For Blade, Jigoku provided no chains, no starvation cells, no gladiatorial pits. His prison was a different kind, a vast, obsidian training ground known as the Arena of Becoming, and his jailer was Rushifa himself. Here, under the gaze of the lord of all nightmares, Blade was granted his one desire: to train without limits. It was a wish twisted into a torment.
He trained until the spotted fur was worn from his knuckles, leaving raw, weeping flesh that cracked and bled onto the punishing stone. He pushed until his legs were numb, trembling columns of pain that threatened to buckle with every stance and strike. Sleep was a negotiated surrender, stolen in fitful minutes between sessions, and his brilliant, exhausted mind began to turn against him. In the silent moments, cruel hallucinations bloomed: the phantoms of his people walked the edges of the arena, their glassy, accusing eyes silent, the mocking laughter of the three Royals echoed from the shadows; Shiba's arrogant smirk would materialize before him, only to dissolve as Blade lunged through empty air. Still, he trained.
Rushifa allowed it. More than allowed, he orchestrated it. He was the unseen maestro of this brutal symphony. Demons brought nutrient-slurry that healed his wounds with unnatural speed, only so they could be reopened. Ancient, hateful combat masters from forgotten hells were summoned to duel him, teaching Blade techniques of murder that had been purged from a million worlds. Rushifa molded him, not with kindness, but with the relentless, shaping pressure of a tectonic plate. The goal was to forge a weapon stronger than any Nekonian in history, a living blade tempered in the fires of hatred and honed on the whetstone of endless pain.
But the metal refused to take the desired imprint. Blade's body learned, adapted, grew terrifyingly powerful. Yet his will remained his own. He became a master of deception, learning to fake the hollow-eyed loyalty he saw in the other broken souls of Jigoku. He bowed his head at the right times, used the title "Father" with a flat, unreadable tone. But inside, the core of him was a vault, and within that vault blazed a single, dual-pointed star: Shiba, who had destroyed his world, and Rushifa, who had stolen its ashes. One goal, kill them both. It was the engine of his every breath, the calculation behind his every feigned submission.
Every day, like a twisted ritual, he would test his progress. In a moment of Rushifa's apparent distraction, or at the end of a particularly successful training bout, Blade would unleash everything he had learned. A lightning-fast strike aimed at the demon lord's throat. A focused beam of stolen hell-energy directed at his heart. A telekinetic grip meant to shatter the armor of shadow.
Every day, it ended the same way. Rushifa, with a sigh of profound boredom, would dismantle him. Not with overwhelming, Shiba-like force, but with an infuriating, pedagogical precision. He would demonstrate the flaw in Blade's stance, the arrogance in his attack pattern, the pathetic nature of his hatred. The punishment was not just defeat, but a thorough, humiliating deconstruction followed by a beating that left Blade a hair's breadth from death, bones pulverized, organs faltering, consciousness a tiny flame in a howling void. Then, the demons would drag him to the restorative vats, and the process would begin again.
"You cling to a ghost," Rushifa told him one day, standing over Blade's broken form as regenerative fluids stitched his lungs back together. "You are not the Nekonian prince. That prince died with his planet. You are the son of Rushifa. You are not the heir to a lowly, extinct race of cats. You are a slave to my will. The only legacy you will have is the one I carve into the multiverse with your edge."
Blade said nothing. He stared at the roiling, blood-red sky of Jigoku, teeth gritted against the pain. The words were meant to scald, to sever his last connection. Instead, they cemented his resolve. Rushifa's very interest was proof. The legend of the Tiger Nekonian wasn't just a campfire story, it was a cosmic threat. Why else would the second strongest being in existence waste such energy on a "lowly, extinct" boy? Rushifa feared it. He was trying to overwrite it, to co-opt it, to create a Tiger of his own design.
A wild, defiant hope took root in Blade's shattered heart. If the legend is real... then the power is real. And if it's real, it's in me. He wasn't just training to please a master or to kill a foe. He was training to provoke his own ascension. Every beating, every drop of blood, every hallucination of his lost people was a hammer strike on the shell of his own limitation. He was trying to break through, to reach the power that Rushifa so dreaded.
This secret hope was his true sustenance. It made him stronger than the restorative vats, more resilient than the demonic tutors. It was why, when he saw Birman in the pits, a tailless, hollow-eyed engine of violence who no longer recognized him, he felt a pang not of defeat, but of fury. It was why whispers of Burmilla, turned into a silent wraith of hatred, only hardened his heart. They had broken. They had become Rushifa's. He would not.
He was the anvil upon which hell itself was beating. And with every blow, he did not break. He grew denser, harder, sharper. He was learning to hold the shape of his own soul against the infinite pressure of damnation, waiting for the moment the hammer would finally strike the spark that would set him, and all of Jigoku, ablaze.
The turning point did not come with a fanfare of triumph, but with the silent, shocking absence of resistance.
It was a day like any other in the Arena of Becoming. The sourceless, bloody light painted the obsidian floor. Blade's body, now a latticework of scar tissue over corded muscle, thrummed with stolen power and seething intent. He had learned to mute the tell-tale flicker in his eyes, to keep the set of his shoulders perfectly neutral. His daily assassination attempt was no longer a burst of rage, but a calculation, a flawlessly executed sequence honed over thousands of failures.
He feigned a stumble after disarming a hulking magma-demon, using the momentum to pivot. In that fraction of a second, he channeled every ounce of his being, the focused Primal State, the hell-forged techniques, the crystalline, burning hatred, into a single, perfected strike. His hand, fingers hardened to diamond-like points, sheathed in a corona of crackling void-energy, shot forward. It was aimed not for armor, but for the infinitesimal gap in reality that Rushifa's form seemed to occupy.
And it connected.
There was no impact of flesh, no crack of bone. His hand simply... passed through. It felt like plunging his arm into a still, bottomless lake of absolute cold. Rushifa did not block. He did not counter. He did not move. He simply allowed it.
Blade froze, his arm buried to the elbow in the chest of the lord of Jigoku. He stared, uncomprehending. Rushifa looked down at him, those starless eyes showing not pain, not anger, but a faint, weary curiosity, as if observing a peculiar insect that had finally managed to crawl onto his sleeve.
Shock, cold and total, washed over Blade. The relentless tension of years, the daily cycle of attack and devastating rebuttal, snapped. For a single, vertiginous moment, he felt nothing but a hollow void. Then, into that void, rushed a sensation so foreign he almost didn't recognize it.
Joy.
It was a tiny, bright, treacherous spark, igniting deep in the frozen core of his being. He had done it. The impossible. The tyrant was struck. The invincible was vulnerable. After an eternity of breaking himself against an immovable mountain, he had felt the mountain give. A laugh, choked and hysterical, bubbled in his throat. His vision blurred, not with tears of pain, but with the dizzying promise of release, of vengeance fulfilled, of—
"Foolish child."
The voice was inside his skull, but it felt like the universe itself whispering into the sanctum of his soul. It was not loud. It was not angry. It was the sound of absolute, annihilating truth, and it extinguished that nascent spark of joy as utterly as a supernova snuffs a candle.
In that instant, understanding crashed down upon Blade with the weight of dead worlds.
He hadn't killed anything. He hadn't even wounded.
Death was a concept for mortals, for things that had a beginning and thus could have an end. Rushifa was not of that order. He was not a king to be overthrown, a foe to be surpassed. Trying to kill him was not an act of rebellion, it was a category error, like trying to murder gravity or assassinate time.
The chilling void his arm was plunged into wasn't a wound. It was a sample. A tiny taste of Rushifa's true nature. The demon lord wasn't just a being in Jigoku; in a fundamental way, he was Jigoku. He was the echoing scream in the eternal hall. He was the cold cruelty in Shito's smile, the despair in Burmilla's cell, the hollow violence in Birman's arena. He was the unspoken thought behind every betrayal, the silent permission for every atrocity. He was the dark potential in every heart, given dominion and consciousness. He was everywhere the light was not, and in the shadows it cast.
All of Blade's training, his pain, his brilliant, furious striving, it was all just noise. It was an ant, having spent its life perfecting the art of lifting grains of sand, suddenly looking up and comprehending the true, continental scale of the mountain it lived upon. No amount of strength could bridge that gap. No technique could affect a fundamental law.
The strength bled from his body. The void-energy around his hand winked out. He withdrew his arm, which was now numb and grey as if touched by absolute frost. His legs buckled.
Blade fell to his knees on the obsidian floor. The tears that streamed down his face were not of anger, or of sorrow for his people. They were the tears of absolute, humiliating comprehension. They were the acknowledgment of a scale so vast it rendered his entire existence, his entire purpose, into a fleeting, meaningless flicker. He had finally grasped the true nature of what stood before him.
He wasn't facing a tyrant.
He was kneeling before a fact.
Rushifa looked down at the broken prince, the silent tears cutting paths through the arena's dust on his cheeks. There was no smirk of victory. No gloating. The lesson had been delivered, and its truth was its own reward.
"Now," Rushifa said, his voice the gentle rumble of tectonic plates settling into a new, final arrangement. "Now you understand the material you are made of, and the nature of the forge. The pretense is over. Let us begin your real work."
For the first time, Blade did not look up with defiance. He stared at the ground, at the reflection of the monstrous, infinite truth in the polished stone. The anvil had finally understood the hammer. And in that understanding, a new, more terrible phase of his forging could truly begin.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHe8r4YRizu
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