Chapter 3
Disclaimer: I do not own 12 Kingdoms; all characters belong to Fuyumi Ono and the respective right holders. Original characters of this story belong to me.
His ears perk up as he hears the rustling of leaves near him. Abruptly opening his eyes, his eyes are fixed on a bush to his right.e stares at the bush right next to him.
His gaze meets thate gaze of a deer looking back at him in returnat him. Out of instinct his body moves. Toward the deer, without fear.
"This is prey," he subconsciously knows, "this is food."
Black silence fills his mind.
As his senses return to him, everything is already over. The deer's brown coat is soaked in a dark red tint and the once white spots shine like bright red eyes, staring at him. His hands, his t-shirt, and his face are covered in the lifeless mammal's blood. A big wound gapes on the deer's throat, almost as if a piece of it was bitten out by a large predator, its belly lacks a big portion and one of the legs seems to be missing as well.
Looking at his hands, he realizes, that they are not only covered in blood, but are also somehow different from before. His fingers seem to have become longer and his nails appear to be quite sharp.
The strength he can put into his grip does not even come close to what it was before and apparently his whole body is a lot more flexible than before, but feels as though it has always been that way.
His hands aren't the only thing that is undergoing changes, but his mind can't even properly handle a small portion of what is happening right now.
The dead deer, his blood smeared appearance, and this strange place he was thrown into are too much for him to rationally handle at once.
The big knot inside him that is telling that this is all just a dream, that he will wake up in a few moments continues to swell, making his headache even worse.
In a desperate attempt to reduce the confusing factors and protect the last bits of his sanity from crumbling, he hurriedly leaves the place of the massacre he apparently committed, hastily stuffing the clothes he used as a blanket into the pockets of his lab coat, and trying to calm himself down.
Clad in a tunic carefully embroidered with the pictogram of a Kirin on the front and a stylistic depiction of the twelve kingdoms, she still exerted a faint regal aura even as she took out her Sekko from the stables. Youko had bought it to have her own means of transportation, so she wouldn't always be forced to borrow one of Keiki's Shirei whenever she wanted to go somewhere, partially because the Shirei were loyal to their master and thus more often than not tattled on her to Keiki.
She had taken a liking to Youka, as she had called her Sekko, since then both their names would share the first character. Youko and Youka, Sekko and Sekishi. She had been amused by the idea and later thought that it would be a good way to mock the people in her court who were still thinking of her as an incompetent ruler, a red-haired child.
"Come on, girl. We're going to go on a little stroll through the countryside," she said as she petted the big, red tiger. Purring and pressing its head against her soft hand, the black striped Kijuu followed her master outside the stables onto a platform made of marble.
On the flat surface of this stone terrace, thirteen fully armed men in military uniforms were already standing and waiting for the half god with the appearance of a girl, which had just come of age who was their ruler.
Her presence alone protected the country from many natural disasters and stopped the flow of Youma coming into the country. But more than that, these thirteen men knew that their Queen wasn't just an ornament, sitting in the palace, reigning her people from above, completely disjoint from them. She was ready to risk her life for the sake of her country, had the willpower to fight even when she was on her own, without her social standing protecting her, and most importantly, they knew that the second Queen Keiki had chosen was a person who was willing to reflect on her own actions and continuously strived to improve herself and tried to bring her people to follow her in this.
All of them were men who that had first known her as the fighter Yosho, who wanted to save an old scholar from the grips of the tyrannical local lord Shoko and had to overthrow him in the process.
Knowing that these men were owners of hearts that didn't break under oppression and wanted to create a future that would be a little bit brighter for them and others was a big relief for Youko.
In the court and the army, she originally had had close to no influence and couldn't even bring one of her own vassals to justice who's crimes were obvious. After painfully learning this lesson, she set out to change this by putting people she could trust in various positions and after ten years her efforts were fruitful. She was sure that almost nobody who would scheme against her was left in the court, but at the same time took care not to tyrannically banish all those who opposed her as she wanted to keep those who really cared for her country in her court, especially if they had opinions that differed from her own.
Casting out everyone with different view on things would only lead to an environment of people bending themselves, which was exactly what she tried to abolish with her first decree. A Ruler ruler who didn't listen to his people and his vassals will at one point stop listening to his better half, the Kirin, and thus ruin his country.
She had experienced that firsthand with the King of Ko and heard about the King of Ho from Shokei.
To keep an open ear and and open heart for all of her subordinates was the task she thought Tentei gave to all rulers and she was determined to accomplish it.
"Are you ready to depart, Your Majesty?"
After mounting her scarlet Kijuu, the green-eyed ruler simply replied with a smile of excitement on her face: "Yes.".
Fourteen silhouettes slowly ascended from the white stone and took off with the first rays of the morning.
Three hours after he had eaten his lunch, the last tree for today had fallen and was pulled out from the undergrowth, so it was time for him to go home. Fixating a rope onto a tree he needed to pull back home, he thought of what he would have to do when he arrived there.
The heavy piece of wood behind him would make his return a long one, so he had a long time to think about what he would do later today, tomorrow, and it even allowed him to indulge in thinking about one of the village girls he had grown quite fond of in the past months.
As he came out of the forest, he smelled a scent he had only smelled this intense one time before. It was the time when he, his father and one of his brothers went into the woods. A tree didn't fall the way they expected it to and it fell right onto their father's leg. Crushed and pinned down by the weight of the fallen tree, it had been easy to see, that his father's leg was beyond what could be treated. Calling for help or chopping though the wood would have taken too long. Rather than leaving their father to bleed to death, Rikkyo made the decision to save his father's live at the cost of his leg. The metallic smell of human blood he had smelled that time was rushing once again into his nose.
Overcome with bad premonitions, he threw down all the tools he had taken with him, except for his ax, and rushed towards his village.
On his way to the village he already saw the lifeless body of his next-door neighbors on the fields.
This gruesome scenery caused his steps to grow faster and faster in the hope that he wasn't too late.
Lifeless streets awaited him as he entered the village. No living soul around, just bodies lying on the ground.
His house was empty; there were traces of a fight inside. Nobody was in his home, which made him feel relieved. He hadn't seen anyone from his family among the dead so far, so he searched through his house while calling for them repeatedly, hoping that they weren't here, making it a possibility for them to be still alive.
After looking through all rooms, he was certain, that there really was nobody, and especially no body, in his home, so he decided to return outside to look for anyone still alive who could tell him what had happened and maybe where his family was now.
As he reached the marketplace, he saw a single person in a strange white robe standing bent over a body. Wondering who that person was and hoping to get information from that person, Rikkyo ran towards and called out to the figure in white, but stopped abruptly.
The man in white had turned around and Rikkyo could see, that the man's white robe was tainted crimson.
"What happened?"
"What is going on with my body?"
"Where am I?"
Filling his head, these questions are gnawing at the last border that is keeping his sanity intact. In a state somewhere between drunkenness and a feverish delirium he wanders through the forest, trying to sort out his thoughts and cool down his head. The brown color of the tree trunks blur into an ever changing maze and flow into the green of the moss. His field of sight narrows as the borders of his view turn darker and darker. Just as his capability to see decreases, his mind fogs up in a swirl of white.
Not knowing where he is going, or what his body is trying to do, his steps steadily lead him towards something. Something familiar, something he finds pleasant. His body follows something he instinctively likes.
But what is it? The smell of food? No that isn't what he is following. The smell of civilization? No, that isn't it either.
As his feet come to a rest and his eyes at last focus on something, it comes to him as clear and obvious as if he forgot something like breathing until now.
"Of course, that's it. The smell of human blood," he whispers.
It is something he has liked for as long as he could think. Other people would often look at him with disgust or a plain lack of understanding for it. Whenever he fell down, pricked his finger with a needle or otherwise started to bleed, he stared at the part he hurt with a look of fascination and liked the taste of it when he licked his wounds to stop the bleeding.
Where most people didn't like to see blood, he finds the sparkling red more beautiful than artistic paintings from famous artists and wonderful music made by skillful composers.
Its taste which combines a somehow sweet, almost fruity flavor with the metallic taste of iron is something he counted among his most favored treats.
Seeing the scenery in front of him breaks the last mental shackles formed by getting scolded for his abnormal fixation on the red liquid of life.
In front of him, a scene that would make the stomach of most normal people rebel unfolds. Painted in red, the bodies of several human beings lie before him in a puddle of blood mixed with dirt.
Their bodies are cut up and their faces distorted in fear.
Barely beginning to realize the full extent of what lies in front of his eyes, he hears somebody shouting and turns around, towards the voice.
In about forty meters distance he can see a man with an ax in his hand staring at him.
They stand there without moving for a couple of seconds before the armed man's face changes from dumbfounded, to disgusted, to what can only be described as pure hatred. Just a moment later, the man begins charging towards him with his ax held high.
Her country had indeed noticeably increased it's liveliness. Regions that had been devoid of humans before were now being regained from the nature that was trying to take them back. Farmland was made usable again and a steady income of food now filled the kingdom's storehouses.
And from her position above the clouds she could clearly see that change. Every time she got to leave the palace, the world beneath the Unkai seemed more vibrant than before.
This change filled Youko with a feeling of pride and gave her hope for what would happen in the future.
After the Queen and her thirteen companions had ridden for half a day above the clouds, one of her guards informed her, that the first place they were going to visit would soon be reached.
Anticipating a little bit of contact with her subjects, especially with those this far away from the capital, her fatigue caused by all the paper work vanished.
Descending towards the small settlement that could be seen from the air, the mount of Kei's ruler was the first to notice that something wasn't right.
Next, the other Kijuu noticed that at the place their riders wanted to descend towards something was amiss and refused to lower their altitude. Their breath grew haggard, their nostrils trembled, their hair stoop up and they began restlessly pawing in midair out of fear of the thing, they felt was down there.
Unable to get their mounts to descend to the ground, Youko and her escorts were forced to stay airborne and look for the reason of the animal's' unrest from above.
From her position in the front of the group, Youko noticed that there was some movement down in the village after she was able to calm down Youka. She could make out two figures standing on the town square facing each other. Judging from their body size and stature she concluded that the two characters down there must be men. One of them was clad in normal clothing for a man from a small village, but the other one's appearance piqued her interest since he wore an overcoat colored bright white.
That kind of color of fabric was fairly rare to find in the twelve kingdoms as it was either made from the purest silk or dyed through expensive procedures, so the man was a little bit out of place.
But before she could continue with this train of thought there was already movement below her.
The plainly clothed man started running towards the man in white, wielding a long object.
Time slows down as the polished piece of iron is continuously drawing nearer and nearer to him, slower and slower as the head of the ax seeks to penetrate his body and end his life.
As every movement in the world seems to have stopped, he can look at his own reflection in the leaf of the ax.
His face is smeared with blood, the front of his body still dripping wet with red, and an expression completely unfit for this place is on his face.
He can see that he is smirking, making him look like a psychopath.
Why does he do that? Why is he standing here, looking like that?
As these thoughts cross his mind, the world starts to regain it's momentum and the ax once again tries to close the distance. Out of the most simple of instincts, to protect himself, he reflexively closes his eyes and aises his arms to defend against the tool about to end his life.
Kling.
Just that? He always thought that an ax ripping through human flesh would make a more crushing and grinding kind of sound. The noise he heard rather sounded like metal hitting armor or a piece of rock.
Was that the kind of sound a human life ends with?
As he arrives at this question, anticipatingseeing himself lie in his own blood, missing at least one of his arms, slowly bleeding to death, he opens his eyes.
What awaits him isn't the scenery of despair he painted out inside his head, but rather a surprise for him, and for the wielder of the ax.
He is still standing on his own feet as a single drop falls from the place where the ax connected to his arms. Mesmerized by the falling drop neither man dares to move. The drop falling down towards earth gets all of their attention. Being neither especially big, nor shaped in an extraordinary way, everything is normal about it; everything aside from it's purple color.
Hitting the ground and forming a round dot in the dirt, the drop releases the men from it's spell and their attention returns to the place the drop originated from.
Making a clean cut through the lab coat, the ax ripped through what seems to be a layer of skin. But rather than continuing to sever his muscles, tendons, and bones, the ax had stopped at a shimmering layer of scales beneath the skin.
The drop of blood originated from that point, no mistake about it, but as they are looking at it, they can't make out a wound it could have come from.
Just like solving a puzzle, the disconnected pieces in his head begin to line up and make sense to him.
A mysterious horn that doesn't make sense when researching it with normal methods, getting thrown into another place, probably another world, undergoing strange changes, and now a clearly inhuman body makeup.
Everything leads him to one conclusion:
He got thrown into a strange parallel world or something that doesn't play by the rules of his world and it somehow induced a change in him.
As the situation he is in at the moment becomes logical in a fantastical kind of way, the knot in his mind unties itself and he returns from confused, feverish thinking to a calmer and more logical approach to things than running blindly through the forest.
With a deep breath he decides on his next course of action.
A sudden attack and then silence. The fourteen mounted riders had no idea what was unfolding beneath their feet. Looking at the two men confronting each other, Youko noticed the circumstances. Several bodies lay on the ground, unmoving, some of them visibly bleeding.
In the face of this scenery, Youko was saddened and angered. Who could have done that to her people? Youma? Bandits? She didn't know, but was determined to find out who committed this atrocious act.
And the first step to achieve that was to stop the men fighting in front of her and inquire what happened.
"Cease your fighting!" She commanded them in her royal voice.
Devising a plan on what to do now, he is suddenly interrupted by a voice from above.
Above him and the man he is facing, he can make out around a dozen of what seemed like soldiers on flying horses and a red-haired woman on a flying tiger.
"Ok, so animals can fly here...,", is his first impression of the fantastic picture in front of him.
"But this is really bad, I'm here soaked in blood, surrounded by a mountain of corpses with an agitated villager and now there's even more."
"To talk my way out of this I would need a devil's advocate, so what other options do I have?"
"First: Let myself be caught. Bad idea, I'll probably end up dead soon if they think I did this."
"Second: Try to fight my way out. Tremendously outnumbered and unarmed I won't stand a chance, so again a bad idea."
"After all it comes to number three: Run as fast as I can."
At the sight of the airborne Riders wielding the flag of the kingdom of Kei, Rikkyo stood there struck with awe. The compelling voice of the female rider atop the red flying tiger made him shiver as she commanded to put away the weapons.
Obeying the order he was given, the grip on his ax loosened and it slowly slipped through his fingers to the ground, falling to the side as soon as its head hit the ground.
In exactly that moment a white flash passed his left side.
In front of him stood nobody anymore and half of the riders rode towards the direction the white flash had passed him.
After commanding the men to disarm themselves and the execution of said command, Youko felt relieved for a moment that this could be settled without any more bloodshed, but her expectations were betrayed, when the man in white started to run away as fast as the wind the moment the ax wielder let go of his weapon.
Swiftly ordering half her men to follow her, she started the pursuit in person.
Urging her still nervous Sekko to go deeper, she closed the distance to her target with big leaps and was only about 5 meters away from the man when her ride came to a sudden halt.
She could clearly see the reason for this a moment later.
"Dammit, they will get me, I'm not fast enough. Is there something I can use as cover? I need to get faster or they will catch me and then they'll be convinced I was the culprit behind that massacre. How can I get faster? Lean forwards and let myself fall towards earth, was it?"
Trying all in his might, he spares a small glance behind him just to see that his efforts showed no noticeable results. He could almost see each of the red tiger's teeth glare at him.
"I will not get caught here; I will not get caught for something I didn't do in a fantastic place like this. Faster, faster, come on body; give me everything you've got!"
Stealing a peek behind, his pursuers are even closer than before. In front of most of them, a woman clad in a beautiful piece of clothing, poses an especially high risk in his opinion. Long scarlet red hair and the smell of freshly fallen flowers accompany her.
"Am I a dog or why am I noticing something like her smell now," shoots through his head and a second later the feeling in his hands change followed by his feet, eventually his whole body feels different.
In reaction to the sudden rush of a funny feeling throughout his body, his view returns to the direction he is running in just to notice that he doesn't run with just his legs anymore.
As often as she had seen Keiki change, she still was surprised by what happened in front of her eyes.
The white figure gradually lost its human form and brown and red fur replaced the parts of skin that could be seen.
But what emerged was neither a white nor a black Kirin, but rather something like a tremendous wolf. Filling out the white clothes and visibly bursting apart his pants, the beast continued its escape unfazed.
With every leap it took, it widened the distance she tried to close before.
Her Sekko, still frozen in fear, allowed for no further pursuit as the beast got closer to the forest.
At the entrance to the forest, it turned around one more time, showing Youko the reason for her ride's unwillingness to pursue it.
A set of blinking white teeth, fluctuating lines of red on its face and two fiercely glowing red eyes were staring at her, giving her the feeling that she stood in front of an endless abyss of black.
Freed from the intimidating stare, Youko and her company were free to move again, but the beast had vanished into the forest.
Abandoning the pursuit of what she thought could only be a Youma, Youko returned to the city square where the other half of her companions had already landed and taken the other man into their custody.
A Youma of that strength has been rampaging around in her land without her knowledge? It was something that would make even her who had fought against many different kinds of Youma before hesitate.
She was sure that she wouldn't lose to a normal Youma or most humans, but without Jouyuu or more soldiers fighting against a strong Youma like that would most likely kill not only her subordinates, but also herself and plunge her kingdom into ruin once again, so pursuing it immediately was out of question.
So the only thing she could do now was to get as much information as she could from the only witness around. Sadly, the soldiers that remained had to report to her, that aside from the man who apparently wasn't here at the time of the attack, no one survived.
"But according to what he said, people are missing, and not just a few. It seems that most of the people that lived in this village are nowhere to be found," one of the soldiers reported.
Unable to do anything against the threat that vanished into the woods she decided that sadly there was nothing she could do against it right now.
Without a Shirei at her side she could use to inform Keiki in a short time or to take things as they were into her own hands, she deemed it best to return to the Kinpa Palace and plan on what to do next.
As she was about to order the retreat, one of her men brought to her a piece of the clothing the beast had lost in the process of its transformation.
"Your Majesty, this is some of the robes that... thing lost."
Astonished by what laid in front of her eyes, she swiftly took the piece of clothing from her soldier's hands and ordered the return to her palace.
With the mentally exhausted man called Rikkyo on the back of a Kitsuryou, Youko and the majority of her entourage set out to towards Kinpa Palace. The ones who stayed behind were to warn bordering village guards of the threat and try to track down the whereabouts of the Youma.
The mysterious man, his transformation and what he left behind. These things were causing Youko a headache by just thinking about the complications of what she feared was the case.
His feet or rather paws are taking him further and further away into the twilight of the setting sun. Free of his pursuers and overflowing with energy incomparable to anything he had felt before, his leaps get filled with joy. No amount of running seems like it could exhaust him and no kind of shackles seem like they would be able to hold him down.
He is free.
Not just from the soldiers following him. Not from the massacre that would without a doubt would be made his doing. Not from the small wish to return to his own world.
No, this freedom is something totally incomparable to those things.
Each and every thing tying him down is gone. From when to behave in what manner over the feeling of shame all the way to the innermost part of his being are gone without a trace.
The only things that are still the same are his desires and the deepest parts of his personality making up his self.
This before unattained state of freedom overwhelms him and compels him to vent the rush of excitement it gave him in the most fitting way he can imagine right now.
As the last rays of the setting sun touch the ground of the southeast province of the Kingdom of Kei, a roar shakes the earth, signaling the birth of creature unbound by the strings of fate like no living thing else in the Twelve Kingdoms, yet entangling the fates of many others.
AN: I was quite busy the last two months so I didn't really get around to finishing this chapter, so it sat around for the meantime, but I could finally finish it over the holidays.
At last the story starts to pick up a little bit and the preparations for the further plot are going quite smoothly, I think.
As before I'm thankful for every kind of feedback especially on whether I got Youko down somehow realistically or whether I'm ripping her out of character ;)