a magnificent thing it was, maybe the best ever, all power concentrated in four inches of flying yakiba, and if he weren’t again lucky as hell, it would have cleaved him, clavicle to belly button, and left all his secrets to spill out on the nice white snow.
Inside the thrust, he head-butted again, at the same time trying to find enough play to get his own point into flesh, but the butt was a glancing thing, more of an ear slap, and by the time his blade was where Kondo was, Kondo was no longer there.
Bob gulped.
Christ, he felt old and used.
“Feel fear? I see it in your eyes. You have accepted your defeat. Wonderful. I can do it quick. You won’t feel a thing. They just fall, wordlessly, without a sound. I’ve never heard a cry. The eight seconds of oxygen in your brain goes fast. The pain never catches up with it.”
Bob’s answer was yokogiri, left to right, driven by the proper “Ai!” because expelling the air in perfect timing hastened the blade. He sliced the air cleanly in two. A lesser man would have fallen in both directions at once. Kondo pirouetted into a new defensive position, then stepped forward with a high kick and a “Hai!” and drove a superspeed diagonal at Swagger who fortunately had a nervous system still enough in the fight to react and leap ahead. In a blinding flash Kondo unleashed another giant power cut, this time his own version of yokogiri, left to right, much more perfectly formed than Bob’s, much more elegant and worthy of a movie. The wicked point of the blade cut Bob’s hakama sleeve and maybe an inch or so of skin. Swagger smelled blood, his own. That was a serious cut, deep, almost to the bone. It needed stitches or it would bleed him out in an hour or so. But it wasn’t to guts or heart or lungs, it took down no bone structures, it didn’t interrupt the flow of neurons, it just fucking hurt.
He rotated leftward, bumped into something hard, the thin trunk of one of the ceremonial willows, and maybe lost a step. At that moment, from utter repose, Kondo fired another yokogiri at him and he winced, not fast enough to block, too tired to duck.
But instead of opening his throat like a broken gutter, the blade lost possibly a tenth of its speed as it hit the willow trunk, glided through without breaking a sweat, and then halted and withdrew a few inches from his face.
“Pretty cool,” said Kondo. “You haven’t seen that in a movie, have you?”
Indeed, he hadn’t. Suddenly snow on the willow leaves shook itself loose as the top half of the tree tumbled, trailing spirals of snow.
Swagger took a shot at kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, his best option, but it was too slow.
“I’ve seen better,” said Kondo. “Really, I think Doshu would admonish you for that one.”
Bob gulped air.
“No snappy patter? You’re spent. That was your last cut. You have no offense.”
With that Swagger lunged again, tsuki hard, but spent most of his energy in the thrust, which connected with nothing except the void that Kondo had so recently occupied.
Swagger sucked hard for oxygen. God, where was his second wind?
“Swagger, let me finish it. No need to go out on a bad cut, screaming, your guts hanging out. I can put an instant end to your suffering.”
Swagger responded to the offer with a diagonal issued from on high that was so awkward and poorly timed it was almost an insult to Kondo. It missed by what felt like seven yards. He had almost nothing left.
“Just let me end it now, fast and clean, old lion.”
Bob didn’t take the advice, as expressed in shinchokugiri, a vertical downward, but badly out of timing and harmless.
“If you didn’t kill me early, you aren’t killing me at all,” Kondo said. “Okay. I offered. I pay my respects. This has been great. You’re a valiant guy. But the party’s over. Five hard cuts and you’ll only be able to stay with me through four. I know you will die strong, great samurai.”
“Fuck you” was all the blown man’s wretched mind could come up with.
“Hai!” screamed Kondo.
The blows came so fast Swagger’s eyes could not stay with them, only the dying warrior reptile far inside took over his instincts and got soft parries on the first left-hand diagonal, the second left-hand diagonal, somehow got horizontal for a harder, low-blade block on a vertical, lurched to the right to dissuade the fourth, now right-handed diagonal, and dropped to come against the final side cut, the yokogiri.
No time.
No gas.
No speed.
His blade couldn’t catch up with the blur of steel that seemed to pick up acceleration as it vectored hard to his body.
It was perfect yokogiri, with Kondo’s full might and genius behind it, and as he knew it would, it flew true into the shred of opening under Bob’s lagging defense. Kondo had an image, almost of woodcut clarity, of what must happen next.
Yakiba-tempered edge-sheers through hip bone, shattering it, continues downward, shattering the femur ball by the inevitable physics of its own impact reverberation, then shatters the femur itself and with it nips the femoral artery, that torrent of blood. Sundered, the femoral deposits its fluid in midair in a fine and driving rush to turn the snow below to purple slush. The blade itself, far from spent, cleaves through what remains of flesh, breaks free, its amputation complete, and Bob falls as he exsanguinates. Clinical death is possibly not instantaneous but certainly occurs within eight seconds.
Yet even as his brain told Kondo that must happen, it did not happen. Instead odd vibrations of uncertainty came his way, as he felt the cut stop hard and shallow and his own hilt torque wildly, almost out of his hands, though he was fast enough to recover even as an old adage somehow came to mind. Who said it? Where? When? Why was it so familiar?
Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel.
He struggled to regain timing but was not quite fast enough.
It was the migi kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, the scythe cut, Swagger’s best, honed on desert slopes under a hard and ceaseless sun. For his part, bad old Muramasa was with it all the way. His blade hungered for blood, driving up from just above the hip, through hoses and ducts and wet linkages and mechanics, through a whole anatomy lesson of viscera, splitting them wide so they could jet-empty their contents upon the snow. It wasn’t Swagger’s best cut, for it wore out at the halfway point before cutting the spine, much less the lungs. But even Doshu would have counted it adequate.
He withdrew, and seeing that which was far as if close and that which was close as if far, segued rather gracefully from recovery into the next most accessible position, which was kasumi (“mist”), a horizontal, over-the- shoulders construction supported on reversed wrists.
“Feel the fear at last?” Bob asked, and maybe saw a glint of it in the man’s stricken face: I am mortal, I will die, my time is up, why why why?
Bob’s kasumi then transcended miraculously and of its own volition into tsuki, not well aimed but well enough as it punctured and passed through Kondo’s throat, splitting his larynx and jugular, half-severing his spine, and weirdly sustaining him in midfall for a half-second before withdrawal.
Kondo toppled, issuing fiery liquids from his ruptures. His face was blank, his eyes distant, his mouth slack. When he hit, a reddened puff of snow flew up.
Swagger stood back from the carnage and his hand flew to his hip, where the steel inserted courtesy of a Russian sniper in Vietnam decades ago had stopped Kondo’s brilliant cut. It was Swagger’s only card, and he’d been wise enough to play it last. The cut was precise butchery, smooth but shallow, and some black gruel pulsed from it, but it wasn’t geysering spectacularly, meaning no artery had been cut. Bob got a pouch of QuiKlot out, tore the top off with his teeth, and poured the clotting agent into the wound, knowing again that stitches were mandatory within an hour, if he had the strength. Then he poured more on the bloodier cut on his left shoulder.
Christ, it hurt.
He retreated, found his saya, and stood for a second.
Do it right, he thought. Thank the fucking sword.
Feeling foolish and white, he held the weapon horizontally before him and bowed to the little Japanese god
