Scott McGough - Guardian, Saviors of Kamigawa

This time the arrow converted into a gleaming bolt of white energy. The glowing missile slammed into the top of the head Kyodai had just immobilized. Instead of tearing the serpent’s skin or burrowing into the meat below, the bolt seemed to spread out along the surface of O-Kagachi’s scales. The growing white stain stiffened and calcified the serpent’s body as it went-Toshi could hear the scales creaking and hardening even from where he stood.

In seconds the entire head and most of the surrounding neck had been covered in a sheath of stone. Toshi saw the muscles below the petrifying mass straining to keep the head aloft before they were engulfed by the shroud of white. Undaunted by the fate of their fellow, the serpent’s other heads now surged forward to attack Michiko.

Kyodai returned before they could strike, flashing like a lightning bolt into the calcified head. She was a screeching bird of prey as she flew once more into the face of the serpent.

The impact sounded like an entire mountain shattering. Great plumes of white dust shot out from a cloud of force-driven debris. Within the cloud of grit and dust, millions of distant stars flickered. Every one of the serpent’s other heads shot straight out and howled, filling the air with an indescribable wail of pain and fury.

Toshi picked himself up off the ground. For some deep, instinctual reason he felt he was unworthy to look at the aftermath of the sisters’ attack. It was like a kind of blasphemy, seeing something mortal eyes were not meant to see. Then he looked anyway.

The sky above the battle was filling with fading pieces of void and an ever-brighter field of stars. Below this curtain of darkness and light, O-Kagachi was now a seven-headed serpent, the eighth now little more than a ragged stump at the end of a long, flailing neck. Michiko’s arrow hadn’t just immobilized the serpent’s head in stone, it had wholly converted it to stone. As Konda had done to Kyodai, Michiko did to O-Kagachi. The sisters had no intention of putting their stone idol on a pedestal and worshipping it, however.

Livid with rage and pain, O-Kagachi flailed at the sisters, throwing his heads at them like a barroom drunk throws punches. Michiko and Kyodai easily avoided these enraged, clumsy attacks. They drew one head away from the rest, and when it was isolated, Michiko rose over it while Kyodai drew back. Michiko fired another white arrow, which O-Kagachi almost dodged, but the bolt still caught him behind the ear.

The process was even quicker this time. The calcifying stain spread across the serpent’s face and across his skull, working its way down the massive neck. O-Kagachi struggled to move the stricken head and to bring his other coils up to block Kyodai’s killing stroke. The yellow-eyed maiden was too fast and too fierce, dipping down and shattering this head from below.

The sisters established their perfect rhythm on the next head: isolate, immobilize, and shatter. The headless necks all hung lifeless, weighing O-Kagachi down and disrupting the movements of the survivors. The longer he struggled with his injuries, the wilder and less focused he became.

The serpent truly panicked after they destroyed his fourth head. Effectively halved, O-Kagachi was still a formidable threat-he had battered down the walls of Eiganjo with only three heads, after all. But Eiganjo had only men, moths, and magic to send against him. Michiko and Kyodai were unlike anything he had encountered before, a brand-new fusion of flesh and spirit. If O-Kagachi hadn’t been frothing with pain and rage, Toshi expected he would have been raging over the sisters’ very existence. He was the great spirit of all things-how could something unknown to him exist, much less cripple him?

The fifth head fell to the sisters, and then the sixth. The sky above the serpent was now covered in an unbroken sheet of glittering starlight. A cheer went up among the kitsune around him, but Toshi was not yet ready to celebrate.

Almost on cue, the sisters stopped their attack and streaked toward the ground. They regrouped between O-Kagachi and the observers in the forest. Toshi saw them talking and nodding, pointing to the last two heads.

Don’t get fancy, he thought. Do your thing on these last two before O-Kagachi surprises you.

But the sisters did not hear or heed his heartfelt advice. Instead, they split and each went straight to one of the remaining heads. O-Kagachi hadn’t been able to catch them when he was whole, and now it seemed all he could do was snap, roar, and hate.

The sisters landed simultaneously. Each stood proud and strong on top of a flat, boxlike skull. They faced each other and nodded, and Michiko drew her bow. She fired an arrow at Kyodai, allowing for the vigorous thrashing of the serpent’s coils. Halfway to its mark the arrow changed into a streak of vivid blue. The azure line raced back toward Michiko at precisely the same speed as it hurtled toward Kyodai so that it touched both sisters at the same time.

At that precise instant, Michiko and Kyodai both turned and caught the incoming blue bolt with both hands. The sky, the air, everything in Toshi’s field of vision was swallowed by a sapphire wave of light and force. Blind, he staggered and stumbled against a cedar tree. He turned toward the last place he had seen the sisters and waited for his vision to clear.

Spots danced before his eyes and the blue sheen blurred details, but Toshi saw. As light flickered in the sky and behind his eyelids, Toshi watched, the sisters, now gigantic, grappling on even terms with O-Kagachi’s two remaining heads. Kyodai had her quarry clamped under her arm like some great, playful dog. Michiko was keeping the serpent’s other jaws closed with both hands, straddling the neck like a powerful horse.

Then, faster than he could register, the sisters and O-Kagachi all shrank from the size of giants who filled the sky to that of average, full-grown humans. It happened as fast as snow melting on a hot griddle, a smooth but dramatic change. One moment they were grappling in the sky like gods and the next they were back on the ground, no larger than they had been before the old serpent came.

O-Kagachi had been reduced far more than the sisters. The great old serpent was still in their clutches, struggling with all his might as his hardened and shattered necks flopped appallingly on the ground. Each of his final two heads was now only a square foot in size, easily controlled by the vivacious warriors who had bested him.

Pearl-Ear stepped forward, Michiko’s name on her lips, but the princess called, “No, sensei. We are not yet finished.”

Michiko and Kyodai looked at each other. They nodded and lifted the serpent’s struggling heads up to eye level.

“This is the way of mortal beings,” Michiko intoned. “The aged give way to the young.”

“The old must stand aside for the new,” Kyodai replied.

The air between them blurred, and when it cleared, O-Kagachi was no larger than a soldier’s pack, each wriggling head as long and as broad as a garden snake.

The sisters exchanged one final glance, then as one opened their mouths and bit the final heads off O-Kagachi. With foul black mist and blood streaming from their mouths, they simultaneously chewed, swallowed, and tossed the headless stumps aside.

Michiko turned to Pearl-Ear, wiping her face on the back of her leather gauntlet. “Now,” she said grimly, “it’s finished.”

Kyodai’s serpentine eyes glittered as they reflected the starlight around her. “Not quite,” she said.

Daimyo Konda redoubled his efforts when he saw the great serpent appear suddenly in the sky. It was troubling, as O-Kagachi had never manifested so quickly or completely, but Konda was confident in his eventual success. Anything less than victory was beneath him, unworthy of his destiny. But just to be safe, he summoned the rest of his ghost army to him, ordering them to break off their attack on the soratami and come west with all due speed.