Author's Note:

This is something I need to write to get it out of my head before it drives me mad. Partially based on the novel, partially on the games (Orochi Warriors makes a cameo), this is an exploration of what-ifs in the Dynasty/Orochi Warriors universe and a character study on some of my favourite men and their interactions with some of the bizarre circumstances that came about from six years of roleplaying with them. I will be introducing a unique backstory influenced by my roleplaying, as well as some original characters. I will update this when I have time. Follow along at your desire!


"Chiu jén chiu tao t'ou; sha jén sha tuan 'hou."

Save thoroughly, if you will;
Kill thoroughly, if you kill.


The weather was the first thing she noticed upon waking—only because it literally hit her in the face.

"What the—goddamn it!" Throwing the tree branch back to the laughing winds in vengeance, it took her several seconds before she realized the hell she had woken up to. The skies had come to life with a monstrous storm: wind screaming through the trees, lightning ricocheting through the sky from one end of the horizon to the other, thunder slamming the earth in ceaseless rhythm, rain sweeping the ground in torrents.

But as monstrous as the storm was, it was nothing compared to what it was birthing. The turbulent red clouds swirled together in faster and more erratic rhythm across the entire horizon, stretching and twisting and knotting together until two distinct shapes rose through their formations. The new shapes were gargantuan in size: each spanned a quarter length of the horizon and she could see their entirety only through her peripherals—focusing on them individually was too much to take in at once.

Eyes. There was a pair of goddamned snake eyes in the sky.

The sight stunned her into statuesque stupidity for a second. The serpentine stare discolored the surrounding sky the same gold as its irises, but it was the slit-like pupils that unnerved her: each a gash of light that seared the sky for a kilometer or more in length, they filled the storm with such brilliance that everything else beneath them faded away. The earth was still hard beneath her feet and grass still whipped her bare legs from the wind, but the blind sensation of these things was all she knew; she could no longer physically see them for those several seconds.

So the world had finally woken to her presence? Three days of hell raising and shit disturbing and general douchebaggery to everyone and everything here just to be noticed, and the bastard acknowledged her only after she fell asleep? Did He consider her less a threat without the reflex of a roused body and mind at her handle? The advantage would always be hers as an emissary of the afterlife—one of the few perks she still enjoyed despite all the emotional baggage that came along.

But did that matter to Him? No. He just wanted his vengeance, and she was here to give it to him.

"Yeah, yeah, I see you, too. Bastard." The wind partially ripped the words from her mouth, but the sentiment survived and she knew it carried to her aggressor through the storm. The response came several seconds later in the distant pounding of hooves and beating drums, the echoing of which resonated from a source still some several kilometers away. The surreal stridence of a thousand voices rose in a outcry just seconds afterwards, filling the storm with the song of his bestial legions and their thirst for war.

He had roused his armies for her. About goddamned time.

The nearby farmhouses made no response to the approaching army over the next hour—or the phenomenon in the sky for that matter, though technically only she could see the latter. The farmers and their families had abandoned the village over a day ago and she had been its sole occupant since.

Was she ready for this fight? Psychologically, yes. Physically? Her long-sleeved business shirt was dirty as hell and threadbare in many places; it had taken the worst of the storms the past couple nights while the black halter beneath it escaped mostly unscathed. Beyond the two shirts and her black underwear, she wore nothing. Though she doubted a half-naked woman would serve as an effective deterrent against an invading army, their ability to treat her seriously as a combatant when she looked like this was questionable.

Damn the Judicature. They had afforded her no chance to change out of her sleepwear before transitioning her here. For the sake of continuity, she should have gotten rid of the modern clothing and found something more suited to the culture of this world the instant she arrived—she'd had three days since, for fuck's sake—but something had held her back.

The mediators are the ones who have to follow the rules. Not you. Not anymore.

Rolling her eyes at her own stubbornness, she stretched her arms above her head to limber herself out before starting towards the closest farmhouse. The mighty eyes in the sky watched her as she moved, but their presence was little more than scenic to her now: it was His army she needed to worry about. Reaching the door, she tried the handle only to find it latched from the inside. After landing a solid kick to the flimsy wood panel to knock it off its hinges, she waited several seconds for its clattering echo to attract any unwanted attention. When none came, she stepped inside.

The brightly burning lamp on the table in the center of the front room was the first red flag. There had been no light through the windows from the outside.

Her mystical senses pricking, she stepped forward with a ready hand. Though no longer a mediator, she still retained some otherworldly strength—and not the unreliable shit granted under contract by her former employers, either. The mystical advantage of being a mediator also came with the disadvantage of being told how to use all that awesome power. Now that she had been demoted from mediator status, she no longer had that contract. There were still certain rules to follow if she wanted to wander the afterlife freely, but only the mediators really had the strength to wreck a world when they disobeyed those rules.

Another round of shouts rose in the distance, followed by a renewed bout of drumming. The approaching army was rallying. Time to get moving.

Taking a quick survey of the front room, she noticed two additional doorways: one covered by a tattered curtain through which she could see a small space outfitted with a single bench and wash tub, and the other set into the floor on the far side of the room. Taking the more traditionally dangerous of the two first, she went over and hefted up the hatch door. When nothing immediately jumped out and attacked, she peered down into the darkness and found the bottom beyond her range of human sight.

Second red flag. There was no use for a cellar too deep to see the bottom in a rural farmhouse like this.

Keeping in mind the supernatural vigilance of the storm still raging outside, she decided against her first instinct for illuminating the pit and instead resorted to a more human method: the lantern burning on the table behind her. Lifting up the paper apparatus, she checked the measure of oil left in its canister only to discover a roughly handcrafted candle secured into the flimsy wooden interior instead.

Right. This was a world resembling an ancient time period from one of the continents of her own. Oil was reserved for the lanterns of the upper class here.

She took the lantern regardless and returned to the hole in the floor. At least the earth beneath the floorboards was properly boarded off to avoid ground flooding, and the same went for the visible upper portion of the tunnel. If she did eventually venture into down there, the likelihood of it all collapsing in on her in this storm was minimal. Holding the lantern out over the entrance illuminated only a half dozen more feet down the tunnel—still not enough to see the bottom—so she dropped the whole lantern down.

A good thirty seconds later (paper lanterns were damn light), the light finally stopped its descent at about fifty feet. So the farmhouse had a hatch door opening to a deliberately deep, manmade pit? What the hell was down there? Did she even want to know?

Her mystical senses pricking again—this time almost in reprimand—she rolled her eyes and swung her legs over the side of the hole. Normally a descent of this depth required scaling equipment and moderate preparation to avoid serious injury and death, but there was a time and a place for that kind of shit and she had patience for neither. Taking a breath to brace herself, she pushed off the ledge and dropped in.

The landing was shit. Soldier of the afterlife or not, her vessel for this mission was still human in many ways—including the pathetic physical frailty of that former existence. The impact alone fractured dozens of bones in her feet and legs despite the mystical cushioning she provided, and it took a good several seconds of conscious effort to heal the damage before she had chance to straighten up properly examine her surroundings.

When she did, she immediately wished she hadn't.

What she had expected was another tunnel leading further downwards—or maybe a second tunnel deliberately dug out in addition to the first to lead astray the unwary. It would have taken some time to explore them both and she could have wasted her last hour of peacetime with the effort and ideally turned up something—anything—but what she actually found.

What she had not expected was the small room she found herself in now—or with whom she shared it.

The man sat on the only piece of furniture in the room—a rickety, half-rotted chair that looked liable to collapse at any moment—with his head bowed so she could barely see his face. The faint light from the paper lantern by her feet illuminated only the darkness closest to her and so the seated man seemed even more of a specter through the gloom: his mane of unkempt black hair fell over his shoulders and wreathed his face in shadow, and his hunched stance made his body look disproportionate from his head in the darkness.

Then she noticed the chains. At his wrists, around his arms and chest, then at his ankles and around his legs, chains encircled and anchored him to the chair that was itself bolted to a stone plate in the ground. But even stranger than the chains was the item clutched in his one hand.

A small object that glinted an eerie green-blue through the darkness—some kind of precious stone: jade, maybe—bearing a ring of five intricately carved, interlaced dragons.

The sight stopped the breath in her chest. No.

Just now noticing his company at that worst of possible moments, the man on the chair stirred. His movement jerked her from her reverie and she stumbled back against the wall behind her, unable to hide her face or even cover her eyes before he lifted his head. For that second as his eyes locked with hers, the world above them stopped. The storm stopped. The army stopped. The sense of carefree boredom that had possessed her since her arrival here stopped.

As the oldest prince of the kingdom of Wu straightened with visible effort to devote the full of his attention to her, she knew something had gone horribly wrong. The rage of recognition flushed through his face, but it barely diminished him: he was still that great warrior of old, a pillar of strength and dominance even in his bonded plight now. And she had her fool self to thank for that.

"You …" The hatred in his whisper twisted something unwanted deep inside her chest. His chains rattled in his efforts to pull himself off the chair and held him back in spite of his strength. "You of all people, to come back here … how dare you …"

"Look, it wasn't my—"

"I don't care!" His roar was as mighty as ever; the flame in the paper lantern flickered unsteadily behind her in the wake. "If you have any mercy left in that twisted heart of yours, any consideration or kindness or love at all, then you'll do it now—do it like you should have done ages ago!"

She scowled at him, knowing full well the answer already. "Do what, exactly?"

"Kill me."