Pilgrim 3, p.32
Pilgrim 3, page 32
As he prepared to return to his perch on the rooftop, Danzen caught Yato staring at him, a mixture of both admiration and fear in her eyes. No time to offer her a curt nod, he quickly leaped to the rooftop just as two men emerged from the front entrance of the shrine, filtered bits of shadow hanging from their forearms, the assassins clearly aware that something was awry.
The two men separated, one heading toward the north, the other toward the south, where Yato was. He didn’t need to make eye contact with her for the young assassin to know what to do, but as he watched his prey beneath him, a new unexpected feeling came to Danzen, one of worry.
What if the clansman overpowered Yato before Danzen could get there? He needed to move quickly.
Once the clansman he was stalking was out of view of the other, Danzen dropped down behind him and quickly ran Astra through his chest, once again breaking his neck to end it quickly. He didn’t wait to confirm that the man was dead before he jumped back to the rooftop and bolted to the other side of the shrine, where he spotted the other Penumbra assassin, just about to come upon Yato.
Danzen could have sent Astra forward at this point, but he stopped himself at the last moment, assuming that Yato would like a shot before he intervened. He turned out to be right, the young assassin springing into action just as the man came upon her, driving both her gauntleted blades into his chest as she slammed into him. She jumped backward, the man pushed back to his feet by his own shadows, and dead by the time Astra bloomed from the front of his throat.
Astra returned to Danzen’s grip in a matter of seconds, and with five of their opponents down, there were only a couple left for them to handle. He still hadn’t seen Jinkai, but there was always the chance that he would have to actually face off against a powerful opponent, even if it didn’t seem to be the way that this would go.
It took a few minutes, but eventually two other men came out of the front of the shrine, both spotting blood at the same time. Danzen dropped down between them and with one fluid motion decapitated both Penumbra clansmen, back on the roof before their bodies could fall to the stone.
He waited.
Yato crept up to the entrance of the shrine, and gave Danzen the signal that she was going to enter. Once again, he felt a quiver of hesitation in his chest, but she was capable, she’d already been Thane’s student, and even if Danzen truly felt the urge to shepherd her, Yato knew what she was doing.
She entered the shrine, and as she did Danzen slowly lowered to the ground as well, just about to slip in himself when she joined him again.
“It’s clear,” she said, a bit breathless, clearly being affected by the adrenaline coursing through her. “The other member must have already died and been buried around here.”
Danzen felt a bit of cold air reach him, which made sense considering the thick walls of the stone shrine. He was just about to go inside himself when he sensed something behind him.
He swiveled around to find his half-brother, Nomtoi, just a few feet away from Danzen and Yato in his white robes, his red hair combed back, the smile on his face barely able to hide the rage he felt in seeing Danzen.
“Get behind me,” Danzen told Yato.
“Who…?”
“Get behind me.”
Nomtoi raised both of his hands, paused for a moment, and began to slowly clap. “You clean up nicely, for a mortal.”
****
The bodies of the Penumbra clansmen were all dragged toward Nomtoi, as if they had invisible nooses around their necks. Some moved over rocks, and the ones who had been decapitated came down the steps of the shrine, their heads rolling after them. They all stopped at Nomtoi’s feet as he continued to look his brother over.
“I have a theory,” Nomtoi said, his knuckles visible as he squeezed his fists. “I have a theory that our father would prefer that I take his throne, and that you are secretly trying to work against my efforts, to show him that you can grow strong enough to do an adequate job at ruling Diyu. Of course, you, a mutt if there ever was one, would have no idea what to do if the throne were given to you, and our father knows that. He’s just testing me.”
Danzen didn’t say anything. There was no point in refuting his brother’s logic; Nomtoi had clearly skewed things in his head.
“You see, he doesn’t want me challenging you, but I would be a fool to let you grow stronger. Not that you would ever, in Diyu or in your world, be able to stop me if I wanted to kill you. It simply isn’t in your blood. Your mother was a whore, and you have her whore blood wasting away in your veins, diluting the goodness of our father. You’re despicable; it’s no wonder that so many people want you dead. Yet you think you are capable of change, that by doing something as useless as bending your echo, that you will be able to overcome all of this. But you can’t overcome your past, and you can’t stop the inevitable. I am the inevitable.”
“You can have the throne. I don’t want it.”
“It is not your throne to give me, you fool. It already practically belongs to me, and soon, Father will understand that. He loves me, you know. I am his favorite son,” Nomtoi said, his voice cracking, “and you are hiding behind him, afraid to face me!”
Danzen placed his hand on Astra’s grip, his thumb popping it out of its scabbard.
“I find it flattering that you would even consider trying to challenge me. Maybe there is some demon blood in you after all.” Danzen saw Kudzu about fifty yards behind Nomtoi, the white fox low to the ground, Bawa next to her. He wanted to yell for her to stay back, but he didn’t want to alert Nomtoi to her presence, to give him another target. “I’m not going to give you the pleasure of losing, not yet. After all, we don’t want Father to see just how weak you are. I’d rather you grow just a bit stronger, and bend your useless echo to the point that you can actually provide a fair challenge to me. For now, I’ll leave you with this.”
The Penumbra corpses that had congregated around Nomtoi slowly got to their feet, their faces morphing as horns pressed out of the fronts of their skulls, their jaws dropping, eyes enlarging and turning red. It was as if thousands of worms were moving beneath their skin, all of them convulsing as claws sprouted from their hands. The two headless bodies had been repaired in this process, veins acting as stitching as their faces formed from hardened scabs, their necks bent off to the side.
“Enjoy,” Nomtoi said as he stepped out of reality as if he had slipped behind a curtain. “I’ll visit you again soon.”
Danzen sent Astra forward and went for his Blade of Darkness, barely able to stop an onslaught of shadows, the darkened tip of his weapon repelling all of them at once.
The assassins Nomtoi had summoned were still able to use their shadow abilities, which only made it that much harder to kill them. And for that matter, could he even kill them? Were they like his demons? Or were they something else entirely?
Astra returned to his hand, blackened blood on its tip. Danzen sent it forward again just as Yato stepped around him, the young assassin seemingly fearless. But she didn’t know what she was up against, and as he blocked the next incoming shadow using his glaive, Danzen shouted out to her. “Stay back!”
He bolted forward just as she slipped behind a rock, the top of which was cut in half by a shadowy blade. His Blade of Darkness in his left hand, his boomerang sword in his right, Danzen spun into the first clansman that met him and he cut him down.
He realized then that the only way to do this would be through speed; with this many opponents in one place, it would be easy for him to be overwhelmed. Kicking off one of the crumbled stone statues, Danzen jumped behind the group and sent Astra into the back of one of the assassins. He used his glaive to lift one of the men and slammed him onto the ground, which would have killed a mortal.
Back in the air, Astra once again in his hand, Danzen used a variety of the rock structures as springboards as he swept his Blade of Darkness and all the shadows it could gather across the tops of the assassins’ heads, able to cut a chunk off one of them, and a horn off another. This disoriented the group, who didn’t seem to operate with the same intelligence they would have in their human forms. Danzen wondered what his brother had done to them, and if he merely animated the Penumbra assassins with demon blood, meaning they were as mindless as Danzen’s hellspawns.
Deciding to address them as such, he landed a few feet away from the clansmen and returned Astra to its scabbard, Danzen with both hands on his Blade of Darkness as he met his first opponent, the man wielding shadow whips. There was no time to get used to fighting this way, the tip of his weapon never meeting the man’s accoutrements; rather, the shadows of their weapons clashed a few feet in front of them, adding a slight delay to the combat.
He saw Yato on the periphery, one of the Penumbra assassins going for her. Quick on her feet, she dodged a shadowy strike and charged into him, both gauntleted blades drawn, her eyes closed for just a second as she tore through his body. Rather than leave it at that, she dropped down onto him and quickly went for a common kill zone before moving on.
A quick head count—a very rudimentary one considering he was actively engaging an opponent—told Danzen that there were still four left.
Increasingly doable.
The next shadow that came at him grew in size as Danzen cut through it, a tendril of it slicing through the end of his robe, dangerously close to his wrist. In a quick draw action, he once again utilized Astra for its range, his sword hitting its mark and practically thrumming by the time it reached his hand again, Astra thirsty for more.
Zipping around some of the rock formations, Danzen moved in a zigzag pattern avoiding shadowy blades that came at him rapidfire, leaving marks in the soil and across the jagged rocks. As he had done earlier, he cut down two opponents with one blow, the final Penumbra clansman brought down by Yato just as he was forming a drill-shaped shadow tendril to send in Danzen’s direction.
Back to back now, Danzen and Yato waited for the assassins to come alive again; they also waited for Nomtoi to appear, and perhaps engage them. But this never happened; it was when Bawa and Kudzu came to them, that Danzen finally relaxed his guard.
“That was intense,” Kudzu said, the white fox breathing more heavily than Danzen was.
He nodded, still not ready to put his weapon away.
“I’ll grab our things,” said Yato.
“Yes, I’ll lead you to them,” Bawa told her. “With a weapon like that, you should be able to get to the remnant inside the shrine,” the fox said, his eyes falling to Danzen’s Blade of Darkness. Once Danzen didn’t respond, Bawa motioned for Yato to follow him.
“Are you all right?” Kudzu asked him.
“I’m fine.”
“I think your brother is scared of you.”
Danzen glanced down at her. “You do?”
“I do, and he should be. You’ll kill him one day,” she said, a proud look in her eyes.
Danzen couldn’t hide the grim look that slowly moved over his face. “That may not be possible.”
“It will be, once you grow stronger. Let’s get this remnant, and get out of here.”
Part Seven
.Chapter One.
Chipping away at the statue in the center of the shrine turned out to be a delicate affair, Bawa the fox instructing Danzen where to cut, the former assassin using the shadow of his Blade of Darkness with extreme precision. He never thought of using it in this way before, and it was strange to see it slice through stone as if it were warm bread.
As he continued his delicate work, Kudzu and Yato collected talismans from the bodies outside, all of the men wearing them to enhance their shadow abilities. While Danzen worked, he thought of Jinkai, and wished he had had a moment to ask one of the assassins whether the older master was still alive. If he was, Danzen had just added a new name to the list of people that wanted him dead.
“Careful…” Bawa said as they grew closer to the base of the statue.
For the last thirty minutes Danzen had been taking thin slices off the top, and as he moved it through this time, he noticed just a bit of friction in the extension of his blade. Once his cut was finished, he sheathed his weapon and lifted the slab of stone which he placed with the others. He returned to find the top of a large metal case, about three feet long and two and a half feet wide.
It took a little finagling, but eventually, Danzen was able to lift the modest metal case out of the statue’s pedestal. He brought it outside of the shrine so they could utilize the light that was left, Yato and Kudzu joining him as soon as they saw Danzen with the large object.
“I told you it was in there,” said Bawa, the smaller fox now seated near a stone pillar, a proud look on his face.
As the yokai had promised, the remnant was much larger than the first one they had found, and it was heavy as well, easily fifty pounds. Danzen carefully took it out of the iron crate, noticing how it pulled at the energy within him, and for a moment he felt weak in the knees, like he wasn’t going to be able to carry it. There was no way it was going to fit in the bag Menya had given them.
“How long would it take us to get to the nunnery from here?” Kudzu asked Bawa as she glanced back to the setting sun, which was now an orb on the horizon half-purple and half-pink, surrounded by a pair of smoky blue clouds.
“It really depends on how fast you travel. If we left now, and we didn’t stop for anything, we would arrive around midnight.”
“Is it safe?”
“Normally, yes, but one of you is going to have to carry that remnant, and I’m guessing it will be you,” Bawa told Danzen, “which could leave us prone to an ambush. There are other things in these mountains, and a remnant such as that, especially when it starts to glow once the sun sets, will likely attract attention. The best time to go would be during the day.”
“We can’t stay here,” Kudzu said, a mask of horror coming across her face. “This place is way too…”
“Creepy?” Yato asked.
“Something like that.”
“No, we cannot, unless we want ghosts whispering in our ears through the night,” Bawa said with a nervous chuckle. “Not to worry. I know of a place that we should be able to reach, an abandoned hermitage. The hermit that used to live there expired a couple months ago. There should still be supplies unless other yokai have found them, but I seriously doubt that. It is well-hidden.”
“We will go there,” Danzen said, “and we will set out for the nunnery in the morning.”
“And I will join you, at least until you reach the nunnery. That is as far as I go.”
“You don’t like the nuns?” Yato asked him.
“No, nothing like that. I just prefer to keep to the mountains. Gather your things and follow me. If we hurry, we will get there with plenty of sunshine still left, and can make a fire for the night.” Bawa looked up at the sky. “We will have to go through a few darker areas because of the rocks, but just follow my tail.”
They set off, Danzen carrying the fifty-pound remnant with both hands. He eventually switched it to his shoulder after giving his Blade of Darkness to Yato. To make it easier to transport, he kept the remnant in its iron box, which would have eliminated the chance of the remnant glowing at night. Danzen had never seen a remnant do anything like this before, but it could very well have been possible with a piece of this size.
Back through a gorge they went, the tops of the rocks casting enough shadow onto the ground that it became crucial for them to keep an eye on Bawa, his bouncing tail leading the way, and sometimes changing color. Danzen didn’t know the significance of the colors, but he appreciated the guidance, and for some reason it made him feel slightly relaxed, the fox’s tail occasionally changing colors as they continued on their journey.
Everything was a dark shade of blue once they arrived at a rocky gulch, Danzen starting to notice the effect of carrying the iron box for so long. He still had plenty of energy left, but he was glad when they reached a mountain pass and paused for a moment, Bawa going ahead to make sure that the path was still viable. “Sometimes things change,” was his only reasoning for doing so.
But it turned out things hadn’t changed, even with some of the snow melt, what little there was this far out. They hugged the side of a cliff that wrapped up a spire-like peak, where they eventually found a cave at the top with a good amount of space in front of it. The hermitage would have been more pleasant had it not been for the dead body seated by what was once a fire, much of the man’s flesh missing, and that which was left simply dry.
A sky burial.
Danzen had encountered these in the south. They said that your level of iniquity in life played a part in how thoroughly you were consumed by the wildlife, Danzen recalling that he had come across several bloated bodies that the animals didn’t seem to want any part of. This wasn’t the same for the hermit, who was likely already thin to begin with. And even though there was something tranquil about it, the visual still caused Kudzu to gasp.
“I probably should have warned you,” Bawa said.
“Probably? You didn’t say he would be seated out here like…” Kudzu turned into the cave, her tail held high, clearly annoyed at the other yokai. By the time Danzen began to move the body, Kudzu returned to let them know that the hermit had plenty of supplies that hadn’t been touched, and were still good.
“What ate him?” Yato asked as she continued to examine the body.
“Likely a number of things,” Bawa told her.
The large remnant now resting at the mouth of the cave, Danzen took the body down to the next ledge he could find, so Kudzu didn’t have to see it any longer. This required him to jump out onto a rock, and from there onto a hoodoo with a very small space at the top, but eventually he found a peaceful and quiet place to set the hermit. Danzen did so, and quickly returned to the others.
