“Son of a bitch!” I cursed loudly.

I poked my head out of cover for a second, baiting the arrows, which, as predicted, passed overhead almost as soon as I had withdrawn back into cover, then I took off towards where Ginko was hiding behind the shrine, before the longbowmen had time to nock another arrow. As I was running, I saw Ginko rummaging through his medicine box for something, just as an unexpected arrow punched me in the flank. The surprise made my feet slip along the gravel, but I managed to turn it into a slide, so it looked almost intentional, though I landed pretty hard. I added another bruise to the long list, though this one was on my ass, so it’d be the worst of the current collection.

“I don’t have any healing potions!” I yelled at Ginko, even though he was right next to me.

“I’ve got something, just give me a moment.”

Before he had the chance to find it, one of the spear-wielding monks had pushed up to our cover and emerged around the corner. Ginko moved with a sudden speed neither I nor the monk had expected and tossed a glass jar of some dark-green viscous liquid at the guy. The jar shattered against his face, leaving many shards stuck in his skin and one even directly in his left eye. It also deposited a green blob on the side of his head, which quickly crawled down the monk’s torso and then leapt from his legs, rushing into cover underneath the shrine building, immediately vanishing from sight.

I used the distraction to swing my katana at him, although with very little power as I was using my left hand, but the blade still managed to pierce into his side shallowly, embedding itself. Realising I wouldn’t be able to kill him like this, I performed my Lacerate, which carried my blade through him like a knife through butter. Or rather, like a katana through so-soft-as-to-be-almost-liquid butter. The force of the ability almost made me lose grip of my blade, but I kept hold of it until it had turned the monk into three neatly-cut lumps of flesh and rent armour.

“Found it,” Ginko announced, uneventfully, producing a small bottle of golden water. “Take only a tiny sip,” he ordered.

As I sipped the golden water, which seemed to glow by itself somehow, I felt a feeling similar to the healing potions, but several times stronger. A pleasant heat spread across my body, mending my shoulder and refilling my lost energy. I suddenly felt ready to take on a whole army by myself.

“What is this!? I feel amazing!” I exclaimed.

“Kōki.[1] It is made up of pure life energy.”

“Can I have some more?”

“No,” Ginko replied seriously. “I shouldn’t even have given you this much.”

“Why?”

“Too much isn’t good for you, and it seems to have aggravated the Mushi clinging to you. It has grown considerably, which I doubt is good for you… or me,” he explained. He probably feared that the Death Frenzy Spider would make me kill him, but I doubted I’d succumb to its influence, especially when I was already feeding it more than enough blood as it was.

With my body fully restored, I charged out from the corner, just as two of the monks rounded it. I knocked one down and quickly stabbed him through the chest before he could get up. Then, without a moment’s notice, an arrow bounded off my cuirass, pushing me back, just as the other fully-armoured monk swung his Naginata at me, its blade passing only centimetres in front of my face. Ironically, the knockback from the arrow had saved my nose from being sliced in half. I had to hand it to the smithy who’d sold me this cuirass, this thing sure could take a beating, though with some padding behind it, my skin would’ve suffered less from the impacts it absorbed.

I retreated back a few steps, going past where Ginko was still hiding. Just as the armoured monk passed by Ginko, he tripped over an extended foot and fell forward, hitting the ground with a hard crunch of metal and leather on stone.

I looked up at the Mushishi, who was nonchalantly adjusting one of his box-straps.

“What?” he asked, as though I was looking at him funny, for no reason whatsoever.

I just shook my head in disbelief, then hammered my sword down at the rising monk, casting forth my Helm-Splitter, though the helmless monk took its full brunt to his skull, which, as per the name of the ability, did indeed split, quite violently too. Blood, brain, and other stuff[2] splattered outwards, but I didn’t waste any time trying to clean it off my blade, as the three archers in the distance hadn’t let up their rain of arrows. Deadly spikes flew at us without pause, hitting the shrine, the corpses before us, and my chestpiece once again, where they bounded off, for the nth time today. It was like bruises were developing on top of bruises at this point. Every movement hurt like hell, as the sturdy cuirass pushed on the raw skin beneath it without mercy. When I was done here, I’d spend a long time soaking in the hot spring of the Azure Lady’s mansion, that much was for certain.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I felt my killing calm, my self-named Dance of Death, take hold of my body yet again, propelling me forward, ignorant to the arrows flying past and overhead. For a moment it was like my body was following a stream that allowed me to step between every arrow aimed at me, like I’d cracked the code of how the patterns worked and was able to avoid harm by repeating certain steps, like those of an elaborate tango, or, Gods forbid, flamingo... It made me wonder if the muscle memory that possessed my body had been shaped through hundreds, if not thousands, of times going through the same Stage over-and-over.

I got within ten metres of the archers before my luck[3] ran out, but I reacted fast enough to swat two synchronously-fired arrows from the air, then I kicked off into a jump, closing that final distance before neither of the three longbowmen had the chance to cock another shaft.[4] With a Quick Draw, I sundered the air with my midnight edge, cleaving taut bowstrings, wooden limbs, and soft flesh, scattering the broken weapons, spilling their unused arrows, and tossing their blood to the wind like a child playing in a puddle of water… viscous, pungent, red water…

All three archer fell to the ground lifelessly, and as the adrenaline faded from my blood, I felt the killing calm dissipate bit-by-bit.

Ginko sidled up to me, stepping around the severed body parts gingerly, while I removed the blood and bits of intestines from my blade and armour, using the ‘clean’ headwrap of one of the archers.

“There were better ways we could have dealt with this,” he advised.

“A bit late for that now,” I replied.

“Who knows what kind of defence awaits us in the main building, now that they’ve been alerted to our presence and have had time to prepare?” It was a bit hard to take his cautious words seriously, as the tone in his voice made it seem like he didn’t really care. Rather, he just sounded kind of bored, or like he had better things to do.

“Guess we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”

I finished wiping off my sword, which was rather difficult as the red blood sort of just disappeared on the obsidian glass, but I’d done it several times already and had developed a meticulous technique to clean it properly. I tossed the bloodied headwrap down on the body I’d borrowed it from.

Will Buddha or Amaterasu smite me for this defilement of their sacred place?

Before we headed to the large temple building where the monks had fled to, I returned to the tiny shrine after spotting a floating wisp above the corpse of the armoured warrior monk. When I touched it, the tooltip appeared before me, stating, ‘White Tiger Naginata’. I would have picked it up, if it wasn’t for the fact that its weight would negatively impact my available stamina and movement speed. Perhaps I’d return to pick it up after I finished the Stage.

The gravel crunched underneath my boots, accompanied by the pitter-patter of the red rain. We were only a few metres from the temple doors, when they opened before us, like some haunted house or a cliché Dracula movie. As the two separate panels of the door were thrown wide, the corpse of a monk fell through its opening, his blood quickly running down the shallow ramp towards us. He had a clean cut down his back, which had torn fabric and severed armour with surgical perfection.

Now, I’m not one to shy away from a fight, but when I saw the unnatural gloom beyond the threshold and felt the clammy cold brush past me, a shiver ran down my back. I had a very bad feeling about this.

“Seems its power has been unleashed,” Ginko stated calmly.

“Can you see anything I can’t?”

“The ground is covered in what looks like squirming dark-grey hairs. I think it’s a Mushi.”

“Great, so you know how to deal with it,” I replied hopefully.

“Maybe. I will need to study it before I can figure out how to handle it properly.”

“And how long will that take?”

“I don’t know, but—”

Without warning, a body was flung out from a second-storey window, splattering against the gravel only a couple metres behind us.

“I’m going in.”

“I think I’ll stay here… I need to do some tests,” Ginko explained.

“You do that…” I replied sceptically. I couldn’t tell if he was being a coward, or just knew that he’d be of no use to me.

As I stepped over the corpse in the doorway, the music picked up, and an unnerving twang cut through it occasionally, echoed by a wordless wailing. It made my heart thud painfully in my chest and with every few steps further into the temple I witnessed more-and-more slaughtered monks, which only intensified its rhythmic pounding. The floor was slick with blood, and the interior was covered in a haze or some kind of supernatural fog, which made the room dark enough for my Sight to kick in, amber lights rippling across the edges around me, highlighting things I hadn’t noticed before, such as a staircase in the back, and many more dead bodies, not that I needed to see those, but it did help me avoid tripping.

“It weeps for us. Claim its power,” the entity in my ring suddenly said. Last time it had spoken to me was before and after my encounter with Mŕtvy, who had wielded the Cursed Blade of the Forlorn Shadow. I doubted it was a coincidence that it’d chosen now of all times to speak to me again. Perhaps it would come in handy in the future if I ever faced off against someone else wielding a cursed weapon, though I doubted it could change the tide of battle just knowing someone carried a cursed weapon. I would’ve been better off with a ring that alerted me to nearby treasures or something along those lines.

I made my way up the staircase, treading carefully as to avoid slipping. Besides the blood everywhere, water also soaked the wooden floor and walls, as though a massive wave had washed over the temple grounds. It dripped from the ceiling in grey droplets and ran down the walls like transparent worms.

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[1] 光酒, “Sake (rice wine) of Light”.

[2] I honestly wouldn’t even know what to call it…

[3] Or was it skill?

[4] What? That’s a perfectly normal sentence… You’re the one with a dirty mind, not me!