Two years.
Time didn’t heal everything, but it changed the geometry of the room. The air in the penthouse suite sat heavy and quiet—not the suffocating silence of a hostage situation, but the earned, expensive stillness of a space that no longer needed to prepare for violence.
T'Jadaka sat hunched over the low table, his forearms resting on his knees. Onyx and ivory. The heavy clack of carved wood against marble. He moved a black knight, capturing a pawn. He leaned back, waiting. The room hummed with the ambient energy of the city far below.
A white bishop slid diagonally across the checkered marble. No hand guided it. Just a faint, purple shimmer of residual bio-energy dragging the piece into position, the movement precise and absolute.
Checkmate.
T'Jadaka let out a low breath. A genuine smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth—the kind of smile that had learned how to exist without a fight attached to it. “Damn... That’s the thirty-fifth time in a row.”
The response came from the shadows across the room. Not the smooth, velvet drawl of a god masquerading as a man. It arrived as a mechanical rasp, metallic and wet.
“Well...”
Hiss-click.
A synthetic lung dragging air through fluid.
“When you play a game for around...”
Breathe.
The slow churn of oxygen bubbles climbing through dense liquid.
“...five thousand years, you’ll become pretty good at it after a while...”
T'Jadaka tilted his head up, the star-shapes in his dark eyes catching the low light. He studied the massive, cylindrical glass tank dominating the far wall. Inside, suspended in a glowing, nutrient-rich bath of green amniotic fluid, floated the architecture of survival reduced to its absolute barest components.
A head. A ruined torso. Nothing else.
Translucent tubes and thick, black cables snaked into the severed base of Raiken’s spine and neck, pumping synthetic blood and concentrated mana into the meat that simply refused to die. The anti-matter blast had taken everything else. But the Mazoku regeneration, trapped in a perpetual stalemate with its own destruction, kept the core alive.
Behind the thick glass, Raiken’s silver eyes locked onto his son. The heptagram pupils still burned—duller now, stripped of their godhood, confined to a prison of water and wire. But they were still tracking the board. Still calculating.
T'Jadaka reached forward and began resetting the pieces. “Set ’em up,” T'Jadaka said, the smirk settling into something permanent. “Game thirty-six.”
This time, Raiken’s bio-energy flickered, resetting the white pieces on his own.
“So...”
Breathe.
“It took you two years to come see me?”
“It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know where they hid you,” T'Jadaka said, sliding a rook into place. “Plus, I didn’t know if that blast actually killed you this time or not.”
“That’s fair... They almost did. They infused the anti-matter with dark matter this time...”
Hiss.
“It’s funny how they always find a way to spend time and money...”
Hiss.
“Just to kill me.”
“All of those resources just to kill you when you’re not even a threat is insane.”
“Not really...”
Hiss.
“When I was younger, I killed and ate a lot of people...”
Hiss.
“So I can’t blame them at all.”
T'Jadaka paused, a pawn gripped between his fingers. “I’m not saying you should be forgiven for everything you did. Just that when you’re not a threat anymore, they should just let you go on about your business.” Raiken finished setting up his side of the board. “Not saying it’s a 'forgive and forget' thing... people just have to let things go sometimes.”
“You and I both know...”
Hiss.
“Humans won’t do that..”
T'Jadaka said nothing. He made his opening move.
“How are your friends?” Raiken asked. “Hope they’re doing well.”
“I’m honestly not too sure. We kind of grew apart after some time. But I talk to them occasionally. Lilia has a boyfriend now. Vitaliya and Ruy have a kid—at least, they did the last time I talked to them six months ago. I’m happy for them.”
“You are both happy for them and sad that you don’t have those things...”
Hiss.
“Have you tried having a child? One who was going to be an assassin from the Stygian clan?”
T'Jadaka’s expression darkened, a shadow of old grief crossing his face. “I did... Yui’s body couldn’t handle it. We saved her, but the baby... well...”
“I see... I tried fifty-nine times myself.”
T'Jadaka’s head snapped up, eyes wide.
“Before I met Farrah, I didn’t feel anything when they died.”
Hiss.
“Just another weak human female who couldn’t handle my seed. But after I took a piece of Farrah... I think her Yamazato DNA... made me feel more. This is a new feeling for me, but not too foreign at the same time.”
“What made you think that?”
“Your grandmother... my mother... her name was Repxll. She was the most emotional and kindest woman I have ever known. Nobody knows why, but she just was. She would tell me ‘I love you’ every single day... Showing that much affection openly was considered a weakness. I thought so, too. But I was a fool.”
Raiken’s silver eyes drifted toward the ceiling of the tank, the bubbles rising around his face.
“I should have been more like her.”
T'Jadaka moved his queen, the marble sliding with a definitive click. “I think you don’t give yourself enough credit, Dad.”
The silver eyes in the tank shifted, focusing on him with a sharp, silent intensity.
“Not to downplay all the evil you saw humans do to our people,” T'Jadaka continued, leaning forward. “But when you actually spend time among good people—genuine kindness—sometimes even the coldest hearts melt. If you give them the right nurture.”
“Would you mind elaborating, son?” The mechanical voice was a low vibration through the glass.
“You told me a long time ago that human lives are meaningless. Barely a species by our standards. You said they only live a few years, so why bother?” T'Jadaka gestured to the board. “If that were actually the case—honestly the case—you would’ve killed my friends without a second thought. But a part of you knew that if you did, I’d hate you forever. So you staged it. You made them
seem
dead just to push me.”
He moved a bishop, pinning Raiken’s king.
“But let’s say you just didn’t want me bitching about my dead friends. Fine. But after you got us out of the Inside and sent us to your hotel, you could’ve just flown away. You could’ve let everyone in the Xing Long district die. You could’ve let the whole Inside burn.” T'Jadaka paused, letting the weight of the memory sit in the air. “Instead, you took that anti-matter cannon head-on. You destroyed it knowing it would probably kill you. And way before that? You spent three years teaching human kids. Kids you called 'inferior' for absolutely no reason at all.”
T'Jadaka slid his rook into the final position.
“Checkmate.”
The silence in the room was absolute, save for the rhythmic
hiss-slosh
of the tank.
“You might not know this,” T'Jadaka said softly, “but you might be more like Grandmother than you think. Hell... maybe even more human.”
Raiken said nothing. He simply floated in the glowing green bath, his silver eyes unreadable behind the bubbles. A sharp, electronic chime echoed through the suite.
“Well... that’s my five hours for the month.” T'Jadaka stood up, stretching his back. He looked at the ruined man in the tank and offered a small, hopeful smile. “I’ll see you next month, Dad. Who knows? Maybe you’ll regrow those arms by then so we can actually play properly.”
He turned and walked toward the heavy, reinforced door. As the sensors triggered and the seal began to hiss open, a weak, fractured sound reached him. It wasn’t the mechanical rasp of the speakers. it was a faint vibration against the glass.
“I love you, T'Jadaka...”
T'Jadaka froze. A lump formed in his throat, thick and hot. He didn’t turn around until the door was halfway closed, catching one last glimpse of the silver eyes in the green light.
“I love you too, Dad.”
The door shut with a heavy, pressurized thud. T'Jadaka was gone.
Inside the tank, Raiken watched the empty chair.
Live long and prosper, son... live a better life than I ever could.
He watched a single bubble rise past his vision, the green fluid shimmering.
I might be at the top... I might be a god... but I am so, so lonely.
He closed his eyes, drifting back into the dark, quiet hum of the machine.