Pilgrim 3, p.31
Pilgrim 3, page 31
“Not because of this particular group, but over the years, yes. Sadly, yes. We don’t have the protection of the Asura Forest, nor the density. A good archer can hit one of us from a distance, and if they are clever, it’s much easier to track one of our kind here in the mountains. Some of the bandits are quite nimble.”
“How many are there?” Danzen asked. It was the only question that really mattered to him aside from what they were capable of, but if they were human, and even if they were relatively hardened by the environment they put themselves in, he didn’t expect for them to put up the same challenge as a member of the Diyu Brotherhood.
“Seven or eight,” said Bawa. “One of the bandits was injured last time I checked in on them, and I don’t know if he survived it. He got bit by an onikuma.”
“A demon bear?” Kudzu asked.
“Is that really a thing?” asked Yato.
“By Sunyata,” Kudzu said with a shake of her head. “If you want to know about a demon bear, you should ask Jelmay. He’s the one with the hide.”
“Who is this Jelmay that you keep speaking of?”
“A bakeneko that sometimes travels with us. He’s off in Odval right now, gambling as usual.”
Bawa gave her a sympathetic look. “You travel with a bakeneko?”
“Not by choice,” Kudzu said as they started up again, which elicited a laugh from the other fox. “We killed a demon bear in the Asura Forest, well, he did,” she said, her tail pointing toward Danzen. “We were doing a favor for another yokai, and it turned out to be quite the miscommunication.”
“How so?”
“This yokai told us to handle the demon bear, which we did, by killing it. But he actually wanted us to simply ask her to stop attacking other yokai. He wasn’t clear with us, and then berated us for not following his orders. What can you expect from a jade rabbit?”
“Aside from a good meal, not much,” Bawa said. “I’ve been burned by their kind before, years ago. In fact…”
“What?” Kudzu asked once he didn’t finish his sentence.
“This rabbit of yours doesn’t happen to go by the name Usagi, does he?” Bawa asked, the tip of his tail glowing a deep shade of maroon.
“You have to be kidding me.”
“It really is a small world then,” Bawa said. “That was the reason I was in Genshin Valley, because of something to do with him. In all actuality, Usagi probably wanted you to kill the onikuma, but made a show of getting angry at you so he could later get a favor.”
“Or not face responsibility in the community…”
Bawa seemed to agree with this assessment. “I wouldn’t put that past him either.”
“Ugh, I hadn’t even considered this.”
“What’s this about?” Yato asked, and when Kudzu didn’t answer, Danzen gave a slightly more detailed explanation. He stopped speaking once Bawa took cover behind a rock. Danzen heard a bit of commotion ahead, amplified by the cliffs around them. He dropped as well, Yato mirroring his movement.
They pressed forward, until they came to a rocky outcrop, the jagged stones seemingly sprouting up from the soil as if they were mushrooms. Similar to the last shrine, this one was also carved into the rock, albeit in much better shape, Danzen surprised at how well-made the structure was. It was unlike any architecture he’d seen aside from some of the older buildings at the Diyu Brotherhood, the ones he had marveled at as a child. They were still about a quarter mile away from the main structure, but it was clear as to why the bandits had chosen this area. It provided maximum visibility, the conjoined shrines in the middle sitting on a hill, with stone roofs that would protect against the elements. There was plenty of space to stretch out.
And this was something this particular group of bandits appeared to excel in, hides pulled across certain stones, makeshift workstations used for slaughter, dried blood on the rocks and discarded bone starting to pile up.
One thing Danzen hadn’t told Bawa was that he didn’t plan on killing these men; no, there was a better way to handle them, and it had to do with rewiring their minds. This hadn’t been his initial reaction after being told of the group, but there was more than one way to make them stop butchering yokai, and the usage of Danzen’s Demon Speak ability made perfect sense.
In fact, there really was no reason to hide themselves, and while he was sure that Bawa likely wanted the bandits dead, there was another way.
But then Danzen noticed the banner that hung from one of the pillars, which immediately caused his heart to sink.
“It can’t be…”
****
A memory came to Danzen, one from years ago, back when he was still a young assassin training. A man named Jinkai had given a demonstration on shadow fighting, Danzen remembering the Sunyata remnants he wore around his neck, how they all glowed as he cut through stone with shadowy tendrils that jutted out of his forearm. He remembered likening them to loosened silk, and seeing Jinkai’s demonstration was how he quickly adapted to using his Blade of Darkness.
The men staying in the abandoned shrine were no ordinary bandits, and for that matter, they weren’t really bandits at all. They were assassins, ones that had been trained by Jinkai, his clan known as the Penumbra, as indicated by their banner and its eye with a wavy line beneath it. Threatened by their appearance five or six years ago, Danzen had been instructed by the Brotherhood to take several of them out, yet they had never put a mark on Jinkai’s head, planning instead to cut the legs from beneath his organization.
For all Danzen knew, the Diyu Brotherhood’s strategy had worked. The several Penumbra clansmen he had killed were enough to crater what Jinkai had founded, and he remembered that all the men that he’d slain had the eye insignia somewhere on their body, which matched the banner currently draped from a pillar.
But apparently, Danzen had been mistaken.
Not only was there the potential that Jinkai was there, if he was still alive, but there was also the potential that his Demon Speak power wouldn’t work on these men, depending on how deeply they had bent their echoes or abused remnants. Danzen concluded that the reasoning for being in the mountains was twofold: to collect yokai parts to further fund their operations, and to locate abandoned remnants. If there really was a remnant in the shrine’s statue, as Bawa had suggested, then why hadn’t these men discovered it by now? Jinkai had been able to cut through stone with the shadows, and Danzen was sure his disciples would have been able to as well.
Something wasn’t right.
The seven or eight Penumbra clansmen holed up in the abandoned shrine were a fitting example of the fine line between a killer and a murderer. These men were monsters who killed indiscriminately, contract or no contract, their focus always on the money, and if they were here after the remnant, they should have located it by now.
Danzen never knew what had gone wrong with Jinkai, and why he had broken away from the Brotherhood.
Somewhere along the way, Jinkai had lost his mind and turned rogue, which wasn’t unheard of when it came to assassins who would abuse the remnants, Soko being another example. He had wondered at the time why the Brotherhood hadn’t put out a hit on Jinkai’s head, why they had rather gone for some of his underlings instead, and the reasoning behind this had never been revealed to him. Biren Yeshe remained tight-lipped about the whole affair, and after Danzen had satisfied his contract, he’d never heard about it again.
It was clear now, as he looked down at their camp, that Penumbra was still active.
“Should we be worried?” Yato asked Danzen, the female assassin right next to them.
“We need to get some distance between us and them,” he finally said. “Is there a place near here we can keep an eye on them?”
“I know the spot,” Bawa told him. “It’s not very far from here.” The fox turned back in the direction that they had come, and soon he was hopping from rock to rock, up the side of a cliff. This one wasn’t too high, but Danzen didn’t want to draw attention to himself by simply jumping to the top, so he made his way further away from the shrine, and found a point that he would be able to walk along, Yato and Kudzu close behind him.
They reached an overlook a little more than half a mile away, Danzen and his companions able to utilize a shadow cast by a large stone shaped into a hook as cover.
“I’m getting the sense that something is wrong,” Bawa said, the tip of his tail glowing black.
Kudzu certainly recognized a change in Danzen’s behavior, and now that they were away from the shrine, she pressed him on it. “Do you know these men?”
Danzen nodded. “They are members of the Penumbra, a clan that was created by an assassin named Jinkai who could wield shadows. They are able to as well, through Sunyata talismans, or by abusing remnants.”
“Jinkai?” Yato asked him. “Master Thane mentioned him several times.”
“It would make sense that you have heard of him, considering he came up around the same time that Thane did. Jinkai, Thane, Neeranyaga, and Thulma. They were all of the same class at the Brotherhood.”
“Master Thane only briefly spoke of Jinkai, saying that the remnants had driven him mad.”
“They had, and about five or six years ago, I was tasked with taking out some of his lower-ranking students. But I never found out what happened to him, or if anything happened to him. I figured someone else had gotten that contract. Or perhaps someone like my teacher, Biren Yeshe, had gone after Jinkai himself. I never asked.”
“So these men are killers of some kind?”
“Assassins, but murderers would be a better description,” Danzen told Kudzu. “Penumbra was driven from most of the cities and the kingdom, a concentrated effort from the Brotherhood to eradicate them. It would make sense that they were this far out, in the north or the south. I’m actually surprised I didn’t meet one in Genshin Valley. Any that survived the purge would have scattered, including Jinkai. Have you seen them use shadow weapons?” he asked Bawa.
“Yes, I thought I mentioned that.”
“You didn’t mention anything about that,” Kudzu told him, her eyes narrowing on the yokai. “Are you trying to set us up?”
“Set you up? Why would I try to set you up? How?”
“If you knew that they use shadows, you should have told us. That would have been something that we could prepare for, or perhaps Pilgrim here would have made a connection between them and this Jinkai character.”
“If I recall, I came upon the three of you standing with weapons drawn amidst a scattering of dead demons. Something like shadow weapons, to me anyway, didn’t seem to be a very important detail for people that can do what the three of you are clearly capable of, or at the very least, you,” he told Danzen. “But I see now that I should have mentioned it, yes, I’m sorry. Please accept my apologies. It was by no means on purpose.”
“It’s fine,” Danzen said after a long pause. “I was going to use my power to force them to leave these mountains and put a stop to the illicit yokai trade, but depending on how strong they are, my ability may not work, which means that we will likely have to kill them.”
“I thought that’s what you came here for anyway,” Bawa said.
“You thought wrong,” Danzen told the fox, and even though he wasn’t as agitated as he should have been that Bawa had withheld crucial information, the tone of his voice indicated he was certainly disappointed. They could have walked right into a very sticky situation. “I need you to tell me in detail of the men you’ve seen down there, including the one that you said was injured by an onikuma.”
“In my opinion, they are all bearded heathens. Is that what you want to hear? Because that’s what I’ve seen, most of them bearded, all of them roughly between the ages of twenty-five and forty. Was there a particular feature you’re looking for?”
“Was one of them older, maybe around sixty years of age for so, something to that effect?”
“No,” Bawa told Danzen after some consideration. “Not that I’ve seen. And I must apologize again, for I feel as if I’ve misled the three of you. I wasn’t kidding when I said these men are monsters. I’ve also heard some talk from them of moving on the nunnery, that there is a remnant there, but this was only briefly, and clearly they haven’t acted upon it.”
“I’m surprised they haven’t found the remnant in the shrine,” Danzen said, “especially if, as you claim, it is in the statue.”
“It’s actually part of the base of the statue, buried within it, and it’s the portion of the base that is sunk into the soil, a few feet down. They have hacked away at the top of the statue, but didn’t find anything and moved on. I checked myself one night while they were sleeping. We are just lucky that the abbot who hid it there years ago was smart enough to hide it well.”
“Then we should move shortly, while the sun is still out,” Danzen said. “If they are utilizing shadow weapons, they will become deadlier once it is dark.”
.Chapter Four.
It would be up to Danzen and Yato to take out the assassins, and to do so, they would need to move quickly and quietly. They would be discovered at some point, especially once one of the Penumbra clansmen noticed that a companion or two was missing. It was only a matter of when, and a matter of how many they could take out before they were discovered.
To lighten the load, Danzen left his bags and the remnant behind, which were guarded by Kudzu. It was a bit cumbersome, but he decided to keep his Blade of Darkness with him, not quite sure what would happen once its shadows at its tip met shadows of a potential assailant, but it would give him another option if he wasn’t able to do most things through the usage of his boomerang sword.
Both Yato’s gauntleted blades were already drawn as they approached together, a focused look on her face. The two stopped behind a rock formation in what was once the courtyard of the shrine, where they paused for a moment.
There was always the option of unleashing his demons, but this wasn’t something that was tested enough for Danzen to want to attempt it now. Perhaps if he had had more practice tries he would have gone for it, his hellspawns able to add much-needed confusion and terror, but as it stood, and with the chance that Jinkai, the leader of Penumbra, was there, Danzen decided to keep this trick up his sleeve for the time being.
Both of them heard some chatter; Yato peeked around the edge of the rock and returned, indicating to Danzen that someone was coming their way.
As soon as the man stepped past them, Danzen sprang into action, his hand going over his mouth as he slit his throat and dragged him straight to the ground. Yato crouched as well, sending her gauntleted blades across the bottom of the man’s robes, through his femoral arteries for safe measure while Danzen maintained a grip over his mouth. It was overkill, but was important they took out the first one just in case he alerted the others.
Shadows surged up along the man’s arms, but they quickly dissipated as his life left his body, the man’s head sinking forward.
Once he was sure that the clansman was dead, Danzen moved back to his feet. There would be no way to cover the blood on the ground, so he simply propped the man up against the nearest rock.
The assassinated clansman had been quite lean, maybe somewhere in his thirties. Branded along the side of his neck was Penumbra’s symbol, something Danzen hadn’t seen this particular clan of assassins do before. He would have noticed it a few years back, and it told him once again that the organization was alive and well, and perhaps thriving.
Danzen and Yato exchanged glances.
There wasn’t anything very complicated about their plan. Danzen thought it would be best for him to reach the shrine itself, so he could use the rooftop as a vantage point to spring down on enemies, Yato’s role being one of providing backup and additional support.
As they came out, he would pick them off, and she would pick off the remains. A simple, yet time-tested strategy.
After offering her a truncated nod, Danzen quickly moved toward the shrine, and from there to the roof, the former assassin able to hunch low at the edge of the roof just as another clansman came out of the shrine.
A brief flash of gray movement told Danzen that Yato had ducked behind another rock in the courtyard, and from his current location he could see the whites of her eyes, a rock in her hand. Once the man turned his head to the right, Yato tossed the rock to the left-hand side of the courtyard, which would put the clansman who had stepped out of the shrine out of view from the entrance. Hearing the commotion, their target turned toward it and moved to investigate the sound.
Danzen withdrew Astra from its scabbard and waited. It was a bit of a strange angle to utilize his boomerang sword, but he knew it would work.
He had killed someone in this way before.
Svicckt!
Astra broke through the crown of the man’s skull, and out the bottom of his chin, a testament to its sharpness. Yet another flash; Danzen saw Yato swoop in to finish the job, just as his blood-drenched boomerang sword was returning to his grip.
There had been a little more noise than necessary, the man making a wispy yelping sound before Yato could finish him. Two down, and five or six more to go were better odds for them, but he would have to act quickly if someone inside heard the commotion.
Danzen waited, Yato once again hidden from view.
“I’ll check it out,” called out a man below him. He exited the shrine and turned in the opposite direction, looking toward the gully Danzen had come from. A shadow grew from his forearm, and he used it to slice through one of the stone structures, testing his power or simply bored. Someone inside yelled for him to stop messing around and he whipped at the rock again in agitation.
The Penumbra assassin looked as if he was about to go back inside, but then he paused, noticing something about twenty feet away from him, a trail of blood from the first man that Danzen and Yato had killed.
Danzen dropped immediately, using Nomin’s short sword to hook the man under his collarbone, his left hand coming over his mouth. He broke the assassin’s neck and pulled him off to the side, where he clamped down on him long enough to make sure that he was dead. He then dragged the body behind another stone, one with carved characters still visible on it, its north side weather-beaten.
