And then, a night of horror that changes everything:
One of the things that Momo struggles with most at this moment of her life is that nothing makes sense. While the effect of their isolated upbringing has not been as heavy as on her sister who is lost out in the world, there are a lot of things about everything that she didn't know about and wasn't prepared to deal with. The shrine on the mountain was a safe and sheltered place.
Sometimes, she slips away into her memories to comfort herself, a source of warmth.
In her mind, she is back at the shrine, sharing a humble dinner with Master Haru and Ayame. Master is fussing at the cat for getting on the table, and the cat pretends he doesn't know he's doing wrong.
She refuses to acknowledge her reality, that she is going through hell and that she is going to die.
How did any of it happen?
That's right, she remembers, Tanashiro said he wanted to take her with him to the battlefront despite all the degrading commentary he'd made about her failures at the shrine and her status as a probably infertile woman.
He brought her close earlier in the day, so close that in the distance, they could see the fires from the enemy camp on the other side of the river. When night fell, she was told to go with his oldest son to a location separate from the main camp. From a strategic standpoint, this location didn't make sense, but she didn't exactly consider herself a war tactician.
When they arrived at this location where she now fully expects to die, Tanashiro's men started killing the residents of this little group of tiny shacks that could hardly be called a village. She was confused and horrified, seeing Kyomaru drag a man from his home and douse him with alcohol before setting him on fire. He screamed and ran in circles as he burned.
As she begged for them to stop, and asked why they were doing it, one of Kyomaru Tanashiro's men unrolled a battle banner, and it wasn't Tanashiro's.
It was a red silk banner with a white and black dog painted on it, the banner of Fujiwara House.
Why would they do this terrible thing and fly that banner?
A few days ago, they passed a village where horrible things had happened, and they all said to themselves that even if Tanashiro was a demon, Fujiwara was worse. It was just like this, innocents tormented and murdered, but a red banner with twin dogs stuck in the corpse of one of the victims.
Kyomaru Tanashiro, no doubt at his father's orders, stabs her with the sharp bamboo pole the banner is affixed to.
It protrudes from her body, not high enough in her chest that she simply dies, but high enough that she is left choking on her own blood, hallucinating about warm memories with people who have left her behind to suffer in this monstrous, wicked excuse for a world.
Unlike the Shinto priests, the monks that teach the ways of Buddha say that all the suffering in the world is caused by the desires of mankind, and that that learning to be content and at peace would bring fulfillment.
Yet Momo isn't suffering because of her own desires, unless it is unreasonable to desire that she not die in the worst way in the worst place. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?
She's not sure why she's thinking about this while a man is doing unspeakable things to her and beating her with a heavy rock. Momo wants to go back to thinking about that warm dinner at the shrine with her family who is dead.
Momo doesn't even know why Tanashiro would want her dead. What purpose would that even serve? Her life is in a void state right now and ending it just doesn't seem to accomplish anything at all?
There is a part of her that feels a sense of elation that she is probably mere moments from joining her family, wherever they are, but also an intense sense of despair that she has to suffer this way. This isn't how she wants to die, but with her technique, she knows she would probably live forever until someone killed her, so her end was almost certainly always going to be violent.
She's ready for it to be over.
She doesn't know what happens afterward, truly, but she is not afraid, because there is simply no possible way that whatever is on the other side of death could be worse than this moment.
Momo wonders where Michizane is, because the last time she saw him, he wasn't far away. A little voice in her head wonders if he knows and he chose not to help her, but her heart knows that he come to her aid if he could.
As she lays there, waiting to die, staring up at the snarling, vile monster that is Kyomaru Tanashiro, his father's pride and joy, she has a moment of clarity and suddenly understands why all of this is happening.
It's because Kenji Fujiwara is close, right on the other side of the river. The two main armies are probably going to clash the next day, and by the time the night after this one begins, everything will be decided.
In order for Tanashiro to win, he needs his favorite slave to attack Fujiwara in a heightened state, filled with anger and negative energy so he'll fight his hardest.
What better way to do that than to convince him that Fujiwara killed his friend in such a brutal way? Tanashiro will have his son do it, and Michizane will find out soon, and go into his battle blind with rage and grief. If he dies fighting like that, it doesn't matter to their lord as long as he accomplishes the goal of eliminating Fujiwara.
Her life is just a tool for Tanashiro to control Michizane.
Momo doesn't really care if she dies, but she will not fail Michizane. Every real test, she has failed, but this one, she will pass, no matter what.
Is it too late for her to fight? Her body is in very bad condition, already on the brink, but there is a way to come back from that, isn't there?
Master Haru couldn't do it, and supposedly there are only a few people in the land who can, but he told her about a special technique. If cursed energy only destroys, there's a way to reverse it against itself. It didn't make sense to her before that moment, but somehow, it falls into place in her mind.
Perhaps it is the enlightenment that comes with realizing she wants to live not for the sake of being alive, but because she has something she needs to do, or maybe it's her resolve not to fail again, or maybe it's her anger and disappointment that despite being born with significant power, she has lived in this wretched world and not done one single thing that made it better. There are a lot of incredibly powerful and entirely negative feelings churning inside of her heard.
All of these things swirl together in her mind, and Momo suddenly ascends in her state of aggrieved madness as everything crystallizes into a mass of convoluted, broken desperation and wrath.
While all of this is happening, Michizane can't sense what's going on because Tanashiro has sent him on an errand to move him away from her so he can complete this final turn of the screw inside Michizane Sugawara's heart.
Tanashiro thinks he's won his war, until a very loud, thunderous tearing sound rips across the low-lying areas.
Across the river, Fujiwara sees the 'fuzzy dot' suddenly become enormous, and growing by the second as latent cursed energy begins to swirl around it like a typhoon. The cursed energy isn't even originating from the fuzzy dot; the fuzzy dot seems to be consuming all the loose cursed energy that might otherwise eventually turn into a cursed spirit.
Fujiwara has never heard of such a thing and has no idea what is happening, but whatever it is, it sends out negative sentiments so far even he feels it.
Turning to his armor bearer, who is staying up with him while he gazes into the distance, Fujiwara says, "Wake everyone up. Tell them to leave everything and retreat from this location back the way we came. As fast as they can go."
"What's happening?"
"I don't know, but it's definitely bad. I'm a little too curious, so I'm going to go see for myself."
Fujiwara assumes that whatever is happening is the reason that Tanashiro thinks he will win the war, but actually Tanashiro himself feels the strange, unexpected disturbance and thinks for a moment that for some reason, Michizane came back instead of completing his errand.
Tengen, who felt quite small at her lowest, grasps the privilege of being a star plasma vessel, and having a different body than everyone else.
Running on a kind of broken illumination, she fills her body with cursed energy until it displaces what makes up her actual body, and she starts to grow, using reverse curse technique to heal herself and stretch her skin over this monstrous form she is creating.
Riding on Nue's back, Fujiwara sees this strange creature suddenly emerge from the darkness, a glowing naked girl with broken, gnarled fingers and a disfigured face and scars and wounds all over the place. It looked like someone had been beating her with a hammer at first.
The giant, more than eight times his height, is made up almost entirely of cursed energy, with the human parts of her separated by massive amounts of power.
The obvious injuries and disfigurements straighten themselves out as Momo continues to use reverse curse technique, and as she does, still more and more cursed energy is churning around her.
Fujiwara has never seen a human manipulate free cursed energy from the air before, but he doesn't think what he is looking at is a cursed spirit.
She picks a person up off the ground—Kyomaru Tanashiro—and squeezes him until he simply pops.
When Katsuragi told him the gods sent Michizane with his Six Eyes to judge them, he clearly had the right idea but the wrong sorcerer, and as Fujiwara circles the giant atop his flying shikigami, she turns to him and shrieks.
"VANISH!"
"Yes, ma'am. Whatever you say."
He flies back toward where he came from.
While Michizane would not have sensed what was happening to Momo if things had gone according to plan, he certainly sees with Six Eyes all the cursed energy even heading toward the castle being sucked up toward one single point.
Something terrible is clearly happening at the battlefront and not wanting to disobey his lord but knowing returning might be more important, he decides to do something that is against the rules.
He opens the scroll to see how urgent the message is so he can decide whether to deliver it or turn back.
The scroll is empty. Blank. There's nothing there.
He wonders if invisible ink has been used but holding it up to lit orb of cursed energy, he would be able to see that on the paper even if it was invisible to everyone else.
Why had he been sent away to deliver a blank message?
He hurries back as fast as his powers can possibly take him, and while he does, the giant finishes annihilating all the people that were part of the team that assaulted her and killed the residents of this pathetic little collection of houses…just ordinary people who were trying to live and didn't deserve the misery that was brought to them for no reason.
Momo runs toward Tanashiro's main forces, and they scramble like ants.
Even though she resolved to kill everyone, the most important goal in her clouded, darkening mind was getting Lord Tanashiro, the one responsible for nearly all the suffering of all the people she'd known in her life.
That man did not run faster than Tengen could move in her current form, and she stepped on him like a cockroach, swirling cursed energy under her foot to cause an explosion that left him unrecognizable as a thing that used to be human.
Despite efforts to hide and flee, she had a clear idea of who played what role and within the boundaries of her power, no one could hide from her. At least, at the moment she was still mostly lucid on some level and knew who she was targeting, but with every second, things became a little cloudier.
Fujiwara really had no idea what he was watching, but things were clearly not going according to any plan Tanashiro would have made because the evil old lord probably didn't plan on getting smeared across a giant woman's foot. He wondered if someone had a giant-summoning technique, or someone could turn into a giant girl, or if there was an actual human inside of that monster?
His forces are fleeing on foot, and he has no idea if she will turn on them once she finishes on the other side. The giant is extraordinarily powerful, and his instinct is to simply leave these people with whatever curse they have summoned upon themselves, but if she turns and goes across the river to target his soldiers or the villages on his side of the border, then it's his problem too.
It really seems like, the longer he watches and the more quietly he approaches, this time in the shadow, this giant is some sort of accidental aberration. When his shadow slips into Tanashiro's campground, people are yelling a name, indicating that the giant is, in fact, a person.
A person named 'Momo,' who is referred to only like this and never by her family name like a slave or a little girl—someone of little respect. It was an interesting choice to still call her like this even while she decimates the camp and wipes out most of the higher ranking soldiers.
Momo shrieks as she continues her enraged destruction of Tanashiro's army, and her hands start changing, fingers distorting out shape into claws, her head becoming oddly square.
When Michizane arrives, he sees this happening, and with Six Eyes, he is unable to deny that this now-unrecognizable creature is actually…Momo. His friend who he promised to protect has inexplicably made herself big by filling the space inside of her body with cursed energy from everywhere.
"Momo! Momo!"
He calls out, and she glances down, but doesn't seem to recognize him.
Michizane doesn't understand what's happening.
Momo had never once in her life communicated violent thoughts or an intent to harm others. She was a disciplined shrine maiden who had spent her whole life up to a very specific point focusing on growing into a mature and thoughtful person. Even when everything went so badly, even if she was angry, she wasn't ever violent.
He keeps calling out to her, and she seems to become less and less human looking as her field of interest widens and she starts attacking people with less intelligence about her targets and her movements, and finally Michizane himself, looking down at him with crazed eyes as if she didn't know him.
Momo slaps him with such force that he goes flying through the air and hits the side of a mountain because he couldn't throw his technique up fast enough. The cursed energy disturbance around her is noisy and makes it hard for him to really move and function as a sorcerer. Or maybe she was somehow able to deliberately weaken his cursed energy somehow. Whatever the case, his technique didn't work correctly near her.
If he was an ordinary person, the sheer concentration of cursed energy in the air in this area would be poisonous, and certainly, he can see that many of Tanashiro's soldiers who tried to flee are unconscious from being subject to harsh levels of cursed energy.
As he dusts himself off, she turns back to the mountain behind her and starts ripping it apart with her enormous claws, shrieking like a wild animal.
Michizane feels a surge of cursed energy near his feet, and from the shadows, Kenji Fujiwara appears.
Will he have to fight him too?
Fujiwara says, "I bet you didn't think we'd meet like this, Michizane Sugawara."
The older sorcerer's posture isn't set for battle, so Michizane says, "What do you want?"
"Do you know what that thing is?"
"It's…it's my sister, Momo. Like a sister, anyway."
"So there is a person inside of it?"
Michizane turns to him fully. "Yes. A good person. Obviously, she's not supposed to be like this. I don't know what happened or how it happened. You know a lot about sorcery right? How can we save her? Will you help me? I know you're my enemy, but, I'll do anything. Make any vow. Agree to any debt. If you want my life, I will give it. I'll be your slave, if that's what it takes."
Fujiwara finds this offer annoying, and answers, "I don't understand what is happening, but I do know that when the transformation first started, she seemed to have her wits about her, and as time go by, she's becoming less human in appearance and behavior. She's practically feral."
"What happened before that?"
"I was too far away, but I can tell you that when she first transformed, she was naked like that, and it looked like someone was probably trying to beat her to death or something. There were markings of violence all over her."
Sugawara remembers who he is talking to, and asks, "Did your men…you raid the villages around here…"
Fujiwara says, "Are my men the ones the goddess is stomping to death?"
Michizane's knowledge is limited by age, and by the fact that he has been raised for the singular purpose of killing humans and sorcerers in battle. He actually doesn't have much experience dealing with cursed spirits or any of the other dark and strange oddities of the world of sorcery outside of the dark idol.
Fujiwara actually thinks that while others might insist the only answer to this situation is to kill this monster, as a phenomena, this is all very fascinating—a strange thing he will probably see this one time in his life and never again. It's hard to tell what was supposed to happen here; maybe Tanashiro knew this young woman had the potential to spin out of reality if she was stressed enough but thought he would be able to control her.
Maybe this was an accident, maybe something else was supposed to happen.
This situation is also incredibly dangerous, and while Momo is currently inanely clawing at the mountains, Fujiwara's concern is that she will turn and realize her path will be uninhibited if she crosses the river.
Fujiwara asks, "When you were close to her, did your cursed energy suffer any kind of disruption?"
"Yes. I wasn't able to fire off my technique normally."
The older sorcerer thinks for a moment and then says, "I am not suggesting this, but let's say we stood here on this cliff and said 'the only option we have is to kill her,' would we even be able to do that? Both of us, together? She could easily destroy my shikigami, and even with my cursed tool, I don't think I'd be able to do much to her. Even if you could blow a hole in her with your whatever it is you think I don't know about, couldn't she just fill the hole with more cursed energy?"
Michizane for a split second is incensed, but he reminds himself that Kenji is not suggesting that, he's asking Michizane to confirm that isn't even an option.
"R-Right."
Momo has lost her sense of reason, has access to basically all cursed energy everywhere, a body that can't be destroyed by means available to them, and if they get close to her, she'll mess up their cursed energy.
What horror, for Michizane to watch Momo in this state: feral, consumed by rage and grief, distorted out of shape into something that looks scarier than any curse.
He doesn't know what to do, and he feels so lost.
Fujiwara ruffles his hair, an acknowledgement of their age difference, of the disparity perhaps not of their raw power, of the fact that this is terrible and painful and scary for Michizane.
Kenji says, "Listen, I don't know this with any certainty, but I believe the reason that she is loses her senses is because she's basically turning into a vengeful spirit while she is still alive. If she turns fully into a vengeful spirit that can manipulate all cursed energy, the world as we know it is probably just be over. We probably only have a few minutes to stop that from happening."
"What do we do?"
"In order to stop her, we would need to be able to do something about that body. Do you know how to use reverse curse technique?"
"…no."
"I guess it doesn't matter, since there is a limit to how much we could produce, and your friend has unlimited cursed energy. Domain expansion?"
"Not yet."
"I really am not understanding why anyone thought we were going to fight and you'd win, but that's beside the point."
Fujiwara believes fully that something incredibly apocalyptic is going to happen if they don't pull this sorcerer back from the brink, and that some risk is both unavoidable and necessary. If he withdraws here when he has a chance only to face a future where he doesn't, that's not useful.
Michizane asks, "So what then?"
"We will use Mahoraga."
That thing—the one that Katsuragi warned him about. A harbinger of destruction that would wipe the entire battlefield if summoned.
Michizane says, "I've heard of that thing. Isn't that just for you to kill yourself?"
"Eh? It's not as simple as that. Mahoraga is a shikigami, so basically, a monster from another world. There are a lot of things that are special about the Ten Shadows. Each one has kind of a little secret. Mahoraga has both a sword that carries reverse curse technique, but he actually has the ability to adapt to anything and everything. Unless your friend kills him, if he lives long enough, he will create a balancing force and 'balance' your friend.
"All or some of us might die, but Mahoraga will probably focus on her because she is so powerful, and she'll wear him down. As soon as Mahoraga neutralizes this cursed energy phenomena, we will have to kill him. It's extremely dangerous—every time Mahoraga has been summoned, everyone involved has died, but I am stronger than my predecessors, you've got teeth to bite with. We'll be relying on the fact that she'll probably weaken him significantly."
Michizane wonders if Momo is conscious or not, if she's scared, if she can really come back, if things could possibly go the way they are planning.
In the back of his mind, he knows that if there's an opportunity and they have no other path, she might have to die.
Fujiwara isn't confident their plan will turn out as intended, although he thinks they have maybe even odds that at the end of the fight, the monster will either back in whatever state she was before or dead. The boy isn't unreasonable; he clearly understands that what has happened is terrifying and wrong and that they might have to pursue an end he doesn't want.
If there's any useful skill that Tanashiro instilled in his soldiers, it is the ability to accept everything always going wrong and everything in the world being depressing and disappointing.
Michizane feels like his heart is full of broken glass at this point, because how did this happen? Did Momo always have this power? What caused this to happen? He doesn't have the mental space to put the pieces together in his head.
When they approach Momo, she scarcely looks human at all, and her eyes have turned red and appear catlike.
She doesn't like them being close, and Sugawara is left with trying to distract her while Fujiwara summons the Mahoraga.
The summoning ritual is set between Momo and Fujiwara and Mahoraga, so Michizane will be outside of it and will likely not be targeted by the shikigami—at least that's the theory. Assuming everything goes according to plan, his job is to stay in position to launch a powerful attack as soon as Mahoraga brings 'balance' to Momo's cursed energy again.
Michizane knows that Fujiwara isn't helping him because he cares about Momo, and that he is principally concerned about containing the threat she poses before she finishes evolving into whatever she is going to change into. Still, having a more powerful sorcerer with more experience there gives him courage and direction that he might not have had otherwise.
The night is so dark, a new cloudy new moon, which isn't a problem for him with Six Eyes, or for Fujiwara, who is reportedly much more powerful in the dark. He wonders how this scene looks to an ordinary person, barely able to see anything that has happened or is happening now.
Fujiwara chants, and the instant that Mahoraga appears, before he can even move out of the way, Mahoraga backhands him in the face as he tries to move, stabbing Fujiwara in the eye with his sword.
"That was foul, and you know it, you big twat," Fujiwara shouts as he covers his mangled eye and heals it using reverse curse technique. When his yelling causes Mahoraga to turn around, he adds, "Never mind, I deserved that. I called you. Thank you for coming to visit."
Mahoraga lets out a growl that seems to indicate he doesn't want anyone speaking to him or telling him jokes.
This is the first time that Michizane has seen a person use reverse curse technique, and watching it happen with Six Eyes is fascinating, an explanation better than anything he's read on any scroll.
In this battle, he feels like he lacks everything he needs to contribute meaningfully.
He watches how Fujiwara moves, how he uses his cursed technique.
As expected, Mahoraga turns from him to the giant, and when he stabs into Momo with the Blade of Extermination, she shrieks in pain even though the wound disappears even as the blade slides through her.
Momo slaps him down and blasts him with an amount of cursed energy that would turn most sorcerers into a fine mist, and the wheel floating over his head turns.
It has to turn seven more times.
Mahoraga rises up to strike Momo again, and in her inhuman, feral state, she is incredibly powerful, but that is about it. She doesn't sufficiently dodge or use strategy or even really move out of the way fast enough to keep Mahoraga from cutting her again, resulting in another deafening scream.
Then Mahoraga takes three minutes out of his evening to ignore Momo completely and throws half of a mountain at the sorcerer who summoned him, who only avoids being crushed by the high-speed projectile because Michizane blows it up.
Mahoraga is so powerful that he is able to juggle both opponents and seems to note that sometimes Michizane interferes and is clearly starting to think about attacking him too.
Michizane has heard the other shikigami serve their master without flaw, and then there is this one, who kills everyone around whenever he gets to come out. And oddly, the longer Mahoraga is out, the larger he seems to get.
Fujiwara was surprised by this fact too because it hadn't been written down, but Mahoraga was, in fact, getting bigger and bigger with each second, but the effect was smooth enough that he thought at first his mind was playing tricks on him.
His increasing size makes him more of a hazard, as he is also becoming heavier and throws his weight around like some sort of huge demon cannon. Fujiwara thinks maybe Mahoraga becomes more and more powerful the longer he is out in the mortal world, which means the longer it takes him to deal with the giant, the harder he will be to get rid of once that task is done.
This means he might reach an undefeatable state before completing the task at hand.
Overall, this whole situation is very dangerous and stressful; Fujiwara has no idea what Tanashiro was doing, but he evidently had two young sorcerers under his control who were on a higher level and for some reason, this one lost it and was actively turning into a curse while still alive.
Fujiwara has so many questions he wants to ask about the nature of this woman's body and her powers. What powers did she have and what situation led to this outcome? Every sorcerer has a limit to how much cursed energy they can output into the world, and that limit is typically enforced by the body. Surpassing it involves damaging or even destroying the body.
What's unique about this woman is that she is able to freely collect latent cursed energy that might otherwise be used to by cursed spirits and she can just use it like it's hers. If her body has those limits, she has ignored them without mortal consequences or broken whatever enforces those limits.
Michizane can see their plan is working, but this comes at the expense of listening to Momo scream as he hits her, and slashes her, and at times, there are moments where she seems quite frightened.
Growing up in a region that practiced native religion exclusively, he'd learned most of what he knew about Buddhist imagery from a travelling sorcerer who named his eye ability 'Six Eyes' to indicate his ability to see all things in existence, the six realms. Whether the six realms are real or not was a different matter.
The wheel over Mahoraga's head was interesting and strange. He doubted it came from Buddhism because Mahoraga is an enormous monster from a world that may or not be some sort of hell and all he wants to do is murder everyone around in a specific order that starts with the person who summoned him.
Mahoraga is clearly not following the way of Buddha.
He also didn't think Buddhists would have taken the wheel from Mahoraga, as it was absurd to suggest considering how far away those ideas came from and how few humans had ever even seen what Mahoraga looks like.
Maybe it was simply the case where Mahoraga is utilizing a truth of the universe that religious people discovered independently, and while their version of eight paths to perfection and balance involves virtue, Mahoraga's version is purely based on violence.
He is torn from his thoughts by another shriek as Mahoraga cuts Momo again, and he once again just prays that she's somehow unconscious or can't feel it or won't remember.
How did this happen?
Why did this happen?
This seems to go on for all eternity, but it goes on and each moment in this horrid eternity brings them one moment closer to completion.
When the wheel finally turns for the last time, a huge wheel appears in the sky that seems to reverse Momo's manipulation of the cursed energy in the area, blasting it away instead of drawing it in.
Michizane viewed this attraction and the subsequent repellant effect as a reversal and he saw with his Six Eyes a glimpse of himself too.
Without the ability to simply pull more cursed energy into the vortex, all they needed to do was neutralize the cursed energy in her massive body, and before Mahoraga can hit her with his sword again, a glowing red orb erupts from Michizane and goes through Mahoraga to hit Momo.
Deprived of new cursed energy and hit with an explosive, catastrophic amount of reverse curse technique, from the first ever Red attack, Momo's body simply shrinks back to her original size and shape, falling to the ground like she was before her transformation.
Michizane catches her before she hits, and when she lands in his arms, she loses consciousness and everything just sort of stops for a moment.
His brain is oddly filled with so many things:
If there is a path to perfection through violence, and one through virtue, are these things inherently related to each other?
He thought of everything as being a collection of all the physical material in the world, but is he not also a part of everything? He came from that physical material, and has been imbued with this strange power, but will he not also return to the dust that he came from someday?
The first time that he does it, he only uses one hand because he is holding Momo.
Even though Fujiwara is coming up on his flank to defend him against Mahoraga, the older sorcerer feels a sense of impending death as he takes one step too many and the teenager raises a hand and crosses two fingers, a representation of the interconnectedness of all things.
Michizane has never seen anyone else use a domain expansion before, and by all accounts, he mostly does it wrong. He doesn't speak its name, the barrier is incomplete, causing it to sort of explode as soon as it almost solidifies, and the inside is unpolished—an amalgamation of incomplete thoughts about completeness.
Mahoraga is a creature with enough of a psyche that he is stunned and suffers severe damage to his mind from being inside of Sugawara's domain expansion for even the three seconds that it was sustained.
With Mahoraga stunned, bleeding from the eyes, and frozen like a statue, Fujiwara plunges his cursed sword into the back of Mahoraga's skull and the shikigami disappears.
Fujiwara doesn't at all understand what he just witnessed outside of understanding a domain expansion happened, but three seconds to critically damage Mahoraga so badly he can't move is a scary reality for Fujiwara.
Fujiwara wonders if it would even be possible for a human to survive inside of whatever it is that Michizane very briefly created.
Both summoning Mahoraga and not dying from Mahoraga had depleted Kenji's cursed energy, and he simply flops down on the flattened grass.
Michizane blew his technique out using a domain expansion and also spent a lot of his cursed energy with the huge Red attack he used against Momo, so he similarly simply folds onto the ground, slipping his torn haori off to cover Momo.
Out of breath, out of strength, out of power, for a while, they are simply quiet.
Perhaps the violence has passed, but the real chaos lay ahead. Tanashiro has been tracked all over the battlefield like dog excrement on the bottom of a careless child's shoe.
After a while, Michizane says, "I understand you didn't help me for the sake of helping, but I am grateful nonetheless."
"What exactly is her technique that she did all of that?"
"Her technique is immortality."
"Well, if it's not 'immortal giant,' that doesn't tell me anything about anything."
Michizane carefully watching Momo's breathing, says, "Momo isn't like other people. I don't exactly know how to explain this since it's something only I can see, but there are things about her that don't look human to my eyes. Up until tonight, I have never seen her do anything that wouldn't be possible for a powerful human sorcerer before tonight."
They are younger than Fujiwara was when his father died and he was almost crushed by the weight of his own responsibilities, so Kenji is inclined to show a little grace here. If they were a decade older, everything around them would have been playing out differently all along.
Sugawara still has a bit of boyishness about him, probably a late bloomer, with a lot of physical growth still to do. The girl looks younger than he expected, probably around his age, but older-looking in the sort of way that happened when people got injured or went through bad circumstances.
Michizane holds Momo close, paying close attention to the sounds of her breath and pulsing of the blood in her body through Six Eyes.
Neither of them really knows what to make of anything that happened, and as soon as it's over, it doesn't feel real, but there are huge monster footprints everywhere, and Mahoraga and Momo fighting destroyed a lot of the local terrain, leaving cracks in the mountains and holes all over the place.
Fujiwara doesn't really understand how the young woman's body simply went back to its original shape, or how it got so big in the first place.
"What now?" Michizane asks.
"We will sit here for a while. A sorcerer is weakest after a big battle, especially when a domain expansion has been deployed. The world is filled with powerful sorcerers right now, and you would be surprised to know how many of the greatest are killed by unworthy opponents in the minutes after a battle."
They appraise each other as they sit, legs crossed in the middle of a destroyed battlefield, while the now-exhausted woman sleeps.
"Her name is Momo?"
"Momo Tengen."
The older sorcerer scratches his head, finds his fingers are now covered in blood, mumbles something about his shikigami, and then says, "I think you might need to keep Tengen somewhere very safe and away from sources of stress for a very long time. I don't know what caused this, but she's probably someone who shouldn't be anywhere near a battle ever again."
It was harsh, but Michizane thought it was a fair thing to say. It wasn't like he was asking to eliminate the threat even though if Momo turned into whatever she almost transformed into, she'd be a problem Fujiwara too.
"I thought you'd demand we kill her, because she's dangerous," Michizane says.
Fujiwara answers, "I doubt Tengen's extraordinary power was placed in this world so I can remove it. I'm not really a smart guy or anything like that, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in not committing consequential acts for no reason."
Michizane answers, "That's really a dumb thing to say for someone who has let their army rape and pillage the borderlands for years."
Fujiwara answers, "I am astounded both by the incredible power you appear to possess and your almost incomprehensible stupidity. These people didn't have anything to pillage, you absolute imbecile. We came here from Nara. For what reason would my men leave a city filled with meat and beautiful women so they could march across the muddy plain and come to some isolated village with ten falling-down shacks in order to take liberties with women who look unwell and have thin hair because they only eat radishes and rice? And then what? Kill them and pillage the radishes?"
It seems like a stupid thing to believe, but maybe he had asked Lord Tanashiro once why someone as privileged as Fujiwara would engage in such horrible acts. Michizane says exactly what Tanashiro told him. "It was about terror, not about stealing or even the women."
Fujiwara says, "Yes, because a man who can summon shadow demons from the underworld to do his bidding has no other means to frighten illiterate radish-eating peasants."
"Why do you keep mentioning radishes? I eat them all the time, is there something wrong with that?"
"If you're starving to death, okay? Once a week in a soup? Sure. The radishes are not really the issue here, Sugawara. The problem is that you're an idiot. Normal people can be foolish, and they usually don't inconvenience anyone more than themselves, but powerful sorcerers being ignorant is bad for everyone."
Michizane is first and foremost concerned with Momo, but all of his life, he's been accustomed to being praised for his intelligence.
"Oh, did you want me to praise you? For what? Allowing yourself to be a slave to a man you could have killed? Letting him pull on those chains like strings on a puppet? You spilled blood for him, knowing you should have done something about it. If you kill for someone who is evil, what do you think that makes you?"
The weight of Michizane's inaction weighs on him as he looks back at his own actions.
Fujiwara says, "You killed some of my guys. We collected their bodies and burned them yesterday. Some of them have sisters. Most are probably brothers. They have mothers that loved them. There are women who don't know they are young widows, and little kids waiting for their fathers to come home.
"You had the power to stop all of this. Instead, you let this go on. You let Tanashiro starve people over the winter, you let him bring teenage boys out here to die, you killed for him, and you even let him drag this girl out here. If someone like Tanashiro got anywhere near my sister, I would do such terrible things that even in a thousand years, people would still be talking about how cruel I was."
Michizane had thought a lot about what was going to happen when and if they met, and while he'd initially be relieved that they didn't fight each other, he maybe would have preferred serious injury to having an older, more powerful sorcerer rebuke him for so many of the choices that had led him to this moment.
He wants to defend himself, so he says in a voice that sounds surprisingly weak even to him, "You can't just blame everything on me."
"It's not about blame. It's about responsibility, and the obligation that comes with having power. This world is full of people who will die wishing they had the power to help the people they cared about. It was freely given to you, and you squandered it. Allowed someone else to abuse it. Stood around and watched things happen until someone else use the power allotted to them to complete the task assigned to you. I cannot imagine how you could have failed more."
The words cut like knives, and he feels like a little child being scolded by a disappointed, angry adult. Everything Fujiwara said was true; he could have killed Tanashiro, and he knew deep down, he should have. But he just never felt the impetus to really do it. It was easier to just go along with each day's tasks and, in the back of his mind, think about how unfair it was. That was how everyone else coped.
But he wasn't everyone else.
As long as he was doing it because he told himself he didn't have a choice, it was Tanashiro's fault that people had died, and not his, but…it all starts to fall apart in his mind when held to the light of truth.
"What do I do?"
Fujiwara points in the direction of the castle. "Did you not hear me? Go back to that castle, kill everyone who had the power to make decisions under Tanashiro. His advisors, his relatives, his allies…anybody who strengthened his regime. And then you are going to take control. People might try to stop you, but they can't. You will make peace with your rich neighbors and see if they'll throw a little gold your way. Butcher Tanashiro's pet pigs and feed them to the people. Let them drink all his sake. Either make yourself useful or lay down in a ditch and die. But I swear if I have to come back here because one of Tanashiro's people took control, I'm going to find you and bathe in your thin, watery blood."
Kenji wants to get up and walk away, but he's so tired, so he just lays down on his back and looks up as the clouds part and the stars become visible.
Michizane wants to get up and run away from all of it.
"And one more thing—that's not a house slave or your personal concubine. Don't call her by her given name to strange men. It's disrespectful," Fujiwara adds.
He feels like an old man, lecturing some idiot kid who probably didn't mean for anything to go the way it did. Growing up a slave, he was probably conditioned from early childhood to not make decisions for himself, so even when he had the power to do so, he deferred to his conditioning, and all of this was the result.
Momo stirs, opens her eyes, but doesn't do much besides tighten her grip on Michizane's clothes and whisper something that sounded like an apology.
Michizane answers her with his own apology, and she goes back to sleep.
"If I have questions, can I come visit you?"
"Absolutely not. Your little boy face annoys me, and I don't want to look at it."
"How about a letter?"
"My wife answers my correspondence, and she will hurt your feelings. Oh, speaking of her…she's going to love this story. A tale of a woman transforming into a giant naked goddess that mortals alone cannot stop so she can stomp a bunch of evil, stupid men to death will delight her."
Michizane asks him a lot of questions that he cannot escape because he is too tired to move, and before they part ways, Kenji answers a question about Ten Shadows.
The first Ten Shadows user, now five hundred years in the past, wrote in scrolls as he explored his technique. Due to the exotic nature of the ability, he was well into his second decade of life when he was still forging new subjugation pacts with the shikigami.
One by one, he met them and subdued them. Some fought more than others, but he considered them friends. This continues all the way through his ninth, and he wrote that he was excited to meet the Tenth Shadow.
'What sort of friend will I meet when the sun rises?'
The rest of the scroll rotted off due to being soaked in blood.
And then, as he stood and dusted himself off later, feeling somewhat revived, the older sorcerer says, "Before I left Nara, I met the most beautiful woman in the world. Unspeakably gorgeous. A little boy like you wouldn't even know what to do. Beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, milky skin. Quite exotic…whoever her people were, they aren't from around anywhere I've been. But I can't ask, because at some point, something happened to her. She lost all of her memories and doesn't even know her real name.
"I decided to lean in on my benevolence and bring her to my home, so my wife has been looking after her. In her last letter, my wife joked that she thinks the girl might have come from around here."
Michizane asks, "Why?"
"Because she gets really excited about a radish."
"You're actually kind of a bad guy."
Fujiwara lets out a little laugh and waves. "I'm going home. Let's never meet again."
"I will visit you someday and bring you radishes."
"Please don't."
If he'd just said, 'pink hair,' maybe it all would have fallen into place, but as told, it really was just a joke. A little moment where the truth fluttered past and none of them knew about it.
Michizane watches him walk back toward the river, the warlord satisfied and willing to end his war.
For a long time, perhaps two hours, he just sat in that field with Momo while she drifted in and out of consciousness.
There's something incredibly concerning that they are both aware of, and maybe Fujiwara noticed it before he left too, and that's why he told Michizane to hide her somewhere.
Momo is somehow giving off massive amounts of cursed energy, an amount that would be deadly to humans and hazardous even to weak sorcerers.
Michizane could tell that something had changed about her body; maybe she'd evolved into something stronger or maybe she'd damaged whatever protective mechanism kept this from happening before.
Whatever the answer was, he couldn't take her around people without cursed energy for the time being.
He doesn't know what that means for Momo or anyone else, and while he wants to focus on her, what's left of Tanashiro's army has fled. He doesn't know what they'll do, but there are probably some former leaders who would try and reorganize them to take control of the territory.
That's right—Lord Tanashiro is gone, and judging from the residue smeared everywhere, maybe only his youngest son back at the castle is still alive.
Michizane was the one who has the power to prevent everything from falling into chaos or right back under a cruel dictator.
He knew he needed to move past what he was and become something better. Someone better.
Someone who could make his own decisions and act on those decisions.
If he'd been stronger, and braver, and more decisive, Momo's hell this night would not have happened.
He finds a safe spot to leave her for a while and approaches the remnants of the army. Even from a distance, he can tell if anyone is approaching Momo, although he doubts if anyone would dare cause her any stress after what happened.
One of the generals is still alive and already trying to exert his authority over the army, talking about marching back to the castle and living like lords, claiming that supporting him will lead to riches.
Michizane approaches him and there's no hesitation for the general, who seems to just assume that if Michizane was Tanashiro's slave, and the general thinks himself the new lord, he now owns Michizane too.
In this context, it's really incredibly absurd.
Fujiwara was right; he should have murdered these fiends a long time ago. Maybe for some, they really didn't have other choices, but there were those who knowingly chose to participate in Tanashiro's cruelty.
Michizane feels like he is supposed to say something, but he can't find the words. He reaches out, and with one little blue burst of light, the general is no more.
And then his lieutenants, one of which tries to barter with Sugawara for his life with the information about what happened to Momo before she transformed. He had been the one to deliver the order from Lord Tanashiro to his son. This only makes Michizane angry, and he kills the lieutenant anyway.
Some of them clearly think of this as the moment a slave rebels against his masters, but it was more that he was trying to become a person worthy of the power that had been given to him. He made a vow within himself that he would make difficult decisions and act on them when it was needed.
He wondered too, could his homeland really know peace and prosperity because he had the power to make that happen for them?
He orders the army to return home, but knows he'll have to go back and forth and make sure they don't cause problems. If some of them got the wrong idea and wanted to avenge Tanashiro for some stupid reason, and crossed the river, Fujiwara would probably yell at him again and possibly beat him up as well.
Michizane could tell the only reason Kenji didn't whoop him at least a little was because he was tired.
There's also Tengen. He can't just have Tengen out in the open. He's not really sure what to do with her, but, well aware of her problem once she fully regains consciousness, Tengen suggests she can recuperate in an abandoned mine in the mountains.
Cursed energy doesn't spread across solid ground as easily as open air, so the area of influence from her constant cursed energy leakage would be more limited deep underground.
So that's where he takes her.
Tengen for the most part doesn't want anyone's company, including his, and wishes to be left alone in the mine while she recovers. He makes it as comfortable as possible for her, even making rooms with walls and floors, and cursed sunstones so she could have a few little plants although her cursed energy actually kills them right away.
Because of that, she can't have the cat with her either.
He appoints an older sorcerer from a fallen sorcery clan to tend to her, since her over-saturated aura remains dangerous.
Momo can't explain how she is different after the incident, but she simply feels like a different person. She understood why she had to be confined underground, but it was also incredibly dehumanizing. She thought about the dark idol, and how it was kept on the mountain because it was dangerous to others.
Then she also thinks that maybe she doesn't want to be around other people. She's not sure if she even feels like a person anymore.
In the maelstrom she created, she entertained a strange hallucination, when the area of effect of her power was at its widest. She almost felt like she could feel Ayame for a split second. She dismisses this as a figment of a troubled imagination, a mind making up lies to comfort her, like when Kyomaru Tanashiro was literally murdering her and in her mind, she was back home at the shrine with her family.
Maybe most importantly, Tengen has learned how to truly use her power at scale, but this came with the realization that manipulating cursed energy, even if she learned how to do it well, would eventually mutate her into something like a curse. What happened quickly when she was out of control would probably happen slowly, over many years, a process that would only take place due to her immortality technique.
Was this her fate?
To slowly turn into a monster, possibly confined in isolation underground forever, watching generations of people die?
Michizane visits her often, and sometimes, she just doesn't want to talk. Sometimes he respects her wishes and leaves when she asks, but sometimes he lingers for hours, telling her about everything that is going on while she seems strangely absent.
His life meanwhile has become a constant challenge at this particular stage, because he never envisioned himself being in the position he was in. Being leader of an entire land involved a lot of tough decisions, but it also involved a lot of looking at grain ledgers and listening to farmers fight about one of them moving the rocks that marked their property.
Michizane is glad that Tanashiro didn't have any family members who were young or innocent because he erased their clan from existence.
Some sorcerer from the south wrote him a letter saying that eradicating entire clans was wrong and he was wrong for doing it because it eliminated a bloodline and a technique.
He felt like no matter what he did, someone thought he was wrong.
When he opened the storehouses to the people, some people complained that if there was a blight or a crop failure they wouldn't have enough, but if he restricted access, a lot of the food would rot.
The few members of Tanashiro's upper class, even if they were just politically aligned with him and didn't participate in the cruelty, turned out to be the biggest pain of all, complaining about him to the poor field workers, reminding them that even they were higher in position in life than a slave.
Even though Michizane was no longer a slave, and even when he was a slave, Tanashiro would have traded the lives of a hundred peasants for his, he noted that the people he was trying to help really sometimes just wanted to look down on him.
They sit around and mock his ideas about living in a better world, with bellies that he makes sure are full of nutritious food.
Michizane is astounded at the bitterness that generations of cruelty left behind because he thought that under kinder leadership, people would feel happiness, but the people are collectively sour.
A strange sentiment lingers: 'I am a poor field worker like my father and his father before that, and no baby faced former slave is going to convince me the world can be a good place.'
His desire to build a proper port with a real city on the east side of the province is met with mockery, and at times, casual cruelty. He knows the perfect spot, and he could use his Blue to carve out the port into the perfect shape for ships.
With vast amounts of land, resources worth mining, and access to a coastline with a path by sea to the continent, there was no reason for them to be poor, for them not to have a Heian Kyo or a Nara for themselves.
An old man once asked him what the prosperous government on the continent would ever want from them, asking, "Do you think they can't grow radishes on all that land?"
It's demoralizing in some ways, how the people he is supposed to rule over have been so thoroughly mentally enslaved by the idea that they are poor and deserve to be poor, and any attempt to better their lives is just a silly idea from a former slave who isn't noble and shouldn't be ruling over them.
Michizane struggles to understand why noble blood should even matter. They were ruled by a noble house for generations, and the end result of that was misery and ruin.
It really doesn't seem like anything he does works well, and he wonders if the others in similar positions struggle with the same things he does.
When he visits Tengen, he desperately wants to help her feel okay or normal again, but she seems so disconnected from everything going on outside, so disconnected from him. Yet she is controlling an ever-expanding barrier that protects the area, first the area around the mine, then the castle, and by fall, most of the valley.
One day Tengen tells him that even if she can leave eventually, she'll probably stay underground because she finds it comfortable to be isolated from everyone else.