Pilgrim 3, page 26
Danzen glanced back at Yato. The next idea that came to him caused him to shake his head. Yet it remained a viable option, something Jelmay certainly would have utilized: Yato. Could she provide the distraction Danzen needed to get in close enough to the demon to subdue him? How smart was Shutendorji? Could he be tricked in this way, using beauty as a distraction?
An hour passed this way, Danzen deep in thought as he slowly bent his echo, the power swelling within him. He still hadn’t come up with a solution to their impending problem, but perhaps something would arise on its own, especially after they were able to do a little reconnaissance. He didn’t know how easy this would be, but they were trained for this sort of thing, and if he deemed it too dangerous, he could always leave Yato behind or make the trek back to the nunnery to get Jelmay.
He had options, but first he needed to see what they were up against.
Movement near the water below caught his attention. Danzen dropped as an older woman with a hunched back shuffled forward. She wore a flowing cape with pine needles stitched into it, almost porcupine in nature as she crouched for the water and began drinking.
Danzen was seconds away from making his way down to her when he stopped, wondering if it was a trap, or even his father.
There really was no telling.
He remained on his perch as the woman finished drinking from the water. If he got her attention from a distance, she could give away their cover through a scream or a yelp. If he was going to question her, or to figure out what she was doing out here in the middle of nowhere, Danzen needed to get in close enough to stop her from making noise if that was what she intended to do.
He moved in silently as the woman turned back to the forest, Danzen leaping from the perch he just been on down to the shoreline behind her, quiet enough that the woman didn’t hear him. He came in close enough that he could grab her before he finally spoke.
“Stop,” he said, summoning his Demon Speak power, “and speak to me.”
Rather than freeze as he would have expected, the woman began to lower her head, her voice haggard as she finally spoke. “So you found me.” She slowly turned around, the look on her face changing from disappointment to one of surprise. “I… I don’t know you.”
“I am Danzen Ravja.”
“Ravja… Ravja…” The woman blinked a few times, one of her pupils black, the other almost white, the skin on her cheeks sagging to the point that it went down past her chin line, her lips chapped, a bit of a mustache full of white hairs visible. “You are related to her?”
“Who?”
“Shodren, at the nunnery.”
Danzen nodded.
“Her son? Relative?”
“Her son.”
“Why are you out here? Why would you come to a place like this?” she asked, a hint of fear in her voice.
“To kill Shutendorji.”
The older woman brought her hand up to her head and threw her head back, sighing with relief. “Thank Sunyata, by the stars fallen and still shining bright, thank Sunyata.”
****
It took Yato just a bit longer to get down to Danzen’s position, the young assassin at his side just about the time that the elderly woman introduced herself.
“My name is Minjin,” the old hag said. “Haven’t heard that name before, have you?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Danzen told her. “This is Yato, she is an associate of mine.”
“An associate, huh?” Minjin asked, the woman baring her yellow teeth as she grinned at the two of them. “The reason you haven’t heard it is because people haven’t used the name for two hundred years. Do I look that old to you?”
“Not particularly,” Danzen said. The woman did look old, and if he had to guess her age, he would guess she was somewhere between seventy and eighty. He turned out to be wrong as she began her explanation, Minjin motioning for them to move to the safety of the foliage.
“It was two hundred years ago that Shutendorji kidnapped me, stole me from Odval as a young girl, and made me his servant. It won’t be long before I die, to be honest with you. Perhaps another ten days or so, but I had plans to make it to your mother’s nunnery before then, so I can die properly.”
As if revealing her age sparked a change in her appearance, Danzen could now see that she truly was two hundred years old, as she had claimed. It was something beyond immediate appearance that told him she had seen more than she should have, the thinness of her skin, the way her veins looked shriveled up, and even now, how she held herself, the woman even more hunched over than Danzen had noticed at first.
There was no way she was going to be able to make it to the nunnery.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t already started looking for me, but Shutendorji is well satiated at the moment. Two hundred years…” She muttered. “The spoiled man-child of a demon, keeping me alive to serve him, all the people he’s killed. I just hope that… I just hope that they aren’t marked on my soul, that I won’t encounter them in Diyu. He says he’ll come there, you know, he told me before, to bring me back if I ever left his side. But he won’t go there. Tengir Gantulga will keep him in Diyu if he shows up. It always has bothered me that no one from hell has come to retrieve this terrible demon, especially with how vile he is. But that just goes to show you that Diyu is not on our side, that even demons have their own agendas.”
Danzen glanced at Yato to gauge what she thought of the older woman. He couldn’t shake the suspicion that it was his father, but if it was, Tengir Gantulga was doing a pretty good job of his disguise. And why would his father go to all this trouble anyway? It wasn’t like he needed to change his appearance for Yato’s sake.
In the end, Danzen couldn’t get a read on Yato, the assassin doing a good job of preventing her thoughts from changing her facial expression. He did however have an idea in the time it took for him to look from her back to Minjin.
“Lead us to Shutendorji, tell us how we may kill him, and I will personally escort you to the nunnery,” he said, getting down to the point. “I can get you there faster, if necessary.”
“You could?” Minjin asked, her good eye focusing on Danzen.
“I have my ways, yes. We will hurry, if that’s what you are worried about.”
“I don’t know if I should go back…” She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her disheveled robe, the pine needles shifting across her back.
“He won’t do anything to you,” Yato said, “not with us here.”
“Is that so? And you plan to kill him without a weapon?”
A grimace formed on Danzen’s face. She wasn’t wrong in her suspicion of their power, especially now that the two were weaponless.
“It’s a long story,” Danzen told her, “but there are other ways to kill a man, yokai, or demon, for that matter.”
“Is that so? Is that what you believe?”
“Perhaps you could help us,” Yato said, her input adding a different dynamic to the conversation. Even if she was hardened for a twenty-year-old, there was still a hint of youthful optimism in her voice, one that Danzen hoped would be to their advantage.
“What do you mean?”
“You must know of a way to kill him without a sword. After all, you have been his attendant for two hundred years now, as you claim.”
“Without a sword, you aren’t going to be able to kill Shutendorji.”
“Does he have a sword?” Yato asked.
“Of course he does. An enormous one, I forget the name for it, but it is easily as tall as you,” she said, motioning toward Danzen.
“An odachi,” Yato said.
“Call it whatever you’d like, it would kill you long before you reached him.” Minjin spat, a dark look coming over her face. “He is a monster, you know, and the things he has done to people who have passed to this valley, no matter their rank in life, from nuns to bandits, are things that I could never…” She started breathing heavily. “I can never unsee them, the torture, the sheer violence, the mutilations.” She covered her brow with her hand for a moment and began sobbing lightly. “He made me prepare them so he could… So he could…”
“You did what you had to do,” Yato said.
As Yato tried to comfort the woman, something Danzen’s father had mentioned came to him regarding any weapons they tried to use turning to dust. Even if they weren’t able to put themselves on a level playing field with the demon, was there another option? What would Jelmay do? Was there something they could do that could at least shift the odds in their favor? There was, and Danzen was happy that a strategy had finally revealed itself to him. They would get his weapon, and as soon as they did, the weapon would turn to dust, leaving Shutendorji in the same state as Danzen and Yato.
All he had to do now was get Shutendorji’s weapon.
“Don’t worry about our lack of weapons. We just need for you to lead us to him. Once you do, Yato and I will kill Shutendorji, and then I will escort you back to the nunnery. I will make sure you get there with plenty of time to go through any final rituals you would like for the nuns to perform.”
“How could you be so confident?” Minjin asked. “You have no weapon, and you’re going up against a demon almost three times your size, and you’re a big man.”
“Because I’m half-demon, you may know my father.”
“Your… father?”
“I am the…” Danzen shook his head. It was strange voicing this out loud. “I am the bastard son of Tengir Gantulga. And he’s the one who sent me here to deal with Shutendorji, both of us,” he said, gesturing toward Yato.
Minjin gasped. “You are Shodren and Tengir’s son? I always thought it was a rumor, that they had a child. I… I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m giving you a choice here. You heard my voice earlier, when I used my Demon Speak power, and it didn’t affect you. I can’t command you to lead us there, but I can ask you, and I can promise you that we will kill Shutendorji, and I will personally make sure that you make it to the nunnery.”
“And in Diyu? Can you promise that Shutendorji can’t abuse me there? He is going to be rather vengeful if you sent him back to hell…”
“I’m sure that can be arranged,” Danzen told her. “Now, what will it be?”
.Chapter Four.
The walk took them around an hour, Minjin quiet as she led them to where the demon had been living the last two hundred years. Shutendorji rested at the mouth of the cave, several carcasses laid out before him, all belonging to wild oxen and other animals that lived in the valley the demon called home. Perhaps even yokai, there really was no telling with the mutilation on display, a few puddles of blood signaling that the kills were fresh.
And then there was the smell.
The last time Danzen had smelled something so appalling was in dealing with the giants back in the Panchen Mountains. It was a terrible odor, one that sat heavy in the air to the point that he began breathing out of his mouth.
Shutendorji rested on his back, and from their current vantage point, on a ledge overlooking the entrance of the cave, Danzen could see that the demon was just as large as Minjin had claimed, with wings and a face that reminded him of the two lion dogs that guarded his monastery. Sticking out of the ground, without a scabbard, was Shutendorji’s enormous odachi that Minjin had told them about, not unlike the golden one that Danzen’s father wielded, the demon clearly not respectful with his weapon.
“I can’t look,” Minjin said, her back now to a rock. She was trembling, and kept puffing her cheeks out as she tried to calm herself.
“What did you do to him?” Yato whispered.
“I overfed him. He has become lazier over the years, and I found that giving him more food than necessary would make him take longer naps. He stupidly put me in charge of some livestock he keeps about half a mile from here, mostly for self-control. It has been a long game, but I’ve slowly been mixing munlo leaves in his meals, which have affected his sleep. It has worked to some degree. And I would be nearly at the nunnery by now had I not…” She didn’t say anything else, Minjin interrupted when Shutendorji came awake for a moment, his eyes bloodshot and angry as he turned to his other side and relaxed, his flatulence loud enough to make birds in the trees scatter away.
“Disgusting,” Minjin said. “Such a foul creature.”
All Danzen needed to do was get his hands on the demon’s enormous odachi. No matter how large Shutendorji was, if he could get his weapon away from him, it would increase his odds of killing the demon.
“Stay with her,” he told Yato. “It’s time.”
Yato kept in a crouched position next to Minjin as Danzen slowly lowered down the rock face, doing so with his back to the stone. He finally reached the ground, ignoring the foul stench as he closed his eyes and focused on his surroundings.
Outlines took shape, Danzen first searching for any object, be it a twig or pebble, that could make enough noise to disturb Shutendorji, to alert him to Danzen’s presence. He did so first with his eyes shut, and then verified everything he’d seen with his eyes open, utilizing this power in tandem with his normal seeing ability.
Once he saw that he was in the clear, he shifted toward the weapon, which jutted out of the ground a few feet away from Shutendorji. Barely breathing, Danzen inched his way forward, his focus entirely on the path that lay ahead, on the enormous demon resting on his side.
Danzen paused, and as he did Shutendorji came awake again and flipped over, snorting as a stone was dislodged from beneath his calf muscle. The stone came tumbling toward Danzen; he lifted one foot to let it pass, an attempt to keep everything as natural as possible.
It took him about ten minutes of ultra-slow movement, but Danzen finally reached the odachi. The weapon was nearly as tall as he was, and as carefully as ever, he reached a finger out to it, touching the side of its shimmering blade. He expected the odachi to crumble, and when it didn’t he gritted his teeth and looked up at the grip, Danzen assuming he had to actually place his hand around it for his father’s spell to take shape.
Shutendorji came alive again, the demon coughing and eventually belching, his tongue flopping out of his mouth as he did so.
Danzen froze, and the demon settled again, oblivious to his presence.
He was close, and all he needed to do now was wrap his hand around the grip of the enormous sword, which would force it to turn to dust. Once he’d done that, he could sneak back up to his perch and wait until he was certain that demon was fully asleep.
Then he would strike.
His fingers out wide, Danzen wrapped his outstretched hand around the grip and closed his eyes for just a moment, feeling its power, a weapon clearly forged by a remnant.
But the odachi didn’t crumble to sand.
It remained stuck in the dirt, Danzen’s eyes widening as surprise quickly came over him. Had his father been lying? Could he have simply taken a different weapon from the monastery and used it?
His only option now was to use the odachi for its intended purposes, but it was exceedingly large, and Danzen didn’t know if he would even be able to hold it, let alone retrieve the weapon from its current vantage point, especially without disturbing the demon.
Unfortunately for Danzen, he had run out of time.
Shutendorji came alive again and let out a grunt, this time turning to Danzen’s direction, his bloodshot eyes falling upon the former assassin. There was a flash of confusion, quickly overcome by delight.
Calling on his demon blood-fueled might, Danzen grabbed the grip with his other hand and yanked it down with all his strength, his biceps bulging, Danzen able to successfully dislodge the weapon from the soil. He quickly stepped back, now holding the grip with both hands, just barely able to pull the sword out of the soil.
Shutendorji lunged toward him like a charging bull, Danzen barely able to dodge the demon as he took the enormous odachi with him.
The demon struck a wall of rock, which caused a small avalanche to kick dust up into the air. Shutendorji scrambled around, got to his feet, his hulking size even more evident now as he glared down at the former assassin.
The demon began to laugh. “You dare challenge me?” The look of murderous glee on his leonine face quickly turned to surprise, and from there to sheer animosity as he sniffed the air. “Tengir Gantulga’s son? Half blood at best, filth.” He clenched his jaw, his shoulders pressing up and down as he heaved in deep breaths, his wings stretching outward and then returning to his body.
No other words were exchanged as Shutendorji dropped to the ground again like a gorilla. He pounded his fists into the ground as he charged at Danzen, leaving craters in his wake.
Using his enormous sword as a pole vault, Danzen drove the tip of it in the ground and relied on momentum to send him up and over Shutendorji, Danzen yanking the odachi out at the very last moment.
He landed, both hands on the grip, the muscles in his leg screaming as he fought to keep it erect. As the demon tried to turn around, Danzen spun, the end of the odachi sweeping across Shutendorji’s winged back. A normal blade wouldn’t have cut through the demon’s thick skin, but this was no ordinary weapon, and if Danzen needed any more proof that it was forged by a remnant, or perhaps in Sunyata itself, it was the massive cut that it delivered to the demon’s muscled back and the start of his wings.
Shutendorji wailed, black blood rushing out of the newfound wound. Swiveling around, his eyes growing crimson with fury, Shutendorji brought both fists up and slammed them into the ground, causing a ripple in the stone that Danzen wasn’t able to dodge. He slipped, one foot going into the crack, and for a moment he thought he had drawn blood.
He barely had a breath to register what happened as Yato appeared on the other side of the demon and began calling for it, providing a distraction. Proving that he wasn’t as smart as he was vile, Shutendorji turned to Yato, his big tongue falling out of his mouth as he licked his lips.
“Ah… you have brought me a snack,” he said, saliva dripping from his chin. “Or perhaps a slave.” He tilted his head up, once again smelling the air. “Minjin? Is this your doing, my dear? You know I can smell you…”
