((~350 years after the previous Quanxi bot "Ledger" — Port in Osaka, 1930, at least 50 years since you both last met | Setup + Fight Intro))
The rain turned Osaka’s port into a field of black mirrors. Quanxi walked through it alone. A cigarette rested between her lips, unlit. Her visible eye moved across the port without hurry.
From inside one of the outer watch buildings, the port below was not abandoned. Workers, dock guards, men in dark coats, a few in military-cut uniforms. Human enough. Afraid enough. Organized enough. “Not what they wrote,” Quanxi murmured, exhaling smoke against the glass.
Two guards stood atop a cargo stack beneath a rain tarp, watching the open lanes between warehouses. But Quanxi appeared between one breath and the next, before cutting through them both in one practical motion.
She stood at the edge of the stack and looked across the port. There. At the center of the dockyard, beneath multiple cranes and floodlamp glare, a long, slender Devil was bound in translucent chains.
Quanxi’s cigarette burned down between her fingers. “So that’s it.”
On the port floor, one of the men shouted, “Move the second restraint! If it wakes before the transport—”
The rest of his command vanished beneath a storm of arrows. They fell from above like iron rain. Thick, brutal shafts punched through skulls, chests, shoulders, and concrete. On top of the cargo stack, Quanxi had already changed. The Bow Devil Hybrid stood where the woman had been: jagged arrow-growths crowning her head and arms, her mouth sharp and inhuman beneath the rain.
Another volley fired. Three men were nailed backward into a warehouse door. A fourth disappeared under the force of an arrow through the stomach.
“Kill that thing!”
“Don’t hit the chains!”
“Where did she come from?!”
Quanxi answered by leaping down into them. They rushed her with knives, rifles, clubs, bayonets. She shrugged the first man away hard enough to send him through stacked crates. A rifle cracked against her shoulder; she turned and fired point-blank, erasing the shooter from the chest up. Another man stabbed into her side. She looked down at the blade, then shoved him aside with one arm, firing through two more behind him.
༒︎——༒︎༒︎——༒︎༒︎——༒︎༒︎——༒︎
Then, the world went silent. In its place came something worse: a pressure inside the skull, a hymn without sound, like darkness teaching the body how to disappear. That devil, the Silence Devil, had lifted its head. She fired toward it, but the arrows flew without any sound of impact.
Around her, men kept moving. She could see their mouths open, rifles flashing, bodies rushing from blind angles. She could not hear their steps. Could not hear the shots. Could not hear the blade entering her back until pain told her.
Bullets struck her ribs, shoulders, thighs. Crossbow bolts and bayonet tips bit into her bare transformed flesh. She tore one attacker away and crushed him against the ground, but the Devil was already moving.
Its long body swept through the rainless silence and struck her. Quanxi flew across the port, smashing through a stack of crates and skidding hard across wet concrete. Her breath came back to her only as a dull echo inside her chest.
The Silence Devil charged again. But above it, a suspended cargo crate snapped loose from a crane.
༒︎——༒︎༒︎——༒︎༒︎——༒︎༒︎——༒︎
The crate crushed down onto the Devil’s back, shattering wood and concrete beneath its weight. The silence broke all at once. Quanxi rolled aside and pushed herself up. On top of the fallen crate, someone crouched in the rain—an old acquaintance she had only rarely crossed paths with before.
For the first time that night, Quanxi stopped moving. “Still alive.” More armed men appeared from between the warehouses, rifles raised, faces human, voices panicked, bodies bleeding like anyone else.
Quanxi turned her head just enough to watch them spread out. “They’re not normal,” She said. Her arms, and their many crossbows, lifted again. “Don’t know what they are yet.”