James instantly shifted into a defensive stance, hands and short sword raised defensively, stepping to place the Red Oni between most of James’s body and the Blue Oni’s.

  “I guess you understood that your brother couldn’t win,” James taunted, raising his voice to make sure the Blue Oni caught what he was saying.

  “Oh, I just noticed that your monster was creeping up on my brother, and I realized that you didn’t intend to allow the fight to continue as a one on one duel,” the Blue Oni said smoothly.

  The Red Oni turned its head and looked back at the smoking ruin of James’s Body Double Dummy.

  “Well done,” it murmured quietly, turning back to face James. “You almost surprised m—”

  The still-steaming, slightly charred Body Double Dummy leaped onto the back of the Red Oni’s head. Suddenly, the Red Oni was wrestling with the not-quite-dead monster, and the creature was covering the Red Oni’s eyes. James took advantage of the brief moment that this lasted to stab at the Red Oni.

  His sword sank into the Red Oni’s neck just as the Red Oni bit into the Body Double Dummy neck and ripped its head clean off. That was when James’s monster stopped moving—but the damage was already done. The Red Oni’s eyes went wild, his body dropped backward, losing control of his flight, and his hands released the axes to clasp at his neck wound. James pulled Roscuro out of the neck, and he smelled the coppery tang as blood began to gush out of the hole.

  “Brother, no!”

  James heard the Blue Oni’s voice, and he was suddenly struck by a heavy, hot force. As his body writhed, momentarily out of his control, he recognized that the power that had hit him was a bolt of lightning.

  His eyes stopped working for a moment, and then he saw the Blue Oni standing in front of him, pouring green energy onto the Red Oni. James knew what that was—healing power. The hole in the Red Oni’s neck closed, and the Blue Oni quickly yanked the Red Oni backward, pulling his apparently weightless body away from James.

  James regained his ability to move. He felt sore all over.

  Good job, Dummy, he thought, looking down at the pieces of his fried and now dismembered monster.

  His eyes darted back up to quickly focus on the two Onis again. The Red Oni was shaking its head as if trying to regain its presence of mind. James wondered if it had lost consciousness for a moment.

  “Let’s fight together,” said the Blue Oni, glaring at James as he spoke. “We gave him enough of a chance to win one on one. Now it’s time we bring this home.”

  “Thank you, brother,” the Red Oni said with a mixture of warmth and gruffness. “I appreciate the healing, but I can handle this. He just surprised me, that’s all.”

  “Don’t try to fight alone,” the Blue Oni replied sternly. “You almost died just now. All it takes is lowering your guard for one moment. Think what would happen to me if I didn’t have you to act as a meat shield. Our best chance is together.”

  James blinked. That’s quite an argument there.

  “Well, after you saved my life, I can’t very well turn you down, can I?” the Red Oni said hotly, punching the air. “Don’t regret it if you die, all right?”

  “Don’t be silly,” the Blue Oni said. “You’re the emotional one. I’m not the type to have regrets.”

  James thought the Blue Oni was actually emotional, too. It was just a little more subtle; it took something like James almost killing the Red Oni to upset it.

  But more importantly, as the brothers were bickering, he developed his strategy for fighting both of them at once, having assumed that they would ultimately fall on the side of fighting him together—the sane option.

  I need to keep the Red Oni between me and the Blue Oni as much as possible to try to avoid being struck by lightning. Maybe if I can catch the Red Oni in my spider silk, I can break away and deal with the Blue Oni. Always kill the Healer first.

  “Let’s go, then,” the Red Oni said, pulling James’s attention back to the brothers.

  They charged him, then, the Red Oni flying in like Peter Pan, on the right, while the Blue Oni charged in from the left.

  James began silently charging Illusion Magic—deception was the best way he could think of to get himself out of this disadvantageous position.

  As he kept his eyes carefully on the Onis, James noticed the Blue Oni’s kanabo flying through the air toward it—returning to its hand, just like the Red Oni’s axes had earlier.

  That reminded him that the Red Oni had actually dropped its weapons. James looked down and saw the axes beginning to move, and he grabbed hold of them before they could return to the Red Oni.

  Then the weapons started to carry James through the air, toward the Red Oni, just as the two Onis closed the distance to either side of him. The Red Oni tried to reach out and take its axes, and James responded by leaping up to the Red Oni’s head height and kicking its hands away. Then he twisted his body in midair to block the Blue Oni’s kanabo with one of the axes. The other one, he swung at the Blue Oni’s torso. The monster nimbly sidestepped, evading it.

  The Red Oni’s grasping hands latched onto James’s ankles at that point, and he swung the axes at the Red Oni’s head from opposite sides.

  The monster did nothing to block the attack, but the axes themselves simply stopped inches from its face as if hitting an invisible wall. The Oni grinned, as if to say, Did you really think those axes could hurt me?

  From behind James, he sensed swift movement from the Blue Oni. James instinctively dropped his body backward, making himself as flat as a wooden board, and the kanabo hissed just overhead as the Blue Oni swung it with great force.

  James hurled the axes as far away as he could, then bent his body even further down and threw his back against the Red Oni’s armor as the kanabo swung downward. This time, one of the spikes on the club grazed the top of his head and tore a deep gouge in his scalp. Hot blood immediately poured from the wound, though it fell straight down to the ground rather than dripping into his face, since he was upside down.

  Can’t let that hit me directly, James thought.

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  He activated the Illusion Magic he had been charging. Then he used Lightning Strike, running electricity through his ankles.

  The Red Oni writhed and released him, and James tucked his head and rolled sideways away from the two.

  The Blue Oni fired a bolt of lightning at James, and he threw himself to the side, barely avoiding the blast. The odor of burnt grass and scorched earth filled his nostrils.

  But he couldn’t stop and smell the charred sod. Another bolt of lightning shot through the air at James’s head, and he launched himself out of the way once again.

  “I can see through your deception, human!” the Blue Oni yelled angrily. James looked at the Blue Oni and noticed its yellow eyes glowing. It must be using one of its magical abilities to counter the Illusion Magic.

  The glow of lightning appeared around the Blue Oni’s arm again, but then the Red Oni slashed at it with one of the axes, which the Red Oni had apparently reclaimed while James was running away from the lightning bolts.

  “What are you doing?” the Blue Oni screeched, dodging and weaving away from axe blows.

  “Hold still and fight like a man, human! You don’t think you can fool me with that pale imitation of my brother’s voice?” the Red Oni said.

  “You damned idiot, you need to see through the illusions! Here, let me help you—”

  The Blue Oni reached for his brother, and an axe cleaved his arm off. The white robes were instantly stained with blood.

  “Ah, what the hell?!” the Blue Oni screamed, his arm gushing improbable-seeming amounts of red.

  “Die, human!” the Red Oni yelled, cackling and swinging his axe like a maniac.

  I saved this for the ogres but didn’t end up needing it. And now, with the open sky above, I have sunlight to recharge.

  James prepared to fire his Solar Ray at the Blue Oni. He would kill the enemy’s magic user. Then the Red Oni, still under his spell, would be easy pickings.

  The solar energy already in James’s body and the solar energy pulled in across every part of his body under the sun began moving along his body, coalescing just in front of his mouth.

  “Damn it, listen to me!” The Blue Oni was screaming as he ran from the Red Oni at this point, while the bloodthirsty Red Oni raced behind him, wielding his axe with even more impressive fervor now that his target was wounded. They moved ever further from James, as the Blue Oni tried to escape its brother. “He’s going to kill us if we fight each other. We have to work together!”

  James chuckled quietly from his distant vantage point but otherwise simply remained standing still. As he stayed there, not doing anything but letting his attack charge, his body was healing itself from the minor injuries he had suffered. Already, the wound to his scalp had stopped bleeding, and he thought his cracked rib was trying to restore itself too.

  The Blue Oni finally snapped and shot a bolt of lightning at his brother, seemingly almost as a last resort. The Red Oni stood paralyzed in a moment, its body writhing.

  Then it shook its head.

  “Wait, what’s happened? Why are you bleeding, brother?”

  Shit.

  James’s concentrated solar energy had been focused into a ball that sat just outside his mouth at this point. Now he let go and unleashed it as a beam of light.

  He aimed it at the Red Oni’s center of mass—the Blue Oni’s body was too obscured by the Red Oni’s larger figure at this point—and he concentrated the blast as much as he could into a small, intense beam.

  The Solar Ray scorched the air between James and the monsters, moving at a speed James still found incredible.

  The Red Oni seemed to hear or feel the attack coming. It managed to turn slightly—to make the beginnings of a motion to evade it—but still, the attack tore straight through the area where a human’s right kidney would be. The Red Oni dropped instantly to the ground, instantly disabled, and the beam tore through the abdomen all the way up to the shoulder.

  As the Red Oni landed, James saw the meat of that wound land, mostly separated from the Red Oni’s body, beside him. It was as if someone had taken a hot knife and cut from the right shoulder down almost to the right pelvis and cauterized the wound.

  The Red Oni made no sound, and it made no motion. James saw the Blue Oni up and moving—running away from the attack—so he next focused on the Blue Oni. Changing the direction of the beam was as simple as turning his head, so James simply followed the movement of the Blue Oni with his neck.

  The monster ran with the desperation that accompanied certain death, however. It moved faster than James had seen either of the creatures run before, and it managed to reach the Shinto shrine without suffering more than a scorched sleeve at James’s hands.

  James simultaneously began walking closer to get line of sight on the Blue Oni again and pivoted to aim the beam into the shrine. It chopped through the thick columns first, then cut the thin paper and wooden doors much more easily.

  But James was unable to get much closer before the beam ran low on power and finally petered out.

  Damn, I almost had him, James thought.

  He turned his head and looked back at the Red Oni. The more physical of the two brothers was still alive, he saw, and its body twitched with pain as it looked up at him.

  “That was a great attack, human,” the Red Oni mumbled. “You deserve the win. It was a pleasure dueling with you.”

  James opened his mouth to reply, then felt a jolt of pain through his whole body. Every inch of flesh shook with the impact of the most powerful lightning bolt that had struck him yet. As James felt that his movement was about to return, another lightning bolt struck him. And then another.

  He has to have limits to his Mana, James thought. These attacks aren’t injuring me very badly. He’s just delaying the inevitable.

  He couldn’t move in a coordinated way while the electricity was disrupting his nervous system, but his brain still worked somehow. Perhaps it was his superhuman powers of endurance.

  James’s body relaxed for a moment. He started to turn his head, to tense his body, to open his mouth. Then the Blue Oni was right beside him, administering a blast of lightning directly to the side of James’s head.

  The whole world went fuzzy, and James found himself on the ground, his body as uncoordinated as it had been a moment ago, and now even his brain fuzzy.

  The Blue Oni was leaning over his brother, speaking urgently.

  “We have to fuse,” the Blue Oni said.

  “Against our very first opponent,” the Red Oni said. “Maybe it’s better to accept defeat with dignity.”

  “Will dignity put food in your belly?” the Blue Oni asked. “Will dignity take walks around the shrine with me when my brother is no more? Think of this as real death, brother. Death for us both, perhaps, if Carol sees us as failures.”

  “I was dead before I was born, and it was fine,” the Red Oni said. It had the air of parroting a quote that the Red Oni had heard—perhaps something the Blue Oni often said.

  “Enough of that. Put your pride aside, or we’ll both die, idiot!” the Blue Oni cried.

  “Sorry, brother,” the Red Oni replied. “I know you’re trying to do what’s best for us.” He reached his left hand out to his brother, palm open.

  James’s fingers twitched. He thought he was starting to get a little mobility back. His eyes blinked. His brain processed.

  What are they doing? Did the blue one say fuse?

  The Blue Oni took his brother’s hand with his right hand, palm open. Both their bodies began to glow.

  James overcame his physical issues. He had a bad feeling about this. He launched himself to his feet and threw a quick Air Strike at the glowing brothers.

  Then the light grew too blinding for him to see.

  He raised a hand to cover his eyes, and then he lowered it as the light faded.

  “Hello human,” said a voice that sounded like the intonations of the two brothers—twisted and merged and made more sinister by the combination.

  James stood and stared at the new monster.

  What the hell am I dealing with now?