The Way of Death

by James Von Ohlen

  Reiji.

  Reiji.

  REIJI.

  Glory to the Ikeda!

  Where had that come from? Reiji wondered as he basked in the warmth of their praise. He didn’t remember having any such thoughts before. It had come to him in a dream, he concluded as images of the nocturnal visions danced through his head. Great slaughter and cities burning.

  Or perhaps he had wanted to do exactly that all along, and only now, was he facing the possibility, no, the necessity, of doing so. With what meager arms he possessed, he had proven more than a match for all Cent-Sec he had crossed paths with.

  How many of them lay dead behind him? How many now heard his name in fearful whispers back in their barracks, dreading being summoned to join a team dispatched with him as their target? Would they even dare to fight him if he came for them?

  No. The smart ones, at least, would flee. Only the stupid would fight and die. The very smartest might even beg for mercy and then pledge their allegiance to him. Time would tell.

  Looking to the distant future, something Reiji had done infrequently throughout his life, he knew he would need more weapons. More soldiers for such a thing. Cutting down each stupid man on the face of Lexington, one by one, would take decades. Centuries probably.

  He had no idea what it was that Gavin sought. The man wasn’t all there mentally, but Reiji strongly suspected a cache of military weaponry or something to that effect lay at the end of the old man’s journey.

  Reiji would find the man and cut the information from him. Piece by piece if need be. And then he would gather the hardest of the wastelanders to him, as soldiers and cannon fodder. He would have his weapons and he would have his army.

  Reiji knelt once more and paid his respect to the ancestors. A force of habit when dealing with them, but this time something was different. As if he actually felt some small degree of kinship with them, if not outright reverence.

  As he knelt, strong hands laid upon his shoulder and Reiji looked up to see his father. Smiling as he had when Reiji was a boy and had done something clever or entertaining. Behind him the whole host of the grandfathers stood.

  “This is no exit for a Warlord,” the man said as he squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Walk with us.”

  Reiji did as he was bid, and the grandfathers led him to a wall that shifted to a large wooden gate at his approach. It swung open as war drums sounded in the distance, summoning warriors to battle. A large stone courtyard lit by torches, not unlike the courtyard of Tower Two, stretched before him.

  Faceless samurai appeared there, clad in their finest heavy armor and carrying the sharpest blades. As one they turned to face Reiji and saluted. This all seemed a bit much to him. He had only said that he would become a great warrior and bring war to his enemies. He’d done very little work in that direction.

  “We are bonded to you by more than blood, son,” Reiji’s father spoke at his side. “Our minds touch in some places, and we can sense what is in yours. The contempt you had for all of us when you first came here. Thinking that the ceremonies were bullshit.” He paused and laughed.

  “All of us felt the same way, but eventually we came to see the utility of it all. How everything was just one small piece of the puzzle that would forge us into a greater warrior.

  “And we can see the truth in your words. You fully intend to do just what you have said. This,” he motioned to the assembled host of warriors. “Is a preview of things to come.”

  “The honor of our clan is reborn,” one of the grandfathers spoke.

  Reiji knelt once more, paying respect to the grandfathers and feeling the stone of the courtyard dig into his skin as he did so. Touching his forehead to the ground, he reached up and removed the data plug from his neural interface implant.

  Another successful bout of training behind him, Reiji returned to the physical world around him. Namely the driver’s seat of the APC. Some thousand kilometers beyond whatever was left of Fort Houston, yet still surrounded by barren, rocky desert. This fucking thing doesn’t really end, he mused.

  The details of his experience in the training hall began to fade, like a dream. If he concentrated on them hard enough, he could remember them. The feel of the blades jarring against one another or the unmistakable way it vibrated ever so slightly as it cut through flesh. That was well and good, but what really mattered was the neural imprint of his combat sessions.

  How to not get himself killed in a fight.

  The training sessions had definitely been different as of late, he thought as he plugged in to the APC and adjusted to its input. The grandfathers actually seemed to want him to be there.

  The last of their line had a purpose in life, and was crushing all in his path on his way to fulfilling his mission. For some reason that pleased them far more than when he’d been gutting petty criminals and amassing a small fortune in doing so. A man with a purpose, they had said as they spoke of him.

  No longer Ronin, that despised thing of no honor, but now Samurai.

  Reiji pointed out that he served no master as they had implored him to do so often in the past. How could he be samurai, he had asked. Their answer had been unexpected.

  You now strive to ascend as a warlord and master of this world. You no longer need a master, but you become one. Reiji had paused at that and laughed to himself. The training hall must have been digging deep into his subconscious to come up with that.

  He’d had a dream the night before of being banished from the capital and to the wastelands, pretty much the situation he found himself in now. But in the dream he had gained a valuable prize after cutting his way across the face of the world. Ancient war machines and powerful warriors became his to command as he returned to civilization and ground it beneath his heel. Bringing the whole stinking, rotting thing down in flames and building anew from the ashes as he saw fit.

  His thoughts had lingered on the dream as he entered training. That was likely what the ancestors had sensed in him. Mistaking his thoughts of fancy for a grim, new determination.

  They had been pleased. And then they had attacked him mercilessly in training. Spears, bows, knives, swords, axes. You name it, and they had killed him with it. Men with and without armor hacked and shot him to the ground. Over and over until he learned how to defeat each weapon he faced. Each time he rose and corrected his path, defeating his foes, the ancestors voiced their approval.

  And each time he left the training hall, they gave him a warning. Be careful lest the monster you have created destroy you. The same bullshit over and over. He guessed that they meant he would face some change within himself over the course of his mission. Unlikely, he thought.

  Reiji found it nothing if not irritating.

  Leaving the training hall for the day, he was looking forward to a few moments of peace. The boy slept and Reiji drove in silence.

  Some hours into the night, the APC reported to him that something out there was alive and moving. A group of some things to be exact. After some playing with the sensors and optics, Reiji received an estimation that it was men and horses. He activated the camouflage and veered from his path.

  How much could it hurt to see what it was? And if there were animals and people out there, that likely meant water. The vehicle slowed to a crawl as Reiji adjusted course. The sounds of the engines became almost nothing as the sound dampeners activated as well.

  The stealth abilities of the APC were good. Good enough that Reiji wanted to run them constantly. But there were limits to how fast the vehicle could move under those conditions. And in his mind, the faster they reached their destination, the better. Once there, he would be able to track Gavin’s movements since leaving the installation. It would be as good as a map in his hands allowing Reiji to follow his prey.

  And then find him and kill him.

  Slowly the APC crept towards a low rise, pausing a few times as it advanced. From the safety of his near-invisible, mobile armored fortress, Reiji watched them move. They were relaxed and unconcern
ed that they might be watched. Of course, out here, what were the odds that there would be anyone at all to see them?

  A group of men, mounted on horses, actual fucking horses, he thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one in person. Only the super wealthy on Lexington owned them. Some anachronistic reminder of past nobility, or some garbage like that. Reiji wondered if the men who owned those horses realized their true value.

  Not as status symbols and things to be shown off. Not some simulacra like the ridiculous thing that Gavin had ridden into the desert. In a few short generations, actual horses might be the only reliable transportation left on the planet.

  Reiji looked over the tribesman on their mounts, still at quite some distance. Magnified and illuminated by night vision. It was like something out of the movies he’d watched as a kid. Only as a kid though, he made sure to remind himself. As an adult he had far more valuable uses for his time.

  Four of them in total. Filthy men wearing little more than rags and carrying spears. Lots of them, too. Each man looked to have four or five at least. They rode their horses down a gentle slope of bare rock, next to a slash of green things growing there. Tenuously clinging to life in a place defined by its absence.

  A sure sign that water was up there. The riders leaving the watering hole after seeing that their horses were taken care of was a good sign. Maybe the water wouldn’t be poisonous.

  The APC could supposedly purify heavily saline and polluted water, and produce drinkable liquid from it. But Reiji had no desire to find out if that function was still working. He swallowed once as he watched the horsemen move.

  His throat was dry and irritated. There was water in the APC’s tanks, but it was running low. Not knowing when they’d find more, he had rationed it out to himself and the boy.

  They were close to their destination. It should be visible just about any hour now, Reiji thought. But then again, he had no idea what he was looking for. Just a description of the abilities of the installation, and the general area in which it could be found. Global position coordinates, still valid despite the last time the system received maintenance having been some two centuries ago.

  How much longer could that last? Reiji wondered what would happen first, the reactors and batteries running the system died, or gravity finally pulled them down to Lexington. No matter though. What did matter was that they were still there and they had led Reiji to the doorstep of his destination.

  Now that he was here though, it might take some intense and drawn out searching to find it. It was plausible that he and Tod might run out of water before they found it. Reiji looked to his left as he thought of the simpleton.

  Tod lay there, sleeping like always, in the copilot’s chair. The boy was changing so much that it might not even be correct to call him a boy anymore. Literally everything he ate seemed to be turning into muscle. The narrow frame he’d started with was as filled out as any weightlifter of at least a few years that Reiji had seen before.

  In the few weeks that Reiji had been training the boy, he’d gained a huge amount of weight and strength. Seemingly impossible with the food they’d been eating. But the boy wasn’t picky. The supply of MREs that was supposed to be enough for two men for several months was already running low.

  Despite Reiji having been hard at his physical training for some decade or so longer than the boy had even been alive, Tod was rapidly catching up to him in strength. It was only a matter of a few weeks more until the boy surpassed him.

  And his face…the boy’s face was changing as well. Growing broader through the jaw and leaner by the day. It was becoming a man’s face seemingly right before Reiji’s eyes. Puberty compressed entirely into a few weeks.

  If that option had been available when Reiji was a punk-ass thirteen year old, he’d have killed to be able to do it.

  The scar on the side of the simpleton’s head still stood out, in stark contrast with its surroundings. The dirty blonde hair gave way to bare scalp and the pink angry lump of scar tissue. The skull had corrected its shape, but the scar remained.

  Perhaps, Reiji considered, it was incorrect to think of the boy as a simpleton as well. That had undoubtedly been the case when they’d first met. But now, something was happening. As the boy’s body developed, so did his mind.

  Reiji could see the intelligence burning behind his eyes. The way he communicated was continually improving too, and the boy even seemed angry and frustrated that his mouth couldn’t seem to work as fast as his mind was beginning to.

  Reiji found himself wondering when the process would stop. Would all of it continue until Tod was the size of Onryo and twice as strong, with the brainpower to match? Unlikely, but more seemed to be on the menu for now.

  Tod stirred in his seat and opened his eyes, slowly looking about the pilot’s cabin. His gaze fell upon the screen that showed those without neural interface implants what the APC could see with its sensors. He squinted for a second as he looked at it.

  “They’re bringing horses away from there, and there’s plants growing too. There must be water there,” he said, easily drawing the same conclusion that Reiji had. No great leap of inductive reasoning there, but far beyond the abilities of the boy Reiji had met some weeks before.

  “You recognize the horses?” Reiji asked, curious where the boy had seen the before. “Where have you seen one before?”

  “I think it was in a book I read as a kid,” Tod answered. “I guess I used to be able to read.” There was no slur in his voice and he was beginning to remember long ago things. Reiji nodded.

  “We’ll wait until they’re gone and then take what water we can from the spring,” Reiji said. Tod nodded in agreement.

  “Good idea,” he added. “We don’t know how many of them there are.” Tod paused and worked his hands over the APC sensor display. “And that,” he pointed.

  The image grew in Reiji’s mind, zooming in on the spears carried by the warriors. They were and odd shape. He called up a long range scan of the weapons through the APC and it confirmed what he was beginning to suspect and what Tod had already concluded.

  Several of the spears were tipped not with blades, but with shaped charges. The kind that blasted holes right through armor and killed whoever was unfortunate enough to be on the inside of it, regardless of how many medical nanobot injections they’d given themselves prior.

  The explosives were originally intended for delivery from weaponry mounted on armored vehicles or on large men’s shoulders. The firing mechanism and shape of the payload caused the explosion to be directed in a specific place, usually directly to the front, to concentrate its power into punching through armor. The kind of thing that made a neat hole in the side of a tank, and utterly destroyed the crew inside.

  Overlord wasn’t having any of that though.

  Reiji was surprised that he hadn’t seen more men doing things like that in the past. Then again, setting off explosives might not get Overlord’s attention, but it would bring down the weight of Cent-Sec. The military arm of a failing government was still a military force, after all. Better to escape their interest. Reiji snorted as the thought passed through his mind.

  Was that what he was doing tearing across the great wastes in stolen military equipment and leaving a trail of destruction in his wake? Remaining unnoticed? Here’s hoping, he concluded.

  He looked back to the spears. The warheads seemed to be carried on shafts that were a meter or two longer than the others. The way the weapons were supposed to work would allow a man using such a spear as a handheld instrument, and not thrown, to avoid injury while causing maximum damage to his foes. If he was stronger than almost everyone else on the face of Lexington, he might even be able to retain his grip on the shaft of the spear when the warhead went off.

  Still, only a man who gave little value to his own life or was insane would deploy such a weapon. And here Reiji was, looking at a group of five or so of them.

  All the more reason to take a cautious approach.<
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  Reiji brought the APC to a stop and watched the horsemen moved across the barren landscape, eventually disappearing behind an outcrop some five hundred meters away. That was likely far enough to approach without being noticed.

  The vehicle began to move again, slowly. Reiji imagined that he could get out and walk along side it. He probably could have, but there was a significantly greater chance he’d be spotted. Moving undetected about a large city was easy work as far as he was concerned. Something he’d done for nigh on two decades. Moving around out in the open without being seen was something else entirely. Best leave it to the professionals. Or at least their military vehicles.

  Time seemed to crawl even slower than the APC, but Reiji waited it out. Full scanners ran as the vehicle crested the low ridge, keeping a constant distance away from the scant vegetation marking the trail of the stream, lest its disturbance give away their presence.

  The vehicle came to a rest near a pool of water, reflecting the light of the moon. The babbling of the water as it rose and spilled over the edge of the natural bowl was the only sound in this place. When he was satisfied that there was no one there, Reiji brought the vehicle to a stop and opened his door.

  Stepping out into the cold air of the night was refreshing. A breeze worked its way through the stubble of his hair and beard and he took a deep breath, enjoying the sensation. Tod emerged a few seconds later, carrying a small electronic device and a hose.

  The boy moved to the edge of the water and lowered the tip of the device into it, in a few seconds it showed a blinking green light. Safe to drink. Taking care to make no unnecessary noise, Tod attached the hose to a port on the side of the armored vehicle and then placed the other end in the water.

  With a slight slurping noise, the vehicle began to refill its tanks. With sword in hand, Reiji stooped down near the water and grabbed a handful of it, rubbing it over his face and the back of his neck. Things always seemed slightly less shitty when he could bathe on a regular basis. Whether that was actually true or not remained to be seen.