Scott McGough - Guardian, Saviors of Kamigawa

“Good,” Toshi said. “We’ll all need a good laugh in a few minutes.”

“Toshi,” Pearl-Ear snapped from where she sat with Silk-Eyes. She must be a teacher, Toshi thought. She’s got that iron tone down to a science. “If you are to remain here among the living, tell us, where are Michiko and …”

“Kyodai.”

“Tell us where Michiko and Kyodai are.”

“They rabbited,” Toshi said. “She burst out of the stone disk looking just like the princess, only sassier and with a definite air of snake about her. Oh, and she was naked.” He looked up at Sharp-Ear. “How’s that for amusing, you feisty little fur-ball? They’re gone, and we’re still here. For once I’m the one who’s been left behind.”

“It’s ironic,” Sharp-Ear admitted. “But I wouldn’t call it funny.”

“Nor I. Anyway.” He turned back to Pearl-Ear. “They said they were going to prepare.”

Pearl-Ear rose and glided back to Toshi. “Prepare? Prepare what?”

“How should I know? Nobody tells me anything.”

The forest around them was now as dark as midnight with O-Kagachi spreading over them like a world-sized umbrella. All of the kitsune stunned by Kyodai’s rebirth were now awake, and they wept and prayed in the shadow of the serpent.

“If she’s gone,” Sharp-Ear said, “why is O-Kagachi still coming here?”

“What am I, a librarian? I barely know why I’m here. When it comes to vast, ancient spirit beasts and their succulent naked daughters, your guess is as good as mine.”

Sharp-Ear bristled. “Listen, you.”

The air beside Toshi blurred. Instinctively, he took hold of his jitte and rolled backward, away from the source of the distortion. He came to his feet beside Sharp-Ear and they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting.

The same kind of mist and smoke that had accompanied Kyodai’s emergence was back, only now there were two indiscriminate figures moving in the haze. The sisters came forward simultaneously.

Michiko and Kyodai were dressed in fine leather armor with hammered metal plates over their torsos, biceps, and thighs. The princess wore hers Eiganjo-style, with full sleeves, woven bamboo epaulets, and a white peaked helmet. She sported a longbow on her shoulder and a leather brace on her bow hand. The square quiver was as broad as her back and filled with gleaming, white-feathered bolts.

Kyodai’s new outfit was dusty gray and fit her like a tailored suit. The collar ended high, just above her chin, and her fierce eyes fairly glowed yellow in the dwindling light. She carried no weapon, but she walked with power and confidence. Both sisters were now accompanied by the cloud of stars that attended Kyodai when she first emerged.

Michiko said, “Hello. We have come to end this.”

Toshi smiled a sickly grin. He poked a thumb up at the sky. “Be my guest.”

Kyodai looked up at O-Kagachi, who was steadily crushing the tops of the trees as he descended. Without taking her eyes off the serpent, she extended her hand to Michiko. When the princess took it, Kyodai tossed back her head and hissed, raising the hair on Toshi’s arm.

“Father,” Kyodai said. “At last we meet.” She dropped Michiko’s hand and spread her arms up to the sky. “Embrace me, O-Kagachi. I have waited so very long.”

Michiko drew an arrow and nocked it onto her bow.

“Michiko,” Pearl-Ear said. “What have you done?”

The princess lowered her bow. “Nothing yet, sensei.” She bowed. “Wait and watch.”

O-Kagachi was barely a hundred feet above the forest floor when the sisters soared up to meet him. With this, Toshi had reached the limit of his astonishment. Anything else he saw today would necessarily fail to amaze him, as he simply had no more surprise left.

The stars around them flashed. Surrounded by individual nimbuses of harsh white light, Michiko and Kyodai spiraled up and around each other in a fluid double spiral, circling mirror images of each other. Despite their speed, ferocity, and confidence, the women seemed small and insignificant against the mighty serpent’s coils. It was like they were rising to battle the sky itself after the sky had sprouted teeth and claws to receive them.

Toshi noted that Kyodai’s transformation seemed to have baffled O-Kagachi’s unerring sense of the Taken One’s location. Either that or he simply did not recognize the fierce warrior-maiden who now confronted him. If he did, he continued on to meet her as he would any other foe. Toshi had hoped there would be some sign, some form of acknowledgment between the two powerful spirits, but his hopes were quickly dashed. This did not truly surprise him; family relationships were often difficult.

Michiko broke formation first, soaring wide under O-Kagachi’s lowest head. As she’d intended, the head oriented on her and snapped its massive jaws. Michiko was too quick, however, easily zipping out of range of those gargantuan fangs.

As the rest of his coils pressed ever downward, O-Kagachi’s head roared after the princess. Powered by the great roiling muscles in his neck, the serpent’s jaws overtook Michiko in a heartbeat. She disappeared behind the massive, square head, but dropped below the serpent’s strike by letting herself fall rather than trying to fly out of danger. The moment she had cleared O-Kagachi’s bottom jaw, Michiko swooped back along its neck, aiming her bow at another head over the edge of the forest.

Kyodai rose like a rocket, following one of the serpent’s necks to the uppermost head. Two other heads harried her as she climbed, snapping with their jaws and trying to batter her from the sky with teeth clenched tight. She weaved and dodged around the central neck, narrowly avoiding her attackers. They could not catch her, could not harm her, could not stop her. She was a beautiful song of battle come to life in the skies over Jukai.

Suddenly, O-Kagachi flexed the great sinews in the neck Kyodai was ascending. It was barely a nudge from where Toshi was sitting, but from a giant even a nudge is devastating. Kyodai was hurled violently away, glowing as she soared back to the ground like a shooting star.

Michiko was just stretching her bow when Kyodai was struck from the sky. The princess let fly with her arrow and changed course so that she streaked to intercept her sister before Kyodai hit the ground. Judging by her speed, Toshi knew she’d make it in time.

The arrow was just as strange as the warrior who’d fired it. The bolt started normally as it sped straight and true toward a thick rope of O-Kagachi’s coils. Halfway to its mark, the arrow burst into brilliant, sparkling light that cast a red tint over the serpent’s mammoth scales. The wooden shaft and white feathers were no longer visible-Michiko’s arrow had become a flashing bolt of pure scarlet power.

The red missile tore through O-Kagachi’s hide and disappeared below the serpent’s scales. A single gout of thick, black liquid jetted out. What flowed through O-Kagachi’s veins was not blood, but a strange miasma of dark humors. To Toshi, the muck seemed like jagged shards of the void suspended in a torrent of shadow. The thick cloud dispersed quickly as it flowed away from the serpent, but the splinters of void lingered in the sky.

The wound then swelled and burst as the magical bolt that caused it exploded.

O-Kagachi howled and thrashed, but Toshi could see that it was not gravely hurt. Michiko’s attack had blown a man-sized hole in the serpent’s neck, but it was barely a pinprick to such a massive beast.

Toshi looked back to the sisters and saw that Michiko had indeed stopped Kyodai’s fall. The two warrior-maidens clasped hands and streaked toward the closest head. They left a brilliant line of white in their wake that slowly crumbled to powder and fell like snow. They changed course once the other heads began to close on them, rolled, and then punched through the tough scales on the serpentine neck below them.