u/SteelTrim

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

The first half of John's day blurred. Yuki asked if he was okay at breakfast, granted, but she didn't seem overly concerned, so he wasn't either. He didn't bring up that he had stayed up overnight without blinking, but with her hearing, she surely knew. Honestly, he wouldn't be that surprised if the kitsune could somehow hear the goings-on in Broadstream.

With little complaint, he merely headed into the "office" and got on with his day. Granted, he was a bit tense about Kon Saya staying somewhere on the same floor, but he didn't anticipate too much of a problem. Maybe it was just his recent experiences, but fighting against an impossible to detect threat that could hide in a crowd and overwrite your mind with a touch made a fox who was only trying to trick you into what was effectively slavery honestly far less stressful.

It was a different type of threat, one that felt more manageable. He'd rather deal with six Kon Saya's at once than a single Kiku. He just had to do his best and get things ready so they could dodge the issue entirely, should Yuki be unable to squeeze a fair deal out of her.

Part of him wanted to stay in the fort and finish the telekinetic foci there, but he felt a duty to come in and multitask. Besides, if something went wrong, he needed to be nearby. Yosuke was guarding the fort anyway, and John had given the man a makeshift flare to signal if anything went wrong.

It was wild what you could do with a few offcuts from fire crystals, glue, flint, and a sling.

Glancing down, he read the latest report: a quick summary of expected yields from soybean fields from the next town over, and what Broadstream might be able to scrounge together to trade for them. The numbers weren't looking good, but perhaps if they could send a runner over, they might be able to shore up their supplies somewhat. Perhaps firewood would be an attractive trade to them?

John remembered that soybeans were calorie-dense and a big source of protein, which they could always use more of, especially with the forest still being unsafe to traverse unarmed. Unfortunately, they still hadn’t solved their looming problems with vitamin deficiencies come winter. Yuki told him that they could blunt some of the "winter sickness" with pine needle tea, and John vaguely remembered that it was a good source of vitamin C, but that didn't cover the full scope of malnutrition.

She also mentioned possibly growing mushrooms to avoid foraging trips by the villagers into the surrounding woods, which required an armed escort force to avoid issues from any remaining Nameless. Unfortunately, John had no idea how to go about that safely. 

Mushrooms were always something he had steered away from because the odds of picking something that looked identical to a harmless shroom but would kill someone on the spot were far too high. One errant fungus slipping into a farm could multiply and easily become a mass-casualty event.

Hmm. Only as a last resort, then. He couldn't stomach the risk otherwise. He made a note to speak to Yuki about firewood production. It was probably one of the easiest things he could do.

Glancing down at the small, sap-filled glass jars behind the desk, he saw the foci settling, suspended in solution, and decided that it was probably time to check up on them.

Sliding the chair away, John knelt, pulled a lens from his pocket, and carefully examined each one for micro-shifts. Thankfully, only one of the six had shifted enough to be a problem. Grabbing his tongs and metal probe, he carefully submerged them into the thick slurry. Grabbing the prospective foci, John nudged the slightly misaligned piece, butting it back into place. After that, he spent ten minutes making sure none of the sap had leaked where it shouldn't, lest the potent magical insulator brick the connections.

Ugh, it would still be a few more hours until it was solidified enough to remove. At the very least, he could, if all else failed, chip the pieces out of the sap and try again. He had a stone chisel that was softer than the crystals, but harder than the solidified sap, for that exact reason.

If he weren't so short on time, this wouldn't be so stressful. Unfortunately, winter was looming closer by the day.

Going back to his paperwork, John stretched before sitting back down, getting ready to—

A knock upon his door frame drew his attention, jolting him from his work and almost making him smear ink all over the page.

What now? 

He was pretty sure that Yuki told everyone to leave him be for the day, although he still had to poke his head out earlier when someone was causing trouble. At least he had one of the militiamen to guard the place while he was out, even if that Nomura kid was a bit too hero-worshippy for his taste.

"What's going on?" John politely asked.

"It's one of Lady Kon Saya's men, sir!" tensely barked Nomura. "He is asking for entry, sir, and says he has a message from her for your ears only!" At that, the man loudly shifted, thumping the edge of his obnoxiously large polearm on the ground. Honestly, the thing nearly scraped the ceiling, and the head might as well be a sharpened metal block. John wasn't even sure where he got it, as it certainly wasn't standard issue.

Well, damn. He supposed he didn't have any reason to send the poor man away. Besides, it might cause problems with Saya later; something about being 'ill taken care of' was not something he was eager to allow her at the negotiating table.

"Send them in, please," John called out, and moments later the door slid open, revealing a man in full armour, who promptly marched in and bowed deeply at the waist.

Then he stayed bowed, bent into a ninety-degree angle with no sign of stopping, eyes fixed on the floor. Was he… okay? You were supposed to just bow and get back up, right?

Yet the man stayed, frozen as if in a trance. It couldn't be comfortable. The awkward silence hung between him as he stared down the messenger. He was maybe sixteen at the oldest, now that John was looking at him. Academically, he knew people historically got jobs or even went to war at far younger ages than in the modern day, and yet something about this still needled at his heart.

In his time, in his home nation, someone like this would be picking up some shifts for some extra spending cash to blow on something stupid that seemed really important at the time, as tradition dictated. This kid should be blowing a hundred bucks on booze rather than being armoured up and ready to die for the whims of some lady who probably viewed him as more of a number than a true person.

"You good down there?" John finally asked, breaking the silence.

The kid bolted upright, arms still eerily still at his side. John noticed that he was unarmed, too, and didn't even bear a single dagger, unless one was tucked into his gear somewhere. Hmm. He supposed wandering around as a guest while armed to the teeth would be bad form. "Lord Hall, Lady Kon Saya requests your presence at your earliest convenience," the teenager delivered, his delivery strangely stilted.

Hmm. Well, he supposed that he could ask her what she wanted and—Wait. This was some weird power-play or espionage nonsense, wasn't it? She was "summoning" him in what was, ostensibly, his domain, like a king demanding service from a vassal. Ugh. He hated politics. He could go to her, but that was undoubtedly what she wanted, and she might be able to leverage that somehow.

Unbound not bearing yokai traits seemed to be able to enter Broadstream just fine, despite its magical protections, hence why the name of the man John duelled next to the well wasn't on the ofuda, and they still hadn't accounted for the Unbound that the okuri-inu discovered. If she had someone with abilities specialized in infiltration on call, they could slip into the room while he was gone and, even if they were only looking for documents, find the foci.

The thought of someone associated with the Celestial Court finding out about his foci, reverse-engineering the principles and coming for him… it couldn't be risked.

Should he deny her outright? Nah, she could use that too, and might even tip her off that something was up. While he didn't expect her senses to be as good as Yuki's, acting like he had something to hide could lead to her poking around where she was even more unwelcome. Saya clearly didn't place much value on human life, and she could probably come up with some crazy gambits using her own men as sacrificial pawns.

Telling her messenger he'd think about it and consulting Yuki first risked her somehow leveraging it much the same way. Maybe she'd say that it was a simple request for certain food and send out one of her men to purchase it during that delay, only for them to be "robbed" or murdered, causing a major diplomatic incident that needs compensation.

Perhaps a bit grim and extreme, but John couldn't risk it. Bah, he was living among kitsune too much. He never thought that he'd say it, but he missed workplace politics.

That left him only one option.

"Please send her over at her earliest convenience," John finally responded. "I can't leave my office at the moment, but I'd be happy to hear her concerns."

Worry flashed across the young man's face before he dipped his head. "It will be done, Lord Hall," he said, bowing one last time before pivoting sharply and walking out of the room.

After he left, John sighed and called out, "Let Lady Kon in when she shows up, Nomura."

"Yes, sir!" he answered, perhaps a bit too loudly.

He didn't have much time. Hurriedly, John corked the jars with work in progress foci, stashing them in his desk where nobody could see them before sweeping the more incriminating documents into a different drawer. Then he pulled out some of the more flattering reports from the "no concern" pile, because he was absolutely sure the kitsune was going to read everything she could.

Yuki had shown that she could read what he was writing by watching the motion of his fingers and, well, even if Saya was only half the woman Yuki was, that was enough to be scary smart.

Moments later, the door slid open once more, and the kitsune stepped through. It was hard to believe that both she and Yuki were the same species. While his friend towered, Saya was merely tall. Her humanoid form and smooth skin were only accented by fox-like ears and tails rather than bearing silky fur and wild might. Green eyes stared back, seeking weaknesses, rather than piercing gold that merely wished to learn.

"Lady Kon. Welcome, I hope you had a good night’s rest," John greeted, forcing a smile onto his face that he was sure she could tell was fake.

If her capabilities mirrored Yuki's, he suspected she could tell when he was lying, so he merely had to not lie about anything important. Hopefully, half-truths would at least make her question what part was the deception.

The kitsune slowly walked over, eyeing the western-style chair sitting opposite his desk before slowly settling upon it, threading her fluffy tails through the gap at the back. "Please, call me Lady Saya. As for my sleep, it was better than what I expected this far from major cities. Although where is the nearest shrine? I would make use of their services."

Damn. Well, that would be a problem. He wouldn't be surprised if she already knew and was just trying to needle him; they had already established that Saya had scouted them out. Was this a try to get him to slip up, admit that he murdered some spreaders of the Celestial Court's laws or something?

Well, she was going to be disappointed.

"Gone, I'm afraid. Only one apprentice stayed behind, and he hardly knows more than simple charms. The rest were being paid off by the Nameless, and were driven out of town once they were found out," John explained. There were pretty good odds that she was going to try to charm answers out of that man, but… Well, John and Yuki didn't show him anything incriminating. At most, he knew where the fort was, but a good third of the town did.

She breathed in sharply, eyes narrowing. "A hefty accusation," she said, a carefully curated frown painting her face.

Careful, John. She was fishing for something. She knew about the Transcendent Alchemy clash. Was she trying to determine whether it was Yuki and the Greater Nameless or something else? 

Oh, damn, right, the ofuda. He had almost forgotten that it might be what she was here for in the first place! 

"Well, even though the shrine itself was protected, it didn't explain certain other oddities," John explained. "Among others, they could seemingly travel and spend suspicious amounts of coin without being harassed while the village teetered on the edge of collapse."

"Do you know the names of the priesthood who were stationed here? If they were truly aiding the Nameless, I would see them brought to justice, and although I could send for information, I suspect not all of their number were officially recorded…" At that, Saya trailed off, and John hid a flinch. Right. Shit. If she finds them, they might be able to pry information that he would most certainly not like found. Hopefully, Iwao kept the construction methods to himself, assuming Kiku didn't dictate what to do directly. Neither John nor Yuki found any hint of instructions when they spent a few hours scavenging the place for useful resources two weeks back.

"Only one. I've forgotten the names of the rest, including the survivor," John admitted, shaking his head. "Head Priest Iwao. Dead now. We found him in the Nameless Nest, half dead from torture due to failing," he stated, omitting the nature of the torture and who, exactly, was doing it.

Saya's eyes met his, searching, for a moment before that slitted gaze lost a hint of its former intensity. "I see." 

"Was there anything else I can help you with, Lady Saya?" John asked, keeping his tone as polite as possible while internally praying to whoever would listen that he didn't leak anything important.

"Yes, I wished to speak with you about yesterday. You are recently Unbound, or at least whatever your equivalent is, are you not?" she inquired, one of her fox-like ears subtly swivelling. 

"I prefer not to discuss my past, Lady Saya," John quickly answered, biting the inside of his cheek and using the pain to focus himself, lest a giveaway leak into his expression. "There are plenty of painful memories there."

The fox merely inclined her head, a sly smile spreading across her lips. "I don't mean to dredge up any painful memories, I assure you. Your disgust was clear, but I assure you that I'm no slaver."

"You asked for a decade of control over these people's lives, Lady Saya. That is firmly against my values," John politely explained, careful not to grit his teeth.

Yet nothing in her eyes changed, and as he stared into those green orbs, he saw only amusement. "While Unbound may not live as long as most yokai, you'll see it, too, in time. They are in this situation because they failed to prepare for the worst." The woman leaned forward almost conspiratorially, brushing her long, orange hair from her eyes as her face was cast in shadows. "Maybe the next famine will strike in five, twenty, fifty, but it will strike, and they will be forced to beg again. Perhaps I could teach a few to plan ahead, but who's to say that they would teach their children, or their children's children?"

Saya shook her head and sat back up straight. "What about the famine in a hundred years from now, or two hundred years? It is our duty to guide the short-lived, and the best way to do that is to establish systems that will guide them. It's like plucking the pests from a garden by hand when you can put an ofuda instead."

It was easy to forget, even with Yuki, that so many yokai were ancient, until he was suddenly slapped in the face with it. How many times had people repeated the mistakes of a past generation back home? How many times had a hard-learned lesson been forgotten in just a few years?

Yet, the thought of being gardened ate at his heart. The idea of people not being able to decide for themselves, to be little more than crops that their superiors cultivated over generations into a "fitting" shape made bile rise in his throat. She asked them to… trade hundreds of lives to her the same way one might purchase a plot of land to do as she saw fit.

Would they end up better off? He had no way of knowing. It would certainly reflect poorly on her if they all died, he suspected. Most of them would likely live.

But he suspected she'd work them to the bone, and her time was certainly not free. From what he gathered from Yuki's conversation with her, it seemed like Saya needed prestige relatively quickly, and a sleepy, rundown town turned into an economic powerhouse would look good, even if everyone there was working from sun up to sun down to make it happen.

Even if she could deliver, would a decade of servitude under a taskmistress be a deal most here would make?

"I understand your perspective a bit more," John gritted out. "I do not personally agree with it. My home culture has an intense love for people being able to choose their own path." 

Saya nodded, that same damned smile lingering on her face like it was stuck. "Thank you. I merely ask for you to consider my offer; I wish for these people not to starve now, and not starve in the future."

"Ah, you'll have to talk to Lady Yuki about that," John interjected, shaking his head. He wasn't going to be responsible for the exact terms at any point; he had nowhere near enough experience. "I might be her, uh, advisor in certain matters, but this isn't my area of expertise."

"Of course, Lady Yuki is certainly an interesting kitsune," Saya muttered. "Wise beyond her years… but she is only a three-tailed kitsune. That is all a nogitsune can achieve, after all."

John didn't react, fixing her with a simple gaze. Where was she going with this? She had already dumped the whole nogitsune spiel in the previous meeting.

"If this deal goes well, perhaps we will be working together more closely in the future, no? After all, your mistress shall be bound to me for a few years." At that, her eyes gleamed with naked greed. "Perhaps you'll find a more fitting place in my court, once I sprout my fourth tail." 

Oh. Ohhhhh.

Holy hell, she still thinks he's a normal Unbound! Yes! That was pretty much the best thing he could hope for! She was only trying to poach his loyalty in exchange for higher quality yokai materials.

Thank you, world, and screw you, Saya!

"I'm afraid I can't make a commitment like that," John responded, trying to keep the giddiness out of his voice. "We'll see," he added, deciding that perhaps stringing her along might help for now.

"That's all I ask," Saya beamed, rising from her seat and giving him a shallow bow.

John returned a deeper one, just as Yuki had asked him to.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

John sat at the workbench with the emptiness-based 'clean room' magic installed, quickly going over the rapidly forming plans in his head as he cleared the counter of his previous project and started on the flying cart mark one, built for trade. Unfortunately, he couldn't just make the disc but larger—which he’d just remembered he still had to replace —as it was rather lacking for long-distance travel.

The core of the disc’s locomotion was a series of telekinetic foci that grabbed and levitated it through the air with him on it, controlled through an admittedly clunky leg-mounted yoke. Of course, there were a bunch of specifics about how it remained level no matter how he moved, or how it spread the work between four different embedded foci, but that hardly mattered when the math simply didn't work out.

Quite simply, the disc ran out of power after a short scouting run, and a long-haul vehicle based entirely on it would be constantly dogged by lengthy stops to land and let the capacitors refill. The problem only got worse when he thought about scaling the design up to make it haul weighty loads. 

Sure, he could cram bigger capacitor banks and more magic collectors onboard, but he rapidly encountered the same problems that airplanes and rockets had. He'd end up adding more 'fuel', and it'd only marginally improve its lifting capacity before it decreased the range, and some napkin math said he'd hit the point of zero payload far before long hauls were viable.

Almost on autopilot, John pulled a chunk of earth-aligned crystal from a bin, placed it under the mounted magnifying glass, and examined the grains of the structure. Unfortunately, he could just barely see a warped whorl in the structure that would make it entirely non-viable for the focus. With a groan, he tossed it into a separate bin and pulled another chunk, examining it carefully for deviations as he quickly ran through potential solutions to the design problems.

It all came back to range and weight. At the very least, he could mostly sacrifice speed; not having to care about roads, rivers, and the like probably would make up for it even being only a third as fast as his now-destroyed flying disc.

He had to improve some combination of levitation efficiency, capacitor power density, and charging. Power density and charging would be ideal—as they would provide improvements he could backport to everything else he had ever made—but it would doubtlessly be far more challenging than levitation efficiency, given how long he had stared at that exact problem for other projects with little progress.

Maybe it'd be better to just entirely give up on the flying cart idea and make something like a high-capacity river boat that can transform into a more conventional cart when they were relatively close to their destination? If the 'Iron Mountain' was a major city, it was doubtlessly on a major river. Even if they had to slog for a few miles to jump from one body of water to another, it wasn't the end of the world.

…Nah. Not only would it be slower, but it was much more likely to get him in trouble along the way. The rivers were infested with yokai who might demand tribute, and they'd have to pass through dozens of towns or smaller cities, which would mean a lot of government or Unbound attention, leading to inevitable delays. Really, making an impression before reaching their destination was the last thing he wanted.

Maybe he'd circle back around to it if his current idea didn't work out.

He could only imagine some greedy official might want to pry a super boat from the hands of a foreigner, or an Unbound might plain assume that he stole it from a yokai. Although he liked Rin, the thought of repeating their first meeting with someone else less friendly was undesirable, to say the least.

A flying cart, though? He could fly low over dense tree cover, head straight to his destination, and either land out of sight or fly in as appropriate.

Well, he just had to hope the solution he came up with on the way over actually worked out.

A potentially suitable stone finally caught his eye after another dozen rejects, and he snapped to attention, examining the fine details. Yeah, yeah, this… might work. Every damned piece of magical rock had its own unique internal structure and could have bits and pieces of other elements trapped within, tainting them, which made it a pain to find ones appropriate for a given focus.

Reaching to one of the upper drawers, he pulled the half-dozen diagrams that made up his telekinesis focus, laying the appropriate documents on the stand. Ideally, he would design an entirely new focus for this purpose, but the standard telekinesis would have to be good enough. He simply didn't have the time to spend the laborious days of math figuring out the interactions.

He hoped he could make it fracture in just the right way; otherwise he'd be starting from scratch. On top of that, if he ran out of suitable pieces, he'd be dredging through the depths of the forest looking for new samples, which would take precious hours.

Alas, if only he could make artificial, uniform magical crystals, but such things had entirely eluded him. He supposed that, on a very technical level, they were more like mineraloids than true crystals, but being a kind-of wizard who spent all day working with mineraloids upset his inner child on some deep, primordial level.

When he was first learning, John thought magi-melting and reforming would be enough, but that introduced impurities from opposing magical elements. Plus, it didn't even work with entropy or order crystals. Alas, he was stuck hunting naturally formed stones the old-fashioned way until further notice.

With the rest of his materials gathered, John pulled open a drawer and almost reverently handled his oldest tool, the breakthrough that started it all: the grey razor.

True to its name, the blade was a hyper-sharp, pure grey steel with a dark wooden handle, seemingly untouched by time since the day it was made. When he first made the fort his home, it had caught his eye with how it seemed untouched by the decay around it. At first, he thought it was just a stroke of luck, but weeks of use with no signs of wear, no matter what he did, had clued him into its magical nature, leading to experimentation that built up to his first breakthrough once he figured out how to read some books months later. Nowadays, he knew the metal was somehow naturally imbued with emptiness around a paradoxical core of attractive magic that stopped the emptiness from leaking out, creating a tool that simply kept the world from touching it.

He actually ended up basing his 'clean room' table off of it, since emptiness tended not to mix easily with anything else without relatively extreme force.

It didn't explain why it never lost its edge, but now that he knew Yuki's clothes were old and storied enough to be alive in some small way, he had some suspicions. Well, if there was some sort of tool spirit inside it, he hoped it was happy with being his number one workshop assistant. Maybe he should see if the kitsune could tell at some point… and perhaps see if it could leak information about his work if the wrong people asked.

No matter what the knife's true nature was, the elements within were also in just the right balance to avoid contaminating most crystals as long as he didn't hold it against them for too long. Emptiness was rather useful for enforcing quasi-sterility, when used in the right amounts.

Sliding on his arm-length gloves impregnated with magic-resistant sap, John clicked the switch on, creating a vacuum above the counter as a motor below let out an ominous hum. It was probably still one of the smartest safety features he'd ever implemented. It only took a nightmare about leaning in while he thought it was off and suffocating as it pulled all the air from his lungs to give him the idea.

Maybe he should implement something to stop him from slumping down into it if he fell asleep at the desk. Perhaps some kind of harness? That was a task for later, though. He'd go to bed before he felt tired enough for that to become an issue.

With a careful hand, he whittled away at the gem, his supernaturally sharp blade cleaving through it with the same ease it always had. It was a shame that he hadn't found a way to make a small enough rotary tool that wouldn't contaminate the crystal with foreign energies. Alas, no matter how he tried to "clean" the electricity generated from air-aligned magic, he always ended up with some showing up in the result, and he didn't have rubber for a flexible high-pressure air line to dodge the issue.

Years of experience kept his hand steady as he worked, constantly glancing up at the diagram as he did the rough cuts, constantly ensuring that he didn't overcut and need to start from scratch. He had a close call when an inclusion of the crystal snapped at a weird angle, but thankfully, it broke in a harmless direction despite nearly giving him a heart attack. 

This stage always stressed him out, but he figured working on parts small enough that you could cram fifteen of them into a marble would do that. Longingly, he stared at the miniature arm that would have made the process much less stressful, but using it for the rough cuts would be like using a fine metal file to saw through four inches of steel.

Soon enough, the first piece was done, and after verifying the measurements, John set the one-third finished focus component aside as he sorted crystals for a viable second. After all, he estimated he'd need at least four sources just to lift the cart, so he was going to make six.

As he did the rough cuts on the next components, he fell into a near trance, making light work on the rough cuts for the dozens of parts. Working in batches, he produced the nearly one hundred assorted pieces he'd need, only tossing a small handful of miscuts in the process. As always, he had to improvise in a few spots due to imperfections in the base material, but he had developed a good instinct for how to compensate in the other pieces.

With that done, he began the incredibly tedious work of fine-finishing every single part to spec. That finally meant he could strap on the control harness that let him guide the miniature quasi-robot arm attached to the desk, use it to grab one of the tiny files, and get to work. While it didn't have to be perfect, he needed it to be close to have any sort of efficiency. A cart that could travel an hour before needing to find a place to settle down would be of no use at all, and he was likely to crash it trying to locate clearings to set it down.

Production took hours, even with all his practice and improvements to the process over the years, and by the end he was pretty sure his eyes would start to bleed if he had to squint to read any more sub-millimetre measurements today.

He'd have to glue all the parts together later, carefully balancing them in a suspension of sap and praying that it would work, but for now, he put that thought to the side. It was too late to start that job now; the process would probably take an entire day on its own given the relative complexity of the foci. At the very least, all the foci could be worked on at the same time, even if he had to babysit them like a mother hen to make sure it was all settling correctly. One slightly misaligned connection could cause the whole thing to brick, and then the only chance of salvaging it would be very carefully chipping the components out of the hardened mass.

A problem for tomorrow, or maybe the next day if some nonsense with Saya happens, but he'd have to make time. The construction process wasn't the most equipment-intensive, so perhaps he could finish assembling it in his office at the ryokan tomorrow.

Bah, but it would all be for nothing if he couldn't make his idea to fix efficiency work. Luckily, he already had everything he needed to test it.

Heading over to the racks, John retrieved a very particular tool, one which he hadn't needed since the siege of the Nameless Nest: the primer tool for the bombs he’d dropped.

He might not need the primer, but the focus that slowed the air around an object until it was effectively a solid hovering in place, on the other hand…

John unscrewed the side and removed the two foci from the device's core, setting them aside as he got to work producing a new mount.

He would place it inside the cart below a false bottom, alongside the rest of the machinery. Otherwise, it would be at risk of getting knocked off, potentially stranding him, so he would simply run a reinforced glass conduit and emit the magic towards the front where he needed it.

His vision for the cart was simple: he'd mount a few metal skis on the bottom of the main body, lubricate them so they could slide easily, quasi-solidify the air below the vehicle so they were resting on it, then use the telekinetic focuses to grab a few very solid mounting points, and he could fly in the air with omnidirectional control and minimal power loss. 

Hopefully.

Of course, there were numerous ways this could fail.

He planned to starve the focus of power to make the solidified air persist a few seconds after leaving the active effect region and save power, but it could still end up too power-hungry to be practical, and he hardly had time to redesign the focus.

Going down would need him to starve it of power even more so it couldn't support the cart*,* which could potentially lead it to cut out entirely, leaving them on telekinetic flight only.

Alternatively, he could give it too much power and leave a trail of solidified air behind them that the wheels would smash into if he turned too tightly.

Additional weight might cause the controls to feel unresponsive, leading to a situation where he overcompensated and crashed.

Turbulence might cause something to activate or deactivate unintentionally, causing them to lose control and crash.

The gyroscope system could fail, causing the telekinetic foci to stop keeping the cart level and flip the vehicle and crash.

All things that John would have to work out during testing.

For now, though, he had to get the prototype working.

It took an hour or two, John thought—he didn't bother to check—but eventually, he created a mock-cart body… which is to say he grabbed some two-by-fours, glued them together with his magi-welder, and slapped a slightly modified entropy capacitor and magic collector to the focus in a kludge job that looked suspiciously like something that would have a "Danger: Radiation" warning in a lab. Around the edges of the platform, he’d lined the cart with spare offcuts from order-aligned crystals, which should keep the effect contained rather than coating the whole thing in a suffocating field of slowness—not that he expected the focus to be getting enough power to do that.

Lifting it in the air, he flipped the hastily installed on-switch before releasing it and… it hung perfectly in the air, not sinking an inch. John reached below and rapped on the bottom with a gloved knuckle, producing a slight tick as flesh and bone met solidified air. With a growing smile, he pushed it, and the wooden raft slid as if on ice before bouncing off a wall.

Giddy now, John grabbed an entire chest full of materials and levitated it onto the hovering platform. It didn't fall. He grabbed the chest again, and this time he pressed it down, exerting a few hundred extra pounds of force to try and smash it down. Again, nothing.

"Yes!" he shouted, grinning from ear to ear. The concept seemed sound; he'd just have to make up a proper full-size model, finish producing and calibrate the telekinetic focuses, double-check how much weight it could hold, make sure it was usable in a grounded mode while fully loaded, and whatnot.

Hmm. Maybe having telekinetic control in the ground configuration would be nice. If he was going to play the part of an Unbound, perhaps he could make a show of being able to pull the whole thing himself. It was probably a pretty good feat of strength and would help sell the image… or he could control it from the driver's seat while Rin did so. Maybe he could use the same technique he did with his war gauntlet, where it mimicked the forces put on it to make it seem weightless?

Yeah, yeah, that could work!

Well, he was still plenty energetic; perhaps it was too late to start the foci, but he could start on the cart body itself. Sure, he might not finish it tonight, but, well, Rome wasn't built in a day and all that jazz.

John headed toward the door, swung it open, and beheld the dawn peeking over the battlements of the walls, cascading light filtering through the trees. Squinting his eyes at the sheer radiance, he froze in place as his brain lagged a few steps behind reality.

He hadn't been working for that long, had he? He wasn't even tired! Hmm. Well, he had a much better diet now that Yuki was here, and that was on top of having access to food from town. Perhaps all the extra energy was just a side effect of proper nutrition, though he was shocked she didn't come and force him to go to bed like the last time he tried to stay up through the night to work.

Then again, that was also when they had the imminent danger of an attack the next day, and he was a fully grown man, after all.

Still, he felt better than when he stayed up studying in college, and he was far less fit back then!

Bah, no use looking a gift horse in the mouth, he supposed.

Tossing that thought aside, John went to storage, grabbing a few more planks to squeeze in some last-minute work before he had to head into town for the day.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

John groaned, staring blearily at the endless spreadsheets that he was going to have to sort through once more. There had to be a better way. Yuki could flip through the whole thing in moments and retain all the information, after all. Maybe spending a month or two bedbound as the kitsune figured out how to make him Unbound would be worth it, if only because he would never have to spend more than thirty seconds looking at paperwork again.

The last month of work had been incredibly stressful; the three days they took to rest and relax after escaping the Nameless Nest were nowhere near enough. Yet, the turn of the seasons waited for no one, and if they wanted Broadstream to make it through the winter without mass starvation, they had to keep at it.

Yet, no matter how much he tried, he found himself completely unable to focus, eyes glazing over as words blurred into unintelligible jumbles. He needed a break.

With a sigh, John pushed his chair out from the hastily raised desk, cracking his back as he rose.

“I have more papers for you, Lord Hall,” declared a youthful voice that sounded... vaguely familiar. John was pretty sure the guy was one of the militiamen who had investigated the confrontation between them and the tax collectors when Aiki and Haru were collecting their possessions.

With a sigh, John walked over to the entry, sliding the door of the converted inn open. The kid must have been sixteen, maybe seventeen at most, and his eyes sparkled with far too much idolization for John’s taste. He shouldn’t have been armed with a bow and ready to kill or die for his home, but John supposed it was better than being sent off to whatever war was going on in the south.

The youth bowed deeply at the waist, almost tipping himself over from the sheer speed before catching himself.

John glanced down, and at the sight of another sheaf of reports in the kid’s hands, he felt a little bit more of the light in his soul wink out like a snuffed candle.

“Just... Please leave them on the table. Thank you,” John said, fighting the urge to yawn. “I’m going to stretch my legs.”

“Of course, Lord Hall!” the kid beamed, shooting back up before stepping to the side with a bright smile as John shuffled past him, stepping out into the halls of ryokan turned command post. It was a shame that the owner seemed to have fled the area after the taxmen pushed them out, but it did give John and his friends a proper nerve centre for their operation. The economy needed revitalizing, after all, and running messages between his home and the town would have been terribly inefficient.

John was feeling social, but who to talk to? Yuki was probably on the second floor in her human disguise, taking meetings with locals to gather information. Yosuke would be on patrol somewhere. Rin would be overseeing the ongoing money-changing operations as a manager. Her true role was to scare anyone out of doing something stupid. Rin’s reputation as a hot-blooded menace after that fight with Yuki in the noodle shop and icing up that merchant had some upsides, at least.

Well, he was sure she could spare a few minutes to talk to her dear old mentor. He had some questions about local logistics that he was unclear on as a “foreigner,” and she would be a plenty good source of information, if Yuki was indeed tied up.

John took a brief jaunt through the third floor corridors, which had begun to serve as the unofficial ‘upper offices’ for any staff that were not to be disturbed during working hours. Unfortunately, it consisted only of him and two scribes Yuki had hired, leaving it feeling rather empty.

He climbed down to the second floor and was immediately greeted with the slightly more lively sound of conversation behind closed doors. Here was the administrative heart, supported by “Yumi” and several assistants she had hired for their good social skills. Here, they conducted the closest thing they had to professional interviews with people about the ongoing conditions, needs, and wants within the local community, collating data for later use.

Thankfully, even in her human disguise, the kitsune could hear every conversation down to the heartbeats on the entire floor, which was enough to root out any attempts at deception while she was there.

John walked past the entry to the kitsune’s and, alas, she was still in a meeting, judging by the low tones of unintelligible conversation drifting through the closed door. She was probably talking to the owner of a local store, or maybe the village headman whose name he couldn’t remember right now.

Drat. Rin it was, then.

John, finally, made it down to the ground floor, heading down the stairs into... well, it wasn’t a chaotic mess, but it was where the few offices open to the public dwelled. Frontline staff noted basic information and recommended more thorough interviews while providing basic money-changing services, all under the watchful eye of a woman who had a semi-justified reputation for anger issues. She... probably couldn’t hear everything on the floor, but nobody here needed to know that.

Stalking forward, John strutted through the floor, silently weaving past the few people that filtered through the halls. Each bowed to him, and he returned the gesture in turn, albeit a tad awkwardly. While he had tried to get everyone to stop, or at least cut down on the gesture, the thought evidently made the average person here so terribly uncomfortable that he gave up on trying.

They always mumbled something about “not disrespecting him and his station” or something like that. It was weird, but he supposed they had no way of knowing that he was just a more educated mortal with a newly awakened sense for danger.

He really had to put some time aside to figure out what was up with that, but as long as it wasn’t actively killing him, it could probably wait.

...Hmm. That was something else to be paranoid about later, but he had things to do today.

John found Rin stalking the corridors like a wraith, peeking into a meeting room to make sure everything was going well. She was trying to be subtle, but... cracking the door wasn’t the way to go about it. John could hear the stiff, formal, very clearly put-on tone of the man inside as he went over the basic intake form.

Well, she was trying, at least.

She was so terribly focused on her job that Rin didn’t notice John slowly creeping up behind her, quietly tiptoeing across the wooden floor. Normally, it would be a bad idea to sneak up on a superhuman woman with dragon blood flowing through her veins.

He did, however, have enough warding to take bigger strikes than she could throw at a moment’s notice.

Now standing by her side, John leaned in above her, peering into the cracked open doorway. At the desk stood a broad, short man, trying his damnedest to go through the script as he was getting stared at by not one, but two of his bosses through the barely open door.

“Do you have any children who live at home?” he asked the woman, glancing over in their direction every few seconds, sweat beading upon his brow.

“Aren’t you a charmer? No, my daughters have all gone off to their husbands now,” the sixty-ish year old woman responded, heavy nostalgia lingering in her tone. “Why, are you looking to marry? I think my niece has someone who she is looking for a match for, and you seem like a nice young man...”

Terror seized the man as he dryly swallowed, looking over at them once more. “Nothankyou, ma'am!” he quickly replied, blurring his words together, eyes wide, locked onto theirs.

Poor bastard. Well, John had his fun.

“What are we looking at?” John whispered down to Rin.

She jolted, limbs suddenly flailing and tail whipping from side to side as she slammed the sliding door shut with a loud clack, quickly throwing herself clear and into a ready position. Instinctively, he flinched as her horns swung unnervingly close to his eye, despite knowing that his warding made for better safety glasses than anything Earth could conjure.

Rin’s hand dropped to her sword as she instinctively squared up before suddenly realizing who was in front of her, eyes widening and cheeks reddening. “Sensei!” she whined, quickly smoothing her clothes as she straightened.

“Good...” John began, quickly looking out an open window. “Afternoon, Rin! I had some questions that I hoped you could answer. Mostly logistics things. I suspect things work a bit differently here, after all.”

He would kill for a damned train line or a semitruck. Alas, nature always ‘snapped back’ here due to the Shape of All Things, and any rails or concrete roads were likely going to get eaten by the forest in short order. He was told that priests could make simple charms to blunt that effect, hence why towns and cities can be made, but the local shrine was currently occupied by exactly one priest who knew only simple charms.

“Of course, sensei!” Rin quickly acquiesced, a smile quickly spreading on her face, any annoyance quickly forgotten. She had been rather deferential lately, looking at him with a bit too much awe for his liking when she thought he wasn’t paying attention.

“Walk with me,” John requested, and his student hurried to his side as he slipped on his shoes and headed out the front door and onto the streets, making a beeline toward the edge of the town and far away from prying ears. Some fresh air would do him some good, but he didn’t want people to overhear and panic. They'd only need to hear "not enough food" and start hoarding.

“Well, we should be alright on firewood for the winter, at least,” John said once the crowds had finally thinned out, walking between fenced-off fields of crops towards the outskirts. “I’m about ninety percent of the way through my latest artifact, and I should finish it this evening once we close shop. Remember that axe of mine that can suck the moisture out of things?”

Actually, did he tell Rin about it or only Yuki? He was sure that she saw him using it, at least.

“Essentially, I’m tearing the internals out of it and rebuilding it into a machine that does it to any piece of wood you put into it. I plan to place it in a designated spot toward the edge of town, so anyone who needs to can use it. Assuming it works as it should, it should let people top up their stocks even after it would be far too late to start the drying process. If it gets really bad, you, Yuki, or I can knock down trees in seconds and haul them back,” John hurriedly rambled, which Rin nodded along with.

“Housing’s not a problem, either. It’s unfortunate, but enough of the people that could flee did that we can probably use the abandoned houses as shelters,” he continued.

“And the food, sensei?” Rin innocently asked.

John winced.

“Bad. We’re on track to maybe have a third of what we need,” John sighed. John’s fort farming operation was designed with self-sufficiency in mind, and could probably support himself, Rin, and Yuki with some hunting and fishing, but...

Well, even if he could make enough of his grow lamps, the tail end of the growing season was upon them now, and there was hardly enough time for it to make a difference.

“Have the surrounding villages such bad blood with Broadstream that none can spare aid?” Rin incredulously blurted.

Sighing, John shook his head. “It’s not that. Kiku’s tax collectors terrorized the whole region, even if Broadstream got it especially bad since it was right by the nest. Maybe the other villages have more, but things are still rather tight for them, too. From the reports I’ve read, they’re hesitant. We need to go outside of the immediate area to get some, I think, which means we’ll need to find something to trade.”

In retrospect, things would have been a lot easier if Yuki hadn’t ground the entire Nameless’ hoard into nothing by overwriting its existence, but the risk of leaving some of the wealth behind and starting this whole mess over again was far too high. One particularly valuable artifact buried somewhere within the halls of that nest would have been all it took for a new Greater Nameless to emerge, and the thought of dealing with one potentially harassing the village’s supply lines and trade routes with winter coming up...

Brrr. 

They had found the core of the nest by blind luck last time, and though they wouldn’t have Kiku’s aid, John doubted he and Yuki would have the time to track one down while making sure Broadstream didn’t starve or freeze.

Still, it would have been nice to keep the main body of the hoard, but it was hard to think rationally when you just devoured part of the soul of your monster sister, and what was done was done. He still hadn’t asked what she had seen to avoid prying, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Bah, he was getting sidetracked again. What were their options on what to sell, anyhow? They had to have something people might want.

Wood was easily acquired elsewhere, and with food prices surging, they’d have to trade the lumber in bulk to make the effort worth it, even if it were all perfectly dried. It would also mean they’d need enough transport to actually move the wood, which would mean either attracting the attention of traders this late in the season looking for some fast profit, or constructing their own wagons and somehow acquiring labour or draft animals to pull them.

Finished goods would be better, but they had too few skilled craftsmen to make enough of a dent in time, and it didn’t solve the problem of getting all the food here. It’d probably take a lot of time to arrange transport and guards.

Hmm.

John could always make some high-quality finished goods and baubles with fairly minimal effort. He had already rebuilt the magi-welder, too, so he could easily make items that look distinct from everything else on the market, providing a direct advantage of having a seal of “supernatural Unbound craftsmanship” as a form of branding. If he travelled to a population centre, maybe he could catch the eye of a wealthy buyer or a conglomerate and, from there, he could say he had plenty more pieces for sale back at Broadstream, and thus force trade.

This wasn’t the first time he had fallen down this line of thought, but it always came back to one thing: it would mean attracting attention to Broadstream Town. Unfortunately, if people started sniffing around about a mysterious Unbound craftsman, they were going to hear rumours from the town about how he “saved their lives” or “slew five Greater Nameless in a single blow” or something like that, and that’d get eyes on them if nothing else.

From there, maybe they’d get the attention of someone who’d investigate the mysterious kitsune who is, ostensibly, somewhere between two and three hundred years old with seemingly no history.

And that’s putting aside the time a man detonated himself in the middle of town while trying to kill him. There’s a non-zero chance he was well connected, and they’d see yet more people trying to kill him for revenge until it snowballed into wiping out an entire noble family or some nonsense.

Did they have an option, though?

They certainly couldn't let the townsfolk starve. Under ordinary circumstances, maybe Yuki would be able to sell a bit of her blood or fur as a high-quality material, but her body was pumped full of enough toxins that it would certainly kill anyone who tried to integrate it into their being.

“Rin, is there a chance that your family has holdings nearby? Or at least, anyone of standing who you might know. If you can think of anyone who would want something I can make... Something non-magical, that is, it would be a great help,” John cautiously queried.

Outwardly, Rin’s expression didn’t change. Strange.

“Perhaps I know some family allies, sensei,” her tone was measured, slower than it normally was. “What would you wish to sell to them?”

“Magi-welded furniture for display or heavily improved tools for general use at low prices. Given materials, I can work several times faster than a regular craftsman, so the per-unit cost is far lower. How long does it take one to make a single horseshoe, when I can make dozens in an hour? Expertise, too. I am fully capable of fully draft sealing a room in minutes far better than mortals could dream, for example, or improving many common household items.”

“Why not sell them your alarms? I’m sure that the average noble would dream of knowing the second someone entered the building late at night...” she began, only to trail off as she saw John’s gaze harden.

“It would be a poor idea,” he sighed. “Even if it gives us the money now, if I introduce anything truly revolutionary, it would draw far more eyes to us than we can handle, unless, of course, you fancy someone finding out about Yuki?” At his question, the Unbound’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “Besides, if someone truly powerful got a security system like that, the easiest way to make sure none can bypass it is to make sure the owner can produce no more.” Dramatically, John drew a finger across his throat in a cutting moment while cringing. 

Rin winced.

“I’m decent at fighting, Rin. I can’t stay on guard forever," he said, gazing out toward the forest.

They lapsed into silence, the weight of responsibility settling upon them like iron collars made far too tight.

"Seven days' travel from here is the City of the Iron Mountain," Rin finally added, although every word sounded like she had to force them out. "The Shimamura family has a presence there, and they've traded Unbinding materials with my family in the past. The name of this Nagahama Rin should easily grant an audience."

Alright, now this was getting worrying. What the hell had her so shaken? She was slipping back into that weird quasi-formal phrasing, which she had only used extensively when they first met.

"Is there something wrong with them?" John hesitantly questioned. "If they're likely to take advantage of us somehow, I'm sure we can find someone else."

"No, no, sensei, I just… don't like them much," the unbound explained, looking away, clearly hiding something. Unfortunately, they didn't have many options, and he refused to pry. It seemed like a personal matter.

"Then I think we have a kitsune to talk with to arrange some things," John muttered before pausing, a faint frown flickering onto his face before disappearing. This wasn't much of a break. "Actually, how about we stop for lunch first? Your break must have been coming up soon, and heavens know that my eyes are going to start bleeding if I stare at another spreadsheet."

The concerning stillness in Rin's form broke down all at once, a bright smile tugging at the edges of her face. "Of course, sensei!" she beamed happily.

With a smile, John turned back into the city.

Rin was going to be less happy when she realized that they were going to the same restaurant she almost levelled when they first met. "Granny Noodles" made a good bowl; embarrassing his student was merely a bonus.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

John settled down upon the tiled roof of the main residence of his home, staring towards the distant horizon peeking out from the sea of green below. The faint colours of dawn had begun to tinge the sky, an edge of faint blue creeping in.

With its glow, he could just barely see the hole where Yuki's use of Transcendent Alchemy had seemingly erased the land overlapping where the Nameless' sealed realm had once existed. Climbing out of the crater had been an experience.

Then came the walk back, and, boy, Rin was sure… animated when recounting the tales of her adventures. By the time they got back to the fort, John had needed an escape from her and Yosuke. It wasn't as if there was anything wrong with either of them, but whatever had happened during their little solo expedition had certainly brought them closer together.

For whatever reason, he hadn't quite believed her tale of fighting an actual tide of elite Nameless warriors. Fortunately, both Rin and Yosuke's ideas of a victory celebration involved beating each other senseless in the courtyard, so John found it easy to slip away.

Yuki herself decided to take a hot bath, which bought him some time to just sit and think.

These last few weeks were the type where decades happened, weren't they?

He leaned back, feeling the coolness of the tile soak through his shirt into his curiously unmarred skin. Years of hard living and old, aching wounds had been erased with nothing but a warm embrace. Honestly, despite all the injuries he was covered in not an hour before, he felt better than he had in a decade; Yuki had even fixed that persistent twinge in his knee that he had simply learned to ignore. 

It would probably be best to sleep, but… eh. He couldn't sleep now, and even if he found a way, it'd probably ruin his sleep schedule. He'd just blame any groginess tomorrow on the aftereffects of his healing. It wasn't as if this was the first time he pulled an all-nighter.

What the hell type of response was all this going to get? Yuki unmade a portion of the landscape, even if the Shape of All Things meant it would repair itself. Rumours were going to find their way to someone of importance, and they were going to investigate how a seemingly powerful yokai sprang up out of nowhere. 

Broadstream was still likely to starve come winter, so he had to figure out a way to restore trade and get a good influx of food incoming before the cold set in. Ideally, they would have been able to claim the Nameless' hoard, but Yuki had wiped it out in the process of flattening the hive itself. Truth be told, he was still trying not to think too hard about her being able to seemingly delete matter without the energy going somewhere.

From the report of that okuri-inu, it had also seemed like Kiku had some Unbound forces on standby, but nothing came of it. It was a damned shame that Yuki hadn't acquired that fragment of memory when Kiku's soul was divided between the surviving kitsune.

 Had they chickened out? Were they actually some unaffiliated force who performed some act of sabotage they'd only find out about come morning? He doubted that they'd seek direct conflict after seeing what Yuki did, but…

Moreover, there was also what his kitsune friend herself would do next. Would she need to flee to avoid scrutiny or her other sisters? Something about the thought of Yuki leaving him alone once more filled him with bottomless dread. 

Would he have to flee, too? John had, after all, helped her, and if her true identity became known, he doubted that the authorities would look kindly on him for aiding her.

Well, hopefully if it came to that, it would only be after he fixed up Broadstream. Those poor people didn't deserve what happened to them. Maybe he could figure out a way to take his show on the road; in spite of everything, that fox was probably the best thing that happened to him since he got here.

John sighed, looking up at the fading stars that dotted the vast expanse above.

He supposed those were all problems for later, weren't they? He really should be celebrating what they accomplished.

The tax collectors were either dead or captured. The Nameless were effectively eliminated as a threat, although there might be weeks or months cleaning up survivors in the surrounding woods to prevent a resurgence, as even one could lead to a fresh outbreak. Kiku herself was gone, broken into shards and split between the remaining sisters. How many were left now? Five, six? It felt like so long ago when Yuki explained the whole deal to him.

While he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders, he couldn't help but imagine he should feel absolutely elated. Unfortunately, there was just so much that he had to do. Had all this just fried his ability to feel truly happy?

"John?" the kitsune asked.

He almost jumped, but managed to restrain himself. Instead, he managed to turn to face her smiling face poking out from the side of the eaves with dignity. "Oh, hi Yuki!" he greeted. "What brings you to this rooftop?"

Without waiting for permission, she swung herself around, mantling the edge cleanly before sitting next to him, careful to leave perhaps a foot of distance. Outwardly, the kitsune hadn't changed much, but the colours of her fur and eyes felt more defined; they hadn't changed shades so much as become sharper, like he had been seeing her through an out of focus lens until now. She bore gold richer than the coffers of any lord, and whites purer than freshly fallen arctic snow. Blacks deeper than a lightless abyss at the bottom of the ocean, and an endless cavalcade of mixes between. "I was checking up on you. It has been a hard day, and your injuries—" Yuki began, cutting herself short when John raised his hand.

"I'm fine," he replied, shaking his head. "Sure, getting cut in two was a bit scary—" Which might be the understatement of the century, even if it was overshadowed by the fear of losing Yuki. "—But you healed me up before the shock wore off. Fixed the way my ankle clicked, too, so thanks for that."

For a moment, the two simply lingered in each other's company. Just two friends, ending one chapter of their lives, and moving on to the next. 

"You could have not destroyed my flying disc and crossbow, though," he dramatically sighed. "You owe me new ones."

To her credit, Yuki only let out a ladylike huff of amusement. "Oh? I suppose I'll have to go out and shop for a new pair," she theatrically sighed, lying back beside him. "Alas, there's only one man around here, nay, the world, who can produce such wonders. Whispers on the wind say that he's a recluse, so it might take some time to track him down."

John couldn't help but snort in return, rolling on his side to face her. "Your sources say that, eh?" he half-mumbled, scratching his chin. "What else do they say about this mysterious inventor, then?"

A smile, ever so radiant, flickered onto her face. "People the land over speak of how kind he is; more than is healthy, even, despite the world's attempts to crush that kindness. They even say he'll take any stray that wanders onto his steps," she said, still facing the fading night sky. "Others only said that he is a genius unlike any other, but remains grounded, solving the problems of the people rather than only dreaming of distant horizons."

"Well, uh…" John started, stopping a moment later as he tried to come up with a response. How the hell do you even follow that up? He felt blood rushing to his cheek and, if he didn't know better, he could have almost sworn that it was making him lightheaded. "They say plenty of things about you, too. They say that you're scarily smart, and always know what to do next or what someone needs to hear to set them right. Some folks are scared of you, sure, but I think that all the ones that take the time to get to know you think that you're a damn treat to be around."

Finally, Yuki rolled over to face John, borderline glowing eyes gleaming with mischief as they met his own, duller, more mundane gaze. "It seems like my reputation has far improved greatly," she mused. "A few weeks ago, a mere whisper of my presence would have sent thousands into panicked flight."

John harrumphed, mouth puckering at the thought as if he had bitten into a lemon. "Not here in my home, at least. You're welcome as long as you wish to stay."

At that, the kitsune's ears perked, swivelling to lock onto him like he was the most interesting thing in the world, her nine tails stilling.

"What, do I have something on my face?" he reflexively grouched, breaking eye contact first.

"It's nothing," Yuki tittered in her very characteristically vulpine way, making him believe it very much wasn't nothing. "I did think that a victory like this should be celebrated, though, and you're up here on your own. Care to share a drink?" A furred hand drifted down and reached through the front opening of her clothing before she somehow managed to pull a whole ceramic jug of what he was pretty sure was shōchū from his stores and two cups from the depths, hidden in some inner pocket he must have entirely missed while cleaning them.

Desire to share a moment with a friend clashed against the potential for awkwardness, as he had mostly certainly not had any time to research drinking customs around here, and he'd hate to look like an inconsiderate fool. You had to fill each other's cups when they were low, right? There was also something about toasting to the gods, but with what he knew about Yuki… well, John was pretty sure he could skip that one.

You know what? Screw it.

"Yeah, sure," he answered, holding out a hand, which Yuki promptly plopped one of the small ceramic cups into before popping the jug’s wooden seal effortlessly with a single claw—a feat of precision that would have doubtlessly made her popular at bars. Then, she poured him a more than generous portion of rich, deep drink. While clear, it gave off a heady scent, a rich combination of something akin to rice with undernotes of something flowery he had never quite been able to identify.

Reaching over, he took the jug and poured Yuki a matching dose, although he could not manage to match her impressively smooth pour. Supernatural grace was some nonsense. He did, at least, manage not to spill, and carefully nestled the jug against the upper edge of a tile once he was done.

"To better days!" John toasted, holding his cup high in the air as he dared.

"To brighter tomorrows!" Yuki echoed, and they both took deep draughts from their respective cups.

The flavour punched him in the chest. The alcohol burned on its way down, of course, but it was accompanied by a potent, earthy flavour, accented with a sweet edge and something that tasted of fresh blooms.

John let out a single strained laugh as he came up for air, having emptied a good third of his drink in one go. "There's no way in hell I just happened to have an alcohol that tastes like spring in a bottle when we were just talking about new beginnings," John muttered to himself.

"When I smelled a wisp of it leaking through the seals in your storeroom, I could hardly contain my excitement," Yuki admitted with a sigh. "I've always had a soft spot for the theatrical."

John took another sip, this one much smaller than the first. "If there's such a thing as fate, it sure has a sense of humour," he sighed.

"Many Unbound back in my era became such to flee its capricious whims," Yuki noted, fingers drumming the edge of her cup as she took a matching drink from her cup. "Fate is mostly just the fiddling of heavenly accountants going over ledgers and trying to reach quotas. The vast majority are absolutely dreadful at their jobs and use what little freedom they have to cheat on bets."

"Well, damn," John muttered to himself, placing the new source of existential dread on the pile with the rest. "What's the easiest way to trip them up?"

"Besides becoming an Unbound?" Yuki asked, raising a curious brow. "Well…"

They faded into a comfortable rhythm, sharing stories and knowledge back and forth with the casual ease of friends that had known one another for years, despite the short length of their contact. Yuki had to carry most of the conversation, of course; he had yet to spill the truth of his origin and needed to obsessively censor anything that might give her a hint of his extraplanar nature.

…Or, did he have to?

From a practical point, they were pretty much as tied together as they could be already. She helped knit him back together when he was about to fall apart, both mentally and physically, and he knew of her nature as one of the greatest "villains" in this land's history and faced down one of her sisters without flinching.

Even putting that aside… he trusted her.

A month ago, he would have thought the idea foolish, but he was not the same man as he was a month ago, or even the same man as he was yesterday. Maybe he would regret this one day, but he wasn't the man he would be tomorrow, either.

He was just the John of today, and that would have to be enough.

"Yuki," he began before abruptly halting, alcohol staining his breath. Thankfully, he was barely buzzed; he would have hated to spill his heart while a slurring mess. "You asked about my home before, and you promised not to rush me. I think I'd like to tell you now."

Her eyes narrowed, darting to the cup. "Are you sure?" she asked. "I don't want you to do anything you'd regret come tomorrow."

"I'm sure. I try… not to think about it much. It hurts, you know? Knowing I'm probably not ever going back, but I'd like you to know at least this much," John cut himself short once more, taking a deep, shuddering breath as he steeled his will. Every word fought to stay within, but he had to continue.

Yuki, for her part, only shifted closer before flaring her Presence, bathing him in the warmth of her aura. It was not something forceful, demanding obedience, nor did it have a proper emotion imbued within its expanse.

It was a declaration that she was here, and here she would remain.

"Pardon me," he continued. "Where I come from… it isn't in a direction you can point, Yuki. You could spend a thousand years scouring the world and never find a trace of it, for I don't come from here. I come from another world."

He stopped, waiting for her reaction, waiting for something.

Yet, only her patient gaze remained. Curious, sure, but solid, steady.

What did he expect? Disgust? Greed? Yuki remained Yuki, after all.

"There's no Unbound, no yokai, no magic that we can prove, not even the Shape of All Things… although we found our own way forward. There's myths of beings like you—some of which you match up eerily with, mind you—but that's it. It gave me a bit of an existential crisis when I first showed up, I'll tell you that," The words tumbled out of him slowly, and he ended with a choked sob. What was wrong with him? He wasn't going into anything too personal. How was he going to handle what came next?

Breaking eye contact, he flopped back onto his back, staring into the fading night once more.

"The day you arrived was the fifth anniversary of when I dropped into the forest alone," he breathlessly muttered. "I want to go home, but… I know I can't. I know that I won't see the people I left behind again. Whatever traces of why and how I showed up must have long faded by now. At first, I thought that it was the design of some invisible god, but then why leave me here alone for so long, soaking in my sadness?" His vision blurred, smearing the sky beneath his tears.

"Maybe if I weren't a coward and started adventuring back then, I would have found something, but that wasn't the man I was. Probably not who I am now, either. Maybe whoever or whatever took me gave up and stole some other poor soul for what it needed me for."

Could he live with himself if he ran into someone who had only been here for a year or two?

"John. Take your time. I know," Yuki lowly whispered in his ear, so terribly close now, sending shivers down his spine. "I promise you, if knowledge of why you're here exists upon the face of this world, I will find it."

As if he had been spotted by a stalking predator, John paused mid-breath. She knew. How? She couldn't promise that, either. Yet…

He struggled to find his words, each slipping from his grasp like grains of sand.

"When'd you figure it out?" he asked after an uncomfortably long silence.

"It's less about what you did say, and what you didn't," she admitted, a curious lilt he couldn't identify entering her tone. "Although, your talk with Rin about how weather worked back home was rather telltale, and I would have been hard-pressed not to notice that your body was untouched by spirits when I was putting you back together." 

And yet, the way she treated him hadn't changed.

Tension flooded from his body and, despite himself, a goofy smile snuck onto his face.

"Well then," John began, glancing in his friend's direction. Perhaps it was just him, but he swore he saw a bit of wetness at the edge of her eyes, too. "Would you like to hear about it? Maybe it would do me some good." Hesitantly, he lifted an arm and snuck it around from the side, wrapping it around Yuki's shoulders, gripping her as if she might disappear like the morning mist. In response, a tail crept up, snaking under his head like a pillow, raising him off the harsh ceramic.

"Of course," Yuki responded with a gentle smile.

Under the brightening sky, he told her what he could bear of his home, of skyscrapers, logistics, telephones, and more besides; the bottle left forgotten upon the edge.

When he finally looked back towards the horizon, he beheld the rising sun, casting the sky in blazing orange.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

Time was a curious thing. An age could feel like it passed between blinks, but a moment could be a torturous eternity, chaining you to a vile instant.

Yuki watched the light from her sister's eyes in a time best measured by the heartbeats of mice. This was all her fault, and she was going to fix it, no matter the cost. It was foolishness on her part to assume that Kiku wouldn't do anything to avoid a cage, given the many centuries of memories of crushing stones and impalement. 

A moment of carelessness was all it took. 

Yuki saw John tumble, numbly falling as his legs were cut out from under him with all the care of a farmer reaping their crops. Even then, his first thoughts had been of her, begging her to do what he thought was best for her.

Even if he was being truthful about creating substitutes, the thought of leaving him to suffer on wooden legs was anathema. Yuki couldn't imagine looking him in the eyes while knowing that she could have reattached his limbs and chose not to for such a childish reason as delaying the inevitable.

Kiku's gaze clouded as she let out one last, shuddering breath that sounded almost a laugh, and her soul started to destabilize, slipping through Yuki's fingers.

Here it—

There was no transition. One moment, she was in her own soul's realm, and the next, she was in a vast expanse of emptiness. Shapeless, unformed. To say it was dark would be inaccurate, for it would have implied an alternative.

"Kiku," Yuki growled. "Let's not waste time. Some of us have things to do."

"Oh? Are you in such a hurry to get back to your little pet?" Kiku cooed, crawling out of non-existence like a feral beast before twisting around, rising unnaturally upright without using her arms at all. It seemed the process had already begun. The image of her, this representation of her soul, was already fraying around the edges. One of her eyes was slightly misplaced, and the individual strands of fur on her left tail were beginning to unravel into memory and power, drifting away in erratic un-directions.

"You know it's not like that," Yuki responded, golden eyes narrowing as she glared at her dead sister. For a moment, she considered biting Kiku's throat out and continuing the merge, but her sister was clearly trying to bait her. She probably was shifting some of her most unpleasant, poisonous memories there in anticipation of such an obvious attack.

"You're right. He's more like a beloved tool. Give him a task, and he works and works and works, doesn't he?" Kiku mused. You don't even have to tell him to overwork himself. It probably saves you from feeling that bad about it."

She was done entertaining this farce, plot be damned.

Yuki blurred towards her sister, razor-sharp claws reaching towards her vulnerable, pale-furred throat. Kiku looked like she attempted to dodge, but her movements were just a bit too slow, too sloppy. Besides, were she truly trying to protect her neck, Kiku would have thrown up her arms as buffers.

At the last moment, Yuki dropped low, baring her fangs before sinking them into Kiku's side, digging up through her abdomen and into her liver before devouring messy, bloody chunks of it.

She was pulled along by her hand, Takauji's grip tight around her own as they hurried through the stone-leafed trees of the Inverted Forest. She fearfully glanced at the trunks as eyes gazed out at her from between the wood grains, countless nascent spirits letting out annoyed rattles at their presence.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, big bro?" she squeaked out to the other kitsune.

"Pfft. You a big girl or not, sis?" Takauji smarmed, blue eyes meeting hers as he looked over his shoulder with a lazy grin. "They wouldn't dare cross anyone who smells like Father. Besides, we're almost there… Don't tell me you're going to chicken out now? Aww, has my sister developed a mortal's heart?"

Her cheeks puffed up big and red. "Nuh-uh!" she shot back. What did he know? He was only four years older than her, but she actually grew up in the mind rather than just in the body. "You're stupid like a mortal! Duuuuuh, look at me, I'm going to go swim across the ocean 'cause I only live for like ten years!"

The big dummy laughed. "Oooh, that got you, didn't it!"

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yeah-huh!"

She heroically pounced at him, sending them tumbling down a slope as they battled for victory. Although he ended up on top, she kicked him off and… wow.

She saw where the river curled into the sky, glowing waters shimmering with colours that had no name as they flowed up to splash against the dome of the sky—

The memory cut out as the insides of her sister swirled beyond recognition into new, impossible shapes, cutting off the only fading memory of a brother Yuki didn't know she had.

Kiku lightly drummed her fingers against John's cheek, smiling as his mind flickered under her grip. The poor soul was hurting, bearing far more weight than anyone should bear. Was her sister keeping him like this on purpose, perhaps, to make him easier to control?

"My apologies, you sweet little thing," she cooed. "Call me Kiku. I'm one of Yuki's darling sisters."

She paused before laughing at the sheer callousness of bringing such a fragile heart out to slay a monster when he should focus on healing.

"Although, are we really sisters when we were the same kitsune once?" she mused, fingers idly drumming against his cheek. "There are many things Yuki neglected to tell you."

The Nameless should keep her sister busy for long enough for her to give this poor soul a new purpose and home.

Yuki recoiled and attempted to spit the memory out like poison, the sheer, twisted care slamming into her mind like a crossbow bolt. Yet, it was too late. It was part of her now, sliding right into her soul alongside the memories of the original kitsune's—no, her childhood. 

She was a bit cruel to drag such a hurting man out there, wasn't she?

A fist slammed into the top of Yuki's head, dislodging her from the open wound and making her head spin. It did little more than stun her, but it bought Kiku a moment to reposition.

Looking up, Yuki saw that Kiku was unravelling, the edges between her and the ever-present nothingness slowly going soft, fading. She was more of a gradient than a true being now, and although the wound where Yuki had torn her liver had 'healed', it was messy and faded, like a dream in the moments before waking.

Kiku bit off one of her own fingers, tearing through her flesh and bone alike with a mighty crunch, before lunging, trying to shove it into Yuki's muzzle in a frantic frenzy, but she expected the move.

Smacking the hand to the side and sending the finger careening off into nowhere, Yuki scooped out a portion of her sister's thigh and braced herself as she bit deep.

The spears pierced almost every part of her body as the anchors dug into her spirit. Magically enhanced stone pressed her flat as the mountain fought to crush her spirit along with her body. Gathering the strength to writhe, she felt her prison shift, groaning ominously as it shook with her desperation. Yet, it held.

She couldn't move. She could hardly think. How long had it been? Days? Centuries? Time lost all meaning. Surely her friends would be here for her soon. They had to be working on getting free; they had to be.

They couldn't have given up.

Yuki gasped as she bit into the imprisonment, the weight almost too much to bear as the flesh between her fangs became abstract. It was too much, too fast. Yokai or not, her mind was not meant to process mortal lifetimes in moments.

Yet, she went back for more regardless, eating past the poison.

She acted as a heavenly executioner, her face a mask of indifference even as rage roiled in her chest.

"And the sentence is death," she told the man who had committed the simple crime of stealing medicine for his sick boy. Why did he have to get caught? The fool just had to tell his friends about his daring plot to steal from the procession of a visiting dragon. To the borderline deity, it might have been a glorified throat lozenge.

"You yokai are all the same," Makino Sadaaki spat, struggling against his bindings, even as he glared up at her. He dared not mention his son, lest the court's wrath turn against the beneficiary of this little plan next.

If only she could tell the man that his son was recovering just fine, and Makino Ryuta would see his third summer after all.

Looming over him, she fanned her six tails wide. It was terribly tempting to free him and strike down all the other observers; the dragon himself was far too 'busy' to attend the execution of the father he’d condemned. It would have been a simple matter to relocate the man to the far end of the continent.

Yet, she would be branded nogitsune, and her strength would be limited to that of a six-tailed kitsune until she 'repented' in the eyes of heaven. She wished she could tell him that she was sorry, but she knew she could save far more lives once she bore a full nine.

The kitsune reduced him to a fading memory with a tilt of her head. 

She would make sure that his family received compensation, disguising the source as the inheritance of some distant aunt none of them had heard of. It would be a shame for them to starve.

Turning away, she saw the satisfied faces of all the attendants and made a note to find the names of every single one.

She only had to endure a few more centuries.

Yuki hissed as years flooded through her mind, stumbling back. How dare they? It was like a knife to the heart as she remembered years and years where she was forced to put on a false mask, to aid a system that was slowly strangling the world. 

Was it worth it if she didn't manage to break everyone free in the end? Could she have been kinder when she had the chance?

Yuki choked as a finger was forced into her mouth as she was forced back to the present, breaking from her reverie. Reflexively, she bit down and was plunged into memory once more.

She parried the star-blade of the older kitsune with her staff, idly waving her hand to the side and reducing a battalion threatening to flank her army to dust. All around them, the battle raged, but none risked getting too close to the duel of the near-deities, the sheer weight of their clashing souls alone threatening to unmake any interlopers in their sacred conflict.

"You're not bad, elder," she mused, feinting a strike against his side, forcing him to dodge, before smashing through his Aegis and crushing one of his knees with a flick of her tail. "I will honour you with a quick death."

He knelt before her, trying to force himself up before growling and spitting blood. It splashed against her clothes before rolling off, failing to stain the celestial silk.

She raised a claw, and—

A blade forged from a piece of the sky punched straight through her chest! WHO dared? There was nobody behind her, but… her own lines.

She turned back towards her army, ignoring the pain as she searched—

The memory ended.

There had to be more. She had to know who it was! That was the battle, the one where she was imprisoned! No, no, if someone betrayed her, she'd know. The kitsune had spent so many years alone in the dark; she must have spent at least some time ruminating on it. She should have known. Yuki pushed the idea of her sister over with a devastating shoulder check, tearing open her hollow rib cage, muzzle slick with gore.

Centuries passed.

"You and I both know…"

Or was it seconds?

She laid on the rock, soaking up the warmth from the distant fires burning overhead.

This was far too much to absorb consciously, yet it slotted in her mind all the same.

She picked out a bangle at the market stall, paying far more than it was worth.

How much of this was from Kiku, and how much used to belong, and how much was from her already deceased sisters?

"I'm sorry," she growled, bristling before the oni brought its club down upon her back.

Ages flew past as Yuki assimilated more and more of her sister in a frenzy, drunk on memory. The ending continued to slip through her grasp. It had to be here, unless… had one of her sisters already taken it? She would find them, and they would tell her. 

Kiku stared up at Yuki, not with hate, but a curious admiration, even as she felt her strength wane. With every moment, blood gushed from her middle, and intestines splayed out like a spider's web. Her well of magic had nearly run dry with the Nameless' death, and she lacked the means to resist imprisonment.

Other than one, of course.

Kiku looked at her own severed limb resting behind John, and thought it poetic as she sharpened the bone into a blade, twisting the muscles into thick coils, compressed and ready to propel her last attack at a moment's notice.

…Perhaps she would leave her a gift. Maiming her sister's friend would doubtlessly cause Yuki to murder her in a rage, but he didn't deserve to spend the rest of his days without a limb or two.

Watch carefully, Yuki.

Using what little of her strength remained, Kiku slowly severed and reknit the muscles and bones in her arm.

Again, and again.

Kiku focused on how it felt, deliberately thinking through every step she might have subconsciously performed under ordinary circumstances.

Then, the blade flew, and John toppled.

The kitsune gasped as she was once more standing upon the surface of a lake beneath both day and night, staring at the cooling corpse of her sister even as it began to fade into nothing. She was both the victim and the murderer, staring at her own corpse.

Part of her hated herself. Another knew it had to be this way. A third wondered what the rest of her sisters saw.

Standing back up, the kitsune stared down at her blood-slicked hands. The difference was apparent. Although her colours had not truly shifted, the black and grey fur that poked up through the liquid screamed that it was more real than she had been before, a thing closer to the source of all existence.

"Yuki?" a weak voice asked her, an uneasy rattle rising from his lungs.

It was a good question. How much of her was still Yuki? Turning away from her—Kiku's corpse, she rose to face John.

Her heart stirred as she stared at his prone, broken form. Shadows still cradled the stumps of his legs, stemming the bleeding as she instinctively walked forward. His breath hitched, and his heart beat faster. Something in her chest ached.

"I'm here, John," she whispered, kneeling in front of him, reaching out to cradle the side of his face on instinct, hand shaking unsteadily.

A soft palm drifted up to meet her, holding her hand against his smooth skin, stilling it. "You scared the hell out of me, you know that?" John's voice was strained, and she feared it wasn't from his injuries, but his heart. "I wasn't lying when I said I could have made prosthetics."

"I couldn't have asked you to do that," she replied, a sad smile gracing her face.

John lunged the best he could, wrapping his arms around her back in a tight hug as tears formed at the edge of his eyes.  "Yuki, I… was worried about you, okay?" he quietly sobbed, burying his face against her neck as she stooped, arms slipping around his back in turn.

As she rested her chin upon his head, her eyes began to glisten even as her tails scooped up his errant limbs, positioning them against his stumps.

It seemed like she was still Yuki enough for him, and that was good enough for her. "I was worried about you, too," she whispered back, voice faint enough to be mistaken for the breeze.

Yuki banished the shadows and pressed the severed limbs against his wounds, making John gasp as she went to work. Knitting flesh and bone together with borrowed, almost instinctive ease, she followed Kiku's instructions to the letter.

But she could do more than that, couldn't she?

Yuki reached out, drawing on her now-expanded reserves with ease, letting her warmth wash over him, letting her care surround him as she unwound the damage to his muscles and skin, scouring the burns from existence. Yet, the damage went deeper. She felt the leftover hairline fractures in his bones from years of abuse and unmade them, too. She unfused the skin from the metal of his gauntlet. A prior break in his left arm that never healed properly was smoothed. 

It was the least she could do.

"There. How do you feel?" she asked, reluctantly breaking their hug, leaving his hands grasping at air for but a moment.

Hesitantly, John, now whole once more, flexed his fingers, eyes lingering on his now intact skin with a faint smile.

"Better," he responded, voice holding a bit stronger now. "But I think you have one last thing to do before we can go back to the fort… back home, I mean."

Yuki nodded, looking at the piles of corpses just beyond the edge of her Transcendent Alchemy, the realm's oppressive presence held back only by her sheer power. Distantly, she could sense Rin and Yosuke watching them from somewhere nearby. She let them and noted their position to avoid accidentally annihilating them.

Then, Yuki breathed out, her soul flaring brightly, and the horrors around them crumpled, overwritten.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

"We are victorious!" Rin beamed brightly, a grin splitting her face as she surveyed the field of the dead. The broken bodies of their foes bled upon the ground, staining it even deeper black with their shadowy blood. Were it to rain, she had no doubt it would seem like the land itself was weeping bitter, darkened tears from the sheer joy of their conquest.

There was still an undeniable anger lingering in the air like a smothering blanket, but Rin didn't let it bring her down. It was undoubtedly from their vanquished foes, the few that survived shouting their seething indignation from inside their holes!

She was greeted with silence. Lady Yuki was too far refined for such rejoicing, and the undead, Yosuke, couldn't talk. Still, she had expected something from her sensei, even if it were muted. While reserved, he had no compunctions about showing a bit of his true face to the world.

Rin turned to face the sky, only to behold his disc slowly drifting to the ground. That was strange. Had he had to dive off the flying disc? While she had never witnessed him air-step before, it would be rather strange if he couldn't. Even she could stand upon water, so the idea of someone able to reduce an entire company of abominable monsters to ash in an instant being unable to perform such a meagre feat was silly. Perhaps whatever type of foreign Unbound he was traded mobility for pure ranged power, though?

Pivoting her head around the sky, Rin couldn't see him anywhere! Perhaps he had—

A wave of red-hot rage punched into her chest, threatening to force her to her knees through sheer vitriol alone. It was as if someone had heated an iron weight in a forge and rested it around her shoulders!

Rin's gaze shot over, and beheld Lady Yuki's expression warped into a rictus snarl full of razor-sharp teeth. What rested in her eyes could not even be vaguely connected to humanity, not anymore; in its place was the maddened glare of a starved dog chained to a post for far too long by its cruel masters.

"The conniving wretch was here after all. Why didn't she flee?" the kitsune hissed as the pressure faded, although it didn't disappear. No, it merely faded into the background like a predator lurking somewhere out in the darkness. "The nogitsune… Kiku," Yuki growled, spitting the name like a curse as her eyes traced from where the disc was slowly falling to the land below, "has stolen John away. She is underground and used a faint flicker of Transcendent Alchemy to relocate him, abusing the way it stretches to the sky in a pillar to catch him within its area."

Kiku. The mere name sent a shiver down her spine. Although Rin still had some reservations about the kitsune who had attached herself to her teacher, there was no two ways about it: the nogitsune was a monster. The last time she had used Transcendent Alchemy, Rin was lucky to have escaped with her life! Far too many were less fortunate than her, and their screams, the noises they made as their flesh and minds were sculpted like wet clay, still lingered when she was on the edge of sleep.

"Lady Yuki, if Lord John was caught within its area while off guard…" Her voice was low, almost a whisper, as her heart dropped and her eyes turned stormy.

She couldn't, could she? Lord Hall was far too mighty for something like a cheap trick to bring him low. Yet, Transcendent Alchemy was the surest sign of a yokai's mastery over the world itself, carving a place into reality where their word was law and enforcing fates of their choice on all within. While this one lasted but a few moments and proceeded without the fanfare of the first she had seen, Rin was, admittedly, horribly unaware of whatever the sacred art's limitations might be.

"She wants him alive and unbroken, but suborned to her whims," Yuki stated, sharp eyes tracing the landscape before finally landing on the burning spire before them. "At best, John's currently fighting to keep her away. At worst, he is a hostage in his own body, puppeted to lure us into an ambush. When we find him, do not trust anything he says before I say so."

Yet again, cold flooded Rin's veins at the thought. Could the demon truly have worked through John's defences so quickly? His Aegis should make him a world in and of himself, able to repel all the evils she could muster as long as that wall stood, but something in the kitsune's voice made Rin feel almost queasy at the implication. She both knew John's and her sister's strength. How monstrously strong must this Kiku be? "What shall we do, Lady Yuki?"

"The hive stretches below our feet, and we know roughly where she was as Transcendent Alchemy forms a vertical pillar. Even if she has managed to subdue John, I can follow his scent." The kitsune paused before scoffing quietly. "Of course, we will have to fight through whatever darkness lies waiting for us in the depths, first."

If not them, then who?

Rin cast a glance towards the undead, who seemed unbothered to her untrained eye, still holding his blades like a soldier at rest, before she looked to the kitsune. Her expression was steel, the borderline feral anger reshaped into something far sharper, more focused.

"Every second we waste is time she has to fight John," Yuki declared. "We leave at once." At that, she spun, heading towards the crumbling tower at a blazing run.

Neither Rin nor Yosuke hesitated for more than a heartbeat before following her.

The heat hit them first as they approached the molten obelisk, flames still coring out the upper levels where John had struck, doubtlessly killing innumerable Nameless with nothing more than a single strike. The air took on a sickly air that tasted rather like roasted pork and corroded copper as they approached the besieged fortress, and the continuous crackling from the purifying fire above called ever louder.

Around the base was a pile of the shadowy monstrosities, the scuttling horde having fallen to the flames as they fled the hole-filled structure in the wake of the attack. In a way, the melted mass almost reminded Rin of a hastily erected barricade of branches, the tangled legs jutting out like the twisted limbs of fallen trees. Thankfully, they had mostly burned out, so nothing was stopping the group from jumping over the corpse pile and reaching their destination.

The entries at ground level were almost like the pillar had holes chewed into it by cart-sized termites, though the holes were half-collapsed perhaps a dozen steps in. Heavy, dark material blocked their descent into the depths, almost like someone had poured liquid wax and let it solidify into ugly lumps.

Yuki scoffed and pounced, light sheathing her claws in luminous white as she carved through the mass as if it were butter, burrowing through the material as she kicked fading chunks out behind her.

Rin, for her part, was left to watch uneasily as the mass above groaned like a dying man, deep bellowing cries sounding like whale-song as the monument died a slow, inexorable death. Was she not worried it might collapse? While the kitsune's Aegis would easily protect her from a disaster lacking any supernatural power behind it, she might become entrapped for far too long! Who knew what their foes might plot if they had to spend an hour digging Lady Yuki out?

Was she… that worried about John? It was rather unlike the relationship most yokai had with their loyal Unbound, but Lady Yuki was warmer than most kitsune she had heard of.

Her worries were for naught, however, as Lady Yuki managed to cleave a path through into the depths in short order. While a bit harder to see into in comparison to the landscape lit by the towering inferno outside, it would seem darkness took no root down there, either.

The walls were smoothed down yet ribbed, dug unevenly out of the ground before being worn smooth by the constant traffic. It reminded Rin of the intestines of some great beast torn apart and buried in the earth to rot, but no sweetness rushed up to meet her, only the smell of copper and the stillness of a crypt.

"We press on," the kitsune ordered, taking position at the tip of the spear, ears twitching this way and that, daring a single monster to try and exist without her knowledge. Rin and Yosuke were not far behind, keeping an arm's length behind as the depths constricted around them like a snake. 

Down, and down, and down they went into the bowels of the earth, their path spiralling in on itself, splitting, merging, almost as if it were carved by a mad architect. Somehow, the kitsune still seemed to know where to go, tracing an invisible path before finally leading them off the main spiral and into a side branch, into a tunnel that widened enough for two carts to pass side by side.

Perhaps the worst part was how quiet it was. Where outside was a screaming tide of beasts, here in their home, in their very heart, they cowered away in mute terror. How many were there left? Dozens? Hundreds? Even more? Ahead, Yuki rounded a corner, and Rin hurried to follow her. 

An aching, rattling scream echoed out down a side path, and Rin twisted to the side and held her blade out in front of her as she stared out into the abyss, stepping back from the entrance. Yet, nothing rushed at them, the beasts conspicuous in their absence.

Yosuke grunted, wet and guttural, and Rin spun to him, narrowing her eyes as she tried to figure out what the undead was trying to convey. "What is it?" she quickly barked out.

He pointed past her, burbling something wordlessly with what little his ruined throat could force through.

"You want me to get a move on? I was checking the noise!" Rin hissed back, bristling. 

He groaned, pointing past her with more urgency this time, the wheezing, sickly noise wordlessly trying to convey something.

Rolling her eyes, Rin turned back around. "Fine, it seems to have been—" Her voice faltered as she turned back around, precious moments ticking away as she struggled to comprehend what was before her.

There was no Yuki. Had she left them behind? No, this tunnel here was straight for a few extra strides… but she swore it seemed different moments ago. Hadn't it curved right, rather than left? Her tongue was sandpaper against the roof of her mouth, and a rare spark of fear flashed through her before she smothered it.

"Lady Yuki!" Rin called out, echoing through the tunnel.

Silence was her only answer.

The world had changed around her when she looked away. How? Was this the true power of the Nameless' Transcendent Alchemy? Moments later, her eyes widened as realization struck her. "Stay close to me!" she quickly ordered, shuffling steps closer to the undead, ignoring the ways the scent of the grave stung her nostrils. "Did you look down the tunnel, too? Did you see what happened to split us off from Lady Yuki?"

After a moment, the undead shook his head, crossing his arms.

"Has it rearranged the tunnels?" Rin posed, glancing towards the tunnel from where the noise emerged. To her, it looked the same as before. "Maybe it needs us so far to change them?" Chewing on her lip like she often saw her sensei doing, she frowned. That didn't seem right.

"Welcome," a voice rattled and wheezed, almost as if someone were forcing air from a sack. "Welcome. Intruders. Rivals. It has been a while."

Rin growled as she wheeled around to face the new voice, making sure to keep the undead within her field of view as she turned to face a tunnel which she hadn't seen before.

It was once a man. The first thing she noticed was its gait. It didn't walk like a person as it strode up from the tunnel. Its steps were exaggerated, jerky, like a stage puppet which someone was making sure the children in the back could see as it emerged into their field of view. The thing was pale, but not the jade quality of nobility or the brightness of snow, but that of thin parchment held up to the sun, light leaking through. It made it horribly easy to see the many limbs between his—its—ribs, pulling strings to make his head twitch up to face them.

The Greater Nameless had come to them, its spawn wearing the puppet like a glove.

Yosuke dropped his stance, holding one of his blades out in front of him for parrying while he held his other arm above his head, blade pointed forward, ready to spring forth.

The only reason Rin didn't cut it in two on the spot was that it might let slip some piece of valuable information.

"No words for a foe? I have learned much from your lieges. Your teachers," the monster rattled. "John learned from me, too. We are partners."

"You're awfully calm for something who just had its armies smote," she spat from dry lips. "Lord Hall and Lady Yuki will see you dead."

It didn't laugh. It couldn't. A long, terrible limb merely reached up and rattled what vocal cords remained as cords pulled its chest tight. "Ha. Ha. Ha. They are disposable. I will move. Setting up will be easier next time. Mistress Kiku will corrupt more mortals. John will be hers. I shall grow mighty."

Despite her draconic blood roiling in rage inside her veins, that brought a smile to Rin's face. "You're not as smart as you think if you think a nogitsune that got melted into soup a few days back is a match for him."

It turned as if to look at her, but the beast's eyes weren't quite aimed at her, looking off into the distance, unfocused and uncaring. "You don't know," it stated. "He crawled into this forest. Broken. Uninteresting. He learned. Taught me, then taught you. I will learn from you, once your masters are dealt with."

A pause, as the monster waited for her to bite onto its bait. Perhaps she was not the most socially adept, but the beast was clearly trying to trick her into conversation. Cold coalesced around Rin's blade, and she struck out, a crescent of ice forming mid-air, screaming towards the skin puppet.

"Begone, monster!" Rin roared, looking down her nose at the creature. Yet, it was too slow to react, and she could see the numerous inhabitants of the shell scrambling to move it out of the way, yet only achieving a jerk to the side and making it fold backward at the middle.

It didn't die so much as collapse, crumpling like a paper bag before falling in two, eight spiders rushing out of the bisected shell of skin, string, and bones, which Rin finished off with a second strike.

Even now, no wave of monsters rushed to meet them. It left them alone, in the silence. It seemed the beast had been truthful in leaving them alone for later.

After a moment of silence and staring at the corpse, Yosuke turned to her, head tilted up as if he was looking down his non-existent nose at her.

"I would not let it besmirch Sensei's name!" She quickly shot back, bristling. "That monster is not his student. Never has been, never will be."

The undead shrugged his shoulders, and she could almost see him rolling his buried or missing eyeballs, even through the mass.

Rin sighed. "You're probably right. I don't know why I'm putting any weight on what the Nameless said. It's clearly just trying to get under my skin." What could such a thing know about sensei, anyhow? Sure, he had spent years fighting it, but it must have spent most of that time hiding away from his wrath! It was little more than a rat hiding from a hawk.

The undead merely leaned to the side uneasily and pointed past Rin once more.

Turning, she beheld an entirely new tunnel, unfamiliar in nature. Looking back over her shoulder, the corpse was gone, and an upward slope had taken its place. The tunnels had shifted again. Wait, had something come to take the corpse? That couldn't be, unless it had licked the spray of blood clear off the ground.

Rin frowned, but something clicked into place in her mind. "Let's walk. Always keep an eye on my back. Do not look away," Rin said, eager to test her idea. Perhaps she wasn't a true genius like her sensei, or possessed millennia of knowledge like Lady Yuki, but she possessed some passing smarts.

Yosuke merely nodded, keeping but a step behind her at all times. She pointedly ignored the faint smell clinging to the man and walked forward. If she was correct, the path didn't truly matter. 

Minutes passed as she tried to head down, keeping a consistent direction, but every time she looked behind her, the world itself seemed to change. Tunnels changing. New boreholes springing out of nowhere. For all intents, they seemed to be well and truly trapped, the tunnels changing around them, but Rin knew better.

"The tunnels aren't changing," she breathed, eyes widening and a smile splitting her face. "Where we are is. Why else would the corpse have entirely disappeared without a whisper? It seems like it doesn't, no, can't change what we're perceiving." Her gaze snapped to Yosuke, grinning. "The reason why all these tunnels look the same is by design; it works by transporting us to a new spot that looks identical to where we were. But if we change the tunnels, so if nothing matches…"

Reinforcing her blade further with her Aegis, Rin held it out to the side with a grin, carving a wavy groove into the wall and stepping forward, randomly changing the pattern so it could never be perfectly replicated.

"We lock arms so we can't be split apart. I carve a path. You keep it in sight, so neither of us can be transported," Rin explained.

Huffing, the man gestured for her to go on. She could tell he had questions. Sure, they could maybe stop themselves from being transported, but then what? They were still lost, after all, and there was no telling where they were relative to Lady Yuki or Lord Hall.

"We go down as far as we can, of course. Where else would the Nameless keep their riches but in the greatest depths of their nest?" Rin asked, smile turning from satisfied to feral. "I wonder how much value a coin loses when it's melted into a useless lump of mixed metals?"

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

What a terrible evening to hunt monsters.

The forest itself seemed twisted in agony, the last gasps of the sun spiralling through the gnarled, grasping branches that dragged at their sides as they passed. Above, the clouds overhead were leering spectators, flushed brightly like drunkards as John and his compatriots marched toward the slaughter. 

The wind felt dead, more like an occasional, fluttering heartbeat that blew the scent of something festering and rotten over them, like a butcher had dumped a load of offal onto blazing concrete and left it to cook in the sun.

Step by step, they walked towards the final battle, every eye in their procession scanning the treeline for lurking danger, silent as the grave. Yuki was the spear tip, guiding them through the brush as every member of the team carefully stepped around low-hanging branches and over every piece of detritus that might snap and give away their position.

One way or another, it would all end tonight. The Nameless. Kiku, if she were there. If he and his friends emerged victorious, that would be that, back to their lives with a new appreciation for just how bad the world could get. It might be a few weeks or months yet to root out any remaining spiders from the woods, but nobody in this region would have to worry about monsters slipping down their throats and puppeting them if he had a say about it.

However, if the Nameless won—if Kiku, if she was still around, got her way…

John didn't want to think about it. He certainly wouldn't let the spiders take him alive if it came down to it. The thought of the malicious kitsune's tails wrapping around him, of her hand clamping down over his mouth as she effortlessly overwrote his thoughts, was too much for anyone to bear, never mind one as weak as him.

So, there they were, trying to burn out the infestation before it could spread.

John shuffled awkwardly, shifting the wooden cylinder the size of a horrifyingly overstuffed hiking backpack that he had strapped to his back. Thankfully, he had the foresight to remove the detonator, so it wasn't as volatile as it could be. Even if the way the quasi-aerodynamic pointed tip dug into his thigh left much to be desired, it was better than risking breaking the fins upon its base. It probably would have gotten caught on his crossbow.

He had half considered asking Rin or Yosuke to carry the load, but his warding seemed better at fully protecting things that one wore than an Aegis.

After all, 'less volatile' hardly meant safe, and if this damned thing went up, he was pretty sure nobody here, save maybe Yuki, could take a thermobaric explosion without turning into a blast shadow.

John glanced over his shoulder, making sure that the rambunctious Unbound and the undead were still close behind. They kept a simple marching order: First Yuki at the head, then John, followed by Yosuke, and finally Rin. He shot them a questioning thumbs up, having taught them both the gesture before they left.

Yosuke and Rin both nodded without a word. While the undead was as blank as ever, the expressive Unbound's countenance was unusually grave, a frown carved into her face like a statue’s; were it not for the occasional blink, John might have been fooled into thinking she was wearing a mask.

Returning the look, John turned back to his route, staying perhaps a dozen steps behind the kitsune as she scouted ahead. In theory, the monsters had no way of knowing they were coming. From what Yuki had explained, the space was entirely split off from the normal world, with no communication back and forth.

In practice… Well, John wasn't going to gamble on what shouldn't be possible for the Nameless. He had gone in and out of the area plenty while testing the boundary, after all, and the spiders could be pretty damned crafty even without Kiku’s help.

Hence why they were going to hit them with something they had no chance to prepare for. Kiku was smart, but she wasn't omniscient, and while she quickly adapted her plans around whatever new thing he unveiled, she needed time to do that. Which, of course, was where his newest modification to the previously developed thermobarics came in.

Yuki held up a hand, and their whole column ground to a halt. The space ahead looked like any other section of the forest, indistinguishable from the verdant sea of green they were entombed in, but the kitsune had sensed something.

Looking over her shoulder, she gestured for John to step forward, and he did, anticipation building in his gut as she waved her hand, shadow dripping from her fingers as she used a trick he hadn’t seen from her in what felt like an age.

"This should be the edge of the barrier. Please check for me," read the floating, shadowy words as an almost foreign nostalgia bloomed in John's chest. Yuki hadn't needed to do that since before he had learned the local tongue. In a way, those were simpler times, unburdened by the duties that now rested on his shoulders, even if he was positively miserable and terrified of his own shadow around his now companion kitsune.

He had given her a two week window to recover and get the hell out, hadn't he? Heh. John wondered whether, had he known what he knows now, if he would have even considered taking her in.

John took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, breaking free from his reverie. He needed his head in the game; there wasn't time to mess about.

Eyes fluttering open, John gave the kitsune a thumbs up and started creeping forward, carefully stepping around a mess of fallen branches and leaves from the recent storm. The forest always felt malicious after the winds had swept through and culled the weakest twigs. Maybe it was just an abundance of well-justified caution on his part, though; the Nameless did like their random debris-chic, and it was hard to spot the difference from afar.

Tick-tick-tick-tick.

John took a step back, and the ticking stopped. His eyes met the kitsune's golden orbs as he turned around, then he pointed to the sky.

She nodded.

Well, this was it, then.

John tensely set the weapon he had carried upon his back down and slotted the detonator into the open slot with a loud click before latching it into place, readying the contraption. Then, he set down his hoverdisc, powering it up before swapping out the freezing focus on his war gauntlet for telekinesis with but a flick of his wrist.

Grabbing the bomb in his grip, John levitated into the sky once he made sure the way was clear of any errant webbing.

Ten meters. Twenty. Thirty. The dusk wind howled around him as he steeled his will. They had one chance to launch a proper ambush; he had to pick a target and let loose as soon as Yuki popped this slice of reality wide open. Who knew what the Nameless could pull off if he faltered, even for a minute? Perhaps they had reinforced doors they could slam shut, blunting the blast wave's effects. Maybe they could burst the 'sealed realm' like an overripe egg sack early and disperse their numbers far and wide, just with slightly more casualties. They had no way of knowing, but he could only hope and pray that this strike would fly true and shatter their plans, at least for an hour.

An hour was all they'd need.

Hovering in place, John spun the bomb around, aiming it like a spear toward where their immaterial enemy lay. While his original gauntlet lacked the ability to push enough power into the relatively gentle telekinetic focus to throw it like a dart, his new war gauntlet had no such limitation.

He felt it before he saw it. Yuki's Presence washed over him like a warm wave at the beachside, settling around his shoulders as a warm blanket, enshrouding him in her gentle care. He was shielded against the world as his heart rate slowed, the otherworldly feeling building around him but never becoming truly overwhelming.

John breathed it in, and slowly breathed it out; then the world began to bend under the pressure. Shapes sharpened to a razor's edge. What was and was not cleaved into two, separated by the iron will of the kitsune as she told the world what it must be, and it obeyed. The colours were next: not brightening, not dimming, yet somehow becoming more vivid regardless. More defined. More real, like he was wearing muddy goggles and had just taken them off for the first time.

The rattling calls of the forest’s beasts were rich and omnipresent, carrying melodic tones that he had never heard, that he wagered no musician could reproduce if they tried, as they looped back in themselves, creating self-referential choirs of impossibility.

He breathed in. The air that flowed into his lungs tasted wrong, and he could feel every particle of faint pollen and dust that flowed into his form. The scent of distant rot faded; the scent of the forest and petrichor now lingered in his nose, invigorating like walking out into a spring morning after a cold, hard winter.

John breathed out. He could feel his own heart quietly beating in his chest, and the blood pumping through every one of his veins. Steadying his aim, John felt his every muscle, tendon, and joint. When he twitched his fingers, he could feel every little imperceptible bump in his workmanship as his fingers trailed over the controls.

He was a blind man, opening his eyes for the first time. Was being an Unbound something like this? Was this just a taste of what he might never achieve? Why did it feel so natural? Why could he continue to act rather than break down from sensory overload?

Yet, the world didn't break into a mosaic of shadow and light, like when Yuki had last exerted herself. Instead, the world before him shattered like a brittle window with the cry of a wounded angel crashing down to earth, the scintillating shards falling through the air before evaporating like the morning mist. It was a wound in reality, jagged and wretched, into a world that was sick. John's hands shook, and his heart pounded in his chest like a prisoner trying to escape its cage.

A twisted spire of abyssal chitin set upon a field of solidified pitch thrust into the sky, the twisted horn full of bore holes dug deep into sightless depths. Nameless swarmed over its surface, but the slow creatures—which he could see in far more terrible detail than he could ever dream—had yet to notice them. There must have been thousands. John could see nine hundred eighty three crawling over the preci—

John dry-heaved as his vision suddenly swam, his hyperawareness continuing to expand. He saw every leg. Every unseeing, maddened eye, a few slowly turning towards him, yet uncomprehending through their madness. He counted the teeth individually. Some rotted, decay taking them even as they sat next to pearly whites in the same misshapen maws.

Perhaps the worst thing was that the realm wasn't bright. It wasn't dark, either. It wasn't… anything. The world had forgotten this place, and it had set its own rules, its incompetent god trying to patch the holes with its eyes closed and a faltering will. John couldn't tell how he saw into its depths, just that he could.

It was enough for him to find his prey. John reached forward with his spare hand and flicked the arming switch.

He twitched his fingers, and the missile streaked from his grip as he propelled it forward as fast as he could before releasing it like a shot. It flew through the air, approaching the spire with terrible force, triggering the sensor embedded in the tip. His poor welder gave its last service as the melting focus was utterly overloaded, pumping far more entropy than it had ever been designed to process, melting a hole into the tower and carving a path into its inner workings before the missile slammed into the open wound, dispersing the material that used to be solid like a layer of pollen.

Then, reality snapped back to normal, the horrible portal slamming shut as Yuki banished her empty approximation of Transcendent Alchemy.

John felt empty as the world took on its normal tinge, the impossible details slipping from his vision, even if he could still see them in his mind's eye when he blinked. Once back home on Earth, John had thought about what it would be like for a character from a game to briefly come to life, only to be returned to their cage, fully aware of how much lesser their world was.

Was that what it would be like?

His hands shook as he descended back to his allies, but as he approached, he steeled himself, stilling his trembling limbs through sheer force of will alone. This was awful, and every part of him was screaming for him to retreat, to bury himself in work until he could come up with a better solution, but there just wasn't time. It was now or never.

"How long do you need before you can open it back up?" John hurriedly asked Yuki.

"A few breaths more," the kitsune responded, softly panting. "Not needing to overwrite most of the world's laws makes it much easier to commit."

It's go time, then.

John snapped to his other two companions. Rin straightened under his attention, but Yosuke stood with casual ease, leisurely reaching up to his impaled head and drawing two of the blades from its mass. "Rin. Remember, you'll be the tip of the spear alongside Yuki. Yosuke, you'll be the rear guard to the main group. I'll provide air support as we burn everything outside the tower to the ground. Inflict as many casualties as possible, but stay safe. We kill, we kill, and we kill some more, and once we either kill enough or get the Greater Nameless, she pops Transcendent Alchemy and shreds anything that's not us to ribbons. If they cower in the tower, I start killing them through the walls."

"Yes, sensei, I won't let you down!" Rin quickly responded, blade flying free of its sheath with a lightning-fast draw, current arcing along its edge.

Yosuke nodded, flicking his wrist to cast aside some lingering corpse fluids off his blades.

In the few seconds that they had left, John swapped the filter on his Sentinel System from the Nameless one for his Kiku one, just in case. It wasn't as if he'd have time to calibrate it properly to read only the actual Nameless, not the ambient environment, if it were even possible with all the interference.

"Be prepared. It is time," Yuki declared, and John's heart seized.

Her Presence extended once more, but this time… it felt duller. Hyper-reality set in all the same, of course, but John was ready for his veil to be torn away, and he did not get washed out into the expanse.

A fresh wound was carved into reality, reopening a portal that now led into hell. The spire burned, melting like wax as flames cored the skyscraper, an inferno screaming out of its orifices with glowing orange hatred. The land burned with his wrath, and the Nameless ran about in sheer panic, every horrible, twitching eye widened in maddened terror as the survivors scuttled about their cage for an escape.

An eye met his.

A horrible scream erupted from the mass, and a sea turned upon them as the creatures saw but four small shapes standing between them and freedom.

"Forward!" John screamed out before he thought it through.

His allies surged forward, and John flew into the sky as the portal healed shut behind them. Surveying the battlefield, John saw it repeat itself infinitely towards the edge of the space, a myriad of burning towers and screaming spiders swarming through the distance as the space looped in on itself. 

The horde, still numbering hundreds, closed in on his companions below, some of the sea of legs and fangs towards the far end of the field, cutting across where space looped to encircle them with ease.

John raised his hand, giving his controls one last test, fingers flexing as he clicked his heat focus into place. Aiming at the center of the horde, he lined up the iron sights on the gauntlet with the casual ease of years of experience. Then, John flexed his fingers.

Heat soared from his gauntlet, the hiss of the moisture in the air turning to steam, hissing a joyous song as John finally used his war gauntlet for its true purpose.

It was inelegant. Bulky. Sometimes, he forgot how large it was and smacked it into things. Ill-suited for shop work. The fingers were large and clumsy, and he had to take it off while working regularly.

However, he considered none of those design goals beyond the bare minimum. Any civilian uses for it were akin to hammering a nail with a rifle stock.

It was a tool, one that existed to kill things very, very quickly.

The world hitched for but a moment, the sheer overwhelming heat impacting the Nameless' collective Aegises, and they stopped being enemies and started being physics. The concentrated beam melted the strange, dark ground below into a blistering, glowing ichor as two dozen spiders simply ceased to be.

Eyes turned to John, and numerous spiders in the backlines reared up, giving him only moments to track over to them. He was too late, and they spat a horrible barrage of thick, grasping silk, each projectile the size of his torso.

It didn't matter, as he had plenty of fire to go around.

The projectiles burnt to a crisp under a wide, diffused blast, and the only thing that reached him was soft ash. The Nameless in front of the blast fared better as the wide cone softened the blow by the time it reached them. They were instead "only" ignited and maimed, relegated to non-threats as they spasmed like slugs covered in salt, flailing blindly with no thought given to anything but their death throes.

The focus was getting hot, though. The sheer heat threatened to melt it into slag from the weight of magic coursing through its form in these quick bursts, even if his magic reserves were still plenty high.

That was an easy fix, though.

John flicked the cold focus into the slot with an easy turn of his wrist as he drew his hand crossbow, firing a quick shot into a group approaching his party from behind. The arrow itself did little. The slowing field that materialized around the Nameless upon being destabilized, however…

With that bit of extra time, John picked out another group and unleashed sheer cold upon them, the hyper-accelerated heat transfer killing another two dozen on the spot as they crumpled into brittle pieces upon hitting the invisible kill field. The only way an outside observer might be able to tell how they died was by a thin layer of fading frost clinging to the ground and a trail of shining, frozen droplets that fell to the earth like rain.

The first waves that he couldn't catch smashed into his allies below, surrounding them, but Yuki was death itself. Where John was a gunship on high, she was Charybdis, claiming all that stepped too close. Dark and light swam around her as two parts of the same whole, coating her claws and fangs, as she flowed from blow to blow. There was no wasted movement as she bowled through them; each step was a dead Nameless, be they burned away or impaled by light, or perhaps flayed and outright consumed by her impossible shadow. 

Rin was no slouch, either. Perhaps a storm was not as terrifying as the reaper herself, but her blade sang all the same as single, decisive strikes parted Aegis and flesh alike in a deluge of steel, ice, and lightning.

Yosuke… John had never seen him fight before. It was a mercy that they never had to come to blows. He moved little, but John could tell that his footwork was incredible. It was slow, controlled. Perhaps he was not as showy as the other two, but his blades cut true.

That was all that he needed.

As John watched, he couldn't help but notice that blades that shouldn't reach all the way through somehow still managed to cleave spiders in two, or a slash that touched nothing still managed to spray a thick arc of black blood.

Was it air? No. It was something deeper, something purer. The truth tickled at the edge of his mind, a nymph dancing beyond his grasp, refusing to be caught beside a flicker at the edge of his vision.

John snapped to another approaching clump and snuffed them out like a candle.

They killed, and killed, and killed some more, forcing the spiders to climb over their own dead as they built a fortress of corpses around their foes. When the encirclement tightened too much, John blasted a hole through the lines, allowing his allies to take up new defensive positions. He had to smite the occasional attempt at swatting him from the sky. They died like the rest.

Their numbers culled, their waves thinning, even the infatigable hatred of the spiders quaked under their wrath. Yet, there was nowhere to run other than into their burning home. It started slowly, but rapidly picked up speed, as many took their chances with their burning spire rather than facing the extermination that had come for them.

Tick-tick-ticktick-tick-tickticktick—

And then John was gone, and the last thing he saw was his flying disc slowly drifting to the ground without its rider.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

John really should make upsizing the hoverdisc a higher priority. He kept finding himself in situations where he was crammed onto the thing with Yuki. Even if he wasn’t afraid of falling off, there was far too little room to move without hurling himself off the contraption that might as well have been a flying manhole cover. It wasn't as if his kitsune companion would let him fall; her reflexes were far too sharp. Still, he'd appreciate some extra leg room.

Tick.

John looked down at his wrist, his Mage's Compass revealing a contact toward the east. With a lazy twist of his foot, he angled his flying disc toward the source and flew headlong toward it, idly sweeping the area ahead of him with his Nameless detector.

"Another read," he muttered to Yuki, the towering kitsune leaning over his shoulder to keep track of the compass with sharp eyes. "Let's hope it doesn't take as long to find as the last one."

"You seem to be getting used to it. It only took half as long as the first to track it down," she gently reassured, although John couldn't help but roll his eyes.

"It took me nearly half an hour to realize that the reason the signal kept 'moving' was because there were two separate hits, and one was in a blind spot directly below me," John grunted in response, double-checking the charge on the disc's capacitor through the handy-dandy display he had installed into the top plate. Still plenty of charge, it seemed, after their last five minute break to let it top up.

"And that is better than your first attempt," the entirely too smug yokai quipped back.

John didn't rise to the challenge lest she get him all wrapped up in another conversational game and instead focused on his work. He could already feel the limitations of the device creeping up on him, and if he had more time to redo this crude device, he would.

Mostly majorly, it needed to read out far more angles if he ever needed to use it under pressure. The purely eight directional display made it nearly impossible to tell the exact location of a distant target at a glance without some fiddling. Sure, it may "only" delay him when he was on the hunt, but what about in a situation where he was pinned down and trying to pick enemies out in a treeline? Knowing whether they were in the pine on the left or the will on the right could be the difference between coming out without a scratch and getting eaten by his own shadow or whatever bullshit the world decided to throw at him that day.

Maybe, if he refined it enough, it would allow for combat without direct line of sight. Most of his premier ranged options already hardly cared about most obstructions, and he had to actively restrain their range to avoid causing dramatically more damage than he planned. The only thing that really stopped him from using it as such right now was a lack of targeting capability.

The day would come when they had to storm the Nameless' tunnels, and if he could clear out a few pitch black tunnels full of body-snatching spiders without walking headfirst into an ambush, he might save himself a heart attack or five.

Man, fighting the Nameless and Kiku sucked. Why couldn't the local town be besieged by something simple, like a gang of bandits? Hell, maybe the tax collectors could have just been thugs playing dress up. Life would have been so much easier if he could just swoop down, scare them off, and then get to rebuilding the local economy.

He couldn't wait to get to that once the spiders were dealt with…

Well, once he dealt with whatever came from the 'Transcendent Alchemy' incident, too. It'd be stupid to assume that nobody noticed the two giant pillars of impossible colours; it would absolutely get investigated.

Then he had to deal with any further revenge seekers linked to the Unbound they had fought against.

Not to mention that the tax collectors were probably still government officials, even if corrupt, and any investigation into the slaughter of them might turn up Yuki's true origins.

John sighed, already feeling exhausted from the mere thought. Maybe he could offload some of this onto the kitsune if he ate one of those mushrooms from his first year in the forest and made himself sick for a few weeks.

"Two and a half o'clock, between the gnarled tree and the boulder," Yuki helpfully chimed in, a large arm emerging into his vision from beside his head to point.

Narrowing his eyes, John could just barely see the telltale mound of disturbed earth from a recently buried Nameless. Unlike some of the others they had found, this one was uncomfortably close to the road. While not in direct line of sight, he did not doubt that it was within range to scent valuables.

John aimed, carefully lining up the sights on his knuckle. He adjusted his fingers carefully, double-checking the cone's power, range, and size.

He breathed in, holding onto it like a life raft for just a moment before releasing, easing the air out of his lungs to keep his aim steady. Then, he twitched his fingers, firing a blast of impossible cold through the air like a missile. 

The moisture in the air turned to ice on the spot, tiny, glinting crystals dropping from the sky like a rain of stars. The leaves in the beam's path simply disintegrated in the breeze, flash-frozen husks brittle as the early morning frost.

Below, the mound twitched once as the Nameless recognized it was being attacked for but a second before being no more, its aegis soundly punched through as a thick sheen of frost covered its surroundings.

"Good eye," he responded, checking his wrist.

Tick.

Of course, the creature's body was still fresh enough to respond strongly to his tracker, as much as he wished the reading disappeared the second his target was dead, so he had to carefully make sure it was the only thing he was reading. Idly, John piloted the disc around the corpse in a wide circle, watching carefully for any other Nameless.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Cold sweat dripped down John's spine as he whipped around, searching for the sudden danger that the sensor detected all around them, but there was nothing. On instinct, John threw his disc into a quick reverse, reversing them out of the incoming damned ambush, and—

Tick.

Suddenly, only the corpse below him was reading, not the space right in front of them, which was screaming moments ago.

What the hell?

"John?" Yuki's voice was level, but Yuki's furred hand grasped around his shoulder like an armoured gauntlet, and two of her tails wrapped around his lower half like the tassets of some samurai.

"I'm fine, I'm fine." He breathed deeply, tapping his chest to slow his racing heart. "For some reason, my tracker started going insane the second I flew us over there. I thought that we were surrounded and were about to get ambushed."

"We're safe. If the Nameless were going to attack, they would have tried to salvage their plan once they realized we knew they were there," Yuki confidently stated. "Is it a fault with the device, perhaps?" Yuki curiously leaned in, peering over John's shoulder.

"I wouldn't be surprised; this is the first time I've used this thing," John sighed, glancing down at his wrist. "I mean, if something seems to work flawlessly the first time around, that probably means it has faults you haven't noticed yet." A frown split his face as he fell deep into thought. Even then, it was an extremely simple device, and all the detection hardware was already proven technology. What could have caused it to fail like that? "Maybe it's something with the corpse? I could see if it repeats if we fly back in."

"I shall be on guard," Yuki said, uncoiling her tails from around her legs.

Well, that was probably the best he was going to get. The kitsune would doubtlessly notice anyone below trying something before he did. It was another good reminder that he had to make a bigger and better alternative to the hover disc, though. It'd be a lot more comfortable flying over Nameless territory if he were inside something built like a tank, complete with mounted weaponry and thermobarics to drop.

John pulled his handheld Nameless sensor from his pocket and pointed it toward the corpse.

Click.

Well, that seemed to be working fine, at least.

He then pointed it towards where his Sentinel System was going insane, scanning along the ground in a grid, but nothing read. Just in case, he pulled the Nameless filter off the device, too, but it still didn't read above background levels.

Hesitantly, John drifted the disc forward, inching through the air like a burglar creeping through an alleyway. With every passing moment that nothing happened, John tensed more. Was it just a one time event? Why hadn't it—

Tick-tick-tick!

There! There it is again, at the same spot, too! What the hell could be causing it? Now no longer buried under an avalanche of panic, John's analytical mind spun up. 

He glanced at his wrist, and, indeed, the entire dial was lit up like a Christmas tree as the alarms blared. Pulling out his magic detector, he—

Click-click-click!

Okay, now THAT was a reading a half. The thing was screaming about Nameless being all around him. He pointed it at the ground and got the same response. At the sky, same again. Hell, he even tried pointing it over his shoulder at Yuki, and it was still going off, almost like the sensor thought there was somehow a Nameless between him and her overwhelming might.

It confirmed that it wasn't merely a failure of his Sentinel System, but that there was something strange going on here.

John backed off until the alarms fell silent before going in again. In. Out. In. Out. Eventually, he managed to narrow down the location where it triggered to a few inches.

"Weird," he mumbled to himself. John scooted to the left, but eventually the detector went silent. He drifted forward again, and eventually the sensor started clicking again. Going with the flow, he traced the boundaries of the zone, slowly revealing it to be a circle maybe half a kilometre in diameter.

Next, he drifted higher and lower, trying to figure out the shape of this anomaly, but no matter how high or low he went, the diameter didn't change. It was almost a sheer cliff face of Nameless energy, purpose-made to confound his sensors yet undetectable to Yuki.

So, it was a cylinder of Nameless aligned magical energy, stretching into the sky…

John breathed in sharply as the bottom of his stomach dropped out, memories flooding to the forefront of his mind.

Two pillars split the sky in the distance, impossible hyper-reality crushing down whatever was foolish enough to exist where titans duelled. Terrifying shadows deeper than anything the mortal plane could conjure and light bright enough to scar the world itself fought alongside one another against a tide of broken flesh and souls rewritten. Colours were smeared across the sky as the rules of existence were reforged and rewritten by wills mightier than that of the world's.

"Oh no, no, no, no, no." John frantically threw his disc into reverse, pulling themselves back out of the field as he pivoted back towards the fort, screaming through the sky as fast as was feasible.

"John! What's wrong?" Yuki asked. Her hands landed onto his shoulder and gripped, not quite digging into his body, but enough to hold him steady, as if she was worried he'd dart away.

"It's a pillar, Yuki, like your or Kiku's Transcendent Alchemy," John hissed, shuddering. "I don't know what the hell they're doing, but it has to be something related to it. Is the Greater Nameless preparing to perform it? Fuck, can the whole hive collectively do it? Why out here rather than somewhere tactically useful, like the fort?" Every word that spilled out of him came out faster than the one before as he rushed to warn his companion.

The entire time, Yuki was dead silent, but he could feel the kitsune's grip grow ever tighter and hear her nine tails lash through the air like angry snakes. The yokai growled like a primordial beast, the sheer bass rumbled in John's form as her Presence flared.

White-hot anger hammered into his chest like a gunshot, and he felt the sheer fury of the sun bearing down on him like the eye of an angry god. Sweat beaded on his brow, running into his eye as he tried his best to focus on flying. Instinctually, he wanted to step back, but behind him was an endless, terrifying abyss from which nothing could emerge. His fingers grazed it, but ice and something far worse threatened to take them with but a brush.

"Yuki?" John called, cutting through the sheer, crushing pressure of Yuki's spiritual weight.

And then, it was gone as the world snapped back to reality.

"I'm sorry, John! Are you alright?" Her grip loosened, claws no longer threatening to press through his clothes.

"Yeah, just… You know what they're doing, don't you?" John uneasily glanced behind him, committing the location to memory. Yet, he couldn't help but catch the sheer, unrelenting worry that coloured the kitsune's muzzle out of the corner of his eye, which was terrifying as any army of monsters.

"I do," she said, an almost sad resignation settling behind her eyes. "I've been wondering why all the entrances to the Nameless nests are so obvious. Why create a massive area that is easily visible from the air? Why not have some hole in the ground? Why do they care about controlling the area around the exit so much when they could have just easily dug a few secondary exits? It would have been much easier to defend, and not visible to any hostile Unbound who might pass overhead."

Hmm.

Cold gnawing dread settled in John's heart as he started to run over the facts.

That was a good point. Sure, having subtle nest entries wouldn't protect them from the locals tracking them down, but it wouldn't have let him pinpoint each and every one in an afternoon once he could fly. Hell, given how dangerous a threat Nameless were, it would have only taken one Unbound taking the shortest path to somewhere else to bring it all crashing down.

The entrance itself was absolutely more easily defensible than the area around it was, so it wasn't likely made to hold the line in case of an attack. They hardly needed supplies, so they didn't have to worry about being trapped inside and being sieged out. More exits could be dug out, given time. If it were just to inform them of attackers, they could have Nameless camouflaged nearby with a few subtle threads as traps.

So, the area itself was important in some way. He had only seen one Nameless nest up close, but the creatures had pointedly come up through an impossibly small hollow in a tree trunk rather than a hole at its base for seemingly no reason. The tree itself had been wrapped in a heavy layer of silk, wide bolts hanging from it like the rafters of some great temple…

It was almost ritualistic.

A memory twinged in his mind as John remembered the shrine outside Broadstream Town. Yuki eliminated a location where Iwao could have stored sensitive supplies due to contamination from a hole into the spirit world, hadn't she?

What if it was their equivalent of that shrine room, and they were retreating into a space beyond this world, created using a process similar to Transcendent Alchemy? The idea was unintuitive, but something about it felt like it made sense.

The strange readings his Mage's Compass got seemed to point to something shaped a bit like Transcendent Alchemy. In addition, there was at least one extra plane of existence which was 'higher' than this one. If someone could create something that overwrote the natural world, could you use that to carve a space for yourself?

"Fuck," John cursed. "It's some sort of… parallel mini-world made with Transcendent Alchemy, isn't it? They're not hiding underground at all. Most of them aren't, at least. Every one of the 'nests' we've destroyed were just doors into it."

Much to his growing horror, Yuki nodded. "What you found is most likely them bringing it closer to reality, so they can spill it open. We might have hours. We might have weeks. There's no way to know."

And just like that, they would be free, completely ending the siege. The Greater Nameless would be free to go to ground wherever it wanted. Even if the beast didn't take it out against Broadstream, the monster would doubtlessly leave a wide swathe of destruction in its wake as it fled. 

What was supposed to be a decisive blow could fade, and it might turn into a multi-year slog as the creature fled; he doubted that it would ever make the same mistakes again.

Shit! He couldn't just let them get away!

Wait.

"When you and Kiku both used Transcendent Alchemy, they fought against one another, right? What would happen if you were to use it against this hidden realm? Would it collapse?" John hurriedly asked.

A smile, however faint, flickered onto the kitsune's muzzle. "Where they clashed would reveal a path into their sealed realm as it overlapped with mine. The Greater Nameless isn't strong enough to maintain the effect by itself and is almost certainly working together with the rest of the hive. While I lack the strength to crush it directly, if we can get inside and kill the Greater Nameless leading the hive, I might be able to manage its destruction while they are in disarray. We could take them all out in one go."

"Isn't that suicide? I mean, I saw what you could do, and if it can even do a tenth of that to anyone within…" John muttered, eyes darkening at the thought of what such a monster could do. Kiku could warp flesh and soul from a distance. What if it could directly teleport its spawn inside a person's body? While Yuki's Aegis might provide her protection, John doubted his far less comprehensive warding would.

Shaking her head, the kitsune explained, "A chorus of souls can not manifest the same power as a single, overwhelming voice, even if they weren't focusing on maintaining such a vast area. At most, they will be able to impose minor environmental effects rather than the techniques Kiku and I employed in our duel."

"And if she is there?" John needled.

A pause. 

The corners of the kitsune's muzzle twitched down. "If she is, then she will be in a far worse state than I am. She'd be half-solid at best, lingering between life and death. There is one issue, John. We can only break in because we are across two different planes. Once inside, any further conflicts will not open up a path out. We will have to break it apart from the inside."

Cold settled across his shoulders like a mantle. It was like the jaws of an eel, with teeth pointed inward, offering only one path forward.

There had to be a better way, but… they didn't have time. He couldn't prepare. If they delayed for even a moment longer than necessary, it might burst open like an overripe egg sac and spread its cursed contents across the land.

John was a coward. He knew that; the first time he faced down real combat had taught him that. Yet, he couldn't just sit aside and let this happen. How could he live with himself if he knew what was going to happen and did nothing? Well, maybe it was for the best that he had allies. Perhaps not acting alone would give him a bit more courage to do what needed to be done.

In the distance, the fort emerged from the sea of verdant green below, the faint white sheen of the inner buildings seeming to gleam like a beacon in the afternoon light.

"Well, we best figure out a plan, eh?" John mused grimly, scratching his chin. "We'll brief Rin and Yosuke, then we end this today, one way or another."

The kitsune's tails tightened around his legs, but she said nothing.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

John mused that Rin's little impromptu lesson went better than it probably should have. He kinda came up with most of it on the fly after spending far too long agonizing about what he could teach the hot-blooded Unbound. It just kinda clicked when she laid her insecurities bare.

While he wished he could tell her that he was working off an entirely different ability set and that he had not even the slightest clue how to channel magic through himself… Well, he hoped this helped her, at least. The way she lit up when she shot some mostly straight lightning was charming.

To be honest, he didn't really think too much about how throwing straight beams of electricity might be unusual, but it made sense in retrospect. While he was still kinda surprised how quickly Rin figured out how to mimic it, at least in part, there was some consolation that the new toy would keep her busy for a while. If he strained his ears, he could just barely hear the constant cracks of muted thunder through the thick workshop door.

Well, he should probably finish off this project.

Shaking his head, John soldered the connection the hard way, with a very careful heat ray carefully connecting the air-aligned capacitor to the gimbal mount's base while mourning the loss of his beloved entropy welder.

This device was probably one of the stupidest things that he had ever designed, but there really wasn't an easier way to do this.

Core issue: They needed a way to detect individual Nameless in the woods. Every single one they left alive posed an existential threat to rehabilitating the region, and the bounties on their own were not likely to be enough. Even if only a handful went undiscovered and they found some source of wealth for themselves, the Nameless could have a new hive growing in the shadows before they knew it. 

How long did it take to generate a Greater Nameless? Yuki couldn't tell him much, other than 'it depends on environmental factors', much to his frustration.

There were several possible solutions. The most obvious was airborne reconnaissance. However, even Yuki couldn't easily detect every Nameless from above. The canopy was too thick; the damn things were eerily quiet, and tracking by scent from the sky amidst the unobstructed winds was a hopelessly lost cause.

The obvious solution was to mount a magic detector with one of the impromptu Nameless detecting lenses to the bottom of the hover disc, but that came with a few engineering challenges. How wide an area to scan? How could one quickly and easily narrow down said area to where the creature actually was? Ideally, John would want it to show things on some sort of display, but building that would be a nightmare.

Screwing wood to wood, reiterating the steps of his project in his head, trying to think up any holes in his own logic even as he flew through the various steps of fabrication at a breakneck pace.

He didn't have a screen, nor did he have the means to make one. So, something more basic would have to do. Once triggered, a magic detector released a small electric pulse, which he normally fed into a magical radio transmitter or into a motor.

Of course, it didn't have to connect to one of those directly.

With utmost focus, John grabbed a piece of copper wire and sealed it in the magically resistant sap that had proven ever so reliable these last few years.

The idea was simple. He would give the detector a lens with a very wide vertical field of view, but a very narrow horizontal field of view, then mount it to a motor which would rotate continuously. Sticking out from the detector's base would be the output line, and around it in a circle would be several different thin copper plates, each hooked up to a different transmitter.

From there, he would have the ability to tell what direction a reading was from, letting him close the distance rapidly and narrow down the location of any potential targets from an impressive range of several hundred meters.

He linked each to his "Mage's Compass," the same device he had used to track down the ofuda not so long ago, adding an extra set of lights for them specifically while shrinking the whole contraption. Embarrassingly, he had made the damn thing maybe five times the size it needed to be, and now that he trimmed it down, it could be somewhat comfortably mounted on his wrist with a simple leather band.

Once done, he figured that it should probably let him scan the forest from the air safely and easily. While it was tempting to try and make a system that could automatically fly over and drop a payload… well, even if it wasn't orders of magnitude more complex, he was terrified of the idea of a magical bomber 'getting sidetracked' and going off on an adventure, or the Nameless figuring out they could divert them to civilian targets by dripping some blood near them.

It was easy to make a weapon that could destroy indiscriminately. It was much harder to create a weapon that destroyed the correct thing and nothing else.

Hmm.

Actually, that gave him an idea. The scanner was incredibly low-power and lightweight, only a little larger than a marble. The electric motor wasn’t much larger, and the only thing with a bit of bulk was the base, thanks to the need for several different transmitters. In time, he could doubtlessly cut it down to one, maybe two at most. Even with all that extra bulk, the footprint was barely larger than a playing card. Why couldn't he just strap it down and use it on a personal scale?

Setting a new course, a feral grin split John's face. He didn't have the senses of an Unbound… but if he could constantly scan the area around him, it would sure help close the gap. Maybe it wouldn't have the same range it would have in the sky if he used it on foot, but he could selectively scan for anything he could get a large enough sample of.

Work blurred past as the newest tool in his arsenal quickly took shape, with only a little more trouble than he had originally thought. John giggled as he cast a bronze fitting the old-fashioned way, or at least as old-fashioned as you could get while directly manipulating entropy and heat, running his finger over the smooth surface.

A drill punched slim holes into the top bracket, and John mounted a small premade motor in place, attaching part of the salvaged quick-connect system from his old gauntlet to hold the detector in place. Then, the engineer dipped copper wires into sap, forming a well insulating coating, before sealing them away in the device after attaching them to the corresponding copper plates.

His hands were shaking as he gave it a quick test, completing the circuit and letting the electric motor start spinning.

It… got stuck immediately on a slightly warped piece of copper.

John cursed and started smoothing it down, then made sure to grease everything carefully. Then, he started the motor up again, the detector spinning freely on its axis with a small buzz.

With an almost frenetic energy, John raced over to one of the magically insulated parts bins at the far side of his shop, pulling free a chunk of Nameless eye that he had kept for testing. It was weak, faded, yet…

Tick.

As the detector panned the item in his hand, his modified Mage's Compass went off, signalling a reading directly in front of it before fading out as the detector left that eighth.

Giggling, he circled his… Sentinel System, holding the chunk of Nameless at various heights.

Tick-tick-tick-tick.

It worked flawlessly! Pausing the motor, he removed the filter, and—

Tick-tick-tick—

Huh. It was pointed at him; it shouldn't be reading enough to go off. Was it picking up interference?

John shut his warding entirely off rather than letting it sit in its constant low ready state.

Tick.

Tick-tick.

No good. It was intermittent still, even if it wasn't triggering as often. Narrowing his eyes, John pulled the detector off the base with a quick twist, palming the diminutive orb and connecting it back up to its original housing.

Silence.

Then, he pointed it at the Nameless eye piece, pointedly still ignoring how human it looked.

Click.

Hmm. It still worked, so why…

John narrowed his eyes as he looked at the base before starting up the motor again, pointing the detector at it.

Click.

Alright, shit. It was picking up noise from the motor's power supply and likely his warding. Until he figured out how to implement a blacklist, he wouldn't be able to use it as a general magic scanner. It would have to be filtered, at least for now.

That was honestly fine with him.

John turned the spinning motor off and slotted the detector back in its new housing, putting the modified Nameless lens back into its slot. Last was, honestly, the easier part. He slapped a metal shield over the unit after double-checking his grease job, holding it down with a hinge and a simple latch.

Grabbing some spare strapping, he doffed his jacket before wrapping his new toy around his shoulder, pulling everything tight, but not too tight.

Rolling his shoulder and twisting his shoulder as he swung his arm around, John tested his range of movement, finding it more than satisfactory.

Before, he was just reacting, relying on his own sense of danger and his allies for safety. Now? He was cooking with gas. If one of those damned spiders breathed near him, he'd know it. While this wouldn't be as precise as his usual methods, it would tell him when to start looking to begin with.

"Well, someone looks pleased with himself." John spun his head to the side, seeing the giant figure of his kitsune friend filling the doorframe, blocking the light.

He belatedly realized that he looked like a crazed shirtless lunatic, cackling in the middle of his workshop with a chunk of bronze tied to his shoulder. "Yuki!" he cried out, sprinting back over to his shirt before burrowing into it like a startled gopher seeing an eagle. "Well, I was just—I mean—I made something new!" Hurriedly, he tossed the chunk of eyeball to the kitsune, who leisurely caught it without breaking eye contact.

"Oh? Is this more of a destroy your enemies type of day, or an infrastructure kind of day?" she cooly quipped, mirth dancing in her gaze as she rolled the piece over in her hands.

"Yesn't?" John cautiously ventured before reaching up to his shoulder and switching the device on with the small toggle at the base.

Tick.

Yuki's tall ears perked up, locking onto his newly compacted Mage's Compass with almost unsettling focus.

Tick.

Wordlessly, John held it up in front of him, as if he was checking his time on his impulse-purchased watch he had left back on Earth. It pointed forward, directly at Yuki.

Then, he turned left.

Tick.

Still, it pointed toward Yuki, even as he continued to spin.

Tick.

John walked back over to his materials bin, pulled a piece of carapace he had used for durability testing in the past, and placed it on the table.

Tick-tick.

Both Yuki and the device read without complaint.

"It has a range of… I'd say perhaps three chō if I'm flying*?* It depends on how many things are in the way, and how strong the magic is, but I wouldn't bet on it punching through more than three or four trees at ground level," John excitedly rattled off, smiling broadly.

"Indeed?" she mused, stalking closer like a shark through the shallows. She paced around him like a wolf circling a hurt lamb, disappearing out of the side of his vision, but John stood still. He probably would be a lot more scared if he hadn't spent so much time around Yuki recently, although some primal part of his brain still sent a shiver down his spine. 

Danger, it screamed. You're showing a predator your back. She’s a monster who could strike at any time.

John resolutely ignored it. 

Tick. Tick.

He had offered the kitsune far more trust than this again and again, and she had yet to abuse it.

The kitsune placed a clawed hand on his shoulder from his side, and John's breath caught in his throat as he felt her slick grip creep up to his neck, soft, silky fur rubbing against his exposed skin. Then, her hand slipped down his collar.

He froze on the spot like a deer in headlights as her grip trailed over the straps, slipping inches deeper, probing grasp running over his toned body.

Click.

The kitsune switched off the Sentinel System. "Well, isn't that interesting?" she whispered. "Aren't you a smart little inventor?"

John was a very, very red statue as her fingers slowly withdrew. "Yuki…" he whined lowly, refusing to turn and meet her gaze.

"Oh? You tease your student, but I'm not allowed to tease you?" the kitsune questioned, tails wrapping around the man and spinning him on the spot with ethereal grace. Her eyes were alight, and a wide grin split her muzzle. "Come, John. Am I not allowed to embarrass you?"

"Whoa, hey, that's entirely different!" he sputtered. "I just called her the dragon of socks! That's it!"

"And she's easy to embarrass," Yuki quipped back. "You are not troubled by such social niceties."

"Never mind that, our relationship is different! You and I are hardly student and teacher, we both teach each other!" John quickly shot back.

"Oh?" she cooed.

He had made a terrible mistake. 

The kitsune leaned in, fire in her eyes, drawing his gaze into her endless abyss as she hovered inches away from her. "Well then. Then turnabout is fair game, no? Go ahead, John. Fight back."

He opened his mouth to respond, but the noise that came out was less like that of a rational, thinking human and more like a frog getting strangled.

The kitsune laughed, the deep vulpine gekkering laughter echoing through John's mind as the sheer resonance thrummed against his chest.

What the hell was with Yuki? Why was she going so hard on teasing him now? While he might have been blind, this was a bit more… brazen than most of the games she had played to get a reaction out of him in the past. The only other thing that this could be was flirting, and there was no way in hell the kitsune was doing that. He's an absolute mess, and they hadn't known each other for that long. Besides, she probably needed a mental equal, not someone who she could effortlessly lead around on a string. Yuki just wasn't that type.

A long-forgotten instinct bubbled up in his chest, and he locked onto the kitsune's nose like a missile. This was a bad idea. He might get his finger bitten off, but John kinda wanted to do it anyhow.

Almost autonomously, his arm lifted from his side, rising to the kitsune's muzzle as she watched with hawk-like intensity. "Boop," John muttered in English as he pressed a single finger against the kitsune's nose.

Yuki's eyes crossed looking at it, her face scrunching up as the universal reset button did its work. He wouldn't normally call the kitsune cute, but the way her all-seeing golden eyes crossed, and her magical, fluffy ears twitched was admittedly adorable. They were like tiny little radar dishes.

"Aiki and Haru haven't been gone that long," he grumbled, withdrawing the offending appendage. "I think you're already getting broody looking for new people to play with."

"Kitsune do not get broody, they plot," Yuki quickly responded, smirking sharply. "This is all for your own good, I assure you."

John narrowed his eyes and went to poke her muzzle again, only for the kitsune to snap forward, and before he knew it, she had her teeth gently grasping the tip of his finger.

The shiver that went through him was smaller than expected, although he still tried his best not to let her see it. Instead, he met the kitsune's eyes, marvelling at the sheer amusement in them as she idly chewed on his fingers. A week or two ago, he had no doubts that he would have violently yanked his finger away, and probably cut himself up in the process.

Then again, he had a feeling that the Yuki he knew back then wouldn't have been willing to do this, either. Although her fangs were sharp, they didn't puncture his skin; instead, they merely scraped and ground against the vulnerable flesh. She was looking for some reaction, which he refused to give her on principle.

"You know, you're not beating the broody allegations with this," he flatly responded, looking her dead in the eyes and putting on the most grim, serious expression he could manage.

"John," she said, leaning in. "If you heard the jest I had planned when you first asked me to roll my clothes up, you'd turn as crimson as maples in fall and curl up."

When did… Yuki was messing with him, right? That seemed pretty out of character for him.

Wait.

Oh fuck, he did, didn't he? When Yuki first showed up, he asked her to—but that was just to get access to her leg to treat her injury! Part of her leg was scooped out! Flushing crimson, he pointedly avoided eye contact.

"T-that's different, and you know it!" He paused for a beat, eyes narrowing as his brain finally caught up with the reality of the situation. "Wait, how the hell are you talking around my finger so clearly?"

With a wet pop, the kitsune unclamped her jaws, leaving only the faint indents of teeth in his skin and a tiny bit of fox slobber. "A lady must keep a few secrets. Well, I think I'll leave you be for now. I'm sure you have many little kinks to work out," she chimed, turning and strutting toward the door, nine tails fanned out behind her like a massive, furry shield.

"You can't just do that to someone and then leave!" John barked, hurrying along in her shadow, but the kitsune adamantly refused to turn to see him. Somehow, he could feel the absolute radiance of her smug grin through the wall of fur between them.

"Oh? Why not?" she questioned, low mock curiosity colouring her tone. The way her tails twitched told him that damned woman was holding back full-body laughter.

"I just… Ugh!" John borderline growled, shaking his head. Silence hung between them, albeit lightly, less like an oppressive blanket and more like a silken sheet. 

"It needs field testing now," he finally admitted, begrudging acceptance settling in his shoulders. "Want to come along with me and scout out some nearby Nameless?"

Finally, the kitsune spun to face him, showing him that radiant, beaming smile he knew she had been wearing all along. "Well, why didn't you just say so? I'd love to," she cooed warmly.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

Rin meditated, her blade held firmly in her hands as she instinctively went through a series of katas, mimicking the masters of old as she followed in their footsteps. It was a good warm-up for her before she started practicing her follow-through against the boulder she had hauled into the courtyard.

A sharp enough body and will, together, could cleave the very dawn itself.

That was what her father taught her.

She had long pondered the profound mystery of his words and was constantly surprised by the new meanings she found in that simple phrase. Truly, his wisdom knew no bounds, and yet…

Rin had seen the results of true strength when used without regard for others. Uncountable thousands burned under the weight of heavenly power, and the survivors had limped on, if only for a time. Even being near the epicentre of divine wrath had scourged both their flesh and soul, unravelling what they were. Existing only in half was an ugly, fading thing, wracked with misery until you were drawn into the underworld was a terrible fate indeed.

The Unbound frowned, shifting her stance to match that of the Seventh Divine General, holding her blade almost loosely. Water coalesced on the blade, which she still did not know the true name of, and Rin struck at an imaginary target to her left with a flawless pivot, bisecting the spectre in two.

Lady Yuki had doomed them to that fate, in her own way, but was it truly her fault?

Hot rage bubbled up from the depths of her gut, but it was smothered under uncertainty, an inferno never to be. She had broken—No. If Rin went down that line of thought again, she was going to give herself another headache thinking about whether Yuki was whoever was in the prison or not.

Between her and her sister Kiku—Ugh! Why couldn't she just be simple? She was so kind, as far as Rin had seen, but the idea of something as foul as her sister springing from the same place was equal parts unsettling and terrifying. Maybe the nogitsune just… had all the bad parts?

Frost coalesced around her blade before she impaled another nonexistent enemy, flaring her power and making ice blossom within its depths like a snowflake, carving channels through flesh, bone, and steel alike.

Wasn't Yuki a nogitsune, too? Legends say that nogitsune were wicked kitsune who had abandoned the will of the gods to pursue their own desires, driven to brutality to sate their appetites and forever stagnate until they repented. Yet, Yuki had harmed no one, save those who had deserved it. Frankly, she had been well within her rights to teach Rin a painful lesson when she had, uh, foolishly challenged Lord Hall to a duel.

The Unbound's cheeks flushed crimson at the memory, her new sensei's complete bafflement replaying in her mind. The thought of such foolishness, at taking the first words whispered into her ear like the words of a divine messenger.

 It was for the best that neither of them had taken her seriously. She was strong, but to think herself an equal of Lord Hall or Lady Yuki would be the height of arrogance.

Lord Hall…

Her grip on her sword loosened, if only slightly.

The towering flames peeking over the distant horizon were burned into her mind, the sound of the distant explosions washing over her like a wave. While she was not privy to all that he had done, the terrifying potential of his power was evident. Somehow, he had taken a few hours out of his day to concoct weapons able to lay low terrible monsters, controlling them from ri away with little more than a glance and a gesture.

In her mind, he was akin to one of the lords of old, back when the highest of gods still visited this world openly. To be a leader in that age was to be a scholar and a warrior both. To be nobility was to be able to debate the lessons taught by the fading of cherry blossoms in the morning, govern in the afternoon, and win a duel in the evening.

Yet, Lord Hall had embodied those revered ancestors not in a court, but in the woods, spilling forth endless kindness and wisdom simply because he was the one who could.

"If not me, then who?" Such a simple statement, yet laden with a thousand meanings. It spoke of the duty to act. That no kindness is below those who can bestow it, and that you could never expect anyone else to solve a problem, should you turn your gaze aside.

Truly, he was a genius beyond compare, which made him all the more confusing.

She shifted into the twelfth storm stance, lightning crackling out from her heart and down her arm, quietly arcing bolts flicking from its surface before returning to their source. The air itself split under her attention as she swiped, the scent of hydrogen burning her nostrils as she cut another invisible enemy in twain.

She had seen how fear threatened to consume him at the sight of the priests, but how could that make sense? To them, he might as well be an invincible god; it would have taken him a simple wave of his hand to reduce every single priest who used to live in that shrine into ash.

One, single use of that devastating attack that Lord Hall had simply called heat, which passed through everything he pointed at.

How could they have possibly hurt him so? Sensei had walked through the protective field of their ofuda without a care in the world, and she doubted that any of their other weapons would find more purchase.

Her breath caught. He was far too beneficent for his own good.

They had abused his good nature in some way. They must have. He had offered a hand in peace, and they had turned their foulness against them. Yet, his grace held back his righteous retribution.

Why? Was it mercy, or did he think that they might perform some vital function?

The door to the workshop slid open, and Rin hurriedly resumed her forms, tightening up her stance as her sensei walked out of the building.

Light bags hung under his eyes, although he held himself upright with ease. Had he not slept for weeks? The idea of an Unbound, or whatever they were called in his distant homeland, of his strength showing so much fatigue was strangely foreign, like seeing a shopkeeper trying to haggle down prices while the customer tried to pay more.

"Rin," he greeted, yawning as he stretched. "How goes the training?"

Quickly, Rin finished off her set with a decisive strike before standing straight and bowing deeply at her waist. "Well, sensei!" she quickly responded. "How may this humble student aid you?"

His piercing green eyes met her reddened gaze, searching for something beyond her comprehension. What did he wish of her? The scraps of strength of arms she lent to his cause were hardly equal to the absolute weight of knowledge he casually set in her lap like one might a pamphlet.

"Please, don't stop on my account. I'm just taking a bit of a break from work." He waved off her concern, standing at the edge of the courtyard with his arms crossed. His arm still bore that massive, heavy gauntlet he had revealed recently, but John carried it with the ease of an experienced hand, seemingly suffering no loss in dexterity despite the huge, awkward looking fingers.

Hesitantly, she nodded before returning to her kata. What would her sensei want to see? What would impress him? While he taught her the principles of weather itself, it's not like she had the comprehension to work it into her swordsmanship! Surely he was not expecting her to already know how!

What a monstrous talent, to forget how far below others were…

Rin swapped into a middle stance, holding her blade out in front of her as if she was to slice a wave in two and took a single step forward, raising its edge high as she turned to the small granite boulder she had hauled in to use as a training dummy.

She breathed in and out, summoning the lightning from deep inside her soul. To most, it would be a hostile, imperious force that threatened to tear their body apart. A twitch could crumple a warrior who tried to use it skilllessly. A moment's hesitation where it flowed through a heart off-beat could seize it forever. Releasing it a moment early could fry nerves, leaving limbs limp and useless or worse. Her body, though, was built for it. The blood of a storm dragon flowed through her veins, her donor's flesh long ago having remade her anew.

Finally, the Unbound brought the sword down. Her edge alignment was flawless as it streaked through the air in a sheath of white and blue, and the air screamed like a wounded beast as Rin parted it with impossible precision. Surging forth as a whip, the arc of lightning shot off into the distance in a glorious, burning crescent.

The strike cut into the granite in a bright, devastating flash, carving a blackened gouge into the dense surface and spreading a spiderweb of burnt cracks around her attack before dissipating.

Yet, she wasn't done, and as soon as the attack had left her blade, she was already gathering water upon its razor tip. Her stance dropped low as she drew into herself like a viper ready to strike, twisting the sword's tip towards her target.

She exploded forward, crossing the distance in times best measured in the windbeats of flies, and impaled her target upon her weapon! The sword bit deep before she twisted, the water exploding outwards as it turned to ice, spreading like roots growing deep into the crevices as a series of almighty cracks echoed out as rock gave way.

Melting the ice around her blade, she tore it free with a flick of her wrist, water fleeing its edge as she sheathed her blade in one smooth motion.

It wasn't good enough. Why would her sensei be impressed? He did not just direct lightning, but had it heed to his command, flying like an arrow rather than a heavenly force!

She turned to her sensei and bowed deeply, eyes locked onto the slightly muddy dirt below. "Thank you for watching, Lord Hall," she intoned softly.

She heard the sound of stone under his feet as John walked closer, and smelled the distinct scent of sweet sap and charcoal that seemed to cling to the impressive man like a cloak. He was so, so close to her, but he hadn't said anything. She could hear his breath and almost taste the aura of wisdom that swirled around the man as he examined the stone she had trained against.

"Huh. That's pretty good," John praised, and Rin jolted, eyes snapping up to meet Hall's own. They were kind, knowing, but still undoubtedly curious. "Impressive amount of damage. You could be a living battering ram if you put your mind to it!"

"But sensei," she began, before cutting herself short, smothering the foolish words that would come next.

John held her gaze, although he frowned. "What were you going to say, Rin?" he asked.

"It was nothing, sensei," she responded, dipping her head once more.

His frown didn't waver, and he looked at her with a raised brow, letting the silence between the two weigh heavily.

Sweat dripped into Rin's eyes as his gaze seemed to burn through her will. He had to give up eventually, right?

Right?

M-maybe Yuki was around to interrupt? She always had the best sense of timing!

Rin's eyes searched around for escape, and eventually found Yuki. She was up on the wall, talking to Yosuke.

Seeming to read her mind, the kitsune momentarily turned to face her and beamed the Unbound a wide smile that felt at least a tiny bit demonic before turning back to her previous conversation.

Her heart dropped as she realized that no rescue would be coming.

"I… Why was that impressive, sensei?" Rin finally cautiously ventured after Lord Hall's gaze had grown far too intense. "I'm supposed to be a master of the storm, yet I can't even make lightning fly straight like you do."

At that, Lord Hall's eyes softened around the edges, the intensity bleeding away into sharp understanding. "Ah, that's what it's about, then," he muttered to himself, cradling his chin in his free hand as he looked away.

Rin let out a breath, shoulders slumping and nails no longer digging into her palms as she uncoiled, releasing tension she didn't know she was holding.

"I'm not sure that's an indicator of my strength or control or anything, and more just because of how I learned to control it," he lectured, raising his gauntleted finger to point toward the rock. "Stand clear and watch closely, please."

Hurriedly, Rin took a few quick steps away from the chunk of abused granite.

John's fingers twitched, and lightning erupted with a bang from his hand, a single, perfectly controlled bolt manifesting like a beam for a split second, passing straight through the rock and out the far side before finally, at the very end, writhing out like ordinary lightning into the ground. It was not the divine bolt of judgement she had seen Lord Hall perform in the past, only leaving scorch marks on both sides rather than splitting the rock in twain, but that shouldn't have been possible.

It didn't punch through with sheer force. It should have merely stopped rather than passing through the stone like water.

"What is lightning? Natural lightning, that is, with no divine or magical force controlling it?" he questioned, hand flopping down back to his side.

Rin pouted, pondering just how unfair a question it was. Did he want a precise explanation of why lightning was? Did he want a philosophical explanation of why it acted as it did? "I… lightning is the wrath of the storm, a bucking beast that does what it wants and needs an iron will and a steady hand to command." 

Lord Hall nodded. "Lightning is lazy," he stated, "You ever wear socks, rub your feet against the ground, and then feel a shock when you touch something?

What?

Well, yes, she was an older sister. It wasn't as if she had never done that and poked her brother's ear when he wasn't paying attention, but—Surely that's not what he was implying?

"Lightning works kinda like that. Now, this isn't going to be one hundred percent accurate, but if I got into the weeds, we'd be here all day, but imagine a storm cloud like a giant swarm of angry flying socks," John began, crouching down to write in the dirt with his finger. Almost unconsciously, Rin followed and leaned in, watching as he drew what looked like a river with a small pile of symbols on each side. "Ice and water rub against one another, creating charges we'll call positive and negative. Negative goes down, positive goes up."

At positive and negative, he pointed to a matching side of the divide.

"These charges are drawn together, and wish to even out. Eventually, they overcome the resistance of the air to bridge the gap, finding the easiest path."

Lord Hall carved a bridge over the 'river' into the dirt at the narrowest point and moved half the symbols on each side over to the other one.

"Lightning happens. Cloud to cloud, if the easiest path is to another cloud. Cloud to ground, if the easiest path heading to the ground. Lightning waves and jitters because the charge passes through water more easily than air, and the area below a storm isn't uniform. It's just following stuff like pockets of moisture."

Rin's eyes were already bulging at the first half of the explanation. To hear such a divine force reduced so casually was already shocking enough, but the sheer simplicity struck her. Could it be so basic? Truly? Centuries of debates on natural philosophy, with divinists saying that all lightning was the force of the heavens' will, while others argued that no god would spend that much time smiting trees. Personally, Rin had sat with the latter, but to hear this stated so definitively…

Surely her sensei was correct. Something about it felt right, but it felt almost anticlimactic. Too clean. True, he had stated it was a simplification, but even then.

"Oh, I got a bit off track, didn't I?" her sensei mused, standing back up and stretching. "My lightning flies straight because I don't have to wrangle it. I just give it an easy path and let it do what it does naturally."

It couldn't be that simple. It just couldn't. There was no way.

Something deep in Rin's soul clicked into place with the explanation, fingers drumming against her thighs.

She was the storm itself, contained in the shape of a woman; not fully mortal, but not fully divine, either. Water flew at her command, forming a barely visible lance of wet air between her and her target, incidentally creating an area of dry, barren air around the channel. She couldn't do both this and summon lightning at once. She didn't need to. After all, it wouldn't fade instantly.

Rin's will pulsed, and her electric heart roared with life, power flooding to her fingertips as lightning rushed to her command. It was so simple; why hadn't she seen it before? It didn't writhe, fighting against her will; it was just like water, trying to flow through her clasped hands. Flowing towards an equilibrium, it was following rules Rin didn't know she had to pay attention to.

Mimicking Master Hall, she pointed. Lightning flew from her fingers with a mighty crack. Perhaps it wasn't perfectly straight, like Lord Hall's, and it didn't pass through the core to the far side without effort. Yet, it still flew like an arrow, crashing into the stone and blasting a hole into its depths.

Mirth filled her soul, and she threw her head back in a raucous laugh, staring up at the heavens far above.

It was that simple.

How could she have been so blind?

John laughed with her as he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Damn, Rin. I didn't expect you to get it that fast," he warmly chimed. "I mean, keep this up, and I might need to come up with some new titles for you." 

She spun to face him and saw that Lord Hall's face bore a wide, beaming smile, eyes alight with what she had sworn was pride.

Rin looked away, her cheeks reddening in both embarrassment and joy. "O-of course I got it, sensei! I'm your faithful student, after all!" Rin borderline cheered, although she didn't dare to meet his eyes.

"Want to go show Yuki your work, oh dragon of socks?" John teased, sending her sputtering as she suddenly found herself choking on her own spit.

"Sensei!" Rin piteously whined, tail whipping behind her.

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

Yuki settled down on John's side of the "picnic table," slipping into thought as the other yokai cautiously arrayed themselves on the far side. 

It was a curious construction, and not for the first time, she wondered what led his home culture to favour sitting on such awkwardly raised platforms over just sitting or kneeling on the ground.

Perhaps they had trouble keeping insects out of their homes, or all their available flooring materials were profoundly uncomfortable in the cold winters he had mentioned. Ah, but he didn't think his house's heating was anything special, so that likely wouldn't hold true in the current era.

She was getting sidetracked. She had pondered long and hard enough about the eccentricities of John's mysterious home, especially after she had overheard that little class he had with Rin about how their weather worked.

For now, though, she had to focus on their guests. It was surprising how many of them the river yokai could summon on such short notice, especially as they had doubtlessly hidden away in the wake of John's rather impressive array of explosions.

The first was the kappa, who awkwardly sat across from her on the raised seat, trying to find a position that was at least semi-comfortable. John had, at the yokai's insistence, placed a side half in the water, so he could easily tumble back into the river if needed to escape. 

Of course, the yokai hadn't phrased it like that, but his desires were transparent to the kitsune. Stability. Good food. Appreciation. He was easy to curry favour with, and Yuki would need that when dealing with the other members of his "shogi group" he had pulled together for a meeting on such short notice. His reactions would form a helpful baseline to compare the others to.

Yuki suspected the kappa had a few other tricks up his sleeve, too. She doubted it was any sort of mobility technique, given he hadn’t disappeared from the area entirely after the explosions, so he must have had some means to communicate at a distance.

Next was a surprise; she didn't know of any kodama in the area. The green, softly glowing yokai was only about as high as John's knees and had the soft, childlike appearance that most of its kind possessed, and was clothed in brittle-looking silk clothes. He had likely buried them under his tree in a box to keep them safe from the Nameless, and seldom had the occasion to wear such relative finery. Perhaps it was an offering from decades past, before the forest grew dangerous for the average mortal.

Yuki made sure to gently poke John with her tail to stop him from staring at the tree spirit while the kodama smoked his long, ornate pipe stuffed full of some unidentified herb that smelled of spring and bad decisions. While she understood why the man might be a bit put off by the childlike spirit's smoking, it was no excuse to be rude. 

Perhaps, when all was said and done, she could bribe the spirit to produce that sap John seemed to use in great quantities. Strangely, although the name was on the tip of her tongue, she couldn't quite recall it.

She wondered where the spirit's grove was; they couldn't range terribly far without risking death. The kodama wore an expression of forced boredom, but she didn't miss the way his eyes refused to wander far from her or John, nor the subtle scent of fresh sap, even though he bore no open wounds. No, given his relative immobility, the poor thing was almost certainly terrified of John burning the forest down around him, and had likely used his lifeblood to take control of a nearby tree to provide a distraction if needed.

Perhaps he scratched the inside of his cheek to hide it, but a kitsune's nose was far too sharp for such a simple distraction.

Finally, there was the okuri-inu, the hairless dog-like yokai's human face putting on a mask of politeness, flawed as it may be, as her body trembled like a shaved rat in a snowstorm. That was fair. Yuki had threatened to pull out her soul and eat it the last time they had met, and John had electrocuted her after her instincts demanded that she attack him on some trail.

To be honest, the kitsune was still tempted to minimize the odds of unplanned deaths, but the creature's nature was not her fault, but that of the gods. Even after all these years, she wondered how much one could change their nature, given the proper motivation. A way to throw off the yoke of the Shape of All Things, even in some small way, would go far to grant her favour with those scorned by its gaze.

Yuki was under no delusions that this was every yokai around here, evidenced by the kappa's missing cousin and a lack of several other beings she had heard about from the townsfolk. Alas, this was probably as many as they were going to get.

"I'm very glad you all took time out of your busy days to be here," John sheepishly began, skipping the perfunctory bows these types of meetings normally needed and causing the kappa distress. "Over the last few weeks, the fair Lady Kitsune and I have been conducting attacks against the Nameless, the culmination of which you saw last night."

While they hadn't had much time to rehearse, John had a talent for addressing groups he didn't know he possessed, albeit unrefined. Still, Yuki ensured that she was to be referred to as "Lady Kitsune" this time, if only not to rub the fact she had a proper name, etched into the bedrock of reality rather than the ethereal, fleeting things that weaker yokai often possessed.

"Well, that's all fine and peachy. You just decided to blow up half the damn forest without a 'Hey there, neighbour, you might want to keep your heads down tomorrow.' You could have blown someone to bits!" the kappa loudly grumbled, crossing his arms. The okuri-inu, of course, looked positively terrified and ready to bolt, staring at the kappa with the same expression reserved for passengers on the back of a soaring dragon who started questioning what the point of living was.

Alas, no divine vengeance rained down to erase them from the face of this world. The kappa was direct, and Yuki cared little for decorum beyond how it could be leveraged to benefit her.

That little tirade only made John redden in embarrassment and look away. As was becoming increasingly clear, her human likely came from a far more relaxed society as well. Every little twitch and reaction he had was useful fodder for building an image of where he came from. 

"Sorry about that. We were in a bit of a rush, but the Nameless shouldn't bug any of you for a while, at least," John explained. "They've been sealed underground for now. Every single one of their nests has been completely levelled."

The only reason you couldn't hear a pin drop following that casual proclamation was the nearby river burbling.

"What?" the woman dog yokai disbelievingly barked out.

"It makes sense," the kodama calmly reflected, something about the calm and measured nature of his voice drawing Yuki's full attention. "I couldn't see all of them, but the fireballs evident from my grove were all near where I suspected Nameless nests to be."

He tried his best to make sure it sounded like he had only just come to that conclusion, but there were little signs that set Yuki’s mind alight. Too little hesitation between sentences. Tone just a sliver too flat. Interesting. The most obvious reason behind a little lie like that would be to make them feel like he was less aware than he was. Now, why would the kodama want that? Was it just a matter of avoiding the attention of a dangerous kitsune?

It was time to gather some more information for herself.

"It all began a few days ago, when we were clearing the minions of the Nameless and their master from the town…" Yuki began, quickly recapping the events that had occurred in their struggle against Kiku and her hordes. Of course, the other yokai had likely been able to intuit much of this from the gossip of the town’s minor household spirits, but once the ofuda had gone up, the area might as well have been a sealed tomb.

The yokais' reactions told her much of what she needed to know about them, further refining her image of each in her mind. The kappa, despite all his gruffness, seemed legitimately concerned about the people in Broadstream, given his wince when Yuki mentioned the deaths of the militiamen at Kiku's hands. The okuri-inu, strangely, seemed relieved at the same news. Curious. 

The militia should not pose a threat to her, even if she were actively prowling the roads. Why did she benefit from the town's protectors dying? It would have to be looked into later, but the kitsune suspected it had something to do with why she was here rather than up in the mountains.

What really interested her, however, was the kodama's reaction. He got nervous when Yuki mentioned the scattering of the priests, although he tried to hide it. Something about the currency change unsettled him, too. It was very likely that he had some sort of business arrangement with the dethroned holymen

Regardless, she would keep an eye on that one. Despite the apparent concern for the priests, he didn't react in the slightest when she talked about the danger to the townsfolk or the deaths of the tax collectors. At the very least, the latter told her that he wasn't affiliated with Kiku.

"Well, you lot have been busy," the kappa muttered, scratching at his chin. She didn't miss the little opportunistic glint in his eye, though, or the way his breathing had steadied over the course of the explanation. "You didn't pull us here just to tell us that, though. You could have just asked me to spread the news around."

Yuki nodded, a smile creeping across her muzzle. "The Nameless underground will be having a civil war over what resources they still possess. If we are truly lucky, the Greater Nameless at the head may have regressed into a mindless savage, but I wouldn't count on that. For now, I would task you, one and all, to let us know if you see any Nameless on the surface, so we might track them down and contain the infection, lest it spread."

And, of course, alert them of any hidden nests they somehow missed, but that went unsaid.

"To that end, we bequeath you with a way to gain our attention, should it be needed," Yuki continued, and John dug through his bag, putting what was formerly the bomb's "detonator" on the table, with a stake now attached to the bottom.

It had been a simple matter for John to link it to a light on his "security tablet" and relabel it; after all, it was based on a repurposed magic detector to begin with. "If you flip the case off and press the button, it will inform me that it has been pressed, as long as I'm within four ri or so," John instructed, demonstrating the simple process before bending over and driving the spike between rocks with a single slam. "I will leave it here, and if anybody presses it, I will make my way over here if I can. Do not move it." 

The "or else" went unsaid, but Yuki could see how everyone stiffened at the proclamation.

Was it a risk? Of course. If Kiku was still moving freely, she could use it to plan an ambush. Unfortunately for the other kitsune, Kiku would have no Nameless army to back her up, and John would quietly line the area with detectors, specifically tuned to her, later this evening, once everyone left. If those went off, every single inhabitant of the fort would be coming to pull her tails off one by one and turn what was left over into a blanket.

Thankfully, the device was so simple that it would be within reach of native artifact creators should the idea strike them, so it was unlikely to reveal anything about John's abilities. At most, it would be novel for how cheaply it was made. The Nameless would be kept away, too, by the fact that nobody who knew of it would wish to possess it and risk angering John after last night. Possessing it had, in all regards, negative value.

"What do you offer in return?" the kodama quietly cut in, tilting his head after he finally put his pipe down.

Now, were these his true colours, or was it just an act to ensure they considered his potential relationship with the priests as strictly a matter of greed?

"Is the fact that mortals will walk the woods freely again, able to give offerings, not enough?” John inquired. “You'd be able to own things of value without it drawing the spiders in.”

Silence greeted him, just as she expected.

"Information leading to the destruction of a Nameless will be worth one iron mon for each," Yuki authoritatively declared. "A bounty of one iron and five copper mon will be granted per corpse. In addition, you will be able to request Lord Hall to send someone to spend your money in town, when time permits."

"It's not very much," the kodama noted, drumming his little fingers against the table. "Heads should pay triple—no, quadruple that!"

Yuki smiled gently, like she was putting on a polite smile for a slow learner. Perhaps a bit of anger would bait him into revealing some of his inner thoughts. "A mon has a lot of purchasing power in the village," she calmly explained. "Between the tax collectors and the Nameless, they've lost much of the coinage that used to circulate through the village, driving up the value of money."

It was a shame they couldn't inflate the currency a bit to further devalue the Nameless’ holdings, but they couldn't risk the distrust that would come with it. The ensuing underground economy for the original coins would cause the Nameless' hoard to retain too much value. The one-to-one nature of John's coins made them slot seamlessly into daily life. This very second, there were doubtlessly townsfolk flooding to the former ryokan to change their money over, worrying that being found with Imperial coins inside the village would be taken as a sign they were breaking Yuki and John's decree.

The kodama's reaction revealed annoyingly little, nodding and seemingly falling into thought.

"Pssh, that's good enough for me!" the kappa barked, interjecting in the conversation and cutting any further negotiations short, much to Yuki's amusement and the kodama's immediate frustration. While it may be unfair to him, seeing what appeared to be a child with a bald head pout as if their parents had just caught them sneaking an early dinner was always entertaining.

Hmm.

"I… guess that's okay," the okuri-inu uneasily added, frowning. "We just pop over here and press the button, right? The bounty for heads seems a bit low, though… Sorry! I don't mean to…" The dog-yokai shivered under her gaze.

"That's intentional," John said, smiling. "While there is a bounty on kills, we don't want anyone risking their lives for it. By setting the bounty low enough but still above the standard, we'll let any confident yokai clean up the weak, isolated ones without incentivizing someone to do something stupid."

The okuri-inu quieted once more, and the kappa nodded thoughtfully, greed lighting behind his eyes. It didn't take much effort to imagine what the kappa was thinking. Given that the Nameless couldn't swim, he could leave bait in shallow water and take them whenever they investigated, almost like reverse-fishing.

The kodama's reaction was more interesting, though. The creature seemed mildly displeased, from the very slight downturn of the corner of his lips before he suppressed it, eyes lingering on John for a moment longer than she'd expected.

Pieces started to fall into place.

He had a close relationship with the priests, who were neglecting their relationships with the local yokai even before the Nameless showed up. He didn't care either way about the people of the town. However, he wanted the bounty increased.

Why?

It was a foolish question at first glance. Everyone liked having more spending money, after all.

Yet, kodama aren't known for their combat ability outside their groves. Most could only move between trees silently, quietly possessing them. Despite that, he had pushed for increased payouts for deaths, not scouting. It wasn't for him. It was for others, and he was pointedly displeased with John's explanation of it being to lower the risk to others.

This yokai wanted others to risk their lives and likely die chasing bounties.

Now, did he want the other local yokai to die in general, or did he want a specific one dead?

Yuki's outward facade was that of a polite host, quietly directing the flow of the meeting as it devolved into a back and forth over exact terms and the occasional pleasantries. Internally, she was dissecting the kodama in front of her, watching every single reaction and what he didn't react to.

Yet, she didn't take any action. 

The kodama was nominally a member of the kappa's social circle, and although she was certain of his aims, she didn't have proof. It would ill suit her to alienate the local population at this stage, although she hoped that he was targeting someone unimportant. The kitsune doubted that his target was anyone attending this meeting in particular, given he hadn't been watching the reactions of the others with any exceptional focus.

If they were truly unfortunate, he would be part of some greater plot, and there would be more to do once the Nameless had been dealt with. Perhaps, if there was a conspiracy, they were hovering above like scavengers, waiting for the spider yokai to do their job for them.

It would be smart to kill him off, once she was sure he was not part of a larger conspiracy. If he were, the clear option would be to confirm its nature and use him as leverage to manipulate them, too.

"Well, that's just about everything, I think," John said, smiling, completely unaware of the viper he was addressing.

"I declare this meeting adjourned," Yuki stated, rising from her seat and towering over all others present.

"This wasn't a complete waste of time, I guess," the kappa rumbled, standing in turn. "Well, I'm off to find some bait. I'll be back this evening." He trudged off with all the swagger of a fisherman who 'had a good feeling' about the day. Yuki decided ahead of time to tease him overmuch should he not call for attention by nightfall.

"Uh, thank you for not—I mean, thank you for hosting us, Lady Kitsune," the okuri-inu quickly simpered before scampering off like a scorned dog.

The kodama simply rose, bowed, and walked calmly out. Yuki wondered where that old, faded silk outfit came from, and whether she could track the weave to any particular artisan or region. Although she was out of practice, she committed the cloth's subtle pattern, the weave of the fabric, and the stitching to memory. Perhaps it would reveal where his loyalties lay.

"Well," John chimed, finally rising from his well-worn spot, "I think that went better than expected. I would have thought it would have been a harder sell, but it went off without a hitch."

Yuki smiled, although it was a sad, piteous thing. "About that, John…"

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)

The morning was bright, the distant sun slowly cresting the edge of the forest, burning away any remnants of the night’s chill that still clung to the earth. Perhaps it was his imagination, but John swore that the land itself breathed easier than yesterday, despite the cataclysmic amounts of firepower he levelled against the nests.

It felt like he woke every other hour and mindlessly stumbled towards the window, staring off into the distance with bleary eyes to see if he could spot the red haze of an inferno in the distance, but… no burgeoning forest fire emerged. Perhaps it was the Shape of All Things, maybe it was the rain they had been getting, but an early-morning flight confirmed that the nests were nothing more than a scorched crater with only light damage to the surrounding area.

Well, light as far as thermobarics were concerned. To be honest, the ability to pack that much boom in such a small bag was a bit spooky, and John was sure as hell going to figure out a way to detect bombs like that in case someone ever reverse-engineered or stole one.

The lack of collateral damage was a bit terrifying, in its own way. He had expected the damage to be far more extensive, but other than a few dozen flattened trees around the craters where the Nameless nests used to be, the forest seemed eerily unharmed. Was this the Shape of All Things' influence, too? Were his numbers terrifyingly off on the strength of the explosives?

And, if they were correct, how bloody strong were the people who dropped a mountain on Yuki when the very world itself fought against mass destruction?

Bah, existential dread for another time. For now, they had to find the kappa and explain their mistake. Thankfully, this time Yuki didn't stop him from bringing an apology basket.

They probably should have warned the poor river yokai about the thermobarics ahead of time; it must have sounded like a Greek god taking it out on the Earth after finding out about their spouse's latest bit of infidelity.

"You sure he wouldn't have gone down the river?" John whispered to Yuki, casting a glance at the water. He couldn't see anything from this angle; it'd be a lot easier with his disc, but he had decided that it wasn't worth the risk of getting caught out with a low capacitor.

The kitsune shook her head, pulsing her Presence once more, directing the burst very pointedly into the water with a desire to talk as friends. John felt it pressing heavily on his mind, even though he hadn't been in the blast proper. "The river passes through town, and the barrier the priests erected would repel him," she stated, "At best, he might cling to a log and hope to float through while unconscious, but if there were anyone to catch him, it would be guaranteed capture. Given a kappa's first instinct is to remain near the water due to the bowl on top of their head, he almost certainly fled upstream. I doubt he went too far, though. He’d bed down to let the danger pass."

John had almost forgotten about that whole skull-bowl thing. Once he learned about it, it stopped being a mystery why every kappa he skirmished with over the years had refused to pursue him far on land. There was the one he had seen with a shell embedded in his skull to stop any spills, but that would have likely been easy to shatter in a fight amongst near-peers.

John nodded along before his eyes returned to the forest, unsubtly scanning the treeline for any Nameless. He came up blank once more. Part of him was surprised that the remaining Nameless hadn't attacked yet, and it was making him nervous. In theory, John and Yuki should have been easy for the spider monsters to scent, and if they were starving, they almost certainly would have rushed the pair down in sheer desperation.

Maybe he was putting too many eggs in one basket with this plan; he could already be pressing them to make sure the destruction took.

They didn't like water, to his memory; perhaps he could dig a canal over from the river and drown them now that they had the issue contained. John might have to apologize to the kappa a lot, but maybe he’d appreciate having a pre-dug cave habitat. Hell, maybe John could employ him to help loot the caves, too. There was no way in hell he was personally going into a pitch-black flooded maze full of dead spiders the size of small to mid-sized cars.

Well, at least Kiku was almost certainly either sealed away or in another prefecture by now.

Birds peacefully chirped in the distance, almost as if singing a song of triumph. Yet the fragile peace had only banished the darkness for now, with no true victory claimed. Nameless still lurked in ambush under thick canopies for unwary travellers, and they would likely grow more desperate by the minute as their siblings devoured one another in the earth below.

Still, the sun was warm on his skin. Perhaps he could enjoy this little sliver of just being allowed to be, if only for now. When he had first met Yuki, he had given her a timeline for recovering and leaving him be, but, to be honest, it was hard to picture the fort without her now, and she seemed poised to plant roots here, at least for the time being. 

When this was all said and done, perhaps he could hire some carpenters to expand the main building of the fort, at least to give her some more room for herself. Perhaps something for Rin, too, if she decided to stick around.

Speaking of Rin, it was probably a good call to leave her behind. The kappa might think that they were coming to exploit him for more appendages or something.

The pair quickly continued their quiet, riverside walk. It was a shame that it was so rocky, the large river stones a veritable sea of slicked-up bowling balls that he had to step over, being careful not to slip on the algae-slick surface. Yuki, the filthy magical cheater, had no such problem and maintained her eternal, unnatural poise without complaint, gliding over the rocks like an ethereal spirit of dignity.

It was tempting to head to the left and get off the rocks, but he discarded that traitorous thought immediately. John didn't want to get any closer to the treeline than he had to. Sure, the Nameless were weakened, but they weren't entirely gone, and even if his warding could take a few solid hits, he didn't want to risk getting tangled up and yanked into the bush—

Click.

John's eyes hardened as he snapped toward where he was idly pointing the Nameless detector. Across the river was a region where the canopy thickened, creating a dollop of shade where one of the beasts might like to bed down for the day.

Yuki stilled at his side as John halted. Slowly, carefully, he panned the device around, searching for any sign of an ambush materializing around them. There was nothing else. No upturned earth of a freshly dug hole. No suspicious mounds of forest debris. No other positives on the Nameless detector.

He slowly dialled the aperture—a quick and easy addition to the detector—to shrink the detection angle. "You smell it?" he asked Yuki, voice dropping to a whisper.

The kitsune shook her head. "It's downwind," Yuki stated, pupils narrowing to cut through the deep shade. "It has buried itself deep."

"Does it know we're here?" John slowly narrowed down where the creature was, using the tighter cone to eliminate suspiciously looking lumps one by one.

Yuki didn't respond for a moment before shaking her head, never letting her eyes leave the shade the creature was probably hiding in. All the while, her ears twitched wildly, pivoting this way and that to locate any sign of incoming danger, only occasionally locking onto where the monster should be.

"If it does, it's keeping calm. It's… quieter than most of its kind," Yuki breathed, voice laden with something airy, a light smile touching her muzzle.

John spun his head, levelling her the flattest stare he could manage. "It being good at hiding is a good thing?" he incredulously asked.

Click. Click. Click.

At least there only seemed to be one of them. John was pretty sure he saw it, too. There was the barest hint of a pile of dirt and leaves by the base of a tree, but the Nameless had dug into a natural divot, making it hard to see anything but the very tip of the shadow-monster iceberg.

"Where are we, John?" Yuki rhetorically asked.

"In the forest by the river?" he hesitantly answered, pausing to think.

There was something special about it. There had to be, otherwise Yuki wouldn't have asked. They weren't near a road, and no Nameless nests were anywhere nearby. The kappa and any other water-dwelling yokai would be pretty much impossible to catch. If they were trying to hide forces for later, they'd probably not spread them out in individual mounds next to obvious landmarks. There shouldn't be any resources that it'd want…

Wait. If there was no practical reason, why was it out here? The Greater Nameless would have no reason to send it out this way. It didn't seem to care much about others of its kind, given that it used them like toy soldiers against him to gain command experience, so this Nameless wasn't sent out here to save it.

"It's out here of its own free will," John muttered, smiling.

It was rogue, free of direction. From control. Dangerous, of course, but no longer bound to a will that would drive it to swarm. Hell, if there was one like this, there were probably more. There was a non-zero chance that every Nameless on the surface had been freed! With their mindless aggression, it'd be a simple matter to draw them out of hiding and kill them. If he flew over the forest with enough money, he could just burn anything that gave chase.

Yuki straightened, clicking her tongue. "I think I'm going to dig it up," she cheerfully commented, strutting toward the river like a woman with a mission.

"I can kill it from here, you know," John commented, watching warily as the kitsune walked into the shallow water before crouching down and leaping the damned river with near contemptuous ease. Granted, it wasn't a large river, but it was still a river! Yokai were some nonsense.

He provided overwatch, sweeping the woods around the kitsune as she strolled up to her target. It didn't move. The beast made no hint that it had sensed her approach as Yuki loomed over its seemingly slumbering form like an executioner. If this was a trap, it was a damn good one, but he doubted Kiku and the Greater Nameless would have had time to pull something that well planned off, especially when there was no reasonable way to know they'd visit the riverside today.

Then, without warning, Yuki crouched, dropping onto four limbs like a feral animal before pouncing. She sailed through the air with impressive ease before diving onto the beast, jaws biting straight through its cover and into its flesh, which sprayed black blood over the kitsune's muzzle.

The mound writhed, trying to dig itself out in a frantic shuffle, and Yuki seemed more than happy to help it along. With the sheer strength of her jaws, she wrenched the creature out of the earth, tossing her head to the side and releasing it to sail through the air.

The beast impacted a tree, sailing through it before finally being stopped by a second with a wet-sounding crunch. A storm of flailing, knife-like limbs spasmed as it tried to right itself, slowly getting its feet back under it as Yuki watched from a distance with naked interest.

It staggered, turning to face her, and then it screamed from its all too-human mouth, a chorus of piercing shrieks blending into one disharmonious cry. It had the voice of a woman who had subsisted on dew alone for two weeks. It had the timbre of a boy drowning in a swamp. A man bleeding to death outside a hospital. Someone crying at a grave until their voice left them. Then, it turned to flee, far too long legs skittering over the ground with unnatural speed. 

It was still slower than Yuki.

The kitsune handled the beast like a toy, pinning it to the ground with a single powerful hand as it writhed and struggled, trying its best to get up as she examined it. Then, a paw landed on one of its legs. She pressed straight through like it was wet clay as the creature struggled beneath her. Then, she twisted the next leg off like one might pull apart a steamed crab claw. Yet, her pace wasn't slow, like she was torturing it for her own pleasure.

No, even at this distance he could see the way she seemed to be carefully evaluating the monster as she removed its limbs one by one. Seeing how durable it was, seeing how it reacted. Unlike most Nameless, it was trying to get away; the only attempted strikes against Yuki were attempts to secure an escape route.

After the first four limbs, she silently decided she had seen enough and cleaved the other four off in a single quick motion, to a renewed chorus of screams. 

She turned to him, then. "John, would you mind coming over here?" the kitsune called, barely audible over the sheer auditory chaos emitting from the monster.

John looked at the screaming lump of monstrous flesh, which was already rather loud at this distance. He sighed. To be honest, that display of borderline sadism should probably bug him more than it did, but he couldn't be assed to have much sympathy for body-snatching monsters that would probably wipe out hundreds of people for pocket change. The image of all those men silently begging him for death as spiders crawled down their throats still sometimes flashed through his mind in the quiet moments.

"Mind gagging it first?" John asked, barely over normal speaking volume, but Yuki's supernatural hearing picked it up anyhow. Damn thing was probably loud enough to give him hearing damage.

She nodded, grabbing its jaws and breaking them, presumably to stop it from biting through its gag, before stuffing a sizable rock between its teeth.

It quieted the monster down, at least. John would probably die pretty fast if he got his ears blown out… But, huh, shouldn't that have happened when he was at ground zero in that explosion the other day? Maybe his warding was better at blocking that type of stuff than he gave it credit for. It could have blocked the sound wave pretty easily if it had already been triggered by the pressure hitting him first. Yeah, that was probably it.

John set up the disc before gliding over the water, setting down next to the kitsune and pointedly not in front of the monster, just in case. At least it didn't shoot webs at them this time.

"Actually, why didn't it try to web you and escape?" John mused aloud, pacing around the creature. The monster was, perhaps not smart, but clever. Now that he was looking at it more carefully, the creature looked… wrong. Where the darkness should have clung to it like thick tar was instead a layer almost like thin oil. Where the material touched the sun, it sizzled violently, cutting straight through the shadows' protection like a knife.

The severed limbs were thinner, too, like the carapace was sucked inwards, and the inky chitin was a few shades lighter. In fact, it looked almost like what happened to the beasts when Yuki pulled their souls out and ate them, but not as severe.

John picked up a nearby stick and prodded the creature with it. It was probably softer than chitin should be, but the creature's growl rumbled deeply until Yuki put a bit more pressure on its side with a claw.

Its eyes were clouded with a faint gray sheen. They were still absolutely mad and insane, constantly looking around independently of one another, each bearing a different emotion John struggled to describe, but they were almost sluggish with how they jolted around.

"It's sick," John breathed, a smile creeping across his face. "Is this what starvation looks like in them?"

Yuki had an almost feral grin split her muzzle. Then, she pushed her hand through the Nameless' carapace with slight effort, making the limbless monster writhe before suddenly stilling as she pulled out the orb of its soul, popping it in her jaws and swallowing.

John was slightly bothered by how unbothered he was by the whole act.

"Come," Yuki said, gesturing towards the pit where she had dug the monster out and strutting over. 

John obeyed, staying by her side, peering into the small pit. The edge of the divot was lined with thick webbing, almost like a silken bed. Dirty, rough, but there were a few oddities throughout its den. At the very bottom of the nest were a few imperial copper and iron coins, half-buried into the netting. To the side was… a fish? It was almost like the Nameless had tried to fillet it but failed, the blade-like front limbs far too brutal and clumsy.

John's eyes widened. "It was trying to create value to live off of," he muttered. "The coins weren't enough. It knows—" He glanced at the corpse and Yuki's bloody arm. "—Knew that it needed more valuables to survive, but it couldn't find anything. Was it fishing? Had it seen someone make money by doing that?"

"The Nameless on the surface are struggling. Your plan is working!" Yuki beamed.

John's smile brightened, widening until it split his face from ear to ear. "It works!" he shouted. "Of course—I mean, I should have—Don't think—Yeah!"

Soon, he could walk through the forest without fear. The local priests would never bother him again. He was, if not outright welcomed, tolerated by the townsfolk. The local intelligent yokai no longer thought of him as a mute sociopath. Local caravans would have no reason to drive him off, with Yuki making him feel less like a strange invader and more like a moderately less weird Unbound.

He staggered at the thought of connecting to the world once more, of being able to take a casual walk into town to buy some noodles, to casually gripe with a store owner about the weather.

John sat down on a rock, shaking his head. There were still things he had to do, though. They had to get a proper plan to clear out the Nameless, and possibly Kiku, below. Flooding it was sounding more and more appealing. It was either that or just figuring out a way to make drone weapons and just dumping enough of them in the tunnels that they gave up and died. Maybe a combination of both. They were weak to light. Perhaps, with Yuki's help, they could make some sort of light bomb? Maybe some sort of Presence-based radar system to "ping" where any underground concentration was to drop a bunker buster on them? He sure as hell wasn't going into any infested cave any time soon.

They had time to think, to breathe now, though, and that was one of the greatest gifts he had ever clawed from this world.

"Yuki, I—" He cut himself off, not trusting his words. Perhaps, things would be alright after all.

"The free Nameless will doubtlessly congregate within a handful of ri from Broadstream Town, drawn in by the scent of wealth," she continued. "There are no other easy targets for them to strike. Either they rush to where we can hunt them down, or they'll starve."

And then, they can work on rebuilding, and their little corner of the world will be at peace.

Then, from the side, he heard an awful, gurgling, choking noise.

John tensed, readying his gauntlet to toast whatever the fuck that was, aiming toward the river… only to behold his kappa, well, friend might be a strong term, but acquaintance was close enough, holding his head to stop the water from spilling out as he coughed up copious amounts of fluid back into the river. Part of him kinda wondered why he didn't just breathe through his skin like a frog, because although he was mostly a turtle-man, John could see some frog-ish qualities in those exposed limbs.

Where the hell did he come from?

The kappa's face still bore an ever-present scowl as he finished coughing up water, straightening once more.

"Sir Kappa," Yuki beamed, all the blood on her hands and paws making her look at least a tiny bit like a serial killer. "We were just looking for you to tell you the good news."

"What the hell did you do now?" the turtle groaned, shoulders slumping. "Was it you?" He levelled a glare at Yuki. "No." His eyes narrowed, staring at John instead. "It was you, wasn't it?"

John held up a hand placatingly as he detached the basket full of fresh-ish fruit and vegetables from his garden from his backpack. "How about an apology basket?" he offered. "As an apology for conducting a bombing campaign to block the Nameless in their nests without letting my neighbours know?"

Something softened in the kappa's gaze, then. "An offering?" the kappa muttered, something almost light in his voice. He clamped back down on it, burying it under a visage that was just a bit too dramatic to be real, full of puffed-up pride. "Hey! Don't think I'm going to let it go just like that!"

First | Previous | Next (Patreon)