A cold glare choked the boy’s protest. The old man nodded as Isao fell silent, turned to his captain. “Maro-san, take half a dozen Shadows and bring the oni to us. The rest of you, come with me.”
Maro glanced at Kaori, grim-faced, but still covered his fist and bowed.
“Hai.”
Kin saw dark looks exchanged between Isao, Takeshi and Atsushi. Something else passing between the trio. Desperation? Fear? Takeshi opened his mouth to speak, but Isao shook his head, motioning for silence. A cold dread seeped into Kin’s belly. Thunder shook the treetops, shaking his insides.
“Daichi-sama,” he said. “With your permission, I will come with you. I can operate one of the ’throwers. Free up another blade for those demons who make it through to the line.” He stared at Isao as he spoke, the younger boy’s face pale as bleached bones. “And I’ll be there in case anything goes wrong…”
The old man nodded, stifled a dry cough with the back of one hand.
“I would have it no other way, Kin-san.”
He looked amongst his warriors, lightning gleaming across steel-gray irises.
“Come. Let us send these abominations back into the hells.”
*
Steady rain falling on the leaves above his head, a thousand drumbeats per minute, shushing all in the world beneath. Sweating still, despite the storm, the boy crouched in the ’throwers’ operator’s seat, damp palms pressed to targeting controls. He blinked the burn from his eyes, squinting into the dark, blind, deaf and mute.
Kin grit his teeth, tightened his grip on the feeder crank. All around him, Kagé warriors were gathered, hidden in scrub and dead leaf drifts, all eyes on the approach. Daichi was crouched in a thick copse of mountain fern beside Kin’s emplacement, so utterly still the boy couldn’t tell him from the leaves around him. The storm was growing worse, thunder jolting him in his seat every time Raijin struck his drums. And there, amidst the fear and tempest and rising doubt, it was all Kin could do to stop himself falling back to the familiar mantras—the words he knew by rote, explaining all about life he had ever needed to know.
Skin is strong.
Flesh is weak.
He felt naked. Tiny. The metal beneath his hands the only comfort, the only certainty. These machines of death he’d assembled, dragged from scorched wreckage and filled with new life—these he knew. But demons? Children of the Endsinger? He’d been raised to scoff at such superstitions. Tales of gods and goddesses were crutches for the skinless. Those who had never breathed warm blue-black in the Chamber of Smoke. Never been shown their Truth.
Call me First Bloom.
A distant cry, a rumbling, croaking roar. Faint sounds through the storm, not unlike music. Bright steel, ringing crisp beneath the cloud’s percussion, running feet amidst the hissing deluge. The signal floated down the line—a series of short nightbird whistles. And eyes narrowed, peering into the gloom, Kin saw tiny figures swathed in dark, dappled cloth, dashing back toward the ’throwers fast as swift feet might carry them. And behind them …
Behind them …
Kin had never seen the like. Not in his bleakest imaginings. Loping and croaking and growling deep, long sinewed arms dragging knuckles on the earth, black, wicked talons at the end of every finger’s tip. A dozen shades of blue among their skins, midnight to azure, all muddied and smothered in the cold and the dark, lit only by frantic lightning and the bloody light of their own glowing eyes. Faces wrought of nightmare, adorned with rusted metal rings, tusks curling cruel and sharp from jagged underbites. Their blades and war clubs tall and sharp enough to fell the stoutest tree. A language dark as sin, roared amidst the trees by black maggot tongues.
“They come,” Daichi said.
Oni.
Maro and his scouts were swift, weaving between the Kagé pits with the demons close on their tails. One oni crashed through the scrim of branches and dead leaves covering a trap, tumbled headfirst, twenty feet down into a tomb of sharpened bamboo spikes. Maro’s blade was black with blood, the oni enraged, rushing on heedless, another of the demons crashing into a Kagé trap and plummeting to its end. But the monsters numbered in the dozens, twelve feet tall and seething, the death of their fellows seeming only to stoke their fury. Warbling screams and guttural roars, blood-red eyes aglow as pierced lips pulled back from crooked teeth, long loping strides bringing them ever closer to the fleeing scouts.
Kin’s fingers tightened on the firing stud. Breath coming fast. Fear rising.
“Come on,” he breathed. “Faster…”
One scout stumbled on an upthrust tree root, slipped in the muck. The oni behind was on him in a moment, tetsubo raised high, bringing it down with a delighted howl and smashing the unfortunate man into mush. The remaining scouts kept running, no time for grief, on through the brambles and ferns and grasping branches.
Kin set his sights on a pit demon, crosshairs centered on its chest.