Fox-Faced Conceit

Orochi had been stunned into silence.

He had no words left to fill it. Even Doku's charm seemed to have failed him, Kurayami's quips were empty and Mizu's jokes were hollow. Kyofu's babble had stilled. And three words rang throughout their mind. 'I meant it.'

Everything? She meant everything?

Orochi tried to shake off the sensation, to ignore it, to suppress the alien notion of content that rose in his body. But he failed. It seemed bizarre, the strangest idea that without a shadow of doubt they all felt it. They may have individual thoughts, but they only had a single organ capable of being called a heart.

A cluster of light formed in the sky, penetrating through the layers of cursed fog and interrupting his thoughts. They all turned to glare into the night sky, where the stars had begun to gather and cluster into tight formation. It was unnatural, for sure, but not the work of the Brush God's, nor the work of Amaterasu herself. It drew tighter, and began to solidify, forming an obscure multi-limbed shape in the heavens.

He sighed. He knew exactly who it was.

"Enter."

The shape grew tighter, forming a fox. A fox with nine tails and a smug leer fixed firmly upon its face. Ninestrike was, as always, perched precariously on his back. He wondered exactly why Ninetails had picked that precise moment to emerge into eastern Nippon, then suspected he knew the answer. The fox wanted to catch him off guard.

"Lord Orochi."

He spoke with a deeper accent, marked with a vulpine undercurrent and the slightest urban twitch at the end of his words. He could call himself a Lord of Darkness all he wanted, but he could never escape his roots.

"I see you have been keeping yourself most busy."

It was both a statement and a thinly veiled threat, a sneer, daring him to contradict.

"Lord Ninetails, don't you have other things to do? Women to impersonate? Demons to enslave?" It was Kasai who answered, as usual, not even trying to keep the biting sarcasm out of his voice.

Ninetails replied with a withering smile. "Naturally. I have my eye on one right now."

Orochi stiffened. He tried to shake it off, to cover it up. Ninetails noticed, and his smirk simply grew broader and nastier. He cursed himself for his sign of weakness, in particular for displaying it in front of Ninetails, of all demons.

"You always had a weakness for them Orochi. But this? Won't Yami like to hear of this."

At the mention of Yami's name, he turned to glare at his ally, baring his tusks. The fox always brought up Yami, wielding his Master's name like a shield, or rather more a weapon. But then he had always been subservient to Yami, dependent on his powers to survive. Ever since he had lain paws on the fox rods he had been addicted to the power that Darkness held. And it was for that addiction he gave Yami his soul.

"Keeping the girl as a pet! Thinking that the rest of us would never find out!"

"I have never had any doubts."

The very way by which he had summoned her had ensured that. Lechku and Nechku were hollow, mechanisms with demons pinned to the clockwork, merely vessels for Yami's hand to work through. It remained the sole reason he continued to ally himself so tightly with Ninetails. Even if the fox was little better than a vessel himself.

"I don't wish to fight you, not as Amaterasu's rebirth draws towards us." His tone grew serious, low and urgent. "It's only a matter of time. She will find us. Your curse will soon be under threat, your kingdom falling into the hands of the Brush Gods. You are always the first of us. We should no longer stand for it. Amaterasu may be a Goddess, but we are the Lords of this land! And with Yami as our Master..."

"Your Master." Orochi wanted there to be no qualms with where he stood.

Ninetails' head twitched in surprise, but he quickly recovered with a snide hiss and a hushed sneer. "Orochi, you always were clinging to the delusion that you were worth something beyond what Yami provides, beyond those Yami protects. Please tell me you are not so conceited as to think you are close to independence this time?"

"Why else would I have her?" It was a lie, a blatant lie. And for the first time in his entire existence, it was a lie that seemed coarse and unnecessary. But he couldn't prevent it from escaping his lips one word at a time. "She is a vessel, nothing more."

He hoped that Ninetails would leave the matter alone, that he would take no further interest in the matter of the girl. His hopes were mislead.

"A vessel that you show your favour to, a vessel that you protect and guard, as if, don't get me wrong, she were even worth something. Now, to me Orochi, that doesn't sound like a Master and a slave, but more like a friend, or even, a lover?"

It was intended to provoke, aimed deliberately and with a callous precision only Ninetails was capable of. Ninetails shook his head, and gave a low, ominous laugh.

"You always did think that you were better than the rest of us. But you're as much of a Lord as the rest of us. You've allowed yourself to grow weak Orochi, clouded against what Yami..."

"Leave, Tsukai."

At the sound of his former name, the fox spat. Each of his nine tails wriggled in disgust, bearing upwards like claws. He couldn't escape it though; it still clung to him along with the scent of old fox, beneath the layers of women and perfume. He was still the same old, battle-weary fox that had wandered into Yami's hand willingly, and stayed there ever since. Nothing could change that, not all of his delusions of grandeur, his obsession with the Brush Gods and his possession of priestesses and monks. He was no deity, no matter how much he tried to make himself so. He was simply an old fox, and that, whether he liked it or not, was never going to change.

"Remember this, Orochi, as Tsumugari splits you from every head to every tail, remember that you are just one of us, you always will be one of us." His voice had turned into a low, sly hiss. "And the girl, she is worth nothing to everyone but you."

He left then, disappearing back into the stars, leaving Orochi once again alone with his thoughts.