Still Waters 3, Book 2, Chapter 26: A Fox in Kyoto, Part 2
"Youkoooo...!" Konoka whined as she ducked a spear thrust and batted it aside with her free hand while she desperately parried a sword thrust. "This isn't fair...!"
"Sorry Ojou-chan," Aoyama Kazuki, the spear user, said as he engaged in a spectacularly swift series of thrusts and cuts with his wide-bladed spear, "but you know we can't go easy on you, no matter how cute you are."
"My cousin is correct," Aoyama Daigoro said, his long samurai ponytail blowing in the wind as he moved back to give himself enough room to execute whatever move Kazuki was keeping her distracted from. "It is our duty to do our best to halt the advance of your group."
Konoka pouted even as she ducked under Kazuki's spear again and shot in close. He leaped back, giving her just enough room to avoid Daigoro's ki strike. "You guys are just...just mean!" she said as she tried to keep close enough to Kazuki so he couldn't use his spear. He pegged her upside the head with the base of it an instant later, staggering her and leaving her wide open for Daigoro as she let out a pitiful little cry.
It must've been the cry that did it, Konoka thought later as she scrambled away from the scene. Daigoro hesitated, and Konoka kicked him between the legs. Hard. He fell to his knees and let out a little cry of his own, then, echoed in horrified sympathy by Kazuki. Konoka took the opportunity while Kazuki was looking at Daigoro to yank the tip of his spear down, bringing the butt of it up between his legs. An instant later, Kazuki let out a little cry again, this time most assuredly not done out of sympathy. Konoka wasted no time celebrating her victory, and instead staggered out into the forest as fast as she could in the direction Youko had fled.
Youko ran swiftly through the trees, her face pale as if she had seen a ghost.
Back at the shrine in the woods, after she had dug up the Yasakani no Magatama, one of the three items a youkai needed to hold to become the Youkai King, Youko and Konoka had heard voices approaching. They had instantly hidden themselves as well as they could and waited for whoever was approaching.
What Youko had seen next had left her stunned.
The first voice, stern and serious, had belonged to a man who resembled the samurai of old, those who had built the Shinmeiryu back up to reach and even surpass its former glory. The second voice, however...Youko shivered as she recalled her first glimpse of that man.
He was taller, as people were in this age, and his hair was a light brown instead of black, but his face, his expression, his laid back style, the way he moved...it was as if she was looking at her Saburo, back from the dead. Barely able to think, she had scrambled to her feet and run away as fast as she could, leaving Konoka behind to face them alone. She hadn't meant to do it, it had just kinda happened...and that was kind of why she had asked Setsuna and Konoka along, after all. Still... 'I'll have to apologize to her later,' Youko thought to herself as she neared the edge of the treeline and darted across a path into another patch of trees. At the very least, she now knew Saburo's bloodline still ran strong.
In her panic at seeing the Saburo-look-alike, she had taken off in the wrong direction, leaving her dangerously close to the front entrance of the compound and its multitude of guards before she realized what she was doing. Still, she had a fairly good idea of where she was, and she adjusted her course through the trees accordingly, heading for the main house and the servants' quarters next to it which were, luckily enough, a fairly short distance from the main entrance. She soon crossed another path and entered a thin stretch of forest; through the trees, she could catch glimpses of part of the main house and the servants' quarters just to the west of her position. A shout came from the area in front of the main house and she froze in place, thinking she might have been spotted, but it wasn't repeated. She strained her ears to listen, but had to pop out her fox ears to catch the sound of swords clashing coming from the front yard. 'Good, at least one of them made it this far,' she thought to herself as she crept from cover to cover. 'It must be Setsuna; there's no way Konoka defeated those two that quickly.' She liked Setsuna; the half crow girl really knew her swordwork, that was for sure. She was loyal to her friends, too, far more so than could be expected of just about anyone, really. Youko just hoped it wouldn't be Setsuna's undoing some day.
She let such thoughts go as she neared the house. A careful look around the area showed no sign of any watchers except a carefully hidden spot in a tree, where someone had evidently sat in hiding...probably vacated as soon as the fighting in the front yard started. 'Thanks for the diversion, Setsuna. I'll definitely have to pay you back for this when we get back to Mahora...' Youko thought as she darted across the carefully trimmed grass and toward the servants' quarters. She paused by the door, glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and darted inside. 'I just wish Haru was here; it'd be good for her to do a little breaking and entering. I wonder where she is...?'
A branch slapped Haru in the face as she ran. She let out a yelp; she couldn't help it.
"I hear you...!" her pursuer howled in delight, sounding far too close for Haru's liking. Haru gritted her teeth and plunged onward through the forest, her legs pumping as she ran harder than she ever had in her life. She clenched her teeth as she ran, so focused on escaping the woman chasing her that she didn't even notice the rope stretched in front of her until she'd run into it. There was a brief burning sensation where the rope made contact across her chest, but her power surged of its own accord and the rope snapped and she was through. The woman chasing her seemed to lose track of her a second or two later, so Haru strained to pull out a little more speed. A few seconds later, she saw a huge dark shape loom in the forest, and slowed as she approached.
"Wait! Where did you go?" someone shouted a fair distance back. Haru looked nervously back the way she had come, then to the big shape, and hurried on.
As she approached, she could make out a badly neglected building hidden among the foliage. The closer she got, the more details she could see; from the boarded up windows to the piles of roof tiles that had fallen, the large Japanese-style house was a mess. She couldn't tell how old it was, but it had obviously been unused for decades, maybe longer.
"Wait...!" her pursuer cried out somewhere behind her.
Haru climbed over a fallen tree and slipped inside through a hole where part of one of the walls had fallen through.
Haru coughed and tried to wave away the dust she had stirred up, but that only made it worse; the dust swirled crazily in the air as she waved her hand. In the end, she settled for pulling the collar of her shirt up over her nose and holding it there. "H...hello? Is anybody there?" she whispered, her voice muffled by the shirt. She paused for a moment, straining her ears to hear the slightest hint of a response, but there was nothing; not even the noise of the forest could be heard from inside the building. She peered around in the darkness at what little she could see of the fairly small room, trying to discover what manner of place she had climbed into, but all she could make out were a couple rotting piles of rags and a handful of leaves scattered around the hole in the wall. The whole place seemed unusually dark in her opinion; but then again she was trespassing in an abandoned house in the middle of an overgrown forest, so she supposed that sort of thing was to be expected. 'Now, how about some light...'
"How did Youko say that worked? Something like...this?" Youko said aloud more to drown out the silence than anything else, frowning in concentration. A moment later, a little blue ball of flame, almost blindingly bright in the darkened building, popped into existence in front of her. Haru squinted her eyes against the brightness and focused on reining in the power; even after all the training Youko and Eva had put her through in Eva's resort, she still tended to overdo it when using her power... After a moment the ball of foxfire dimmed to a pleasant pale blue glow, and Haru headed for the sliding door across the room. She put her fingers into the narrow opening at the side of the door and tugged, but nothing happened; the door was jammed. It took a few more tugs, the last boosted with her power, to work the door loose, and it fell apart as she pushed it. She uttered a quick apology to the probably long-dead owner of the house, and stepped into a long, narrow hallway.
She looked first one way and the other, but the area lit by her foxfire was small; the inky blackness that surrounded her seemed unnatural, almost malevolent. "Th-that's crazy! There's no such thing as...as ghosts..." she said, realizing even as she spoke that yes indeed, there certainly were ghosts. Spirits too, both harmless and harmful, not to mention all the monsters that existed in the world.
Something breathed on the back of her neck.
Haru let out a yelp and whirled around to look behind her, but there was nothing there, only the discolored wall of the hallway. "Th-this is crazy! I-I-I'm just imagining things, right?" she asked. Afraid something might respond, she answered her own question. "Right! Now, I'm just going this way! Yes! And there's nothing standing in the dark behind me! No there isn't! Nothing's there looking at me! Not at all!" she said loudly as she marched down the hallway, the sound of her footsteps seemingly swallowed up by the darkness around her. Was it her imagination, or was the circle of light getting smaller...?
"...ru...re...ou..."
"Eee...!" Haru bit her tongue and clapped her hands over her mouth and her ball of foxfire drifted closer, seemingly as scared as she was. She had definitely heard someone—or something—speaking...!
"...here?...are you..."
Her eyes widened as she recognized the voice: it was that crazy woman who had been chasing her...! Fear of the dark (or, as Haru thought to herself, fear of what might be hiding in the dark) was one thing, but this was a real, solid person who was trying to chase her down! 'I came here to help Youko get that fancy sword, right? I know I'm not very useful, but at least I can try and keep this crazy lady occupied, right? Right!' she thought to herself. 'And besides, it's better than thinking about how creepy this place is...'
"Okay then," she said aloud, then took a deep breath to calm her nerves. She took a chance and flared her foxfire, but the darkness only receded a little. "Still don't have enough control," she muttered, frowning at her lack of skill. Now what? Should she get the crazy woman's attention? Seemed like a good idea; maybe she could lose the woman somewhere in this surprisingly big house.
"...rous in...ere. Co...t...before..."
Haru couldn't make out what the woman was saying; her voice seemed muffled. Nevertheless, Haru could tell she was close. She took another deep breath to steel her nerves, turned back in the direction she was fairly sure she had come from, and shouted. "Catch me if you can!"
She turned and ran, her foxfire hovering along beside her as she fled down the hallway. She passed several doorways, several of them only slightly open and a few open completely like a yawning gulf of shadow. Several times she had to leap over piles of rubble as she ran, or more of those piles of rags such as what she had seen in the first room. She reached a T-intersection of hallways and paused, listening for any sound of pursuit, but heard nothing. She turned to look back the way she had come, but she couldn't see anything but the area lit by her foxfire—shrunken now to a sphere a couple feet wider than she could reach with her arms stretched out to the sides—and another pile of rags off to the side, just at the edge of the light. Something about it seemed odd, though...it looked like there was a stick or something poking out of it. Frowning, she edged closer, the light moving with her. The rags were faded and obviously quite old, and...was that a sword?
Haru squatted down for a closer look at the item in question. She hesitantly reached out and touched the hilt of the sword and the ragged bit of cloth that was tied to it. She tugged on it, and was stunned at how heavy it was; it wasn't unmanageable, not for her with her mixed youkai ancestry, but it was far from the lightweight sword she had expected. She pulled it loose of the rags and lifted it up; the tip bumped into the ceiling. With a lightly curved blade that broadened toward the tip and the long and, to her eyes at least, oddly angled hilt that curved in the opposite direction from that of the blade, the sword was over five feet long...! She hadn't ever seen a sword like it; though Asuna's probably matched it for sheer size, the style was completely different. She wiped some of the dust off of it and gave it a few experimental swings; the first one threw her so off balance that she nearly ended up on the floor, but she quickly got the hang of it. She thought the big blade was surprisingly easy to handle, not nearly as awkward as some of the other, more normal sized weapons she had been given to experiment with in Eva's resort. Finally, she swung it around and plopped the blade down resting on its side on her shoulder and upper arm in a motion so smooth it felt like she had been doing it all her life. She couldn't help but grin as she eyed the weapon. It was really quite pretty in her opinion, though the ragged bit of cloth hanging from the end of the hilt made it look a little messy...but that could be changed, right? Haru used her free hand to touch the cloth, which was stiff and fragile with age; some of it crumbled at her touch. A quick tug removed most of the cloth, which, now that she looked at it more closely, seemed to have some sort of writing on it, though it was so old and faded that it was completely unreadable. She decided it didn't matter anyway, as the rotten fabric quickly disintegrated in her hands. With that done, she looked back at the pile of rags and sticks she had taken the sword from, and froze.
What she had thought was a stick...wasn't a stick. It was old and faded and brown with age, but now that it had been disturbed and she could see the end of it poking up, its true identity was plainly obvious.
What Haru had taken for a pike of rags was, instead, a body, long dead and reduced to little more than bones.
Still holding the sword on her shoulder, Haru felt her stomach start to turn and whirled to face the other direction, dropping the sword as she fell to her knees and vomited. After a moment of shaking she sat up straighter, using a handkerchief to wipe her face clean as realization hit. That hadn't been the only pile of rags she had passed in this place. Not only that, but the sound that giant sword had made when it hit the floor hadn't been right; the sound had almost been...swallowed up. And...was she just imagining it, or was the air getting thin? She climbed to her feet, finding the effort disturbingly difficult, and again picked up the sword. Almost immediately the air seemed to clear, and the sphere of light created by her foxfire seemed to widen a little.
die
"Yee!" Haru squealed as she whirled around, brandishing the sword; the blade stuck in the wall and she had to tug on it a moment to free it. "Who's there?!" she demanded, her heart racing. As she eyed the unnatural darkness surrounding her. "I-I know you're there! I-I can...I can..." She trailed off, unsure how to describe what she was feeling. It wasn't a sensation produced by any of her normal senses, that was for sure. It was more a...feeling of general malevolence, maybe? Like something wanted her to die. She had a brief vision of some future explorer entering the building only to stumble across a pile of rags and bones with tennis shoes and a big sword.
"G-get away from me!" Haru squealed, swinging the sword wildly around her. "Get away!" She swung the sword one final time so hard that she spun nearly in a circle and tripped over her own feet, hitting the floor. The sword dropped from her hand and the darkness immediately leapt forward, trying to overwhelm the light of her foxfire and close in around her. Haru screamed and snatched up the sword, and the darkness again retreated. She scrambled to her feet and backed up to the wall. "Y-you don't like this sword much, d-do you?" she asked, trying to put on a brave face in what she was quite sure was a vain attempt to scare away whatever was in the darkness.
'I have to be careful,' she thought. 'This sword won't be enough to protect me. That other guy had it, but he died anyway. Maybe I should try to get that Shinmeiryu woman to help? Would she help me at all...?' It was a good question, Haru thought. She knew an even better question would be 'could the Shinmeiryu woman do anything?' Sure, the Shinmeiryu were trained to deal with horrible things like this, but they couldn't all be as good at it as Setsuna or Konoka or Asuna, could they? And besides, someone would have to realize something was wrong in the first place, and Haru realized she hadn't heard the woman calling out for quite some time, now...had she left? Was she dead? Haru didn't know, but she did know she couldn't count on that woman for anything at the moment.
"Come on, gotta think positive," she said aloud, more to hear the sound of her own voice and break the muffled nothingness surrounding her. "I'll go...this way!" she said as she picked a direction and started walking.
After a moment, she realized she had sped up to nearly a run, and forced herself to slow back down to a walk. It was difficult...she could feel the weight of the darkness around her, pressing in on her, and now that she had been turned around, she had no idea where she was in the house. She flared her foxfire again but, just like the last time, the darkness only retreated a little; she had bought herself a few minutes, perhaps, before the darkness again crept closer. She paused in the hallway as she came across another pile of bones and rags, this one different from the others she had seen. There were fewer rags, for one thing, and the multitude of bones were small...surprisingly so. It took her a moment of looking at a fairly short bone to realize that it was the same type as the bone she had looked at when she found the sword. This was a dead child...!
Haru made a mistake; she knelt down and put the sword down on the floor beside her.
The darkness leapt forward and Haru screamed, hands scrabbling for the sword as the darkness closed in, crushing the air from her lungs and devouring her screams before she could voice them.
"Zanmaken, Ni no tachi!" someone bellowed.
The darkness shivered, and exploded away from her, leaving Haru convulsing on the floor as she reflexively grabbed the hilt of the sword.
"Are you alright?"
Haru shuddered as she gathered her wits and finally looked up at her savior, the cat youkai woman she had glimpsed earlier, the one that had been chasing her, and she realized with a shock that she could see again without the need for her foxfire, which had been snuffed out by the darkness. Sunlight filtered in through boarded up windows and cracks in the walls, and as she looked down she realized she was curled up on the child's bones.
Haru screeched and scrambled away, the floor creaking ominously under her as she smacked her back hard against the wall behind her. She felt the floor shift under her and looked frantically at the cat youkai woman, but it was too late to ask for help; the floor collapsed under her, dropping her down into darkness as she screamed.
"No!" Ikari Hikari screamed as she scrambled forward to the edge of the hole the half-youkai girl had fallen into. She ignored the child's remains on the floor beside her as she knelt beside the hole and looked in.
"Help me!" the girl screamed in the darkness below.
"Dammit!" Hikari snarled. She had just meant to scare the girl, test her skills like the ojou-sama had asked, not chase her into this horrible place...! She had just wanted to do Konoka-ojou-sama a favor, why had it come to this?! "Can you hear me?!" she shouted frantically, hoping the girl would respond, but, just like before when she had encountered the mass of darkness in the hallway, there was no response. "Dammit!" she said again as she held her sword out and gathered her ki, boosting it with a little of her youkai power. It was awkward to do the second form of the Evil Cutting Sword from such an angle, but that didn't matter; she had to save the girl.
"Zanmaken, Ni no tachi!" she bellowed as she swung the sword. As expected, the technique sent a wave of ki into the evil spirit without harming the girl, but, as she had thought, at this angle it was too weak, and the technique only cut into the shadow; the girl wasn't freed, or even revealed. Hikari was getting tired from the chase and the lack of an afternoon nap, and using that technique was difficult for a youkai in any case...nevertheless, she intended to save the girl, no matter what. She readied her sword again. "Zanmaken—what?!"
Something was moving in the blackness below...a long shape was swinging back and forth with great speed and power.
"...way from...e!"
Hikari's eyes widened and she quickly readied her sword. She paused a moment to gather the required ki, and again performed the technique. "Zanmaken, Ni no tachi!"
This time, the technique cut deeply enough into the mass of shadow to reveal a brilliant blue light—'The girl's foxfire...!' Hikari realized—and a shape that turned into the girl, hanging with one hand from the end of a broken floor joist as she swung that ridiculous sword she had picked up somewhere with the other, keeping the shadow at bay. She was in an incredibly precarious position, however...the wooden beam supporting her was old and half rotten, while the shadow, concentrated in the underground areas of the house, was doing its best to envelop her again.
"Climb up!" Hikari shouted at her. The girl looked back up at her, her eyes, wide, and nodded. Now, with the girl in plain sight and easily avoidable by someone of her skill, Hikari could focus on damaging the evil spirit that the girl had inadvertently awakened by ripping through the shimenawa that had been used to seal the house away from anyone who might stumble upon it.
"Zanmaken!"
The first form of the Evil Cutting Sword was much easier to execute; it didn't involve accounting for a hostage, like the second form; Hikari liked that. Cutting evil spirits was one of her favorite things to do, and she was quite good at it. Still...this level of malevolence was more than she had ever faced before; it wouldn't go down easily. She was just glad it hadn't been fully released yet. She readied her sword again.
"Zanmaken!"
She saw that the girl had climbed up to a more secure position on the floor below, and stood looking nervously up at her, unwilling to let go of the silly oversized sword, the hilt of which she clutched with both hands. As she tried to figure out what to do next, she spotted a tendril of shadow creeping up toward the girl, and readied her sword to perform the technique again.
"Zanmaken...!"
That one seemed to do it; the shadow retreated further and hid, quivering in the darkness below. She flattened herself out on the floor, reaching down through the hole in the floor. "Give me your hand! Hurry!"
The girl looked indecisively up at her, then at the squirming mass of blackness below, and back up at Hikari. "But..."
"There's no time!" Hikari shouted. She wanted to wring the stupid girl's neck...! What was wrong with her, couldn't she see she was still in danger?! Every extra second spent in the house held the potential for disaster...! "If it's about the sword, throw the stupid thing up!"
"You're sure you'll catch it...?" the girl asked.
"Freakin...yes, I'll catch the stupid thing! Just hurry!" Hikari screamed at the girl. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, she turned the sword to hold it by the blade and raised the hilt toward Hikari; she pulled it up and tossed it behind her, out of the way.
The floor creaked under her.
"Dammit, hurry!" she screamed. The girl pulled herself up to stand on the next floor down from Hikari, then jumped up and grabbed her hands just as the blackness surged upward. Hikari yanked her out of the hole and dragged her to her feet, a feat that would have been impossible for any but the strongest humans, but which was only a little tough for a youkai. "Hurry! We have to get out of here...!" she screamed as she looked around, trying to figure out where they were. "Dammit...!"
The girl picked up her sword and propped it up on her shoulder before turning to Hikari. "How do we get out?"
Hikari looked around, frustrated. The light that had been filtering through the cracks in the walls earlier was gone; she realized with a start that the only source of light was the girl's foxfire, which had followed her up. "Dammit!" she snarled. 'I didn't realize it was trying to circle around behind me instead of hiding...!' "Okay then," she said, almost to herself. "If you're not gonna let me find the way out, I'll just make a new one...! Zantetsusen!"
Hikari bellowed out the name of the technique, watching in smug satisfaction as it blew through the frail wall she had aimed it at, followed by another wall and another, revealing a hole to the outside world. The Iron Cutting Sword, one of her favorite techniques next to the Raimeiken and Zanmaken, had many uses...though this was the first time she had used it to exit a building. She grabbed the girl's hand. "Come on! It doesn't want us to leave!" she shouted as she took off running toward the exit. A quick glance back showed the girl was keeping up with her just fine in spite of the ridiculous sword she refused to let go of. The evil spirit haunting the place may not have wanted to them to leave, but it couldn't do much about the sunlight coming through the hole, not unless it brought its main body up out of the basement...even as they neared the exit, one final billow of smoky blackness crossed in front of them and dissipated in the sunlight, and then they were out in the real world again and the two of the collapsed on the ground in the sunlight that filtered through the trees, struggling to catch their breath.
"...I should have known that was you, Ikari."
Hikari looked up at the tall, elegant woman with the long hair and oversized katana standing over her, and couldn't help but grin as she panted. "Fancy...fancy seeing you here, Tomiko...gah...Tsukiko-san," she said, nodding at the shorter figure in the straw hat, squatting down comfortably next to Aoyama Tomiko. The straw hat dipped in a nod of acknowledgment.
"And you're one of our invaders, aren't you?" Tomiko said as she looked at the girl, who, to Hikari's admiration, heaved herself to her feet, stood up straight, and looked Tomiko in the eye with only a slight tremble. That was quite an accomplishment; though Tomiko couldn't hold a candle to Aoyama Tsuriko, when she wanted to intimidate someone, they tended to notice, to put it mildly. Most people simply wet their pants when Tomiko's attention was focused on them. Hikari figured the girl was probably still on the adrenalin high she got from nearly getting herself eaten by living darkness, but still. 'Good job, girl.'
"I'm...I'm Endo Haru, from Mahora. And..." the girl said, trailing off as if unsure of what to say, "...and as long as you've been lured out here, you can't do anything to stop my friends!" she said. Hikari's admiration for her got bumped up another notch at the defiant look in the girl's eye. Of course it was probably mostly post-battle elation, but still...
Aoyama Tomiko, one of the most feared women in the Shinmeiryu, grinned and tousled Haru's hair. "You're right; good job on that, though you have caused us a little more trouble than you might think..." she said, turning to look up at the house.
"The...the shadows?" Haru asked.
"That's right," Tomiko replied.
"She ran right through the shimenawa, as if it wasn't even there," Hikari said as she finally climbed to her feet. "I've never seen anything like it."
Tsukiko stood up, revealing herself to be only a little shorter than Tomiko, who was roughly the height of Haru and Hikari. She moved up to Haru and leaned in close, reaching up to tip the straw hat back so she could see Haru's face.
"You are a strong one, aren't you..." she said, grinning crookedly. Hikari noticed that Haru looked a little taken aback, but Tsukiko tended to have that effect on people. "This blade, though..." she said, looking at the big sword Haru carried. "Where did you get it?"
"I...I found it inside...is that okay? Did you...did you want it back...?" she asked, her elation at having survived her encounter with a powerful spirit finally dieing. Hikari thought it was a little amusing, the way her expression turned from defiant to pleading so quickly.
"No...if you found it in there, I don't think its old master has need of it any longer. Take care of it; it's not your average sword," Tsukiko replied, then cackled laughter as she turned to regard the house. "Where was the spirit?" she asked. Tomiko looked back at them, waiting.
"In the basement," Hikari replied. "If you take the, ah, 'new door', you'll find a hole in the floor about fifty feet or so in; its main body is pretty much straight down."
"Let's go," Tsukiko said as she started toward the hole Hikari had made for her escape. Tomiko bobbed her head at Haru and Hikari and followed; soon, the two of them were lost to sight, and Hikari led Haru further away from the house.
"Is that...is that okay?" Haru asked, looking nervously at her as they walked along under the trees.
Hikari chose a suitable spot and settled down in the shade of a tree to wait; she really needed her afternoon nap... "Yeah, it's fine. Tsukiko-san's an expert in onmyodo, you know, and Tomiko's, well...Tomiko. If the two of them can't take care of that spirit, we've got bigger problems than—"
The house exploded. That was the only way Hikari could describe it; it was as if someone set off a bomb inside the house. The walls went up and out, the roof flew up and came apart, and Hikari just watched with her mouth hanging open, dumbstruck, until Haru shoved her down and dragged her next to the tree trunk. 'Tomiko and Tsukiko were in there...' she thought in shock. 'There's no way they could have survived that! What happened? It couldn't have been a bomb; that house has been sealed up for a hundred years or more. Did Tsukiko lose control of a spell? Was the spirit stronger than I thought?' All these thoughts and more raced through her mind as the debris began to fall. Haru yelped, and Hikari glanced over to see her pressing her hand to a small cut on her leg, where a shard of glass had fallen through the branches and hit her.
Then the ground began to shake.
Haru yelped again as the ground began to shake violently, and forgot all about the tiny cut on her leg as she looked up at the spot where the house had once stood. Debris was still falling from the sky when a huge black shaped heaved itself up from the ruins, little shadowy tendrils reaching out and grabbing tree branches, debris from the house, anything they touched. She gasped as she spotted the two squirming figures it held, the two women from the Shinmeiryu...! The evil spirit shook them violently, then tossed them aside to land somewhere deep in the forest.
"We have to go...!" Haru said frantically as she tugged on Hikari's arm. "Come on!" She let go when Hikari finally stood up. "Hurry!"
"No," Hikari said, her tone solemn as she dusted herself off and stretched.
"What?! We have to go!" Haru repeated. What was wrong with the woman?! Haru wondered if the sight of the other two getting thrown away somewhere had made her snap or something. "That thing's dangerous!" she said, grabbing Hikari's arm with both hands.
"And that is why I have to do what I can to stop it," Hikari replied, her face expressionless as she eyed the spirit, measuring it up. She abruptly shook off Haru's grip and strode out into the open air and took a quick draw stance, facing the spirit as it lurched around, its quivering body a twisting, billowing mass of shadow, bloated with the power it had absorbed from its many victims over the years.
"But Hikari-san...!" Haru pleaded, using the cat youkai's name for the first time.
"Take up your sword; you may need it," Hikari said, glancing at her. She made a small smile, then turned her attention back to the spirit. "Hey! You!" she bellowed, her voice painfully loud to Haru's ears. It was enough to get the spirit's attention, however, as its movements immediately shifted to focus on her. She drew her sword in a single swift motion. "Zanma—gurk!"
Haru watched, eyes wide in horror, as a shadowy tentacle spiked out of the evil spirit's body and speared Hikari in the stomach. The cat youkai's ki attack went off target, digging into the ground and blasting up a spray of dirt and rocks as blood sprayed from the the exit wound made by the tentacle. The tentacle ripped itself back out and Hikari dropped to her knees, barely managed to keep her grip on her sword as she groaned.
"Hikari-san...!" Haru screamed, horrified. She took a step toward the cat youkai, but Hikari held up a hand to stop her, and turned her head to look at her.
"H...Haru...san..." She coughed, spray blood into her hand. "Use your...use your sword..."
"No! We have to get you to a doctor, we have to—"
"Silence!" Hikari roared like one accustomed to command; the force of it clearly caused her a great deal of pain, and her next words were softer, each word spoken with great effort . "It's too late...can't run. It'll catch up before...before you could out of the forest..."
"Hikari-san..." Haru said helplessly as she saw how pale the cat youkai's face had become. Hikari turned back to look at her and opened her mouth to speak, but the evil spirit chose that moment to make its next move. One moment, Haru was looking at Hikari as she knelt on the ground in front of her, weak and in pain; the next, the tentacle swung through the air and took Hikari full in the side and with a startled grunt she was gone, flying silently through the air to disappear into the forest somewhere off to the left.
Haru screamed at the suddenness of it, fearfully, uncontrollably, she screamed. This was worse that that duel with Rex at the youkai festival, this was even worse than that awful training in Eva's resort...! She hadn't ever been so scared before in her whole life!
'Idiot, run!' the other Haru roared in her head, further muddling her thoughts. 'RUN!' she screamed.
Haru scrambled back without looking where she was going and tripped over a tree root, hitting the ground hard on her butt, the other Haru's terrified screams in her head and her own fear threatening to block out her own thoughts. 'Hikari's dead she's gotta be dead it KILLED her speared her swatted her like a fly gone blood everywhere Haru's screaming is driving me crazy oh my God it's coming after me what am I gonna do its gonna kill me I don't wanna die somebody help me save me no no no nonononoNONONONONONO—'
Haru's hand touched something, and with a strange mental shiver, her mind emptied and became clear as a bell.
'...what...?'
Her terror and confusion were still present, just...pushed aside by whatever was giving her this sensation of calm, whatever had put her into this slow, almost dreamlike state; even the other Haru's incoherent screaming seemed muffled, unimportant. With an effort of will, she turned her head to look down at her hand, and saw it was touching the hilt of the enormous sword she had found in the big house before its destruction, left forgotten, dropped in the underbrush. Without thinking, she grabbed the hilt of the sword.
Reality came rushing back and she scrambled to her feet, sword in hand, and lunged aside, narrowly evading the same tentacle that had speared poor Hikari-san. Almost without conscious thought, she swiveled on her heel and brought the sword down across the tentacle; it was a clumsy blow, utterly untrained, but nevertheless, the sword cut through the tentacle and the spirit let out a horrible screech Haru felt in her very soul and she realized, startled, that it was scared.
And Haru...Haru was not.
She was nervous, true. Her youkai ears were twitching, her eyes were darting back and forth taking in every last detail, her pulse was racing, and yet...she wasn't scared. 'Is it because of the sword?' she wondered as she nimbly sidestepped the wild swing of a tentacle as the spirit flailed at her. Her mind was clear, and the fatigue from what she had gone through in the house was gone...or perhaps pushed aside. She knew the situation she was in was incredibly dangerous—trained professionals had maybe-possibly been killed by the evil spirit thing already—but she knew she she couldn't turn and run; the spirit would do to her what it had done to Hikari the instant her back was turned. She lunged aside almost lazily as the spirit tried spearing her again; it missed, kicking up dirt as the end of its tentacle dug into the ground. Haru took the opportunity to hack off another chunk of it, this one a good eight feet long. The spirit screeched again, the sound only audible within her head, as it frantically drew back its tentacle. She looked down at the piece she had cut off; it was already dissolving, pale purple steam leaking out of it and dissipating as it shrunk away to nothing in the dappled sunlight. It was in this moment that her strangely enhanced mind caught upon an idea.
She knew from extensive experience watching and training with Asuna, Konoka, and Setsuna that the Shinmeiryu used swords to channel their ki; she didn't have any ki to speak of, but could she do the same thing with her youkai power...?
"This is crazy," she said aloud as she held the sword out in front of her and concentrated on harnessing her power the way Youko had shown her. It was right where she had expected it to be, a vast well of warmth hidden away in her soul, startling in its strength...Haru had been scared of it for the longest time; it hadn't been until Youko had forced her into training that she had begun to learn to accept its presence. She still didn't trust it, but in a life or death situation such as the one she found herself in now, mistrust was a luxury she couldn't afford. She felt a brief moment of panic, but it was quickly soothed away...or shunted aside. She gripped the hilt of the sword tightly in both hands, and her fears quickly faded, a quiet undercurrent to her thoughts. She focused on her power and forced it into the blade, which began to shake in her hands. The wind kicked up around her, blowing the grass and underbrush and picking up leaves in a whirling column as she awkwardly raised the sword over her head.
"Aaahhh...!"
It wasn't much of a shout, she knew, but she didn't care; as she swung, the power left the sword in a massive blast that shook the forest and uprooted a few small trees, and finished knocking down what little of the ancient house remained. The blast was unfocused, however, and while the spirit reared back from it, it did little damage to its intended target.
'Too unfocused,' Haru thought, marveling at her clarity of thought. 'How did the others do it? Setsuna said it was like making your soul a sword, didn't she...?' Haru wouldn't admit it to anyone if she could help it, but she had, a couple times, taken one of the practice swords in Eva's resort and pretended to be Setsuna, complete with ass-kicking sword moves and sideways ponytail. She looked up to Setsuna; as soon as she found out the woman was a half-youkai like her and saw what she could do, Haru had seen her as a great example of what a half-youkai could be. Setsuna was kind, intelligent, graceful, pretty with those wings of hers...she was also, as Haru privately thought, freaking awesome in every way. The thing with Konoka was pretty weird, but she brushed it aside; she had a feeling nobody could fend off Konoka for long...girl was scary. 'Now, how did that go...?' Haru thought as she moved the big sword down to her side, where she held it with the tip angled off to the side. She didn't have a sheath to put it in so she couldn't do any sort of quick draw like they did in anime, but the sword was really too big for that kind of thing anyway, she thought; it was the sort of sword you carried on your back, maybe, maybe even on some kind of sling, like Setsuna did with her own extra long sword. That seemed a little awkward, though...She supposed she would just have to carry it in her hand until she found something that felt right.
'Gah, come on, concentrate, Haru...!' Haru thought to herself. Luckily, from what she could see, the spirit didn't seem to be doing much other than quivering in place. 'Maybe it doesn't like the sunlight, or maybe it's scared...' she thought.
Maybe it was scared? That was a thought Haru relished. She gripped the hilt of the sword just under the guard with her other hand gripping it just above the pommel, the way she had seen Setsuna do when using her nodachi; this stance felt better, more natural, than the overhead one she had adopted before, but something still felt a little off. She concentrated, moving her power into the sword, and the wind kicked up again, harder this time as it swirled around her. She brought the sword up diagonally and almost lost her grip on the hilt, she was so surprised at how easily it moved. The power she put into the sword flew off toward the spirit, a ragged, swirling mass of white energy, and impacted against the spirit's massive body. The explosion was startling in its intensity, and when the smoke cleared, Haru could see a huge chunk had been blown out of the spirit's body. Wide eyed, she looked down at the sword, which, she now realized, seemed to move better when she gripped it with one hand instead of two. The spirit was still alive, though, flailing violently and lashing out at everything around it. Even as she watched, one of its tentacles took up a wooden beam from the remains of the house and tossed it a hundred yards while another uprooted a small tree and swung it around. Haru took the same stance as before, this time only using one hand to grip the hilt and the other just supporting the pommel. A slight motion of her off hand moved the tip of the sword a surprising amount and she looked down at the sword, pleasantly surprised. 'It moves so easy,' she thought, surprised just as much about liking the sword as much as she did as by the ease of movement of such a massive blade.
"Now," she muttered under her breath as the wind, stronger than before, whipped around, blowing her clothing as she again concentrated on pushing power into the blade. It took her a moment to realize pushing wasn't the correct way to go about it, and she started directing power into it instead, and was delighted when the process went much more smoothly than before, and the sword pulsed with far more power than it had held the last time. With the sword charged up and ready to go, she shifted her feet slightly, looking for the position that felt most comfortable, wobbled the tip of the sword with the hand she supported the pommel with to get a better feel for it, and moved the sword around and up in a graceful arc, launching a sharp slice of energy at the spirit, expanding as it went. She allowed her body to keep moving as it followed through with the motion and the sword swung around and down, launching a second attack perpendicular to the first.
The first hit the spirit an instant later, slicing straight through it and making it freeze in place; the second cut hit the spirit across the first, again slicing straight through.
For a long, long moment, nothing happened.
Haru gasped when the spirit began to crumble, pieces falling off and turning to purple steam, which faded under the afternoon sun. It let out a low cry as it crumbled and collapsed in on itself, no longer able to function as its existence faded away to nothing.
Haru stood there for a moment in the devastated clearing, scarcely able to understand what had just happened. She looked down at the sword she was holding and realized her hands were shaking.
"I-I...I did it...I did it...!" She looked up at the demolished remains of the old house. "I did it! I did—" She cut off mid-sentence as she recalled what had happened to Hikari and the other two. "Hikari-san...!" she said, horrified, as she looked at the trees to the left. Had the woman died? Was she still alive, laying in the woods somewhere, all alone? Was she—
There, standing among the trees, she saw several figures, all dressed in the same red and white as the guards Haru's group had encountered upon first entering the compound.
Haru gulped. "U-um..."
"You did pretty well...for a newbie," one of them said, stepping forward to look at her sword. Haru stared at her for a moment before she realized she was a snake youkai. "Nice sword."
"Er...thanks," Haru said nervously.
"Yep, pretty good indeed; you saved me from having to put in any real effort," another one said, this one wearing two swords strapped to her back; Haru noticed that for some reason the right sleeve of the woman's uniform had been ripped off, and she kept rubbing her exposed shoulder. "Do you know how hard it is to fight somebody else when you've got that thing in the woods behind you?" she asked rhetorically as she eyed the ruins of the house.
"Kekeke, I knew you had it in you to do something like that," a familiar voice said.
Haru's eyes went wide as she whirled to look at the newcomer. "But you were dead! I saw it throw you!"
Aoyama Tsukiko grinned under her straw hat, looking a little worse for wear, but basically all right. "I'm not that easy to kill; none of us are. Still...you did well."
"I'll be sore for some time, I'm afraid," Aoyama Tomiko said as she limped up out of the trees. "But I'll survive."
"Then Hikari-san!" Haru said hopefully. "Is she okay? It hurt her..."
"She's already receiving medical assistance," the snake youkai woman said as she eyed the sword. "Hey, is that Chinese? It looks Chinese."
"I-I don't know," Haru said, her relief at Hikari's probable survival leaving her knees weak.
"Can I see it?" the snake youkai woman asked, smiling in what was probably intended to be a pleasant manner. Even with the human face she wore, the effect was disconcerting.
Haru looked from the snake woman to the sword and back, hesitated, and held it out, offering the hilt. "It's mine, Tsukiko-san said I could have it..."
"Don't worry, I'll give it back. It's just really cool looking..." the snake woman said as reached out and took hold of the handle of the sword. She abruptly jerked and looked up at Haru with wide eyes just as she let go of the sword.
Haru staggered as exhaustion crashed down on her, bringing with it the other Haru's demands to know what was going on, why Haru wasn't paying any attention to her, as well as a sense of shock at her earlier near-suicidal actions. With the sword finally out of her hands, Haru dropped to her knees on the ground as her stomach tried to heave up what little was left of her lunch. She was dimly aware of someone shouting as she fell over onto her side and curled up into a ball, and everything finally, mercifully, faded to black.
Author's Notes: Believe it or not, Ikari Hikari has been seen in the Still Waters series before, as well as Chiba Usagi and Mizuhara Rie. If you can't remember where, check out Meet the New Class, Chapter 27: Kondo Kai.
Now, about Haru's sword. It's a powerful artifact. I won't go into any details of its abilities at the moment, but it's the sort of thing that tends to pop up in myths and legends. As for what type of sword it is, I based it on a 'Bagua Dao', as it's commonly called on the internet; I don't know if that's the proper name. It's basically a huge version of a Chinese Dao type sword; there are some excellent videos on youtube showing its use, one in particular with an old guy doing a demonstration showing how smoothly one of these swords can be used. Do yourself a favor and look it up; it may dispel some mistaken ideas about big swords being slow.