Chương 11: Book 1: Chapter 5 - Teeth [Part 2]

A little later, when the path widened enough for two men to walk abreast, Shimon found himself near Sakurai. The cultured young samurai moved quietly, his once fine and faded clothing brushing against the leaves. His face remained composed, but his eyes were working, looking everywhere for enemies. He was a man that Shimon could not quite explain. Everything in this strange new land felt off to him, but something felt even more off about Sakurai.

Even more so when compared to the slimy Mizuno, and especially now that they were in these accursed woods. Shimon hesitated, but then decided that if anyone could answer his question with some form of clarity, it would be Iori.

"Sakurai-dono," the lost young man said softly, almost whispering. Iori looked at him.

"Do you think the men we are chasing might have firearms?" The word came out wrong, and the phrase landed like a dropped cup. Iori's brow moved by the smallest amount.

"Fire arrows?" he asked.

"No. Guns," Shimone tried to explain.

"They are a weapon that makes a very large noise. Iori's confusion deepened.

"Some mountain men use fire tubes during festivals. I have heard of crude weapons from the western provinces that frighten horses and little else. Bandits would not carry such useless weight here."

"Not those," Shimon whispered.

"Tanegashima." He felt, rather than saw, Kuroda Genzō's attention shift behind him. Iori looked genuinely puzzled now.

"The island?"

"Yes. From the island. Matchlocks. Hinawajū. Arquebuses. Long barrels, fired with a slow match. They release a sort of smoke and thunder. The Portuguese brought them." Iori stared at him.

"Poru… what?" the man asked. Shimon felt the inside of his skull go quiet.

"The southern barbarians," he tried.

"Europeans. Men from across the western sea. Traders? Priests? Ships? And, they brought with them guns." Iori's face had changed. Not much, for ee was too well-mannered for the crude thing that was open disbelief, but disbelief clouded his features nonetheless.

"I have heard tales of men from beyond Morokoshi and Tenjiku," Iori said carefully.

"Large-nosed people in old stories. I have heard of strange islanders and sea folk. But I do not know these Porutogarujin. Nor this weapon you speak of. If a lord possessed some device that killed at spear range through smoke and thunder, every household in the east would speak of it." Shimon swallowed.

"No, Francis Xavier," he whispered in English.

"What was that?"

"Nothing." No Portuguese, no Tanegashima, and matchlocks. No Saint Francis Xavier arriving in Kagoshima. No southern barbarian trade reshaping warfare. No mass adoption of firearms. No Oda volley fire… This was not the Sengoku period as he could predict it. It was a strange Japan where Europeans had never arrived. Plus dinosaurs, Shimon thought weakly. No guns, no Portuguese, no Jesuits. But with dinosaurs. He almost laughed. The urge was so inappropriate that it became dangerous.

It pressed against his throat and threatened to become something hysterical. Sakurai Iori kept watching him, and in the other man's eyes, Shimon saw a calculation forming. Not the suspicious greed of Mizuno Sōbei, nor the blunt hostility of Kuroda Genzō. Not, was that of a cultured man reclassifying a stranger from unusual to impossible. Freak, Shimon thought. Or fraud. A man with an old name who did not know simple things. A man who talked about island guns that did not exist, brought by strange foreigners.

A man whose speech sometimes slipped into true nonsense. Sakurai Iori could not make trouble over it here. Not now, but he had noticed. Shimon looked away first as the party continued deeper, the forest becoming quieter and more forbidding by the moment. At first Shimon did not notice, because he was too busy being afraid of everything. Then the biochip marked the change. [ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIO SHIFT] Natural Ambient Sounds: Reduced Caution advised.

Understatement much, Shimon thought, raising his spear by half an inch. Kuroda Genzō noticed something too and the old samurai's eyes narrowed, not at Shimon now, but at the forest ahead. He smelled it next. Iron, and freshly spilt. Blood in the air, carried by what little wind wove through the trees. Mizuno Sōbei's smile vanished entirely. The Kume brothers stopped joking in even the smallest ways. Jirō's breathing became audible. Tarō's jaw worked once, as if he had bitten down on words.

The coolies behind Shimon were nearly silent now, which meant they were terrified. The chip pulsed with fresh information. [MOVEMENT DETECTED] Direction: Forward / Slight left Distance estimate: 41-53 meters Pattern: Irregular dragging. probable human-sized. Genzō raised one fist and everyone stopped. For several heartbeats, Shimon heard nothing but his pulse and the small sounds of men trying to be still in their armor. Then came the scraping sound, then a pause.

The sound of something dragging itself across the forest floor. A voice followed it, thin and torn raw.

"He… lp…" The Kume brothers looked at each other, a flash of fear in their eyes.. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Again.

"Help…" A shape emerged slowly between the trees and at first Shimon thought it was a crawling animal. Then it lifted its head, and the animal became a man. He was filthy, hair matted to his face, eyes wide enough to show white all around. His armor was gone except for torn cords and a stained underlayer. One sleeve had been ripped away. The cloth across his chest bore a mark that was dark against paler fabric, though mud and blood had nearly erased it.

He dragged himself with both hands and behind him, where his feet should have been, there was nothing. Both legs ended below the calf in ragged, dark messes wrapped in leaves, mud, and blood that had already begun to clot badly. He had left a broad dragging smear along the forest floor. The man saw them and his face changed with a hope so terrible that it looked like another kind of suffering.

"Help!" the thing on the floor rasped.

"Kill me…! Kill me…!" No one moved for a second. Then the veteran Kuroda Genzō stepped forward, spear held low.

"Watch the trees." That broke them to action. Tarō and Jirō moved to either side, spears out. Mizuno and Iori lifted their bows and scanned the undergrowth. Shimon followed their examples.. The crawling man reached toward them. His fingers were black with mud. His mouth worked twice, perhaps trying to say more. Then his arms failed and he collapsed face-first into the leaves with a wet, gurgling sigh. Kuroda waited before kneeling.

He did not touch the man's shoulders until he had used the butt of his spear to turn the head slightly. The eyes were open and dead.

"He bled out," Sōbei said, stating the rather obvious quietly. It was an unnecessary observation, but perhaps everyone needed it to ground the current reality. Jirō swallowed, looking very young.

"Who cuts off a man's feet?"

"Something that takes pleasure and sustenance in suffering as much as it does in death," Genzō replied. Tarō crouched near the corpse's shoulder and tugged carefully at the torn cloth. He revealed a clearer patch of marking beneath the mud.

"Hojo," he breathed in a shaky voice. The word moved through them.

"From the fleeing army?" Mizuno asked. Tarō shrugged a little calmly.

"Or someone who robbed one." Kuroda Genzō looked at the blood trail vanishing deeper into the trees. The man had crawled from whatever had happened ahead.

"The head," Sōbei decided to add, causing everyone to look at him. The too-friendly man's face had settled into a practical blankness.

"If he is Hojo and from the routed host, proof is proof. He has no more use for his head, and a bounty is a bounty." Shimon felt something twist in his stomach. Of course. Of course that was how this world worked. A man crawled legless through a forest begging to be killed, died in front of them, and the next step was to profit from it.

"Quickly," the old samurai ordered.

"Then we follow." Mizuno Sōbei drew his short blade and did the work with efficient hands. Shimon looked away before the first cut and hated himself for looking away. Then he hated himself for looking back to show that he was not weak. One of the coolies opened an empty sack with shaking hands and a few moments later, the sack had a new weight. Jirō's face had gone pale. Tarō put a hand briefly on the younger man's shoulder, then removed it before it could be an admission of humanity.

"They must have fought amongst themselves," Sōbei explained casually. Though the friendliness in his smile had not yet quite returned, his tone was certainly trying to.

"Starving routed men. Panic. Madness. A quarrel over food, perhaps?" Kuroda Genzō looked at him with unveiled contempt.

"Fool," he accused and the word cracked like a thrown stone. Sōbei's eyes sharpened.

"Master Kuroda?"

"Men fighting over food do not eat both feet and let him crawl away," Genzō said.

"Yōma." The forest seemed to lean closer around the word. Jirō wet his lips.

"How many?" Genzō looked down the blood trail.

"If it is old, we leave," he declared.

"If it has nested, we leave. If it is young and feeding on fresh death, we have a chance." That was not comforting. A chance was not good odds, but still they followed the blood. The path gave way to a thinner track of crushed ferns and broken grass, the blood trail wandering, as if the dying man had not crawled in a straight line but had veered whenever roots, stones, or pain forced him aside. Shimon imagined dragging himself through leaves with no feet, feeling his own warmth empty into the ground.

Shaking his head he forced the thought away as a caw from a murder of crows brought him back to here and now. Their cries were almost eager and the smell of something vile grew thicker. The nature of the forest began to change. There were more broken branches now, scattered arrows, and a sandal without its owner next to a torn strip of armor cord. A little further on there was a shallow cut in the earth as if something heavy had been dragged. Then the first body appeared, lying on its back with both arms gone.

The corpse's face had been opened from jaw to cheek. Looking at his trunk, Shimon saw that the mark on his clothing was too damaged to identify. Crows hopped away from him as the living approached, indignant rather than afraid. The coolies stopped and they both whispered something like a prayer. Another body lay beyond the first. Then two more. One missing a leg. One with his stomach opened. One folded around the shaft of a broken spear, the weapon still clutched in hands that had stiffened around it.

The Kume brothers had gone rigid. Mizuno Sōbei's breath came slower now, deliberately controlled. Sakurai Iori's knuckles were pale around his bow. Kuroda Genzō moved through the dead with a terrible familiarity, reading the ground.

"Not men," he said, poking at a dead body.

"Well, not only men did this." One of the coolies dropped his bundle. The sound was not loud, but in that forest it felt like a bell. The man just stared at the body without arms, his mouth working silently. His partner looked at him, then at the dark trees, then at the way ahead where the crows were gathered and both men made the same decision at almost the same time. They ran.

"Stop, you fools!" Genzō hissed at them, but they did not stop. The first coolie crashed back through the undergrowth toward the boundary. The second followed, leaving rope, sacks, spare spears, food, and whatever else they had been carrying scattered among dead leaves and loam. The forest swallowed them quickly. For a moment, everyone listened, but no scream came.

"Let them go," Sōbei said softly.

"Their courage has been eaten."

"They will bring word," Iori murmured.

"If they survive this forest… but even if they live that long, I do not see them surviving Hieda's wrath. Kuroda Genzō looked at the abandoned bundle of spare spears. Then he looked ahead toward the gathering of crows.

"We press on a little farther," he announced grimly.

"Only enough to see. If it is more than we can kill, we mark the place and leave." Nobody argued, but Shimon wanted to argue. He wanted to deliver a clear, modern, rational presentation on why walking deeper into the site of a supernatural mass-casualty event was a poor strategic choice. The young man wanted to propose a timely withdrawal, to maybe come back with a few more reinforcements. But, instead, he simply walked because everyone else did.

Because looking cowardly in front of men with swords remained, somehow, part of the danger calculation. And because the quest promised something greater if he survived it. They came to a low place in the forest where the ground dipped between old trees and saw the remains of a camp that had been in the hollow. It had not been much for routed, desperate men did not often build proper camps.

They had scraped together a low fire pit, broken branches for cover, and a few poor lean-tos made from scrounged up banners and cut saplings. A cracked iron pot lay overturned near the ashes, rice grains scattered in mud. At one end, a banner pole had been snapped and tossed aside. And the dead lay everywhere, perhaps fifteen, perhaps more. Some were still in armor. Some had stripped down to rest. Some had died reaching for weapons. Others had died curled around wounds that no one could have survived.

Limbs were missing from several, and a head sat beneath a fern as if placed there thoughtfully and then forgotten. Over them stooped three yōma which Shimon's brain refused to categorize at first. Large grey men, it tried, but the details failed his modern sensibilities. They were man-shaped in the way a mockery of a man might be man-shaped. Too tall, too long in the arms, and too smooth across the face. Their skin was grey, not the grey of ash or stone, but the grey of meat left without blood.

They had no hair, and no ears that Shimon could make out. They seemed to his senses, almost blurred. And not because they moved quickly. They were slow in their movement, hunched over the dead, feeding. But the edges of them refused focus. Looking at one was like trying to watch something that was, and at the same time, simply was not. Then one opened its mouth and that drew reality into sharp focus.

Its mouth split wider than a human jaw should allow, and inside were teeth arranged in three rows, triangular and wet and horribly real. The kind of teeth designed to rend and turn. One yōma pulled an arm from a corpse with a wet, fibrous sound and fed on it. Shimon felt his body go cold from the inside out.