47 – A Whole Lifetime of Bad Decisions
If they gave out prizes for stupid fucking decisions, I was bound to take the gold. It wouldn't even be close. That thought pounded in my head as I sprinted up the familiar winding track that led to the snowy peaks of Mount Gruai.
But what was I to do?
It was the same as when Inumi came by. That horde of flying beasts likely wouldn't content themselves with just killing the cultivators on the mountain, and that wasn't a risk I could take. Better to take them all out in one go before they could even notice the village.
By the halfway point on the ascent I began to find bodies on the slope. Mangled or sliced apart. A few were human bodies, recognisable even as pulp, but the others...
They were strange and scrawny humanoids with pale grey skin, broken wings upon their backs. They had rows of sharp dagger-like teeth and slim clawed fingers.
At a glance they looked like humans that had been emaciated and then reshaped into grotesque parodies of men. A bit like the mudmen Novos was so fond of.
The bodies grew more numerous as I ascended higher and higher, swathes of snow crusted with red. The human bodies became more prominent, but the same could be said of the misshapen creatures. A familiar scent of death and rot hit my nose, and it was most foul from the winged... things.
Like the demons I had seen back home, they seemed to rot faster than any normal human. And the stink that came from their corpses was utterly foul. Like a yawning mass grave.
I was no stranger to the scent of death. I'd walked among many battlefields, seen the ruins of sacked cities, had had the misfortune of walking through fortresses that had suffered protracted sieges where the besieged bastards had had to do unspeakable things to survive... but the sell of rotting demon meat was something else.
I pressed on, higher and higher up the peak, drawn in by the sound of shouts and the ringing of steel. And the screams of dying men.
Oh yes. The same abroad as it was back home.
Yamato had not known what was happening until they were in the thick of it, when that great white flash had struck the barrier of the sect and shattered it apart like a cheap pane of glass. That alone shouldn't have been possible, he thought. It went against... everything he knew, everything he had been taught.
The Grandmaster himself had been the one to construct that barrier, warding off the worst of the elements with his own qi. And with how powerful the Grandmaster was, well... surely there should have been none capable of shattering it, at least not so easily.
But of course nobody really had any time to think about that when a bottomless tide of bloody tengu had come pouring in from the shattered opening. They were not particularly strong, where a junior disciple could overpower them... the issue, however, was in their numbers. They outnumbered each junior disciple more than ten to one, and not matter how many went down there were more to fill the gaps.
The senior disciples, such as Yamato, could have perhaps taken care of them only... in that crowd of winged filth there were the occasional oni. Massive, red-skinned and horned brutes, more than strong enough to keep two senior disciples at bay at a time.
And perhaps the elders and the Grandmaster could have swept the oni aside... but the Yokai at the head of the pack, a lean figure who perpetually blazed with fire, and though outnumbered he weathered the storm of the elders formation, and batted their blades away with terrifying speed and skill.
Yamato pressed through the throng, huffing for breath, sweat slick on his skin while blood dribbled from a few gashes on his shoulder and brow. Even in a bit of a daze as he was, he still threw out regular slashes that sliced through swathes of the tengu, sending their severed parts sailing into the wind.
All pretense of technique had left him by now, his slashes raw and brutal. Yet each one worked just as well as any refined technique.
All around him, everywhere he looked across the shattered plaza and broken buildings of the sect, he could see the bodies of those he knew. Dear friends, fellow disciples, men he was sure would have been his sworn brothers had they lived.
He spotted Kai's severed head, his body nowhere to be seen, glassy eyes staring sightlessly into the stormy skies. Elder Zhao's corpse had been smashed deep into a crater, his limbs twisted at impossible angles. Brother Hong, the man who had first taught Yamato the proper way to hold a sword, had been severed at the waist and partially eaten by the tengu.
Tears of rage, sorrow, and horror burned down Yamato's face as he pressed through the ruin of the courtyard, cutting down any of the winged vermin who got too close to him.
"Come on you bastards!" he snarled, a fresh spray of dark and foul-smelling blood gushing across his face. "Come at me with everything you have! I-"
Yamato froze. At the far end of the courtyard, beside the shattered remains of a great red tori gate, an oni loomed over one of his dear friends. Ichi, who had trained alongside Yamato for most of their young lives together, was left rasping for breath an unable to rise from the crater he had been smashed into.
His attacker was missing his left arm at the elbow and seemed not to even notice the dripping gore. In his right hand he held a spiked iron club aloft, the spikes already dyed red with the blood of many disciples.
"Keep away from him you son of a whore!" Yamato snarled, the cords flaring on his neck. He raised his blade and sprang forth as fast as he could move, pouring qi into his red-stained blade. The more power he put into it, the harder and sharper the blade became. It was the most basic technique of the Snake Flower, and certainly one of its most dangerous.
It struck the red-skinned beast on the neck, cut about a centimeter into the brawny thews... and then bounced off. The oni snorted, baleful golden eyes briefly flicking toward Yamato. The boy tried to leap away.
Pain, white hot, exploded in his right eye as the club struck, and half of his vision became a canopy of twisted gore. He screamed, thrashing on the cobbles, his hand clutching his face Half of it felt as if it had been torn wide open. Bones sagged under his touch. Wind whistled through a hole in his cheek, ice cold in the face of his boiling agony.
"Agh... haaah..."
He tried to rise, but his whole body ached from the blow. With his good eye, he could see the oni raising his club again. "Watch... closely," he said in a voice like stone grinding on stone.
"Y-Yamato..." Ichi wheezed, raising a trembling hand toward him. "Y-young master! H-HEL-"
The club smashed him into a fine pulp, meat and blood gushing from the crater.
"N-no..." Yamato wheezed. "No..."
The oni grinned, shifting the massive tusks that protruded from his bottom lip. "Little cultivator. A mortal playing pretend, clutching at a shadow of divinity. Witness the death of your foolish ambitions. And may your passage to the next life be rich in agony."
Yamato could not move, his breath refusing to come to him, and he could not look away as the massive spiked club was raised high above him. He stared silently at that obscene weapon, saw his own death reflected in the metal... and the young master of the Snake Flower Sect could only accept it.
That his whole life, all of his ambitions had been for nought,
There was a whistling sound in the air, and a fraction of a second something thudded into the oni's chest. The giant came to a jerking halt, and he stared dumbstruck at the shaft of black iron that had pierced straight through his sternum. The tip of it blazed with tongues of fire.
"Eh...?" the oni murmured, his face slack from a lack of comprehension. "A... spear?"
Even from where he lay, Yamato could see that the red hot tip had passed clean through his back.
He looked back, bleary-eyed, and saw... the foreigner? The hulking bearded man, in his unassuming tunic and dark trousers, stood glowering at the oni. Then he snapped his fingers, and suddenly two down points sprouted from the spear and exploded from the oni's torso and limbs in various places. A tree of black iron, sprouting inside his body, the branches tearing him asunder.
The oni gave a shrill, sucking gasp, blood gushing from his maw in a prolonged spew.
The foreigner snapped his fingers again, the spear collapsing into strands of flame that rushed back to his other hand. The oni tottered and collapsed like a chopped tree, hitting the stones with a loud thud.
"Demons," he muttered through clenched teeth. "I fucking despise demons..."