While Kesa’s head was unprotected, the rest of her body was well-armored. Segmented plates of interlocking ultralight metallic alloys covered her chest, and she had the signature shoulder plates of the Shogunate, as well as matching greaves and boots. Her elbows and biceps were exposed to the open air, likely due to trouble fitting armor to an Oni of her size, but she had thick plated gauntlets on for forearm protection.

  Raising one arm to cover her face and drawing her handgun with the other, she did not have high hopes for her survival, nor that of her Lady. They were outnumbered, away from their targets, and at a severe firepower disadvantage. It was all she could do to place herself between her Lady and the bullets, to hopefully afford Koromi time to flee.

  Kesa’s eyes caught movement in her peripherals. In a flash of movement, Koromi had darted out from behind Kesa, abandoning the cover the Ashigaru had hoped to provide and jerking hard to the right in a quick side-step. Dashing toward the assault weapons at an incredible rate, bounding over the wooden floor in long sprinting strides. She moved with such blinding speed that Kesa could barely track the movement, even with adrenaline aiding her perception.

  Koromi couldn’t believe it either. She’d never felt so powerful, so purposeful, so intensely focused on survival. Her movements were not her own, yet they were hers all the same. She felt every flexing muscle, every surge of adrenaline, every burst of frenzied rage as her eyes locked onto those who would see her dead.

  Thirty paces from the enemy Ashigaru narrowed to fifteen in the blink of an eye. Bullets crashed into Kesa’s forearm and shoulderplates, exploding off of the plated armor and sending fragmented metal off at dangerous arcs. The Ashigaru struggled to shift their aim toward Koromi, having initially deemed the Oni a far larger threat, and that gave the Samurai the second she needed to make it the last mistake they’d ever make.

  Koromi ducked as she ran, right hand coming to wrap around the hilt of her katana, left hand on its sheathe at her left hip. The cybernetic fingers closed around the hilt with more certainty in their movement than any action she’d made in years. She thumbed the guard, breaking the catch release. A bullet struck her in the side, a grazing blow, but she barely felt it, registering the impact as an adrenaline-drowned inconvenience. A splatter of blood ejected from the wound, staining her white traveling clothes, but it paled in comparison to the carnage wrought an instant later.

  Koromi’s katana, a Dojima masterwork named Hinode, drew from its sheath for the first time in years. As each inch of the blade cleared its housing, the micro-fusion cell built into the hilt fed an astronomical amount of energy to the blade, which ruptured violently, projecting deep red energy across the length of the cutting edge.

  Koromi knew its destructive power, this weapon given to her by her mother, to be used only for self defense. She’d never struck a living thing with it before.

  The katana caught the first Ashigaru in the right hip, and the red blade glowed brighter still as it melted through many centimeters of alloyed metal, steel inserts, ballistic cloth – then skin, flesh and bone. It was disturbingly, disgustingly easy how efficiently Koromi’s blade cleaved through the man, exiting his body out of his left shoulder.

  An explosion of deep red gore ruptured from the mangled pile of limbs as the force of the impact tossed the mess back onto the dead man’s comrades. Koromi’s eyes went wide as her face instantly turned red, plastered with gore by the high-pressure spray of arterial blood.

  It was her first kill, her first time taking a human life. She’d always imagined it would be a disastrous event, a tragedy of human suffering that would leave her feeling hollow and angry for what was lost. An enemy soldier on a battlefield, or a treacherous spy, a true story of human angst.

  Yet she felt nothing at all but the pounding of adrenaline, the surge of anger. A shared anger, one that was hers and someone else’s, flowing through her body and taking out its rage on the men before her. The tactile sensation of her grip repositioning, shifting the katana’s hilt a hundred-and-eighty degrees around, so the blade could face her next attackers, and arc down as she stepped forward through red mist before her.

  One of the Ashigaru screamed, his helmet amplifying the horrified sound, and the high-decibel cry was shattered as Koromi’s blade split open his neck, decapitating him in a downward strike and taking a chunk of his right shoulder with it. The clean cuts left in the energy katana’s wake glowed red-hot from the sheer heat used to create them, slicing the men open like a knife through a paper screen and leaving cauterized flesh in its wake.

  A muzzle flash erupted before Koromi’s eyes, the third Ashigaru’s weapon barking a cruel explosion of directed hate, the desperate final act of a man who’d been conscripted into the wrong kill team. The bullet caught Koromi in the left shoulder, a more direct hit, which made her eyes lose focus for a moment as the dull pain knocked her whole body back and to the left.

  Yet she still had the reach, the energy katana whipping up. It didn’t even need to fully strike, such was its destructive power, that a stab – nay, a poke from it, was sufficient to split open layers of armor and spear the final soldier’s heart like a shishkebab.

  He recoiled back from the white-hot pain, wrenching his burning body back from the blade, but he was already dead. Fingers seizing on the the rifle’s trigger, spraying the back wall of the room and ceiling with bullets as he fell to the ground. Blood ruptured from the glowing hole in his chest like a water fountain, though the flow subsided rapidly.

  The whole engagement, two swift strikes and a half-assed stab, had consumed no more than eight seconds of real time and claimed three human lives.

  Time that caught up to Koromi, as the world around her sped up to its standard pace, and the wounds she’d suffered followed with a biting vengeance. She had the mind to sheath her weapon, Hinedo sliding back into its coolant housing with a loud hiss, an explosion of steam from vents along the scabbard. The heat of the sun buried away in a steel sarcophagus, until the next sunrise.

  Then Koromi fell to one knee, painted crimson from head to toe, among the pile of body parts and entrails.

  Kesa was stunned. Completely stock still. She hadn’t even gotten to fire a shot. The arm that had been covering her face for protection slowly lowered, and she beheld the ring of carnage that lay before her. Three dead men, and her Lady knelt among them.

  It wasn’t like other Samurai she’d seen fight. A few precise stabs, a small spray of blood, and dead targets. This was apocalyptic in scope, sheer nightmarish massacre that would make the darkest demons of Jigoku fearful.

  Her hesitation bled another fifteen seconds, before her heart willed her body to sluggishly move forward. She’d soaked thirteen bullets – Eleven to armor, one in an exposed part of her upper thigh, one through her right bicep. None had hit anything critical, and Oni were known for their durability. But that thick body and layers of redundant muscle also meant both bullets were buried inside of her, and would need to be extracted.

  Kesa could feel the pain in her muscles with each movement, and prayed only that nothing critical split until she could get them to safety.

  “M-My…” Kesa began, stumbling forward, stepping over a bisected man’s upper torso to kneel in the rapidly-expanding sea of blood around Koromi, “My Lady?”

  Koromi’s nostrils burned with the metallic, sickly sweet taint of iron and burned flesh. Her lips quivered, bringing a hand up to feel the wound on her shoulder. She was so covered in the fruits of her sanguine slaughter that she couldn’t even tell how much was her own.

  Stuttered half-syllables blurted from Koromi’s lips as her mind reeled from the advance, “K-K-Kuh… Kuh…” She wanted to say Kesa’s name, to assure her that she was alright. That they needed to move forward. To get out of there. The words, even Kesa’s name, did not come. Koromi’s vision blurred and paired, seeing double, then matching the images and flooding the result with stars. She felt lightheaded.

  There would be more soldiers, and Koromi didn’t know if she could kill more. She didn’t know if she could kill again.

  Kesa didn’t need to hear Koromi speak to understand.

  The handgun was stuffed into Koromi’s bag, and Kesa used her good arm to pick the Samurai up, a simple enough feat which would’ve impressed and made Koromi blush under normal circumstances.

  With Koromi held, Kesa quickly made for the door, trailing footprints of blood from her soaked boots behind her. Staining her red armor with similar gore. Hinedo and its wakizashi twin Nichibotsu swayed and rattled in Koromi’s sash as she was carried.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  There were a handful of people outside the traveler’s inn. Workers and curious onlookers from the nearby structures who’d heard the roar of gunfire. When they saw the blood-soaked Samurai being held by a towering, wounded Oni, a sea of gasps and shrill, terrified cries rang out.

  Kesa ignored them, descending a short series of stairs at the front of the inn. Their car wasn’t there, but nor were any more Ashigaru, and no visible means by which the assassins had arrived. That couldn’t have been the entire kill team, Kesa reasoned. Three Ashigaru, all with rifles, and an attack robot? None had swords, yet a sword had killed Akimo. No sign of Koretsune either.

  Something had happened before Kesa and Koromi awoke, something that drew Koretsune away and slew Akimo, but it would remain a mystery for the time being. Survival was all that mattered in that moment.

  Kesa made for the garage attached to the inn, a small concrete structure, and picked a decent-looking vehicle. A black two-door ground car, with deeply tinted windows.

  With her wounded arm, Kesa ripped the passenger side door open in a single savage action, shattering its internal locks. The car’s alarm blared and rang as Kesa set the near-catatonic Koromi inside, the Samurai’s brain merely shifting to a state of blankness, retreating into her mind in the wake of what she’d done.

  She relived those eight seconds over and over. The movement, the strokes of her sword, the kills. The blood. So much blood. When Kesa leaned over Koromi to pull her swords out of her sash and set them in her lap, so that she could actually sit properly, the metallic scent was nearly overwhelming.

  Kesa slammed the passenger door shut, rounded the car, and ripped open the driver’s side door. She hadn’t hot-wired a car since she was a kid, and stole a grain truck for a joyride. That had gotten her two weeks in a penitentiary, and thirty lashings…

  She cracked the dash open, revealing exposed wiring, and set about haphazardly getting the engine running with shaking fingers. She also hadn’t driven in years and the car, even with the seat pushed all the way back, was far too small for her.

  Yet the engine rumbled to life, the car alarm was shut off, and they were off. Back to the vehicle elevator, which Kesa drove right up onto. No time to secure chains, she just hit the parking brake, got out long enough to grab and yank the descent lever, then got back in.

  Khuh… Kuh…” Koromi kept trying to mumble, eyes wide yet motionless, imperceptive of her actual surroundings.

  “I am here, my Lady.” Kesa said as the elevator slowly rumbled, descending. She pried the outer layer of her breastplate off, tossing the heavy metal in the back seat of the car. The breastplate’s surface bore the Oda Clan mon, which was nearly entirely obscured by the shrapnel-laden craters created by bullets striking it.

  Kesa grunted harshly, dividing her attention between the elevator’s movement and Koromi. She tore a strip of cloth off her undershirt’s midriff, pulling Koromi closer to the car’s center console with one strong hand and wrapping the cloth around her thumb, “This will hurt.”

  The warning came a moment before Kesa jammed the cloth into the bullet wound in Koromi’s shoulder, staunching the blood flow and causing the Samurai to scream in pain. White-hot agony blazed across Koromi’s eyes, flooding them with stars as her right arm seized. She felt nothing in the left, the cybernetic limb going limp as the connective signals that ordinarily flowed through her shoulder to it had deadened. It was a hunk of metal affixed to her body. Her right hand grabbed at the seat beneath her, fingernails digging into the fabric, splitting the seat as the robotic digits coiled.

  “It isn’t bad…” Kesa tried to reassure her Lady, gritting her teeth as she pushed the packed fabric into the wound. There was no exit wound, so it was also stuck inside, and would need to be dug out. They were both similarly fucked up.

  Kesa could see the left arm wasn’t working, yet she knew nothing about prostheses. She had no idea if the arm itself was broken, or if it was a symptom of deeper nerve damage in the shoulder.

  Tears of pain and mixed sorrow fled down Koromi’s cheeks, and her sinuses burned from the sheer stench of blood that permeated the air within the car. “Kesa...!” She sobbed, finally managing the Oni’s name, if only in agony.

  A shaking right hand rose to her bloody shoulder, which Kesa gently pulled away. She could feel the robotic digits twitching in her grip. She could hear the sorrow in Koromi’s voice – Not just of pain, but hopeless confusion. “I know.” She said, “But you have to leave it alone.”

  The car elevator reached the ground with a dull ‘thud’, and Kesa accelerated before it was even fully stationary. She turned onto the main road, driving deeper into the sprawling Kyoto undercity. She knew that the car, having been taken from the Inn, was likely to be tracked. The pair needed to get far from the Inn, but Kesa also needed to find them somewhere safe to lay low… and a doctor besides.

  Tall orders, especially due to the number of Ashigaru that would be looking for them. Even if the Tachibana Family, the rulers of Kyoto, were not part of the conspiracy to have Koromi killed, they would still be hunting for the pair due to the incident at the inn. Kesa shuddered to imagine how many cars must’ve been tracking them at that moment.

  Trying to leave the city would be impossible, for the perimeter walls kept people in just as well as out. As such, Kesa took them deeper into the dark underbelly, the ground curving down toward the base of massive structural pillar skyscrapers and statues of Kami holding the first plate of Kyoto’s upper megacity aloft.

  Colossal statues loomed large over rows of cube-shaped homes and businesses, stacked atop each other, the upper floors connected by old metal catwalks and wooden planks. In the distance, visible even from the undercity’s edge, a massive statue of the Kami Tenjin sat. Dozens of stories tall, constructed of stone and metal, with its hands raised to act as supports for the city above.

  Tenjin was the Kami of scholars, writing and knowledge, the patron of Kyoto itself. The statue depicted him as a Samurai in dark ragged clothing, and a face with no features on it, simply a blank white slab beneath a mess of straight hair.

  When Kesa found a suitably darkened alley, illuminated only by the flickering neon of shop signs and Igashi advertisements, she shut off the engine and disembarked to circle around to the passenger side.

  When she pulled the door open, she found Koromi motionless, and Kesa’s heart stopped in panic for a moment. A quick check for a pulse found one, and Kesa surmised her Lady had likely passed out from exhaustion, pain or simply overwhelmed emotions.

  Regardless, Kesa collected Koromi’s swords, placing them in her own sash, and shouldered the Samurai’s bag before lifting her up in another easy carrying position. There she held the woman, as she began dashing as fast as her newfound limp could carry her down the alley.

  With each step, Kesa could feel a tear in her leg forming and worsening, the bullet lodged in her upper thigh squirming about as it was repeatedly partially dislodged and repositioned by her heavy footfalls.

  A door ahead of her abruptly opened, and Kesa paused as she nearly slammed into the metallic surface. A young woman, barely an adult, with dark hair and a neat straightened robe had stepped out with a garbage bag, likely to discard the rubbish in a bin beyond the structure. When the stranger saw Kesa she froze solid, staring up at the blood-smeared Oni and her red-painted master.

  “I need aid.” Kesa said breathlessly. She knew how horrible the situation must’ve looked from the peasant’s perspective, how utterly drenched in gore the pair were and how demonic that made them seem, especially with the Oni’s already crimson hair and long horns.

  Regardless, the peasant woman stammered a reply, “M-My Lord.” And backed up into her house, dropping the garbage bag at the roadside and leaving the way open for Kesa to enter. She did so, ducking to avoid the top of the frame, and the peasant shut the door behind them.

  The room’s interior bore some sort of office environment. A broad wooden desk, a plush rug covering an otherwise hard concrete floor. Bells and chimes hung from the ceiling, and incense burned from a wick about a small shrine. The statuette on the shrine depicted a skeletal Kami with two heads facing left and right, ribcage split open to reveal a golden heart in what was otherwise an iron frame.

  Kesa recognized it as a depiction of the Kami form of Oda Nobutada, who was said to have journeyed to Yomi, where he guides the spirits of the dead to the afterlife.

  “This is a business?” Kesa asked, and the young woman, now trembling as the rush of excitement got to her, bowed her upper body. “A mortician, my Lord.”

  Kesa furrowed her brow. Ideally, they would not need the services of a gravetender. “I need a bed. Medical supplies. Is there a doctor nearby?”

  The young woman stammered, “Bed is– There’s a doctor– I don’t…” She pointed at a door near the back of the room. Kesa followed to where she’d pointed, shouldering the door open. Rows of coffins lie stacked atop each other and wooden support frames in a long hallway. The heavily sterilized scent of the room did nothing to drown out the metallic stench of blood on the Samurai in Kesa’s arms.

  At the far end sat a room labelled ‘Cremations’, and on the side, another unmarked door. Not eager to cremate anyone, Kesa moved to the second door, where she found a small bedroom and secondary office space.

  The bedroom was unoccupied, the room cluttered with small statuettes of various Kami of life and death, mercy and peace. A desk cluttered with paperwork and diagrams for coffins, gravestones and furnaces. The bed sat behind a curtain of beads, which Kesa shoved open in order to lay Koromi down onto the padded surface.

  “Th-That’s Joshi-san’s bed–” The young woman, who’d quickly followed Kesa, stuttered out in a pointless explanation. Trying to fill the tense, rushed air with familiar words.

  “Go get a doctor.” Kesa barked, “Tell no one we are here. Tell them whatever you must, but bring gauze and surgical tools.”

  The young woman hesitated, mind reeling as she perhaps tried to parse how she’d explain such a maddening thing to the doctor, but Kesa shouted, “Now!” And that pressed the woman’s mind into gear, or at least motivated her legs to carry her rapidly from the building.

  Kesa went to stand again, but a surge of pain in her upper leg brought her to her knees. She choked on her own saliva, then cleared her throat, propping Koromi’s swords up on the bed beside her. Kesa set about ripping up nearby bed sheets to create makeshift gauze and bandages. It was all she could do.

  It was all she could do besides wait. Wait and pray.