First to Suffer
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Summary:
Humanity's most ancient ancestors return. Among them death-scuttles Kagemaro, the demon spirit of one of Kamigawa's evilest men.
Up to their waists in the black water of the swamp, Shiro and six other lowlifes formerly in the employ of the criminal overlord Boss Uramon directed their blades toward any sound any of them heard while fighting drowning in Numai's sludge. Unhired by Uramon's assassination, their drudgery for less shabby compensation saw the lot sent to retrieve the heads of an ogre and his force of bandits, leading Shiro's to what could only be described as the remains of a battlefield.
Nauseated pauses over the mutilated corpses revealed the dead had been stabbed, sliced, gouged, chopped, skinned, scalped, and/or choked with an assortment of weapons and the grossest cruelty. In fact, if it weren't for the fear and surprise cloying and constricting the gang's throats like the thick purple mist around them, they'd praise the creativity with which the attacker butchered his kills.
Slaying ogres required trained, unintimidated hands.
Conveniently, Kagemaro had thousands of generations of skill perfecting his art, and possessed a multitude of hands to dirty.
History stated he was the first to suffer, but that was a matter of perspective. If he suffered, Kagemaro only suffered from a scarcity of victims.
Because he was so proficient at killing them.
Squatting on a fungal throne one giant lurch from the carnage was the oni: The kami of the first human so evil his spirit transfigured into a demon. A disgusting god who took the physical form of a heap of human flesh. Fat close to the "back," muscular close to the "front," and surrounded by organlike supernatural energy objects.
Below the discernibly male torso, Kagemaro displayed misplaced nipples and a long furry loincloth hanging off a metal knocker. His aged, chalk-white face was crowned with large, veined horns in the center of a bluish-black orb of uncertain material, minus a neck.
Kagemaro's hands were also legs, some positioned disturbingly backward, and some so tiny it was sickening they lifted his body, swollen with ancient power.
In each of his independently moving limbs, he carried a different instrument of demise. Everything from a sword, to a dagger, to a kyoketsu-shoge, to a whip, to rope for strangulation.
Shiro could imagine a variable number of dreaded fates he rather suffer than dying here to this corrupt master of death magic. And that included his collaborators asking, "Are you on FIRE?"
They had neither the wisdom nor the resources to outwit the wicked ancestor.
The demon stared at Shiro through his third slit eye. Kagemaro's clutch was a dark enchantment. Shiro felt the oxygen escaping his mouth and ears, and the desire for fresh air became so desperate he actually dropped his katana and fled despite his deepening blindness.
Yet the toxic deluge was too suffocating. The vapour Kagemaro breathed infested their breaths, and Shiro only looked back once more to see his comrades fallen behind him before he and his associates joined Kagemaro's epic torment.