Scott McGough - Outlaw:Champions of Kamigawa

"There are many monks in the forest. Some of them will be interested in your proposition. Kobo might not even find his tribe before you find budoka who are more… accommodating. In the meantime, you will need his protection along the way. Or do you expect to fight both kami and soratami alike by yourself?"

"I don't want to fight. I want to lie low." He looked up at Kobo. "He's not capable of low." "You cannot rely on that luxury," Hidetsugu said gravely. "Remember, they would have been waiting for you here if their plans worked out."

Toshi opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Hidetsugu nodded encouragingly. "Think about it, Toshi. Have you ever heard of a soratami in the forest?"

The ochimusha snapped back, "I haven't heard of anything in the forest, lump-brain. I never go there."

"Careful." Hidetsugu's grip tightened on his club, but he did not raise it. "The moonfolk hate the forest at least as much as you do. Their power is tied to their home in the clouds, to the spirits of sky and moon. The forest spirits will not welcome them, cannot sustain them."

"Or me. I'm from Numai." But Toshi was faltering. The ogre made sense, though Toshi could not imagine a prospect more dismal than a prospecting jaunt into the Jukai. He glanced over at Kobo. "Can he fight?"

"He's an ex-budoka monk who has been my student for five years." Hidetsugu smiled, the sly and victorious smile of a gambler with a winning hand. "Do you think I'd send him out as your bodyguard if he wasn't capable, oath-brother?"

"You planned this all along," Toshi realized. "You've intended to shuffle your boy off to the woods with me in tow ever since that fish kami flopped into your cave." Toshi blinked. "Is this why you branded him earlier, to make him part of the hyozan oath?"

"And I did not do it lightly. But Kobo will help us solve our problem. The least we can do in return is stand ready to solve his."

"The least we can do is leave him here and not oblige me to take care of him."

Hidetsugu leaned down into Toshi's face, and once more the ochimusha felt an instinctual urge to run and hide.

"That is precisely what you will do," the ogre growled. "I have marked him with the hyozan and you have consumed his flesh. He is nearly one of us now, a reckoner. And you, Toshi, will complete the ritual, so that you are as responsible to him as we are to each other."

Toshi was unable to hold the ogre's savage glare. "And if I don't?"

"Then we have nothing more to say to each other." Hidetsugu nudged him with a finger as thick and as sharp as a spear. "Do it, Toshi, and properly. This is my price for helping you. My student will return alive, or you shall avenge him according to our pact. Swear Kobo into our brotherhood, so that I know you will defend his life like your own. Otherwise, we can all sit here and wait for the moonfolk or even another kami to come collect you." Hidetsugu stood to his full height and Toshi heard the ridge on the ogre's skull scrape against the ceiling. "Who knows when or how terrible that visit will be? It may be beyond my power to protect you. I will, of course, look forward to avenging you according to our agreement."

Toshi glared up at the o-bakemono. As much as he hated Hidetsugu being right, he hated the circumstances even more. There truly was very little choice.

He drew his jitte and said to Kobo, "Hold out your hand." With swift, practiced motions, Toshi scratched the hyozan triangle and kanji into the bald youth's palm. Kobo's hand was callused and tougher than leather, so Toshi had to trace the symbol multiple times before it was scored into the bald youth's flesh.

Then Toshi repeated the symbols on his own hand and gestured for Hidetsugu's. The jitte's sharp tip was even less effective against the ogre's palm, but Toshi patiently kept at it until he had inscribed all the symbols he needed.

He gestured, and all three of them locked hands. They stood silently for a few moments, feeling a cold flow of nameless force traveling from one to the other like water through an aqueduct. They were all completely silent.

Then Toshi said, "We are free, bound only to each other. My life is yours, yours is mine. Harm one, harm all. The survivors must avenge. Whatever is taken from the hyozan, the hyozan recovers tenfold."

Toshi dropped the apprentice's hand and jerked free of the ogre's. "It's done," he said. "When do we leave?"

Hidetsugu looked over to the oni mosaic and the kami transfixed to the wall.

"Soon," the o-bakemono said. "Right after we have made the proper obeisance to the Ail-Consuming."

"I'd like to do some consuming of my own. I'm already sick of trail food."

Hidetsugu's eyes gleamed. "Have you ever dined on kami flesh? You'll never get a fresher cut."

Unable to determine if the ogre was joking, Toshi shuddered.

Under Hidetsugu's orders, Kobo lit all the torches and braziers in the cavern. The interior of the cave was aglow with hellish orange light, and blood-red shadows danced on every wall.

The o-bakemono was kneeling before the mosaic altar to his oni. In the final stages before its death, the marine kami twitched and struggled against the crude iron nails that held it. Hidetsugu was growling in a language that Toshi did not comprehend, but he imagined its kanji were short, sharp, and vicious.

Kobo ran to and fro around his master, lighting torches and tossing them toward the altar. Sometimes Hidetsugu's chants would rise in pitch and volume, and then his apprentice would crack open a clay pot and spread the thick red liquid within across the cavern floor.

Toshi stood well back from the ritual. He had seen Hidetsugu at work before and knew it was best to have a clear path of escape. Besides, the ogre had warned him that The All-Consuming Oni of Chaos was not particular about what it consumed. Summoned to feast on a kami, it would not hesitate to wolf down any extraneous humans nearby.

The smoke thickened and the air in the cavern grew foul. Toshi heard a faint sound, like the buzzing of a swarm of locusts as it descended on a field. The buzzing grew louder, and Hidetsugu's chants rose to be heard above the din.

Firelight played across the surface of the mosaic, and white sparks leaped from the spaces between tiles. Toshi's thought his vision had fogged for a moment, but when he looked away from the altar he could see perfectly. There was some form of distortion over the image of the oni, and it was growing.

The Ail-Consuming Oni of Chaos thrust one of its hungry mouths into the world of substance. Ghostly images of a dozen other mouths loomed in the distorted air around it. Hovering like insects, the bat-winged scavengers screeched and hooted in the distance, far beyond the oni in the widening pool of blurry air. A second pair of voracious jaws appeared, followed by a third, and a fourth. In moments, a dozen or more of the disembodied mouths had manifested in the cavern and were sniffing the air, jostling one another, zeroing in on the helpless kami. Above this storm of angry teeth and jaws, three huge eyes opened, arranged in an upright triangle. Two massive horns began to emerge over the highest eye, which scanned the inside of the entire cavern while the lower two fixed hungrily on the dying kami.

Like a school of carnivorous fish, the floating maws descended on the maritime spirit, ripping free huge chunks of its dense, blubbery flesh. The kami squirmed against its restraints and began lowing in a deep, mournful voice that brimmed with pain. Blood, scales, and bits of meat flew out from the altar, creating a terrible cloud of sticky gore. The lower eyes of the oni rolled up in their sockets, but the third remained locked on its meal, glowing an unholy blood red as the oni exulted in gluttonous carnage.

At the center of the ghastly maelstrom, the kami finally died and began to fade away. The oni's mouths faded too, following its meal from one world to the next, unwilling to give up even a single bite. The buzzing roar died down and the air began to clear. The last thing to fade from the grisly tableau was the oni's uppermost eye.