Pilgrim 3, page 16
“This is between you and me,” Danzen said before Kudzu could respond. “Call off your students, and…” He stopped speaking. It was no use. This line of reasoning wouldn’t work with Soko. He had learned that during their last encounter.
There was no sense in delaying the inevitable.
Danzen loosed Astra as fast as he possibly could, the sword passing through Soko’s torso and remaining stuck in her chest. She staggered backwards, both hands on the grip of the weapon now, the woman gasping.
“You… You…” With a thrust forward she withdrew the blade, bringing a trail of blood with it. “You dare?” she asked, the expressionless mask she wore at odds with the shocked sound of her voice. Like a moth that had suddenly reached exhaustion, Soko fell to the ground as Astra returned to Danzen’s hand.
The explosion that followed brought the building down, the balcony tumbling toward the ground, the roof cascading on top of the three of them, Danzen, Kudzu, and Yato buried beneath the rubble.
****
Danzen’s ears continued to ring as he slowly began to press himself out of the debris. The explosion had happened somewhere below them, that he was certain, which meant that Soko had set it up beforehand, disregarding the lives of the hotel workers.
During his time alone in the room, Danzen changed into the robes his mother had given him, and while he normally had the sleeves rolled up, he had rolled them down during his rest, and had forgotten to adjust them during dinner. It wasn’t a lot of added protection, but it had done the trick, Danzen somehow protected from any nicks or scrapes that would have certainly called forth his demons.
As the dust settled, Danzen was the first to his feet, the former assassin hunched over now, Astra still in his hand.
He sheathed his famed sword into its porous scabbard, ignoring Soko’s blood on its tip, and withdrew his Blade of Darkness. He turned to the group of assassins practically bearing down on him, ready to shift through the debris.
Soko was gone now, and he faintly remembered as the balcony came down that he had seen her retreat toward the middle of the group, shielded by the younger assassins. Would she survive? Danzen had intended for his wound to be fatal, and when he had that sort of mindset, he generally didn’t miss. There was no way to tell now, and if she was going to die later, he would have to find out about it some other way.
“We will kill you,” one of Thane’s students hissed, his voice louder than it should have been likely due to whatever Soko had done to his eardrums.
Danzen sensed movement behind him, and for a split second he thought it was Soko.
He dropped and helped Kudzu to her feet. He had been so focused on his opponents that he had failed to see to his friends. More movement behind him signaled that Yato was slowly pressing herself out of the wreckage, Danzen unable to assist her now that he had Kudzu’s arm over his shoulder. She was bad off, her face somewhere between human and fox, and her breaths were much lighter than they should have been.
“I’m here!” Jelmay shouted, the bakeneko suddenly appearing to the right of the assassins in Danzen’s form. The only thing was, the approaching assassins couldn’t hear him, which meant they didn’t see the distraction Jelmay was trying to create.
A solution came to Danzen.
He lowered Kudzu to the ground and brought his weapon to the ready, just as they spotted him. He moved rapidly to the right, fast enough that he knew that it would appear as if he had bolted away. Danzen returned once all of the assassins’ heads followed in the direction they thought he had gone, the group discovering Jelmay disguised as Danzen, and assuming it was him.
“We have to get you out of here,” he told Kudzu as he helped her back to her feet. The glint of something sharp cut Danzen’s eye. He looked up to see Yato standing with her blade still drawn, strands of her hair beating against the front of her face. She could have struck him. He didn’t think it was possible because of the power he had used against her, but his ears were still ringing, and he was disoriented from the collapse of the balcony.
He didn’t know what was possible anymore.
“They’re not going to stop,” Yato said, the group of assassins starting to swarm around Jelmay.
“Do you see now?” Danzen asked, catching something behind her eyes, the way her pupils darted left and right. She was finally coming to understand what Danzen had experienced all these years.
“What did she do to them?” Yato asked. “Tensei and Sonin. What did she do?”
“Their ears,” said Danzen. “All of them.”
“What do we do?”
“We?” Danzen asked, his heart skipping a beat. She had made her decision, and while he was prepared to deal with the assassins and Yato at the same time, Danzen was relieved to the point that he exhaled audibly. “I need you to get Kudzu to safety.”
“Where is safety?” she asked, her voice choking.
“There is no safety for us. But for now, north, to Odval, that will do. I have to help Jelmay.”
Yato nodded. “The carriage station on the other side of Arsi?”
“Yes, we will meet you there. Do not look back, keep going. No matter what you hear next.”
Skkrikt! Skkrikt!
Her blades returned to the sleeves of her gauntlet, and as they did Danzen realized something in that moment, something she had been misleading him about. For her to be able to summon the blades required some understanding of her echo. What was her ranking then? Had Yato actually learned to bend it to some degree? Had she really been playing dumb this entire time? She had, but that was a conversation they could have once they made it through the other end of whatever was about to happen here.
“Go,” Danzen whispered to her. “And quickly.”
Shadows swarmed around the tip of his Blade of Darkness, almost as if they were angry beings, hungry demons all coming to feed at once. He got into position and brought his blade back and overhead, Danzen’s first strike cutting into four of the younger assassins, the marks clean, from their shoulders diagonally across their torsos. Instant death. Fountains of blood followed, the other assassins, and Thane’s two students, startled by Danzen’s sudden appearance and sheer power.
Was there a way to convert them? Likely not. It was too late now as both of them dropped their torches and went for their weapons, plumes of fire lifting from the ground, shadows peeling back as Danzen shifted into overdrive.
He needed this to be quick, before they brought more attention. At some point in the night, the authorities would find a group of slain Diyu Brotherhood assassins and all that would be swept under the rug, cleaned up before morning. That was the power of the Brotherhood.
But he needed to reach that point, and to do so swiftly before pedestrians got involved.
Danzen unleashed a fury of attacks, operating at his peak level, his sudden arrival causing Jelmay to yelp and quickly morph back into a bakeneko so he could get away from the incoming carnage. Because that was what it was looking to be. His boomerang sword in one hand, his glaive in the other, Danzen sent Astra through the air followed by spiked shadows, slice after slice butchering the night. An absolute onslaught.
He focused mostly on taking his opponents down in ways that would kill them without much suffering, but several of the assassins tried to move in closer to him and deliver short-range attacks, leading Danzen to turn up the brutality with these brave souls, stomping them down, cutting away their hands and feet, using their bodies as shields to absorb stabs from their counterparts.
In the end, the only two left were Thane’s two former students, Danzen now with blood streaked across him, his face painted red, the whites of his eyes the only thing visible in moonlight that dared reach his face. As blood dripped from his chin, he stared the two younger assassins down, giving them the chance to flee. The one with the two short swords did just that. He took off, leaving the other student behind, the one who wielded a spear.
Danzen returned Astra to its scabbard and placed both hands on his Blade of Darkness, ready to end this.
“You finish him off, I’ll get our stuff out of the rubble,” Jelmay said as if he were calling the shots. “Both your bags, Kudzu’s weapon, my stuff aside from my shield, it broke during the explosion. What else?”
Danzen didn’t respond.
“Right, you’re fighting. Where are Kudzu and Yato?”
“The carriage station,” he said, his eyes never leaving his opponent.
“I’ll wait for you. Don’t take your time with him, Pilgrim.”
Danzen heard a firing mechanism. He bent backwards just as the tip of his opponent’s spear flew at him, the end of it attached to a chain. The spear point zipped back into the casing of the spear and locked into place again.
It was an interesting design, something Danzen hadn’t encountered before. Yet it was also one that would quickly lead to the young assassin’s downfall considering the amount of hours he would have to put in to truly master a weapon with a harpoon ability.
Danzen decided at that moment to let the fight run its course, albeit on a faster timetable. His opponent tried to spear him again; Danzen stepped aside, avoiding the attack. Growing frustrated, the younger assassin attempted to use the distance given to him by the spear to keep Danzen at bay, but Danzen also had a distance-granting weapon in his glaive, and each thrust from Thane’s student was met with a calculated parry.
It became clear that he hadn’t trained against other spear users as much as he should have.
Jelmay called to him, signaling to Danzen that he needed to hurry. It was cheap, it wasn’t the way he wanted to end this fight, but he had no desire to fight the young assassin in the first place.
It was time.
Thane’s student shot his spear at him once again, and this time Danzen cut through the chain, which caused it to retract back into the polearm, the chain slapping the assassin in the face as it did so.
He let out a grunt and fell, but he was back on his feet in a matter of seconds, now with two knives in his hands, reverse grip, drawn from sheaths at his belt. His next move would be his last. As he came forward, Danzen exploded toward him, his glaive held out to the side, the shadow-dipped blade lopping the man’s head off.
His opponent’s head hit the ground and Danzen lowered his weapon, disappointed in the way that he had finished the deed. It was necessary. Time was of the essence. He heard the body fall behind him, and once he did he turned to it, and cleaned the end of his weapon off on the young man’s robes. His Blade of Darkness back in its sheath, Danzen joined Jelmay, ready to be done with this, ready to move on.
“Are you all right?” Jelmay asked, the bakeneko with all of their items hoisted over his shoulders in some way, shape, or form.
Danzen slowly nodded.
“Do you think Soko’s really dead?”
He turned back to where the fight had taken place. It was now strewn with bodies, their features accented by blips of fire from the two discarded torches. Gruesome, yet peaceful in a weird way, all of them at rest.
Finally, he spoke. “I don’t know if we’re that lucky.”
“Maybe you aren’t, but I certainly am,” Jelmay told him. “I’m the luckiest bakeneko this side of the Panchen Mountains.”
Danzen nodded.
“What? You aren’t going to agree with me? Fine, fine, have it your way.” Jelmay took one more look at the battle that had just taken place and shook his head. “This place is so going to be haunted in the future. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Part Four
.Chapter One.
To reach Odval, Danzen and his companions would first have to make it to the city of Bahlingar, which would take the rest of the night. Matters were complicated by Kudzu, who was in incredible pain from the explosion at the hotel, bleeding, not able to keep her form. They needed to get her to a healer, and the further they got from the river side city of Arsi, the better.
After all, Soko could still be alive.
Handling the carriage driver was by no means difficult for Danzen, the man oblivious as to who his blood-soaked passengers were, which allowed Kudzu to morph into her fox form. Sitting across from Danzen now were Yato and Jelmay, the bakeneko nervously picking at his claws. Yato simply stared out the window, at the rolling landscape, Danzen not sure what was going through her mind.
Kudzu didn’t normally place her head in his lap, and he normally didn’t pet her, or touch her in her fox form for that matter unless he needed to move somewhere quickly. Yet there he was, seated in the carriage with the white fox resting on his lap, her eyes clenched shut, Kudzu clearly in pain.
“She’ll be fine,” Jelmay kept saying. “And she’ll heal better in her yokai body than her human one.”
Kudzu made a sound with her throat, Danzen not sure if she was agreeing with the bakeneko or not.
“It’s really going to be up to you,” Jelmay told her. “We can take you to the veterinarian or the healer. I suppose they’re basically the same person, but Bahlingar will be large enough to have separated the medical practices.”
“I’ll be fine…” she said, her voice incredibly thin. “We need to keep going…”
“I don’t know what that explosion was all about. I get that they had booby-trapped the place, but don’t quite see why. Soko must have known that it wouldn’t kill you unless the explosion had gone off in our room.” Jelmay’s whiskers flared up. “Maybe they had bad intel and didn’t know we were staying in the upstairs room. But that just seems impossible. Remember the pebbles at the window? Even if you had Pilgrim-washed everyone’s mind at the hotel, it wouldn’t take a trained assassin long to figure out where we were. Hell, all they would need to do is head to the kitchen and ask which room is ordering the most food.”
“Then they meant to do it,” Yato said, her focus still on the dark landscape outside their window.
“Does that register with you?” Jelmay asked Danzen.
“It does. I have seen Soko handle her marks in two ways. One is quickly, almost to the point that it seems like an afterthought, like something she did on a whim. The other is to really put the fear of Diyu in them, to terrorize them until they are vulnerable to the point that it makes them an easy target, sort of the way a cat plays with its prey.”
“And you used to date her?” Jelmay tsked.
“I didn’t know that part,” said Yato.
Danzen didn’t elaborate on it, and in the end, the young assassin didn’t press him for more information. After a lull in the conversation, Jelmay started up again.
“Well, I don’t know if she’s dead or not, but we can only hope so, by any blessings left of Sunyata, please let that woman die. Our main mission now will be making sure the fox is all right.”
“I’ll be fine…”
“We have the option of resting in Bahlingar,” Jelmay said, cutting Kudzu off, “but perhaps we should continue moving on to Odval, and from there to Mother Pilgrim’s nunnery. They will know what to do there.”
“They will, but that would be quite the journey…” Danzen glanced down at Kudzu, who seemed as if she was barely breathing. Her wounds didn’t look so bad in her fox form; but he did see several trails of blood smeared across her white fur. She would heal; he had to believe this. “We can stay for a day in Odval,” Danzen said. “Rest and regroup.”
“You know me, I have no qualms with resting for a day,” said Jelmay. “Although, I did notice that you forgot to mention eating and gambling.”
“We will do that as well, the eating part. The gambling is up to you.”
“Good, because they have good meat in Odval, the freshest in the kingdom, and terrible gamblers, also some of the freshest in the kingdom. But back to the food. You’ll see,” he told Yato, as if she were interested in gastronomics. “By this time tomorrow, you are going to be as full as you have ever been in your life.”
“I don’t know if I’d like that at the moment.”
“Nonsense, everyone likes to eat.”
Jelmay eventually quieted down when the others stopped responding to his statements. He fell asleep with his hands on his belly, his head resting on a cushion behind his neck as he snored lightly. It was only after another hour passed that Yato finally spoke.
“Tensei and Sonin? What happened to them?” she asked carefully.
“One of them is dead, the other is alive. I killed the one who wields the spear.”
“Sonin,” she said, a hint of pain flickering across her face.
“Yes, him. The other decided not to fight me. They did something to prevent the influence of my voice.”
“Tensei is more cunning than Sonin, always was compulsive,” she said. “If Soko is still alive, I’m sure Tensei will join her again.”
Danzen didn’t respond and eventually, Yato nodded off as well, leaving Danzen alone with his thoughts, the only one who was still awake. As always.
The carriage slowed, and it came to a stop past the bridge, the wood creaking beneath the carriage wheels, the sound of water gushing below. Danzen took a moment to clean the blood off his face, before they departed again.
The road that led to Odval was rocky as ever, and lumber camps on the horizon added a flicker of orange to some of the hills, a protest to the dark-purple sky overhead littered with stars. There was something beautiful about twilight, something that matched him in a way that he couldn’t quite describe. He was at one with it, and as the carriage continued to Bahlingar, and from there to Odval, Danzen was at peace for a time.
They took several more pit stops along the way, but eventually made it to the outer village of Odval. Kudzu was awake now, and feeling better, but Danzen knew that they would be best to rest for the night before heading into the mountains, to his mother’s nunnery. The carriage driver led them to a small inn, and Yato, Jelmay, and Danzen exited, allowing time for Kudzu to gingerly change into clothing before joining them.
