Guardian, Saviors of Kamigawa

CHAPTER 24

O-Kagachi was barely a hundred feet above the forest floor when the sisters soared up to meet him. With this, Toshi had reached the limit of his astonishment. Anything else he saw today would necessarily fail to amaze him, as he simply had no more surprise left.

The stars around them flashed. Surrounded by individual nimbuses of harsh white light, Michiko and Kyodai spiraled up and around each other in a fluid double spiral, circling mirror images of each other. Despite their speed, ferocity, and confidence, the women seemed small and insignificant against the mighty serpent’s coils. It was like they were rising to battle the sky itself after the sky had sprouted teeth and claws to receive them.

Toshi noted that Kyodai’s transformation seemed to have baffled O-Kagachi’s unerring sense of the Taken One’s location. Either that or he simply did not recognize the fierce warrior-maiden who now confronted him. If he did, he continued on to meet her as he would any other foe. Toshi had hoped there would be some sign, some form of acknowledgment between the two powerful spirits, but his hopes were quickly dashed. This did not truly surprise him; family relationships were often difficult.

Michiko broke formation first, soaring wide under O-Kagachi’s lowest head. As she’d intended, the head oriented on her and snapped its massive jaws. Michiko was too quick, however, easily zipping out of range of those gargantuan fangs.

As the rest of his coils pressed ever downward, O-Kagachi’s head roared after the princess. Powered by the great roiling muscles in his neck, the serpent’s jaws overtook Michiko in a heartbeat. She disappeared behind the massive, square head, but dropped below the serpent’s strike by letting herself fall rather than trying to fly out of danger. The moment she had cleared O-Kagachi’s bottom jaw, Michiko swooped back along its neck, aiming her bow at another head over the edge of the forest.

Kyodai rose like a rocket, following one of the serpent’s necks to the uppermost head. Two other heads harried her as she climbed, snapping with their jaws and trying to batter her from the sky with teeth clenched tight. She weaved and dodged around the central neck, narrowly avoiding her attackers. They could not catch her, could not harm her, could not stop her. She was a beautiful song of battle come to life in the skies over Jukai.

Suddenly, O-Kagachi flexed the great sinews in the neck Kyodai was ascending. It was barely a nudge from where Toshi was sitting, but from a giant even a nudge is devastating. Kyodai was hurled violently away, glowing as she soared back to the ground like a shooting star.

Michiko was just stretching her bow when Kyodai was struck from the sky. The princess let fly with her arrow and changed course so that she streaked to intercept her sister before Kyodai hit the ground. Judging by her speed, Toshi knew she’d make it in time.

The arrow was just as strange as the warrior who’d fired it. The bolt started normally as it sped straight and true toward a thick rope of O-Kagachi’s coils. Halfway to its mark, the arrow burst into brilliant, sparkling light that cast a red tint over the serpent’s mammoth scales. The wooden shaft and white feathers were no longer visible-Michiko’s arrow had become a flashing bolt of pure scarlet power.

The red missile tore through O-Kagachi’s hide and disappeared below the serpent’s scales. A single gout of thick, black liquid jetted out. What flowed through O-Kagachi’s veins was not blood, but a strange miasma of dark humors. To Toshi, the muck seemed like jagged shards of the void suspended in a torrent of shadow. The thick cloud dispersed quickly as it flowed away from the serpent, but the splinters of void lingered in the sky.

The wound then swelled and burst as the magical bolt that caused it exploded.

O-Kagachi howled and thrashed, but Toshi could see that it was not gravely hurt. Michiko’s attack had blown a man-sized hole in the serpent’s neck, but it was barely a pinprick to such a massive beast.

Toshi looked back to the sisters and saw that Michiko had indeed stopped Kyodai’s fall. The two warrior-maidens clasped hands and streaked toward the closest head. They left a brilliant line of white in their wake that slowly crumbled to powder and fell like snow. They changed course once the other heads began to close on them, rolled, and then punched through the tough scales on the serpentine neck below them.

Time seemed to slow as the sisters disappeared into O-Kagachi’s body. It was one thing to see a bolt of magic sink under the great brute’s hide, but this was the sisters themselves. Toshi stared at the entry wound Michiko and Kyodai had made going in, willing them to come back out. Any second now, he told himself. Any second now.

Toshi discovered a new vein of surprise when the sisters burst free from the opposite side of O-Kagachi’s thick neck. Huge chunks of muscle and meat blew out with them, along with a great wash of the nauseating mist of darkness and void. Though the muck came Michiko and Kyodai, still unmarred, pristine, and on the offensive.

This time O-Kagachi did roar, and the dragon made a much more terrible sound when it was pained than it did when angry. At last the old serpent broke off his descent and turned his full attention on the fast-moving insects that continued to sting and annoy him.

All eight of the serpent’s heads now turned and joined against the sisters. Driven and pursued from all directions, Michiko and Kyodai were forced to separate. It seemed impossible that they would be able to stay away from so many fast-moving threats-O-Kagachi was so large there was hardly anywhere else to be but in his way.

But the sisters moved in flawless unison to use the serpent’s size against him. They were both small and fast enough to dodge his strikes out in the open, but they were even more effective in close quarters. Together they circled around his necks and zipped between his coils so that he could not strike at them without hitting himself. O-Kagachi was too old to do himself serious injury this way, but Toshi did see heads slamming solidly into coils and other heads as the serpent tried to crush these annoyances against his own body.

From the confusion of scales and coils, two of O-Kagachi’s heads struggled free. They both extended toward the central mass of the serpent, where Michiko and Kyodai buzzed around his body like bees around a hive. Michiko was managing her bow well as she flew, sending bolt after bolt of red fire into O-Kagachi’s hide. Kyodai was likewise attacking whenever her path took her close to the serpent’s skin, though Toshi could not see the method she was using. It was most likely her bare hands, or perhaps her teeth, for each time she skimmed the surface of O-Kagachi’s scales she left a wake of scintillating stars and long, ragged rents in his flesh.

While the sisters continued to nettle him, the wily old serpent struck. He lashed out at both women with the heads he had worked free, one lagging a second behind the other. Each sister dodged, but O-Kagachi changed the lagging head’s course and intercepted Michiko as the princess safely avoided the first strike.

It was a glancing blow but enough to shatter Michiko’s bow and send the princess soaring straight up. In a second she was gone from sight, hurled so high that Toshi wondered if she’d ever come down.

Michiko’s injury had an effect on Kyodai, though Toshi couldn’t tell if she felt the same blow as the princess or if she was simply shocked by brutality of it. Whatever the reason, Kyodai paused for a split second too long as she tried to follow Michiko’s upward flight. O-Kagachi hooked one of his necks below Kyodai and rose up with his jaws spread wide. Kyodai disappeared behind those terrible teeth and vanished into the serpent’s snapping maw.

Toshi stood completely stunned as the last, thinnest thread of hope snapped. The sisters had never posed a serious threat to O-Kagachi, but they had stood against him longer than anything else could have. While they were alive and active, Toshi could contemplate seeing another day. Now that Kyodai was being digested and Michiko was halfway to the moon, there was nothing to stop O-Kagachi from razing all of Kamigawa, starting with the patch Toshi currently occupied.

His worst fears were realized almost instantly. The head that swallowed Kyodai straightened, leveled, and then plunged down toward the forest. The rest of the serpent’s heads sorted themselves out from each other and the larger mass of coils, spreading out to surround the kitsune village once more. The battle must have quickened O-Kagachi’s blood, for he was descending disturbingly fast.

But the lead head that had swallowed Kyodai shuddered and stopped on its way to the forest. It jerked spasmodically, rolling from side to side, even shaking vigorously like a wet dog. Close as it was, Toshi could see the broad, winglike fins behind the serpent’s skull and the terrible vacant glare of its star-sized eyes.

The head twitched one last time and then burst open at the jaw. Kyodai fought her way clear, surrounded by more stars than ever. Toshi could hear her feral screams echoing across the sky. She left the serpent’s jaw hanging loose from one side of his mouth as his tongue lolled grotesquely across his throat.

A shiver of rage and pain flowed across O-Kagachi’s entire body. The maimed head danced and thrashed upon its long neck as the others all opened wide and roared. Even as he bellowed his injury to the world, O-Kagachi was recovering, orienting on Kyodai and beginning to stalk.

Kyodai did not wait. She flashed upward, shooting into the sky after Michiko. Toshi almost called after her, but he needn’t have worried. Now that he’d been wounded, O-Kagachi was focusing exclusively on his daughter. The old serpent wouldn’t spare the forest a glance until he had avenged that injury and prevented any chance of a sequel.

Ponderously he rose to give chase, but a moment later Kyodai returned with Michiko in her arms. The princess seemed limp and unconscious, but Kyodai hovered with her burden, defiantly staring into the eyes of O-Kagachi. For a splendid, terrible moment the combatants held this pose, a single one of O-Kagachi’s heads glaring fixedly at the sisters as Kyodai glared back. What exchanged between these two incredible beings was beyond Toshi, but it was clear that if O-Kagachi did not recognize his daughter before, he did now-as his mortal enemy.

Kyodai let out an inhuman scream and hurled Michiko skyward, clear of the coming charge. She rushed forward to meet O-Kagachi’s wide-open jaws, borne forward on a powerful storm of muscle and malice.

Toshi wanted to see the impact, but his eyes were drawn to the tumbling figure of Michiko-hime. He was enough of a faker and a trickster to recognize a ploy when he saw it. Kyodai had just abandoned the battle to recover her sister, so tossing her away in a fit of anger either meant Kyodai had lost her temper and her wits … or that she was up to something.

He was rewarded when Michiko snapped back to full consciousness at precisely the moment when Kyodai and O-Kagachi plowed into each other. The former Taken One punched into O-Kagachi’s face like it was made of soft dough, and the serpent’s neck was compressed back on itself behind the head. The fierce woman took the worst of it, as O-Kagachi’s mass was unfathomably larger than hers. She broke two of his teeth and drew blood from his nose, but Kyodai herself was propelled backward at tremendous speed.

Toshi saw that everywhere the sisters had struck was covered in stars. O-Kagachi’s broken jaw, the slashes on his necks, and the gaping holes in his hide were all wreathed pieces of light and void alike, but the stars were prevailing. Like the scab that forms over a healing wound, the stars seemed to patch and protect the damage done by the sisters. Was this part of their plan?

Half-mesmerized, Toshi shook his gaze free and quickly looked back to Michiko. The princess hung suspended by her nimbus of white with her bow arm extended. The gauzy star-fire around her flowed into her open hand, thickened, then solidified. The mist sparkled, and then Michiko was holding a new bow made of white wood. She wasted no time in putting the new weapon to use, drawing an arrow and firing it in one smooth motion.

This time the arrow converted into a gleaming bolt of white energy. The glowing missile slammed into the top of the head Kyodai had just immobilized. Instead of tearing the serpent’s skin or burrowing into the meat below, the bolt seemed to spread out along the surface of O-Kagachi’s scales. The growing white stain stiffened and calcified the serpent’s body as it went-Toshi could hear the scales creaking and hardening even from where he stood.

In seconds the entire head and most of the surrounding neck had been covered in a sheath of stone. Toshi saw the muscles below the petrifying mass straining to keep the head aloft before they were engulfed by the shroud of white. Undaunted by the fate of their fellow, the serpent’s other heads now surged forward to attack Michiko.

Kyodai returned before they could strike, flashing like a lightning bolt into the calcified head. She was a screeching bird of prey as she flew once more into the face of the serpent.

The impact sounded like an entire mountain shattering. Great plumes of white dust shot out from a cloud of force-driven debris. Within the cloud of grit and dust, millions of distant stars flickered. Every one of the serpent’s other heads shot straight out and howled, filling the air with an indescribable wail of pain and fury.

Toshi picked himself up off the ground. For some deep, instinctual reason he felt he was unworthy to look at the aftermath of the sisters’ attack. It was like a kind of blasphemy, seeing something mortal eyes were not meant to see. Then he looked anyway.

The sky above the battle was filling with fading pieces of void and an ever-brighter field of stars. Below this curtain of darkness and light, O-Kagachi was now a seven-headed serpent, the eighth now little more than a ragged stump at the end of a long, flailing neck. Michiko’s arrow hadn’t just immobilized the serpent’s head in stone, it had wholly converted it to stone. As Konda had done to Kyodai, Michiko did to O-Kagachi. The sisters had no intention of putting their stone idol on a pedestal and worshipping it, however.

Livid with rage and pain, O-Kagachi flailed at the sisters, throwing his heads at them like a barroom drunk throws punches. Michiko and Kyodai easily avoided these enraged, clumsy attacks. They drew one head away from the rest, and when it was isolated, Michiko rose over it while Kyodai drew back. Michiko fired another white arrow, which O-Kagachi almost dodged, but the bolt still caught him behind the ear.

The process was even quicker this time. The calcifying stain spread across the serpent’s face and across his skull, working its way down the massive neck. O-Kagachi struggled to move the stricken head and to bring his other coils up to block Kyodai’s killing stroke. The yellow-eyed maiden was too fast and too fierce, dipping down and shattering this head from below.

The sisters established their perfect rhythm on the next head: isolate, immobilize, and shatter. The headless necks all hung lifeless, weighing O-Kagachi down and disrupting the movements of the survivors. The longer he struggled with his injuries, the wilder and less focused he became.

The serpent truly panicked after they destroyed his fourth head. Effectively halved, O-Kagachi was still a formidable threat-he had battered down the walls of Eiganjo with only three heads, after all. But Eiganjo had only men, moths, and magic to send against him. Michiko and Kyodai were unlike anything he had encountered before, a brand-new fusion of flesh and spirit. If O-Kagachi hadn’t been frothing with pain and rage, Toshi expected he would have been raging over the sisters’ very existence. He was the great spirit of all things-how could something unknown to him exist, much less cripple him?

The fifth head fell to the sisters, and then the sixth. The sky above the serpent was now covered in an unbroken sheet of glittering starlight. A cheer went up among the kitsune around him, but Toshi was not yet ready to celebrate.

Almost on cue, the sisters stopped their attack and streaked toward the ground. They regrouped between O-Kagachi and the observers in the forest. Toshi saw them talking and nodding, pointing to the last two heads.

Don’t get fancy, he thought. Do your thing on these last two before O-Kagachi surprises you.

But the sisters did not hear or heed his heartfelt advice. Instead, they split and each went straight to one of the remaining heads. O-Kagachi hadn’t been able to catch them when he was whole, and now it seemed all he could do was snap, roar, and hate.

The sisters landed simultaneously. Each stood proud and strong on top of a flat, boxlike skull. They faced each other and nodded, and Michiko drew her bow. She fired an arrow at Kyodai, allowing for the vigorous thrashing of the serpent’s coils. Halfway to its mark the arrow changed into a streak of vivid blue. The azure line raced back toward Michiko at precisely the same speed as it hurtled toward Kyodai so that it touched both sisters at the same time.

At that precise instant, Michiko and Kyodai both turned and caught the incoming blue bolt with both hands. The sky, the air, everything in Toshi’s field of vision was swallowed by a sapphire wave of light and force. Blind, he staggered and stumbled against a cedar tree. He turned toward the last place he had seen the sisters and waited for his vision to clear.

Spots danced before his eyes and the blue sheen blurred details, but Toshi saw. As light flickered in the sky and behind his eyelids, Toshi watched, the sisters, now gigantic, grappling on even terms with O-Kagachi’s two remaining heads. Kyodai had her quarry clamped under her arm like some great, playful dog. Michiko was keeping the serpent’s other jaws closed with both hands, straddling the neck like a powerful horse.

Then, faster than he could register, the sisters and O-Kagachi all shrank from the size of giants who filled the sky to that of average, full-grown humans. It happened as fast as snow melting on a hot griddle, a smooth but dramatic change. One moment they were grappling in the sky like gods and the next they were back on the ground, no larger than they had been before the old serpent came.

O-Kagachi had been reduced far more than the sisters. The great old serpent was still in their clutches, struggling with all his might as his hardened and shattered necks flopped appallingly on the ground. Each of his final two heads was now only a square foot in size, easily controlled by the vivacious warriors who had bested him.

Pearl-Ear stepped forward, Michiko’s name on her lips, but the princess called, “No, sensei. We are not yet finished.”

Michiko and Kyodai looked at each other. They nodded and lifted the serpent’s struggling heads up to eye level.

“This is the way of mortal beings,” Michiko intoned. “The aged give way to the young.”

“The old must stand aside for the new,” Kyodai replied.

The air between them blurred, and when it cleared, O-Kagachi was no larger than a soldier’s pack, each wriggling head as long and as broad as a garden snake.

The sisters exchanged one final glance, then as one opened their mouths and bit the final heads off O-Kagachi. With foul black mist and blood streaming from their mouths, they simultaneously chewed, swallowed, and tossed the headless stumps aside.

Michiko turned to Pearl-Ear, wiping her face on the back of her leather gauntlet. “Now,” she said grimly, “it’s finished.”

Kyodai’s serpentine eyes glittered as they reflected the starlight around her. “Not quite,” she said.