Gunfire Samurai: The Mikasa Yamakazi Chronicles

SIX DAYS passed since the samurai in black had fed his Jungle Crows and he felt their patience would thin out given a seventh. There was plenty to go around, but they didn’t see it that way.

Should be called vultures, he grinned.

As he walked alongside his Emperor’s coach, the young man he’d sworn to protect with his life, he looked up checking on his avian chums who hovered a quarter mile above the royal pageant which he’d been asked to watch from arm’s length. He alone heard their excited caws urging him to get back to his dirty work already.

The alpha male, a broad silver wing tipped and red-eyed fellow, head bumped a smaller member of his murder, no doubt testing him to see if he was weak enough to turn against, maybe make a quick meal of him mid-flight. He’d observed them go cannibal with or without his objection. The samurai in black shook his head.

Again, no loyalty in the animal kingdom.

His Jungle Crows, like any wildlife men had attempted to tame, hated waiting for their next feeding. They batted their wings feverishly sideways showing their disapproval of his sluggish work ethic. Their talons had sunk into many a man in their time under his employ, and they’d turned a dark purple.

The blood chips fell into the crowd as snowflakes. It was another vile protest which the samurai ignored feeling he’d been put in charge of the black carnivorous demons by some cosmic fate, and he alone chose when they ate.

It’s about time we had a fresh pecking, lord samurai. Feed us now, or we’ll make you our next morsel!

The samurai in black made a quick figure eight scan of the area. His eyes moved in a fashion which his training had, over the decades, turned into nothing more than a reflex. He landed on a parchment advertising the latest grand monster hunt – his curiosity peaked.

The fictional beast sighted at the time was the epitome of a sight for sore eyes with huge fangs, thick, brown, tree bark-like fur. It stood sixteen feet tall, with long, steel claws, and those ferocious, ‘don’t you ever dare mess with me’ eyes which often came with the savages roaming the dark wilderness. The monster hunt wasn’t of a mythical Bigfoot or Yeti, though that idea did amuse the samurai in black.

He held his composure in the crowd for he wanted to laugh at the top of his lungs. There was one exception which caught his eye even further; though it was a quadruped, it stood on its two hind feet to chase down any pray albeit select, or unlucky…and some say to scare the life out of them. That had been the main horrific rumor passing from one ear to the next, hopping from village to town.

The beast was alleged to devour fear itself for its sustenance.

The flyer’s illustrator didn’t know where to place the eyes, so there were many. Word was the monster’s several traveling eyes wandered around its head and could be anywhere the beast wished them. The samurai figured this meant it didn’t have to move its big old head too darn much. It could look ahead and behind itself at the same time.

What a nightmare! What a freakish mess it must make of the imagination, he laughed again on the inside.

The samurai in black favored hunting humans, not creatures of frail men’s imagination. They were a tamer thing to him, the humans. Though, at times, they were more dangerous prey to stalk. Before his own eyes, he’d seen them act more animal than the beasts of the wild. Most of the men whom he’d been asked to hunt down, like the wild dogs they were, deserved it, whereas the animals were just minding their own business.

You leave them alone, they leave you alone, he’d often say.

He envisioned that the son and grandson of farmers would rather be in their lush rice fields in times like this. Though, as a father, he wished his wife, Oichi and his son, Endō, as well as his daughter Nakano, could come to the festival instead of baking in their rice field back in outskirts of Osaka. He felt they’d enjoy the pageantry despite their modesties, and it wasn’t too far away.

Yet, on that festive occasion, drunk peasants and merchants got to mingle; guzzling Doire Roots and dancing crazed dances, with sweat the size of raindrops on their foreheads, as the greats passed by to bless them for another year. The Festival of the Great Lights; a festival for which blood had to be spilled for it to be had in the first place, wasn’t about debauchery. He wouldn’t have allowed his family to see that part of the services.

He turned his attention back to the festivities, closing his mind away from family and farm life. To think, it had taken place in Osaka on seven Sunday mornings under Emperor Yamamomo, with tens of thousands of people clogging the streets only to see their emperor renew his vows to reassert that he’d be their deity. That he, Emperor Yamamomo, would protect them from brutality and strife always from the Chrysanthemum throne way back in Kyoto.

They were a sea of dirty clothes to the samurai in black. Any of them an assassin, a traitor. He couldn’t trust even a boy, old lady, or a beggar, for to do so meant a dead Emperor and the loss of his family’s honor for three generations. The Shogun, Nagasaki-no Akira, would never tolerate such a failure either; nor would he ever grace them with his presence in such pageantry which was why he’d sent his despotic nephew Commander Sora to ride behind the Imperial family’s coach.

The Emperor rode securely with Empress Minamoto-no-Tatsuo, their son Ryuu, his brother Takahiro, and his cousin Ryota in a yellow coach splattered with gold trimmings. They were surrounded by troops and Samurai, but their real champion was the samurai in black; a member of the Unbound Samurai lineage – a shadow, or Sons of the Moon. He served as deterrent used by generations of emperors who’d counted on their services to counter a threat worse than any assassins to have ever existed in Imperial Japan.

The Haduat.

He was instructed to blend in the crowd as an aristocrat or a peasant and hide his weapons at his side just in case there’d been an attack by a Haduat and in the rarest occasion, a Saduat.

He remembered how the first emperor who’d kissed death because of a Haduat; Emperor Jimmu, did so a century ago. Jimmu had called on a very powerful Mystic in his deathbed, who’d been able to heal in real time. The mystic was named Baku Tenenbaum, an outlander, who then was able to rescue him from mortal peril.

Mystics were later forbidden by The Shogun but never made officially illegal on the books by the Emperors who followed Jimmu. The samurai had never met one, but if he did, he’d probably have to sever their head for essential law keeping.

The prime minister, Prince Goro Fujita, came next in the royal procession. He was no priority to the samurai in black. The emperor was his task. Hayato Kojima, the Emissary to the Shogun, who had a purple coach went after the prime minister’s coach accompanied by an even numbered amount of royal guards. General Yuma Kojima, the Commander of the Armed Forces, choosing to be frugal as he often did, sat next to his cousin in Lord Hayato’s coach.

Though there were military and royal guards there, the samurai in black knew his role in the story as the real last call should they all fail his master, and according to the legend, the specialist assassin had succeeded every single time except for Jimmu.

He stared deep at the peasants once more for what they looked like and how they acted to him seemed strange. Was it the Sake or was it too much Doire Roots going to their heads? To the roof above he saw dingy houses which needed repair. The street lights were in need of repair, the pungent scent of street food, and dancing entertainers distracted every sense in his control. They dressed as green as Argwars, bright yellow as Ansolis, dark as the Relic of Death, as beautiful as the Daudanes.

The people hadn’t celebrated the end of The Great War Era, which many elders felt was a worse tragedy. Worse for those who were old enough to recall the brutality. As the imperials passed, the samurai saw a group of twenty women, some dressed in black and some in white sheets, sprinkling green scaly flakes on the ground and over the crowd.

Their image reminded the samurai of the Sacred Children of the South; those green and scaly beings were once hunted down for godly treasures. They’d gone into extinction by the time he was a teenager. The SCOTS, they were called for short, used to be spotted all over the Northern Isles, but of late, they’d been thought of as mythic creatures, mere folklore, and another atrocity born of the mind of zealot menfolk. More real to him than the monster hunt, he chuckled. Yet the annual giving of thanks had its own weird beginnings.

He’d heard long ago, as a child working the fields, of the Insane Pretender Emperor, named Asahi Itsuki, who’d ordered a division of his most loyal men to slaughter the entire Village of Hyuga. A total of thirty thousand perished by sundown.

The village was near the mouth of the Oyodo River, where women and children of peasants had refused to accept him as God Almighty. His men had already killed twenty thousand just on their way to Hyuga, many of them pagans, before being stopped by his own generals over their payment and land disputes. It seemed greed prevailed over bloodletting.

Many more had defected after being sickened by the sheer enormity of the carnage, and a regiment of Army troops led by then Colonel Yuma Kojima made sure Itsuki never saw the next daybreak. At the end of the ordeal, over fifty thousand peasants were dead all over the Kagoshima Province during the Insane Pretender’s infamous massacre.

There’d been so many bodies, that the river water, which emptied near the village, turned to a crimson color for miles upstream frightening many residents in the area, for which it was later called the Crimson Massacre.

The samurai in black had read only brief notes on scrolls, but he remembered it as if he were there. It all started with several groups of demented male nomads known collectively as the Kam, the Ari, the Rams and the Gori and sixteen unnamed groups of female nomads.

They were once a simple folk who roamed many village outskirts, avoiding ‘other’ human contact, as disintegrated families. They remained disunited and hungry until they intermarried and joined forces as one forming the mess which later became one of the most powerful clans in Japan.

They were Clan Kamari.

For centuries there was plenty of bloodless infighting among the Ari, Rams, Kam, and Gori for supremacy over the sixteen unnamed female tribes. This stopped when a new princess arose among them from the blood of an emperor.

Jimmu, then Emperor of Japan, couldn’t keep his fly shut but he’d refused to acknowledge the princess. Through this princess, they had a claim to the throne regardless of the denial. She was said to be the most beautiful Kamari clansman ever brought forth to the world of the living, and if ever a man had met a Kamari clansman he wouldn’t beg to differ. They were an especially ugly lot according to the text of the time, with the women often being mistaken as good-looking men while the men were often confused with ugly women.

The samurai in black veered his mind away from ancient stories, as they reached the end of the parade. The royal family bid their people farewell and headed back to Kyoto. The partaking of drink between peasant and merchant quickly ceased as they replaced their old façades, though the party went on in large segregated groups. Towards the end of the festival when all men and women had gone too drunk to walk, and children into their homes, the samurai in black was brought a contract for a young peasant in the North, so he headed straight to his sail team on the coast.

That night, The White Horned Devil paid the city a visit. A single candle fell from a drunkard’s hand onto a cesspool, igniting a bright green spark; Osaka began to burn.

Only after a mortal has lost all things

Will he turn his eyes North

And beg us for a sweet fling

With the kingdom of the South

Pleading to be pulled by a string

His heart opens and praises pour out his mouth

Like a lovely harp his honeyed melody shall ring

And he’ll yearn again for days filled with simpler things

- The Great Oracle, Canto One

ONE

I am the Law

In the North Jade Isles on the month of the Ram…

SEVEN DAYS passed since the samurai in black had fed his Jungle Crows and as he walked towards the ancient stone manor, his spectral defect was out in the open. The circumstance of his visit had called for an extreme he had hidden most of his adult life. One which would have denied him the right to become a samurai long ago.

The journey through the small farm town of Yazaki, known for its great fruits, at the base of the manor, proved the narrowmindedness of the world had not changed. ‘Freak’ they would whisper as he passed by the local fruit market with a confident stride; for he didn’t make it apparent, he was a samurai upfront.

The torment of their words ended shortly after he struck a fruit stand with his blade, leaving behind slices of apples peppering the gutter behind it. He chewed on the last remaining slice he had procured with imperial silver pieces and continued his silent journey toward the stone fortress, which he’d been commanded to investigate.

The samurai in black’s mutation lingered in the terrified villager’s minds. It was not where it belonged, where he usually kept it while he’d be on missions – under his charcoal colored kimono. It was not where he stuffed it when in public – tucked within a pair of brown gloves. It was not where he hid it as a schoolboy to keep the other children from dashing off in a cringe or to stop his bullies from having at him.

This time, the situation had changed for the old soul – he figured his shortcoming would serve a spine-tingling and dark purpose. Mikasa thought his accessory would serve their design on this mission very well, as they did decades ago when he was a hardy teenaged warrior campaigning in the Northwood.

He’d slipped in plain sight through the patchy turf, which, just moments before, appeared to be an angry bed of dust the blight had brought with it from the South, choking all but the most resilient plant life in the North. The elements were accelerating the sun’s darkness as it slipped down the horizon.

He kept all his senses on high regard; taking in the pungent rotting trail of nearby outhouses, light tavern music to his right, and the noisome ringing of steel, no doubt being pounded into weapons, didn’t escape his ears either.

He’d taken inventory of the prophetic gray clouds attempting to push the sun out of sight for his coming. Nothing big or small escaped Mikasa’s ninjalike awareness. He couldn’t afford to at that moment – not even in a land which he was familiar with.

The people of the North Jade Isles were filled with superstitions; of gods and goddesses, of demons and angels, of rare beings with strange supernatural gifts, of items with ungodly abilities, and men who cavorted with immortal dragons. All filled with folly they were, as were the rest of the zealot tribes of the Great Empire.

It did occur to him how ruthless Hirohito’s men were, but it mattered not. They’d plant their eyes on his unparalleled blessings in disbelief. It would be a critical distraction once a skirmish broke out which, counting the far-reaching nature of the governor’s home, would be a long-drawn-out affair. He dreaded the thought.

In the case of anonymity, he’d come prepared as well. His black leather face mask, taking the elongated shape of a smiling lion with a trinket in its mouth, covered what the black face paint had not. They also held back his distinctly pointy ears and perky nose.

His weapon forged for a long-fallen crown prince – under a year’s worth of white-hot flames – was razor-sharp. It had tasted the blood of close to a thousand fearless fighters under its new companion. It swung against his hips, tied down with a thick golden cord. If it came to such a bloodletting, he thought, he’d mesmerize Hirohito as well when the evil Lord of Lands saw him sheathe his rare cannibal of a sword. This, of course, would be after a glorious victory.

He’d mesmerize the loony and deranged governor to death.

With the endorsement of his appearance to favor him, this victory, if at all necessary, would end with the samurai in black taking the child without mortal injury. No cuts on his arms, back, and neck this time, nor any deep chinks on the expensive light armor under his silken garment.

He worried not about his feet for they had been an abomination in their own right; covered well under specially made sox and a worn-down geta, which kept his kimono from touching all the muck on which he trampled.

He had this one goal; snatch that damn kid away from the Monster of the North; a man known for seizing the peasant children of his own farmers. The child was headed to a Bokou to learn to read and write. His father had applied for and got him accepted to the Bokou and paid for the license fair and square. But the Lord of Lands wanted the money, which had been saved from two generations and buried somewhere in the farmland.

They sent two samurai; one to search the property and one to interrogate the peasants. When the family played dumb, they kidnapped the son. The mother pleaded with the samurai, who killed her by accident. In the Isles, peasant blood wasn’t considered accidental once spilled by a samurai dispatching his duties; not to the samurai in black.

So, this was his sole task. It would be simple. It would send a clear message about the new system which would soon arrive. It was sanctioned – though the governor would never know by what accursed authority. He couldn’t know. It would mean bloody treachery and a bit of that good old sweet civil war that no one likes if his ultimate source of power was discovered.

He needed to extract the little snot-nosed boy, bring him back home in the southern end of the Isles – that was it. But would it be that easy? The gates were right before him. All he had to do was enter.

Seven days had passed since the samurai in black had fed his hoggish crows – they grew antsy, eyeing his every step below. Ordering him to act with occasional venom filled caws here and there. For a moment he stared at the gate, then he looked back – caws filled the air.

He stopped short.

The samurai in black thought of his last crusade in the Northwood. He remembered how much of a rigorous and protracted mission it had been. He’d lifted every rock, toppled every tent, tracked down every campfire, to find the dreaded General Yakushima.

He’d searched night and day for the opportunistic miscreant to no avail. He went without food for three days drawing close to death; he thought he’d seen The Relic. The fertile soil under his feet had beckoned him to enter it on the fourth. When he was about to give up and double back to sniff out a new track, it was the father of the little bedwetter, which he’d been sent to rescue, who had altered his destiny forever.

The old farmer was shivering in the frigid wind, his thin peasant clothes seeming like they’d served as a nest for the mating season of moths and worms. With tears rolling down his wrinkled face, an eager Mr. Minamoto bowed before the samurai in black whom he’d run into many times before as Mikasa Yamakazi and sent him toward the general’s hiding place.

The fierce battle between the two combatants was short, but the samurai in black prevailed over General Yakushima. And as promised, Emperor Yamamomo had rid the land of another cruel monster – though the speech on record had been about brutal creatures who roamed the village exterior terrorizing the provincial and agrarian serfs.

Mikasa Yamakazi, the samurai in black, had saved that man’s name in his heart, mind, and soul, but never revisited the name for a time. It was not until that name, the name of a man for which he owed his glory, came upon a secret list, that it would come back to him.

He’d faced and brought to heel countless heedless men – more than his memory could muster up a decent count. But never had he been tasked with taking down a governor. They were considered beyond reproach in the empire. In his days, he’d been stared at by strongmen and looked back with his own cold, brown sets, before tearing them down with his trusty sword. On this grimy day, he’d have to do the same to one whom the villagers perceived to be an unconquerable force.

Working solely for the O.C.I. at Palace Rose would be an honorable departure from the monotony of Imperial Guardian duties. It should be a noble step forward – worthy of his lineage considering he’d been an Unbound Samurai for so long.

Though with this new task, it could end up sending him towards the scorching gates of Hades. If by the favors of fortune, or an act of a god, he’d escape its fiery grip, he figured a part of him would remain down there regardless of any intervention on his behalf.

Mikasa shut his eyes and inhaled a deep cold breath.

He pushed the thick metal gates. Its rusty hinges creaked and flung bits of red metallic flakes, which fell with reluctance on his black leathers. There went the element of surprise.

No need for catlike behavior thought Mikasa. He’d figured that day had no violent destiny written within it. They’d see who he was and hand the little piss-pants over to him and he’d deliver the child to his faithful friend in the southern end of the Isles.

He pushed the vulgar gate open all the way, and it creaked louder, releasing a sheep’s bawl. Once through the stained barrier, his eyes landed on Governor Hirohito, sitting on his marble porch, a boy next to him, two Dandy Destroyers standing at the entry to the manor, armed for doomsday, as if by some cosmic foresight, he’d been expecting Mikasa’s coming.

Mikasa’s action would’ve been unexpected; a scandalous torpedo to long-held etiquette among those of noble birth.

Unknown men of his cast; Samurai 9th Class, were forbidden from entering the orbit of a Governor with arms in hand; this was a frail, yet well-known, effort to take the bite out the possibility of betrayal. An attempt that has, up until that nebulous moment with some unknown samurai in black, worked very well among the samurai ranks, who were honor bound to the land from which