Rise of the Sword Saint: A Reincarnation Epic Fantasy Saga (Kensei Book 2)

by DB King

  Jin nodded. “Hirata cannot muster a legion of conscripts. At best, we can offer five hundred warriors for the war effort and nothing more. We need warriors to stay behind and defend their homes, in case the war ever reaches us, which it eventually will.”

  He needed warriors to man the walls, to operate his machines, and to fight in the strategic choke points that would open up as the enemy inevitably looked to climb over the town fortifications. At the very least, Jin needed other people to hold back the enemy long enough for him to unleash a veritable tide of magical destruction upon them. He possessed more than enough power to decimate an entire army by himself. The biggest unknown was the possibility of an enemy mage. But that was neither here nor there. Jin could only hope to plan for the future and its many possibilities, but there was only so much he could do alone.

  His uncle nodded. “Hirata is a small fief. Lord Izayoi will not be expecting much from me—if anything at all. However, our warriors possess weapons and armors of a much higher quality than the rags and sticks the other lords give their conscripts. And you have ensured that they receive adequate training in the arts of war.”

  “They have enough discipline to stand their ground and raise their spears in the face of a cavalry charge, at the very least,” Jin assured, feeling rather proud of the warriors who’d been under his care. Quite a lot of the rowdy young men had been incensed at the thought of learning under a ten-year-old, but Jin very quickly silenced them by means of effective and efficient violence. “I have faith in them. They will serve you well in the war, uncle.”

  “War?” Arima repeated, chuckling softly as he stood and downed one last cup of sake, before walking toward the window and leaning against the ledge. His eyes were downcast as Jin followed him. “This great nation is going to fall. Moyatani will drown in its own blood and the people will suffer for it. Warlords will rise and society as we know it will collapse. We stand at the precipice of great and terrible changes, Jin. Is it war, or is it revolution?”

  Jin stepped forward and looked out the window. The servants had already finished cleaning up the remains of the garden and Ebisu was unlikely to blow it up again anytime soon. The sun had long since fallen asleep and much of the village was illuminated only by the lamps of Jin’s designs.

  “It’s both, I think,” he said. “War and revolution often go hand in hand.”

  They stood in silence for a time, merely looking out the window as the wind rolled by and blew over them. Jin looked upon Hirata and smiled softly. He was the one who built this place. His uncle had ruled over a nameless village in some forgotten place in the eastern province—but Jin had turned that useless, backwater village into a hub of trade, industry, and science. And it was still growing. Soon, this place would become something even bigger than the capital, dwarfing it in both stature and wealth. In a time of great social and economic upheaval, the people of Moyatani would look upon Hirata and they would look upon it with awe—Jin’s first masterpiece upon the waking world.

  He did not want it to die and disappear into rubble, turned to ruins by some passing army of marauders. No, Jin could not accept such a fate. Hirata was the beginning of something wonderful. It was actual proof that he could build and nurture, not just destroy and conquer. Hirata was the first example in his new life that he’d fulfilled his promise to himself and to his friend.

  Jin sighed and turned to his uncle. A single tear was running down Arima’s cheek. “Will you leave tomorrow, uncle?”

  Arima nodded. “I will leave in the morning, before Ebisu awakens. Before that, I will cook his favorite meal. Tell him I made it, will you, Jin?”

  Jin nodded wordlessly. His uncle continued, “I ride for Uzaboto soon after. You will gather five hundred of our warriors and tell them to march to Chobei within three days. I will meet them there.”

  Jin lowered his head. “As you command, uncle. But what will I tell your son, uncle?”

  Arima huffed and forced out a chuckle. “Tell him his father rides at the head of a massive host. Tell him his father will charge his enemies head first and return victorious. Tell him whatever lie you can to ease the burden of my absence. Will you do this for me, Jin?”

  Jin sighed. He didn’t want to lie to his student. Ebisu deserved to know the truth, at least. His father would very likely not be in the front lines, as commanders always did their work from behind. His father would very likely die, especially in the event of a retreat, because lords were always hunted down first. And that there was very little glory in war, as opposed to the books that seemed to worship the acts of the bushi. Ebisu deserved to know, even at such a young age, the harsh reality that was to become his life. He deserved to know that, despite his powers, loss was something that happens to every person.

  And yet Jin also had the very simple option to save Ebusi from the pain of losing his father. Arima wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t even a good leader or a competent commander. His death was almost certainly assured, unless he managed to learn decades’ worth of military tactics within the next few months. And still, Ebisu was just a child. Was it really so evil to let him dream of better, happier things at his age? Was it really evil to allow him to sleep soundly at night in the knowledge that his father was safe and sound?

  Ah, this was probably why Jin was terrible with children, save for the strangely mature ones. The Hollowed Knight often spoke of how he should have opened a school for magical children, where they might learn to harness their powers without blowing themselves up in the process. Valden had tried, he really did, but Valden had had no idea how to talk to children or how to understand them, and so he’d given up. It was only through some divine miracle that Jin was even capable of teaching anything to Ebisu.

  Jin groaned and ran his hand through his hair.

  “I will… try my best,” he said. “But I can’t make promises based on lies. I will tell Ebisu what he needs to know, uncle.”

  Arima smiled. “That is all I wish, Jin.”

  The older man turned and laid a hand on Jin’s right shoulder. His eyes were strangely focused and steely for a man who’d just downed several cups of sake. “I want you to lead Hirata, Jin. Use your otherworldly knowledge and lead this place in my stead.”

  Jin stiffened.

  But Arima continued, “I do not know how or why, but I know that you are not of this world, nephew. Your wisdom, your knowledge, and your strength… Please, use them for a noble cause. Protect the people, lead them, and become the man you were meant to be. You may not have found a reason for why you were brought into this world, Jin, but you can give yourself a reason for why you should live.” Arima finished, letting go of Jin’s shoulder and slowly walking away, his eyes losing their focus and sharpness. “Protect the people, Jin. Protect the people.”

  His uncle left his office and proceeded up the stairs and into his room, presumably to pray and enact whatever last rites he wanted to. Jin stood in place, eyes narrowed as he turned and leaned into the edges of the open window. What a perceptive man you are, uncle, he thought. If only you were blessed with a strong mind and an even stronger body, you would’ve carved out a name for yourself in the history of this world as a peerless warrior.

  How did he figure it out? Was it all just his unnatural perception? Was it some sort of cognitive ability? Then again, Jin figured it hardly mattered. His uncle, despite his meekness, was far more than met the eye, and he had seen what all others failed to see. Huh, did Hamada notice anything peculiar about me, or did he just brush everything away as me being some sort of incredible prodigy?

  He shook his head and sat down, eyeing the dark, gray clouds in the distance. Jin then grabbed the whole bottle of sake and drank the whole thing dry. His face flushed red as he laid on the floor and sighed. “I guess… I have a purpose now, huh?”

  It wasn’t a terrible purpose. Defending the weak and the innocent sounded a little infantile, but that had been his dream once upon a time when he lived at the top of a nameless mountain, playing with wooden swo
rds and eating apple pie, and sleeping to the sound of his mother’s beautiful voice. The young Valden had wished to become a knight, who defended the people from evil monsters and cruel tyrants. He had wished to do so alongside his friend, who did become a knight, but of a different kind.

  In this new world, he could live out that dream and turn it into reality. Valden became the very thing he’d once dreamed of defeating and driving away, but Murasaki Jin was different. He could become a hero—not a demon, but a true hero, who defended and nurtured the weak and the innocent.

  Could I become a hero?

  Well, if he could take the highest throne and smite down the gods themselves, then becoming a hero should be rather easy. But what does that even mean?

  His first step, regardless, would be to defend Hirata and ensure the safety of its people, no matter the cost. Arima surely knew that he was going to die in the coming war. There was no way he could survive. The defense and nurturing of Hirata was his final wish, and Jin was prepared to do everything in his power to fulfill that wish.

  Jin lingered in Arima’s office for another hour. Having taken another bottle of premium sake from his uncle’s hidden cache, Jin took to drinking the night away as he’d done numerous times in his youth. But the magic that coursed through his body would not allow the alcohol to dull his mind, no matter how much he drank and how many bottles he’d downed. Disappointed, Jin walked out of his uncle’s office and walked into his room. As soon as he stepped foot inside, however, he froze.

  “Now… just how did you get here?” he muttered, eyes narrowing.

  At the center of his room, a ring of dust surrounding it, was the family heirloom that he’d taken from the Murasaki treasury many years ago. He’d almost forgotten it even existed after trying numerous times to pry it open and finally giving up after it never did. Though it looked to be made of mundane wood, the heirloom was surely protected by some extremely powerful magic that kept anyone from opening it. And so it had remained at the bottom of his storage chest, where he kept most of his important belongings, alongside Agito. The days and the weeks and months flew by and his mind simply forgot about the tiny wooden box from five years ago.

  After all, he couldn’t get the thing to open no matter how hard he tried.

  And now, somehow, it was there, on the floor. A hellish script of unknown origin, crimson symbols as though etched in blood, were scattered all around the surface of the heirloom. It emitted a strong, magical stench that reminded Jin of a gruesome and bloody battlefield, where millions died and blood flowed and seeped into the soil, creating a crimson marshland, filled with corpses upon corpses, piled atop each other, and all the while carrion birds circled above.

  He had seen plenty of those—far too many for one life.

  Jin took another step toward it and stopped immediately. This presence…

  He knew it from somewhere. Whatever was inside of the heirloom was seeping outward, and the presence that emanated from it was somehow familiar. It was dark, evil, and malicious, but it was also unbearably powerful—a magical energy whose magnitude was far beyond anything Jin had ever known. It was so powerful that the energies were actively pushing him back—away from the heirloom. Jin couldn’t take another step forward, even if wanted to.

  “What is going on?!” Undeterred, Jin pushed back against the wave of evil magic. He took another step forward and felt the skin peel off his right foot. Jin braved through it—he’d been through worse. He took another step and all the skin from his shins to his foot disappeared in an instant.

  It didn’t matter. He would heal all of it back anyway.

  Jin took another step forward and felt his flesh stripping from his bones as the dreadful energies assaulted every fiber of his being. Where do I remember this magic?

  It came from a brief and distant memory, something he’d felt in passing.

  It flashed in his mind’s eye, a statue of a demon in his family’s treasury.

  Jin’s eyes widened. “The Asura.”

  The energies exploded outward and sent him flying through a wall.

  Chapter 14

  A wave of malice and darkness exploded out from the lord’s manor. Those with magic in their blood looked and saw and felt a great terror, rising into the sky, a titan of wrath and ruin, given form. They witnessed a specter, towering above the clouds themselves, wreathed in black flames, eyes aglow with eldritch lights, bearing aloft a blade of ash and shadow.

  The common folk shivered and felt a deep dread creeping into their souls and making their skin crawl and their hairs stand on end. Those who lie asleep and dreaming thrashed and turned in their beds, beset by torturous nightmares of ancient battlefields and rotting corpses, millions upon millions of lost souls groaning and moaning for release, their near-skeletal hands reaching out to some unseen savior that would never come.

  Great black clouds converged over the earth. The stars disappeared and all the lights seemed to dim as the shadows in every corner grew.

  “What’s going on?!” one of the guards yelled at his fellow patrolmen.

  The darkness was growing. The lights that were scattered all over town were dimming. And, when he looked toward the lord’s mansion, something terrible stared back at him, a titan of ashes and darkness. “Do you see that?!”

  “I don’t see anything!” another guard replied, screaming. “But there’s… something foul in the air! I can feel it!”

  A great evil had descended upon Hirata. Fear gripped its townsfolk. A terrible panic swept across the town, fear and paranoia seeping into the minds of the masses.

  The guards and warriors marched out onto the streets to calm the rapidly forming mobs of deranged merchants and farmers, but even they were wavering as an aura of madness and despair exploded from the lord’s manor, enveloping the entirety of Hirata in a single nightmare.

  Screams echoed everywhere—men, women, and children alike afflicted by the overwhelming malice and rage in the air.

  And yet, as quickly as it appeared, the specter vanished, leaving nothing but a thin wisp of smoke and ashes that only the magically gifted would ever see. Almost as though the nightmare was never there to begin with, the once crazed townsfolk returned to their homes in a daze, their minds addled and confused, unable to comprehend the power that had loomed over them moments ago. And so they did as their minds dictated and chose to forget the horror that was the ashen titan.

  And no one noticed the figure of Murasaki Jin, blowing a hole through the manor and flying out, disappearing.

  * * *

  Shinji

  Shinji’s eyes snapped open as a wave of fear, terror, and malice spread through the woodlands. Several birds and bats flew off into the night, and the forest came to life as the beasts were sent to fearful flight. The ground shook, and the wind grew colder. The shadows turned darker, and an evil magic twisted time and space itself, creating tiny pockets of singularities in the air, where dust and leaves and twigs were pulled inward, before they were violently launched back out.

  Shinji’s eyes narrowed as he leapt from his perch atop a tree and bent down, eyeing a singularity that was rapidly destroying a mound of dried leaves and twigs.

  Spatial anomalies through sheer force of magic… he mused.

  Such phenomena were not unheard of. There were entire branches of magic dedicated to time and space, and there were even a few Magical Beasts that swam through the currents of time itself, defying whatever temporal rules humans were bound to. But what could cause such a thing to happen?

  Shinji breathed in and cringed, his head ringing and his stomach rolling at the malice and darkness that seeped through the air and corrupted everything it touched. It wasn’t just malice, it was also anger and indignation—the rage of one who was betrayed. And there was just so much of it, the wrath and ruin of a million souls, crying out for justice and vengeance and destruction. His eyes widened and the woodlands shifted as his powers pulled him deep into the bowels of another vision.

  The trees a
round him shrunk into the ground, disappearing into red puddles that stank of copper and iron and filth. It was a bog, darkened by shadows and the absence of the sun or the moon, the sky turning a stark crimson hue.

  Shinji took a single step forward and recoiled when his feet sank. The ground was not soil or mud or clumps of moss and swamp matter, but bodies. Millions upon millions of bodies, stacked atop each other, desecrated and ravaged beyond recognition.

  They appear to be victims of war, he realized. Most of them are wearing some kind of armor and holding weapons in their hands.

  He didn’t recognize the designs of the armors or the weapons, but something about them felt familiar. The corpses themselves were obviously the children of Moyatani, with their almond-shaped eyes.

  It’s an ancient battlefield, he thought. Some of the weapons are made of poorly wrought iron, but most of their equipment is of wood and bronze. They must be the ancient people of Moyatani.

  There were flags underneath the crimson waters. Etched upon them was the same symbol, over and over again, a blood-red blade over a field of white skulls. That symbol seems familiar…

  There was a northern family of nobles whose sigil was that of a crimson blade, over a field of skulls. Unfortunately, Shinji had only read about that clan in passing, and they weren’t all that important, since they were not nearly as powerful as their neighbors. He did remember the first name of the last clan head, however, a brutal warrior whose skills easily made him a match for even the most powerful of mages, despite his lack of magic. His name was whispered among the sword masters of the capital as being one of the very best in the whole country, Hamada the Mage-Killer.

  Apparently, he received the title after some errant mage challenged him to a duel and lost quite laughably. The man was given a choice between death and shame. Of course, the mage chose death and was promptly decapitated. Tales of the mage’s death spread all across the southlands, marking the event as one of the very few times a mortal was able to defeat and kill a magic user. Hamada was young at the time, one of the many bushi who sought to receive the title of Strongest Under Heaven, though he failed, just like everyone else.