19 – The Superior Bastard

Inumi closed the distance, moving so fast that he created an explosion of force. I barely jerked away, avoiding a stab aimed square at my gut. I tried to close the gap, but a hard swing of the iron staff caught me in the ribs and sent me stumbling back.

Smoke snarled and pounced upon him, enraged, but a hard blow from the staff swept the hellcat aside with ease. His bulk smashed into a portion of the fence, wood exploding into splinters as Smoke bounced and skidded on the grass beyond.

“Smoke!” I gasped. Again that familiar, tempting anger spiked through my whole body. I bit it back. The cat was fine… a little sore, most likely, but he was far tougher than I would have thought for such a creature. “Stay there!” I ordered.

He might have been strong enough to kill normal humans, but this was something far worse.

I steadied myself in time to see Yomi close the gap, her billhook swinging out in a rapid flurry of blows, her arm a blur from the shoulder down. But Inumi was just as quick, grasping his halberd and deflecting each strike. Whenever their weapons met it kicked up sparks of red and purple energy, the flashes lighting up the night.

Yomi’s face was set in a hard grimace, brow furrowed in focus, and she picked up the pace in her slashes second by second. The clangs of steel on steel grew louder, more frequent, but Inumi met her blow for blow.

A sudden shock wave of unseen force slammed into her, snapping Yomi’s head back and sending her spinning back through the air. Inumi pressed toward her, aiming a sweeping slash clean toward her waist, but I’d closed the gap and caught the shaft with one hand. I felt the immense strength in Inumi’s unassuming build, the ground shuddering beneath my heels.

“Now where did you come from, westman?” Inumi asked, his voice hissing from a slight strain. We struggled back and forth, soil shifting and roiling beneath our feet. “They don’t make them all so strong where you come from, no. You’re something different.”

“You’re one to talk!” I snapped my head forward, headbutting him with a resounding crack. A great chunk of his mask broke off, the bandit reeling and stumbling away.

Now I could see the top left side of his forehead, and the skin beneath was… pale. Almost ghostly white. A few veins protruded from beneath the skin, radiating a strange purple glow.

“Shit,” I hissed.

“Never seen a yokai before?” Yomi huffed.

“No, I can honestly say I haven’t.”

“Had a feeling there was something off about you,” she said, her gaze fixated on Inumi. “There was some kind of stink in your trail, the kind that only a yokai would have. Question is, why is a yokai running around with human bandits?”

Inumi chuckled, braced again, and then lunged at us.

We jumped in opposite directions, avoiding a slash that tore into the ground and uprooted several meters of earth in an explosive burst.

A miasma of shadow swirled around Yomi, swiftly forming into a pair of tendrils that rose up from her shoulders. The darkness warped and shifted, until the end of each tendril had taken the shape of a snarling, red eyed jackal. Both hounds snapped at the air, before the two lengths of shadow rocketed toward the yokai. They were swift, rabid, snapping at him from multiple angles but always being beaten back by the ends of Inumi’s halberd. Yomi pressed toward him, those tendrils still attached to her shoulders like an extra set of limbs.

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A particularly hard swing split the iron shaft of the halberd, kicking up sparks, and the second dove forth and bit into Inumi’s side. The yokai gave a sharp gasp, his exposed eye widening in shock. In truth I had a feeling Yomi could have taken care of the bastard on her own, but I wanted this over with sooner rather than later.

I rushed at him from the side, fire blazing in my muscles. My right arm parried a swing from the severed head of the halberd, and I caught him with a punch that shook the earth and launched Inumi clean off his feet. His body rocketed several dozen meters away from my land, striking a grove of trees with enough force to blast them apart in a cloud of dirt and splintering wood.

Inumi was already recovering as Yomi and I sprinted his way, rising from the deep crater his body had punched into the rocky soil. He looked largely undamaged, but there was an uncomfortable hunch to his posture now.

Yomi’s blade thudded into his shoulder, but it was like trying to chop a slab of granite. It only dug a few centimetres into the flesh, pulling a pained grunt from the yokai, but from how the ground shuddered it was clear Yomi could have sliced straight through a normal human. The strange shadow jackals had dissolved from her shoulders by now, but she was able to use her own hands just as ruthlessly.

Inumi dodged another few slashes from the huntress, purple blood slowly bubbling up from the wound on his clavicle. I could see, already, that strands of flesh were already springing up along the torn flesh to pull it shut. A hard kick nailed Yomi in the chest, driving her wheezing to one knee, and his fist rammed into my cheek with more force than a cannon ball.