drops to their knees, the strength gone out of their legs, their lungs. Every plant in and on the building curls up and dies. And then it is gone, sucked out of the world with gracious immediacy, pulled back into its master, who stands over the blood-red and ragged form that had once been a woman, turning his back to the scene, the kanji ten glowing on his back.
Akuma hears the sirens and the chut-chut-chut of the approaching helicopters, but they concern him not at all as he steps through the smoke and the swirling paper debris to the massive bore left by his Shoryuken.
Just before he leaps to the rooftop, the ten on his back changes for an instant, to a circle marked with eight jagged points, the lines of some strange and forgotten star, the sign of a terrible alliance.
The mark of Orochi.