Izanami rested for a moment, leaning on her sword. She didn’t need to breath, but if she had she’d be panting. The new goddess of battle was proving to be unexpectedly resilient, displaying far more raw power than any fledgling kami deserved to and swordsmanship that possibly exceeded her own. But more than that she was cooperating with the other new goddess and the mortals. Something that she’d never seen any god or goddess do before.
True, she was engaging with Izanami in single combat, but only mostly alone. The others joined in in defiance of all tradition and code of conduct. In Izanami’s experience, no warrior would cede one iota of the honour of fighting their enemy to another… and yet, even as the girl’s sword sliced at her loathsome rotting flesh, she was blasted by lightning and cannon shells.
The ground around her feet was sticky with her black corrupted blood, strips of putrescent flesh hanging in tatters from her bones. Her neck had been cleaved down to the vertebra by one strike, her rib cage had been blasted open by a lightning bolt, exposing her blackened withered heart.
But still she fought. She had no choice. Even if she had no other reason, the hatred burning in her core would be reason enough. How dare they defy her! She seethed. They owed their existence to her, everything they were, she had created at the beginning! She given the universe life, and it had killed her, her own brother/husband had turned his back on her, and gone on to create more squirming, creeping life that infested the world, even making the hated mortals that mocked kami with their resemblance.
She was so close to success as well… just a little more power and she would have the means to end all of the detestable crawling things that infested creation, corrupting it with their mortal life, smearing their dying bodies all over everything… All she had to do was defeat these last remaining kami, consuming their essence, returning it to herself. Then she would have the means to end it all, and start over again.
This time she wouldn’t make the mistake of creating living things. They only died and destroyed the purity of creation with their decay. She would create a pure world, one that would be unchanging, perfect, forever.
Gritting her teeth she willed her hated decayed body to move, forcing herself to fight on… regardless of her injuries her victory was only a matter of time. Everything died, and these impure mortal-born kami were no exception. She would cut down this annoyance, and add their strength to her own… perhaps she might even indulge herself and torture their comrades before consuming them whole.
Izanami shook her head. There was no time...she couldn’t indulge her hatred. But she couldn’t afford to flex her true power and crush this insect with magic. She had to defeat the annoying girl before her, using physical strength alone. She needed every iota of power she had for later.
Katsu fell back, once again… leading Izanami towards the top of a small hill. She’d already slashed open her throat, ruling out that location of her ‘core’. Tatsuo had speared her chest with an iron rod, a section of left-over rebar that acted as a lightning rod for Suz-metal. The lightning had split her ribs open above her heart, revealing nothing but the pulpy black slime of decayed internal organs.
Katsu parried another blow, letting the force drive her to her knees momentarily, dissipating it as she fell backwards and rolled, springing to her feet another few precious yards towards her target. Izanami’s core had to be buried behind her solar plexus, nestled against her spine and protected by her breastbone.
She had another dozen yards to go, when she put her foot on a loose stone, twisting it as it rolled away. Katsu dropped to one knee, hissing in pain. She whipped her sword up, parrying the blow that experience told her would follow...and almost fell over as it didn’t come. Looking up, she saw Izanami leaning on a rock. Immediately she realised that Izanami must have lunged, trying to take advantage of the momentary opening, and simply over reached herself, almost toppling as her exhausted body failed her.
Slowly, carefully, Katsu stood.
“There is no honour in beating an exhausted enemy… take a moment to recover, I can wait.”
Izanami glared at her.
“Look to yourself fool! I’m not the one who’s mortal and will tire!”
Katsu smiled, a small tight and cold smile.
“You’ll be truly dead long before I tire.”
“Liar! Already decay is coursing through your body, weakening you. All I have to do is endure until you die.”
Katsu shrugged, acting far more nonchalant than she felt.
“It matters not. I will end your suffering, and be healed when I return victorious.”
Izanami laughed, a cruel overly moist sound.
“Child, this is the spirit realm. Wounds sustained here are of the soul, not as easily healed as those to mere flesh.”
Again Katsu shrugged. It was a maxim in kendo, never let your opponent see your true feelings.
“I know that. It was taken into account. I’ve traveled here, through dangers untold, sustained by one simple truth. You have no power over me.”
Izanami screamed in frustration, and charged at Katsu, who parried the flurry of clumsy attacks, giving ground step by step until they stood atop the knoll. Inside her soul, she could feel Katsumi’s glee as she readied the anti-magic beam, or wave motion gun as she insisted on calling it. Now all she had to do was wait for the signal to fire, while keeping Izanami too occupied to realise what was going on… and avoid getting killed in the meantime.
Paul couldn’t help thinking that the chamber full of crystal hearts was perhaps a little too creepy. It looked like something that belonged in a Clive Barker novel, with the rough black stone walls, dotted with carved niches containing anatomically correct crystal hearts that pulsed with an inner light in a multitude of hues.
The niches were ringed around with silvery markings that almost resembled kanji characters, although they were of no language he knew. Not that it mattered, the lines connecting them formed a circuit pattern he could understand. He sighed, studying the chambers walls that stretched upwards into darkness, until the hearts resembled twinkling stars.
“Well, that does present a problem… there has to be hundreds of them, and we need to modify them.”
Beside Paul Dot was also staring up into the shadows.
“Yup… ain’t possible in ta time we got ta do it all by hand like. We gonna have to automate it like.”
Paul looked down at Dot, frowning in puzzlement.
“Automate? Care to explain?”
“I was thinking we could use sympathetic magic, ya see?. Create a model of the ward, change that and thus the ward. They be all alike, so do one and you do them all.”
Paul blinked.
“Okayyy… that’s a new one on me. You can do that?”
“Aye, I can.”
“Alright, go for it lil’witch. I’m going to take a look at the central thingamajig and see what I have to do to it.”
Paul nodded in the direction of the disco-ball like collection of faceted crystals about the size of a basketball, hanging from a chain above the centre of the chamber.
Dot nodded, taking out a box of common chalk, and beginning to replicate the wards on a blank section of wall. Paul smiled slightly to himself, for all her child-like appearance, Dot was without a doubt, the smarter one of the squad. Enough that he was fairly certain that given a bit more experience he could happily turn over the development of ‘magitech’ to her and go back to being a moderately successful author and sometimes Inari’s Herald.
Assuming they all survived the next few minutes that was...
Turning his attention back to the task in hand, Paul studied the crystal sphere up close...grateful for his tallness for once. Japan wasn’t built for people his height, and anyone else would’ve had to stand on tip-toe at least, but Paul simply stared up at the sphere that was just above his eye-line.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Upon closer inspection he could see that it wasn’t a single mass, but hundreds if not thousands of tiny prisms, all tightly slotted together and none bigger than the nail of his pinky finger. Each had their own distinct hue, although they blended altogether into a general impression of dimly flickering white light. Paul glanced back over his shoulder, wondering if each prism corresponded to a heart. He slowly nodded to himself, noticing that those hearts he could see clearly, each had a small hole, as if a splinter was missing from them.
Turning back and peering closer Paul saw that inside the sphere, right in the center, was a single distinct black ball, looking like a small obsidian marble embedded in the multicoloured gem.
Paul had no doubt that was what was converting each individual frequency of energy to Izanami’s own personal wavelength. The question was, what to do about it?
For a moment Paul contemplated simply taking a hammer to the whole array, but that brute force approach was too uncertain. It could result in a catastrophic feedback and destruction of everything. Even if it would make him feel somewhat better to vent his frustration on it.
Reaching a reluctant conclusion he removed card stock and pen loaded with silver conductive ink, and started constructing a talisman. There was no shortage of power to fuel it, all he had to do was get it right first time because there would be no second chances and no time for experimentation.
Paul hoped he knew what he was doing, but he was fully aware that there was a lot he didn’t know, and any unaccounted for factor could trip him up. Still, so far his instincts hadn’t been wrong. With a short prayer to any deity that happened to be listening, he set to work designing what was almost certainly the most complex spell talisman he’d come up with to date.
--------
Chiyo hovered the castle, keeping both Shoko and the battlefield in sight. It wasn’t proving to be easy, the very nature of Yomi meant that the magic that allowed her wings to be functional and keep her aloft was more draining than usual. Coupled with that she was maintaining a spell crafted to shield her from unfriendly eyes, a necessity since she made a tempting target and high speed evasive dodging would mean taking her eyes off events.
It would have to be soon… she thought. Katsu had lured Izanami onto a hilltop, giving Katsumi a perfect shot. They were just waiting on the ready signal from Paul-san and Akio. On the tail of that thought she saw Shoko waving frantically. Turning Chiyo aimed the pocket laser pointer at Yamato, and sent a one word signal : Ready.
---
Katsumi saw the signal from castle immediately, and not waiting on orders from either the Captain or Katsu, she spun on her axis, a manoeuvrer impossible for any normal ship, and hesitated… Katsu was in the line of fire from this position.
Sounding battle stations she alerted Katsu to the danger of being hit by the edge of the beam, and warned the crew to brace. Nobody had any idea what discharging that much mana would do to the Yamato, but it was very probable it would do something!
Katsu distinctly felt the skin on her back crawling as she was aware that Katsumi was lining up to fire. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she saw the bow of the Yamato coming around, with an ominous deep purple glow flicking around the prow and the open port of the ‘wave motion gun’ as Katsumi started the firing sequence. She had, at best, a scant handful of seconds to take cover.
With a desperate lunge that surprised Izanami, she drove her sword through Izanami’s lower leg, and into the ground behind her, severing it. With Izanami’s pained shriek ringing in her ears, Katsu dove past her enemy, throwing herself down over the ridge of the small hill, and rolled down the slope on the far side, away from the line of fire.
---
Chiyo looked down, and saw Shoko blur as she raced off to tell Paul-san to do now whatever it was he was planning. Glancing up, she swore suddenly and flung herself towards the ground, power diving as she scrambled for cover.
What Chiyo had noticed, and had been overlooked by everyone else, focused as they were on their target, was that Izanami stood between the Yamato and the castle. If the shot from the ‘wave motion gun’ missed, or went through Izanami, it would hit them as well.
---
Shoko seemed to almost teleport into the chamber, the briefest blur of motion and squeak of sneakers on the stone floor warning of her arrival before she was there, in front of him. Before she could even draw breath Paul activated the complex pattern of talisman’s underneath the disco-ball like crystal structure that transformed individual Kami’s own divine power into a single unified field that resonated with Izanami’s own dead Divine Pearl or spiritual core.
Paul hesitated a fraction of second, long enough to draw a single quick breath, staring at the tarot-deck like lay-out of eight white talisman cards, as the lines inked in silver upon them, and upon the floor connecting them in a circle, started to glow with a pure white light. Checking it was working. He exhaled with a single shouted word.
“Run!”
Shoko was already at the door by the time Paul had pivoted on his heels and taken the first long stride as he sprinted out of the chamber. Out of concern she glanced back over her shoulder, and saw the long shadow Paul cast as behind him the sphere turned into a miniature sun, and then seemed to explode as each individual prism shaped crystal exploded outwards, racing towards it’s corresponding ‘heart’ or Divine spiritual power core for each of the multitude of gods and goddesses that Izanami had captured and turned into the equivalent of a battery for her.
Shoko stumbled, her stride arrested by the sight of the rainbow hued explosion of magic behind her. Without breaking stride, Paul swept Shoko up into his arms as he caught up, and still accelerating into a flat-out sprint, threw them both down the curving corridor that spiralled up the hollow walls of the tower containing the huge crystal chamber, as something like a great wind rushed past and through them, sending Shoko tumbling down the stairs as Paul fell and threw her clear.
------
The entire sixty five thousand ton mass of the Yamato rattled and shook from the discharge of the mana beam, as up on the bridge Katsumi screamed in agony. No-one had even considered that she would experience the energy discharge quite so viscerally. She fell to her knees, screaming, but despite feeling like molten metal was pouring through and over herself, she somehow managed to hold her aim true, through sheer will sighting the beam on Izanami’s solar plexus.
The ground underneath Katsu trembled and bucked like frightening horse, as she lay half-way down on the far side of the hill. From behind her she heard Izanami scream, a sound that ended abruptly, cut off as the beam tore into her core.
Then, over her head she saw the eye-hurtingly deep indigo energy beam lance through the air, and as she followed the line of it’s flight, she saw the scintillating many coloured aurora hanging above the prison-castle. As the beam struck the shifting curtains of resplendent rainbow light, they shattered, and the world turned to white in an explosion of vast unknown energies.
------
Dazed, Shoko slowly sat up, a whole catalogue of bruises making themselves known. Gingerly she felt up and down herself, but nothing seemed to be broken at least, despite the blood that trickled down her face. For a moment, she couldn’t recall where she was or what had happened, but then memory came slinking back like a frightened dog… with a gasp she scrambled up the stairs, looking for Paul-san.
At the top, almost safely out of line of sight of the crystal chamber, Paul lay stretched out on the stone floor. Shoko made a small choked sound in the back of her throat at the sight. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not, but his back was littered with stone shrapnel torn from the walls and sent hurtling down the corridor by the unknown energies unleashed within.
She sank to her knees by Paul’s head, tentatively reaching out to brush the tumbled locks of black hair away from his face. For a moment she feared the worst, too numb for tears she stared...then with a gasp she saw the dust stir as he breathed out.
Without thinking, she flung her arms around him, pulling so his head rested on her small lap and curled around him, weeping in relief.
Shoko didn’t know how long she sat there, only that she stopped when she felt Paul’s hand on her cheek.
“Hey there little fox, why the tears?”
“Paul-san! Are you hurt! I was so afraid you were dead!”
“Nope, still alive...and my coat seems to have done it’s job. I really will have to write a glowing review for those tailors. I’m one big bruise all over, but no, I’m not bleeding anywhere and nothing seems to be broken. Help me up, we’d better see how everyone else is.”
“Yes! I hope Inari is alright! Do you think it worked and Izanami is dead?”
“I bloody hope so, because I’ve no idea what we’ll do if she isn’t!”
Paul leaned on Shoko, one large hand on her small shoulder as he levered himself to his feet, wincing as he went. Shoko was surprised though as he walked towards the chamber that had contained the crystal hearts, or Divine Pearls, that were the kami’s spiritual power cores. Paul paused at the entrance, surveying the wreckage.
There was no sign of any crystals, not even dust. He whistled softly as he stared at the molten edged hole in the wall. Walking over, mindful of the still glowing splatters of lava, he peered through the hole.
“Well… damn. I think the frequency cancelling mana beam went right through here! That explosion was the mana fields cancelling out, like matter and antimatter.”
Shoko frowned.
“That… wouldn’t hurt Inari and the other kami, would it?”
Paul ran his fingers though his hair, dislodging a small cloud of dust.
“Honestly, I haven’t the faintest clue… I mean, logically energy cannot be created nor destroyed, so even if the field frequencies cancelled out, it will have gone somewhere. But we are way outside of what I know here, and magic seems to follow it’s own rules.”
Paul sighed, and walked over to the hole in the chamber floor, peering down through the aperture to the vast chamber below. He whistled again, a low sound of disbelief.
“Well I’ll be… the mana convertor crystal is cracked. It looks burnt, the top yard of the tip is missing and it’s kinda melted round the edge. I think… I think that explosion wasn’t solely the fields cancelling out. It looks like the whole system failed, and catastrophically discharged. Although… we ought to be dead if it did that! Unless…. Yeah, that must be it. The explosion of the fields cancelling out, redirected the huge mana discharge, somehow, and we only caught the fringe of it.”
Shoko, stared at Paul for a moment, then shook her head.
“Paul-san… I have no idea what you just said. But shouldn’t you be making sure everyone else is alright?”
Paul grinned sheepishly.
“Yeah, you’re right Shoko-chan… sorry. I wanted to make sure nothing else was going to blow up, and got carried away trying to figure out what happened.”
“Is it safe?”
“Yeah… I don’t think there’s enough juice left in the whole of Yomi to light a match. I’ve no idea where all that power went, but it doesn’t matter right now. Lets go see who’s still with us and how everyone is doing.”
Shoko nodded firmly.
“Umhm! I want to find Inari and hug her SO HARD!”
Paul laughed, shaking his head,
“Me too kid… me too.”