Suited Ryusaki just fine.
The three Kagé trudged through the wasteland, following sky-ship exhaust trails. Chill winds howled across the desolate plains but utterly failed to stir the vapor: the fumes clung to the soil like a toddler to its mother’s kimono. The rents in the earth were worse than he’d ever seen; some stretching ten feet deep, and the trio was forced to climb down into the fissures if they proved too wide to leap across. The vapor hung heavy within these cracks; a tar-thick, sticky smog, deathly cold, choking daylight utterly. In the deepest of them, he swore he could hear a voice, lilting and sweet, whispering just beyond the edge of understanding.
A woman’s voice …
They marched on, one shuffling step at a time, until his feet bled and his legs trembled. At last Jun could walk no more, sinking to his knees. He retched again into his breather, black and vile, filling the eyeholes. And Ryusaki was forced to watch, helpless, as the young man tore his mask away and puked again; a gurgling fountain of gray and scarlet, slumping face-first into the corrupted earth.
His eyes had turned black.
Twenty-two years old.
They whispered a prayer to Enma-ō, begging the Great Judge to weigh the boy fair. They had no offerings, no wooden coin or incense to burn for him. Looking at the deadland ashes already caked on the boy’s face, Ryusaki hoped they would be enough to grant his soul a hearing at the Court of Hells. The entire countryside had been burned to produce them, after all. That should be offering enough for any judge.
Miles. Hours. Fumes so thick his vision swam, head buzzing, the taste of death chalked on his tongue. Shintaro stumbled behind him, fell under the weight of his pack, and Ryusaki dragged him upright and slapped his back, promising a decent cup of Danroan saké when they returned to civilization. The boy was nearly delirious, but he nodded and kept walking, shoulders slumped, like a man on his way to the executioner’s scaffold.
They crested a small hill near dusk. And across the sea of fumes, they saw it.
The Guild staging grounds.
Ironclads hanging in the air like bloated lotusflies. Walls of razor wire, halogen lamps and cutting torches burning as Lady Amaterasu slipped toward her rest. Ryusaki fumbled with the spyglass at his belt, thumbed the ash from the lenses, cursing beneath his breath as he held it to his eye. Squinting into the Guild compound, blinking black tears, he caught sight of hulking machines lined up in formation, close to a hundred in all. Four legged, brittle-yellow, chainsaw blades for hands. It took a few moments to realize they were shreddermen suits.
Why would the Guild need a legion of those?
He hissed through gritted teeth as realization dawned.
To cut a forest down …
He shook his head, started to turn away when he spotted it. Just a glimpse; a shadow within shadows, something vast and black lurking amidst the smog. But then Lady Sun hit the horizon, flaring bright as she laid down to sleep, and he saw it; a kettle-bellied, sawtoothed colossus with smokestack spines and the legs of some vast, iron spider. A machine the likes of which he had never seen.
“Raijin’s drums, what is that?” he breathed.
Shintaro slumped down in the ash, staring at his hand as if amazed he owned a set of fingers. Ryusaki coughed, tasting black on his tongue. Unbuckling Shintaro’s pack, he pulled aside its oilskin, revealing the graceless bulk of a wireless transmitter. He cranked the handle, but the machine made a sound like a meat grinder, refusing to register power.
“Shit.” Ryusaki thumped the radio as Shintaro keeled over beside him, gasping like a landed fish. “Come on, you bastard, work…”
If it heard him, the transmitter made no effort to obey.
He could feel a sickness in his belly that had nothing to do with fear. An ashen, blackened nausea, creeping into his bones, up toward his heart. He could feel it inside him. Death taken root. Fear beside it. But not here. Not yet.
Ryusaki lurched to his feet, cut loose his own gear and slung the transmitter’s weight across his back. Shintaro was spasming, black foam filling his breather, and Ryusaki knelt long enough to give him a blade to the heart. Better to die quick. Better not to suffer.
Not like he was going to.
The Kagé captain drew a ragged breath, adjusted the transmitter on his back and turned north, toward the rail lines. He had to get far enough from the smog that the device might work, send a message to the closest listening post, on again, until it reached the Iishi. Because Ryusaki knew now he never would.