"You're a rookie, aren't you?" the duplicate of Damon sneered, his voice dripping with an unearned confidence.
Takumi didn't so much as flinch. His heavy blade hung low, its edge cutting a silent line through the stagnant tunnel air.
"Yeah," he replied, his voice unnervingly level. "You could say that."
Damon let out a sharp, echoing bark of a laugh.
"Hah! Vanguard is really scraping the bottom of the barrel if they're sending out day-ones," he drawled. "Aoshima isn't a playground, kid. There are things in this dark that'll swallow someone like you whole."
His voice boomed off the concrete walls, carrying back to the terrified passengers huddled behind the train.
"Everyone, stay back!" the engineer yelled, his arm barred across Timotheo's chest to keep the boy from moving forward. "Stay away from that man!"
Takumi cast a brief, sharp glance over his shoulder.
"And if I do?" he challenged. "Do you actually have a plan, or are you just loud?"
The engineer's face twisted with a mix of fear and frustration.
"You're just a kid! What do you think you're going to achieve?" he snapped. "That man is a monster—he'll break you in half!"
Without a word of rebuttal, Takumi turned his focus back to Damon.
From behind him, Timotheo spoke up, his voice barely a whisper but steady.
"...Just let him be," he said, his eyes locked on Takumi's back. He was afraid, sure, but there was a flicker of something else—a strange sort of trust. "I don't know him well, but I get the feeling he knows exactly what he's doing."
The engineer looked at the boy, wavering, but ultimately held his tongue.
Up ahead, Damon's grin began to sour. His patience was clearly hitting its limit.
"Tch... I'm getting bored," he muttered, rolling his neck until it popped. His gaze narrowed onto Takumi again. "You just dug your own grave, kid. Now... one of you is going to start talking."
A jagged, cruel smile pulled at his lips.
"Because I know for a fact someone in this crowd knows where that woman is."
"Not sure I follow you."
The second the words left Takumi's mouth, Damon's jaw set and his fists clenched, his muscles bulging under his skin.
"Acting tough isn't going to save you!" he roared.
And then, he exploded forward.
Damon charged with his arms spread wide, a human battering ram aiming to crush everything in his path. Takumi's eyes narrowed, but he didn't retreat. Instead, he shifted his grip on the cleaver and stepped directly into the danger zone.
The speed caught everyone off guard.
While Damon moved with the lumbering weight of raw power, Takumi moved with a sharpened precision. His Binder flared, amplifying his momentum and allowing him to vanish from his spot, closing the gap in a heartbeat.
Before anyone could blink, Takumi's cleaver was mid-swing.
Damon's eyes widened. Pure survival instinct took over as he crossed his massive arms to brace for the impact.
"Don't you get it?!" he barked, his grin returning. "Blades won't even scratch—"
But the hit never came.
Takumi's cleaver whistled past Damon's side, missing him by a wide margin. As the blade passed, a brilliant streak of yellow energy erupted from the steel, stretching into a long, shimmering arc that Takumi dragged forward with the weight of his swing.
The energy slash soared past Damon and slammed directly into the mountain of debris blocking the tracks.
"What the...?" Damon spun around, his momentum faltering.
"Start the engine!" Takumi yelled.
The energy tore through the rubble like a hot wire through wax, shattering boulders and sending chunks of stone flying. A violent shockwave followed, clearing the tracks in a spray of dust and yellow sparks.
Caught off balance by the misdirection, the clone snarled and swung a blind, heavy backhand toward Takumi's head—a blow with enough force to shatter stone.
"Takumi, look out!" Timotheo screamed.
Takumi didn't need the warning. He pivoted on a dime, bringing his cleaver around to meet the blow at the same angle, the blade humming with a sudden surge of yellow light.
The collision was deafening.
The clone's arm—dense as reinforced steel—clashed against the edge of the cleaver. A shockwave rippled through the floor, sending sparks cascading into the darkness like dying stars.
The clone grunted in annoyance and immediately threw his second fist, the sheer speed of it dragging a rush of wind behind it.
"For a rookie... you've got some damn nerves!" he growled.
The punch came straight for Takumi's face.
He dropped low, the wind of the fist ruffling his hair as he ducked beneath it. Using the flat of his blade, he parried the force, guiding the massive arm harmlessly past him. In the same fluid motion, he twisted his hips and brought the cleaver down in a vicious, point-blank counter.
An explosion of energy detonated against the clone's chest.
The sheer pressure of the strike sent the heavy man hurtling backward, his boots carving deep furrows into the tunnel floor as he slid nearly ten feet.
Takumi stood his ground, breathing steadily as he adjusted his grip.
"...This thing packs a punch," he remarked quietly. "But man... it's heavier than it looks."
He didn't give the clone time to recover. Pulling the weapon back, yellow energy coiled around the steel like a living current. With a sharp, clean snap of his wrists, he sent another slash flying.
This one was smaller, more concentrated—a disc of light that hissed through the air.
"Whew!" the clone laughed, his irritation turning into a manic sort of glee. "Now that's more like it!"
His expression darkened into something far more dangerous.
"But you're starting to really piss me off!"
Ignoring the incoming energy, he put his head down and charged straight into the light.
Takumi's eyes widened. He hadn't expected that.
With a fluid, practiced motion, the clone reached behind his belt and drew a heavy machete. Without breaking his stride, he stepped into the path of the incoming energy slash and swung with savage intent.
With one powerful, arcing sweep—and a grin that looked more like a snarl—he sliced the attack clean in half.
The severed energy lost its form instantly, detonating into a violent gale that slammed into the tunnel walls, sending a spray of dust and grit through the air.
"Hahaha!" the clone's roar of laughter echoed off the concrete.
"You've got crazy power, kid, I'll give you that!" he shouted, expertly spinning the machete back to his side. "But your skill? It's damn near nonexistent!"
He dropped his center of gravity, leaning so far forward he was almost parallel to the tracks.
Then, he ignited.
The ground groaned and buckled beneath him as he kicked off, sending a visible tremor through the tunnel floor. A heartbeat later, he launched forward like a physical projectile, a spiraling whirlwind of dust and debris tearing up in his wake as he closed the distance.
Takumi's vision couldn't track it. His eyes simply weren't trained to process that kind of velocity; one moment the clone was a distant blur, and the next, the air itself seemed to scream.
Panic flared in his chest as he instinctively scrambled backward, trying to force his mind to focus, but he was already too late.
The clone was suddenly right there, looming over him, a savage silhouette with a blade already mid-arc.
Takumi's pupils dilated in pure terror. The machete whistled through the air, dragging a heavy, pressurized wake of wind that felt like it was pinning him in place before the steel even touched him.
Then, something shifted.
Just as the blade was a hair's breadth from splitting his collarbone, a cold, electric jolt of pure adrenaline bypassed his brain and went straight to his nerves.
His body moved before he could think, a desperate, reflexive twist of his torso that felt like his muscles were snapping under the strain.
The machete grazed the fabric of his jacket—close enough that the passing friction burned—but the steel bit into nothing but empty air.
He stumbled, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, realization only catching up to him after the cold shadow of the blade had passed.
The machete didn't need to draw blood to do its damage.
As the blade whistled past Takumi's chest, the sheer, impossible momentum behind the swing finally caught up with reality. It wasn't just a missed strike; it was a violent displacement of the air itself.
A deafening crack—like a localized sonic boom—shattered the tunnel's heavy silence, followed instantly by a wall of compressed pressure that slammed outward from the machete's path.
The force hit Takumi like a physical punch to the gut. Even though the steel hadn't touched him, the resulting shockwave sent him stumbling back, his boots losing their purchase on the oily gravel of the tracks.
Behind the blade, the atmosphere screamed as it rushed to fill the vacuum created by the swing. A predatory, localized hurricane whipped through the narrow space, shattering the remaining glass in the train's headlights and kicking up a blinding curtain of grit and iron dust.
Passengers cried out as they were nearly knocked off their feet by the secondary gust; the engineer had to throw his entire weight against a cabin door just to keep it from being wrenched off its hinges.
Takumi skidded across the ground, his cleaver sparking against the metal rail as he used the weapon like an anchor to stop his slide. His ears were ringing, his head throbbing from the sudden, violent change in pressure.
He looked up through the swirling haze, his lungs burning as he struggled to catch a breath that the wind had seemingly stolen.
The clone stood perfectly still in the center of the chaos, the machete held loosely at his side. He looked entirely unaffected by the gale he'd just conjured, staring down at Takumi with a terrifying, predatory hunger in his eyes.
"See that?" the clone asked, his voice cutting through the whistling wind with chilling ease.
"That's the difference, kid. You're quick… but you still fightin' against the world around ya. Me? I make this whole damn thing move how I want."
To be continued...