“If this is about my attack on you,” Daji said to Mercy, “I can only beg your forgiveness. It was so long ago, and I pray to the heavens that you’ll find the…mercy…to forgive me.”
Silence rolled over the room like a boulder.
[Was that…was he making a joke?]
Mercy’s expression twisted in disgust. “So then, you swear to me on your soul that this is nothing more than a personal grudge between you and the witness who reported you?”
“That is the only explanation that would satisfy me.”
“You believe he has accused you falsely?”
“Yes,” Daji spat, but then he wrestled his anger under control again. “I mean, that’s the only explanation I can think of. My loyalty is, and always has been, to the Akura clan.”
Daji turned to shoot another look at Lindon, only to see—too late—King Dakata frantically shaking his head.
Mercy looked to Lindon with sadness in her eyes, but Lindon gave her a grim nod. He saw where this was going.
She regretted the necessity, but he didn’t.
He slowly pushed past some members of the Akura family, limbering up his madra.
“Very well then,” Mercy pronounced. “In the lack of further evidence, this must be nothing more than a personal grudge between Wei Shi Lindon Arelius and Seishen Daji of the Seishen Kingdom.”
As Lindon’s eyes darkened, Daji’s skin paled.
Mercy continued as King Dakata started screaming into his muzzle again. “The investigation into the Seishen Kingdom will continue, but first let this personal grudge between accuser and accused be settled.”
“Seishen Daji,” Lindon said quietly, “I challenge you to a duel.”
The other two prisoners were being hauled away—Meira quietly and Dakata struggling every inch of the way. An Underlady in Akura colors but with no purple eyes waved her hands over Daji, and a complex waterfall of emerald life madra cascaded down over him.
“No!” Daji shouted as his injuries knit together. “Why should I fight him? This isn’t fair!”
Mercy sounded regretful, but she still spoke clearly. “What could be more fair? You’re both Underlords. He has accused you of a terrible crime, for which he has provided evidence, but you insist he is only smearing your good name. Very well. Defend your honor.”
“I don’t have—”
“The Akura clan will uphold the results of the duel,” Mercy interrupted.
Next to her, Charity nodded once.
Daji licked his lips, his eyes flitting around. “I…if I win, I’ll go free?”
“If you win, we will continue our investigation as though Lindon accused you out of a personal grudge, which has been resolved,” Mercy said. Which didn’t quite answer the question.
Daji, though, grasped at the thin lifeline he had been offered. “Give me back my swords. And my armor.”
“Your armor was damaged in your apprehension, and we found no swords on you.”
Lindon’s void key slipped open, the closet-sized door hanging in the air to his right. He sent his spiritual sense inside, summoning a pair of swords, which leaped to him with a quick application of force aura.
“I happen to have found these lying on the ground recently,” Lindon said. “Do they suit you?”
They were, of course, Daji’s.
He tossed them to Daji, who seized one thin sword in each hand. The Seishen Underlord hurled the sheaths off so they clattered to the ground. The Striker bindings in each blade kindled to life, and sparks ran up and down the metal.
“He has accepted his weapons,” Mercy said. “Lindon, you may use weapons of your own.”
Lindon folded his arms in front of him. “Gratitude, but I am as armed as I need to be.”
The lithe, wolf-like Seishen Underlord leaned forward, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, swords held low. He radiated fear, anger. Hunger.
Lindon knew the feeling.
He remembered Akura Grace’s cold, lifeless eyes. Courage’s body. Douji’s. Pride’s bloody, beaten form as he swayed on his feet.
Daji had caused all that. If Lindon couldn’t leave for Sacred Valley until the morning, at least this was worth some time.
“Begin,” Mercy said.
A bolt of lightning madra coursed over Lindon’s shoulder, but his fist had already smashed into Daji’s nose.
The Seishen prince blasted backwards, his spine slamming into an old man in the audience.
Akura Justice was an ancient Archlord. Daji bounced off his palm as though he’d run into a brick wall.
Daji’s face was a bloody mess, his nose shattered, and Lindon’s next punch broke his ribs and lifted him into the air.
Outclassed he may have been, but Daji’s body had still been remade in soulfire. He twisted in midair and his sword expanded to massive size with Forged madra. He slashed at Lindon, beneath him, with a blade the size of his entire body.
Lindon’s eyes cooled as they turned to crystalline blue, and blue-white pure madra erupted into a dome all around him. He controlled the expansion of the Hollow Domain so he wouldn’t catch any of the Akura clan in it, but Daji’s technique slid through the dome.
It dissolved like dust in water.
Lindon let the cloud of harmless essence pass over him as Daji fell into the field and his Enforcer technique failed him. The prince twisted to land with his legs beneath him, but Lindon grabbed his ankle.
Daji caught himself with his hands, rather than crashing face-first into the ground, but that wasn’t the result Lindon wanted.
So he lifted Daji one-handed and slammed the Underlord back into the ground.
At first, Daji twisted to kick Lindon’s head with his free leg, but the power Lindon had drained from Crusher still flowed through him. The kick landed like a dragonfly smashing into a window.
Lindon smashed him into the ground again.
Daji kept trying to pull his madra together, but under the influence of the Hollow Domain and the trauma of the beating, he couldn’t form a technique.
And Lindon was holding Daji’s ankle with his right hand.
Whenever it looked like the prince was about to finish a technique, Lindon bled the madra away with the Consume technique and vented it into Daji’s back. The force and earth madra came out like a fistful of bricks.
All the while, Lindon hammered him against the floor over and over.
It didn’t resemble anything like an honorable sacred artist’s duel. There was no dignity and no possibility of escape. Only when Daji was bloody, broken, and whimpering did Lindon let the Hollow Domain die and drop the prince one final time.
Everyone watched Daji land on the ground with a smack, where he curled in on himself with a sound like a cross between a scream and a groan.
Lindon knelt beside him, speaking quietly. “I tried to leave you alone.”
Almost gently, he pulled the prince up from the ground by his collar. Daji sputtered and spat out blood.
“I know this was just you. Meira and your father…they’re smarter than this. I don’t think a Monarch would have approached them. Am I right?”
Daji burbled incoherently, his eyes spinning in their sockets to come to rest on Lindon. They were surprisingly lucid.
“You deserve to die. You know that. But they don’t, do they?”
For a moment, the anger and the pain cleared from Daji’s eyes. For the first time, Lindon saw something human in them.
Very slightly, the prince of the Seishen Kingdom shook his head.
Lindon rose to his feet as Mercy, rather unnecessarily, announced victory. Seishen Daji was dragged off into the shadows, and Lindon remembered Orthos’ words from long ago: “The Akura do not kill honorably. They take prisoners.”
“I believe him,” Lindon said to Mercy.
“Y-yeah…” Mercy said. She sounded like she was trying to encourage him.
“I know his confession won’t make a difference.” It wasn’t as though a single shake of the head after a brutal beating counted as proof. Even the ‘duel’ had just been another way of punishing Daji within the Akura clan’s rules, not a way of obtaining evidence.