The Sword of Kaigen, page 26
“Wait…” Mamoru said as the Ameno, Ginkawa, and Ikeno swordsmen, and the Katakouri archers raced to follow orders. “Who’s going to guard the southern pass?”
The southern pass was the wider of the two avenues up the mountain, and Uncle Takashi had just sent more than two thirds of their fighting force in the other direction.
“We are,” Uncle Takashi said. “Yukino, Mizumaki, with me!” he called and the eleven remaining fighters followed him down the slope toward the southern pass.
Mamoru had walked this path almost every day of his life. It was the path that he took every time he visited the Kotetsus in the blacksmith village, every time he met up with Yuuta and Itsuki before they headed up to Kumono Academy. Yet it looked unfamiliar now, stained with the rust-colored light of the storm. Snow and dust thrashed like fitful ghosts, like the Laaxara rising to snatch at the fighters as they raced to face their enemies.
“Hyousuke!” Uncle Takashi called to the nearest Mizumaki as they passed the numu village. “Go tell the blacksmiths to stay inside their houses with the doors closed!”
The man nodded and split from the rest of the group.
Uncle Takashi called the men to a stop at the narrowest point in the pass. With a sweep of his arm, he cut a straight line through the snow extending from the jagged rocks to their right, to the base of the slope leading up to Kumono Academy on their left.
“We hold them here!” he bellowed. “No fonyaka crosses this line!”
The line he had drawn looked to be at least thirty bounds long. Mamoru imagined that a general who hoped to defend such an area would have sent in fifty-some soldiers.
There were twelve of them.
The men automatically arranged themselves by skill, with the younger Mizumakis placing themselves on the more defensible edges, and the powerful Yukinos covering the open ground near the middle of the pass, where the Ranganese were most likely to break through. Realizing that he had lined up in between his uncle and Yukino Sensei, Mamoru stepped back, thinking he should cede his position to a more experienced fighter.
“Stay where you are, Mamoru-kun.” Yukino Sensei’s voice was firm but gentle. “You’re a Matsuda, aren’t you?”
Swallowing, Mamoru nodded. He felt a hand clap onto his shoulder and turned to find his uncle smiling at him.
“It looks like you won’t have to see rust, after all, nephew.” Uncle Takashi squeezed his shoulder and Mamoru felt a disorienting jolt of pure elation. His uncle wasn’t just smiling to raise the spirits of the other men. He was excited.
The mountain shook beneath their feet as Uncle Takashi took up his position between his brother and nephew. The tornado had consumed all of the western village and the surrounding forest without slowing down and was now no more than a hundred bounds from where they stood—twelve men against a towering column of wind.
“We hold this line!” Uncle Takashi boomed.
“We hold this line!” the other fighters echoed, matching his ferocity.
“We are the Sword of Kaigen!”
“We are the Sword of Kaigen!”
“We hold this line!”
The wind rose as if in response to their voices, trying to deafen them and rip the skin from their bones. But the men of Takayubi stood strong, rooting their feet in the snow.
“Fire at will!” Uncle Takashi roared into the wind.
Mamoru raised his jiya and tried to form a spear, but it was difficult with the wind trying to tear the snow from his grasp. And even if he could form a proper projectile, what was he supposed to fire at? They faced a solid wall of wind. It was impossible to discern anything through the whirl of snow.
Yukino Sensei was the first to take a shot. Raising a bound-long spear from the snow, he launched three spears—one after another—with all his strength and precision.
As far as Mamoru could tell, all the projectiles did was disappear into the vortex, but when he looked back toward his teacher, Yukino was smiling.
“I hit something.”
“You did?”
“Yes.” Yukino Sensei flexed his calloused fingers and raised another ice spear from the snow. “Just not hard enough to do damage. It’s difficult to sense the target and attack at the same time. I could use a bit of Matsuda power.”
“What?”
Yukino Sensei made a sweeping movement with his hands, positioning the spear so that it hovered in front of Mamoru.
“Running start, Mamoru. Then spin.”
It took Mamoru a moment to catch on. Then he smiled in understanding. “Yes, Sensei!” He backed up, counting his steps. Then he ran at the ice spike.
Launching off the snowy ground, he spun in the air, and slammed the heel of his hand into the projectile, channeling all his jiya through his arm. At the last moment, he felt Yukino Sensei’s jiya join his own in an unbelievable burst of power. His teacher’s more controlled jiya entwined with his, guiding the spear through the wind to its target. Mamoru started as he felt it make contact with something solid.
Yukino Sensei senses were so sharp that he could detect the bodies through the swirling snow, just like Kaa-chan had said—like fish in a stream.
“Again!” Yukino Sensei shouted before Mamoru could stand and marvel any longer.
“Yes, Sensei!”
Mamoru had practiced his spinning launch in the months since Yukino Sensei had told him how to perfect it. His aim still had room for improvement, but he could fire projectiles at full power for a waati without tiring.
All along the line, other jijakalu had replicated their technique, forming pairs to fire projectiles into the whirlwind. Only Tou-sama and Uncle Takashi were powerful enough to line up and launch their attacks without assistance. In a siira, a steady barrage of well-aimed ice was raining into the oncoming tornado.
Mamoru could tell that they were hitting bodies. Even if he was relying entirely on Yukino Sensei’s superior aim, his jiya still picked up the vague sensation of ice thudding into flesh—over and over again. They were felling fonyakalu, but somehow, the wind wasn’t slowing.
At a hand signal from Uncle Takashi, Tou-sama, Yukino Sensei, the most senior Mizumakis, and Mamoru all gathered to him. Even right up close, it was hard to hear anyone’s voice over the roar of the wind.
“We’re hitting fonyakalu,” Uncle Takashi said. “Why isn’t it stopping?”
“They must have replacements,” Yukino Sensei said. “As soon as one soldier drops, another takes his place.”
“What do we do?” Mizumaki Hyousuke asked.
“We need to get rid of the ones who can’t be replaced,” Tou-sama said. “We need to destroy the source of the funnel’s power.”
“How?” asked Hyousuke’s older brother, Toki.
Tou-sama’s murmur was so quiet that Mamoru almost didn’t hear it over the wind. “Needles.”
“You mean spears, Matsuda-dono?” Toki said. “That’s what we’ve been trying! The wind is too strong! We’re hardly getting through the wind surrounding the funnel.”
“Mizumaki-san is right,” Yukino Sensei said. “How are we supposed to pierce the center?”
“None of you can.” Tou-sama was massaging his right arm, his eyes fixed on the oncoming tornado. “I’ll do it.”
“What?”
“Keep firing your spears,” Tou-sama said. “Take out as many fonyakalu as you can.” Turning his back on the tornado, he took a knee, laid his open palms on the ground, and closed his eyes. In an instant, his jiya dropped from fighting aggression to perfect calm.
“What is he doing?” Mizumaki Hyousuke demanded. “Matsuda-dono!” He reached out to touch Takeru’s shoulder.
“No, wait!” Mamoru grabbed Hyousuke’s sleeve, stopping him. “He’s meditating.”
“Meditating?” the Mizumaki said incredulously. “Prayer isn’t going to do us any good now! We need him to fight!”
“Just wait,” Mamoru insisted.
It took Mamoru waatinu to reach his deepest state of meditation, but in it he could sense every water drop and snowflake that moved on the mountain. If his father’s legendary focus was enough to reach that state within these precious few moments, they might stand a chance.
Uncle Takashi seemed to agree. “Return to your position. Root there until the wind dies.”
“Until it dies?” Hyousuke said, incredulous.
“You trust your lords, don’t you, Mizumaki-san?” Yukino Sensei challenged.
Hyousuke hesitated but nodded and stepped back to return to his place alongside Toki and the other Mizumakis.
Mamoru and Yukino Sensei tried to fire more projectiles into the tornado, but the wind had grown so strong that neither jijaka could take a step without risking being swept off their feet.
Yukino Sensei shouted something that Mamoru couldn’t hear through the deafening roar, but from the movement of his lips, it looked like, “Root!”
Mamoru did as he was told, raising the snow around him up to his knees and hardening it to ice, freezing himself to the side of the mountain. He could no longer hear anything. His own hair lashed his face hard enough to leave cuts.
As strong as his stance and his ice were, Mamoru realized that if he stood against the wind any longer, he would simply snap off at the shins. It took all his strength to curl his body forward and sink to his knees. Huddling into the snow, Mamoru made a protective cocoon of ice around himself. Tou-sama still had not moved—still as the mountain itself before the wind.
The funnel was almost on top of them now. Mamoru wondered what it would feel like to die by tornado. Would he be ripped from the snow like a tree from its roots and then smashed into the mountainside? Or would it be slower than that? What if he was more stubborn? If he refused to let go of the mountainside, would the wind strip the flesh from his bones? He was certain he was about to find out—
Then Tou-sama moved.
Physically, it was the tiniest of movements, a sharp twitch of his fingers. But it was as if a thread had snapped. Something changed. The wind still spun, but suddenly it had weakened, lost its otherworldly fury.
When Mamoru dared to lift his head, he found the wind funnel falling apart, dispersing into scattered shreds of cloud. Debris rained across the mountainside.
Most of the men didn’t seem to understand what had happened, but Uncle Takashi turned to his brother with a smile. “Well done, Takeru-kun!”
In the snow below, Mamoru could just see two black-clad bodies lying crumpled and motionless. A moment later, a third body thudded to the ground before them, making Mamoru jump.
As Mamoru backed away from the fallen fonyaka, Uncle Takashi strode toward it. Putting a foot under the limp form he turned it over to reveal the wound that had brought the man down. The puncture itself was barely visible, but Mamoru could feel the blood seeping from the fonyaka’s chest to soak into the black cloth buttons of his uniform. The man’s face had been smashed beyond recognition in the fall, but his hair was still neat, pulled back into the long braid characteristic of Ranganese warriors.
Mamoru found that he couldn’t take his eyes off the broken body—the flesh, and blood, and hair. No matter how long he looked, it was a man. Just a man. That wind that had darkened the sky and roared like a god… the heart of it had been human.
“Is this how you killed all of them?” Uncle Takashi asked, considering the hole in the fonyaka’s chest.
“There were just the three at the center of the funnel.” Tou-sama rose smoothly to his feet and straightened his hakama. “Sorry, Nii-sama. It took me a while to pinpoint their bodies all at once.”
It was difficult for Mamoru to process what his father had just done. In order to lance those fonyakalu through the chest, not only did he have to track the movements of a million flecks of snow moving at unbelievable speeds—he had to take control of them. It was super-human. This was why it was said that the Matsuda veins ran with the blood of gods.
“I still don’t know how you do that,” Uncle Takashi said with an admiring shake of his head.
“I listen to the mountain.”
“And what did the mountain tell you, little brother? Other than where to strike?”
“We are outnumbered,” Tou-sama said, “twenty to one.”
Mamoru stared at his father in amazement. He hadn’t just killed the fonyakalu creating the updraft; while deep in that state of meditation, he had had the presence of mind to count the number of foreign bodies on the mountainside.
“Twenty to one?” Takashi scoffed. “The Ranganese are idiots if they think they can challenge us with those numbers.”
“I’m not worried about numbers,” Yukino Sensei said. “It all comes down to the quality of the fighters they’ve sent.”
“Resume your positions!” Takashi called to the Yukinos and Mizumakis staggering to their feet in the surrounding snow. “This fight isn’t over. We have enemies incoming!”
“I don’t see that many,” Mamoru said, squinting into the whiteness.
In response, Tou-sama raised a hand, lifting the fog and snow before them.
Before the ruins of the western village, stood a wall of yellow—hundreds of rank and file soldiers standing in formation. Banners unfurled, revealing the black dragon of Ranga rearing against a blood red sun. These men must have followed the tornado up the mountain, stepping over the bodies and leveled houses.
With a prickle running up his spine, Mamoru realized that the moment they could see the yellow-clad soldiers was the same moment the Ranganese could see them.
The eye contact created a beat of perfect stillness.
Then a sound rose from the Ranganese. A war cry—raw and human—that shook Mamoru more than the roar of the tornado. For the first time, his rust-colored dream hardened into reality.
The Ranganese surged up the mountain.
Chapter 13: The Dragon
The charging Ranganese had many bounds of snow to cover, but they were moving fast.
With the roar of the tornado gone, Uncle Takashi could make his voice heard again. “Hold the line!”
Of the twelve men who had formed the line, two were nowhere to be seen—blown away in the high winds. Of those who had managed to stay anchored in the snow, only some were getting up.
“We hold the line!” Uncle Takashi bellowed again and those who could still stand repeated his call across the pass.
“We hold the line!”
Uncle Takashi seemed only vaguely annoyed by the thinning of his forces. “You three,” he addressed Tou-sama, Yukino Sensei, and Mamoru. “Spread out further. Cover for those we’ve lost.”
Four, Mamoru thought, his eyes scanning the line. We’ve lost four fighters. There were only eight of them now—the three Matsudas, Yukino Sensei, two of his cousins, and the two most powerful of the Mizumakis. How could eight men defend this pass against an entire army?
As if in response to Mamoru’s thought, Uncle Takashi lifted both arms. With them rose a swell of nyama so powerful it shook Mamoru’s body. Throwing his hands forward, Uncle Takashi sent his nyama down the mountain in a single massive wave. Pushed by his power, the snow rose to form an army of spikes, jutting upward from the ground toward the oncoming army of men.
If Tou-sama was a paragon of Matsuda precision, Uncle Takashi was the embodiment of Matsuda power. His was the only nyama Mamoru had ever known to echo the crash and pull of the ocean itself.
Uncle Takashi’s spikes met the fonyakalu’s front lines in an explosion of ice and flesh. It was like watching a white crest form atop a breaking wave—only this wave crested red. Blood burst from the front line as fonyakalu were impaled or cut into pieces on the spikes, but some of them evaded. At first, Mamoru didn’t understand how, with Uncle Takashi’s spikes covering nearly every koyin of flat ground. Somehow, they were shooting up over the forest of ice.
“They can fly?” He blurted out in a mixture of wonder and horror.
“No,” Yukino Sensei said, his intelligent eyes trained on the fonyakalu’s movements. “They’re keeping themselves aloft by throwing their fonya against the ground.”
As the soldiers drew closer, Mamoru could see that he was right. The Ranganese were not truly weightless. As each started to fall toward the spikes, he threw a palm strike or a thrusting kick at the ground, releasing a concentrated burst of wind that propelled him back into the air.
“They’re like leaves…” Mamoru said. A flurry of yellow leaves, buffeted by breeze, never quite touching the ground.
“Well, they’ve come in the wrong season. Autumn dies in the teeth of winter.” Uncle Takashi nodded to his brother. “Let’s put some more red in all that yellow.”
As a fonyaka toward the front of the group started to descend between two of Uncle Takashi’s spikes, a third suddenly burst from the ground, impaling him through the stomach. In the next moment, three more fonyakalu tried to touch down, only to be lanced on spikes so clear and perfectly straight they could only be the product of Tou-sama’s jiya.
This was how the brothers usually worked together, Uncle Takashi leading with his decisive personality and overwhelming power, Tou-sama following, filling in the gaps with his signature precision.
The brothers fell into rhythm with one another, Uncle Takashi erecting walls of spikes that caught the clumsier fonyakalu on their way down, Tou-sama sending spears up in the openings when more careful fonyakalu tried to exploit them.
Yukino Sensei took a different approach, forming and firing spears that took the enemy soldiers out of the air. Some of the other jijakalu tried to do the same, but the problem with firing at fonyaka targets was that they moved, using air currents to sharply change direction in midair. Yukino Sensei might be landing hits, but the Mizumakis who lacked his impeccable control weren’t having as much luck. And no matter how many yellow clad soldiers they killed, the army kept advancing. For every soldier that fell to their ice, there was another right behind him. The closest of the fonyakalu were now mere bounds away—close enough to return fire.
The first blast of wind knocked one of the Mizumaki fighters off his feet. Mamoru was scanning the advancing fonyakalu, trying to figure out where the attack had come from when he suddenly found himself on his back in the snow.
