his eyes showed as he glared up at me. Defiant in the face of death.
“My clan will avenge me,” he whispered. “Lady Hanshou knows you have been released, Hakaimono. As long as you walk this realm, the Shadow Clan will not rest. We will purge you from the land, even if we must sacrifice a thousand warriors, shinobi and majutsushi to do it!”
“Lady Hanshou?” I chuckled. “Lady Hanshou set you up as bait, human. She never expected you to win.” The human’s brow furrowed, and I snorted. “Hanshou knows me…We go way back, your daimyo and I. She is well aware that a dozen warriors and one majutsushi isn’t enough to even challenge me. You and your men were a sacrifice to either slow me down, or to test how strong I’ve become. There’s probably a shinobi close by right now, watching us. That’s fine. It can take this message back.”
I raised Kamigoroshi and brought it down, striking the top of the man’s skull and splitting him all the way to the groin. The majutsushi collapsed to his knees, the pieces of his upper body falling to either side, before he crumpled wetly to the ground.
“The Shadow Clan will die,” I said to the air, to the hidden shinobi no doubt listening to my every word, and to the trapped soul inside me, raging at his own helplessness. “For every day I was imprisoned in the sword, I will kill one member of the Kage—man, woman and child—until there is no one left. I will raze their castles and cities to the ground, and soak the earth in so much blood nothing will grow there again. And when I reach Lady Hanshou, we will see if an immortal can continue to exist after I’ve torn the withered heart from its chest and eaten it in front of her.” Sheathing Kamigoroshi, I turned and began walking across the yard toward the temple steps. “Take that back to your daimyo,” I told the empty air. “Tell her she doesn’t have to send anyone after me. I’ll see her soon enough.”
From the corner of my eye, I caught a flicker of movement on the temple roof, a featureless shadow sliding through the darkness. As it disappeared into the night, I smirked and shook my head. Exactly as I’d suspected. The Shadow Clan, for all their secrets and mystery and claims of dancing with the darkness, was fairly predictable.
Although they had found me sooner than I’d thought they would. Even if this group was just a test, an experiment conducted by their ruthless daimyo to see what I could do, more would follow. After centuries of living with the Kage, learning their ways and their secrets with every demonslayer that took up Kamigoroshi, I knew more about the Shadow Clan than anyone save their immortal daimyo.
The problem was, the Shadow Clan knew me, too. A dozen samurai I could deal with. A few hundred became problematic, especially if they sent majutsushi with them. Their newest head mage, a skinny human named Kage Naganori, was an arrogant, insufferable prick but, from what I had seen, powerful. And much as I hated to admit it, Kage Tatsumi was only mortal. His body, though I gave it a bit of the toughness and rapid healing my kind was famous for, was not as durable as an oni’s. All it would take was a sword across his throat, an arrow through his heart, and I would be stuck in Kamigoroshi for another few centuries.
Deep within, I felt a flicker of a longing that wasn’t mine, the soul of Kage Tatsumi desperately hoping someone would kill him.
So eager to die, Tatsumi? Don’t worry, you’ll get your wish soon enough. But this time, I’m not going back into that cursed sword. This time, when you die, I’ll finally be free.
I raised my head and gazed at the moon climbing slowly over the roof of the temple. The Shadow Clan would die. For trapping me in Kamigoroshi, for arrogantly assuming they could use my power to further their own designs, I would wreak my vengeance upon the entire Kage line. They would experience horror and suffering like they had never known, and in the end, when she was surrounded by the slaughtered remains of her clan, I would personally twist Lady Hanshou’s head from her withered neck and be done with the Kage forever. But there was one thing I had to accomplish, first.
I turned and walked across the courtyard, pebbles