48 – Unlikely Saviour
“996... 997... 998... 999... 1000...”
Haita pushed himself fully up with the heft of his right hand, balanced entirely on two fingers and his thumb. Sweat was slick up his body, muscles nearly steaming in the candlelight of the seaside cabin. Then, with some effort, he lowered himself down to the ground and started the process again with his left arm.
Ever since he explained his situation to Master Amon, Haita had taken to training this way. And with each passing day the intensity and rigor of his training had increased. At first he'd struggled to do a hundred pushups. By the end of the first week he could do 500 at a time. Now he did a set of 5000 on each arm before he'd go for a 200 kilometer jog up and down the southern coast.
And even this seemed a modest exercise to him now.
Of course he took the time to meditate, just like cultivators did in the old stories, but he wasn't sure exactly what meditation entailed. Usually he just tried to count backward from 5000, or rotate an oxen in his mind, or contemplate how pretty Mikan was.
He paused as Yun and Takeda barged in, both huffing for breath. "Haita, something's happening on Mount Gruai!" the former exclaimed, nearly doubling over for breath.
Haita raised a brow and pushed himself to his feet. "Huh?"
"You... didn't hear the explosion earlier?"
Haita frowned, looking up at the ceiling. He had heard something, like a great crash, but he tended to get pretty engrossed in his exercise. After all, he had to get stronger for the sake of Mikan and everyone else. "Er, no," he said.
They grabbed an arm each and hastily led Haita outside, and he let them. Sure enough, only a few paces from his family's seaside hut, he could see the normally silent and brooding mountaintop was lit up in flashes of fire and silver qi. He blinked at the sight of it.
He thought, initially, he could see strange dark clouds bordering that apex, but they swarmed and shifted like living things, and he realised with mounting horror that those 'clouds' were comprised of living beings. Hundreds of shapes, writhing and flapping in the air.
"Goddess," he muttered. "What's going on?"
Yun frowned, unable to look away from the mountain. "There was this huge... explosion in the air a little while ago, a bright flash that was like staring right into the sun. And all those... things up there started landing on the mountain!"
"A fight between sects?" Haita asked warily. Such a thing was dangerous but usually the sects were more focused on each other and so the violence rarely spread beyond where the fighting started. At least that was what he'd heard.
Takeda gave him an uneasy sideways glance. "I think... those flying things up there are yokai. You remember, like that story of Yagi the Red, and the ten thousand tengu?"
Haita paled. That was a far worse prospect.
"We need to tell Aniki, he'll know what to-"
"Aniki already went up that way. Mr Azuwith said so," said Takeda.
An irritated frown briefly crossed Haita's face, but he smothered it. Leave it to Aniki to run off without telling him. "Then... I'm gonna do what I can to protect Tiode in his absence," he said.
His friends stared wide-eyed at him. "H-Haita you might have qi, but..." Yun trailed off, looking toward the sheer volume of figures orbiting the mountain.
"I'll do what I can. It's all anyone can do," he said.
A flash lit up the sky above the mountain. Then another, and another. Great fireballs that must have been dozens of meters in width, and with each of those flashes scores of smoking figures plummeted to the earth.
Haita grinned. "But knowing a man as impressive as Aniki... there's no doubt in my mind that he'll take care of it all."
I lowered my hands, smoke and rippling waves of heat flowing from my fingers. I'd dispersed a vast swathe of the creatures. and the others were hastily moving around to other parts of the vast compound to avoid me.
I crouched beside Yamato, grimacing at what I saw. He wouldn't win any beauty contests, that was for sure. "Can you regenerate?" I asked. I'd known wizards capable of repairing themselves from grievous wounds, so long as they had magicka to circulate into the damaged flesh.
"Demonic qi," Haita croaked. "Harder to heal from such wounds... need a healing sage," he said.
"I ain't no healer," I told him. Quite the damn opposite. Maybe Guang could do something for him, down at the village, but I wasn't about to make a trip back and forth.
Closing my eyes, I could sense the various traces of qi on the mountaintop. Those of human origin were dwindling, bit by bit, and the obscene... thing at the heart of the invasion was still going strong. If I left now, odds were it would be done with the Snake Flower by the time I got back and then... and then it could well turn its army on Tiode.
Whatever it was, I had to stop it here and now.
"Catch your breath," I told him. "Then get off this mountain."
"N-no," the boy snarled through clenched teeth. Tears flowed from his good eye, cutting tracks in the soot and blood that caked his cheek. "It's my home. My family. I won't abandon it!"
I'd admit that that struck me at my core. I took a breath through my nose, glancing off to what I assumed to be the heart of the sect. The pagodas, the broad living areas, the temple... everything seemed to be aflame, and all around me lay the broken bodies of the Snake Flower.
I held no love for cultivators, or sects, or wizards... but nobody deserved to go through loss like this.
"I know what it's like," I told him, "to lose everything you ever knew an' loved. Believe me, I do. And I'm more sorry for it than words can describe. But you'll just get in my way if you stay here. Go."
"Why?" he croaked. "Why does an outsider... want to get involved?"
I set my jaw as I stared down at Yamato. "I spent too damn long doing to others what was done to me. Reckon it's time I should try and stop it happening to others for a change." I wanted to laugh at myself. As if I had any right to act like I cared.
Two-faced fool.
The ground suddenly shook beneath me. I turned to see three more of those ogrish-looking brutes landing several strides from me, flanked by a coterie of the spindly winged creatures. I rose from Yamato and held my hand out.
Flame and smoke surged down my arm, rapidly forming into a great claymore with a broad and spiked crossguard. A weight so familiar, so comforting. Flame danced along the edge of it, and the sight of that blade gave the ogres pause.
That familiar weight in my hand was so comforting.
The biggest of the bunch, further distinguished by the necklace of bleached human skulls he wore upon his broad blue shoulders, sneered at me. "An outlander? What business do you have here of all places?"
"Not much," I admitted, sighing. "Just doing the right thing, like a damned fool."
The ogre sneered, raising his spiked club from his shoulder. "How noble. Too bad nobility gets you killed."
"I'm a very hard man to kill," I replied. "Can you say the same?"
There came an avian shriek from behind me. I spun just as a spear of jet black smoke tore past, a bird with a wingspan broader than my shoulders, and it rocketed toward the gathered yokai.
It crested around, so fast the winged buggers couldn't even react as it sliced them in twain in one fluid motion. At that moment another figure sprinted past me, a lean female form clad in black. And yet, even as fast as she was, I recognised her well enough.
"Yomi?"
The woman was a blur, effortlessly dodging between the swings of the ogres and their spiked clubs. Her own blows were accurate and lethal, swift silvery flicks of her billhook that dug through flesh and bone alike.
The head of the pack was the only one who held his ground as his men died around him, sparks lighting the courtyard as his club met her blade. Yet even this was a brief, fleeting resistance.
Shadow flew from her left hand and smothered the ogre's face in a sticky black layer. And though he clawed and pulled at it with his free hand, he could not fully free his face from the blinding, suffocating mass.
"Those techniques," Yamato croaked. "Assassin."
"Ex-assassin," Yomi called from afar. Her blade was a smooth arc of purest silver as it bit into the ogre's neck, shaving it from his shoulders in that one precise movement. He hit the ground with a crash, shaking the ground under my feet. "Thank you very much."