Mara Papiyas
Before he was called Mara Papiyas, he had more often gone by the name of Kama.
In those days his divinity leaned closer to desire than to pleasure, and it was neither as sadistic nor as perverse as it would later become.
Kama carried a bow of sugarcane and five arrows fashioned from flowers. Anyone struck by those arrows fell violently in love with the first person they laid eyes on afterward. Simple, yet devastatingly powerful — the arrows he loosed could neither be blocked nor dodged. For that reason, though his combat strength was somewhat lacking, his divine rank had once stood even higher than that of Indra, the King of the Gods.
After losing his first consort Sati, the god of destruction, Shiva, sank into grief and withdrew into meditation, turning his back on the world entirely. Unfortunately, it was precisely then that the asura Taraka ran amok, throwing the world into chaos. Taraka bore a destiny that none but a son of Shiva could slay him, and so no one could stop him.
In response, the creator god Brahma commanded his son to have Kama make Shiva fall in love with the goddess Parvati. Kama did as his father bade him and loosed an arrow of love at Shiva. Struck by the arrow, Shiva awoke from his meditation — and then turned the light of annihilation upon Kama, who had profaned his purity of spirit. In the end, Kama's physical body was utterly destroyed.
Vishnu gathered what remnants of Kama's divinity remained and resurrected him once more. That being was Mara Papiyas.
Mara was, in essence, Kama reborn — yet because he had been pieced back together from leftover scraps, his divine rank itself had fallen far below what it had been in his previous life. Moreover, the process of resurrection had stripped away his memories and amplified his sadism and aggression to a far greater degree; the side effects were severe in every respect. In truth, he was better regarded as an entirely different god who merely happened to possess a similar divinity.
Even so, the diligence with which he carried out Vishnu's command — methodically eliminating those who might sow chaos in the world — suggested that, however warped he had become, the earnestness of his former self still lingered. For the Sage, however, that very earnestness proved to be poison.
Mara's dwelling was a vast island. Flowers and trees of every color bloomed across it, and countless floating lights drifted through the air in place of sun and moon, illuminating the entire isle. It was unmistakably a space apart from reality. Looking at the scenery alone, one might almost have thought it beautiful enough to be a dream.
But the enormous throng surging forward in a single mass left no room for such scenery to register.
So this is what they mean when they say people can pile into mountains and fill the sea.
Countless "slaves" were rushing toward the Sage like a colossal tidal wave — so many it was grotesque. The Sage stamped his foot once. A massive shockwave rippled outward, shaking the earth, and in the same instant the thousands of slaves surrounding him burst apart all at once. Blood and entrails might have scattered under ordinary circumstances, but mercifully the slaves were little more than something wearing human shells; they simply crumbled into mud and vanished.
Every swing of the Sage's fist or leg returned hundreds of slaves to dirt, yet they felt no fear. More precisely, having become slaves of pleasure with minds completely broken, they could no longer feel even so primal an emotion as terror. For that reason, the Sage did not treat them as fellow human beings either.
Individually, they're nothing.
The problem was their numbers. He had never once in his life experienced a war of attrition like this. According to what his Mind's Eye and his "eyes" detected, the enemies flooding toward him numbered in the millions — and they were still multiplying without end. The count might well climb into the hundreds of millions.
A war of attrition would put him at a disadvantage. To strike at the master who controlled them rather than the slaves themselves, the Sage tried to close on Mara — but Mara's throne pulled away from him faster than he could punch through the wall of human flesh to reach it. And among the slaves, there were those who proved genuinely troublesome.
A naked woman charged the Sage and lashed out with her leg. The limb cracked through the air like a whip, sharp enough to cleave stone, but the Sage blocked it easily with his forearm.
"I've never much cared for fighting women."
His fist punched straight through her abdomen.
"The feel of hitting them just isn't very pleasant."
A spear came flying from behind at the same moment, but it failed to pierce his skin. Several others whirled their blades in flashy flourishes, stirring the wind. The Sage shattered their swords and cut their throats with his bare hands.
Scattered among them are people who've learned Four-Image Martial Arts.
But their level was not particularly high — all flash and no substance. Given that Four-Image Martial Arts had only recently begun to appear in earnest, that was only natural.
Not all of them, however, were so hollow.
A man who had been hidden in the throng until that very moment closed the distance in a single bound and drove his nails into the Sage's side. For the first time since the fighting began, the Sage bled.
"Long time no see, Siddhartha."
A beast of a man looked down at him with a grin.
"Ajita… I didn't expect to find you here."
Ajita's hand, which would ordinarily have plunged deeper and torn out his entrails, was seized by the wrist and could go no further. He tried to force it in, but the hand would not budge. Ajita stood a full head taller, yet the Sage's grip strength far exceeded his own — and beyond merely holding him, the Sage was crushing Ajita's wrist with raw force.
"For a hedonist like you, becoming that god's slave isn't all that strange. You'd sell your soul for pleasure without a second thought."
"You sure about this? Focusing only on me?"
"Well, everyone else seems pretty much the same to me."
Ajita wrenched his arm free, tearing the captured wrist clean off. The severed wrist regenerated almost at once, so it hardly mattered. After that the two of them began trading blows just as they once had, and the shockwaves of their exchange shredded the limbs of the surrounding slaves and sent them flying.
At some point Ajita's body transformed into something like a hairy ape. His bulk swelled further; his strength and agility rose. His hide thickened until it could shrug off ordinary strikes and even turn aside spears and blades. The last time Ajita had taken this form, the Sage had struggled against him in earnest.
"You haven't improved at all."
Ajita's claws stabbed for the Sage's throat; the Sage casually batted the wrist aside and drove a fist into his side. Flesh, a section of rib, and muscle tore free, leaving a gaping hole.
This bastard — the power in his punches has gotten so much stronger!!
Ajita reeled in shock. He felt no pain, but he could not stop his body from locking up. He tried to leap back in haste, only for the Sage to pin his foot and cut off his movement. A devastating blow slammed into Ajita's abdomen — and with it, the hundreds of slaves behind him burst apart as well. In the end Ajita, his chest blown open, crumbled into mud and vanished just as the other slaves had.
The Sage had already grown far too strong for any human to face.
My Mind's Eye is still incomplete.
Had it been more refined, he would never have bled to Ajita's claws. The thought had barely formed when the Sage threw himself sideways on pure reflex.
A pillar of light crashed down upon the spot the Sage had occupied a heartbeat before.
Lightning.
That isn't Four-Image Martial Arts.
The power was considerable, but the structure of the Prana was far too simple — awkward, as though the caster were not wielding their own body but borrowing someone else's strength.
Borrowing another's power…
Astra. The word for a magic known only in legend flickered through the Sage's mind. Fortunately, having awakened his Mind's Eye, he could pinpoint the origin of the force. The problem was that the distance was considerable. Even so, Mara's slaves pressed him with their endless numbers. The Sage stamped his foot once more and shattered the human tide — only for thousands of arrows to rain down from the sky.
Arrows riding a fierce gale punched through the shockwave the Sage had generated and buried themselves in his body.
A different caster this time.
Those invoking Astras were not one or two alone.
Even as the gale still howled, flames erupted.
Even with the Mind's Eye active, attacks of such breadth were difficult to evade. In the end a colossal wave of fire swallowed the Sage whole.
When he reappeared a moment later, his body was thoroughly blackened and smoke rose from his skin. Astonishingly, he was still alive. If anything, the thousands of other slaves caught in the storm of flame had been swept away instead.
"KROAAAA!!"
Now it was not only slaves in human form — Naga slaves and apes came crashing down upon him as well.
"Nagas… I saw one once when I was a child."
That first Naga was what had taught him the joy of fighting. In a way he was grateful for the creature — but even so, this many of them was more than a little burdensome.