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‘Lift it.’

‘Use your magic, you fraud.’

‘Make it float.’

‘Come on, mage.’

‘Move it, lift it.’

‘Do something.’

‘The rock’s getting bored.’

‘Gods, at least strain your face a little.’

Waiting for the all the demands and insults to die down, Daiki finally breathed out temple-style, stabilised his thoughts and then stared intensely at the small rock that had been placed on the little snow mound in front of him.

He willed it to move, to shake a little, just enough to get him and Akira out of this mess.

Please, rock, just a tiny vibration.

Maybe float half an inch of the ground.

But the rock was a stubborn type that preferred to stay hidden and do nothing as its two supposed allies were tortured and killed by grubby, half-witted bandits.

And by rock, he meant the eight-tailed fox.

‘I can’t do it,’ he whispered finally, letting out all the stored-up breath. ‘Not in this dim light. Maybe if we try again, at sunrise, it will be-…’

His line was cut short by the wincingly loud sound of a bamboo stick whacking against the side of his head.

‘Wah…not that again…’ he spluttered, somehow managing to avoid falling sideways onto the snow.

‘The rock, mage,’ stated the lead bandit, a man so short and stocky that it was hard to know if he was vertical or horizontal.

‘I told you, it’s too dark now, the rock won’t-…’

Another strike from the bamboo, this time with just the right amount of heft to topple Daiki awkwardly onto the ground.

‘This is going fantastically…’ muttered a rough voice somewhere nearby, and Daiki waited for the surrounding forest area to stop blurring before focusing on the equally rough face it came out of.

‘They’re not listening.’

‘Course not, they’re bandits.’

Daiki grunted and, despite having both hands tied behind his back, managed to shift position on the snow so that he was sitting upright with the ashigaru’s face dangling the opposite way in front of him.

‘If you don’t make that rock do something, they’re gonna eat you.’

‘I was talking about the fox, not them. And they’re not gonna eat me, that’s just city-…that’s a stereotype pushed by city bureaucrats. About this province specifically. Gods, my head…’

‘You sure about that?’

‘…feels like a rice barrel. No, it’s true. Echigo and Kyushu, that’s where the real cannibals are.’

‘Okay, fine. They’re probably not gonna eat you. But they will kill you. And, more importantly, they’ll kill me too. Unless you pull your finger out and shift that rock.’

Daiki opened his mouth to offer a rebuke but was interrupted by yet another bamboo hit to the head.

‘Hey, stop whacking, you idiots,’ shouted Akira, voice so fierce that his whole upside down body starting to swing on the rope that was tied to the tree branch above.

‘What did you call my comrades here?’ asked the lead bandit, moving closer to the captured ashigaru with the bamboo stick raised.

‘Idiots.’

‘Ah…’ He glanced at the dull-looking faces of the other bandits standing around the camp, some of them holding sticks, other just staring at their feet. ‘I believe our guest wants to share in the tough love we’re dishing out to his friend.’

None of the bandits moved.

‘Kuso…hit him with your sticks, you idiots.’

They still didn’t move, except one tall guy, who seemed to be slightly more into this torture thing than the others. He drew back his bamboo, searched Akira’s body for the best part to hit…then darted forward and jabbed him directly in the nose.

‘Gods on a-…what happened to swinging?’

‘That’s better,’ said the lead bandit, patting the subordinate on the back of the calf with his own stick. ‘You drew blood too. Nice.’

‘I’ll get you for that,’ groaned Akira, hands chafing against the rope pinning his hands back. ‘Soon as our powerful friend turns up.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Any second now, they’re gonna jump out in a burst of blinding white light, and eviscerate you all…to save US from DYING.’

‘Huh? Evictalate us?’

‘You hear me in there,’ yelled Akira, rotating himself mid-swing so he was facing Daiki again. ‘We are going to die. Dead. The end. No more list. No more carrying you around the countryside like a pampered little princeling.’

The lead bandit prodded his stick forward, into Akira’s cheek. ‘Who exactly are you talking to?’

‘You would not understand,’ replied Akira, trying to blow the tip of the bamboo away from his face.

‘A spirit?’

‘Ha, much greater than that.’

‘A demon spirit?’

‘No, no, no…not that simple. I’m talking about something so strong, so vengeful, so easily offended by bandits who take their friends captive and hang them upside down from trees…that you cannot possibly imagine.’

‘You mean…him?’ asked the lead bandit, switching the stick back to Daiki and poking him in the gut.

‘Wah…’ moaned the mage, pushing himself back along the ground and accidentally bumping into the tall bandit’s leg. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you th-…’

The tall bandit answered with another jab of the stick, also in the mage’s gut.

‘Gods…this is fucking ridiculous. Would you come out already?’

Daiki’s words shot outwards across the camp, through the snow-covered trees, into the cave that was apparently the bandits’ sleeping zone and back to Daiki again, who spat on the snow as a full stop. Then saw little streaks of blood in the phlegm and muttered, ‘kuso.’

‘One of you two…alleged rice merchants…will tell me what is going on right now, or we’ll stop with the sticks and go straight to the katanas.’

‘I just told you,’ continued Akira, scrunching up his nose, attempting to halt the blood flow. ‘There’s a powerful spirit who’s a good friend of ours, very protective, and they’re hiding inside the mage here. Got it? And if you don’t release us immediately…’

‘So, his body is magical,’ the lead bandit interrupted, holding up a hand to the rest of his crew.

‘Not his body…the spirit inside it…the vengeful spirit.’

‘Hmm. A transferrable spirit?’

‘What?’

The lead bandit nodded to himself, and then dropped his hand. ‘Kento, the pages, the knife. Bring them to me. Quickly.’

‘Which knife?’

‘The knife, you fool.’

‘Ah…okay. That one. And which pages exactly?’

‘Gods…how is this even-…the occult literature, you penguin. The brown-looking paper we took from the clerk in the talisman shack last month.’

Kento played out a few more seconds of bafflement before a switch finally got flipped in his brain and he hurried off into the cave nearby.

‘Whatever you think you’re about to do, it won’t work,’ warned Akira, his neck trying to turn towards the lead bandit and then spinning back the other way. ‘The spirit is very mercurial, does not take lightly to commands or…so-called occult literature.’

‘We’ll see about that.’

‘No, he’s right,’ added Daiki, now sitting up straight-ish again, blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth. ‘The spirit is incredibly selfish and manipulative. It can’t stand humans.’

‘Hmm. Your protestations make me even more intrigued…’

‘I’m not joking…cut off these beads…these ones here, hanging from my hair. Cut them off and put them on your own head, then you’ll see what you’re dealing with.’

‘Daiki…’ muttered Akira, his face pointing in the wrong direction.

‘The beads, you say,’ said the lead bandit, glancing back as the hyperventilating sounds of his running subordinate came closer, and then taking the huge chunk of paper and curved knife that was offered forward.

‘It won’t work,’ tried Akira again, the rope holding his feet together now spinning in slow, unstoppable loops, but it went unnoticed with the lead bandit calling the others into close circle and then immediately starting in on the recitation of what sounded like ancient Japanese.

Neither Daiki nor Akira understood much of it, and judging by the sleepy looks on the faces around them, no one else did either. But the bonds on both of their bodies were tied pretty tight so all they could do was sit/hang there and hope that one of them could come up with an escape plan in the next…however long it took for the lead bandit to finish those pages.

An hour?

Two if the vocab started getting more abstruse?

It was a quaint hope, and soon a ludicrously naïve one as the lead bandit stopped halfway down the second page and brandished the knife. Brandished as in held it in a way that said, yup, I’m definitely about to use this thing.

And he did.

Ignoring the, ‘wait a second,’ from Daiki, and the, ‘fox, do something,’ from Akira, the stocky villain-turned-cult messiah took two quick steps forward and stabbed the defenceless mage hard in the gut.

‘There we go…not so bad.’

Allowing a slurred kuso from his victim, the lead bandit put both the handle of the blade and his own hand against the freshly-made wound, soaking up the blood that was slowly seeping out, then moved his spare hand up onto Daiki’s forehead.

After half a minute of muttering, he nodded at the mage’s wound and said, ‘more blood needed.’

‘No, please…’ replied Daiki, but his eyesight was started to haze up, and now there were four lead bandits in front of him and four knives pointing at his stomach down below, and against that kind of enemy, he didn’t stand a-

A sharp light broke the pessimism, appearing for the first tenth of a second as a soft pale blue, then switching to pure dying star white, before returning to the original nighttime in the forest colour shot…with a grumpy-looking fox showcased just off the middle.

‘What the-…’

The bandits reacted the only way they could, by shrieking and collapsing to the ground, hands gripping their scalps in agony, with the lead bandit managing to slice the top of his own thigh as he flailed downwards like a pierced owl onto the snow.

‘Cannot skip the middle part,’ yelled the fox, pouncing forward onto the pages dropped by the bandit, forcing them into a chaotic bundle, grabbing the knife and stabbing the whole mess into the chest of the one who’d tried to summon them. ‘Can. Not.’

The lead bandit led out a shrill death moan, then choked a little as a huge glob of saliva dropped from the fox’s mouth into his own.

‘Absolute amateur,’ said the fox, admiring their handiwork then turning to assess the surrounding scene…shaking both head and seven of their eight tails when they saw Daiki on the snow, bleeding out, and then Akira strung up from a tree like a hunted deer. ‘And as for you two idiots…’

‘Kuso…’

The fox didn’t add anything else, they just stood there, wiping some of the excess spit from their mouth, staring as Akira slowly spun round in small pitiful circles.

‘Are you getting me down or what?’ shouted the ashigaru, finally losing all patience.

‘Hmm…’

‘That wasn’t a question.’

‘Ah.’

‘Kuso…stop making single syllable sounds and cut me down. Some of these bandits will be waking up in a minute.’

Right on cue, one of the bandits nearby made a groaning noise and turned on his side, muttering to the corpse of his leader to move over a bit, it’s really fucking cold.

But that was quickly blown out of the water by the fresh shower of blood bursting from Daiki’s throat and covering pretty much all of the fox’s face.

‘Unbelievable…’ the eight-tailed demon spirit said, waiting a few seconds for dramatic effect before lifting a paw and wiping themselves.

‘Medic…’ said Daiki, rolling onto his side and leaking out more blood onto the not-that-white snow.

‘Cut me down now,’ repeated Akira, the rope spinning faster.

The fox looked at them both, individually, each given their own close up frame titled: complete disappointment.

‘How the hell do you two manage to do this…every single time?’