Chapter 14: Curse
呪い
[still ban's pov]
Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck-fuck!!! [what a great way to start a new chapter.] Rika, hang in there!!! I kept running, following Rika's scream. After all of a sudden, it stopped. Silence. When I heard nothing, not even a cricket, I felt scared, for one of the first times in my life.
"RIKA!!!"
I continued running, and then, I heard a different scream, but it wasn't Rika's. It was a man's. I stopped and tried to gather my thoughts. I needed a moment. I mean, the scream of the guy was pretty high-pitched, for a guy.
After the scream of the man's, I heard a scream of terror. Again, it wasn't Rika's. What….? Just what the hell is going here? A familiar noise came across me; the sound of someone being slashed to pieces. I ran even faster.
A light began to show itself a couple of feet away. I kept running towards it.
"What the hell is that?!?!?!" Someone shouted not too far away.
I had no idea who this was whatsoever.
"Men! Prepare your… what?"
I ran till I saw a little torch on a branch of a tree. I jumped over the bush that was blocking my way and Banryu was already unsheathed I looked around for Rika, she was on the ground and her kimono was all jacked up. I ran towards her, squatted, and examined her body, from what I can tell in the darkness she seemed to be okay. Fortunately the bad part didn't happen yet. I looked up to see five men who looked horrified for some reason.
"Did you weaklings do this to Rika?" I said through my teeth. I was so pissed off at them it wasn't even funny.
"Weak? Us?" The man closest to Rika asked, "Little man, the only weak one here is you!" I assume he is the leader.
Obviously, he had no idea who I was. Just because I'm short. Psh."Really?" I didn't even want to explain to him that I was the leader of The Band of Seven. If I did, they would have probably ran away in screaming terror like all the other people do, and it was too much explaining. Plus, it would be no fun either.
"Listen you little jackass, was it you who cut Takero's finger off?" The man snarled.
"What the hell are you blabbering about?"
"It wasn't the girl; she was too beat up since I couldn't take that damned kimono off. And she was already unconscious 'cause of that."
"You hurt Rika?" I don't know why I was getting all over protective…
"Shut up and let me finish, anyways it had to be you!" He pointed at me with a katana in his other hand.
"I'm telling you it wasn't me you bastards…" I got back up on my feet and swung Banryu on my shoulder, basically asking them for a fight.
"DAMN YOU!!!" And with that the man charged at me along with all his other weaker minions.
My grip on Banryu tightened as I jumped over Rika's limp body. I was about to cut that bastards head off until I realized I never landed on the ground.
I was frozen in midair, "What the fuck is this?"
All the other men were at the exact same place that they were a couple seconds ago. They just had there weapons in hand.
"What is this?" The leader said, annoyed.
I moaned from the aggravation. I couldn't move at all, my hands, my arms nothing. All I could do was breath, move my eyes around, and talk.
From the corner of my eye, I saw something just pass me. Before I knew it the guy way in the back— I just realized he was moaning in pain from his finger—head was just chopped off.
"What the hell just happened?!?!" The leader asked aloud since he couldn't turn his head around.
"T-Takero's head… was just chopped off!!!!" The guy who was next to the headless guy said in terror.
The headless body fell to the ground and a massive amount of blood was spilled out.
"Wh-what? How is that possible? Everyone isn't moving!"
I don't even know what's going on.
At that precise moment the man who was next to this Takero guy, his head was chopped off as well. I blinked in confusion.
"What is going on here!?!" Some random person cried.
All I did was blink, and the next thing I knew, all of the remaining three men's head just slid off their body. All of the headless men just fell to the ground.
After all of a sudden, I finally landed on the ground. I looked around and all I saw were the dead guys, and well, everything else that was there from the beginning.
I spun around to Rika who was the same as normal. I placed Banryu on the ground and held Rika in my arms, now that I touch her she was covered in blood. I gently swung her over my shoulder, grabbed Banryu, and ran to her house.
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The entire time I was running there, I thought of one thing, what caused all of those men's deaths? No one was there, and why was Rika unconscious? Wait she was unconscious when I got there 'cause of those horny bastards… Pft. Well that answers that.
But really? Whatever it was it moved incredibly fast.
Whatever, I have to bring Rika to her house before her condition will get worse.
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After about ten minutes of running I finally made it to Rika's village. It was already morning. The freaky thing was that everyone was gone. It doesn't matter; Rika's mom is completely out of the ordinary so I'm pretty sure that she's at home, if I can find the house that is... Wait a sec, if I remember, Rika's house is probably the biggest house in the entire village.
With that in my mind I had no problem finding her house. A freaking gate surrounded it. That's how big and rich she is. She is probably richer than the bastard who chopped our heads off, the lord.
The gate was already open, so I just let myself in. I couldn't care less.
The front yard was…amazing, seriously. It had a pond with a little brown wooden bridge over it. Little tiny fishes in various colors were swimming happily. A small waterfall that came from this rock led water into the pond. The pond had streams that went to some places that my eyes couldn't follow. They were that far. A statue of… what is that anyways? I think its Buddha or something. Whatever, a small wooden statue of Buddha was floating on a lily pad that was on the pond.
"Ribbit."
Did I just hear a frog? Are you kidding me? She even has frogs living here? I looked around and right on the statue of Buddha sat a very fat frog. It stared at me with those freaky eyes of his…
Wow. The next thing I know there will be a duck or rabbit somewhere.
Other than the main things that got my attention, they were these small trees here and there. Some plants, flowers, and grass covered everything else. Well not exactly everything. Paths were in the front yard that can let you walk around. If this is her front yard… The back yard must be twice as large as this. Wow. Rika is one wealthy chick.
I walked up the stairs and before I even put my hand on the handle, the door slid open so quickly I jumped a bit.
"Bankotsu?"
Right in front of me was Momoko. Rika's mom. She looked exactly the same. Like I said, Momoko is anything but ordinary. I mean, like I said even earlier, she will probably be the only villager here while all the other ones fled for their lives when the castle was burning.
"What's up?" I said casually leaning Banryu against the door. "Um, something happened to—"
"Something happened to Rika yes, yes I know." She motioned me to come inside.
"How did you know?" I walked through, like, three freaking rooms, up the stairs and then like three rooms until I entered what I thought was Rika's room.
"Oh, I don't know, maybe it's because YOU'RE CARRYING HER ON YOUR BLOODY SHOULDER YOU MORON." She scolded me.
"My what?" I looked at my left and it was completely bloody. Was Rika bleeding the entire time I was running here?
"Well don't just stand there at a daze, put her on the bed." Momoko ordered me.
I did what I was told without a second thought.
"Okay, you go get changed into this robe that's in the laundry room on the first floor."
"And where do I find it exactly? I need a map just avoid getting lost in this place."
"Oh, well okay then if you insist," She rummaged in her pockets and grabbed a folded piece of paper.
"You're not serious…" I said in disbelief.
"Nope, we get that a lot, if we have a map. You'd be surprised how many hours we spend looking for kids who get lost in this place. Phew, lot of work." Momoko unfolded the paper and handed it to me.
"Um, thank you?" I said as I took the map. Holy shit she was serious.
"Well go get changed. I'll be here with Rika. Take a bath or something and I'll wash your kimono." She shooed me away.
"Where is the bath?" I asked walking out the door.
"It is… uh… three rooms down the laundry room. First take a bath, and then get into some new clothes." And with that she slid the door closed.
Well, if Momoko doesn't seem too worried about Rika's conditions I guess I don't have too either.
I stood there, map in hands. The map was quite large, and I don't know who wrote it, but whoever did has the neatest handwriting I have seen in my entire life. It was neater than Renkotsu's. It took me like ten minutes just to find my way back to the first floor. I will probably be lost in this house forever, never to be seen again… I sighed to myself.
"Okay I'm in front of the…" I slid the door open. It looked like the kitchen. The kitchen was…big. Simple as that. Biggest kitchen I've seen. Jakotsu could live in Rika's house if he wanted to. "Okay so the kitchen is here, then I need to turn to the left and the bath room will be right around the corner…" I traced my finger on the path I was going to take on the map.
I walked straight down the hallway, turned left and I felt steam brushing off my skin. I looked around and the steam was emanated from a large door that could fit Kyoukotsu. I walked towards it, and slid the large door open.
A bath house was right in front of me. Seriously, a sign hanging from the ceiling that said 'ladies' pointed towards the right. For boys, it was a sign that was carved into a rock that pointed to the left.
I went to the left. To the left, to the left. What was even more surprising was that they were mini—how do I say this?—room-like structures that were used to store your clothes in I guess… [they are suppose to be like, wooden lockers]
I slid one, undressed, and stored my clothes in there. Next, was my adventure to find the actual bath. It would suck if I got lost wandering around this house naked. Talk about embarrassing.
Fortunately, the bath was straight ahead of me. I looked in all the directions, making sure no one was here but me. No one was, so I took a few steps back. Once I did so, I ran towards the bath and jumped in.
It felt as if I died –again—and gone to heaven. The water was perfect. Wow when was the last time I even bathed?
I took out my braid, and soaked it in the warm water.
I stayed there a good hour or so getting myself cleaned. I washed my hair like three times, and scrubbed my entire body with this weird bar that smelled nice. [I don't know if soap existed at the time]
Once I was done I got out and right before me, on a rock, was a little robe. When did Momoko come in? Whatever, she's not the type of person who would sit down and watch you bathe. There was also a pair of sandals beside the rock.
I put on the robe, let my hair down so it can dry a bit, and got my clothes out of the little thing where my clothes were stored. Wow, they smelled horrible. No wonder Momoko shooed me away. I carried them along with my shoes, and walked back up to Rika's room.
I was very pleased with myself because I found her room in less than 15 minutes. I knocked first.
"Come in." A cold voice said.
I slid the door open. Momoko was sitting next to Rika, surprisingly looking serious. I put my hair up in a braid.
"Bankotsu I have something to tell you, but before you do put your stinky clothes in the laundry room." Momoko said with a serious look.
I went down the stairs and into the laundry room. It was a size that could be the lord's room. I tossed my clothes in a dirty pile and went up the stairs, back to Rika's room.
I walked in, and when I did, my robe fell to the ground. I was completely naked.
"Bankotsu if Rika were awake and saw you like this, you would be dead all over again." Momoko said with a vein completely visible on her forehead.
I put my robe back on and continued to stand there.
"Take a seat Bankotsu." She said without even looking at me.
I took a seat in front of her. "Um… What did you want to say to me?"
She sighed and glanced over at Rika who was still in bed. I would never think I'd see this, but Momoko looked sad. Just when I thought she was going to say something, she didn't. "Bankotsu, I thought you should know this." She looked… like a completely different person. It was quite shocking actually.
"Okay what did you want to say?"
"You see, Rika is different from other humans."
If she said different from other girls, yeah I would be okay, but humans? Where is she trying to go with this? "What do you mean different from other…humans?"
She looked up at me, totally confused, "Did I say humans? Oh I'm sorry I meant to say people." She laughed with her hand behind her head, "My bad."
This makes no sense. "Okay so, how is she different then?"
She had a serious face back on. "A couple days after Rika was born, I was carrying her around in a field of flowers."
That's um, great? I don't really care if you were walking around in a field of flowers to be honest.
"Well I sat down with her somewhere, and then after all of a sudden, a cloaked figure came out of nowhere. It was so dark; you couldn't tell where its shadow was. It had no face, everything about it was black. "
Was it Naraku? I had no idea so I had to ask, "Was it wearing a baboon costume thingy? Like it was wearing a mask of a baboon?"
I don't know where it came from, but Momoko whacked my head with some long wooden stick. With a pissed off expression, she yelled, "This is no time to be joking around!!!"
I wasn't joking around though, at all. I was one hundred percent serious. Well, at least I know that Naraku had nothing to do with this.
"As I was I saying, the cloaked figure enveloped me and Rika in complete darkness." She acted as if she had never hit me.
"Where was her dad?" It was a perfectly logical question to ask.
"He was making food in the house."
"Oh, well then carry on, carry on." I insisted.
She raised an eyebrow, and then continued, "Well after we were enveloped by the darkness, I passed out. When I woke up, Rika wasn't in my arms anymore. Of course as a mom, I started to panic, looking around everywhere. It turned out that the cloaked figure had her. I got up, and ran towards it, but after all of a sudden, I stopped moving. I was frozen on the spot."
Right when she said that I had a flashback from the other night with those five men. I was in mid air, ready to chop their heads off, but I froze in midair. My eyes widened.
Momoko continued, "The darkness that had enveloped us slowly started to fade away, and Rika was still sleeping in the cloaked figures hands. Totally oblivious as always," she paused to laugh, "Anyways, I was still unable to move, and it seemed that the shadowed figure was doing something to her. Little black lights started to swirl around her sleeping little self. The lights started to get closer and closer to her, until it entered her body. Rika started to glow black for a few seconds and then her normal skin color returned. The darkness has already disappeared by then, but the shadowed figure was still holding her, and I was still unable to move. The shadowed figure showed its teeth, it was smiling for some bizarre reason. Then I was able to move. I stood there, mouth agape. What I am now about to tell you is something I remember very well, it told me something."
"What did it tell you?" Of course I had to say that.
"Well, my hands started to move by themselves, as if they were ready to catch some one. Then Rika started to float in the air, and into my hands. She seemed perfectly fine to me. The shadowed figure slowly started to get swallowed by darkness. I asked it what it did to my daughter. It said that she has some other side to her now or something like that. I stood there, in shock, as the shadowed figure was swallowed by complete darkness. After that happened, I heard an explosion. I turned around to see that the village was inside a dome of complete darkness. Inside the dome I could perfectly see the shadowed figure inside, and the villagers were running around like crazy. They were trapped inside the dome. The dome let out little beams of darkness, and the shadowed figure let out dragons than were pitch black. The villagers were either killed by the beams, or the dragons ate them. Some of the villagers tried to escape on the water; the shadowed figure noticed this and the clear blue water became a purple-blackish color. Whirlpools started to form on the water, and some twisters formed as well. The villagers who were on the water jumped out of the boat, and they started to rot as soon as they got into the toxic water. I was on a hill, holding Rika, and then I saw it. Nao, Rika's father, was running around in the village. At that moment, all of the twisters, whirlpools, beams, and dragons disappeared. The remaining villagers, who stood there, terrified, were all shaking. And then, the ground, turned black. Each of the villagers became swallowed in the same thing I was, darkness. Everyone slowly started to enter the darkness, they screamed they cried, they squirmed around to free themselves, but nothing worked. They were all swallowed by the darkness, even Nao was, but before he was enveloped he saw me on the hill. The odd part was that he was smiling, happy because we were both okay. And then he was completely swallowed by the darkness. Everyone in the village was gone; they were swallowed by the darkness. The ground returned back to its normal color and texture, and the shadowed figure slowly floated back to the ground. The dome disappeared, the houses were ruined. The shadowed figure looked at me, and then it entered a portal, a portal that had nothing on the other side but darkness. The shadowed figure was gone, along with all the other stuff it brought along. Rika was still sleeping in my arms, the yellow flowers that were surrounding us, were now black."
The entire time Momoko was saying this, she kept a straight face on. Completely serious. She did not shed one tear.
"After that incident, Rika and I moved in to a new village, nothing odd happened to her. Rika started to walk and talk, when she asked me what happened to her father I said that he was killed in war. The truth was that he was killed, but by darkness. The damned shadowed figure killed everyone in the village. It all happened in what seemed to be in five minutes. If I am correct that is faster than it takes you and your mercenary idio—band to kill one village, correct?"
"Yes…" Come to think of it, she was right. It would at least take The Band of Seven thirty minutes to slaughter one village if it were small, yet how can a shadowy dude; who's by himself, kill an entire village by himself? In five minutes?
She laughed. "That shadowed figure was pure evil, I haven't seen it ever since. Sometimes I ask people if they have ever seen a shadowed figure before, and they all say no. Sometimes they show me scrolls of the shadowed figure, and they say that it is the god of darkness or something. There was even a drawing of t, and it looked exactly like when I saw it."
"What did the scroll say?"
"Well other than being the god of darkness, it said that it only shows every thousand years. Wait, or was it one-hundred thousand years…?" She trailed off for a bit, looking into space for a couple of seconds. "Ah whatever it said thousand years. It had a thousand that, I am sure of." She shrugged.
"So what does this have to do with Rika being different?" I queried changing position.
Momoko's eyes, for the first time ever since she started talking, started getting watery. She looked at Rika who is of course, sleeping. "You see, Rika's cursed."
Rika started to move in her sleep. "Nyuu…." She started mumbling in her sleep. She sounded so adorable.
"Bankotsu don't tell her this. I'll explain more to you later, once I make dinner." She got up and left the room.
I was in so much shock, that I forgot I was even hungry.
Chapter 14: /end
Oooh this was a very… um… different chapter…? Yeah I know you guys are prob all 'wtf' but once I get to a certain part of the story, I'll tell you why I had to put that there. Yeah anyways if there are some parts that didn't really make sense to, tell me and I'll explain it.
Okay next chapter preview: [oh it Momoko and Ban who are talking btw]
"Well you should. Trust me, things well get weirder later on." She got up and went over to the container in which all of the sake was in.
"What are you talking about?" I questioned as I watched her take a seat.
"You'll see." She took a sip.
"Ah, now you can predict the future?" I said in disbelief.
"Well let's just say I know people."
I raised an eyebrow, "Like who?"
"People. Simple as that."
You guys are probably all like 'wtf' well you'll see what they're talking about in Chapter 15: Emotions/感情
Please comment and review! :D