Through Other Eyes
Chapter Three: The Enemy
"Neesama, I still don't like this much."
Kirara said nothing as she rummaged in the cupboard, coming up with the formal traveling robes of a senior shrine priestess, the ones worn by her grandmother before her. Behind her, Komachi's frown deepened.
"Okay, so what if he's not lying? Why do you need to go with him, huh? A guy like that can only get you into trouble, I bet he's associated with all sorts of underworld types..."
"Komachi," Kirara said firmly, shrugging out of her day-to-day village wear and into the robes. They were a little musty, but they fitted well and were surprisingly comfortable. "Please don't argue with me any more. I've made up my mind."
"Then take someone with you! I'll go and—"
"You'll stay here."
"But—!"
"Can't you feel it? I can, and I'm not even the one with the pendant. You need to stay here."
Komachi eyed her knees and grumbled. "Stupid pendant isn't right all the time..."
"Komachi."
"I just don't want you to leave and get hurt!" the younger girl burst out, her eyes welling up with tears. Kirara stifled the reprimand on her tongue, and hugged her sister suddenly; the duties of the priestess, on top of the emotional upheaval from Tenmon's announcement about the spirits of the samurai who'd died for their village, were taking their toll on Komachi.
And now Kirara was leaving her to deal with her problems alone. If it had been for any other reason, Kirara would have dismissed going on this journey with Tenmon as a purely selfish action and remained at Kanna, but...
Kyuuzou-dono asks that you come with me. He says he can't fulfill his obligation regarding Kanbei without your help. Heihachi-dono agrees.
Kirara let Komachi cry into the robes for a little while longer, her mind elsewhere suddenly. Four samurai had died for the village—three had gone away and never returned, only one with a home and someone who loved him waiting for him. She'd wondered...
Maybe this was a selfish act on her part, but if Kyuuzou wanted to find Kanbei, she was equally interesting in seeing what had become of the older samurai. Not to mention, if they should stumble across Katsushi—
Definitely selfish. She cursed herself inwardly as Komachi wiped her nose and looked up at her sister, calmer but still red about the eyes.
"I-I'm sorry, neesama, I'm not being much help right now...I promise I'll take good care of Kanna, me'n Rikichi-san, until you get back. But you gotta promise—"
"Hm?"
"Yeah, if that guy does anything funny, you kick him in the nuts and run away, okay, neesama?"
Kirara couldn't stop herself; she laughed aloud, and for a moment she fancied she heard a trace of a bigger, more booming laugh overlapping her own. But that was just silly...
In any case, she reminded herself as Komachi stuffed an extra parcel of food in her traveling sack, if she were going to come to harm, it wouldn't be at Tenmon's hands, at least not with the fortuneteller's intent. After spending one day with the man, her assessment of Tenmon was one of the most mild-mannered people she'd ever come across, impervious to insult, suspicion, and shunning, displaying a slightly astonished, childlike delight whenever he'd somehow made someone happy. Essentially, a perfect medium, someone with such a quiet spirit that a sufficiently motivated ghost could freely inhabit their welcoming body.
And that was the problem. The minute Kirara heard from Tenmon's lips that Kyuuzou's unfulfilled obligation involved Kanbei, the young priestess had gone on the alert; grimly noble as he had been in life, Kyuuzou's unwavering, oft-stated intent was Kanbei's demise on the point of his own swords.
Komachi handed her the sack and Kirara got to her feet. Out by the cliffs, with proper reverence, some of the village men, supervised by Rikichi, would be removing Kyuuzou and Heihachi's blades from their graves about now.
Then they would help Tenmon strap all three swords onto his own back.
Hokuto stared up at the massive thing before them. "Mother-fucking donkey balls—!"
Katsushiro was much too preoccupied to scold her for bad language. The young samurai reached out and ran a hand over the sand-worn steel of the mecha's leg. "This is one of them, I'm certain of it. Can you read the writing on the leg?"
"Y-yeah, I can. It's the Roman alphabet... "Gekkou, Behemoth-Class"? What the hell's a Behemoth?"
"I don't know, but it appears as if someone took the old Benigumo-types used in the intergalactic war and forged them much bigger and more heavily-armed...this thing is equipped with at least three cannons, with the sword as a secondary weapon. I don't know if any normal samurai could possibly stand up to it...I managed, but it was difficult." Katsushiro made his was around the crashed giant, his eyes narrowing as he went. "Hey, there's a body back here."
"Hm? Let me see it, then, I know something about looking over corpses."
The young man stepped aside for Hokuto, and, smiling faintly, restrained himself from pointing out that she hadn't called him "kid" or rubbed his nose in his inexperience for kicks yet. The taller woman squatted down beside the battered form, squinting at it.
"Well, he's a foreigner, that much I can tell you, but I've never seen that uniform before in my life. Oh, and he's fresh dead, and he may not have been a samurai but he was cut down by one unless I miss my guess."
"But the outside of his machine is very worn down."
"So what do you make of that?"
Katsushiro turned the body over with his scabbard so that the dead man was looking up at the sky, unseeing eyes wide, face drawn in a final expression of pain. "This robot had been traveling around for some time before its operator was struck down. Traveling unnoticed. After the destruction of the Nobuseri, one would assume such a thing would be observed and remarked on..."
Hokuto nodded, grinning. "Not too shabby, Okamoto-kun."
Katsushiri sighed faintly. "I wish you wouldn't call me –kun."
"I ain't callin' you –dono. I don't call anybody –dono. Or –sama. Unlike you and that girl you were clearly too stupid to take up with."
Katsushiro's face flamed red instantly. "I asked you before to drop the subject, thank you! But since you won't, where are those sons of yours you were talking about? Somehow I doubt the bushido path allows you to be an attentive mother any more than it would allow me to be a good husband—!"
The flat of Hokuto's sword came whistling down; Katsushiro parried it lightening-swift and knocked it aside, pausing at the dark expression on the older woman's face.
Hokuto's voice was edging into a snarl. "Your doubt is well-founded, Okamoto Katsushiro; just like every other idiot samurai, yours truly included, we don't think we're properly following our bushido path unless we leave a trail of broken hearts, huh?"
Both swordsmen stared at each other, blades drawn; both backed down at the same moment.
"I apologize, Shichisei-dono, my comment was disrespectful."
"No more than mine was...whatever's between you and that girl is your business anyway. It just...makes me tired, that's all." Hokuto sheathed her blade and pulled a face, making her myriad old scars do odd things. "A samurai should have more discipline."
"Some would say that means his unhappiness is justified," Katsushiro said quietly.
There was a moment more of tense silence.
It was broken by the whine of half a dozen engines; like ghosts riding before the wind storm, six gigantic humanoid shapes appeared around them.
"Unidentified samurai, throw down your swords and surrender!"
It was cold out in the desert.
That didn't stop Kanbei. An entire army wouldn't have stopped him as he made his way across the blasted sands, moonlight gradually flaying the dunes bare of all shadow. No such army was there to try and stay his course; no living thing got in his way, save...
...save for something small and furry that scuttled across his path, a three-legged desert rodent of some kind, mutated by the fallout from where the gigantic ships had dropped out of the sky. It was nothing but a flicker of movement and a squeak.
Kanbei darted forwards, concealing himself in the curve of a dune, hand on hilt as he listened intently for noise other than the blowing winds.
Something beneath the sand hummed softly, moving under its shifting surface, creating a very gradual roll across a five-foot area, over the flatbeds where Kanbei had been walking these last few days.
The samurai willed himself into perfect stillness, even as he fixed his gaze on the small, rolling wave of sand approaching his hiding place.
It put him in mind of the one occasion where he'd encountered a shark.
Out of the rolling sand popped something round and black on a spindly metal arm; it rotated, sweeping the dunes with a beam of solid red. Then it pulled inwards and the wave ground to a halt, changed direction, and began moving away from Kanbei.
He didn't move again until he was absolutely certain he could hear nothing except the usual desert noises, feel no humming vibrations. Only then did he approach the disturbed flatbeds, allowing himself no more than ten minutes out of his travel time to examine this phenomenon and confirm his suspicions.
It took him only five minutes of hard prodding with foot and blade to find what he was looking for, and split-second reaction time saved him when his foot went through six inches of packed sand into nothingness, causing the area for twenty feet around him to collapse inwards. He leapt to solid ground, gained his footing, and looked down into the massive hole in the earth that had been caused by whatever was "swimming" in the desert.
Kanbei cautiously pressed onwards.
"Did the Leviathan-class register him accurately?"
"Yes, o samurai-sama. It is indeed the man called Shimada Kanbei. The Leviathan pilots remembered your orders and did not attack him, but returned here swiftly to bring you the readouts of their scans."
"So I see...he almost evaded the scanners completely." Full, blood-red lips curved upwards. It was a sight to freeze a man's heart rather than quicken his blood. "What a magnificent creature. And yet...so quaint. He travels on foot?"
"Yes, o samurai-sama."
"He will be slow in reaching us, then. Very well; I shall be patient and allow him to come to me. All of our Leviathan and Behemoth-class combatants know that he is to travel unmolested? I want him undamaged when he encounters me, and the Admiral would rather not needlessly lose any of our military hardware."
The messenger's moment of hesitation did not go unnoticed.
"What is it? Why, do you not believe me?"
"O-o samurai-sama, I mean absolutely no disrespect, but how can that be? The mecha that we have imported can destroy any number of samurai...how could they be destroyed by one man?"
The luckless messenger did not even see his leader move; she was ten feet away and then beside him in the blink of an eye. Flat, pale blue eyes seemed to smile at him as breath tickled his nose.
"Oh, you poor fool...but how could you know? Samurai such as Shimada Kanbei—and there are still those like him, although not quite of his caliber—could slice apart a Leviathan-class machine as easily as I just cut off your arm."
"But o samurai-sama, you did noeeeeEEEEAAAAAAUUUGH!"
She sheathed her blade and turned away as the messenger fell, clutching the bleeding stump of his arm and writhing. "You may go see the doctors and have that attended to. And please do cease that pointless screaming—after all, you still have one arm left."
The sole other figure on the dais, skinny and sallow, chuckled nervously as she returned to her original place, golden kimono sleeves floating and unstained. "Ahehehe, quite ruthless, are you not? But of course—you're a samurai."
"I am the samurai," she corrected him softly as the messenger dragged himself away, sobbing. "Well—I will be, once we tie up these few loose ends."
"One of which is Shimada Kanbei, is it not? Taken a bit of a shine to him, eh?"
"If you wished to use such vulgarities, which do not properly encompass the bond that is between such as him and such as me, then yes, I have."
"Ahehehe, so sorry, so sorry. And the other loose ends are being taken care of as we speak, are they not? This Shichiroji, for one thing...and I heard rumors of a few others we may have missed, but I'm sure they will all gradually be drawn to us anyways, eh?"
"The Admiral will deal easily with this Shichiroji," she said softly, and for just a moment her thin cohort caught a gleam of something like malicious glee in those usually empty eyes. "He is of that caliber, but once we have Shimada Kanbei, he will be—superfluous."
"As I said, quite ruthless, ahehehe."
Yukino's tea had long grown cold in her hands as she sat and stared at her lover, eyes going wider with shock. "Mechanical samurai?"
"For lack of a better word," Shichiroji said darkly. "They're not a single samurai's body remade into metal, they're too big for that; instead he said they're operated by a team of men according to specifications."
"So just robots, then."
"But with capabilities beyond that of even a Benigumo-type," Shichiroji corrected. "Our guest said he'd seen at least a dozen brought through the port last week in his city alone, and gods knew about the other trading cities."
"Where are they going? The capital has fallen..."
"That's what I'd like to know. That's what I think Kanbei found out, why he left."
Yukino nearly knocked her cup over. "That reckless fool. At the very least he could have taken you with him."
"See, that's where you're wrong, Yukino," Shichiroji said idly, toying with the corner of his coat with his cybernetic hand. "I'm the fool, for not noticing what was bothering him. I just thought he'd gone because he felt he was in the way somehow; now I see some of what he saw, the danger I think he wanted to keep both of us from."
"Oh…then you'll...?"
"Stay," he said in the smallest voice she'd ever heard. "He gave me a direct order, and..."
"Shichiroji..." She took him into her arms gently and he tangled his fingers in her hair. "The only danger I'm in here is of having a handprint worn on my stomach from all the girls wanting to feel in case the baby kicks. Or of going mad from all the conflicting advice I'm getting on how to handle a first child." She tactfully didn't mention the number of comments that had included the phrase "giving birth at your age", which tended to set her teeth on edge and make her hands shake.
"I hope so," was all he said, before their oldest employee, the Firefly House's aged and cantankerous secretary-cum-substitute geisha, came tottering in.
"We have a customer," she announced unceremoniously, ignoring how Shichiroji and Yukino separated on instinct and acted as if they hadn't been doing anything. "Some gaijin type looking for the authentic comfort experience. Big spender, this one."
"Ah," Yukino said, smiling a little, "that'd be nice, although it's a bit late...will you let the girls know and tell the cooks to get things ready? I'll go see him myself for a bit." She rose and followed the tiny older woman out.
Shichiroji stayed in the tatami room a little longer, his mind wandering someplace else, before coming back to reality and to the noise thrumming in his ears...
...in his bedroom, hidden beneath the mats, the blade of the kamayari was screaming.
Yukino bowed politely to the big man before her; he bowed back in the approved style, his smile warm and self-deprecating.
"I cannot tell you how pleased I am to be allowed your hospitality. Most houses in the pleasure district have very backwards policies on foreigners, you see, and I had hoped to enjoy such an authentic Japanese experience before I left..."
Well, it was true, and usually the Firefly House's foreign visitors were of a piece with their usual clientele, some delightful, some no less than aggravating. But Yukino almost frowned and broke her mask of perfection; something about this man was... "Indeed, we are most honored in our turn to receive you. I see you have some high rank in your home nation...a general, perhaps?"
"Not quite," the man corrected gently, chuckling. He was surely the most physically imposing person Yukino had ever encountered, almost as big as Kikuchiyo, broad-shouldered and immaculately dressed in a dark blue uniform with white pants. He had thick sideburns, and his hands were broad and powerful. Broad enough to easily fit around a small Japanese woman's neck. "I am an admiral. Admiral Joseph Garvin is my name."
TO BE CONTINUED...
A/N: To my very kind reviewers, thanks for your encouragement! (Dear KatsuKira fans, please be patient, they're on opposite sides of the desert right now, and progression will only really come with interaction. ) As for my pace of updates, I have no idea: I'll try to add chapters as often as I can, especially since right now the muse is strong with me (a.k.a t3h samuraiz etz0rs m3h brainz0rs), but I can probably safely say after this chapter that...it may update every week or so? If it's longer than that, or somehow I lose momentum/interest, I'll make some kind of notice on my profile or what-have-you. Thanks again!
