Chapter Text
Draxum looked out at the four terrariums clustered in his lab and wondered if maybe the Council of Heads were right, and he really had lost it.
Four small turtles, no bigger than his palm, swimming sedately or eating the lettuce he’d supplied; and he was going to entrust the safety of Yokai-kind to them. But if his theories were correct, if the experiment went as planned, then it would all be worth it.
The ridicule. The indecision. The doubt. it would all be wiped away in the form of his greatest creations yet.
Warriors, highly defensive and durable as turtles, smart and capable from his teachings, and ruthlessly effective fighters…should he succeed in capturing Lou Jitsu.
Lou fucking Jistu.
It disgusted him that he needed to rely on the martial abilities of a human to execute his plan, but even he could not deny the fact that Lou Jitsu was the best fighter around and his creations deserved only the best.
On top of that, the dark poetry of creating his army, intent on the destruction of the human scourge above, with human DNA? It was retribution, it was justice for all the humans had done to them. He felt bolstered just thinking of it. That the sweeping tide of change he sought to bring about by turning human scum into Yokai, would start with these tiny turtles, this mutation, with Lou Jitsu’s own trivial blood? It was all too good to resist.
But regardless of his more emotional appreciation of the cascade of meaning, he also knew that his time in which to act was coming rapidly to a close, and if he wanted to protect the Yokai -as his family had always done, as his job title demanded- that drastic measure would have to be taken.
The latest prophecy from the Crystal Eater had rekindled Draxum’s passion for his goal to reclaim the surface for Yokai. His long time spent in service to the Council of Heads had distracted him, made him forget what his family had taught him.
But he could not forget the day the spider silk scroll was delivered.
Hundreds of thousands of spiders spilling from the crevasses within the chamber of the Council, delivering a pure white, finger-long scroll. Each terrible word weaved into it banged against Draxum’s skull like war drums, demanding a solution.
The end of Yokai, the end of all that lives
The sky torn apart
Birthing terror and fate worse than death
It foretold his worst nightmare: the humans crashing through the cavern sky of the Hidden Cities, breaking through the mystic wards with their barbaric persistence. Laying ruin to all of Yokai, all that his family had strived to protect, all that he had built to shelter and defend the citizens of the Hidden City.
And yet the Heads had the gall to tell him he was wrong, that the prophecy did not speak of the human threat but a global one, a more cataclysmic future than that of human domination. But what would a Yokai prophet see if not the future of Yokai? What would strike fear into the hearts of Yokai if not humans?
Draxum wasn’t going to wait for the Council to come around to what he already knew. He wasn’t going to wait a second longer for the humans to fulfill the prophecy.
There would be no human threat if there were no humans; whether they were dead or transformed into Yokai themselves was inconsequential. Though it all depended on the results of the turtles’ mutation. And that depended entirely on if he could even get Lou Jistu, and damn her but Big Mama knew how to protect her things.
All the lower levels of the Battle Nexus, where secrets and prisoners were kept, had been built with mystic-repellent materials: no portals, no mystic powers, no surveillance of any kind. He only knew Lou was down there in the first place because of Huginn and Muginn.
He had a plan though, whether it was his most elegant plan didn’t matter. All that mattered was succeeding.
He moved amongst the terrariums, reaching into the tanks to give a scratch on the shell or flip over any that had gotten stuck. They chirped at him or reached back to try and nip his offending fingers, much to his amusement.
Standing at the door to his lab, prepared to go obtain the last piece of the puzzle, he gave one last appraising glance over all the little reptiles. Today they were mere animals, beholden only to their needs. Tomorrow: champions.
* * *
Draxum noticed distantly as he stepped through a portal to the highest, almost precarious rungs of spectator seating within the Battle Nexus, that ever since Lou Jitsu stopped fighting there seemed to be less people in attendance, less money in Big Mama’s coffers.
Lou Jitsu had been the most interesting thing in the Hidden City for centuries. He was sure nearly every Yokai from every Hidden City around the world had made the trip even just once to see this wild human, entering and leaving fights impossibly stacked against him with not a hair out of place. And now he was gone, and the stale offerings of pre-Lou Jitsu were back, and the endless tide of spectators, and their money, had stemmed.
She must be livid.
Though Draxum was sure that the word had not yet been invented that could describe how furious Big Mama would be once the human fighter was stolen out from under her.
As if on cue with his thoughts the two little bodies on his shoulders unfurled their wings and darted from the precipice Draxum stood upon and flitted from shadow to shadow, moving swiftly down towards the arena getting into position where they might slip away into the tunnels for the champions once opened.
Draxum grinned as he pulled out the various glittery, bubbling potions hanging from his hip and looked down at the lackluster fight, thrilled to break up the monotony, and Big Mama’s ever fragile composure.
The announcer started up, desperately attempting with every fibre of his being to instill an excitement for the upcoming unimpressive bout that simply did not exist. And as he prattled on, announcing the upcoming combatants, the gates on the tunnels began to lower and Draxum lobbed the toxic looking concoctions down to smash apart on the battle-scarred arena field, and waited for a real show.
Though everything about the mission to steal away the human champion was stupid and ill-advised, Draxum had at least taken some precautions to conceal his deeds. He had nefariously procured the potions from Witch Town, an abysmally unserious faction of mystic users, but potent nonetheless, and their showy magics were well in effect as the splattered potions bubbled and steamed in hideous purples, pinks, and oranges, creating a phantasmagorical fire that quickly spread over the battlegrounds. No matter how terrible the flames and pungent the smoke -smelling of soaps and the sharp acidity of burning hair- they were only a grim herald to the terrible sound of the ground below crumbling apart under the onslaught of the furious undead.
The last remains of champions slain in the arena, many of them surely felled by Lou Jitsu himself, reduced to bits of bone and blood staining the concrete and dirt, were given form through the grim magics at work, reconstituting them only enough to feel their last moments, fear, rage, and the need for violence.
Already the Nexus was in an uproar from the fire breaking out, but when the hideous piles of dead warriors began leaping at the walls, desperately trying to scale them to get at the loud, rambunctious crowd surrounding them it devolved to pandemonium. Yokai trampling over seats and each other to try and escape, Big Mama’s hideously shrill voice calling out and commanding her men to deal with the offending outbreak of magic, and the zombies, still trying to climb and escape the fire, or the rare few turning on each other and spraying the ground below them in more blood, seeping back to where it belonged.
And in all the panic and noise, no one noticed the two little gargoyles slip through the slim gap between ceiling and gate, did not see as they flew deeper into the belly of the arena, deep, deep down where only prisoners, punishments, and rats lived.
Unseen himself Draxum summoned a portal and left the sight of carnage and destruction he’d unleashed in the arena, sure that undead warriors could not actually get out and hurt the spectators, but had no qualms against them laying into Big Mama’s fighters once they’d dropped down to deal with them. Less obstacles for the Huginn and Muginn to deal with in their escape.
Stepping out of the portal found him at their intended meeting spot, a thin ledge of cliff the only thing keeping him from falling into the abyss below, and a large chute the expected method of egress. He did not know as much about the internal workings of Big Mama’s business as he might like to, but judging by the lack of refuse and the streaks of rust-colored blood that painted the chute he could only assume this was how her men disposed of the corpses so frequently generated within the arena. Happy to drop them off into the death-filled cavern below the cliff, maybe even provide the leviathans a meal or two.
Luckily for his nerves and his patience he did not have to wait long until the two gargoyles were flying down the chute with, miracles of miracles, the Lou Jitsu in tow.
The fighter was disconcertingly calm for having just escaped imprisonment and being succinctly kidnapped, seemingly uncaring that any of this was happening at all.
Though in the end, it didn’t really matter what Lou Jitsu thought or felt about any of this, he was alchemical components now, ingredients in the creation of his magnificent warriors, a particularly foul vessel to hold the precious genetic substance that would craft his champions.
“Whew, Boss, that was some impressive fireworks,” Muginn said, strained as he continued to hover and hold Lou Jitsu up by one half of his ridiculous costume.
“Those potions did the trick, huh?” Huginn chimed in, nearly dropping Lou Jitsu in his eagerness to incite praise. “Good to have us around, right? Then you don’t need to go mess with the witches, or anything.”
“We got your back, boss!”
“Silence,” Draxum growled, entirely uninterested in hearing their blabbering any longer, instead reaching forward to turn Lou Jitsu’s face back and forth, admiring his new prize, relishing in the fact that he was probably the first Yokai to even lay a hand on champion outside of Big Mama and her goons in years, a victory in itself. He pulled the man's lip back to see his teeth, the building blocks of his signature smile, checking him over like a dog, inspecting his materials before using them. “Big Mama was wasting your potential, Lou Jitsu. Under my control, you shall save all of Yokaikind, you will assist me in changing the world, it will be magnificent!”
With the slow derision of hate Lou Jitsu opened his eyes to look at Draxum, his expression, though muted by his show of stoicism, was nothing short of disgust, disgust and bone-tired exhaustion. This was a man who did not care what happened to him, so thoroughly broken by Big Mama that he could only muster a dull hate for those around him and the stubborn pride it took to thwart her with his inaction.
“Evil scientists always sound the same, and you’re not even being paid to do it,” Lou snorted, his voice cracking and breaking like wood in a fire, weak with disuse. “All just to be killed by Big Mama, sounds like a lot of effort.”
Draxum grabbed Lou Jitsu by the jaw, holding his face painfully tight, his claws drawing little pinpricks of blood to mar the human’s smug expression, blood that held the very key to his success, the blood of a champion.
“When I am done with you, there will be none who can hope to stop me, Lou Jitsu.”
Then with one flourish of his hand another portal was opened directly to his lab, triumph rushing towards him as he pushed the human through to land roughly on the floor, the sickly green of the glowing vat of Empyrean only making the streaks of blood on Lou Jitsu’s face shine that much brighter.
* * *
Lou had not expected his vow of non-violence to have lasted as long as it did without the premature ending of his life.
In the first months, Big Mama had continued to throw him into fights, expecting the desire to preserve his life to be stronger than his desire to not fight. But what life did he have to preserve? The toy of an arachnid mob boss with no sun for seven long years? Hilarious.
Every day that had passed had him feeling less like a person and more like a weapon, until he could no longer distinguish himself from the swords and axes that lay littered around the Battle Nexus Arena.
Spiting Big Mama with his inaction was worth 100 of his lives; he’d take the senseless beatings again and again if only to see the way her perfect mask cracked in rage, every move he didn’t make not to crush his abusers was another win he had over her, anothing small moment of worth in an otherwise pitiful, empty existence.
Turns out if she’d really wanted to push him out of his vow she should have been taking lessons from Baron Draxum.
He stood over the scientist now, dripping blood and sweat and the noxious green glowing ooze Draxum had been pumping through his body. He spit out chunks of the vines that had restrained him, that he’d ripped his way through, ready to do the same to Baron Draxum and bared his teeth.
Lou was a wild animal, a tiger loose from its cage. Fueled by bright, incandescent rage.
When the gargoyles had stolen him from the Battle Nexus he hadn’t cared; it didn’t change anything, Big Mama would find him eventually. And when Draxum told him he’d be used in an experiment for the good of all blah blah blah Lou still hadn’t cared.
Imprisonment was imprisonment no matter the intention. Just because his new jailer was the Minister of Defense of the Hidden City didn’t change anything.
What he did care about were the tiny turtles. Innocent creatures who had never done anything to anyone. Except biting him, but who could blame little Green?
And yet Draxum was going to experiment on them. Yet he threw them into those bubbles of viscous ooze, and hit the switch that had sent such terrible pain rushing through Lou’s body and into theirs.
Lou was not innocent: the ghosts of his family's expectations haunted him, his failure to perform his duty weighed him down like chains around his legs, the people he’d hurt, the hundreds of Yokai he’d killed. All of it stained him, dulled him; but it only meant he had no qualms about attacking the mad scientist and defending the little creatures who could not defend themselves.
“You fool, what have you done?!” Draxum roared, rushing to tower over Lou, devastation and rage battling on his face like two opposing ripples in a pond. The scientist immediately tried to rush past him, going for the four turtles wailing on the ground and Lou snapped.
With a quickness belying decades of training and experience Lou kicked out at Draxum’s digitigrade knees, sending him to the ground in a crumpled heap. Following him down to the ground, Lou jabbed at Draxum’s jugular, hoping to break it against the stone floor.
Draxum just narrowly avoided the strike and used his uncharacteristic nimbleness to roll out from under Lou and get to his feet, well, hooves, and with the momentum swung a furious punch at Lou’s head, opening up the shallow cuts on his face from Draxum’s claws and rattling him thoroughly, but there was just no time for that.
Lou sprung up and returned the strike before grabbing for the golden horns framing Draxum’s rageful expression, intending to break the scientist’s nose with his knee, when, taking advantage of Lou’s grip on him, Draxum charged forward, smashing the fighter against the unforgiving pillar in the center of the room.
Pinned as he was Lou could suddenly vividly feel the empty, bleeding places in his body that Draxum had carved out for his experiment, where the channels to carry Draxum’s ooze and his blood had run through. Could feel his ribs creak under the onslaught, his breath robbed of him in an instant, he felt brittle, fragile, weak.
Desperately, Lou reached out and grabbed a fistful of Draxum’s long maroon hair, pulling until Draxum’s thick skull wasn’t planted in his stomach at the same time as he braced a foot against his armored chest and kicked him away. Then just for petty satisfaction Lou yanked on the hair with a sharp twist of his wrist until he came away with a bloody clump of scalp and hair in his hand, tossing it aside in disgust.
Draxum snarled and lunged forward to tear out Lou’s throat with his sharp teeth, but before he could get a hold of him, Lou dove to the side and rolled around and behind Draxum, wheezing a little as he did so, his lungs and ribs not quite recovered from the ram.
When Lou stood, static flooded the edges of his vision for just a moment as the blood loss and exertion caught up to him all at once, this was the most he’d moved in months ever since he’d sworn off fighting. And it showed as he was so caught up in his momentary weakness that he barely caught the massive fist aiming to drill a hole through his face.
His grab was sloppy and Draxum broke free easily to claw across the side of Lou’s face, Lou retaliated with dozens of sharp jabs, with such devastating power that Draxum could not hide his wince even through armor, then he kicked out and pushed Lou away, but they just kept coming back to each other, fists and furious kicks finding their home in the soft, vulnerable tissue of the other.
Already bruises were blooming on Lou’s fists and forearms, the skin red and raw, never mind the mottled canvas of his torso, or the caved in feeling of his muscles as he tried to push past what Draxum had done to him. Draxum with his armor was able to hide whatever bruises there may be, but the blood streaming from his nose was not so easily disguised, nor the heavy, uncoordinated swings as the injuries Lou inflicted caught up to him.
This wasn’t the showy combat Lou had grown accustomed to in his movies and the Battle Nexus. There were no punches pulled, no crowd to entertain; this was hateful, vitriolic, success told only in how much blood was spilled.
So when Draxum knocked him onto his back and restrained him with a grip of thorny mystic vines wrapped around his throat, Lou wasn’t surprised. He thrashed and tugged as his oxygen quickly left him, but when he saw Draxum turn towards the turtles he saw red.
He shoved his hands between the vines and his throat, ignoring the jagged pain of thorns ripped out of his neck, digging into his hands, and with all his strength ripped the vines to shreds, kicking up to his feet in a move so familiar he could almost pretend the spots in his vision were from set lights and not the blood loss that was becoming more and more a problem.
But this was no set, no scripted combat, not an honorable fight by any stretch of the imagination. Wasn’t for anything except winning, and, more importantly, the defeat of the other, so Lou didn’t hesitate to rush forward and leap on Draxum’s back, hooking his finger through Draxum’s mask and into his eye socket in one cruelly efficient move.
With the devastating grip Lou had on Draxum he stepped down and pulled the large Yokai off his feet, over Lou’s back, and far away from the turtles. Using his opponents size against them was one of the core tenets of karate, maiming them was all Lou.
The scientist howled in pain, desperately grasping at the suddenly empty socket with fingers Lou had broken and claws still stained with Lou’s blood and skin. He ignored him, darting away from the scientist and quickly shaking off his glove stained with the thick, viscous ooze of dark, dark Yokai blood and orbital fluid, dodging grasping vines to slide to his knees in front of the turtles.
Only as he sat in front of them did Lou realize two things.
They were no longer the simple turtles he’d seen earlier, something Draxum had done had transformed them into something more…human.
All four were still tiny, could all fit in his hands, but they had the chubby legs and cheeks of human babies. When the red-eared slider looked up at him with an excited chirp, he realized with a drop in his gut that they had his smile too.
Not just half-human/half-turtle babies, but his half-human/half-turtle babies.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have a lot of time to freak out about the sudden rush of paternal instincts he was feeling in light of the second thing.
The lab was actively falling apart around them. Some additional catastrophe had happened as they fought, unaware to them, and now things were exploding and collapsing and strange Yokai creatures ran amok around them.
The turtles huddled close together, whimpering and clutching one another. Their distressed chirping and crying managed to kick Lou’s adrenaline into overdrive in his panic to get them to safety.
He picked up the excitable slider and reached for the spiky one who was double the size of the other turtles and was admirably using his impressive shell to shield the smallest two.
When his hand gripped the shell he found himself wrenched back into hot pain, his strangled scream of pain overpowering the high-pitched wail of surprise as the snapping turtle was dragged back as well.
Claws gleefully dug into the meat of his calf, burrowing deeper despite accomplishing the job of pulling him away from the remaining turtles.
Lou kicked out with his free leg and looked back to see he’d unmasked Draxum, gone was the clean impassive face of the scientist and Minister of Defense, instead it was a feral Yokai, skin a paler maroon then his hair but flushed in rage, and all of it coated in blood from his broken nose bubbling and leaking into the mask, who snarled at him with his left eye swollen shut, thick blood weeping unbidden.
Despite everything Draxum managed a manic, self-satisfied grin as he shed the organic gauntlet he wore in Lou’s leg, using it to leverage himself up to stand and watch with sadistic glee. Lou only had a second to question what was happening when his leg erupted in pain.
The shed gauntlet peeled apart into vines that drove further into his wound and further up through his muscles, pinning him to the ground and sending him writhing in agony.
He could barely keep his eyes open to watch as Draxum scooped up the other two turtles before approaching Lou, some preemptive, self-important bullshit accompanying, gratefully drowned out by the surrounding commotion. But each step Draxumn took, slow and heavy, the fight weighing on him as it did Lou, seemed to shake the whole ground, thrumming up and through Lou’s very bones, carving imminent danger into his marrow.
The turtles in his grip squealed in panic, maybe at the destruction around them, maybe at his pained noises and thrashing, or maybe at the sight of their brothers picked up by someone else. Regardless, they reminded Lou he could not afford to be incapacitated.
He grasped the two he had close to his chest with one hand while he reached back with the other to grip the wriggling clump of vines burrowing deeper in his wound.
As he pulled mystic vines from his muscles and veins, he gritted his teeth so hard against his pained scream that he felt a molar shatter.
He spat a mouthful of blood and shards of teeth at Draxum’s hooves, throwing the wet clump of vines for good measure before rolling back and away.
The two of them stood, breathing heavily, bleeding heavier, and wavered. Lou’s leg gave out underneath him, the gaping hole in the back begging him to collapse, but he ignored it, forcing himself into a familiar stance, imagining he was as sturdy as the mountain and spry as the breeze, that he was stronger then the flesh that held him. No matter his injuries the fight couldn’t be over, Lou had two more turtles to rescue, two more innocents to spare, two more of his children to take back.
Lou could see similar thoughts cross Draxum’s mind as he shifted into a fighting stance, his face falling into a determined glower and the blood-wet clump of vines rose around him, roused to action.
But before either of them could push themselves forward and continue the fight, the pillar at the center of the lab exploded, sending them both diving for cover.
Lou moved quickly enough to protect the turtles and avoid the heavy machinery falling, but not quick enough.
The glass chamber at the top of the pillar cracked and imploded, sending waves of the poisonous ooze splashing down on him. The thick, viscous liquid sizzled on his skin and burned in his open wounds, choking him as it clung to the inside of his mouth and nose. He fell heavily to his knees, curled over in pain and panic, his lungs and throat spasming as he tried to reject the radioactive green sludge that seemed to slide further down his throat with every desperate cough.
He could feel it, sliding down, hot and painful everywhere it touched, doing his level best to vomit and not swallow it down to his anxiously cramping gut until finally, just as his vision went dark from lack of breath he convulsed and gagged and coughed it up, quickly scrambling away from the seemingly living puddle of glowing ooze.
His hands shook where they clutched the turtles after yet another abuse to his system in a long, long line of them, panting so fast his lungs burned in exertion.
Behind him Lou found that the debris of the terrible machine bisected the lab; flames, boiling ooze, even furiously thrashing mystic plants, all of it effectively cut Lou and Draxum off from one another.
He wanted to go back, vault over the pillar, and reclaim the last two turtles, but he found the world swirled around him uncomfortably and just standing sent lightning streaks of pain through his body. He couldn’t hope to defeat Draxum in such a state, certainly not rescue the other two turtles, and was probably more likely to lose all four of them and his life in the attempt.
And suddenly his life mattered a lot more.
So with guilt hounding him like hunting dogs and an armful of crying, baby turtles he limped and dragged himself out of the lab and toward his long-awaited freedom, the taste of it soured by his failure.