Soul Binder (Personas of Legend Book 1)

by Dante King

  I stood in the center of my little group, watching the creature warily.

  “Stay close,” I said. “Don’t attack it just yet. It wants us to approach. Let’s wait and see what...”

  There was a clanking, rattling noise, the screech of rusty metal on metal and a dry groaning sound. We glanced around, confused. In the cage, dangling from the scaffold, the Tengu woman was crouching, her back straight, looking down on the scene. She had woken from her slumber and discarded the rags that had covered her. Her elegant, long-fingered hands clutched the bars of her prison. I looked up, but except for a glint of eyes, I couldn’t see her face because of the shade cast by her hood.

  “Where’s that sound coming from?” Cara asked.

  “And what is it?” Toshiro added.

  My weapons were in my hands, but instinct told me I might be needing the armor of my Ironside Persona soon too. I glanced around.

  “There!” I said suddenly, pointing. “Look there!”

  It was the suits of armor.

  The rusty suits of ancient samurai armor were rising, jerking up into standing postures as if they were filled with living men again, but they were not.

  “It’s the skeletons! He’s raised the skeletons!” Cara’s frightened cry was true. Empty eye sockets stared from the shadow of helmets, and bony, gauntleted hands groped at the air as all the armored skeletons were wrenched back to a horrible mockery of life.

  That was where the clanking sound was coming from; it was the noise of many rusty armor plates grinding against each other. They rose up out of the dust like the spectral ghosts of ancient warriors, before they shambled toward us.

  “They’re everywhere!” Kai cried.

  She was right. As the corrupted Yakuna monster leaned back on his central stone block and howled with laughter, the entire landscape erupted with rusty figures.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Yakuna remained seated in the middle of the courtyard while the armored undead soldiers came at us from every direction, lumbering and groping forward with skeletal hands outstretched. There was no questioning that this was the darkest necromancy. These corpses had been raised from the dead to fight on the side of the Festering. Some were armed with rusty polearms and swords, but most were coming with claw-like hands extended toward us, as though they wanted to catch and tear us to pieces.

  “Cara!” I shouted. “Be ready with your lightning power! Kai, Toshiro, stay behind us and don’t risk yourselves. There’s magic to deal with here, and I doubt your swords will do much good against it.”

  It was time to try out my mace.

  I reached for the Ironside Persona and let out a battle roar as the strength of it flooded my body. The enormous mace was in my hands, and Cara was at my side with her bow at the ready. I made sure that Toshiro and Kai had their backs to the wall, then I waded into the approaching mass of rusty figures.

  I swung my mace, and the animated suits of armor crumpled like paper under the massive strikes of the powerful weapon. I circled it around my head and caved in the chest of an armored skeleton, then crushed another two on the back swing. The fallen skeletons tangled the feet of the others, and I stepped up and drove the mace’s head into the helmet of the leader. The skull inside the helmet shattered, and the whole suit crashed to the ground. There was a hollow scream from inside it.

  “Time to see what fire will do, I think!” I called to Cara.

  “Luckily you have just the right person for the job!” she called back.

  I glanced over at her to see her face alight with the joy of battle. She laughed out loud and loosed a flight of arrows into the midst of the armored skeletons.

  The resulting boom rocked the thick air of the gloomy hilltop, and pieces of bone and rusty armor flew flaming in all directions. Out of the smoke, another wave of the undead lumbered.

  Cara was treating her arrow with fire potion, so I ran in, tackling the biggest armored skeleton with my mace. He was armed with a naginata, and he caught my first blow on the shaft of his polearm and turned it, stepping back and trying to get enough distance between us to use the rusty blade. For a moment, I gazed into the darkness of his helmet. Twin points of glowing red burned deep in the skull’s black eye sockets.

  Battle-fury filled me, and I changed tack. I slammed the mace forward, just as I felt a rain of blows scoring my armor plating from behind. I drew on the stone shield spell, flinging up a curving wall of stone between me and my dead foes. With a twist of my will, I hurled the spell at them. It shattered into a million pieces and blasted outward with a wave of force that sent them flying backward in a hail of razor sharp stone fragments. Cara followed up with another rain of flaming arrows, clearing a space in the encroaching sea of rusty enemies. I fell back to talk to her.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  She nodded, a little breathless. We glanced back to see Kai and Toshiro standing with their backs to the stone wall and their swords at the ready. As I watched, a wave of armored skeletons came rushing around the corner. Kai leaped into action. As I looked at her, I caught her smile and her challenging glance as she charged, and I understood its meaning; she wanted to make sure I was seeing what she could do.

  Kai stepped up swiftly and swept her graceful sword through the necks of the first two who came at her. As they crumpled, a third raised a rusty samurai sword for a killing blow. She hit the skeleton’s sword with such force that it cracked in the middle. As she shoulder-barged the armored skeleton out of the way, Toshiro dived in to take out two others.

  “Their swords seem pretty effective after all,” Cara said wryly.

  “For now,” I said. “They’re buying us a little time. Let’s see if a fire arrow will have any effect on Yakuna.”

  The terrible, corrupted form of Yakuna still sat, squatting like a giant frog on the stone block at the center of the courtyard. He had grown, bursting out of his black robes to reveal gray, puckered skin. He was bloated, monstrously large, and his huge distended belly hung down between his legs. He looked like a bloated corpse that had floated in water for a week.

  Making a sound of disgust in her throat, Cara whipped an arrow out, treated it, and fired it. The potion-imbued projectiles multiplied in the air, but Yakuna made a gesture with one swollen hand, and the fire burst before it hit him. I snatched a throwing axe from my belt and threw it at Yakuna, but that too met an invisible force and clanked to the ground. I reached my hand forward, and the throwing axe returned to me, but it was no use trying again. It was as if Yakuna was protected under an invisible dome of glass.

  “He’s got a protective barrier like the one which stopped us at the border!” I exclaimed.

  “No time to wonder how to get past it now,” Cara said. “Look!”

  I looked where she was pointing. Kai was hard-pressed by a crowd of the armored skeletons, and one had got between her and Toshiro, separating them from each other.

  Cara lifted her hand. She held the humble-looking Tree Persona staff, ready to use. She raised it up. I kept one eye on Yakuna while I whirled my mace and smashed back a sudden wave of armored skeletons that attacked from the side, trying to push a wedge in between me and my friends.

  Then Cara struck.

  The emerald lightning that blasted in an expanding circle out from her staff made a great bright light in the gloomy Festered haze of the ruined castle. The crackling blast ripped out from her, ran up the suits of armor, and smashed them to bits as it exploded.

  The blast had bought us a bit of time, but Cara was starting to shake with the effort of containing the magical energy.

  “Cara!” I shouted, sprinting toward her through the piles of broken enemies.

  “Leo! I can’t control it!”

  I ran up to her and grabbed the staff. I gritted my teeth as the force of the Persona’s magic flooded through me. Ironside’s essence seemed to reach out through my armor and begin to absorb the energy.

  Together, Cara and I began to bring the emerald lightning under control.
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  That was when Yakuna decided to make his move.

  He had become an amorphous thing, a massive, bloated corpse-like giant. He stood on his stone block now and raised his sagging arms. The voice of the Festering boomed out an incantation that darkened the very air with its evil influence.

  “To me!” he called. “To me!”

  Kai and Toshiro had made it over to where we stood, but now the air was full of a rain of flying metal. All the suits of armor we had broken were rising up from where they had fallen and were knifing through the air toward Yakuna. They hit his massive form and coalesced around him.

  “Now! Now!” I shouted. “We have to try the projectile weapons again! Cara, get your bow ready!”

  I reached for Kitsune, and the shinobi aspect washed over me with a cool wave. I reached to my shuriken sash and pulled a handful of shuriken stars out, feeling the cold magic nearly burning with its intensity.

  Cara fired a volley of arrows at the same time as I hurled a flight of shuriken stars. Fire and ice combined into a massive explosion, but as before, the thick orange flames and black smoke washed around Yakuna as if he were covered with a glass shield.

  Nika, the woman in the cage, screamed wordlessly.

  A sudden thought struck me. “The Persona powers! Let’s combine the Persona powers as we did before, but this time, let’s use them to counter a spell!”

  Cara looked hopeful. “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “There’s a chance it might work. What spell?”

  I didn’t have to think about it. “The lightning. It will flow along the ground and up under his shield. We can blast his spell from the inside outward.”

  “I’m ready,” she said, looking grim but determined.

  “We’ll hold off any enemies from this side while you do it,” Kai said, and Toshiro nodded. The horde of armored skeletons hung back for the moment, but they still menaced us from a distance with their swords and rusty spears.

  “Now!” I said to Cara.

  Together, we reached for the spirit realm, and as we did so, Cara slammed the staff into the ground and sent a bolt of lightning along the ground toward the obscene figure of Yakuna. Metal was slamming onto him from every side, and he was beginning to look as if he were some gigantic titan made of rusty steel. He roared with glee in his strength and power, and he laughed and beat his chest as more and more metal flew to him to build up his armor.

  Cara and I were like a single combined awareness, hanging somewhere between the material world and the spirit realm. I could perceive her clearly and could also see the delicate way she held the lightning spell. I reached for her and wrapped my control of the spell around hers. I felt like a master swordsman gripping the timid hand of the apprentice to show her how to grip.

  Instinctively, she understood. Her control of the magic steadied and expanded, and I fed my strength into the spell. The effect was massive. The lightning crackled along the ground, rushed up Yakuna’s stone block, and crackled around him. It blasted outward, filling and giving shape to the previously invisible dome that he used to protect himself.

  Yakuna roared and gloated; the lightning didn’t seem to be able to harm him. But harming him with the lightning was not our plan.

  “Now!” I said to Cara, and together we put all of our power into blasting outward with the spell.

  There was a deafening crack as his protective barrier shattered like an eggshell under a hammer, and the shockwave threw everyone except me onto their backs. It washed around me like water around a stone. Yakuna roared his rage.

  His protective field was broken.

  In my mind’s eye, as clearly as if it were painted in front of me, I saw General Koshu, Yasei, and our other companions. The magical barrier holding them back broke, and they saw it. Like a gush of fetid water through a breaking dam, the Festering poured out around them, washing up the green valley and over the ridge, turning all the land gray, brown, and rotten.

  Luckily, Cara’s potion was still affecting them, and they didn’t lose their courage. The horses screamed, and the tiger-like Byakko roared, but the riders were grim-faced and ready. Koshu gave the order and they thundered into the plain.

  The vision passed.

  Cara was clutching my hand. “We did it!” she cried. “We broke the barrier!”

  “And Koshu and the others are coming. It won’t be long before they get here.”

  “Let’s finish this horror off before they arrive,” Cara said fiercely.

  “You keep Yakuna busy with arrows. I have an idea.”

  She nodded once, and as another wave of armored skeletons rushed her, Kai and Toshiro leaped into action, holding the attackers off while Cara loaded up her bow and fired.

  Still wearing the shinobi aspect of the Kitsune Persona, I sprinted toward the grotesquely armored Yakuna as fast as I could. Fire bloomed all over him as Cara’s arrows landed home, but through the thick plate metal, they couldn’t do much good. I could have tried using a coat of ice to blow his armor off, but I had another idea.

  I wanted to try out my misdirection power.

  As I sprinted over the ground toward him, his huge, mad eyes followed me. When I was just a few yards away from him, he raised up his hands. He now held a massive metal sword. It was rusted and filthy, a mockery of the beauty and grace of true Samurai swords. His voice gurgled and cackled wetly in his throat as he readied a swing.

  I was headed for his right hand side, and that was where he aimed his swing. I used my teleportation ability at the last moment, and my previous position was hazed in a cloud of smoke while my body appeared on his left side. As soon as my feet hit the ground, I triggered my misdirection spell. His head swiveled from left to right, his bulbous eyes passing over me as though I wasn’t standing at his feet. I saw his eyes widen and his teeth pull back into a snarl.

  “Where have you gone, Soul Binder?” Yakuna howled. “Are you really so cowardly as to flee from battle when your companions still fight?”

  Not knowing how long it would work for, I changed direction at a sharp angle, dashing toward his left side. I had a kusarigama in my right hand, the ball and chain attachment on the top swinging. I flung the ball toward him, and the long chain snaked around his upper arm. He saw me then—I couldn’t keep the misdirection spell up while I was actually attached to him by a chain—but the spell had served its purpose. He’d missed me, and I was under his guard. I was able to pull myself toward him on the chain.

  “You use the art of the shinobi?” he questioned. “I thought such tricks were beneath the Soul Binder.”

  “I use whatever I can to rid the world of evil such as you!” I yelled as I grabbed the chain and started to scale Yakuna as if he were a cliff.

  I ran up the misshapen armor, using the chain and my twin kusarigamas like ice picks to haul myself up. He was huge, easily five times my height now, and he stank like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Fire billowed around him as Cara’s arrows thudded into his armor.

  “Go on, Leo!” she shouted, firing at his legs.

  He stamped and roared, tormented by the flames and enraged at how I had tricked him. He was big, but he was slow. As I climbed him, he battered ineffectually at me with his free hand, flailing his sword around in the air with the other.

  I reached his shoulder, leaping up there with my kusarigama in my hand. His head was ten paces long, and he turned his face to try to bite me with sword-like teeth, but I dodged him. I slammed my long, cruelly sharp kusarigama blade into his ear, puncturing the drum. He howled in pain, and black blood sprayed out and soaked me. The stench was incredible, but I leaped up and continued climbing.

  When I reached the round dome of the top of his head, I transformed into the Ironside Persona and reached for my mace.

  In the Ironside persona, I was much bigger and much heavier. My sheer weight anchored me on the slick, rotten skin of his head.

  I raised my mace and put every ounce of weight and every glimmer of power into the swing as I smashed
it into his head. His skull crumpled, his devilish eyes popped from their sockets, and his brain splattered beneath the force of my blow.

  Then the giant Yakuna exploded.

  Bits of him went everywhere, soaking the whole hilltop in a foul, steaming mess of rotten flesh and hot metal. I fell through him, the weight of the Ironside Persona bringing me down with a crash into the middle of the mess.

  The shockwave of my landing blasted wreckage away from me on either side. All trace of the Festering was washed away in a rush of power. The armor suits fell lifeless to the ground, and even they seemed like noble monuments to ancient bravery rather than the foul relics they had been beforehand.

  The clouds parted, and the sunlight came rushing in like a cleansing sea over sand.

  “Thank you, Soul Binder,” a voice whispered, as though carried on a breeze. “Thank you for freeing me.”

  In the distance of the now green and pleasant hillside, I saw a flash of red, white, and black: Koshu and the rest of the party were approaching.

  Cara strode toward me, her arms outstretched.

  “We did it, Leo!” she shouted. “We defeated him! We won!”

  She clasped my hand in a warrior’s grip, then flung her arms around me.

  I understood her elation. It had felt like we might lose for a little while there, especially because Toshiro and Kai did not have the magical abilities we had. The sooner we could bring Kai into the magical circle of power and give her the ability to use Persona powers and spells, the better.

  Toshiro and Lady Kai approached, expressions of relief on their faces.

  “My dear friend, Yakuna,” Toshiro said as he stared at the spot where I’d obliterated Yakuna. “To think that this was his final end.”

  “I’m not sure that’s his end,” I said. “I think, somehow, his spirit lives on.”

  “As a Persona?” Lady Kai asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. “All I know is that something spoke to me at the end there. It thanked me. I believe it was Yakuna’s true self.”