This shit tastes like horse piss, Kenshin glowered to himself, scowling through his red bangs. In the dank, crowded bar, men and several tough-looking women flirted, pushed, argued, and threatened each other. In one corner, there was a knot of men eagerly stoking what promised to be a booze-injected fist fight. The room was crammed with bodies, cigarette smoke, and profanities, and people were practically stacked on top of each other. Yet around the slender redhead, there was an odd bubble of empty space. Most of them were regulars. They knew.
Mick, the stocky barkeep, slid another Bud Light in front of Kenshin's nearly empty bottle and nodded towards the burgeoning squabble. In the middle of the circle were two men who had reached the stage of circling around each other with their fists up, both doing a valiant and almost completely successful job of staying erect. Mike's thick voice cut through the babble of the crowd, "Feel like breaking those two up?" he said hopefully, knowing that stepping away from the bar left it open to be plundered.
Kenshin nodded. Draining the last of the bottle in his hand, he slammed it down on the counter and moved silently through the crowd. His lean, 5'3 frame ghosted invisible through the sticky press of people and within moments, he was standing in the middle of the two combatants. They were both newbies, never having set foot inside the bar before this night. The bar's regulars began hauling people back, making room in the center, a wicked smile on their faces. A Kenshin fight was just too good to miss.
It was over in a pathetically short amount of time. Kenshin spun it out for a few minutes, but there wasn't much for him to do. The two men momentarily called a truce and went at him in a vaguely unified front, but they were both comically inept: no balance, faces wide open to attack, no control over their punches. They were muscleheads, with gigantic biceps and shoulders that did nothing more than give Kenshin extra target space to hit. Within minutes, he had them both in agonizing nerve locks and was dragging their twitching frames towards the door.
He flung them out the door unceremoniously to the cheering of the crowd inside. Yet in all the exuberant celebration, no one gave him a congratulatory high-five or slapped him on the shoulder. They knew better. Thus unmolested, Kenshin returned to his other beer and settled back into his accustomed ominous brooding position.
Gagging down another swig of beer, Kenshin thought sullenly, Why do I do this? It was the same routine, same pattern. Find a bar, get into a fight, drink beer, which he hated. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Stretch out over a year. He froze, the bottle momentarily suspended in the air as his stomach clenched. Yes, in exactly three days it would a year.
Anger slammed into his stomach as his eyes, normally violet, began to swim with gold. He could see the note on the kitchen table, could even smell on the paper the faint trace of white plums that wafted from his wife's skin every movement she made. Tomoe. He resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands, slam the glass bottle into smithereens on the counter, wildly attack the closest person to him. Tomoe. His wife. The only woman he had ever loved. The woman he had fallen desperately, hopelessly in love with almost at first sight. The one he had married, done everything he possibly could do to make her happy. The one he thought was as happy as he was.
It all changed one day with a simple note, a brief letter on the counter informing Kenshin that she had fallen in love with his best friend. Tomoe had left, taking most of her personal possessions and half the money in their savings account with her and leaving behind her cell phone.
The betrayal from both his wife and best friend had left Kenshin an angry, broken man. For the past year, he had thrown himself into his work as a carpenter, putting in as many hours as he could, thankful for the bruising work that left him exhausted at the end of the day. Nights he spent roaming the streets, deliberately seeking out the rough spots, welcoming the fights as they came. When he wasn't cruising for bar fights, he was punching some dude out in the blood-flecked ring of the local Muay Thai training center. Kenshin had practiced martial arts since he was a kid and was a third-degree black belt in Aikido. When Tomoe left him, he abandoned Aikido as being too soft and stormed angrily into the brutal, harsh world of Muay Thai. After a year of training, his shins were hard enough to deflect bullets and his reflexes and instinct were killer. Word quickly spread: this rather slight-looking redhead was no one to mess with unless you had a high tolerance for pain.
Of course, that's what caused some men to deliberately seek Kenshin out, to see if the rumors were true and if he was as tough as others said. The resulting encounters left him stronger, meaner, and more heavily scarred. When he took his shirt off on the job site, eyes would trace the network of scars across his arms and chest. The Hispanics would mutter "Es un cabrón duro de verdad'' and the white guys would raise their eyebrows. No one screwed with Kenshin on the job site – he did his work, did it with a perfectionism that sometimes drove the foreman crazy, and got his paycheck, the bulk of which went to paying back his lawyer bills. The rest went to rent on a cheap apartment, booze, and fees to the Muay Thai center.
Kenshin stared at the bottle in his hand, catching the slight reflection of his face in its glossy side. Around him, the noise and beer-soaked merriment continued at a fever pitch, pounding on his ears like the noise of a concrete nail gun. Tired of the environment, he rose soundlessly and disappeared out the door.
Outside was dark and foggy, befitting his sour mood perfectly. Kenshin jammed his hands in his old leather jacket and hunched down inside the collar, his long red ponytail floating slightly in the dank air. It was about an eight block walk to his apartment , one he'd made plenty of times before. As he walked past an alley, he heard a high-pitched voice, a woman's, shrill with fear.
"No, don't hurt me, please, please stop!" the voice emanated from the alley. Without hesitation, Kenshin pulled his fists from his pockets and brought them up in front of him as he charged into the alley. The way was blocked with trash, a big bin, and other assorted items and only very faintly lit by a dim bulb over a door on the side of the alley. Kenshin could see that there was a woman backed up against this door, trying to pry a man's hands off from her neck. Both turned to look at him as he raced towards them.
Something's wrong. Shit! Kenshin realized as the man dropped his hands from the woman and both gave him a wicked smile. Behind him, Kenshin could sense movement, chi, danger. He was right. There were five men advancing on him, appearing from the shadows and moving forward into the dirty light. Most of them he recognized as former opponents. Double shit, he thought.
"Good job, Baby," the would-be-attacker crooned to his erstwhile victim. She planted a juicy kiss on his cheek before scampering off to a safe location to watch the fight. "Hey, Red, remember me?" the man grinned at Kenshin. "Me and the boys have a couple things we need to discuss with you." The other five men began circling, backing Kenshin up against the wall and ringing him in. So far their hands were empty, but Kenshin had no doubt that there were knives, brass knuckles, and probably guns hidden under their coats.
Shit, shit, shit! Kenshin thought. He had taken on as many as four guys before, but they had all been well on the road to intoxication at the time. These six were obviously in complete control of themselves and hell-bent on beating the living pulp out of him and possibly more. His chances of walking away from this reasonably intact were rapidly approaching zero when his hand reached out and closed upon something sticking up from a pile of trash at his right side that felt reasonably familiar: a katana handle.
Something like instinct took over as Kenshin yanked the sword free and went at the nearest guy. He went down, not in a rain of blood but with a sickening thump that caused his head to ricochet off the alley floor. Kenshin was already after the next attacker and buried the katana into his shoulder. It went in deep but bloodless. What the fuck, it doesn't cut? Kenshin thought frantically but decided that his choices were severely limited at this point and that attacking his opponents with whatever happened to fall into his hand seemed like the most logical course of action.
His attackers, however, had not quite connected "sword" with "will not draw blood" and had instead fixated on the "sword" part. The sight of the crazed redhead coming at them with a katana proved to be more than they had bargained for. One swore and pulled a gun, only to have Kenshin smash the katana down on his hand to the sickly sound of cracking bones. At this, another one yelled, "Fuck this, I'm outta here!" and took to his heels, the other three following close behind him and the girl wailing and trying to keep up with them while severely handicapped by a pair of stiletto heels.
Adrenaline coursing through him, breath catching thick in his lungs, and vision narrow and blurred with the heat of battle, Kenshin gasped in the sticky air of the alley, grateful to be alive and unharmed thanks to the blade grasped in his hand.
The alley was silent. Then, to his complete astonishment, Kenshin felt a voice suddenly drop into his head as easily as someone would walk through an unlocked door. What type of sword work was that? the voice demanded in cool, sardonic tones. Has no one ever taught you even the most rudimentary aspects of holding a blade before?
What the hell? Kenshin thought frantically, darting his eyes in all directions.
Don't bother look around you, baka, I'm the only one here to talk to you, the voice continued. Unless you count these two incompetent fools that you only barely managed to defeat.
Kenshin looked down at the sword in his hand, then yelped, "Shit!" dropping the sword as if it had suddenly caught on fire.
Pick me back up, the voice demanded in the same unruffled but stern tones. Don't ever drop a katana like that: it is severely bad etiquette. I see I shall have to teach you manners along with proper sword technique.
"What the hell are you?" Kenshin screamed, backing away from the gleaming katana.
I said pick me up, baka deshi, the voice continued. I won't harm you.
"Like hell you won't!" Kenshin bellowed. "You're a talking sword for fuck's sake!"
The sardonic tones became slightly impatient. No, idiot, I am far, far more than that. But for now, you may think of me as a talking sword if it suits your limited imagination. I am Hiko Seijuuro, your new master.
"Master?!" Kenshin's voice was nearly deafening. "You expect me to listen to some fucking chunk of steel?"
Pick me up, the voice demanded, growing sterner. Moisture causes rust, which you'll have to clean off, so you might as well get me off the ground. And stop swearing. Only idiots with limited education need to resort to swearing. And yes, you will be listening to me. And taking orders from me.
Kenshin reached out gingerly and picked the sword up as if it was a ticking time bomb or a baby with a filthy diaper. Looking around, he saw that the junk pile he had pulled the sword from contained the sheath to the sword. He tugged it free.
Wipe me off first, the sword ordered. Kenshin, unhappy but grudgingly compliant, pinched a handful of his shirt and pulled the sword through it. As he did so, he realized why the sword had failed to cut his attackers: the cutting edge was reversed. Instead of slicing the men to pieces, he had merely bludgeoned them. When the sword was clean, he slid it into the sheath.
Saya, the sword corrected.
"What?" snapped Kenshin.
You thought "sheath". It's saya, the sword said smugly.
"Great," Kenshin said sarcastically. "Not only have I found the one demon-possessed sword in Chicago, but it can also read my thoughts. Just my luck."
A mind as pathetically undisciplined and untaught as yours is astonishingly easy to read, the voice responded coolly. But that will change. You have much to learn, my foolish pupil.
Kenshin thought briefly about simply dropping the sword into the nearest dumpster and heading back home, but realized that the sword probably saw what he was thinking and could probably stalk him somehow and he abandoned that plan. Instead he grudgingly held it in his left side, due to a hazy memory of some rudimentary sword training years ago in an Aikido class, and began walking out of the alley without a backward glance at the two men on the ground who were beginning to groan themselves awake.
As he walked, he looked down at the katana in his hand and said curtly, "So why is it out of all the swords in Chicago, I picked up the one jacked-up sword that can't cut like it's supposed to? What happened, the smith came to work drunk and made you backwards or something?"
I am a sabuka, baka, the sword said back. A reverse-edge blade. With me, you may defeat your enemies without killing them. In case you failed to notice, there are not two lifeless, bloody bodies back in that alley that would attract the immediate attention of the police and put a search warrant out for your arrest. Instead, you were able to walk away from the incident without any forthcoming repercussions. You already have a police record at this point that you wish to not add to, am I not correct?
Kenshin merely grunted in response. However, the possessed sword was correct; during the past year, Kenshin had spent more than one weekend in jail after a rough Friday night brawl. Manslaughter, even in self-defense, might have made for a cool story to tell, but he preferred to do it on the right side of jail bars. Deciding not to comment on the last response, Kenshin merely stopped talking and tried to concentrate on something else, hoping that the crazy chunk of metal at his side didn't have full access to all his thoughts.
The sword, however, was apparently in a chatty mood, and Kenshin could not shut out the voice that kept opening his brain and marching brazenly inward. We are leaving tomorrow.
"Oh we are, are we?" Kenshin snapped back sarcastically. "Look, creepy demon sword Hijooo-whatever-the-fuck-your-name is, I'll be happy to drop you off in the next Fed Ex box I see so you can leave town and find your next victim to torment. Me, I've got work tomorrow."
You have two options, the sword said coolly. One, you can continue to live the life you have set for yourself which even an ordinary fool could see has only made you angry and weak. Or, baka deshi, you can choose to utilize what passes as your brain and learn the name of your new master.
"I'm not weak!" Kenshin roared.
You have no idea what true strength is! the sword shot back, impatience pushing back the coolness of its speech. Rage. Picking fights for amusement. Blind anger. None of these things are worthy of a student of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu. Only the weak let anger rule them and allow their emotions to guide their movements.
Kenshin was busy mentally running over what tools he had in his car and apartment that would best mutilate about seven pounds worth of high-carbon, hand-forged steel when the sword spoke again, in somewhat gentler tones.
I do not chose my pupils lightly. Few can withstand the intense training required for Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu.
"And you think I can?" Kenshin snarled.
That remains to be seen, the sword responded. But I would not waste my time if I did not have a sense that you could.
Kenshin was quiet for a second, then said gruffly, "So, where're we going?"
That, said the sword, is the most intelligent thing you have said so far. And the answer is, I will tell you when we get there.
Kenshin huffed impatiently. He was still half-toying with the idea of introducing the crazy sword to the brand-new drill he had just bought the other day, but curiosity had gotten the better of him. He was suddenly tired, tired of fighting with himself, tired of wallowing in anger over Tomoe's betrayal, tired of the endless loop of work, violence, and alcohol. Maybe taking orders from a talking chunk of metal would be a welcome change of pace, no matter how odd.
He looked down at the gleaming sword grasped firmly in his hand. "You do realize that I can sell you on Ebay if I chose to, don't you?"
You do realize that I can and will make your life complete and utter hell if I chose to, which I will, the sword responded, but there was an undertone of humor in its voice. In the meantime, deshi, it is cold and late and you will be up early tomorrow. Time for bed.
Despite himself, Kenshin yawned. He was almost back at his apartment and, watching it appear out of the gloomy street lights, realized that he was not going to be sorry to put it and his pathetic excuse of a life behind him. A tiny flutter of hope stirred in him. Maybe his life wasn't destined to be all bar fights and accumulating new scars. Well, he thought to himself with a smirk, the scars part will probably be the same.
Yes, very much so, the sword said, now go inside and go to bed.
"Yes master,"Kenshin said, only partially sarcastically, and did as it said. As he fell asleep, propped up against the wall of his apartment per the sword's commands, he knew that his life was taking a very sudden and dramatic turn, and not sleeping in a bed was one of a thousand new changes he had ahead of him.