No shade on any of the people groups mentioned in this chapter. It is all for the sake of character-building.
It was supposed that Tetsuo Morinaga intended for there to be a bloodless coup in the days when his daughter was still alive. He had no right to make her choose sides and he didn't want to. Kusakabe and his tribe knew this just as well. That was why despite her archaic skill, her unwarlike temperance, her relative empathy towards demonkind for she was orphaned not by them but by human causes, they gave her the task of defeating Lower Moon One when they tracked it, rather than Kanae Kochou who was privately but widely reputed to be more capable.
A Hashira now, Tetsuo Morinaga would do all in his power to keep his daughter in the bubble and away from fighting of anyone's making. If anything, a temporary distraction from his war.
One week later, when Yobusake Iesato Hirobumi Ittōsai was to face his own death packed down the barrel of a gun, he was to realise that this plan had failed and fallen to machinations not of he nor Kusakabe's foreseeable making, and that their ends had come at the whims of a third party. Nevertheless, that would be one realisation too late.
Tetsuo Morinaga shot Nen Kusakabe in the face and memories of a life not well loved, all forty years of it, drooled down the stage in chunks of eye and nose. His affiliate incendiaries waited for the reaction – the few who ran, they let run – and for those who stayed in shock to eventually condemn Morinaga, they rose from their seats with their guns and they fired upon them.
Tsubone Endou only stood up from over her student when she heard the fighting start. There was the rushing and crying of men on the stairs and she closed the door without locking and took out the pistol. She cocked it and stood still for a moment. The men were now in the hallway. They tried to whisper but Tsubone could hear: "Let's wait for her." She got behind the wall with Giyuu and opened the door with a rod, replied to in turn with a volley, and when that ran out she turned into the hall and shot one guy in the leg and the other in the gut. They wouldn't die but they wouldn't get up.
"You ever seen a man get shot before, Giyuu?" she asked.
To him it seemed she had switched states of mind instantly. He replied: "…No."
"You don't have to. Keep your head down!"
Other than those two, there was little to resist them on the way outside. Tsubone wondered if that was their fortune or Morinaga's orders. They were behind the complex now, and they navigated the backwall and ducked in the cover of a pile of timber bars and looked into the auditorium.
There were less dead than they expected. Morinaga's men were there and firing, but at the walls and the corners, where it was presumed the others hid. Morinaga and the rest of the Hashira had vanished. Kanae and Shinobu too. But most of all, she looked to confirm their choice of weapon: indeed, the venerable firearm, what could kill a Hashira in two aimed strokes of the trigger, and do what so many demons could not.
"Tsubone!"
Tsubone turned around and saw Shinjuro Rengoku. He was bent over the same as her, still unshaven and dirty, holding the sword with an incompetence that six years of dishonourable retirement had required, and there was anxiety in the way he kept his jaw.
"You've seen my Tsuguko?" she asked.
"N-no. I…"
"And where's Tetsuo?"
"I-I don't know."
Then, he thrust his sword between him and Tsubone asked with as much shaking courage that he could whether she was with Morinaga or Ubuyashiki. Tsubone did not vindicate him for asking, either, because it was not an impossible question.
"…I don't know," she replied. "Ubuyashiki…"
Shinjuro was relieved halfway, and he lowered the sword. Tsubone asked the same of him.
"I…" He hesitated. "I can't say."
Neutral? Regardless, Tsubone knew Shinjuro was loyal to her, withstanding not a little more than Morinaga. She held his sleeve and tugged on it but he spoke before her.
"They shot Himejima!" he said. The nerves had taken his voice again. "H-he's with Jurou and I don't know where Yoneda is… and I came to find you to h-help, and…"
She would've told him to be a man, but where would that put her? Tsubone turned objectives and pushed Giyuu onto Shinjuro and ordered him to act as escort for her student out of here. If he would not do anything he would do this, and Shinjuro must have understood that instinct. He didn't rebuke, but asked after her when she was about to go: "And what about you?!"
Tsubone saw no reason to answer, because she took power in being wordless. She went on her way to find Tetsuo Morinaga.
Yoneda Magase, at the side of his men, overlooked the courtyard where the fighting had moved since, and he saw all the gunning and all the battling and the hate, and he heard the pleads for orders from younger boys by him, but he felt no amount of remorse for his inevitable insolence and he pointed his gun to the crowd.
"You ever seen a man get shot before?" he asked the others. They ignored him. They went on about the dead men, the wounded, the stragglers, the assailants, the traitors, Tetsuo Morinaga, Nen Kusakabe, and him. He fired and they were silenced.
"Our blood's gluier than a demon's," he went on. "It's 'cause they don't smoke and they're always healthy. It's 'cause they need it to be thin for their blood demon arts to work."
Magase's sergeant, reputable for his diligence in the name of Ubuyashiki, put a hand on his shoulder and explained everything that had already been explained to him. He said the situation was too urgent, even if he had seen his commander's indolent response and made some sort of suspicion when he disappeared the same night Tsubone Endou's home was to be overtaken in a bonfire of bullets. Again he asked for orders, and Magase replied this:
"We will follow Morinaga."
They shot the sergeant in the back with the other men there on Ubuyashiki's side, then it was consolidated. Yoneda Magase was the second Hashira to depart from the holy consecration of Ubuyashiki Kanata. He would ensure the dissidence of normal routine.
Though in time the firefields of Seventeen Heiseigamaha would calm. Below a pile of the dead, the amnesiac slayer Numachi pushed over a limp arm and stood up and saw before the cornrows of taken life that had since sprouted in the Hero's Auditorium, and she was noticed. A man put a gun on her and asked how she still lived. He said that he shot her, and she replied that he must have missed, and this agitated him and he nearly did the trigger, before in a movement defying her condition, Numachi locked a fist over his jaw and he went to the floor and she took the rifle in her hand and killed him instead.
Numachi stood over the body a while, one more of many, before she heard his compatriots coming and she decided to find her juniors.
Kanae and Shinobu Kochou, on other hands, hardly knew nor wondered about the sporadic ping of the guns, because they had been removed so far from the auditorium grounds they were unable to recognise it as such, and now they sat in huddling wait between the detachment of men who were standing guard, and not so much guarding them.
"It's started," one man said to another.
"Mmm-hmm."
He turned and fixed Kanae with a fatal expression. He asked: "What about them?"
"They're Tsubone's," the other replied. "We can't do anything. Magase told us. Despite… the other day…"
"But Magase's not here and Magase wouldn't know any better than us."
Naturally, this talk intrigued Kanae, and she had more than a slight idea of what it revolved around. However Shinobu had her bound. Then she saw the men stand to salute and a man came to light in the arcaded courtyard and it was the Hashira Yokota Ryo.
"And what're you doing here?" he asked.
"Boss's orders to watch them."
"And who is boss?"
Magase, one replied. Morinaga, said the other. Yokota frowned and he looked at Kanae and he nodded. He asked if she knew what was happening, and he was surprised to learn that she did not. So he told her, in a low and softer way for Shinobu's ears too.
"We are having a turnover. Do not get in our way."
Yokota Ryo was the third Hashira to depart from the holy consecration of Ubuyashiki Kanata. He would ensure a moderate revolution where he could ensure it and he ordered the men to let the children go, but warning them this: "If you come back, you'll be shot."
Kanae didn't thank him. She kept Shinobu inside her arm and walked until they were sure they could no longer be seen, and then they ran. On the way, they met Numachi, and there was not a moment left in that time to wonder about the blood on her, and then they saw a darkened Giyuu Tomioka in the veil of Shinjuro Rengoku, and that left the only point of contention in their minds being the issue of Tsubone Endou.
It seemed the assault was ending. In another place, the Hashira Niten Ittōsai departed the gunfire and turned the corner of the arcaded passageway where he had seen men go, and he found Tetsuo Morinaga in cloistered discussion with soldiers in the lamplight, and he cut one apart and bashed the other with his hilt, and Morinaga let his hands up and pleaded combat.
"Did your father send you to kill me?" he asked.
"Regardless," Ittōsai replied, "these people want you dead now."
Morinaga spun on his shin and kicked the sword away. They went out to the courtyard. Morinaga dodging and Ittōsai trying to knock him off with a sideways blow but he could not. It appeared that they were at equivalent odds, however Ittōsai made a shy step and Morinaga whirled around and ensnared his arm in an elbow and, in a move that gravitated the thirty-year dividend between their respective experiences, curled his leg around Ittōsai's calf and swiped. He fell soundlessly on the paving. Morinaga then took his collar and shook him hard. "And have you ever killed before?" he asked. Ittōsai said nothing. Their folly was interrupted by a cry sent from the other side of the garden, and in the moment Morinaga turned his head Ittōsai crunched his body and tried to haul himself on his feet, and in the reactionary state Morinaga forgot who was there and propelled Ittōsai's head into the ground. Only the blood acted as glue so that it did not split completely.
In fact Niten Ittōsai did not die. However that was Tsubone's determination. Tetsuo Morinaga stumbled but on the last step straightened himself and watched her take Ittōsai's head in her hand. She gave him a look bursting with vindication. For a moment he could not return it, then Morinaga cleared his head and pointed at Ittōsai.
"If you don't treat him now," he said, with all abstinence in his tone, "the boy'll die."
Tsubone replied in a spitting, opposite voice.
"You're a scoundrel," she said. "He's nineteen and a child."
The soldiers of the rebellion came. They surrounded Tsubone, and divided her from Morinaga, but he pushed through and stood in the middle of the vortex crowd, over Niten Ittōsai and the crouched woman, and one of the rebels – his name was Yokota Ryo – asked him again whether Tsubone Endou was their enemy or not. From behind, to sway Morinaga's reply, Yoneda Magase held a gun to her head. It was ordered down and what Tetsuo Morinaga said next was not the answer, but a valiant speech. On this Sunday, the 30th of April, 1916, he proclaimed as if it had not been proclaimed already, a state of civil war, of a nation inside a nation, the Demon Slayers of Japan, to overturn the insufficient and growingly evil administration of the Ubuyashiki family, and to see the dough demon threat kneaded out of existence between the hands of the populists, their hands. Then his throat cooled, and his passion stabilised, and he lowered his voice to bring out of it the name of Tsubone Endou.
"And," said Morinaga, "after consideration, will you stay, and make your sacrifice for another Ubuyashiki?"
"No, Tetsuo," Tsubone replied. "And if I have to kill you to stop this, then I'll kill you!"
That was the end. It had taken the forty-five and forty-nine years of the lives of Tsubone Endou and Tetsuo Morinaga – and twenty-eight of kinship – to reach this moment. Together they had seen three Ubuyashiki in succession die, recovered one of them from self-exile, dismantled a demon nation, evaded the eye of a paranoid government who surely would have demanded the young boys that they kept from school to be instead in their army, and they had seen the collapse of their control in Shikoku – but not humanity's – and ever since worked tirelessly to maintain a stable administration in the remaining three figurative quarters of their mainland, and had succeeded until a week before. Morinaga whisked his hand and ordered no pursuit for Tsubone Endou and Niten Ittōsai until the nearest hospital, but assured her, as she was to disappear, that the next time they met, there would be no diplomacy.
For whatever remaining diplomacy that needed to be done, was done. Two days earlier, Nen Kusakabe and twelve other men stormed the information office to discover the conspirator that broadcasted the letter of demands to the world, but only found Gotoh Ohtori, who they nearly killed in a hurry of decisiveness though eventually let live.
"If you're l-looking for who sent that l-letter," Gotoh stammered, "I was the only one who came to work today. It must have been the other guys. But I found p-postage meant for you, Kusakabe."
He presented an envelope. Kusakabe ripped it away and scolded Gotoh for giving only when appeared, then he went into another room to read it alone. He came back less than a minute earlier bearing the widest grin, and waving his hand in the air and saying the letter was only nonsense. Those who were there, and who endured the events afterwards to eventually know what the correspondence contained, would recognise that this unusual reaction was the first sign that Nen Kusakabe was going to make himself a martyr. This was proven the next day, when he forwarded the letter to Tsubone Endou who received it in the company of Sakonji Urokodaki, because she would surely deem it with greater urgency. It said:
Let Final Selection go on
Do not let the children get involved in our war.
Naturally, in the company of his fellow mentee and mentor, they recognised Tetsuo Morinaga's handwriting instantly.
Two days after that, the subsequent morning of the fruitioned revolution was the 1st of May. Tsubone Endou could not appear at the departure of Shinobu Kochou, for she did not go to any hospital but treated Niten Ittōsai herself – and his recuperation was still underway that morning – and in her massive stead was the pallid pair of Giyuu Tomioka and Kanae Kochou, to see her off to Final Selection, across the Shikoku strait.
Giyuu, more sullen than he often was, had not uttered one whole sentence since the upheaval of the night before, and Kanae was slowly joining him in this depression. Nisegami Youma was detached, but below his eyes there were undertones. Around them, all waiting for the ferry, were the rest of the anxious demon–slaying prospectives. Then it was a brief farewell exchanged in soft encouragements, and they carried the only hopeful consolation that someone overlooking the selection was sympathetic to Tsubone and would save Shinobu should it ever come to danger.
Yet it was that Giyuu Tomioka's misery was not amalgamated by that departure, or even the dissolution of order at Seventeen Heiseigahama: it would be fault of harrowing postage he was to receive at seventeen minutes over that midnight.
A crow he did not know delivered it to his window. In contemptuousness, it did not wait for Giyuu to unbind the letter from its leg, but it shook its foot and threw it on the floor. The scroll was hemmed with blue string that meant direct and unintercepted mail. Giyuu read it in the candlelight.
Come to Tokyo
And I will tell you who shot your home
And I will tell you who killed Miyamoto Shō
Yoneda Magase
In the morning, when Shinobu's banana ferry had vanished, Giyuu took Kanae by the arm to a secret place and unveiled the letter to her. She did not understand it immediately. She asked: "Killed Miyamoto?"
Giyuu said that he heard it from Morinaga talking to Tsubone.
"But it's Morinaga!" she said. "You don't know if he's only saying that."
"He'd turn his daughter's death into a lie?"
"The traditional thing, for someone like him–"
Kanae went on and said the traditional thing was that Morinaga was not someone to be taken at face, or any value. Giyuu was unchanged. He crumpled the letter and threw it and stumbled from the alleyway onto the pier where they had seen Shinobu go. Kanae followed him, and he turned around and grabbed the shoulder-flaps of her coat and shook hard. He said, in a scarce voice, that he would kill them all, all of those monsters, all those who took her away, and then he stopped shaking and realised what he was doing and he let Kanae go. He declared it finally.
"I'm going to Tokyo."
"And I'll–" Kanae replied. "I'll join you."
That was, of course, the desirable outcome, for Giyuu telling Kanae about this at all. He accepted the camaraderie handedly, despite their knowing that Yoneda Magase was their enemy, that Tsubone Endou would surely not let them go, and that the ghost of Nisegami Youma would be a nuisance accomplice. It was in this knowledge that they made the decision to disappear leaving behind a bare letter containing the circumstances. That evening they went to the train station and purchased two overnight tickets for the capital, and they boarded their carriage and tried to hold a conversation over bottles of Coke they had snuck in, but exhaustion encroached as too great a temptation, and they slumped right where they were into sleep.
A report released by the information office in Hiroshima
The demon slaying contingent under the Ubuyashiki administration may find it hard to believe, but a rebellion has been launched from our ranks, perpetrated by the Mist Hashira Tetsuo Morinaga, and aided by the Wind Hashira Yoneda Magase and the Spring Hashira Yokota Ryo. It is clear after the bloodshed at Seventeen Heiseigahama that they mean for a war, if conditional surrender is not met. So far, one-hundred and twenty-seven other slayers have sent letters to the information office, declaring their allegiance to Morinaga; others declared their neutrality, among them the Flame Hashira Shinjuro Rengoku. It has been assumed that those who have sent none are loyal to Ubuyashiki. Tsubone Endou is expected to lead the charge against the rebels. With the killing of Nen Kusakabe, she is one of those, including and besides Morinaga, who remains of the minority generation that saw Shikoku fall. However it is simultaneously due to this, and her publicised acquaintanceship with the Mist Hashira, that there have been questions raised of her allegiance to the latest Ubuyashiki, Ubuyashiki Kagaya. There have been no statements released to solve these queries, either.
Already, forty-three have been confirmed dead from the fighting. The whereabouts of Tetsuo Morinaga and his accomplices are unknown, though contact has been lost with the provincial headquarters in Nagoya, Shizuoka and Tokyo. It is unknown on what grounds a counterassault will begin, or even if one is possible. The situation is still hazardously conspicuous.
A statement released by another office, somewhere unknown
A war is not in either interest of ours
That would attract the government's attention
And tell Kibutsuji Muzan that we are vulnerable
Surrender yourselves, and accept our conditions, because we are much more than your numbers show
And we will only kill the enemy Hashira, and let the rest live
Amnesty of the Ubuyashiki can be negotiated.
1st of May 1916, midday
The steamboat ferry left port and veered into its permanent path, and now no coast on either horizon could be seen. It was on those innocent waters where Shinobu Kochou sat with her spine braced firmly against a metal rail that the storms of an additional war would begin to cook.
The captain, who looked more marine than the ocean, and was not very old, suddenly turned aft around the corner – Shinobu wondered who was left to manage the ship – and he leaned on the wall parallel her, and he took out his stereotypical pipe, and lit it with a match. It was only the two of them. Then he spoke in a seaweed voice.
"Feet cold? Belly yellow?"
Shinobu nodded. She held her sword to her chest.
"I've been there, too," the captain replied, and he puffed.
Shinobu looked up.
"…Demon slayer?" she asked.
"Nah. A veteran," he replied. "Dishonourably discharged. Now I ferry things to-and-fro, for whoever pays."
"Veteran? But you said you've been here, too?"
The captain was dumbfounded. "Figuratively," he said. "I meant, it was like when I went to Tsingtao."
Shinobu was suddenly intrigued. She pulled the course of history from her head. "The battle of Tsingtao?" she iterated. "Two years ago? Against… against…"
"The Germans," the captain finished. "In Kiautschou. In China. Their colony… concession, whatever. Yes, that one."
"Well?" – Shinobu bounced up – "How was it? What was it like?"
The captain told her to calm and sit down. When she stood her sword fell out of her lap and nearly rolled off the slightly sloped deck but the captain caught it. He chastised Shinobu but held onto it. He examined it for a long time.
"They were crazy, those men," he said suddenly. He rolled the sword in his hands. "The way they fought… like dog soldiers…"
"Crazy?"
"They had a lot of guns built in the ground. We had to park our navy outside. Then we'd wait for night and hope it was dark enough. We'd get onto boats like canoes and sneak on the shoreline. Of course, compared to their grey uniforms, our green ones made no sense, but should they not see us, we'd get into their forts, and do our sabotage missions, because though they were skilled, there were not much of them. Then we'd start the gun-fare."
"And?" Shinobu's eyes bulged. "What happened after that?"
"They—" the captain stopped. He seemed to be chewing the memories out of his pipe. "Well, it was fine, until the last few houses. Their governor, Waldeck, had already signed surrender, but one of his captains refused the order. Of course, fighting to the end is something our army respects…"
It was only then that Shinobu noticed that he rolled the sword not in two hands, but one: he had lost an arm, and the half of his left leg from the knee down was a hobnail. A completely nautical appearance, if she had seen many before, and Shinobu could derive the rest of the story from there. The captain gave the sword back.
"As we entered the last street, we saw the head of a Japanese soldier displayed on a wooden stake. This filled us with new rage and a desire to crush any German. Eventually it turned into anyone we saw in the town. The streets were filled with bodies, so many they blocked our way. We killed the Chinese and the Germans in their homes. Our artillery behind us sent out three volleys for the emperor. The defenders soon ran out of bullets so they just dropped their guns and fled stupidly. At least we thought so. We followed them into a square and they fired on us from the surrounding apartments. That was the ambush. I dodged the gunfire and ran into the parallel building. Three men were waiting there for me. A very tall one stabbed my shoulder with his bayonet and pushed me into the wall. Another one held the other half of my body down. Then a third one came forward. He had hair blonde like wheat, and he wore a cross necklace. He could speak a bit of Japanese. He asked me: Emperor Meiji, or Insurgent Takamori. I did not understand. I replied the emperor, naturally, and that's when they cut... me… like…"
The captain shut up as soon as he opened his story. He stood up from the wall and tossed the tobacco in the pipe into the water, and stowed it again in his pocket. He dug his hand into his chest as if it hurt. While he wagged the other, Shinobu was unsure whether to feel sympathy for him, but when he yelled bigotry, she was convinced otherwise.
"And if you see a German, ever in your life if you have one after this," he said, looking at Shinobu sideways with a brutally red eye, "you should do your nation a service, and kill it!"
Shinobu Kochou was due for Final Selection and the first command she received was not against a demon, but a human being. The captain went back to his post and Shinobu tried to gauge him, and many years later would she look back on the encounter and see that it was one of many hate–driven men she was going to meet in her life.
It was sudden, but the ocean began to heat. The horizontal rain and the thunder followed it by the nose. Though nobody admitted the matter, it was a storm, and soon everyone was ordered inside. In a metal cabin that smelled like litchis Shinobu tiptoed and looked out of the grated disc window. It adjoined another room: the captain was in there, gallantly manoeuvring a wooden wheel, and brushing over switches Shinobu could not name, but she saw through his windshield that the clouds in the sky were now black as cotton coal, and the water was jetting and spraying suds on the deck. The ship began to yaw. Shinobu did not panic immediately, because this sea was often stormy, and whoever crossed it was always prepared, but two soaking men burst into the cabin – a storeroom, that led underdeck – and ran downstairs, and came back even more wet, with their hands up and waving and declaring:
"Hull burst!"
The state of alarm that coursed through the ship infected Shinobu, and in magnification because the emergency had nothing to indicate it prior. She stayed in the corner and felt herself wrung sick by the rocking and the shouting. She stared at her knees to make it go away. For the crowd, its immediate instinct was to leave the room, and after they'd done this, Shinobu caught a look at the cellar door that now had water bubbling through it, and she decided to follow.
The tips of the highest waves licked the mast. Shinobu came out into the whirlwind and the rain and the ship convulsed again in a totalitarian force of gravity. The greased steel floor pulled her feet and she fell. She was doused and the wind snuck under her sleeves and it was the coldest she'd ever felt in her life. She struggled against the slimy handlebar she held onto and would manage to pull herself up, but the next time the ship leaned she could do nothing.
It tossed her onto a lower deck, half-flooded. She heard a human sound permeate the lightning and the whistling but nothing else. Before she stood the ship bounced again. It was passing over an impossibly vertical wave that upended the gradient of the ship-deck like the exciting part of a freeway. Shinobu fought with one shoulder higher than the other. She tumbled again and caught herself on the last dike between the ship and the sea.
The one who was calling her was the captain. He appeared from the charcoal mist and planted himself belly-first on the floor and grabbed Shinobu's wrist. That was the mechanical action by which he supported himself with only two limbs. He hauled Shinobu. The seaslime pulled her down again. For a moment, she wondered childishly, if he would have come for her had she been German. That distraction seized the next week of her life, the years beyond that, until the day she died: she leaned her weight on a spot that would not have it, and she slipped. The momentum thrust the captain with her. They plunged into the liquorice ocean, and thirteen minutes later, their ship and one-hundred and thirty-six prospective demon slayers would join them there.
Now it is general fact that Shinobu Kochou survived the incident, and maybe that she was even not the sole one to do so. However the greatest majority of them, including their captain, were not seen again until 1946, when a team of divers assigned to extract underwater rubble that fell sediment from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima discovered a three-dozen year–old steamboat wreckage littered with the flaking skeletons of children and several adult men, that was unregistered – and after professional observation – sufficiently unkempt enough at its last day above water, that even a minor storm would have been able to subdue it. The hole in the hull ratified this.
In Shinobu's time, no findings would be made, and subsequently no conclusions of dead bitter men and anxious teens. She herself would not recount, only imagine afterwards, her departure from the captain in the water, the intermittent time prior and next, until her washing up on the shoreline of a land where no other influence – not even gravity – of the earth reached, nearer to death than the next minute of life, where it was midnight in midday. She would remember, however, through a gummy and half-closed eye, that it was an obscenely tall man in field grey uniform that found and pulled her off the sands, to take her under wartime asylum.
Mind the letters that are in italic and those that are straight.
