“We have to kill the tainted priest tree!” I yelled over the din of the battle. “He’s controlling the others and summoning more by the minute. Cara, If you use your shuriken stars with ice, you can blast a way through, then I can get close enough to take him out with my axe!”
“We’ll have to move fast! The mercenaries can’t hold on much longer!”
“And the tigers are losing their fight. They’ve over-extended themselves. We need to finish this.”
Further down the hill, Yasei had led the Byakko tigers in a mighty charge against the tree demons who had crowded the edge of the lakeside. They had made some headway, carving through them and pushing on up the ridge toward the top, but behind them, new forces of the enemy had hurried up from the shadows beyond the lake and were pressing their rear. Thick clouds of white smoke hanging in the air showed me that they had been suffering losses.
The remaining mercenaries had rallied around General Koshu, and the Tengu who pressed them seemed reluctant to attack them, but new tree demons were coming up from the very ground around the central tree, and they moved laboriously down toward the Koshu and the mercenaries.
We moved up the slope toward the great tree that had been the Kitsune priest. There was no sign of the priest, so I figured the Festering had consumed him completely, leaving only this demonic tree that was the core of the Festering in this area, the heart of the taint. The monstrous limbs swayed and swung over the heads of the humanoid tree demons who clustered around its base. The tree demons chattered and howled, bare-branched monstrosities with red and yellow cat’s eyes and mouths full of jabbering teeth.
The Tengu fled before us, but the trees did not. As we pushed up the hill, they attacked us from both sides, hurling rocks at us from a distance or running in close to try to smash us with their huge limbs. Roots sprang up from the ground to wrap around our feet and try to drag us down, but Cara slashed them with her black sword and I cut them back with my twin axes.
After a little while climbing, we saw the monstrous heart tree a little way away.
“Time to end this,“ I said to Cara.
“Let’s do it,” she replied. “I’ll cover you!”
I lowered my head and began to run.
Around me, white ice-bound shuriken stars flew from Cara’s hands, slamming into the tree demons who tried to attack me from either side. I plowed through the ones who got in my way, using my two-handed axe to smash their brittle wood into fragments.
After having left a trail of frozen demons behind us, Cara fired off a volley of flaming arrows. A rapid chain of explosions thundered through the valley, bright flames lighting up the darkness which emanated from the Festering heart tree.
We were nearly there. The heart tree loomed up in front of me, and Cara put her back to it, alternating ice shuriken stars and fire arrows to hold off the demons who rushed up the hill toward us. A glance around the battlefield showed me that our effort was paying off. The trees who swarmed around the field had broken off their fights with the Byakko and the mercenaries and were all converging on us in an attempt to protect the heart tree from which they drew their power.
I raised my right foot, channeled all the troll-strength power I could muster, and brought it down on the rocky ground. The force of the stomp sent a shockwave expanding around us. Tree demons flew backward, and Cara loosed a rapid-fire circle of arrows that created a ring of burning all around us. The tree demons who tried to pass were caught in the flames and went up like torches. I hefted my axe and charged the heart tree.
With a great swing, I smashed one of the malformed buttress-roots that supported the base of the tree. It shattered like glass, sending fragments everywhere. Cara flung a flight of ice shrunken stars into the tree, and patches of ice spread across the twisted and knotty bark. I swung again, this time burying my axe in the body of the wood. A shudder ran through it, and I leaped back as claylike branches swung at me, scratching my armor but not damaging me. Fire arrows thudded into the ice patches, and the subsequent explosions ripped chunks from the tree. I dived in again, raining blow after blow onto the damaged wood.
Suddenly, the bark began to crack. Bright light shone out from the cracks, and the outer shape of the tree crumbled. With horror, I saw hands reaching out from the cracks in the tree; hundreds of hands, clawing and groping their way into the world like some horrible demonic birthing.
The tree finally exploded outward in a blaze of cold blue light, and a swarm of humanoid creatures poured out from the space it had occupied. They looked like humans, but they ran on all fours like animals. Their heads were bald, and they were naked except for ragged loincloths. Their eyes blazed with madness, and they swarmed up on us with their hands outstretched and their mouths open.
“What are they?” Cara yelled in disgust as she swung her sword from its sheath, cutting down the countless hungry creatures as they tried to lay their ragged hands on her.
The Byakko Yasei’s voice boomed in my mind, answering her question, and I repeated his words to her.
“They are Gaki, the starving spirits of men who have been condemned to an eternity of hunger and thirst as punishment for their greed and selfishness in life.”
That prompted another thought—the destruction of the Festering heart tree must have opened up a gateway to the spirit realm to let these starving ghosts come into the world.
I stamped the ground again, pushing all the strength I could into the impact and sent
