Divine Manifestation
For all that Sunya said, the gods were truly unreasonable beings.
Where a human spent grueling years of effort refining their martial arts and perfecting their techniques, a god instinctively displayed movements optimized and perfected for themselves with scarcely any labor at all. Where a human had to train and accumulate the corresponding karma to reach the higher realms, the gods were born already fulfilling that karma by the very nature of their birth — and so they wielded tremendous power from the moment they entered the world.
And among such gods, Marduk stood at the very pinnacle of that unreasonableness.
A soft shhk cut the air as Marduk swept his hand-blade like a sword. Sunya twisted at the waist and slipped aside — and the massive cloud behind him split cleanly, as if cleaved by a blade.
Sunya closed the distance and drove a fist at Marduk; Marduk refused to yield an inch and met him hand for hand. Every time their fists collided and their legs crossed, the sound of thunder cracked across the sky. The aftershocks of their exchange tore apart the clouds that had been reinforced by divine authority, reducing them to formless scraps.
Marduk's movements resembled Inanna's. Unbound by form or style, they were instinctive and lethal. Sunya felt a twinge of guilt toward his wife for thinking it, but in speed, power, and sheer improvisation, Marduk was a superior version of her. It was like fighting a beast that merely wore the shape of a man.
To Marduk's eyes, on the other hand, Sunya was like a boulder — or a lump of iron. His body was tough and hard, yes, but more than that, the way he moved itself was solid, without a single gap. And yet at the same time he was like an eel. Astonishingly, these contradictory qualities coexisted in him. No matter how Marduk tried to seize him, he could not; like an eel that slipped through every grasp, he could scarcely land a clean hit.
A dull thud — Sunya's fist crashed into Marduk's face. In the instant his features crumpled and his head rang and he staggered, Sunya struck again: abdomen, left flank, right chest, jaw, face. Just as Kingu had once suffered, Marduk's flesh tore, his bones broke, and his organs burst. The final blow literally exploded his face — yet every one of those wounds healed in the blink of an eye, restored as if they had never been. The speed of his recovery was incomparably faster than Kingu's had been even with the Tablet of Destinies.
Before his head had even finished regenerating, Marduk was already moving. He spun his body as though falling backward and drove an upward kick at Sunya's chin. Sunya lifted his jaw and slipped it by the thickness of a sheet of paper, then closed the distance before Marduk could fully right himself.
But that was exactly what his opponent had wanted. Mid-somersault, Marduk swept both arms — and blades of wind came scything toward Sunya. Fired at point-blank range, those wind blades should have been unavoidable. Once again, Sunya simply dodged them.
A failed attack invited a counter. Sunya's fist detonated Marduk's face a second time. The impact sent Marduk flying like an arrow. Watching him go, Sunya clicked his tongue.
"Concentrate. You've been taking hits one-sidedly for a while now, haven't you?"
"Kh—!"
Who did he think he was, lecturing him? Enraged, Marduk charged Sunya again — and so the brawl resumed. This time the exchange of blows was far faster than before.
Something's off.
Marduk suddenly crooked his fingers into claws and raked for Sunya's eyes — only for Sunya to raise one arm to block and smash the other into Marduk's face. When Marduk seized a shoulder and tried to drive a knee in, an elbow slammed into his thigh to stop him, and then the face was struck again. Even as he was flung backward, Marduk swept his arm and launched wind blades — but this time, unlike before, he fired them from a direction completely different from the arc of his swing.
There had never been any need to swing an arm to launch a wind blade in the first place. He had done so every time precisely so that his opponent would form the false impression that using a wind blade required a swing of the arm.
"Showing off little tricks, are we."
Once again the invisible blades carved empty air. And once again, as a matter of course, Sunya's fists burst Marduk's limbs apart.
Why won't they hit?
Marduk could not understand it. Wind blades were invisible by nature — and yet Sunya dodged them as easily as if he could see them perfectly clearly. No: it wasn't just the wind blades. Not a single one of Marduk's attacks had landed cleanly. Meanwhile every one of Sunya's strikes found its mark and dealt real damage, as though he already knew everything his opponent was about to do.
At first Marduk wondered if it was some kind of power that saw the future — but somehow that didn't feel right. His instincts told him it was a technique of some kind instead.
How is he doing it? What are you even looking at? No — is that even looking at all?
The one-sided thrashing continued. But unlike Kingu, Marduk did not thrash about wildly; he focused on defense and worked to unravel Sunya's ability.
And then—
Wham.
For the first time, Sunya's fist punched empty air. Marduk had dodged the attack.
"Haha. Yes — I get it! So that's what it was!! You weren't seeing with your eyes — you were feeling it with your whole body!"
Marduk was radiant with joy. Having gained enlightenment and grown stronger still, he felt a rapture beyond description. He decided at once to put his new understanding to use. Closing the distance on Sunya once more, he threw himself back into the brawl.
This bastard…
Marduk's movements had become incomparably more fluid than moments before. This time even Sunya could not dodge or block as effortlessly as he had.
Shrrk.
At last Marduk's fingers raked across Sunya's forearm, and blood sprayed. For the first time since the fight began, Sunya bled.
He awakened the Mind's Eye mid-combat?
The Mind's Eye. It was the ultimate principle of martial arts that Sunya himself had realized. Put simply, it was a fusion of multiple senses — but the range and depth of perception it granted could fairly be called transcendent. It allowed one to read not only an opponent's physical processes — the movement of muscle, the flow of blood — but even their emotions, and to perceive the subtlest shifts and currents in the surrounding environment. Beyond that, it granted near-perfect control of the body, making movement precise, fluid, and devastatingly efficient.
Sunya himself had spent more than a decade arriving at that realization on his own. His opponent had grasped it in a matter of moments. It left him with a faintly hollow feeling — though he felt no particular inferiority over it.
"To think a world like this existed…"
Overwhelmed by a sensation he had never known, Marduk lost himself. He sank into a trance and traded blows with Sunya. For both of them, attack and defense happened almost simultaneously — so fast that it was impossible to tell who was attacking, who was defending, who was countering.
Marduk's nails scored across Sunya's collarbone. Sunya's elbow smashed Marduk's jaw. Marduk's fist hammered Sunya's face. Sunya's leg sheared through Marduk's shin. Blood sprayed and bones broke as the battle raged on without pause.
But as time passed, the balance of power grew steadily clearer. Marduk pressed his left hand to Sunya's side and fired wind blades in rapid succession; the flank was gouged as if rats had been at it — and then Sunya's counter sent Marduk's head flying clean off.
No good. I'm at a disadvantage in close combat.
There was a clear gap in skill. And Sunya's body was so absurdly durable that if they kept trading blows and dragged this into a war of attrition, Marduk would inevitably lose.
But that was fine. What determined a god's strength was not the toughness of the flesh — it was authority.
Marduk began to deploy his power in earnest.
When Marduk carried Sunya far away into the sky, several gods gave chase. Among them were Inanna and her children — and Enki, who had finally come back to his senses.
"What the hell is that guy? He just shows up out of nowhere — what's he even trying to do?"
"To put it simply… you could call him a child of mine I kept hidden."
"As if one or two secret kids of yours would ever be enough!!"
The two of them bickered. From Inanna's perspective, Enki had gone and done something stupid just when everything was already settled and made the whole situation worse; and Enki, knowing he had ultimately escalated things, couldn't push back very hard.
"…I don't actually have any hidden children besides Marduk."
"Marduk? That guy's name is Marduk?"
She had heard it before. In the Mesopotamian mythology Sunya had once told her about, he was the creator god who had slain Tiamat — one of the primordial deities — and shaped the world as it was known today.
"…You look like you know about Marduk."
"Never mind that — why is some guy named Marduk suddenly showing up?"
"Well, I couldn't exactly just sit back and let Sunya kill Enlil, could I."
"What are you talking about? Sunya didn't kill Enlil!"
"Isn't that just arguing from the result? And I don't think a little brat who just stood there watching Sunya has any right to say that."
"I stood there because I knew Sunya wouldn't kill him."
"You're calling that an argument—"
A thunderous explosion cut them off. At the same moment, a typhoon swept in without the slightest warning.
"What is this…"
"Mother — over there!!"
Kalam pointed. In that direction, hundreds of hands of light, large and small, were colliding violently with whirlwinds.