Chương 2: Book 1: Chapter 2 - Borrowed Steel [Part 1]

"Fast like the wind, Silent like a forest, Intrusive like the fire, Immobile like a mountain." - Da nny Chaplin, Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan. Shimon Ayanokouji had always considered himself a fairly decent human being. Not heroic, because heroism has little opportunity to rear its head in the modern age. Not noble, because that was mostly a branding exercise performed by people who were rich enough to worry about such things.

But decent, in the ordinary, limited, socially functional sense. He held doors open when it cost him nothing. He returned wallets when returning them did not involve talking to police for more than ten minutes. He did not kick vending machines even when they stole his money, and he did not litter. And, most importantly, he had never robbed a corpse before. That was the sort of line a civilized person should have. Unfortunately in this strange place, civilization was no longer answering the phone.

The battlefield stretched around him under a sky that had begun to lose its color. It was not the dramatic red of an expensive period film, nor the picturesque gold of a historical drama where everyone died beautifully. It was a wet, filthy, exhausted sort of evening, with clouds smeared low over the horizon and smoke flattening itself against them. The air stank of mud, blood, shit, trampled grass, and the sour heat of opened bodies beginning to cool.

Somewhere to his left, flies had already gathered in such numbers that their buzzing had become its own weather. Shimon stood with both hands around the broken spear he had taken from the man he had killed. No, from the man who had tried to kill him, he corrected himself because the distinction mattered. It mattered so much that he repeated it a few times in his head while carefully avoiding looking at the body again.

The spear shaft was cracked near the middle and rough enough to bite into his palm, but it had a metal point still attached and it had already proven, in a deeply unpleasant practical demonstration, that it could keep another human being at a distance. In a world apparently committed to murdering him with agricultural equipment and historical authenticity, that made it more valuable than anything else he had ever owned. Except maybe Mochi.

A thought of his pet struck him with such ordinary cruelty that his throat tightened. Mochi was alone in the apartment. Mochi would have food for the night. The automatic feeder had been filled that morning, because Shimon might have been many things, but he was not the sort of man who let a cat suffer. There was water. There were two litter boxes, because Mochi had strong opinions about hygiene for a creature who enjoyed licking his own backside. Eri was supposed to come tomorrow.

Daigo would probably call when Shimon did not answer. Someone would notice eventually. He would have to hold the universe to that. Shimon looked down at the corpse nearest his feet. The man had been young. That was the worst part, and not younger than Shimon by much, maybe not at all. His clothes were patched. His armor was cheap, more laced plates and hardened leather than anything and the man's sandals— waraji a bit of his mind corrected—were almost falling apart.

There was a small pouch tied at his waist which the young man stared at for a long, long moment.

"No," he said, but his voice came out too thin. The man had tried to rob him. The man had come at him with two others. The man had been part of the reason Shimon was standing in a corpse field with blood stiffening on his hands and a spear he did not know how to use. If morality worked on a points system, Shimon was almost certainly allowed to take the pouch. So he took it. Because money meant there was civilization somewhere. Money meant markets, contracts, wages, rent, debt, tax, and therefore shelter.

Money meant there were places where having money mattered. And he would need a weapon to protect himself and his money. He found the first sword on a body half-buried beneath two others. It was not a glamorous discovery. There was no beam of light, no swelling orchestra, no ancient blade waiting for its destined master. There was only Shimon kneeling in the mud while trying not to vomit as he pushed aside a dead man's arm with the butt of the broken spear. The body wearing the sword had no head.

That made it both worse and, somehow, easier. The corpse lay face-down, or would have if it still had a face. A short banner frame had snapped across his back, the cloth dark with mud and blood but still visible enough to show some kind of crest Shimon could not identify. The little flag had been mounted behind the armor, not carried in the hand. Sashimono, his brain supplied with the slightly smug helpfulness of a search engine that did not understand context.

Very cool when it was not attached to a headless man in front of you.

"Sorry," Shimon whispered. The corpse did not object, but that was of little comfort. The sword was caught beneath the man's weight. Shimon had to hook the spear under the body's shoulder and lever it upward, an action that produced a wet shift in the mud and a sound from the corpse that made him gag hard enough to see sparks. He stopped, breathed through his mouth, regretted breathing through his mouth, then pulled again until he could get at the belt. His hands shook while he worked the weapon free.

The blade in its scabbard was heavier than he expected. He drew it for a moment. It was not huge, not the ridiculous oversized slabs of metal that fantasy games depicted, but of a killing length. The scabbard was lacquered dark beneath the grime. The fittings were plain, but they were not crude. Even Shimon, whose expertise in swords came mostly from entertainment, could tell that despite failing its master that this was a good weapon. A better than average blade, he thought.

Then, with a sort of sick practicality that disgusted him and kept him alive, he checked for the second one. The shorter blade was tucked close, easier to miss beneath the torn cloth and the wreckage of the man's gear. A wakizashi, or close enough that his ignorance could safely hide behind the word. It came free with a little resistance.

"Borrowing," he said, because apparently he had begun negotiating with corpses.

"Emergency borrowing. I'll return it if there's an afterlife and a claims department." The line should have made him laugh. It didn't. He wiped mud from the scabbards with the least bloody part of a dead man's sleeve, then froze because he had just used a dead man's sleeve as a cleaning cloth. This place was already changing him. The longer sword went through his belt badly. Everything about it sat wrong.

He had no idea how the knots were supposed to work, no idea what angle made sense, no idea whether he looked like a warrior or an idiot. The shorter blade he tucked beside it, adjusting and readjusting until they felt vaguely comfortable. The weight at his hip felt obscene at first, then reassuring, then obscene again for being reassuring. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Two blades. He could probably barely use one.

If he tried to draw a sword in a fight, he suspected he would cut his own thigh open and die with the expression of a man betrayed by cinematography. But two blades meant something. It sang to his soul. Maybe not here, maybe not exactly, maybe not in whatever insane version of the Warring States period had decided to install orange quest text, and looters with very real weapons, but it meant something enough to risk. A man with two blades might be treated differently from a peasant.

A man with two blades might be mistaken for someone with backing, rank, protection, a family, a lord, consequences. In a world where clothing could be identity and identity could be armor, Shimon was willing to commit fashion fraud. The spear stayed in his hand only until he found its unbroken brother, an almost identical weapon that had survived in better condition. The spear had seniority over the swords. Despite gagging, the young man searched the pouches. He took the coins..

He took a half-empty gourd because water was not money either, though the liquid inside was probably stale. He took a strip of relatively clean cloth to wrap around his left palm. He took pieces of armor and period correct clothing, adorning himself the best he could. Not wanting to draw attention, he stored his modern clothes in a container he had made from dead men's funeral garb. The orange screen appeared at the edge of his vision, a polite reminder of this world's insanity.

Condition Updated: Tired Shocked"Thank you," Shimon said.

"Very useful. Love the customer service." The screen did not respond and the world in general did not respond. He hated that it did not respond. Shimon hated even more that a part of him wanted it to. A system with dialogue would have been terrifying. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the mess that the universe had laid out for him. The battlefield rolled away in uneven stretches of bodies, torn banners, discarded spears, broken shafts of arrows.

Beyond it, through the early evening haze and mist, he could see water. A river broad enough that the far bank looked far away indeed. Its surface reflected the dying light in dull broken strips. The sight of it struck him with such relief that he almost laughed. Big rivers meant people. People needed water. Settlements grew near rivers. Roads followed them. Boats moved along them. If there was one thing geography, civilization games, and basic human laziness agreed upon, it was that rivers mattered.

It was a place where his newfound wealth would prove useful. He did not know where he was. He had no clue in the slightest That should have been impossible. He had not been unconscious for long, he thought. He had been in the New Kanda Metropolitan Archive Annex, looking at a strange book. The Crimson Age of the Warring Kingdoms, or something like it. Then mist, cold, shouting, blood, men trying to rob him, a spear in his hands, a man folding around the point of it. There were several conclusions available.

One was that he had suffered a catastrophic neurological event and was hallucinating in a hospital bed while his family argued over insurance forms. Another was that the archive had contained some kind of illegal full-dive system or experimental historical immersion rig, which was an idea so stupid and lawsuit-generating that it almost became plausible again. One was that he had been transported to another world.

Shimon did not like the third conclusion because it was the sort of conclusion only acceptable in fiction, and fiction was written by very dubious people indeed. The river pulled at him with promise and direction. He moved toward it with the spear in one hand and the stolen swords bumping at his hip. His legs felt weak. Not broken, not injured in any obvious way, but loose and unwilling beneath him now that adrenaline had left.

Every few steps he looked back, morbidly expecting one of the dead to rise and to accuse him of some sort of crime. The dead, however, remained very quiet. At the riverbank he crouched, then stopped himself before drinking. There might be bodies upstream and all sorts of deadly microbes and parasites in the water. That was not paranoia. Instead, he splashed some water over his hands anyway, the cold biting deep as blood thinned and swirled away from his fingers. For a moment, he almost felt better.

That was until he saw his reflection. The man in the river was pale under mud and blood, with black hair stuck damply to his forehead and eyes too wide for his face. He looked younger than Shimon felt and older than Shimon wanted to be. Wearing a mix of lacquered armor and period correct clothing, there were two swords at his hip and a spear in his hand. The reflection looked like someone pretending to be dangerous. He stood and began walking along the river, away from the battlefield. Away from the dead.

He kept the river on his right because it was difficult to get lost if one half of the world remained water, though after twenty minutes he realized this was the exact kind of thought that was pointless without any point of reference. The ground rose and dipped. Mud pulled at his sandals. Grass slapped wet against his legs. The spear served as a walking staff, focusing on just placing one foot in front of the other. The noises reached him before the castle did.

He dropped into a crouch so fast his knee slid in the mud, heart hammering hard enough to hurt. But the sound was wrong. Not the crashing animal roar of men running into each other with death and murder in their hearts. There were shouts, yes, and drums or something like drums, but beneath them came laughter, singing, the scattered rhythm of celebration. Human joy carried across the riverbank with a cruelty all its own. He crept forward hoping that he would not be spotted.

The castle stood ahead on raised ground, more earthwork and timber and layered defenses than the clean white towers his modern brain insisted on filing under Japanese castle. It looked rawer, lower, more practical. Fires burned within and around it. Torches moved along the walls, figures crossing through the light. It was the sound, his brain suggested, of celebration. The defenders of the castle had probably won. Shimon did not know that, not in any clean historical sense.

He only knew that the people inside the castle sounded alive, organized, and numerous, which meant they were either the safest thing he had found so far or the most efficient way to die next. His mouth had gone dry. He had two stolen blades at his hip and a spear in his hand. He was covered in blood. Though still vaguely understandable, he did not speak the local language as the natives did. He did not know who owned the corpse he had taken the swords from.

He did not know if what he wore made him an ally of the castle or an enemy of it. He did not know whether walking up to the gate would result in help, interrogation, recruitment, enslavement, or even execution. A drunken cheer rose from the castle and Shimon flinched as if struck. No. Not yet. I need more information. He backed away one step, then another, the spear butt scraping behind him. He turned, crouched low, and moved toward the darker shape of trees beyond the riverbank.

Slowly, his unhurried walk became a jog, became a run. Branches whipped at his face as he entered the woods. The world narrowed to trunks, undergrowth, breath, pain, mud, the slap of his own feet, the clatter of stolen swords, the spear catching on vines and shrubs until he nearly threw it away. He did not know what he was running from. Nothing chased him, but the man so out of place ran anyway. The woods swallowed the sounds of the celebration behind him. The trees grew closer, the ground rougher.

Twice he almost fell despite his enhanced reflexes granted to him by advanced science, the spear skidding away through dead leaves. He scrambled after it and picked it up. The spear was necessary. When he finally stopped, it was not because he had chosen to. His body simply refused another step. He leaned against a tree, bent double, and dragged air into his lungs in ragged strips. His chest burned and his throat tasted metallic.

Sweat chilled on his skin beneath clothes that were already damp from the evening's chill and mist. The two blades at his hip seemed to weigh so heavily.

"Good job," he whispered to himself.

"Excellent tactical withdrawal from the possibility of shelter." The woods around him did not make any comments on the matter. At first he found that reassuring. Leaves moved, branches creaked, and insects called from hidden places. Somewhere far away, a bird gave a sharp cry and went silent. Normal forest noises. Ancient Japan, or ancient not-Japan, would have normal forests. Normal forests had boars, deer, foxes, bears, snakes, mosquitoes, parasites. But normal was still a category he could endure.

Then something clicked in the trees. Not a branch breaking, not quite. A dry, hollow, double sound then a click-click, pause, then click.