CHAPTER 15: THE KILLERS

The Ranganese hesitated in the doorway of the Matsuda compound, regarding Misaki with expressions that ranged from apprehensive to amused. Had she been a man or even a more imposing woman, they surely would have attacked by now, but they hung back, seemingly confused to find a tiny housewife standing before them. The hallway was too narrow to accommodate all four of them shoulder to shoulder. Someone had to make the first move. Her victim stepped forward, unknowingly sealing his fate.

He looked to be nearing middle age—in his late thirties or early forties—yet he still wore the colors of a low-ranking soldier. He must not have been particularly skilled or powerful to have gone so long without a promotion. One look into his face and Misaki could see through him, to the internal mechanisms that moved him. This man was insecure, looking for an easy way to feel powerful, like picking on a defenseless housewife.

Robin would have seen the humanity in that kind of cruelty, even if it was turned on him. He would have seen a way to make this man better. Misaki saw only eye sockets, a throat, a sensitive groin, a hundred points of attack to choose from.

Instead of drawing her shoulders back as the fonyaka approached, she cowered. Like dropping bait in the water before a clueless fish. He smiled— the smile of a weak man seeing a very rare chance to feel powerful.

“Don’t hurt me,” she whimpered in Shirojima Dialect. She knew how to say the words in Ranganese, but why let on that she knew their language? Why let them see any of her before it was too late? “Please, don’t hurt me.”

Drawn to her lure, the man closed the distance between them with hunger in his eyes. Misaki waited until he was almost on top of her, then opted for the simplest point of attack. Why waste her best material on this idiot? She snapped a kick into his groin. With a high grunt, the fonyaka doubled over.

The kick was by no means incapacitating, but it bought her the moment she needed to gather ice to her fingertips. And before the man could straighten up, she had him by the throat. Misaki’s hands were so delicate that her grip was not particularly dangerous in and of itself. That was why she had invested so much time and training in her claws. It was these men or her children. Robin would forgive her. Five nails of ice pierced deep into the man’s neck.

His eyes widened in shock. He opened his mouth as if to scream and blood bubbled from between his lips, dribbling down his chin. Curling her fingers in as far in as they would go, Misaki ripped her hand free. His windpipe shredded in her fingers.

Like that, she was a killer.

The remaining men let out cries of alarm as their comrade fell, but Misaki didn’t give them time to take stock of the situation. Before the body had thudded to the floor, she was moving, sprinting on bare feet toward the next nearest soldier. She picked up speed and focused on her target’s face, reading his expression. He fell for it. He thought she was stupid enough to charge him.

Looking confident, he drew his arm back and threw a palm strike. Just before the burst of fonya left his hand, Misaki veered right, running up the wall. In the end, Misaki never did find out if her legs had the strength to carry her to the end of her old maneuver. The peripheral wind off the blast pushed her body, flipping her over onto her feet directly behind the fonyaka. Realizing his mistake, the soldier started to turn, but it was too late. Siradenyaa was out of her sheath. A single stroke severed his spinal cord.

In the same spin, Misaki turned and cut through the next soldier. Only a few steps behind his comrade, he probably didn’t even see what had happened before Shadow’s Daughter separated his torso from his legs.

One more to go.

Misaki made her cut, but this last soldier was a young man—fast—and he stepped back, out of range. Wary eyes flicked over her, taking in her stature, her weapon, her stance, sizing her up. She couldn’t allow that, so she pressed in, black blade flashing in a second attack meant to drive him up against the wall and into a corner.

Infuriatingly, he evaded again, backing through the genkan and partway out the door, drawing his own inferior sword. Smart boy. The aggressive part of Misaki itched to follow him, but she knew that if she let him take the fight outside, onto open ground, she was a dead woman. So instead, she darted right, through the nearest side hallway, disappearing as was her way.

The windowless hallway was so dark it might have been one of Livingston’s alleys, and it was going to stay that way. Misaki formed a block of solid ice over the light switch. As she went, she slid all the doors open, coating the doorframes in ice. Then she flattened herself against the wall, melting into the shadows, and waited.

The soldier moved down the hallway on cautious feet. If he was smart, he was listening closely, his hands open, trying to detect her breath stirring the air. But Misaki could hold her breath for a long time. This was where the dark put a fonyaka at a serious disadvantage: despite their acute hearing, fonyakalu had no sense of a person’s heat signature or blood flow, making them blind to a stealthy enough opponent. Misaki, on the other hand, could feel every inch of her prey as he approached—a pulsing network of arteries, capillaries, marrow, and spinal fluid.

As the fonyaka neared her position, Misaki flicked her fingers, using the ice she had formed on one of the doors to slam it shut. Instinctively, the man whirled toward the sound, turning his back to her.

Misaki peeled from the shadow and stabbed.

There was a crunch, accompanied by a choking grunt of surprise, as Siradenyaa hit her mark. The fonyaka didn’t have to linger long in his pain. Darkness lent Misaki’s attacks unparalleled precision. Without the distraction of clothes, skin, and other visible features, she could hit the exact internal part of a person she was aiming for. Unhindered by the bones that would have stopped a lesser sword, Siradenyaa had driven directly through the young man’s heart.

Misaki slid the blade free of the soldier’s chest and felt his blood pour onto the floor as he fell. She stood still for a moment, absorbing sensation. She had always wondered what it would feel like to stab someone through the heart, but this... this was disappointing.

She had assumed, for some reason, that killing a person would be hard. But it wasn’t. When you were used to slicing tendons, of course cutting a man in half was easy. When you had trained to stab between major arteries, of course piercing a whole organ was easy. With a blade like Siradenyaa, killing was obviously going to be easier than not killing. She should have understood that, but she couldn’t explain the emptiness that suddenly overwhelmed her.

The line between wounding and taking a life had been such a concrete and non-negotiable thing to Robin and Elleen. Yet Misaki had just crossed that line without experiencing so much as a tug of resistance. She had wanted there to be resistance. Deep in her heart, she had hoped there was something of Robin in her.

The young man’s blood spread from his body to seep between her bare toes, still eerily warm from a life that was no more. He had been someone’s son. Why couldn’t she feel anything? As a mother, a woman, a human, how could she feel nothing?

Unbidden, her free hand lifted to touch her waist.

How could she?

A shuffle of movement from the hallway drew Misaki’s attention. As her hand left her stomach to grip Shadow’s Daughter, she welcomed the emptiness. It didn’t leave any room for fear as she went to face her next victims. Three yellow-clad fonyakalu faced her in the front hall.

And for the moment, Misaki let herself be thankful for the thing she was. After all, a lady wouldn’t have been able to slice a man’s legs out from under him and then plunge a blade into his mouth when he opened it to scream. A mother wouldn’t have been able to cut a young woman’s head from her shoulders. A human being wouldn’t have been able to turn from their dismembered corpses without a single pang of guilt.

Thank the Gods she was a monster.

The third soldier managed to catch Misaki in the arm with a burst of fonya, knocking Shadow’s Daughter from her hand. Back in Livingston, she had always had her daggers to fall back on if she was disarmed. “But your greatest concealed weapons aren’t really this or this,” Koli had told her, holding up each of the knives in turn. “They’re your ingenuity… and your brutality.”

Snatching one of the long pins from her hair, she darted toward the last fonyaka. He threw a palm strike, but it was telegraphed. She evaded and drove her hairpin into the side of his neck, burying the hair ornament all the way up to the flowery bauble at the end. He choked, blood spattering from his mouth, and clawed at his throat. Not wanting him to suffer longer than necessary, Misaki jabbed a fingertip of concentrated jiya into one of his eyes. The Blood Needle pierced deep into his brain, killing him instantly.

She let out a breath as the man’s body crumpled to the floor. He twitched and then lay still, blood running from his neck and eye onto the flowers of Misaki’s hairpin. Like all of Kotetsu Tamami’s work, the ornament was a masterpiece, a sensitive composition of pearls and pink lacquer blossoms. Blood ran in between the petals, accentuating the beauty of all their details for a moment before consuming them in red.

Misaki’s hair, now free of its tightly pinned bun, stuck to her neck, and she realized just how sweaty she had gotten. In Livingston, disabling seven enemies would have been a warm-up for her. Now, she was breathing as if she had just sprinted the length of a city.

Trying to ignore the burning in her muscles and the growing stitch in her side, she picked her way through the corpses to retrieve Siradenyaa. She kept a wary eye on the broken-down doors as she swept the blood from the blade but no more soldiers appeared. She had just set the top of Siradenyaa against her left knuckle to return the weapon to its sheath when the air stirred through her loose hair, making her stop. Fonya. Strong fonya. She returned both hands to her sword handle as a pair of uniformed figures appeared in the doorway.

“Oh, xuro.” Misaki’s heart dropped.

These soldiers wore black.

MAMORU

Mamoru ran faster than he ever had in his life. He didn’t have time to pick the easiest path up the snow-covered rocks, so he did what his father did, making ice steps for himself as he ran. In his haste to reach the blacksmith village, he nearly tripped and fell over a body that lay crumpled in his path.

It was Katakouri Hakuzora, dead in the snow.

On his way back to the old village, the archer must have heard the screams or seen the smoke and detoured to help the blacksmiths. His bow lay splintered beside him, his sightless eyes squinted slightly as if he had been lining up a shot when he died.

There was no time to collapse and mourn. Mamoru had done enough of that over Yukino Sensei’s body. In all likelihood, that was when the fonyakalu had broken through to the numu village—while Mamoru had knelt crying like a child. Dropping briefly to one knee, Mamoru took Katakouri’s hand and wrapped it around the grip of his bow where it belonged.

“Nyama to your soul, Senpai,” he murmured, and he was back on his feet, sprinting.

As he neared the numu village, Mamoru felt for the second time that day, that his skin might peel—not from wind this time, but heat. He was used to the distant warmth the forges, the way it built as he neared the little village, but the fire-dried waves of air rushing over him were far hotter than they should have been.

He leaped over the final ridge to the village and crashed into a wall of heat so intense it felt like it might knock him back down the slope. He had known from the oversized columns of smoke that something would be on fire, but nothing could have prepared him for the inferno that spread out before him now. For a moment, he could only stand transfixed and terrified as the smoke took his breath and the heat sucked the moisture from his skin.

“Fire is like an animal,” Kotetsu Kama always told him. “If you feed it, soothe it, and treat it with care, it need not bite you.”

The first few times the smith master had had him stoke a fire, Mamoru had accidentally put it out when his jiya jumped in response to the heat.

“Easy, koro,” Kotetsu had snapped, smacking his hand back with a pair of tongs. “This isn’t a fight. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Kama.” Mamoru rubbed his smarting knuckles, pulled the moisture from the kindling he had just doused, and picked up the striking stones to start again. But each time the flame swelled, Mamoru’s jiya surged up against it out of reflex—like water rushing back to fill the space left by a stone when it was dropped in a pool.

“What are you afraid of?” Kotetsu asked after Mamoru’s fourth failed attempt.

“I’m not—” Mamoru started to protest. It was unseemly for a koro to admit fear, but he stopped short at the knowing look on his mentor’s face. “It’s just... isn’t fire what Hell is made of?”

“Not just fire. There are boiling seas in Hell also,” Kotetsu pointed out.

“Oh.” Mamoru hadn’t thought of that. “I didn’t...”

“You misunderstand the order of the world. Hell is fire without the calming influence of Nagi and Nami. Fire without the power of gods to balance it. And what is our jiya?”

“The power of gods,” Mamoru said.

“I know you koronu like to frame relationships between opposites in terms of conflict,” Kotetsu said, drawing a piece of glowing hot metal from the coals. “Fire against water, light against darkness, day against night, but one who hopes to create must understand that opposites exist to balance and complement one another. This is why the tide-bringing moon follows the drying sun, why day follows night, why men marry women. I believe this is why the two greatest empires are Yamma, built on the power of fire, and our own Kaigen, built on the power of water. The two exist in this realm, not to destroy one another, but to create a balance between jiya and taya.”

He paused to douse the red-hot metal with water. “In this balance, there is creation.” Steam hissed from the metal, dispersing to reveal the twisted serpents that would one day form the guard of Mamoru’s sword. “As a warrior endeavoring to draw on the numu arts, it is vital that you understand this.”

“What about fonya?” Mamoru asked, staring at the serpents, made of two different metals but wound so tightly together. “The finawu say that the fonyakalu were born from this ocean, just like our ancestors. They were born from gods too.”

Kotetsu made a thoughtful noise. “I believe that fonyakalu... whatever divinity they hold has been corrupted into a type of power that was never meant to be. Not in the realm of the Duna.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Based on what I know of wind—what it does to fire, and oceans, and empires—I would say that fonya is the power of chaos. Anyone who wields the power of wind, whether he realizes it or not, is a sort of demon.”

Mamoru had not understood his mentor’s logic at the time. Fonyakalu controlled air, an essential part of water and fire. Kotetsu himself had taught Mamoru to use the bellows to ensure a fire was properly oxygenated. Every living human, including jijakalu and tajakalu, breathed air to survive. He had never understood how something so vital to all life in the realm of the Duna could be a force of Hell.

He understood now.

The fonyakalu couldn’t have reached this place more than a few siiranu ago, but the blacksmith village was already consumed. Even with the forges smashed to pieces, the fire never could have spread so fast or grown so furious without wind behind it. Mamoru had come to know fire as an animal that could be tamed with jiya, but this fire was uncontrolled—an animal fed to bursting, whipped to a rage, and set loose on its keepers.

This was the power that had ravaged the order of the world, destabilized Yamma’s Namindugu colonies, ripped the Kaigenese Empire in two... This was the power of chaos.

With a sickening feeling in his stomach, Mamoru remembered that Uncle Takashi had ordered the numuwu to stay in their houses. He wondered how many of them had been able to outrun the flames, and of those, how many had escaped the Ranganese soldiers.

He tried to run straight for the Kotetsus’ house, but the moment he approached the nearest structure, the flames leaped at him like hungry demons, simultaneously lashing at his skin and evaporating his only means of defense. Pressing forward, he raised his jiya and threw snow into the fire in an attempt to clear a path through the flames. It was no use. Most of what he threw evaporated in an ineffectual hiss. The Matsuda Dragon itself would have had its jaws full fighting this creature. Overwhelmed by the heat, Mamoru had no choice but to double back and go around the worst of the fire.

The best he could do now was find any survivors and get them out. As he ran into a part of the village where the fire was less intense, a sound drew his attention. Crying. The sob broke off abruptly in a crunch of bone. He rounded a burning house to find a Ranganese soldier standing over a prone woman. Her face was so bloody that it took Mamoru a moment to recognize her as Kotetsu Saori, one of Kotetsu Kama’s cousins. She was the one who did the lacquer work on the sheaths. She had spent over a year designing his mother’s sewing box, agonizing over each iridescent flower petal.

The fonyaka’s boot was on her neck. Seemingly unaware of Mamoru’s presence, he lifted his foot to stomp again.

Mamoru had never formed and fired a spear so fast in his life. The water jumped into formation before his thoughts had even solidified into an attack, propelled forward by pure rage. The fonyaka barely had a chance to lift his head before he was impaled through the chest. As the icy projectile jutted out of the soldier’s back, Mamoru was already racing forward.

“Kotetsu-san!” He fell to his knees beside the woman and touched her shoulder. “Kotetsu-san, can you hear me?” But the blood in her veins had slowed. Her nyama didn’t stir. She was gone.

Her young daughter lay a bound away, her spine twisted at a horrible angle, broken. Further down the foot-beaten path through the center of the village were other bodies—big and small, men and women. Kotetsu Saori’s oldest daughter, Kasumi, lay dead beside a tiny bundle of a body. Her newborn son. A baby. No older than little Izumo.

A few siiranu ago, Mamoru hadn’t thought there could be anything worse than staring down at his teacher’s still fingers and shattered skull. But Yukino Sensei was a warrior. He had lived to fight. It was one thing to kill a koro, who faced you with pride and purpose. But death in battle held no meaning for a numu. What had been done here was unthinkable. Unforgivable.

Beside Mamoru, the fonyaka jerked against the ground, coughing blood. Not quite dead. Rage flooded Mamoru and he brought his sword slamming down on the man’s exposed throat. The awkward angle and sloppy technique caused the blade to stick in the fonyaka’s spinal column. Mamoru jerked it free with a snarl and stood.

For a moment, he felt an overwhelming urge to lift his own foot and stomp on the fonyaka, feel his body break beneath his heel. Crush him. Break him until he was as shattered as the women and little children he had killed.

But there were more numuwu in this village, and if even one was still breathing, Mamoru had to protect them. Fists clenched, he stepped over the fonyaka’s corpse and moved on to look for survivors. He scanned every piece of wreckage as he went, but found no movement except the hellish thrashing of the flames. It seemed that whatever Ranganese had been here had moved on after ensuring that their victims were dead. Kotetsu Saori’s killer must have been a straggler.

Halfway through the village, Mamoru encountered a thick wall of ice. It was mostly melted, but it had succeeded in holding the flames back from the easternmost houses in the village. Mamoru let an open hand trail over the water-slick ice and felt relief wash over his singed nerves. He knew this ice, recognized its stable underlying structures. Rounding the end of the wall, he finally found human movement in the rubble. His face broke into a smile of relief when he recognized the soot-stained face of his mentor.

“Kotetsu Kama!” His voice cracked. “You’re alive!”

The ice wall had prevented the fires from reaching the Kotetsus’ wooden house, but the fonyakalu had decimated the structure, reducing it to a pile of rubble.

“Matsuda-dono.” The blacksmith looked up as Mamoru ran to him. “You have to help me!”

“What is it?” Mamoru asked.

“My son.” Kotetsu’s usually steady hands shook and Mamoru realized that they were smeared with blood from clawing through the rubble. “Atsushi is trapped under the house.”

“And the rest of the family?” Mamoru asked.

Kotetsu Kama swallowed. “Th-they...” Mamoru had never heard Kotetsu struggle to control his voice. “The little ones were able to crawl out and run after…” He swallowed. “A-after the soldiers were gone. I think they made it to safety.”

“What about your wife?” Mamoru asked. “Your mother?”

Kotetsu shook his head. “It was so fast. There were only a few of them, but they brought the fire out of the forges. Then when people came running out of the houses, they killed them. Kaa-san knew. She told us not to stay inside from the beginning...” He put a hand to his eyes. Mamoru had never seen his mentor this way, as a husband and son, as someone who could feel lost.

“Kotetsu Kama.” Mamoru had no idea how he kept his own voice from trembling. “You have to get out of here. There are still Ranganese coming up the mountain. Uncle Takashi said he would hold them, but I don’t know how long—”

“I won’t leave without my son.”

Mamoru found himself wanting to nod in agreement. Something in him didn’t want Kotetsu to go. The numu had always been a source of comfort and guidance, but he was a blacksmith. It wasn’t within his power to stop the threat coming up the mountain, nor was it his responsibility; it was Mamoru’s.

“I will protect your son,” Mamoru promised. “But I need you out of danger. I’m just one fighter. I don’t know if I can protect you both at once.”

“Surely you’re not on your own,” Kotetsu said.

“The Yukinos and Mizumakis are all gone. My father was sent back to the main village to protect the women and children, and my uncle...” Mamoru couldn’t understand how he suddenly knew. “My uncle is dead,” he said softly.

“What?” The stricken look on Kotetsu’s face reminded Mamoru that the blacksmith had once helped train a young Takashi at the forges. They had been friends since childhood. “He can’t be...”

Despite Kotetsu’s denial, Mamoru knew. He still wasn’t sure how. Maybe the certainty came through his subconscious awareness of the nyama around him. Maybe it was the simple logic of how much blood Uncle Takashi had lost, how many enemies he had been facing, and how long it had been.

“The Ranganese will be here any dinma,” he told Kotetsu with fresh urgency. “You need to be gone before they get here. I’ll take care of Atsushi. Go!”

“But—”

“Do what I say!” Mamoru bellowed, surprised at the strength in his own voice.

In the forge, he was Kotetsu’s student, but the forges were gone now. This village had turned into a battlefield, and on the battlefield, the koro’s command ruled.

Kotetsu only hesitated for a moment, considering Mamoru as though seeing him for the first time. “You’re a fine koro, Matsuda Mamoru.” He bowed his head in acceptance. “I leave my son to you.”

Mamoru nodded, silently accepting responsibility.

“Nyama to you, Matsuda-dono.” Kotetsu said, and fled up the mountain.

Immediately, Mamoru got down on his hands and knees and peered into the darkness beneath the rubble.

“Atsushi-kun?” he called to his friend. His voice shook at first, but he pushed the tremor down with a smile. “Atsushi-kun?” his voice was stronger now, more encouraging. “Can you hear me?”

He couldn’t quite make out words, but there was a muffled response from under the broken wood and stone. Wind whipped the flames on the other side of Kotetsu’s ice wall. The fonyakalu had almost reached them.

“Hold on, okay? I’m going to get you out of there. I just need to take care of some fonyakalu first. Hold on.”

Gripping his sword, Mamoru ran to the edge of the village, far from the flames, where he could meet his enemies with the full frozen power of his jiya. If there had been some small hope that his uncle would survive to help him, it disappeared when he reached the ridge overlooking the southern pass.

He had always heard that a theonite’s nyama could do strange things at the moment of death. He had felt the air spasm when he killed fonyakalu, but the gruesome sight below was unlike anything he had ever heard of.

It was as if every drop of Uncle Takashi’s godlike nyama had manifested in ice at the end—in some sort of final defiance. The resulting formation was not a recognizable shape like a katana or a dragon. It was something primal and raw.

An explosive personality in life, Matsuda Takashi had become an explosion in death, frozen branches and blades bursting from his body in all directions—crystal ice veined with blood. Unwary fonyakalu who had been too slow to jump clear were speared through limbs, chests, and abdomens by the force of his dying jiya. Some had been hoisted off their feet high into the air, creating a tree of corpses that glittered red against the sunset.

Those who had survived the carnage were charging up the slope toward Mamoru.

With a slow breath, Mamoru raised his sword. Atsushi and Kotetsu Kama were behind him, counting on him to protect them. Beyond them, his mother and father were counting on him. Beyond this mountain, the fishermen of the Shirojima islands, and the farmers of Yuwei and Hakudao were counting on him. His Empire was counting on him.

He took in his enemies—one, two, three, four, five fonyakalu—as they flew up the slope. Any one of these soldiers who got past this point would kill Kotetsu Kama on the path. They would kill Atsushi too, if they found him, and then move on to the main village to kill more. And after that, after everyone in Takayubi was dead, these soldiers would press inland, bringing the same fate to hundreds more.

Unless the Sword of Kaigen served its purpose.

So I will.

With that thought, Mamoru’s limbs seemed to grow light, buoyed by new energy. Yukino Sensei had given his life so he could fight on, and Uncle Takashi had given his last moments to make the job easier. Their strength was in his limbs, pumping from his heart into his veins. There were no longer any confusing ambiguities or difficult choices. There was only what Mamoru had been bred and trained for since he was old enough to hold a practice sword—to charge down the mountain at his enemies and kill.

Kill.

Kill.