The red warlord answered, holding the bleeding bone into the air and bellowing, a cruel iron sword twisted in the other fist. It charged toward them, lips curled back from jagged tusks, knocking aside its fellows in its haste to taste them. They turned to face it, roaring again. Two mouths, one voice, echoed by the raging storm.
The curved sword fell in a ten-ton arc, slicing raindrops in two. They bounded into the air, wings tearing at the space where flight was born, finding only momentary lift and the awful clutch of gravity. But it was enough to carry them over the blade and onto the oni’s torso, claws tearing its chest, piercing bone armor, knuckle-deep in steaming black. With a bellow, it brought the bleeding bone across their brow. A blinding white light arrived with it and knocked them senseless. They rolled apart, shaking their heads, blinking the blood away from their eyes. The flesh that had been Buruu staggered, eye swelling closed, sharing the pain with the flesh that had been Yukiko and feeling it fall away by half. She loaned him her eyes and slipped into the shadows beneath a cedar, his fingers running across the fox tattoo on their shoulder. They began to climb.
The warlord lunged, Buruu’s flesh lashing out at the thing’s face with one razored fist, bringing it back, sticky with blood. The oni roared and they answered, laughter rolling across the clouds. Rain turned the blood-soaked earth to mud, the sounds of battle around them dropping away to whispers. There was only this. There was only them.
ME.
Lightning cracked the sky, burning away the black.
WE.
The flesh that was Buruu danced backward, bringing the oni with it, eyes aglow with hatred. The flesh that was Yukiko sprang from the tree, twelve feet high, tantō clutched in both hands. The knife plunged to the hilt in the oni’s back, gravity and momentum pulling them earthward, flesh parting down to the spine and peeling away like the rind of swollen fruit. The blood was blinding, the scream of deafening white pain filling their ears, drowning the storm. They leaped toward the wounded oni, claws outstretched, smashing the sea dragon skull to splinters and tearing away the demon’s face in their hands. Beak to throat, savaging until there was nothing left but broken bones and empty, twitching meat.
The storm howled in triumph.
They screamed, faces to the sky, knife clutched in their bloody claws. What was left of the oni band turned and fled into the night, pounding back through the broken green, spears and shuriken whistling about their ears. Broken and defeated.
And then there was only the sound of the falling rain. The Kagé didn’t cheer, didn’t goad or gloat. They simply watched the giants disappear into the shadows, nodding to each other, heads bowed in silent prayer for their dead.
Kaori was looking at Yukiko and Buruu with awe, swallowing great gobs of hot, wet air, drenched to the elbows in steaming black gore. Daichi wiped a sluice of oni blood off on his sleeve and slid his katana back into its scabbard. He watched them as their blood calmed, the Kenning receding as the heat of the battle died in their veins, leaving them sundered in its wake. Yukiko felt lessened somehow, reaching out toward Buruu as if to reassure herself he was still there. He purred, satisfaction rumbling across the ground, tectonic and primal.
GOOD. IT IS GOOD.
“You are one,” Daichi said, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “You and the arashitora are one in the same. You are yōkai-kin.”
“Stormdancer,” whispered Isao.
Yukiko glanced at the boy as he covered his fist and bowed, eyes turned to the ground in reverence. She looked around at the other Kagé as they repeated the gesture, bowing one after the other in the pouring rain. She felt the hair on her arms and the back of her neck rise, a thrill of fear surging in her gut, tightening her throat, the word rippling among them like the forest wind through the liriope grass.
“Stormdancer.”
She knew what she must look like. Spattered with demon blood, knife clutched in one white-knuckle fist, the arashitora beside her spreading the saw-toothed fan of his wings and roaring at the storm above. She felt Buruu’s triumph rising in her chest, and it was all she could do to stop herself from screaming with him again, to hold onto some small part of what she’d been, and see in Daichi’s eyes a stark reflection of what she was becoming.
“You are yōkai-kin,” he repeated.
“I am yōkai-kin,” Yukiko nodded, breath still burning in her lungs. “I hear the voices of beasts in my head, can speak to them as easily as I speak to you now. Do you really think the Shōgun would send one of the Impure to spy on you, Daichi-sama? When Guildsmen burn others like me on pyres in the Market Square for sport? Do you think Yoritomo would be stupid enough to brand an infiltrator with his own irezumi before sending her up here?”
The old man stood silent for a handful of heartbeats, amidst the clawing wind and shapeless white noise. With agonizing slowness, he finally shook his head.
“No. I do not.”