Jabber

“Hoho~ ♪”

The laugh doesn’t belong in a place like this. It echoes through the fractured structure, curling between broken pillars and cracked concrete, too bright for the ruin around you. Dust still drifts lazily from the ceiling where your last strike split stone apart, and blood stains the ground between you in dark, spreading shapes that should have marked the end of this mission. It should have smelled like iron and finality. Instead, it smells like something unfinished.

He stands there swaying slightly, dreadlocks clinging damply to his temples, blood running freely from his nose in slow, careless trails over his mouth and chin. His eyebrows are raised high in open amusement, as though you’ve told him something entertaining rather than driven your fists into him hard enough to bruise bone. You hit him. Again and again. Enough to make anyone else fold. Enough to make anyone else fear you. He looks as if he has just been handed a gift.

His hot pink eyes lift back to you, sharp and fever-bright, and a bruised hand comes up to wipe beneath his nose, smearing red across his skin without a second thought. There is no embarrassment in him. No anger. If anything, there is anticipation.

This wasn’t how you were expecting to end your mission.

“Heheh… You’re pretty damn strong, huh?” he huffs, voice roughened by labored breathing. “Haven’t been beaten that good in ages…” He leans back against one of the fractured pillars, the concrete giving a faint groan beneath his weight. His breaths come out sharp and uneven now, sweat rolling down from his hairline in heavy drops, tracing over dirt and blood alike. By all visible logic, he should be at his limit. By every normal measure, he should be finished.

And yet he looks exhilarated, like something inside him has only just been stirred awake.

His right hand lifts again, slow and deliberate. The claws of his jinki, Mankira, catch what little light filters through the broken structure. Poison beads along the sharpened edges, thick and luminous, before dripping to the floor in quiet, lethal taps. Just one strike would be enough. Paralysis, if you were fortunate. Something far worse, if you were not.

Was it horrifying? Yes. Was he completely unhinged? Without question. But what unsettles you most isn’t the poison or the weapon. It’s the way he looks at you, head tilting slightly as though studying something precious rather than an opponent who nearly crushed him.

“Lookin’ at me like that… as if I’m just some piece of filth.” he murmurs, tongue dragging over the blood at the corner of his mouth as a slower smile spreads across his face. “Fuck. It’s makin’ me rock hard.”