Soul
Chapter Three
Restoration: Recognize
Yukimura is a son of Saigo, last of the samurai. He is only seventeen, too cocky, too sure of himself by half – it is the luck of the gods that he is skilled enough to pull it off and survive, that he has made it through his life this far, through fourteen long years of training.
The samurai are standing at the edge of a cliff, an endless abyss below them; the abyss of the future. Yukimura can see the long darkness coming for him, coming for their whole family.
We are truly the last of our kind. And our time...is almost over.
It is the end of an age.
It is the beginning of a whole new world.
All he wants, knowing this, is to be most perfectly that which he knows he is - samurai, warrior, leader – a filial son, a loyal follower. He wants more than anything to give that complete and perfect loyalty to his father which is the ultimate expression of a samurai's bushido; he wants to give his life for his lord.
But somehow, even now, at the edge of this changing world – somehow, something is holding him back. There is a voice inside him that questions his fathers decision, the tenacity with which he holds on to dying ways of war. There is something missing in his lord, and Yukimura does not know what it is...but it torments him.
It is that torment which has driven him to train, to fight, to seek lasting glory beyond the sunset that is a mortal life.
It has made him a warrior without compare, but that drive is failing him now, pushing him into dark thoughts.
Where could he find an opponent worthy of his prowess?
Where find a man like himself -
A man with the dark-beating heart of a battling beast?