The Sword of Kaigen, page 28
A fair fight? The black shapes moved so fast it was impossible to count them, but there were far more than eight of them.
Tou-sama and Yukino Sensei lifted a new veil of snow particles just in time. The fonyaka at the head of the group turned a flip in the air, spinning as Mamoru sometimes did to generate power, and threw an attack. If Mamoru had not seen the wind disturb the mist, he never would have been able to avoid it. As it was, he barely managed to spring clear before the wind slammed into the side of the mountain. Even the fonya coming off the fringe of the attack sent Mamoru tumbling in a spray of snow. Rolling back onto his feet, he couldn’t help but wonder if the fonyaka knew—even at that distance—to aim for the weakest link.
Both Uncle Takashi and Yukino Sensei’s cousin, Shiro, took shots at the lead fonyaka. The man in black deflected them both before a smaller ice bolt from Yukino Sensei struck him in the throat, and he dropped.
As the black-clad soldiers closed in, Yukino Sensei became a blur of movement, firing spears so fast Mamoru’s eyes could barely follow them. The lightning swordsman sacrificed the normal impressive size of his spears, substituting smaller projectiles that he rained on the attackers like arrows. Even with his speed and reflexes, Mamoru couldn’t imagine charging into such an onslaught. Yet the men in black kept coming, dodging, deflecting, even taking bolts to the limbs and shoulders and pressing on anyway.
“What do you think, Takeru-kun?” Uncle Takashi glanced at his brother. “Shall we see if these monsters are strong enough to face a god?”
Tou-sama offered a nod. “I’m ready, Nii-sama.”
At that moment, Mamoru realized that he was about to witness one of the Matsuda family’s most advanced techniques in action.
Unlike the workings of the Whispering Blade, the theory behind this technique was no secret. It was a structure of interlocking ice pieces, joined at the seams by mortar of liquid water. When done correctly, it created a weapon with the fluidity of water and the strength of ice. There were many master jijakalu who could achieve it with a modest amount of water. An Ice Snake, it was called.
But when two fully realized Matsudas combined their power, the resulting creature was greater than any snake.
The full power of the Matsuda line surged into motion as Uncle Takashi took hold of what remained of Yukino Sensei’s barrier and turned it to water. Tou-sama followed, lacing his brother’s stream with ice, forming scales as hard as steel and spines as sharp as swords. Uncle Takashi’s fury intertwined with Tou-sama’s cold precision to form a new creature, long enough to cover half the pass. It was the teeth of winter. It was poetry. It was God in water.
The Matsuda Dragon reared up to tower over its enemies, ice shard eyes flashing with power beyond simple jiya. It gnashed its teeth, and the sound of its several thousand scales shifting against one another produced a hungry hiss.
The fonyakalu pulled up short.
These men could create tornadoes, but even they faltered when faced with a god.
“Ji xu!” one of the black-clad fonyakalu said roughly, seemingly ordering the others forward. They hesitated. “Ji xu!”
One of them took a step—and the dragon struck.
In an instant, the fonyaka was gone, leaving only a bloody smear on the snow. Black shapes scattered into motion and the Matsuda Dragon plunged after them. Uncle Takashi led the water, slinging the dragon’s coils with his trademark speed and unpredictability. Tou-sama followed, spinning the blades, keeping the ice of its scales hard and sharp.
A pair of fonyakalu dodged the crash of the dragon’s teeth, only to find themselves sliced apart by the rush of scales along its body. The dragon’s head, while a formidable weapon on its own, mainly served to distract from its equally dangerous coils. It was in those coils that Uncle Takashi’s power spun fastest, lending deadly speed to Tou-sama’s razor-blade spines. Mamoru resisted the urge to flinch as a fonyaka made the mistake of trying to spring off the creature’s body with his feet. His legs weren’t so much cut up as they were pulverized, turned to a fine spray of blood and bone fragments.
Multiple fonyakalu threw wind attacks at the dragon. They were strong, and a few managed to blow pieces of its body apart, but this had little effect on the creature as a whole. The dragon’s true body was made of the unspoken understanding between Uncle Takashi and Tou-sama. As long as the brothers stood back-to-back, wrapped in one another’s jiya, their creation could not be destroyed by any amount of blunt force. Most of the attacks on the dragon backfired as dispersed scales acted like shrapnel, striking unfortunate fonyakalu in range of the blasts.
Several fonyakalu tried to get past the dragon itself to attack the Matsuda brothers directly, but with the dragon’s central coils encircling its creators, this was impossible for even the fastest elite fighters. It wasn’t enough to dodge the sporadically lashing body of the dragon. The whole thing was coated in ice scales that Tou-sama could shoot out to pierce the flesh of anyone within a several-stride range. The fonyakalu’s powerful long-range attacks had little effect, and any fonyaka who got close to the dragon put himself at the mercy of its projectile scales.
Mamoru realized that he had started backing away from the Matsuda Dragon as the god feasted on its prey. Not because he feared it. Why should he fear the power of his own blood? But what help could he offer alongside such power?
Further down the line, Yukino Sensei had kept up his rain of spears, supported by his cousins, just managing to hold the remaining lines of elite fonyakalu at bay. Mamoru had just taken up position alongside the Yukinos, readying his own spear, when he saw something that made him pause in confusion: a black shape, so fast he might have mistaken it for the shadow of a diving hawk, was zig-zagging between the spears of ice. It took Mamoru a moment to realize that the shape was another fonyaka, and he wasn’t just weaving in between Yukino Sensei’s projectiles, he was springing off of them on the balls of his feet, simultaneously nudging them off course and using them as steps on his way up the mountain.
“So fast!” one of the Yukino cousins exclaimed in shock.
“Keep firing,” Yukino Sensei ordered his cousins, lowering his jiya and reaching for his sword.
The fonyaka may have been fast, but he was charging straight toward certain death—in range of Takenagi. In a flash of black, he was on the swordmaster. Takenagi whipped out of its sheath and Yukino Sensei made his cut—quick and clean as lightning.
The fonyaka dodged.
Mamoru felt like his brain had short-circuited. It was barely possible for a quick-footed fighter to evade Yukino Sensei by staying out of his cutting range. It wasn’t possible for someone to dodge his blade in that close. It wasn’t possible.
Yet the fonyaka had done it, deftly tilting his body to avoid the bamboo-splitting lightning strike of Yukino Sensei’s blade. Takenagi sheared off the tip of the man’s braid as his foot shot upward, slamming into Yukino Sensei’s chest. The swordmaster flew backward, springing off one hand to land on his feet.
Coming out of his kick, the fonyaka caught his braid as it whipped around. Seemingly unconcerned with the second Yukino swordsman advancing on him, he took a dinma to frown at the cut-off ends of his hair. Without so much as a sidelong glance at his new attacker, he evaded the first swipe of Yukino Kiyomu’s blade and pulled out what Mamoru realized was a spare hair tie.
As Mamoru watched in utter disbelief, the fonyaka started tying off the end of his braid. Out of curiosity, Mamoru raised a spear and fired at him. The Ranganese soldier casually stepped out of the way without taking his hands or his eyes from his work. A moment later, Yukino Kiyomu attacked again. In one movement, the fonyaka ducked under his swing and spun a hooking kick into his jaw, knocking him sideways into the snow.
Straightening back up, the fonyaka finished tying off his braid, tossed it over his shoulder, and turned to face Yukino Sensei.
“Ni qie le wo de tou fa.” He scowled and strode purposefully toward the swordmaster.
Mamoru and Yukino Kiyomu both started forward to stop him. With a disinterested flick of his wrist, the fonyaka released a wave of air pressure so strong that it knocked them both back. As he fell in the snow, Mamoru watched the inhumanly fast fonyaka break into a run. Reaching to the back of his belt, he drew a pair of twin daggers.
Yukino Sensei calmly shifted into his stance. White met black in a thunderclap of steel. Even as Mamoru struggled to keep track of the clang and flash of blades, something was horribly apparent: Yukino Sensei was losing. Mamoru had never really thought about the fact that the lightning swordsman was past his prime, the peak of his physical ability behind him. Like most of the Ranganese soldiers, this fonyaka looked to be in his early twenties, at the height of his speed. It made a difference.
Yukino Sensei hit the ground, a dagger buried in his left shoulder. He had deflected the stab so that it missed his heart, but he was now on his back, bleeding, Takenagi pinned under his enemy’s boot. The fonyaka drew his other dagger back to deliver the finishing blow.
“No!” Mamoru scrambled forward, raising a hand to form an attack—
The Matsuda Dragon reared out of nowhere. Jaws of water and ice crashed together on the black-clad soldier, eating him whole. Yukino Sensei let out his breath as the dragon slithered back to coil around its masters, resting its head between Tou-sama and Uncle Takashi.
“That was a bit dramatic, Matsuda-dono.”
“You’re welcome,” Uncle Takashi smiled.
“Nii-sama,” Tou-sama said, his voice suddenly urgent. “Something is wrong.”
“What?” Uncle Takashi turned to his younger brother. “What do you—”
The dragon’s head exploded, sending a shower of splintered ice and water droplets in all directions.
Unbelievably, the fonyaka emerged, shaking, drenched in water and blood but still breathing. Not only had this Ranganese soldier bested Yukino Sensei in single combat. He had destroyed the Matsuda Dragon—from the inside.
The Matsuda brothers should have been able to reform their dragon with a thought, but the fonyaka had burst from its head directly between them, disrupting the intrapersonal flow of jiya that kept the creature intact. The dragon’s teeth had opened cuts all over his body, leaving his uniform shirt hanging in dripping black strips. His own teeth chattered from cold for a moment before he shook himself and threw an attack. Uncle Takashi dodged the burst of wind and he and his brother simultaneously returned fire.
The fonyaka spun, and though it may have been impossible for a single theonite to make a tornado, this one could create a miniature whirlwind powerful enough to repel both Tou-sama’s and Uncle Takashi’s attacks at once. He was so fast! But there was no time to stand and watch.
With the dragon gone and both Uncle Takashi and Tou-sama occupied with a single opponent, the rest of the Ranganese elite pressed forward, emboldened. Yukino Sensei stood, tearing the dagger from his shoulder, and rained spears on them, but they kept coming.
Five fighters advanced on Mamoru’s position. Mamoru readied his sword, but Yukino Sensei moved in front of him, releasing a hail of small close-range projectiles. The first soldier took ice to the eye and went down, but the other four either deflected or dodged. In the scatter of movement, one managed a counterattack that hit Yukino Sensei in his right arm, knocking Takenagi from his hand.
But that didn’t stop the swordmaster. He might not have had a Whispering Blade to fall back on, but he was far from defenseless in an empty-handed fight. He slammed an elbow into the first fonyaka’s temple, knocking him unconscious, then swung the man’s limp form into his nearest fellow, buying him a moment to snatch his sword from the snow. He turned, Takenagi in hand, and engaged two of the others—but the fifth dodged past him, heading straight for Mamoru.
This fonyaka wielded a sansetsukon—a three-segmented Ranganese staff—a weapon Mamoru had heard of but never seen in use. The bizarre apparatus consisted of three short staffs, each about the length of a man’s forearm, connected end-to-end by a pair of chain joints.
Mamoru attacked first, hoping that his speed would be enough to end the fight in one move, but the fonyaka moved fast too, deftly parrying with one segment of the staff before swinging the entire weapon around like a whip. Unfolded to its full length, the sansetsukon covered too much distance for Mamoru to clear its range with a quick back-step. He dropped to a crouch, nearly flattening himself to the snow to avoid having his head taken off. The jointed staff whooshed over him, sending up a spray of snow.
As soon as it had passed, Mamoru burst to his feet, lunging forward to take advantage of the moment of follow-through. Against a swordsman, it would have worked, but the sansetsukon wasn’t a rigid blade with a single trajectory to follow. As Mamoru aimed a stab beneath the fonyaka’s ribs, the sansetsukon curled around its wielder’s body, the end segment whipping around to slam into the top of his katana, knocking it off course yet again.
Before Mamoru could regain his balance for another attack, the sansetsukon was unfurling toward him again in a hard snap, like a striking snake. He blocked, but he wasn’t used to countering a weapon with joints. When he intercepted the middle segment, the end segment swung around into the fonyaka’s free hand—and Mamoru realized he had played right into his enemy’s trap. The sansetsukon tightened around its prey, trapping his sword.
With a hard twist of his body, the fonyaka jerked the segments of his weapon in opposite directions, trying to snap Mamoru’s sword in two, but it took more than that to break a Kotetsu blade; the movement jolted Mamoru’s arm, nearly wrenching it from its socket, but his steel remained intact. When the fonyaka realized he wasn’t going to be able to break the sword, he seemed to settle for breaking its wielder.
With an eerily high-pitched snarl, the fonyaka snapped his head forward, into Mamoru’s. Stars sprayed like blood across Mamoru’s vision, knocking the world off kilter. Through his dizziness, Mamoru registered the stomping kick to his knee a split-dinma before it made contact. Unable to evade or counter, he turned his knee inward and let it buckle under the force. It put him in a horribly vulnerable position, down on one knee with his sword trapped, but at least the blow hadn’t shattered his kneecap.
Hoping for the best, he gripped his sword with both hands and slammed it against its prison, and for probably the thousandth time in history, a Matsuda had a Kotetsu to thank for his life. Even though the strike was clumsy and poorly-aligned, Mamoru’s superior steel severed the chain links of the fonyaka’s sansetsukon.
With his katana free, Mamoru spun in an attempt to cut the fonyaka’s legs out from under him, but the black-clad soldier was too quick to counter. Wielding the broken sansetsukon like a nunchaku, he slammed the weapon into Mamoru’s face.
When Mamoru’s back hit the ground, his blood was splattered across the snow beside him, along with at least one of his teeth. He couldn’t feel his mouth. Before he could rise, the fonyaka was on him again, pinning his sword arm down under a knee. Metal clinked and slithered against Mamoru’s neck.
Dizzied, Mamoru didn’t register what was happening until the chain yanked tight and he couldn’t breathe. The sansetsukon was around his neck and the fonyaka was leaning his weight into it, strangling him. Panic flooded Mamoru, jerking his body uselessly against the ground.
His free hand scrabbled against the fonyaka, but the movements were frantic and haphazard. He knew that his only chance was to draw on the snow beneath him for a counterattack, but blood was pounding in his ears, disorienting him. The ice he formed spasmed and cracked before he could use it to strike.
The fonyaka leaned in harder and chuckled. Even through his dizziness, the sound made Mamoru blink, and a confusing thought flashed through his mind: Kaa-chan?
But his mother wasn’t here. Why did that laugh bring her to mind?
Mamoru blinked again, and in a strange moment of clarity, his eyes found the fonyaka’s. He had been so preoccupied by the color of the uniform and the strange weapon that he hadn’t actually looked into his opponent’s face. Now that he did, he found a soft jawline and delicate features. Beautiful, he thought before blackness swarmed from the edges of his vision to swallow him.
A silver blade flashed into view.
Takenagi cleaved through the black shape above Mamoru, slicing straight through the soldier’s spine. Wind blew Mamoru’s hair back. Abruptly freed from strangulation, he coughed, wheezed, and heaved ice-clear awareness back into his lungs. Yukino Sensei kicked the body off of his student and calmly watched it fall.
Then something on his face changed. His expression turned to shock and then to horror, as he realized what Mamoru had just moments earlier:
The fonyaka was a woman.
Her sweet face was pretty even as the color drained from her cheeks and her eyes glazed over. She looked to be about thirty, no older than Yukino Sensei’s own wife, Hyori—and though her dark chuckle had reminded Mamoru of Kaa-chan’s, she really did look like Hyori…
The hands on Takenagi shook.
“No…” Yukino Sensei said in a low voice. “I didn’t…”
Sensei, Mamoru tried to say, but he choked and had to turn onto his elbows, coughing flecks of blood into the snow.
“I didn’t…” Yukino Sensei whispered and Mamoru hadn’t known his teacher could look so lost. The swordmaster didn’t see another black-clad soldier advance in his periphery, didn’t sense the blast of wind.
Even if Mamoru had been able to get his lungs working, the warning would have come too late.
Air pressure slammed into Yukino Sensei with a horrifying crunch of bone. The force sent him flying several bounds to crash in a spray of snow further up the slope.
“No!” Mamoru scrambled to his feet.
He almost made the same mistake as his teacher, but he registered the fonyaka lining up an attack, just in time to dive out of the way. The concentrated wind hit the slope where he had been a moment earlier, blasting it clear of snow and cracking the rock beneath.
“Ni hao kuai,” the Ranganese soldier said, barring his way.
