Slowly, she came to.
The gray-black outlines of the scenery sharpened little by little in her eyes. As expected, the pervert had her slung over his shoulder and was following the little path along the forest's edge, circling back toward the timber yard.
Where his shoulder dug into her, the pain was a raw burn, and every jolt sent a fresh wave of agony through her body. The old pervert must have realized she was awake by now. He said nothing and made no move because the nails on both her hands had already been broken off...
But that didn't matter...
Her arms hung down like a cripple's. As the muscle of his shoulder shifted slightly with each step he took, a sharp-edged cobblestone slid slowly down along her sleeve.
Her movements were very slow, her body as still as a corpse's. But perhaps she was a little too slow—before long the outline of the timber yard appeared in view. The old man walked at an unhurried pace, drawing closer to the small back gate behind the yard, and then, all at once, he stopped and sniffed.
"There's the smell of blood..."
True, Tsukiike Kaoru's body stank of blood as well, and the old man had only just caught the scent—the thought had not yet settled—when a gunshot, bang, came over from the little square. Startled, the old man pushed the gate open; he had taken barely a step through it when Tsukiike Kaoru flew up off his shoulder!
The loose kimono whirled in the wind like a butterfly, and the round stone gripped in her hand slashed at the old man's throat, swift as lightning. But he was quick to react as well; snapping to his senses, he shot a hand out to grab her. It closed on empty air.
That body flung into the air slid eerily through space for some distance and somehow ended up behind the old man, the stone's sharp edge slicing at his unguarded skull.
Chisakura Senkan!
Red clouds billowed in the darkness. The instant the two came together, the girl's body traced an arc through the air and was flung away outright—at some point the old man had gotten hold of her clothes.
She wore nothing under the kimono. Whirled like that, the girl's naked body, clad only in white socks, flew close to four or five meters through the air before crashing down in a corner of the square where the light fell.
Her barely developed body was covered in stripe after stripe of wounds, a red so stark it made the heart jump; it looked as though she had been dressed in a set of underwear of raw flesh, or had had a layer of skin peeled off her.
She lay there twitching unconsciously once or twice, a thread of blood spilling from her mouth, and in her right hand she still stubbornly clutched that stone.
That was the only weapon she had left, though by now it seemed to mean nothing at all.
The old man held the loose kimono in one hand and reached back to feel his skull; his fingers came away smeared with blood. Looking at that blood, he suddenly started to laugh. "Heh heh. Good. Chisakura Senkan... Chisakura Senkan... Kaoru, your sneak attack failed this time—you can try again..."
He wanted to work out the secret of the Pond-Sakura Thousand Illusions in the middle of a fight, but looking at the naked girl sprawled on her back in the lamplight, she looked ready to die at any moment—how could she fight at all? He took a few steps over, and only when he stood in front of her did he finally see the square clearly, and he went rigid.
The two buildings of the timber yard stood at right angles to each other; coming in through the small gate, the two-story block had blocked his view. Only now, at the corner where the two buildings met, on the boundary between light and dark, could he see everything on the little square.
Four or five headless corpses lay scattered across it, pools of blood a garish scarlet. On the far side of the square a small shed was blazing, the flames about to spread to the buildings around it. Only at a water tap on the other side of the square was there still a boy, washing a machete.
The fall had left Tsukiike Kaoru badly dazed; it was a long while before she could make out the old man's expression. Then she struggled onto her side, and the two of the Tsukiike family both fixed their eyes on that field of corpses and the boy beyond the square. The old man tightened his grip on his katana, but no one made a sound.
Slowly, he finished washing the machete clean, then began rinsing a dagger. After that he picked up a bar of soap beside him and washed his hands. Only then did the boy turn, smile at the two of them, and bow.
"It's been a long time, you two. What a coincidence, meeting here." In Tsukiike Kaoru's bewildered vision, the boy who had been shaking with terror not so long ago was now speaking the pure, native Japanese of Tokyo.
"Welcome to China."
Despite himself, a chill rose through the old man's body.
At some point, Cao Dongfeng had woken up in the woods as well.
It was pitch black all around and he did not dare move. Feeling out his surroundings, he roughly understood that he was up in a large tree.
How on earth did that bastard Gu Jiaming haul me up here...?
He steadied himself, fumbled a box of matches out of his trouser pocket, struck one, gauged the height of the drop, and only then climbed down the trunk.
When his feet hit the ground, he remembered what Gu Jiaming had said.
...Despair, mind you.
He did not understand it, and he did not believe it. But since the man had dumped him up in a tree, even if the others caught him, they probably would not kill him for a while yet. When I get back, I'll give that bastard a proper working over—make him truly unable to live or die!
Thinking this, he had not gone far when something tripped him and sent him sprawling.
He got out the matchbox. The first match went out; the second caught, and he moved it toward whatever had tripped him. It was a man's leg. He followed it upward with the match—a very familiar way of dressing: leather pants, then a leather jacket, and then—
Waaaaaahhhhh—
A scream of uttermost terror rang through the woods. Cao Dongfeng scrambled backward several steps on hands and knees and pressed himself against a thick trunk, his heart nearly bursting out of his chest. It was a corpse with no head!
...Despair, mind you.
In his daze, it was as though someone had murmured it at his ear.
He did not know where to put his hands; they groped trembling over the ground, and suddenly his fingers touched something fleshy and soft. In terror he crawled several steps away again, and it was a long while before a match flared once more and wavered toward the thing he had touched.
—A human head!
This time his teeth chattered wildly, but he did not scream. After a long while came the sound of his low sobbing. "Help... somebody, help me..."
He scraped a pile of leaves together on the ground and, after many tries, got them lit with a match. By that firelight the things within a few meters came clear. A headless body, a human head—this man really had been one of his father's men. And in the darkness not far off, another corpse seemed to be leaning against a tree trunk; from here, it looked headless too.
Trying hard not to look at those hideous corpses, Cao Dongfeng tremblingly fed a few branches into the fire, and once they caught, he took that makeshift torch and charged off like a madman in the direction where there were no bodies.
He had rushed a few steps when he stopped dead and threw up with a "blaargh." Ahead of him a headless corpse had its belly slit open, the innards spilled out, and the head lying on the ground beside it belonged, again, to one of the men his father had brought to rescue him.
Fleeing for his life while vomiting like a madman must rank as a fairly rare spectacle, though there was no one nearby just now to enjoy it. He turned in another direction, ran a few steps—corpse, head, corpse, head. Most of these men bore various other wounds, but every one of them, without exception, was his father's man, and every one had been beheaded. He ran on and on without aim, until at some point he suddenly realized that he had been turning every time he met a corpse—and now he had run right back to where he started!
The fire he had just lit had caught the trees by now and was roaring. The first headless corpse he had found still lay on the ground. He stared at it with fixed eyes, and Gu Jiaming's parting words rang out again.
...Despair, mind you!
No. Dad has to be fine back there. He's the one holding everything together, he wouldn't have come into the woods. He has to be fine...
He had never known this place well, and in the dark it was hard to keep his bearings, but this time he paid the corpses no mind at all. Guessing roughly at the direction of the timber yard, he groped his way there at a run...
Ah, what's going on, what's going on—Sanjiang Pavilion refreshed already? Wasn't it supposed to switch over at midnight...
Never mind. There's another chapter tonight, and I'll stick a "YD" name on all the chapters while I'm at it... Also, votes, please (^__^)