Pilgrim 2, p.39
Pilgrim 2, page 39
“Were you a lumberjack in a former life?” Jelmay asked.
“I’ve never seen this kind of tree before,” said Danzen.
“Most humans haven’t,” said Kudzu. “And that’s a good thing. Once they find these trees, they will certainly start cutting them down. The bark has medicinal benefits, it’s also quite sturdy for constructing a home.”
“Does it have a name?”
“No,” Jelmay said. “Unlike humans, we yokai don’t feel the urge to categorize everything.”
“I see.”
They stopped an hour or so later to drink from a stream, Jelmay pointing out some tracks in the mud. “Those belong to a rokugyo,” he informed them.
“Which is?”
“It’s a fish that lives on land,” Jelmay explained. “Believe it or not, they have the body of a fish, wings, and the head of a cow. They can swim too! Ugly bastards, if you ask me.”
“Does it have legs?” Danzen asked.
“Look at these tracks,” said Jelmay, gesturing toward the soil. “These weren’t made by legs; they were made by fins. Just goes to show you how diverse yokai can be.”
“Do you know how many species of yokai there are?”
Jelmay shook his head. “Like I said, we don’t classify things the same way that humans do. There could be hundreds, maybe less. Some are extinct now, but others flourish, and some are rare, like me.”
“I think the bakeneko mostly have extincted themselves,” Kudzu said. “I’ve never met a species that dabbles so much in human affairs. Poorly, I should add.”
“Ha! That’s where all the fun is.”
“You know, we ran into a yokai that had a few things to say about you,” Kudzu began. “His name was Monobake.”
“Monobake? You’re talking about the guy with the shears on his head, right? What a loser.”
“I am. He claims that you took advantage of Usagi and him, and that you stole livestock, sold it, and headed west for a winter.”
“He’s not wrong. It was a nice winter too, let me tell you. That’s one thing that humans seem to get right, pleasure. Just imagine it, if you will: I’m getting fed three times a day, four if I ask for a snack. I’m also getting massages, I’m able to enjoy the hot springs of Arsi, the smooth skin of pillowers, and occasionally take a road trip to the south, where it’s warmer. Best move I ever made, ripping off those two.”
“You realize that things like this are why it’s hard to trust you, right?” she asked.
“Trust me? You can trust me. I’m not going to do anything shady to the two of you.”
“How can we be so sure?”
“Because that happened years ago, and I am a different bakeneko now,” Jelmay said proudly as he placed a hand over his chest. “I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of my life to acts of kindness.”
“Acts of kindness? Is that what you call what you are doing in Tudan?”
“I mean acts of kindness to yokai, and to some of my friends, not to your average human. Your average human is ripe for exploitation. In my opinion, you would be a fool not to try to exploit humans,” he said with a jovial tone. “I have to give the humans some credit, though: it’s nice watching money grow in a bank account, or just pulling out a wad of it, fanning the kip around as if it means nothing. So they have that going for them. And pleasure houses. And better gambling practices, plus they die sooner, which means grudges are buried faster.”
A fish hopped out of the water, catching their attention.
“Say, Pilgrim,” Jelmay began, “you don’t think you could get one of those fish for me, do you? I’m sure Kudzu would like one as well…”
It was only a minute or so later that Danzen had caught two of the fish, which his companions enjoyed raw before launching back into their discussion on the pros and cons of humanity.
Quiet as ever, Danzen stood guard, the former assassin ready for what was to come.
****
They came to a glade after another hour of walking. Danzen noticed that the trees still had flowers on them, many with bright-green budding leaves. There was a rock formation on the other side of the glade, one that pressed out of the ground in a way that made it stand out. Upon further examination, Danzen saw that there were carvings on the rock, each piece of the formation suspiciously perfect, as if it had been arranged by a giant.
“Is it the shrine?” Jelmay asked.
“I thought you knew every part of the Asura Forest,” Kudzu told him.
“Not every part, just the most important parts. What’s so special about this place aside from that shrine?” he asked, motioning his paw toward the rock formation.
“For one, it is ancient.”
“You and I are both ancient if we gauge our lives in terms of that of a human. It’s all relative.” The bakeneko approached the rock formation, licking his lips as he looked it over. “There has to be an entrance somewhere…”
Kudzu quickly circled the structure, and appeared on top of it, the white fox peering down at them. “It’s on the other side.”
“How?” The bakeneko scratched the back of his head as he took in the structure once again. It wasn’t very large, maybe about the size of a one-bedroom home. It wasn’t that tall either, Kudzu’s current location just a few feet above Danzen.
“It’s deep,” she said. Her ears flitted back, Kudzu baring her teeth as she started to growl.
“What the hell has gotten into you?” Jelmay asked as he turned, Danzen doing the same.
Three white foxes approached.
There was something different about these three foxes, all of them much larger than Kudzu, more muscled as well, all male. They were bigger than Abbot Monpo and the two monks back at the shrine, and one of them was missing an ear.
“A human this far out?” said the fox that was missing an ear, making it known that he was the leader of the group. The other two foxes murmured.
Jelmay slowly began to withdraw his sword, Danzen not yet ready to produce a weapon. He wanted to see what the foxes had to say first.
It was Kudzu who spoke next: “We are here on the request of Abbot Monpo. Unless you need something…”
“Need something?” the lead fox asked. “You are on our territory, which leads me to believe that it is you who need something, rather than us.”
“Leave, and don’t return until we’re gone,” Danzen said, summoning his Demon Speak ability.
The lead fox licked his lips. “Your demonic power won’t work on us,” he said as he started to slink forward. The fox bolted toward him, faster than Danzen had ever seen Kudzu move. In the time it took for the fox to reach the former assassin, he morphed into a human.
Muscled as ever, the naked man swung at Danzen, a maniacal look in his eyes. Danzen managed to block the first punch with his gauntlet, but the second one came from the side, straight into his kidney.
Pain blooming within him, the man bolted away, morphing back into a white fox as his two companions rushed forward.
Danzen loosed Astra at one of them; his target changed his trajectory at the very last moment, Danzen’s blade hitting the ground.
Still reeling from the kidney shot, Danzen barely got his arms up in time to avoid the next strike, from the lead fox again, who had morphed back into a human.
“I’ve got this!”
Charging forward, Jelmay created a distraction as he swung his blade wildly, the two foxes jumping back, not yet morphing into men.
Danzen saw Kudzu collide with the lead fox, her jaw going around his neck. He quickly morphed into a human again, and in doing so threw her off balance. He then proceeded to kick Kudzu several times, his last kick hard enough to send her flying several feet into the air.
Summoning his inhuman strength, Danzen exploded toward the fox man with a closed fist, his blow landing just as Astra returned to his other hand. He tried to bring his blade around, but by the time he reached his target, the leader of the group had morphed back into a fox.
Danzen was struck in the back by a foot; he stumbled forward, quickly realizing that one of the other foxes had also taken the form of a naked man.
They morphed back and forth as part of their attack strategy, making them nearly impossible to track.
Knowing that his Blade of Darkness would put an end to the madness, Danzen sheathed Astra and went for his glaive.
A fist caught him in the stomach, Danzen barreled over and disoriented.
He was just about to summon both his gauntlet blades when he heard Jelmay cry out.
Danzen looked up to see two of the foxes in their human forms. They were quickly getting away, holding Jelmay by the arms, the bakeneko struggling to free himself. He heard Kudzu yell, her cries abruptly halted when the lead fox morphed into a human, kicked her, and then changed his form again, taking off to join his companions.
His hands on his Blade of Darkness, Danzen withdrew it, shadows pooling at its tip almost instantly. It was too bright out for him to really conjure a serious swing, but he tried, his attack cutting through the glade but missing its target.
“Danzen…” Kudzu said as she limped over to them.
He dropped his weapon immediately and went to her, crouching beside the fox.
“Kudzu, are you okay?” he asked as his hand went to the side of her face. She relaxed her head in his hand for a moment, staring up at him with her gray eyes.
“I’ll… I’ll be fine. Just need to catch my breath.”
“I should go for Jelmay,” Danzen stood again and sent his Blade of Darkness back to the sheath on his back.
“Jelmay… Can take care of himself. We should get the remnant first while they are gone.”
Danzen shook his head.
He wasn’t going to leave the bakeneko behind, especially with three brutal combatants like that. Danzen took a quick look around to see if Jelmay had left his sword somewhere. Once he couldn’t find it, he summoned some of his superhuman strength and shot to the air, Danzen given a bird’s-eye view for a moment before coming back down.
“You and your jumping,” Kudzu said as she sat, and watched him do it again. Once Danzen was up in the sky for the second time, he saw that the glade wasn’t far from a lake he immediately recognized.
“Abbot Monpo said the orochi was near here, right? Same lake?”
“Did he? I don’t recall if he did.”
Danzen nodded. “You stay here; I’ll get Jelmay.”
“No,” Kudzu said as she got to her feet, the white fox clenching her eyes shut for a moment as she took a step forward. “I’m coming with you.”
****
Rather than try to engage the orochi, Danzen simply lifted his hands when he reached the lake, the giant serpent immediately coming in his direction. She was as intimidating as ever, trees growing out of her back, her eight heads all glaring down at him.
“I’m not here to fight you,” he said.
It had been a hunch; Danzen didn’t know the exact direction that the three foxes had run off to, and while Kudzu could have sniffed them out, something told him that he should try to reason with the serpent instead. Maybe she would be familiar with the three.
“Danzen Ravja,” one of her heads said, waves lashing against the shoreline. Danzen saw a few golden fish trying to swim away, which seemed to be the prize possession of the lake, and perhaps the yokai.
The orochi’s child peeked around its mother’s body, its eight faces curious about the man on the shore.
“Is this some type of trap?” the orochi asked, one of her heads looking at Kudzu, who stood behind Danzen ready to run at a moment’s notice.
“Not a trap,” but before Danzen could tell her what she wanted, the orochi reared up, water frothing all around her, splashing against the shore.
“You stole something from me!”
Kudzu had told Danzen that she would remember this on their way over to the lake.
While there were many lies he could come up with, Danzen had a feeling that the truth would be the best mode of attack here, so he went with it. Still with his hands in front of him, showing that he was unarmed, even if he wore his bladed gauntlets, Danzen explained why they had stolen her shears.
Two of her heads folded back and looked at one another, the other six serpent heads still focused on Danzen. One of them nodded, and they returned to glaring at him. “That is the most preposterous story anyone has ever told me.”
“That’s how you know it’s true,” Danzen said, which was something he had heard in his youth. “I live in the monastery, one of my stone lion dogs was missing its head, and the only person that we knew of who could fix it said these shears belonged to him.”
“Because of a bet placed years ago…” the orochi said.
“That’s right.”
“Why did you come to this lake? Choose your answer carefully.”
“We are here to retrieve something for Abbot Monpo at the fox shrine. We were attacked by three white foxes…”
“Yet you travel with another white fox,” the orochi said.
“Yes.”
“And you were sent here by a fox. You do know that they can be tricksters, do you not?”
Danzen heard Kudzu huff behind him. “Not as much as bakeneko, right?” he asked, trying to keep the conversation light.
“Bakenekos? Horrible creatures, perhaps one of the worst yokai,” said the orochi. “For a human, you know quite a bit about our kind.”
Danzen nodded.
“And you say three white foxes took your friend?”
“That’s right, and they came in this direction. I thought you may know where they lived, or where they would’ve taken him.”
“I know the three foxes you are referring to. They have been stealing fish from my lake for years now, and since I’ve had my child, they have made several attempts to kidnap her.”
Danzen brought his hand to the bottom of his chin, his fingers grazing against his beard stubble. “If you would point me in the direction of the foxes, I could make sure that they never come by your lake again.”
“Could you now? You do seem to have a lot of weapons.”
“It’s what…” It pained him to admit this next part, but it was the truth. “It’s what I was put on this planet for.”
“Oh?”
“I used to be a member of the Diyu Brotherhood. I am no longer a member.”
“An assassin,” one of the heads said. “Is there anything else you would like to tell us?”
Danzen lowered his gaze, not wanting to get into how he was half-demon. He had probably already said too much.
“In that case, if you are an assassin, then you should be able to dispose of these three for me. They have a den to the north of here. Follow the stream until it breaks into three. Take the third path on the left, and once you do, your companion should be able to find them from that point.”
“I will return with news before we continue on our way,” Danzen told the enormous yokai.
“If you can rid this region of those three foxes, you can consider me a friend. I may even forgive you for stealing my shears.”
“We will be back soon.”
Danzen turned away from her, leaving himself prone as evidence that he trusted the enormous yokai. He reached Kudzu, and together they made their way around the lake, the orochi never leaving her place near the shoreline, her child next to her. They found the river that headed north, and walked along until they were able to cross it without getting wet, both of them hopping from rock to rock.
Now on the other side of the shore, which was muddy and slick with moss, they continued until they came to where the stream split off.
“Third one on the left,” said Kudzu, leading the way now. “I know I didn’t say it back there, but I can’t believe that worked.”
“I’m not interested in fighting the orochi, and I had this feeling that if they lived around here, the odds of them terrorizing her as well were high.”
“Good instincts,” Kudzu said as she started to sniff the air.
They both were able to locate the three foxes using their own methods, Danzen spotting human footprints that were fresh, Kudzu smelling the foxes.
“We’re close,” said Kudzu, Danzen nodding. “How do you want to do this?”
“As quickly as possible. I’ll go in first; you stay on the periphery and strike when they least expect it.” Danzen withdrew Astra. “Let’s hope they haven’t done anything to Jelmay.”
.Chapter Three.
Danzen crouched in a patch of high grass as he listened carefully to what was happening just fifteen feet away or so. He heard voices, and then, he heard something that sounded like someone choking on their own blood.
He jumped around the bend with Astra drawn, which he quickly loosed into the back of the first naked man he could see. Unfortunately, this man had already been stabbed by Jelmay.
Danzen couldn’t help but grin.
Jelmay had taken the former assassin’s form, and he currently held his sword just above his head now, preparing to strike his next foe.
Danzen’s sudden appearance caught the fox leader’s attention, the earless man turning to him and snarling, his eyes filling with fury as he leaped to the ground and morphed back into a fox.
He leaped toward Danzen, looking to take a bite out of the former assassin.
Schnikt!
He was met instead with a blade through his chest. Danzen held the fox for a moment with his bladed gauntlet, before slowly dropping him to the ground.
The leader of the three foxes gasped and wheezed as he tried to get back to his feet. Danzen stepped on his neck and quickly sent his blade to the side of his head.
The fox that remained took off, yelping as he did so, only to be stopped by Kudzu. She sprang out of a bush and collided with him, the two whipping around, nipping and yelping.
He managed to pin her, Danzen giving Kudzu a hand in the form of his boomerang sword, which slid right into the side of the white fox’s stomach, crimson ichor spreading across his coat as Danzen’s blade returned.
