Cat streaked out of the shadows, a flash of white, and skidded to a halt, all four legs splayed, at the offering box below the tomb’s dais. “Our friends are here!”
Django leaped the stone fence around the dais. “Yeah, how about you tiger up?”
“Alas, it is no longer a full moon. What is your course of action?”
Django circled to the cylinder’s face, where there was a stone door or plug, about a foot wide and two feet high, fitted tightly into the opening. “Grab the Scroll and get the fuck out of here.”
Cat jumped up onto the stone balustrade. “So crass, so lacking in elegance—”
“Shut up...” He tried to wiggle the door loose with his fingers, but the fit was too tight. “...Unless you brought a crowbar with you.” Whipping out his dagger, he jammed it into the seam and tried to use it to pry open the door.
He jammed harder, pried harder, heedless of ruining the weapon.
“Might I suggest stepping up the pace?” Cat said, pacing back and forth on the balustrade, listening, tail thrashing.
“Bite me,” Django said through teeth gritted with concentration and effort as he struggled to prize open the door.
“Well, if you think it will help—” Cat jumped down toward Django’s ankle.
“No! What are you doing?”
“You said—”
“No! It’s a nicer way of saying ‘go fuck yourself.’”
Cat sniffed. “Hardly the time for such rudeness. Make up your mind.”
With the point of the dagger, Django pried the seam wider, jamming the point deeper.
From about seventy yards away, near the main gate to the shrine, came the sound of a man’s voice—one of the priests or attendants—raised in a warning question.
Then came the chatter of a suppressed submachine gun.
He was out of time.
He pried harder.
The door grated open a sixteenth of an inch.
A wave of mahō slapped his entire body with the force of an explosion and blew him off the dais, halfway across the courtyard. He caught the receding screech of a startled, airborne feline before his hearing was reduced to a tinny ring. The air smelled like ozone and grave dust.
Django hit the ground and rolled to his feet, throwing up his Shadow Veil. The ground was trembling underfoot. The rustle and clatter of vibrating gravel filled the air, growing stronger. Tree branches surrounding the courtyard shook loose a rain of leaves. Cat was gone, out of sight.
Movement at the courtyard entrance caught his eye: six human figures rushing up the steps. First, four men in suits, carrying MP5 submachine guns equipped with suppressors, then Habu and Yuka.
With their attention focused on the tomb, they had not yet noticed him. He scrutinized Yuka as closely as he could. Was she a willing participant or a slave? She wore a gray backpack with something inside that rounded its shape. To his Third Eye, whatever was inside, a disk of some sort, scintillated with a profusion of colors, like looking at the sun.
He eased Xuan Yuan from its scabbard and crept backward toward the edge of the courtyard, where he could leap over the stone rail for cover if need be. If he activated Sunblade, the enemy would spot him in an instant. But maybe he could get it off in time to send a blast of it through Habu’s body, just like he had the tsuchigumo...
The earth’s vibration intensified, then roared as the ground before the tomb split wide, demolishing the offering box and sending the bronze lantern tumbling away. The front of the dais collapsed. The tomb toppled onto its side.
Rising from the fissure came a skull the size of a minivan. Its eye sockets burned with fires of hungry malice. Its jaw swung wide then snapped shut with the sound of a pile driver. Its body continued to rise, collarbones and shoulders and ribs trailing earth and grit. The monster’s enormous bones were not singular objects but comprised hundreds, thousands, of human-sized bones, all coalescing to form larger shapes.
The gunmen froze, slack-jawed. One of them lost his wad of gum.
Seizing the moment, Django summoned Sunblade into the Sword of Divinity, and the light flashed through its engravings.
Habu spotted him, eyes flaring with realization.
Django slashed toward the clump of enemies, and a searing arc of destruction leaped from the sword’s edge.
Habu dove aside as the arc swept through one of the goons. The man’s bisected body fell to the earth, gushing seared organs, smoking.
Yuka stared for a moment, then her mouth opened in a scream.
The remaining gunmen swung their weapons, faster than Django expected, and unleashed a hail of 9mm bullets even as he spun and dove for the stone rail. Several bullets slammed into his mahō-reinforced duster, sending little explosions of pain through his thigh, hip, ribs, and shoulder, knocking the wind out of him. His momentum carried him over the rail, and he dropped ten feet into the foliage, out of sight of the courtyard.
Gasping for breath, wincing in pain, he collected himself, then stepped back far enough to peek over the retaining wall for a better view. His legs went weak.
The skeleton stood forty feet tall. It snatched two screaming gunmen from the ground in one bony fist and bit them in half, then stuffed the legs in, too. The remains fell into the skeleton’s rib cage, where they paused in mid-fall long enough for the bones to shed their flesh and viscera explosively and then join those of the monster. Blood and entrails rained down, staining the monster’s bones. And with the addition of new bones, the skeleton grew an inch or two.
The snapping of the skeleton’s jaws sent chills up Django’s spine, but he reached into his newly Awakened Root pool and raised his Earth defenses around him. They felt stronger than ever.
The final gunman unleashed his MP5 against the towering monstrosity, but he might as well have been throwing spit wads at Godzilla. A whining hail of ricochets careened in all directions.
Habu braced himself, raised his hands, and with a flurry of movements, gathered a burgeoning ball of yellow flame between his hands and his chest, then launched it like a blazing meteor at the skeleton. It exploded against the skeleton’s breastbone in a fireball twenty feet across. A blast of scorching heat singed and curled the carpet of leaves, as well as those still on the trees, filling the air with a blizzard of smoke and embers. The detonation drove the skeleton backward a step so that it tripped over the dais, knocking over the tomb and breaking it into pieces.
Django had never seen that kind of raw firepower before, no pun intended. Wielding such power openly in the mortal world was a kaiju-sized no-no. Then his Third Eye showed him the truth. Habu was not a Level Four, but a Level Five. Django was still seriously overmatched.
The gashadokuro toppled into the twenty-foot retaining wall and shattered into an avalanche of human bones. Just as quickly, though, the bones sprang back into the air and reformed the monster. Its eyes flared with white-hot hatred.
Yuka had a folding pocketknife in her hand. Fresh blood ran toward her hand from a cut on the back of her forearm. She pointed toward the monster, and a dragon, an Asian lung, squirmed into existence from her arm, writhing its serpentine body, two or three feet in diameter, into an undulating spiral, great claws extended, lion-like jaws gnashing, bulbous eyes gleaming, ruby scales glittering. A resplendent mane of white hair grew from its head and cheeks and in a dorsal bristle down its spine. It sprang through the air toward the skeleton.
Preparing another fireball, Habu snarled at Yuka, “Where the hell is he? What about the tracker?”
Sweat sheened her face as she concentrated on the dragon. Its great, sinuous body encircled the skeleton. She clenched her fists and drew them together. The lung cinched tight around the skeleton, crushing it like a python. The lung’s fangs chomped and tore at the back of the skeleton’s neck like a puppy with an over-sized bone.
Then Habu’s words registered. Tracker.
That’s how they had found him. They had planted a tracker on him and followed him. But how?
The ache in his
forearm.
The double sting Yuka had given him, once to knock him out, once to implant the tracker.
Yuka.
The realization struck him like a physical blow. Nausea shot through his stomach, driving his heart into his throat, choking off his breath. He knelt with his back to the stone wall below the courtyard terrace.
A white shape ghosted toward him through the undergrowth.
Cat said, “It seems the kami of the Scroll has summoned itself a guardian. I certainly wasn’t expecting to run into a gashadokuro this evening.”
“Yeah, that means the Scroll is—”
“Incredibly powerful, yes.”
A gashadokuro, translated as starving skeleton, was formed of the bones of warriors and victims of wars killed or starved to death but never given proper funerals.
Django said, “Maybe it doesn’t wish to be found, after all.”
Cat went on, “The Scroll has gathered to itself the bones of all the unheralded unfortunates who died at the behest of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The grudges they carried into death poisoned their bones and is now all that remains.”
“How do you know this?” Django trained his Third Eye directly upon his forearm and spotted a sliver of mahō luminescence.
“A little bird told me.”
“What?” Embedded just beneath the skin, a sliver of metal, thick as a sewing needle, half an inch long.
“Seriously. The birds around here are insufferable busybodies.”
“So how do we kill it?” Django withdrew a shuriken. He’d lost his dagger in the shockwave.
“You can’t. All we can hope for is to survive while it spends its rage.”
The last gunman’s scream ended with a wet, sickening crunch. The giant skeleton paused to scrape the dripping remains from its foot and stuff them into its chomping jaws.
“When will that be?” Django said, biting down on his lip as he stabbed the shuriken into his forearm.
“When you’re all dead, and what in the name of the gods are you doing?”
Django changed his grip on the shuriken to use one of the points to dig into the inch-long gash he’d just sliced in his forearm. Blood and bitterness welled freely. “Yuka implanted a tracker.”
“And you’re taking it out now? Surely they already know you’re here.”
Maybe it wasn’t the wisest tactical decision, but the need to have the foul, betraying thing out of him superseded reason.
Django asked, “What if we try to grab the Scroll and run?”
“It will happily chase us through populated areas. Reference my previous statement.”
The point of the blade touched a foreign object. Pain lashed up and down his arm, so he dulled it with a trickle of Celestial essence. A little deeper, a quick flick. There it lay on his forearm, a sliver of bloodstained copper, its mahō gleaming the same kind of scintillating colors as the disk in Yuka’s backpack. He flicked the sliver away and let out a long breath, trying to swallow the bitterness that Yuka had set him up.
Django gathered himself. The clatter and grind of all those bones was like a fork against tooth enamel, nails on a chalkboard, a high-speed drill into his skull. This close to the retaining wall, Django couldn’t see what was happening, only hear the gashadokuro’s awful jaws snapping together again and again.
He took up Xuan Yuan and whispered to Cat, “First priority, kill Habu.” If Habu was also a Level Four, he would have about the same amount of mahō essence to spend as Django. He needed to make Habu spend it as quickly as possible, to minimal effect. The bone beast might help in that regard.
“What about her?” Cat said.
Django sidestepped that question and circled toward the stairs, which would bring him up directly behind Yuka and Habu.
With each step he took, the kami of the earth and stone and mountain whispered to him, Avenge us this foul disturbance, this stain! Let us have peace! And with their voices came fresh knowledge, coalescing into patterns of new abilities with each step he took.
He ran up the steps and stopped ten feet behind Yuka. He raised Xuan Yuan high, opened his Root pool, and brought the pommel down onto the earth as hard as he could, channeling Earth essence into the blow. It struck a shockwave that threw a storm of gravel and rippled across the ground as if the stone were water. The shockwave threw Yuka and Habu airborne. Yuka landed face-first with an awkward splat and a cry of pain. Habu hovered in the air, three feet off the ground. The shockwave ripped across the distance to the skeleton, causing it to stumble and stagger, but it did not fall.
Django followed the shockwave with a slash at Habu. The arc of searing fire flashed over Habu’s head as he dropped to the ground in a crouch.
With Yuka’s concentration broken, the skeleton was able to loosen the lung’s grip enough to bite its body in half. She gasped and jerked once in pain.
The dragon’s coils slipped free and limp, falling toward the ground and dissipating into indigo smoke.
“You call that an earthquake?” Habu sneered. His hands glowed scarlet, and he plunged them into the stony ground as if it were water. The courtyard flagstones and the stones of the retaining walls leaped into the air, tons and tons of spinning rock.
Yuka scrambled away from Django as if knowing what was coming, her face alight with alarm.
Habu made a flinging motion with his hands straight at Django, and all those tons of stone crashed down upon him in a thundering rain that would have turned him into a bloody smear—except that he was no longer there.
He Blinked behind Habu and slashed. The arc of Sunblade fire splashed across a rippling, ephemeral barrier around Habu. Django slashed again and again in lightning succession, but Habu’s Fortress turned each blow aside. Gobbets of molten stone sizzled and smoked around their feet, gouged from the earth by the deflected power of Django’s strikes. Each time, his blows got closer to striking his target, whittling away at Habu’s defenses.
Then Habu’s palm erupted in a gout of flame that splashed across Django’s Fortress. Django backflipped away. Habu followed him with the stream of napalm fire, the same kind that had destroyed all those jorogumo in Jianghu, painting a conflagration across the courtyard.
Django Blinked into Habu’s shadow created by the flames, his duster smoking from the too-close call, and slashed again. The gleaming copper edge bounced between Habu’s shoulder blades, a blow that would have cleaved a human in two.
Coiling tentacles of intense blackness erupted from the shadows and ensnared Django’s wrists and ankles, yanking his limbs to extension and holding him fast.
Habu spun with a Falling Star Fist blazing and swung a roundhouse at Django’s head. The force of the blow slammed into Django’s Fortress, but the Fire-enhanced shockwave still stunned him. He sagged in the Shadow Coils for a moment as Habu drew back for a more powerful blow.
The Sword of Divinity sagged and twisted in his grip.
It severed the coil holding his sword arm.
With his arm free, he ducked Habu’s next blow easily. Habu had far more hand-to-hand skills than the average person, but he was not a black belt martial artist. Django blocked and ducked like a monkey, sparks flying from where their Fortresses ground together. In ninjutsu, he had learned how to deliver blocks to nerve points to deprive an attacker of his weapons, even fists, but with Habu’s Fortress still in place, those wouldn’t work.
Yuka hung back behind Habu, eyes brimming with indecision, shying away from the swath of flames Habu’s attack had left.
Then Habu’s hand exploded into a bouquet of scales and fangs, vipers as thick as an arm, heads the size of fists, inch-long fangs dripping with venom.
Their strikes peppered Django’s Fortress faster than his eyes could follow. He slashed at them, but they were too quick. The Sword of Divinity’s reach was unfamiliar, unlike his katana, which he could gauge within a hair’s breadth through long-practiced familiarity, but the vast power of his attacks was eating away Habu’s overconfidence—and his Fortress.
T
hen a huge skeletal hand snatched up Yuka, lifting her toward those bloody, snapping jaws.
She screamed, not with terror, but with outrage and determination. “No!”
She had one arm free, and she pointed it toward the skeleton’s bonfire eyes. A burst of pinkish-white chaff flew from her hand and sprayed over the skeleton’s face like an explosion of feathers. Sakura petals. A huge, blinding storm of them filled the skeleton’s cavernous eye sockets, then burst into flame from the heat. Another profusion of petals choked the flames.
Django changed targets, slashing the Sunblade toward the skeleton’s arm holding Yuka. The arc whooshed across the distance and severed the arm at the elbow.
Amid a rain of human bones and skulls, Yuka dropped twenty-five feet to the courtyard, hit feet-first, and rolled like a skydiver to absorb the impact.
Habu made a motion as if jerking a rug out from under Django’s feet.
Django was not thrown physically, but his spirit felt as if it were. His magical contact with the kami of the earth was cut off as if by a blade. The flow of Earth essence fueling his Fortress evaporated, and his defenses collapsed.
Before he could act, the snakes of Habu’s arm sprang at him again like a hydra, faster than a human eye could follow.
Django’s desperate slash beheaded three of them in one swipe, but the other two struck his hand and forearm. His duster blocked the bite on his forearm but not his hand. He cried out as agony lanced up his arm like white-hot flame, then a fast-spreading numbness. Unlike Yuka’s snakebite, this venom was not one from which he would awaken.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
YUKA SCRAMBLED TO HER feet, gasping for air from the skeleton’s crushing grip, and ran toward the fight between Habu and Kenji. Then she saw two of Habu’s snake heads latch onto Kenji’s sword arm, pumping their venom into him.
Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1) Page 25
