“Get back!” Hana shouted to Yukiko. “Buruu has no armor!”
Yukiko and Buruu leapt into the skies, away from the storm of falling arrows, Hana and Kaiah charging the gaijin troopers. Kaiah clapped her wings together, gaijin clutching their ears and falling like saplings under a shredderman’s blades. Arrows rained amidst black snowflakes, blasted to splinters by the thunderclap. Kaiah unleashed another burst, timing it with the archers’ second volley, shivering the arrows to pieces as another wave of gaijin dropped like lotusflies. But the handful of blood-drinkers stumbled on, blinking and blinded, blood pouring from their ears even as they raised their mallets to attack.
Buruu roared warning, plowed into the wave, a flurry of talons and beak, Yukiko swinging her katana from atop his shoulders. When Daichi had given her the blade, he’d named it “Anger.” The embodiment of Yukiko’s rage at her father’s death, the land dying all about her. But as she wielded it, she felt only sorrow that it had come to this—that all this blood was being spilled for no reason, that everyone on this field was fighting for the same thing.
She reached out into their minds, past the pain, into the song of the world. If she could see them, she could touch them, reach through the storm of death and hurt filling her head. And she flooded the minds of every man she could see with images of ancient dragons thundering into the Bay of Ryu, gaijin sailors fleeing in tiny boats, tsunamis made of teeth smashing the bayside buildings to splinters. Taking hold of the leviathans’ primal fear and flooding the soldiers with that same terror; that fear born in the minds of little boys, huddled beneath their blankets as the winter winds blew outside their windows and the monsters beneath their beds dragged long fingernails on the undersides of their cots.
Run.
A single word in every mind, chilling the marrow of every bone, halting the charge of every man, breaking, turning and screaming from the girl atop her thunder tiger, hair whipping around her eyes as the winds howled and the snows fell and thunder tore the skies.
RUN.
The Everstorm pack arrived in a hail of black snowflakes, half a dozen landing on the troop bridge. Kaiah and Buruu turned from the routed gaijin, grasping the railings with their foreclaws. Each thunder tiger beat their wings, keening with the strain. And between them, ever so slowly, they tore the bridge from the banks, frozen earth ripped away, the iron walkway screeching at its joins, twisting beneath its own weight, the arashitora roaring as they dragged it up, back, finally releasing it and allowing it to fall, welds snapping, metal groaning as it hit the tar-black Amatsu in a blinding spray and sunk down into the depths.
The gaijin army was in utter disarray, halfhearted arrow fire falling about them like feeble rain. Yukiko looked down on them, stepping into the Lifesong, filling their thoughts. The sorrow of Akihito’s death, the loss of her friend, gentle and kind and brave, gone now forever. Like the gaijin mothers and sons and daughters taken into the slave-ships’ bellies, never to be seen again. The same pain, the same grief, no matter the color of their skin or the names of the gods and goddesses they believed in. The simple pain of a thing loved—a thing taken, never to return, no matter the blood spilled in revenge. All of them the same.
All of us the same.
And those who were not fleeing with the shapes of dragons in their minds hung their heads, tears filling their eyes without knowing why. Bows falling from numb fingers, breathing the names of mothers or daughters, fathers or sons, struck to the heart and bleeding anew.
The arashitora took to the skies, a swarm of black and white, eyes of burning amber and brilliant green. Flying west, Yukiko could see the Earthcrusher cutting through Yama like a slow avalanche, concrete dust and screams in its wake. She could see the Guild fleet above Yama city, entwined with the Kitsune, all smoke and fire and gleaming steel. A swarm of shreddermen had cornered a crowd of Fox bushimen near the broken wall, cutting through them like a hot blade through black snow. Behind the soldiers, a crowd of helpless civilians cowered in the ruins, just a minute or two from slaughter.
YUKIKO …
I see them.
FOX NOT LOOKING AFTER HIS OWN, IT SEEMS.
She grit her teeth, clutching her katana so hard her fingers hurt. And at last, she felt the anger Daichi had named the blade for. Flooding up her throat and bubbling over her tongue, one hand pressed to the iron at her belly, knuckles white on the sword’s hilt.
All right, then. Let’s look after them instead.
*
He’d felt his fingers twitching as the pair flew past, Yukiko and her thunder tiger, roaring east toward the gaijin horde. Not the fingers of the prosthetic—the flesh they’d taken away. A phantom reminder of the battle in Kigen arena, repaying her betrayal with his own, casting aside love for the sake of honor. Loyalty. Servitude.