The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

But what he lacked in strength, he could still make up for in speed.

Before the man could complete his swing, Mamoru snapped an ice-knuckled punch into his face. The jab had been more of a distraction anything else. It didn’t break the fonyaka’s nose or even cause his grip to loosen significantly. What it did was buy Mamoru a moment to draw the surrounding water molecules into formation.

Be like water

He brought his ice sword around to meet the fonyaka’s metal one, and the crash sent a shockwave through his arms.

The Ranganese hesitated in the doorway of the Matsuda compound, regarding Misaki with expressions that ranged from apprehensive to amused. Had she been a man or even a more imposing woman, they surely would have attacked by now, but they hung back, seemingly confused to find a tiny housewife standing before them.

This man was insecure, looking for an easy way to feel powerful, like picking on a defenseless housewife. Robin would have seen the humanity in that kind of cruelty, even if it was turned on him.

Instead of drawing her shoulders back as the fonyaka approached, she cowered. Like dropping bait in the water before a clueless fish. He smiled— the smile of a weak man seeing a very rare chance to feel powerful.

I know of many like this

Misaki, on the other hand, could feel every inch of her prey as he approached—a pulsing network of arteries, capillaries, marrow, and spinal fluid.

suddenly overwhelmed her. The line between wounding and taking a life had been such a concrete and non-negotiable thing to Robin and Elleen. Yet Misaki had just crossed that line without experiencing so much as a tug of resistance. She had wanted there to be resistance. Deep in her heart, she had hoped there was something of Robin in her.

“But your greatest concealed weapons aren’t really this or this,” Koli had told her, holding up each of the knives in turn. “They’re your ingenuity… and your brutality.”

Snatching one of the long pins from her hair, she darted toward the last fonyaka. He threw a palm strike, but it was telegraphed. She evaded and drove her hairpin into the side of his neck, burying the hair ornament all the way up to the flowery bauble at the end.

The infamous hairpin

Misaki’s hair, now free of its tightly pinned bun, stuck to her neck, and she realized just how sweaty she had gotten.

Dropping briefly to one knee, Mamoru took Katakouri’s hand and wrapped it around the grip of his bow where it belonged. “Nyama to your soul, Senpai,” he murmured, and he was back on his feet, sprinting.

Respect

“Fire is like an animal,” Kotetsu Kama always told him. “If you feed it, soothe it, and treat it with care, it need not bite you.”

“I’m not—” Mamoru started to protest. It was unseemly for a koro to admit fear, but he stopped short at the knowing look on his mentor’s face. “It’s just… isn’t fire what Hell is made of?” “Not just fire. There are boiling seas in Hell also,” Kotetsu pointed out. “Oh.” Mamoru hadn’t thought of that. “I didn’t…” “You misunderstand the order of the world. Hell is fire without the calming influence of Nagi and Nami. Fire without the power of gods to balance it. And what is our jiya?” “The power of gods,” Mamoru said.

“Fire against water, light against darkness, day against night, but one who hopes to create must understand that opposites exist to balance and complement one another. This is why the tide-bringing moon follows the drying sun, why day follows night, why men marry women. I believe this is why the two greatest empires are Yamma, built on the power of fire, and our own Kaigen, built on the power of water. The two exist in this realm, not to destroy one another, but to create a balance between jiya and taya.”

Opposites create harmony, for one cannot exist without the other

“Fire against water, light against darkness, day against night, but one who hopes to create must understand that opposites exist to balance and complement one another. This is why the tide-bringing moon follows the drying sun, why day follows night, why men marry women. I believe this is why the two greatest empires are Yamma, built on the power of fire, and our own Kaigen, built on the power of water. The two exist in this realm, not to destroy one another, but to create a balance between jiya and taya.”

Yin and Yang

Kotetsu made a thoughtful noise. “I believe that fonyakalu… whatever divinity they hold has been corrupted into a type of power that was never meant to be. Not in the realm of the Duna.” “I don’t understand.” “Based on what I know of wind—what it does to fire, and oceans, and empires—I would say that fonya is the power of chaos. Anyone who wields the power of wind, whether he realizes it or not, is a sort of demon.”

Interesting

Mamoru had never seen his mentor this way, as a husband and son, as someone who could feel lost.

“What?” The stricken look on Kotetsu’s face reminded Mamoru that the blacksmith had once helped train a young Takashi at the forges.

An explosive personality in life, Matsuda Takashi had become an explosion in death, frozen branches and blades bursting from his body in all directions—crystal ice veined with blood. Unwary fonyakalu who had been too slow to jump clear were speared through limbs, chests, and abdomens by the force of his dying jiya. Some had been hoisted off their feet high into the air, creating a tree of corpses that glittered red against the sunset.

With a slow breath, Mamoru raised his sword. Atsushi and Kotetsu Kama were behind him, counting on him to protect them. Beyond them, his mother and father were counting on him. Beyond this mountain, the fishermen of the Shirojima islands and the farmers of Yuwei and Hakudao were counting on him. His Empire was counting on him.

the woman had a pair of strange straight knives tucked into her belt, one at each hip. No, not knives, Misaki realized. Fans. Misaki had once made fun of Ya-li for fighting with a folding fan, but she had shut up after she saw the way a deftly-wielded fan could amplify fonya, doubling its range and power.

hold a weapon. “You slimy Kaigenese sea slug,” the woman spat, resorting to racist insults, as so many fighters did in defeat. Not good ones either. “You cheated.”

Indignant, Misaki scowled down at the fonyaka. “You try fighting fair after pushing out four babies,” she panted in Shirojima Dialect she knew the woman couldn’t understand.

Panic took hold as she realized what was happening to her: Lazou Linghun, the Ranganese called it—the Soul Pull—a bloodline technique as rare as the Whispering Blade and as feared as Blood Puppetry.

That's horrifying

Realistically, Mamoru wasn’t a match for this man, who had fought Yukino Sensei, Tou-sama, and Uncle Takashi to a standstill. But that was exactly why he had to win.

A student like you, who can absorb what he is told but also think beyond it, is capable of anything.

He was a Matsuda. His sword wasn’t made of ice or metal. It was his soul.

Then he felt the blood soaking into his hakama, and it dawned on him that the attack he had just taken hadn’t been a punch at all. Shock melted into dread as he looked down.

She would live, yes, but when the next soldiers entered the house, she would be far too weak to fight them off. She was tempted to give up, let him kill her—but he had hit Setsuko, so he was going to die.

Still holding Misaki to the floor with his boot, the soldier looked down at Hiroshi, incredulous. Offended almost. Misaki’s heart lurched in panic, but there was no fear on Hiroshi’s face, no hesitation. He didn’t even pause to adjust his grip on the weapon before he slashed again, opening a clean cut from the man’s hip to his collarbone.

Born fighter

His fonya rose for a moment, rushing through the room in a howl of denial, then went still. Hiroshi had killed him.

Little badass

But Hiroshi was only five. He had only done what he had been taught by his teachers, his distant father, and his monster of a mother. They had created a little boy who was ready to give his life to kill his enemies. A true Matsuda. Misaki’s head dropped onto Hiroshi’s tiny shoulder. The monster crumbled, and she was just a woman, just a mother who had failed her son.

“Hiroshi…” Her voice broke. “Come here.” Gathering the boy into her arms, she held him tight, and loved him, loved him as hard as she could, and hoped it would be enough to wash everything else away.

And the world snapped into focus. The pain was sharp, but small, unimportant somehow. Suddenly, it wasn’t as though he was missing fingers. His fingers were the snow. They were the rivers, reaching all the way down the mountain to sink into the ocean and grasp the power of gods. He wasn’t bleeding out. He was the mountain. For the first time in his life, he was perfectly, overwhelmingly whole. He smiled.

A decade later, a fifteen-year-old Hiroshi would become known as the youngest swordsman ever to master the Whispering Blade. What the world would never know, was that he was the second youngest.

The power that had just filled him was too big not to be remembered. He had touched divinity, held it in his hands.

People always said the Ranganese were demons of a different breed from the Kaigenese, but their blood seemed to be the same color, now that they lay still, letting it run together. They had all come out of the same ocean, hadn’t they? At the beginning of the world?

Just human

Planes roared closer to the mountainside in the dark, the swooping, scraping sound so big it seemed to exist in multiple dimensions.

Part of what had always made Hyori so beautiful was her simplicity. Those soft eyes were as clear as spring melt, concealing nothing. In love, in joy, in mirth, she was pure. Her pain was the same. Undiluted. And it was unbearable to look at.

“Why? Why are they firing on us?” Because we don’t matter, Misaki thought numbly. The only thing the Empire cares about is stopping the Ranganese here. It doesn’t matter how many of us get caught in the crossfire.

Eventually, the sobs, and screams, and moans of pain all coalesced into a sticky sea of sound, varying only when the boom of bombs too close to the shelter caused it to swell. The sea consumed Misaki. Fire and acid seemed to leach into her lungs, reawakening the stabbing in her chest. The pain immobilized her like a spear through the torso, pinning her back against the bunker wall.

The rain thickened from a patter to a deluge, and Robin caught her hand, letting the water pour down on him. Creatures of fire usually wilted and shivered in the rain, but Robin Thundyil never seemed to fit in with the rest of his kind.

Instead of recoiling from the threat of frostbite like a sane tajaka, Robin sank into it, drinking the cold like a parched man at a half-frozen river. Misaki melted.

but Misaki remembered thinking the first time Robin’s lips met hers that she had never been happier that this particular tajaka had grown up in a barbaric white slum.

A loss like that was enough to shatter a child beyond repair, but somehow Robin had put those pieces back together into a broad smile and a heart open to everyone. A voice for the silenced, a shelter for the defenseless, a pair of fists for the powerless.

hair. Coarser than Kaigenese hair, straighter than Yammanka curls—an anomaly, like everything about him. Her fighter who preserved life. Her theonite who kissed like an adyn. Her tajaka who drank the cold like it could sustain him.

apart. In the few days he had stayed in the Tsusanos’ home, he had managed to make friends with everyone, despite the language barrier. That was what Robin did.

“That’s not why you brought him here.” Tou-sama had probably seen through the lie the moment she told it; he could read people as he read weather patterns, like no one else. “I’m sorry for lying, Tou-sama.” She bowed her head. “I needed you to meet him, so you would understand what I… what I’m about to ask you.”

Asian parents

Misaki had of course seen enough to know that bloodline purity didn’t have nearly as much bearing on a person’s ability as people here thought, but she hardly expected her own experience to change deep-seated Kaigenese notions of propriety.