world beneath. Sweating still, despite the storm, the boy crouched in the ’throwers’ operator’s seat, damp palms pressed to targeting controls. He blinked the burn from his eyes, squinting into the dark, blind, deaf and mute.
Kin grit his teeth, tightened his grip on the feeder crank. All around him, Kage warriors were gathered, hidden in scrub and dead leaf drifts, all eyes on the approach. Daichi was crouched in a thick copse of mountain fern beside Kin’s emplacement, so utterly still the boy couldn’t tell him from the leaves around him. The storm was growing worse, thunder jolting him in his seat every time Raijin struck his drums. And there, amidst the fear and tempest and rising doubt, it was all Kin could do to stop himself falling back to the familiar mantras—the words he knew by rote, explaining all about life he had ever needed to know.
He felt naked. Tiny. The metal beneath his hands the only comfort, the only certainty. These machines of death he’d assembled, dragged from scorched wreckage and filled with new life—these he knew. But demons? Children of the Endsinger? He’d been raised to scoff at such superstitions. Tales of gods and goddesses were crutches for the skinless. Those who had never breathed warm blue-black in the Chamber of Smoke. Never been shown their Truth.
A distant cry, a rumbling, croaking roar. Faint sounds through the storm, not unlike music. Bright steel, ringing crisp beneath the cloud’s percussion, running feet amidst the hissing deluge. The signal floated down the line—a series of short nightbird whistles. And eyes narrowed, peering into the gloom, Kin saw tiny figures swathed in dark, dappled cloth, dashing back toward the ’throwers fast as swift feet might carry them. And behind them …
Kin had never seen the like. Not in his bleakest imaginings. Loping and croaking and growling deep, long sinewed arms dragging knuckles on the earth, black, wicked talons at the end of every finger’s tip. A dozen shades of blue among their skins, midnight to azure, all muddied and smothered in the cold and the dark, lit only by frantic lightning and the bloody light of their own glowing eyes. Faces wrought of nightmare, adorned with rusted metal rings, tusks curling cruel and sharp from jagged underbites. Their blades and war clubs tall and sharp enough to fell the stoutest tree. A language dark as sin, roared amidst the trees by black maggot tongues.
“They come,” Daichi said.
Maro and his scouts were swift, weaving between the Kage pits with the demons close on their tails. One oni crashed through the scrim of branches and dead leaves covering a trap, tumbled headfirst, twenty feet down into a tomb of sharpened bamboo spikes. Maro’s blade was black with blood, the oni enraged, rushing on heedless, another of the demons crashing into a Kage trap and plummeting to its end. But the monsters numbered in the dozens, twelve feet tall and seething, the death of their fellows seeming only to stoke their fury. Warbling screams and guttural roars, blood-red eyes aglow as pierced lips pulled back from crooked teeth, long loping strides bringing them ever closer to the fleeing scouts.
Kin’s fingers tightened on the firing stud. Breath coming fast. Fear rising.
“Come on,” he breathed. “Faster…”
One scout stumbled on an upthrust tree root, slipped in the muck. The oni behind was on him in a moment, tetsubo raised high, bringing it down with a delighted howl and smashing the unfortunate man into mush. The remaining scouts kept running, no time for grief, on through the brambles and ferns and grasping branches.
Kin set his sights on a pit demon, crosshairs centered on its chest.
“Faster…”
Lightning struck the skies, splashing all with grisly white. Thunder shook his bones, gut to water, pupils dilated. And as they finally closed within range of the line, Maro gave his signal, and as one, each scout dropped behind stones or fallen trunks, out of sight and out of harm.
“That’s it,” Kin hissed.
Daichi rose up from his fern, held his odachi aloft.
“Fire!”
Kin squeezed the firing stud, felt his ’thrower lurch, and
The reverb shook Kin to his core, metal beneath him groaning, shuddering, bucking as his creations tore through the oni lines like a hot blade through fresh snow. A dozen demons fell in the first few seconds, riddled with fresh holes, elation filling him to bursting. He glanced to Daichi, a tiny moment amidst the butchery, a lunatic grin on his face. The old man was looking back at him, gifting him a small nod that for a brief and beautiful moment wrapped Kin up tight, filled him with a sensation he’d almost forgotten.
Pride.
Chest-swelling, heart-warming pride.
And then the ’throwers began to fail.
Number three blew first, the seals on the firing chambers bursting like overfilled balloons, gas shrieking in the dark. Kin’s ’thrower went next, a bright burst of light and a rush of vapor, the bucking metal beast he rode falling still, sagging like a puppet with broken strings. All down the line, almost simultaneously, the machines coughed and went silent, shivering in their rivets like men dying of blacklung. Murderous percussion replaced with feeble thunder and whispering rain, so dim after the deafening chorus Kin could barely hear them at all.
Dread stole his breath, gripped his heart tight and squeezed. He lurched from his seat, eyes roaming the ruptured seals, fingers pressed to the damage as if with will alone he could mend it. But no time. No time at all …
“Oh, no…” he breathed.
A roar, black and harrowing, reverberating through the trees. Looking up, Kin saw a tall shape unfold itself from the cover of an ancient maple, its head adorned with the skull of some colossal eagle, armor of bone arrayed on its chest. Taller than its brethren, skin so dark it was almost ebony, all muscle and sinew and fangs. And raising a war club studded with rusted iron rivets, twice as long as Kin was tall, it pointed at the ’thrower line, lips drawing back from broken fangs.
Bellowing hatred.
Daichi tossed his head, wiped the rain from his eyes. His stare was fixed on the demons as the other Kage emerged from cover, gathered around their leader. Their blades gleamed as the lightning flickered, the scouts dashing across the clearing and rejoining the line. The oni formed up around their dread captain, only half a dozen now, bloodied and grim. But still more than a match for a handful of men and women half their size, armed with tiny, sharpened toothpicks.
Rusted grins gleamed in the light of bloody eyes.
Daichi spared Kin a solemn glance. Cold and empty. And the pride that had swelled his chest a moment before fled on broken wings, shoulders slumping as cold fear seeped in to take its place. Hands shaking. Lips parting as if to speak, and finding no words at all.
Daichi turned to his warriors. Each one in turn. Steel in his gaze. And raising his blade, he pointed to the demon pack.
“Banzai!” he cried.
“Banzaiiii!” came the reply, two dozen Kage roaring in answer. Thunder crashed, the warriors dashing across the clearing with blades held high. Kin dragged himself from the ’thrower, stumbled down to the soaking earth, watching the foes plunge toward each other through the swirling rain. Tiny figures and giant hellspawn, moving amidst the lightning strobe. His chest thumping, mouth bitter, panic and guilt and rage filling him to
