Chapter XXIV—Oni Savagery

Eyes widening, Ryuunosuke took a step back as the rest of the Taisho Six members bristled, running to surround and defend the shōgun from the terrible onslaught of the oni.

Like before, Ryu watched as she transformed into a blood thirsty rage-filled fighter that tore man limb from lib. The samurai screamed as she picked one up and threw him across the space where he flailed, screaming to his teeth as he fell from the summit.

“My lord!” exclaimed Suki as she grabbed the shōgun from behind and pulled him back. He turned and allowed himself to be guided back towards the castle.

Shōzu, forgotten by the Taisho Six, stumbled back and almost feel as everyone who wasn’t a samurai of a fighter, ran towards the Awara Castle. Fear shot through his core and he turned to run.

Putting an arm on Kota’s shoulder, he pushed off his prize warrior and screamed, “DEFEND ME!”

Kota narrowed his gaze and tightened the grip on his katana as the oni growled and hissed and tossed samurai about.

Lightning ripped across the sky, illuminating the whole area and the trails of blood flowing across the tiles in the hard rain. The samurai—ever the loyal warrior willing to die for their daimyō, screamed and snarled as they surrounded the oni, but her speed and power far outmatched them.

She far outmatches me in power! What has she become?!

Kota held his position, ready to defend his retreating lord should Rōkura break free of the morass of limbs and swords. She moved, screaming and snarling, the mass of samurai standing in a circle around her lurching every time she struck out against them.

Hans blinked in the rain, his arm smarting so hard he had trouble concentrating. He never thought he would sustain such a terrible wound, and to be afraid of Rōkura—never!

He pushed himself back, desperately kicking and clawing his way across the blood-soaked tiles with his good arm. The bodies piling about him entrapped him. He screamed, pushing to get away.

Without the strength to use his transformation magic, he wouldn’t be able to turn into a cat and get away.

With the terror of the situation coursing through every vein in his body, Shinjiro forced himself to move as he glanced about for Hans, his worry for Rōkura as she was surrounded by samurai.

He breathed heavily, each of his hot breaths coming out in a ragged exhalation of emotional display as his worry and his fear mingled to create a writhing knot in his stomach.

And Hans! “HANS!” he called.

Shinjiro sprinted across the space, moving around the samurai. One of them turned and swung his katana at Shinjiro, but he jumped out of reach. The samurai, confused and harried, realized what he was doing, and turned to his allies, and against his better judgment, reinforced them as his friends cried out in death and anger, their sword arms moving, their bodies lurching.

The oni was surrounded.

He pushed up with his fellows, trying to get into the center mass to have his chance to strike the oni down and defend his lord.

Shinjiro spotted Hans writhing and screaming. He went to him, slipped on the bloody tiles and knocked his knee, but he ignored the pain and scrabbled over to Hans, who kicked and thrashed between fallen bodies.

Reaching out, he took Hans by the collar. “I GOT YOU, CAT MAN!”

“That is not my name!”

Shinjiro yanked him forward, out of the morass and to safety, where he pulled the smaller man up against him with both arms under his own. “Can you stand?”

“What?”

“Can! You! Stand?!”

Arm throbbing in two places and everything around him swirling in a dizzying sickening way, he muttered something even he was insure of. Shinjiro grabbed at his waist and Hans glanced down, wondering why the samurai was taking off his pants?

Shinjiro whipped Hans’ belt off and used it as a synch around his upper arm to staunch the free flow of blood coming out of him. The wound had cut across his forearm where he took the brunt of Kota’s blade, his upper arm sustaining a deep gash that was not fatal.

But if Shinjiro didn’t find a healer or some health potions right now—Hans wasn’t going to make it!

“Come on, Hans!”

Kota Hasegawa grimaced as the samurai’s numbered thinned, and with each strike from the oni, more of them fell. He almost rushed in to attack while the samurai were distracting her, but he hesitated.

Glancing back, he saw that the shōgun and his daimyō were not yet inside the castle. Close by, one of the Taisho Six members, Ryuunosuke, he believed, looked at him with fear and awe in her eyes and then finally turned to escape.

In her Oni Rage state, Rōkura also came into her Overpowered ability, which far outmatched any of the puny samurai attempting to kill her. Their attacks almost seemed childish.

Each wound she sustained, inflicted more hate and rage into her being as she thrashed and slashed. She took hold of one samurai’s arm and yanked him into the circle, whereupon she bit him in the neck and drank his blood before lifting him over her head.

Turning and twisting his body like a staff, she used his thrashing limbs as weapon, forcing the other samurai back. At the last moment, she threw the screaming warrior at his comrades, knocking them down and breaking the circle.

Before her was Kota, looking on in horror and with apprehension coursing through his heart. The oni snarled a terrible threat as lightning and thunder crashed over the sky overhead.

Through her pulsing red-rimmed and gaze, the oni shot forward. Kota attacked, but the oni was far too fast and powerful to let that stop her from her true objective—killing Shōzu.

She grabbed Kota’s katana and snapped the blade off, the sharp edge cutting through the flesh in her fingers that knit as fast as was rented. She ran across the tiles toward a woman all in black.

Rōkura jumped, landing on the woman in a tight crouch where she used her to launch herself higher into the air.

Kota gasped as Ryuunosuke was crushed into a heap of broken limbs. The oni flew through the air, her red skin difficult to spot in the night as she flipped through the air.

When she landed on the tiles far beyond Kota, he almost gave up then, but forced himself to run—to pursue her and save his master, a man who was his slaver, who would have him killed in an instant if ever he chose to disobey his orders.

It is the duty of a sworn warrior to defend his lord, even in death!

He ran.

Rōkura’s vision pulsed read and her anger and rage was so palpable, she could feel it in every bit of her skin as her heart thrummed and thudded in her chest. Aware of what was happening, but with little control over her actions, her hate-filled glowing eyes sought out the retreating form of Shōzu, utterly abandoned by the Taisho Six, who rushed their shōgun into Awara Castle.

The oni sprinted across the tiles as the castle loomed before her, lights flashing in the sky and arrow shafts clicking pathetically near her as the archers up on the battlements attempted to stop Rōkura.

But she was too fast.

She took hold of Shōzu from behind and he snarled, crying out fearfully and pathetically. Suki Arinatto turned at the sound of the daimyō’s screamed and moved to react, but the oni threw Shōzu back toward the great steps leading up to the castle.

The distance his body travelled while he flailed and screamed was astounding. Shōzu landed heavily across the tiles and a grunt he didn’t know could come out of him, was thrust out of his mouth.

The pain that enraptured him was so completely, that his limbs went totally loose and he flopped like a doll, his vision bouncing and jouncing, his awareness of the sudden pummeling dwindling.

As his body stopped turning end over end, the sharp pains in his shoulders and his skull and his legs, shrieking at him, the sky flashed overhead as he slid across the slick blood-soaked titles into a pile of bodies.

“Shōzu-sama!” cried Kota, and he froze, staring at the oni, torn between running toward his master that he hated, and running toward that oni, who would cut him down without a second’s thought.

The piece of his katana still protruded from her grasp. How the oni monster managed to maintain holding it even after picking up Shōzu and tossing him a hundred paces through the air, Kota Hasegawa didn’t know.

He swallowed as Suki Arinatto rushed the oni with her katana.

Rōkura felt her coming long before she struck.

“Hiiiyah!”

Turning, she took hold of the blade in her forefinger and thumb, and snarled. Suki’s eyes widened and she grimaced, just before Rōkura put her palm into the warrior’s chest.

She flew away from the oni, and before she even made contact with the ground, Rōkura turned and ran toward Kota.

Kota glanced down at his broken blade and attempted a magical ability attack. “FISHER’S DEFENSE!”

With his sword shortened, he could act as though it were a wakizashi blade. His defense was completely and powerful, but the oni surprised him.

She jumped in a half grunt half snarly, flew through air high above him and landed near the group of samurai surrounding Daimyō Shōzu, squatted as she landed, and then lashed out with her foot, tripping up half of the men surrounding their lord.

As she rose, two samurai cut in at her with their blades, but Rōkura thrust her hands forward and then out, sending a group of men flying away from her as they writhed and rolled out of her way.

Only three samurai stood before her, the rest writhed in pain or were dead at her feet, covered in blood and vicious wounds.

“Haaaahhhhh!” screamed one of them as he raised his blade.

Rōkura stopped him there, grabbing his wrist and gripping him by the neck. She picked him up and crushed his throat like bamboo, then tossed him into another samurai charging for an attack.

The last samurai stood stock still and backed away.

“You dishonorable coward!” cried Kota.

Rōkura lunged forward and kicked the samurai in the back, sending him flipping off of the summit. Turning and breathing like a beast, her wounds knitting and healing, Rōkura stepped near a squirming samurai on the ground and knelt, striking him in the stomach with her clawed hand.

His flesh exploded both inward and outward as she pierced his body with a vicious attack that snapped his spine in half.

Kota stepped forward, a shuttering breath coming out of him as the oni looked on with blood-soaked features and sharp teeth.

Her red-rimmed aqua-blue eyes were a grimace of pure rage and hate and murderous need.

“How are you this powerful?! Your level—it’s below mine!”

Rōkura snarled wordlessly, her understanding dimmed and her interest in his babbling nonexistent.

Kota screamed--rushed forward, but Rōkura’s eyes were on Shōzu laying and coughing on the ground. As Kota attacked, Rōkura grabbed his wrist and pulled him past her. He flailed, screaming as he fell off the summit onto the steps below. The thrashing that resulted from his roll broke his bones and broke him as a warrior, a profession that would be long in returning to his life.

Shōzu didn’t move.

The daimyō didn’t have the will to move.

My body is… broken,

That monster snarled behind him, and he tried to look in her direction, but he couldn’t angle his head up, not now. His neck, it was—

She came into view above him, her head upside down as she leaned over his broken body. A fear like none he had ever experienced before came over Shōzu.

But he would not beg or whale.

Instead, he growled. “Kill me, you monster.”

The oni actually smiled then, and Shōzu gasped, then a frightful chill shot through his stomach and chest as she picked him up.

His body’s pains screamed, and he too screamed.

The sky lit up, and thunder rumbled over the clouds, skittering, like a bolder. Everything turned, and then he felt it—the tensing of the oni’s muscles.

“DIIIIE!”

Shōzu screamed as he was launched into the air and flung off the summit.