WARNING: Spoilers! If you don't know who Kenji is, please read at your own risk!
WITH DUE CREDIT: This fic was loosely spun off from two fics - "Over the Sting" by sasori and "Chronicles of a Rurouni", one of my earlier fics.
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Yesterday's Shadow is Tomorrow's Twilight
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Chapter 57: Underground Aftermath
By the time Kenji found his way through the labyrinth to his designated room, it was already nearly sunset.
The orange glow of the resplendant rays spread themselves comfortably across the floor of the cannon tower, via the long strip of bunker window that had been roughly carved out from the walls, likely for ventilation. Kenji wheezed, sighing in relief that the sun was still up. It was not his fault that his sense of direction was as powerful as a monkey on opium.
He stepped cautiously into the room, not too surprised to see an array of bodies sprawled all across the area of the floor. He scrutinised the room again, carefully. True to his gut instinct, he found Saitou meandering somewhere near a shadowy corner of the room, the only indication of his presence being the butt of his lit cigarette and the tendril of slow, white smoke.
Kenji hopped over, finding some sort of mischievous delight stirring from within when Saitou raised an inquiring eyebrow at him. "Yo!" He greeted, sounding faux and happy. "I'm here to guide you down the right path!"
Saitou stared at him.
"Enishi's found out that this room is just a decoy," the boy explained coolly. "There's another layer beyond the surface that we need to dig to find. According to him/that/ one's the /real/ danger and we should disable it as soon as possible!" He almost heaved a fist into the air for dramatic effect.
Saitou flicked his cigarette, which had burnt to the butt in the while Kenji was speaking, away. As it fell to the ground, Kenji noticed that there were already quite a number of other burnt-out butts strewn across the floor near Saitou's feet. As the pieces slowly clicked, Saitou stepped forward and addressed him.
"Well?" The officer loomed over the boy. "What 'right path' will you be guiding me down in, then?"
Kenji held Saitou's glare firmly. He then looked at the cigarette butts that were already on the ground, before lifting his head up to meet Saitou in the eye again. "You were waiting for someone to come," he mumbled, hardly able to believe what he was saying. "You knew."
Saitou's only response was to smirk widely.
"But why didn't you go on ahead first?" Kenji continued to mull aloud. "You can't possibly be waiting for someone to /accompany/ you there, huh?"
This time, Saitou frowned hard at the youth. Turning around without responding, he walked further into the darkness.
Kenji was instantly offended, but he did not let it show on his facade. Instead, he calmly followed the man, knowing that he was a friend - for now, and could be trusted in the enemy's lair.
True to his assumptions, they eventually walked through a dark passageway, and into a well-lit and well-renovated doorway room of sorts. Saitou jerked a thumb at Kenji, causing him to pause from staring in awe at some of expensive-looking Chinese tiles that were decorating the walls. He glanced in the direction Saitou was pointing, finding himself staring at yet another wall with intricate designs.
Just as he was about to protest, however, he noticed that there was something about a small portion of the wall that did not seem quite right. Walking closer, he saw that it was just a hidden door, well camouflaged with fancy tiles and firm cement. "A hidden door!" He exclaimed excitedly. Saitou snorted.
"I'm glad you've got that all figured out," the police chief stated stonily. "And since you're apparently here to help me get to the next room, why don't you take this opportunity to demonstrate your far-reaching skills and knowledge already?" From somewhere behind, he pulled out another stick of cigarette. He put it in his mouth and allowed it to dangle, while Kenji stared incredulously at him. "Hurry up, boy, I haven't got all day."
Kenji allowed himself a second of pause for thought. "Enishi never told us there was a door we needed to open," he walked closer to the hidden door and felt around it, feeling the lines that marked it as a door apart from the rest of the wall, yet not knowing what to do to open it. "There are no knobs... no openings at all," the boy frowned. "Have you tried knocking it down yet?"
Saitou lifted something up from beside him. It was his sword. Pulling it quickly out from the sheath, he flung the object - still a blur - at Kenji, who caught it by its hilt. As he lowered the weapon to stare at it, he was shocked to see that the sword had been broken cleanly into half, hairline cracks going downwards from it's point of fracture. When he looked at Saitou for an explanation, the man simply shrugged. "It broke on immediate contact. This wall isn't something you want to mess around with."
Kenji looked at the broken sword. And agreed wholeheartedly. "But there aren't any knobs or openings on this thing at all," Kenji resorted to putting an ear on the door, hearing the hollow room that was behind it. He knocked experimentally on an ornate green tile that stood out among the rest of the reddish brown ones. "How should we go about...WOAH!" Kenji managed to leap away just in time before a barrage of arrows impaled themselves into the ground where he had been standing on. Staring at the arrows for a tensed moment, he eventually shot up to look at Saitou. "You knew about that too," he stated.
Saitou shrugged. "Something as silly as a trap like that couldn't have possibly scratched you, even if they wanted to."
Kenji was caught between wanting to throttle Saitou for his callousness, and wanting to dance around the room in joy at the subtle praise. Eventually suppressing both urges, he looked to the ground and sighed. "Well if Soujirou was here, he could be of great help with that Shukuchi thing of his. Unfortunately..."
"Unfortunately he is not, and even if he is, he would like to remind the audience once again that the Shukuchi is /not/ supposed to be used as some sort of express demolition service?"
Kenji knew that voice, no matter how far the speaker was or how soft he had been speaking. He turned around to the source of the sound, lips already curling up in a triumphant grin.
From beyond the same darkness he and Saitou had taken to arrive here, a blur of silver darted into the room first, coming to a halt just before Kenji's feet. Not two seconds after that, the sound of straw sandles shuffling against gravel could be heard.
Eventually, Soujirou walked partly into the room, standing just at the threshold between the light and darkness, smiling like he always was. "Soujirou!" Kenji exclaimed, relief flooding over him for some reason. "Wow! How did you manage to find your way here?"
Soujirou gestured lightly at the fox. "I had the help of a little divine intervention!" He replied, words joking but tone serious. The fox yipped cheerfully in agreement, although Kenji eyed them both suspiciously. Soujirou then turned his head and smiled at Saitou, as if noticing him there for the first time. "Hello, Saitou-san!"
The officer, who had been scrutinising Soujirou since his appearance, chewed thoughtfully on his cigarette. "You smell like you just swam through a sea of bloody bodies," he commented offhandedly. "What happened?"
The wanderer took a decisive step from the shadows into the light. It was a step that gave both Kenji and Saitou a shock. Indeed, for Saitou had been right. Not only did Soujirou reek of blood, he was also covered from top to toe with a rather impressive amount of said fluid. He held onto something long and bulky - wrapped around and around with a large piece of cloth that was scarlet amidst peeks of blue. "Since when did you care whether I smelled like blood or flowers, Saitou-san?" With one last step, he was completely in the light.
Kenji and Saitou could not help but stare further.
Neither, though, found their voices to question the boyish looking wanderer about his state of disarray, until Soujirou reached the hidden door that Kenji had been trying to open. "Soujirou..." Kenji was the first to speak, having pondered through all possible scenarios in his head and finding none acceptable. "...what happened... to your hair...?"
Soujirou, who had been busy prying something out from the spine of a strange-looking book in his hands, turned around to face Kenji with a pleasant smile. Instead of his usually well-arranged ponytail, his hair was now loose and flying about, framing his face. That alone was nothing to be concerned about. The fact that his hair was now very much /shorter/ than its usual length, though, certainly drew more attention than it ought to be commanding.
After that smile, though, Soujirou said nothing - for he had finally won the struggle against the piece of paper that was stuck in the spine of the book, tugging it out and looking at what had been scribbled on it.
From the sidelines, Saitou removed his untouched cigarette and dropped it to the ground, stepping on it as if it were a smouldering butt, using his stmp to call to attention everybody in the room. "Well, Tenken no Soujirou?" He said. "Are you going to Shukuchi this door down as well?"
"Of course not, Saitou-san," Soujirou said cheerily. His eyes were still upon the piece of paper. He said nothing else, until he was apparently done with it. "There are more civil ways of opening doors than tearing them down." As he was speaking, he reached into the bundle of reddish blue cloth he was holding beside him, and withdrew a longsword, holding it up against the door.
And for the third time since Soujirou appeared, Kenji and Saitou stared - very hard, at him.
This time, though, they were staring more at the sword than his person.
"Umm... ugh..." Kenji stuttered, trying to find the right words to say. "I don't think it's going to work, Soujirou... the old guy over there tried it already, and he just ended getting his sword broken into bits and pieces. I really don't think it's going to make any difference..." He stared hard at the sword in Soujirou's hand again. "...even if it /is/ Enishi's sword."
"Of course, Himura-san, the question would be - whether or not Saitou-san has used the sword in the right way, in the first place!" The cheeriness continued to be with Soujirou. He stepped back slightly, so that he was a distance away from the wall. With amazing speed and accuracy, he began to thrust the long sword out towards the wall, depressing a series of tiles along it.
There was immediately a mechanical click from somewhere above them, followed by a long, creaking groan of rusty wheels turning against one another. Soujirou relaxed, while his two companions simply gaped at the sight. They had obviously tried many times to depress the tiles on the door, but had failed to do anything but trigger one hidden trap or another. And this, Soujirou solved with a mere look at a piece of parched paper he tugged out from an equally dirty looking book. Wonders will never cease.
Soujirou continued to smile, ignoring the intense scrutiny of Saitou. "Himura-san," he eventually said, amidst the groaning and creaking of the wheels. Kenji glanced upwards at him. "I don't suppose you keep a few tantou handy with you?"
Kenji felt it would be wise to simply reply and not wonder about the absurdity of the question. "I don't bring short swords around," he confirmed Soujirou's somewhat rhetorical question, "but I still have one kunai left from that bridge fiasco." He withdrew it from his sleeve pocket and flung it into the air, catching it by the hook as it fell and twirling it around his index finger. "You need it?" He held it out for Soujirou.
"Not really," Soujirou replied, while the sounds of mechanical wheels continued to grind in the background. Slowly, but surely, the door that was embedded in the fancy wall which Soujirou had been stabbing on just now began to move downwards, bit by bit. Finally, it completely disappeared into the ground, leaving behind a huge, gaping hole of darkness that laid beyond the thick wall. Once it the door finished moving and all was suddenly hush and quiet again, Soujirou continued, "How good are you with the kunai, Himura-san?"
"Good?" Kenji raised an eyebrow. He stared at Soujirou. "Oba-san's told me a few things about it here and there, but I've never really gotten a chance to hold one properly until today, so..."
"Well, whatever it is," Soujirou pointed into the darkness. "You only have one shot to finish this off."
"One shot?" Kenji blinked at Soujirou. Saitou stared at the both of them with an aura of curiosity and disapproval. "One shot to finish what off?"
"The cannons, of course!" Soujirou smiled. But the more he smiled, the more Kenji felt uncomfortable.
"Aren't we going to dash in and destroy the cannons like we did with the other room?" Kenji decided to simply get into the mood of the situation and ignore Soujirou's plasticity for now.
"Well, sure!" Soujirou pointed at the darkness. "If you can get in, you're most welcomed to do that!"
"Huuh," Kenji walked forward, tossing his head over his shoulder slightly to speak while he sauntered. "It's just an empty space! What's there to be-OOF!" The redhead slammed directly into the black wall that occupied the space behind the newly opened door. He fell clumsily onto his backside, holding his face and cursing up a storm.
"I warned you!" He heard Soujirou chirp from behind him, and was immediately angrier. Scrambling to his feet, he removed his palm from his face and pointed at the dark wall, for the lack of a better thing to vent his frustration on.
"Why is there a /wall/ here!" Kenji screeched. "How the hell are we going to be able to get through at this rate!" He pulled the kodachi Aoshi had given him out of its sheath. "Oh, heck with it all! This wall has some guts! Now I'm pissed! I'll hack you down nice and good, you hear?" He started to raise his sword against the darkness. "When I'm done with you, you'll regret you ever...!"
It crept into the room through the dark walls as a minor shaft of light at first. Before long, however, it was filling the room with a hue of intense orange, so strong, Kenji had to stop in his tirade and shield his eyes from the direct onslaught of the fiery sunset. "Oh my," he distinctly heard Soujirou say in the background, while he was still wondering where the light had come from. "It's sunset already?"
"Hmph," Saitou chimed in. "Looks like there's a need to relook at our plans for this evening." He stepped forward, looking evenly at the smiling Soujirou. "Are you going to put that sword you stole from the other guy to any good use?" He noted that the wanderer flinched slightly at his words, but pressed on, "If not, you could let me have it. You won't see the wall still standing within the next minute--"
"No," Soujirou's voice, clear and curt, cut Saitou short. He turned his head slightly to smile at the police chief, who frowned further at the predatory glint in Soujirou's eye. Without explaining himself, Soujirou crossed the room and stood beside Kenji.
"Himura-san," Soujirou said, "there is actually a thin line of open space in this dark area which can only be seen when the sun sets and light shines through it to this door. The wall is approximately twenty-five metres thick. While is it possible for us to eventually demolish it, we won't make it in time to disable the mechanism." He pointed at the tiny beam of light that was shining through the wall onto the floor.
"The space is not very big. It's barely about half a palm space wide. Himura-san, we need you to fling the kunai with absolute accuracy into the space, and right at the heart of the mechanism, before the sun sets entirely. The major cannon here is set to automatically trigger when the last vestiges of solar energy runs out. Before that happens, we have to break it." He paused. "Since it's already sunset, we don't have much time. Take aim and shoot, Himura-san," Soujirou pointed through the shaft, at the blinding source of the light that was pouring in the room. "Where the light is coming in from, that is where the mechanism also is."
"Wa...wait!" Kenji protested slightly. "I... I've never really handled kunai before so I don't know if I can hit a target that's so far away with one shot..."
"Whine some more and the sun will completely set, boy," Saitou was chewing on yet another cigarette butt, and he fingered it as if he would finger a real one, one that was burning away at the edge. "I'll admit the Oniwabanshuu operate effectively and efficiently, but against a major cannon shot, I certainly don't think any of them can come up with a way to deal with it - whether they were properly warned or not."
"But I-..."
"Himura-san," Soujirou put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. He smiled at the frantic boy, and this was the liveliest of smiles Kenji had seen Soujirou don since his entrance into the scene. "Don't worry about missing, and just do it." He pointed at the light on the floor, which was stretching longer and longer, growing dimmer and dimmer, an indication that the sun would disappear in a brief moment.
"How can I not worry!" Kenji gulped. "It's not like I'm fishing for goldfish at summer festival, hello! How can I not--"
"Hey," Saitou suddenly said. "The light's going out."
"Indeed it is," Soujirou agreed.
"AARGH!" Kenji screamed. He shoved Soujirou out of the way and stood against the shaft through the wall, facing it firmly. With the kunai in his hand, he took aim. He could see clearly where the mechanism was, as well as the boundaries of the wall that made a straight path towards it. As the sun slowly dipped, he flung the kunai with top speed at his target. Everything Misao said and all the times he had observed her practicing came flooding back to his mind, filling his senses. Guided by his pure instincts, Kenji did not realise that the kunai he had thrown hit the target dead-on, until Soujirou's bubbly voice snapped him out of his stupor.
"You did it, Himura-san!" Soujirou cheered. "You got it right on!"
"He did," Saitou agreed. "But not hard enough," the older man pointed down the shaft, where the glint of sun against the kunai greeted them, forcing them to blink or look slightly away. As the last ray of sunset moved away, the entire area suddenly rumbled and growled with new activity. The floor shook and the sounds of grinding wheels flooded the entire area once again.
"Sounds like another door is opening somewhere," Saitou remarked, glancing about him warily. As if on cue, the floor beneath them began to tremble and rock loudly.
"That's the sound of the mechanism swinging to action," Soujirou was still smiling. He walked backwards slightly and collected the kodachi, which had fallen onto the ground when Kenji smacked against the wall. "Himura-san, whose sword is this?" He asked.
"Oji-san's," was the harried reply. "Hey, what do we do now?" He asked, as the ceiling began to break up and shower tiny bits of rock and sand on the trio. "Sounds like this whole place is going to disintegrate if we don't get out of it quickly!"
"Please help me apologise to Shinomori-san," Soujirou mumbled, then with one quick movement which Kenji could not see, snapped the kodachi cleanly into half. Handing the broken blade out to Kenji, he instructed, "The mechanism is slightly spoilt, but it won't stop. You need to jam the wheel and stop it from churning entirely. Aim this blade at the kunai that's already stuck between the wheels there. If you jam it hard enough, the whole process will be stopped, and no shot will be fired." He put a hand on Kenji's shoulder and pat him warmly, before the boy could protest again.
"You can do it, Himura-san." He said, softly, but clearly. "You possess something that your father never did in his lifetime." He turned Kenji by the shoulders so that the boy faced the shaft instead of gaped at him. "You control your own future, Himura Kenji, tainted by nothing. Whether the shadows of yesterday bring you to a better twilight tomorrow," he pushed Kenji slightly, "you have to decide. And you can fight for it. But right now," his tone become slightly more serious, "...you /have/ to fight for it."
"I know what to do," Kenji spoke up, without intending to. He held the thin blade between his two fingers, and crept into a battou-jutsu stance. Soujirou smiled, and retreated. Saitou was already hidden in the shadows. All the events that had happened to him since his departure from the Tokyo dojo came back to him, helping him realise that Soujirou had indeed spoken the truth. Why had he even been so against the idea of him being like his father anyway? Why was he envious? Why was he jealous? There were things that his father had that he would never have, and there were things he had that his father would never have. But the things that both his father and himself had - those were rare, far and few between.
He realised that he was now really very proud of it.
In the next moment after his thoughts were sorted out, he flung the blade in the same direction he had thrown the kunai before it. This time, the blade was faster, and hit the kunai through the hilt, embedding itself into the wall behind the wheel. The entire mechanism groaned as if in pain, and the shaking escalated for a while.
As quickly as it came, however, the tremors died down. The ceiling stopped raining pebbles and the floor stopped shivering. The wheel creaked one last time in protest, then relaxed into a state of inactivity.
"Well done, Himura-san," Soujirou smiled at Kenji. "I knew I could count on you. Now then," he picked up the sheath of the kodachi and twirled it around for a while, before breaking it into two as well. Quickly, he sent the two halves down the shaft as well, making them hit on the blade and kunai that were already there, hammering the things deeper into the walls. "That should hold it until help arrives." He turned to Kenji, who was gaping. "You really are a combat genius, Himura-san!"
"You could have thrown the kunai and blade yourself!" Kenji immediately wailed, pointing a finger accusingly at the leisurely wanderer. "Why did you let me do it! I must have lost at least a quarter of my life through that stress, you brainless wanderer!"
Unfazed, Soujirou remained smiling. "I certainly could have," he agreed, "but I think Yukishiro-san would have preferred if you had done it instead."
To caught up in the aftermath of his stress to notice the underlying meaning of Soujirou's words, Kenji snorted loudly. "Since when did Enishi care if I did anything useful or not?" He paused. "Where is he anyway?"
"He cares a lot more than he shows, Himura-san," was Soujirou's vague reply to Kenji's first question. The second one went entirely ignored. Turning to Saitou, the wanderer brandished the book he had gotten from Ming. "I would explain how I suddenly got so familiar with mafia property, but I think it would be better if you read about it from the source itself, Saitou-san." He stepped forward and placed the book into Saitou's hands. "Please take good care of it," were his last, wistful words, before he smiled and stepped - as quietly as he came, back into the shadows of the by now bedarkened room.
"Sou...-" Kenji was about to call him back, when the steady pattering of footsteps interrupted his intention. The sounds were coming from the tunnel they had walked to arrive at this room, so he heightened his senses and got into a ready position, so he could attack anyone who dared approach. Saitou stretched his hand out before the boy, however, and this caused him to snap out of his concentration.
"Relax," the police chief muttered. "It's just the police reinforcement team." True to his words, a few uniform-clad policemen soon poured into the room, saluting Saitou and awaiting his further instructions. "The boy is working under me on a personal basis, so I give him no guarantee that he will be free of police pursue. It would have been most suspicious for one of the most wanted man of Japan to be standing in the core of a overseas mafia underground headquarters, so he did the wise thing by running before anyone sees him." He paused to throw the chewed out cigarette on the ground, stepping on it and putting a fresh new stick into his mouth.
"Hey, half-man," he shifted the topic of conversation immediately, addressing the scythe-wielding police spy who had just stepped into the room as well. Pointing to the dark wall behind him, he said, "Break down this wall. We need to disable the mechanism inside before it's too late."
Kamatari, who had been staring at the scene with great interest, now looked at Saitou and grinned. "Leave it to me!"
Nobody noticed, as Kenji frowned - as if with sudden realisation, and vanished into the shadows as well, slipping out of the room - unseen and unheard.
The fox followed. But nobody saw as well.
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... to be continued
1/4/05
tougenkyou . net / xd
in most feudal eastern cultures - most noticeably japan, the cutting of one's long hair short is generally considered taboo for both males and females. it was considered a silent declaration that something traumatic had happened. the first thing a friend would most likely remark is "what happened", instead of "nice new haircut". this is true even today, although people are more subtle about it now. by late meiji japan this kind of symbolism has been watered down somewhat - by then people cut their hair for convenience's sake. nowadays almost exclusively only girls cut their long hair short out of the blue - usually to protest their boyfriends for dumping them. let's just go along with the flow here. XD