The third day.
The third day since they had set out from the Imagawa main castle.
The first two sites had both come up empty. Not entirely fruitless, perhaps — but they had not found him.
The first was a geothermal vent in the mountains of western Suruga. The cave still bore the traces of smelting: scorched slag, shards of a cracked crucible, a pair of iron tongs left behind. But whoever had worked there was long gone, and by the look of the remains he had been gone at least half a month.
The second lay beside an abandoned mine shaft in eastern Totomi Province.
At the bottom of the pit stood a crude forge, more than half of it dismantled, the warmth in its belly long since bled away. Ox hoofprints marked the ground, running southwest before vanishing into a stream.
Two dead ends.
Kobe Hikaru was not troubled.
Imagawa Yoshimoto, on the other hand, was getting anxious — not over Totosai, but because she had been away from her main castle for three days now, and if she did not return soon the administrative business of Suruga would pile up into a mountain.
Until —
On the afternoon of the third day, the column followed a mountain road southwest through Totomi Province and crossed the last ridge.
And then it stopped.
Everyone stopped.
Because ahead of them lay the final destination of this whole journey: that last small volcano.
Volcano was generous. It looked more like a rounded hill with its top sliced off.
No more than a hundred zhang high, its body glowing red, the exposed rock strata veined all over with hardened lava flows like so many dried-up blood vessels. Thin white smoke rose from the crater at its summit, and now and then an orange-red light showed through the gaps in the fumes.
The air was thick with the smell of molten stone.
The ground was faintly hot underfoot, and hotter the closer one came.
For several li in every direction there were no trees — the heat of the earth had baked them all dead, leaving only ash-grey stumps leaning this way and that.
Imagawa Yoshimoto lifted the curtain and poked half her head out, studying the smoking mound with a frown.
"This is the place?"
"The last point marked on the map."
Kobe Hikaru stood at the head of the column, crimson demon eyes fixed on the volcano.
If Totosai was not here — then all three leads were dead, and they would have to turn back. After that he would have to send the tanuki spirit and the yokai of Tono out to widen the search all over again, and there was no telling how long that would take.
He had patience in abundance, but he would rather save himself the trouble and the time.
Better to get the thing done properly in one go.
So the oni warrior thought.
And then he walked a few steps forward.
Blood mist spread out from beneath his feet, creeping along the ground toward the volcano, serving as a sensory net.
Fifty paces. A hundred.
Two hundred.
The blood mist touched the rock at the volcano's base —
And found it. Yokai aura.
Dense, turbid air seeped out through the seams in the stone. It was not a vicious aura, nor a tyrannical one.
It carried the taste of iron and rock, the heat of a furnace, and something almost like the rhythm of a hammer striking steel.
This was the aura of a yokai at the forge.
Only a creature who had spent centuries in the company of furnace fire gave off a scent like that.
The corner of Kobe Hikaru's mouth curved up.
He had found him.
He was about to step closer — having found the man, contact naturally followed, and he had already worked out exactly how to open the conversation and prepared for it thoroughly.
And then, in the very next second.
His foot had barely lifted when the other side seemed to sense him first.
A roar.
The volcano erupted.
A thick column of fire burst from the crater and shot skyward, tens of zhang high, scattering every wisp of white smoke around it.
And surging out with it was the yokai aura that had been hiding inside — swelling, exploding outward.
By Kobe Hikaru's own scale, that was at least Seven Mutations and above, at least past the threshold of transmutation.
And its concentration was extreme, its foundation deep.
Far beyond an ordinary high-ranking yokai.
The seniority of something that had been in the world for centuries at the least.
Beneath that eruption of molten fire, the ashigaru at the rear of the column panicked. The spearmen in front raised their weapons on reflex; the archers behind them nocked and drew. The samurai in the lead pulled their blades and put themselves in front of the palanquin.
Motoyasu jerked awake off the straw mat, fumbled her spectacles onto her nose, and shrank in behind the palanquin's wheel.
Yoshimoto leaned out through the curtain, folding fan gripped tight, her face grave — though she was, for the moment, still composed.
Her eyes stayed on Kobe Hikaru at the front.
And they all saw it too: from the very center of that pillar of fire spouting out of the low little crater —
A figure came shooting out.
A very small one.
Barely four feet and a bit, hunched, with a head that took up a third of his body. Bald on top, his face a mass of wrinkles, two bulging eyeballs rolling furiously in the firelight.
He wore a coarse cloth jacket burned black, and straw sandals whose soles had all but burned away.
An iron hammer hung at his waist, its head bigger than his own skull.
He was riding an ox.
Not an ordinary ox — a strange black beast with three eyes, black as pitch from nose to tail, flames burning under all four hooves, wobbling its way up out of the crater and into the sky.
An ox, flying.
An old man on its back.
And in the instant he came bursting out —
A shrill yelp exploded out of the old man's mouth. No one else could make it out, but through the blood mist and the spread of perception granted by the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer, Kobe Hikaru saw it, read the shape of his lips, and understood perfectly.
"Oh no! They've found me!"
And from his expression, the terror looked absolute.
In the middle of that flustered shriek the old man yanked hard on an ox horn. The three-eyed fire ox banked sharply in midair, the flames at its hooves jetting harder, accelerating, turning southwest to flee.
He was running.
No probing attack, not even a look at who had come — just turn and run.
A bird startled by the twang of a bowstring.
No description could have fit better.
Kobe Hikaru watched the black dot dwindling into the distance at tremendous speed, and his crimson demon eyes narrowed slightly.
So that was Totosai.
There could be no mistake.
A tiny, ancient yokai, riding an ox, living inside a volcano — it matched every scrap of information they had.
What he had not expected was how fast the fellow could run.
The three-eyed fire ox's speed seemed no slower than his own baseline pace with the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body unfurled.
And more surprising still —
The yokai aura.
The concentration pouring off that stunted, hunchbacked old man was genuinely no ordinary thing.
It was very high.
Measured by the count of mutations —
Nine Mutations.
The same as his own.
This was the swordsmith who had served under Toga, the great general of the dog clan?
Only a swordsmith, not a fighter at all, and he could still hold that tier of transformation, that tier of yokai aura.
The Lord of the Western Provinces, Toga — no wonder he had been one of the few terrifying beings capable of founding a yokai realm in a world dominated by humans.
Regardless, now that he had found him, Kobe Hikaru was hardly going to let him run.
The oni mask condensed into shape in his hand and settled over his face.
Crimson demon eyes lit up behind its slits.
Demon armor spread over him, bone spikes ringed him round.
He called back to the column behind him.
"Wait here."
Purple arcs of lightning burst from beneath his feet, shattering the lava crust where he stood.
The grey figure became a streak of violet light and gave chase.
Purple lightning tore the white smoke above the volcano apart.
At full burst, Kobe Hikaru's speed hit its ceiling — with the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body soaked into his marrow, his baseline pace already exceeded what his all-out sprint used to be, and now, running all out, purple arcs cracked from his soles one after another, every stride leaving a brief afterimage of thunderlight hanging in the air.
But the three-eyed fire ox was no slouch either.
The flames under its hooves stretched into four orange-red tails as it accelerated, like four lit rockets dragging long smoke trails southwest.
The little old man on its back lay flat between the horns, his bald pate reflecting the orange glow of the crater, his wrinkled face screwed into a knot, those bulging eyes stretched so wide they looked ready to pop out of his skull.
He was breathing fire.
And not only out of his mouth — the whole of him was venting. Beneath that scorched cloth jacket, dark red yokai aura oozed from the seams of his skin like magma, congealing into a thin shell of flame that wrapped his entire body in a flowing blaze.
The ox was venting too.
All three of its eyes fired beams of orange-red light — not an attack, simply illumination. It was clearing its own road, and wherever the beams swept, the air twisted visibly from the heat.
The flight of that yokai and his ox was total, absolute, without half a heartbeat of hesitation to spare.
Kobe Hikaru simply swung wide and cut in from the flank at greater speed still, purple lightning carving an arc through the air, blocking the fire ox's path to the southwest.
He spoke.
"Totosai!"
The voice went out wrapped in yokai aura and burst in the air.
The old man's reaction —
Was to go faster.
The three-eyed fire ox wrenched left, the direction of its hoof-flames changing in an instant, the whole beast carving a near right angle in midair and bolting due south.
It never even looked back.
"I'm not here for a fight —"
Kobe Hikaru pursued, blood mist streaming off his body, trying to snare the ox's hind hooves. The moment it touched the edge of the flames it boiled away into white vapor.
The old man's voice came shrilling back from ahead, panicked, broken by coughing.
"Don't try that on me! The last one who said he wasn't here for a fight smashed my forge! The one before that said he only wanted to chat, and nearly twisted my head off my neck!"
That would be Sesshomaru, most likely, or some other formidable yokai.
Kobe Hikaru could understand the reflex well enough — Totosai had been Toga's personal blacksmith, and after Toga's death there was no counting the yokai, great yokai included, who had coveted his craft.
Anyone capable of finding him would be strong.
He had been hunted until fear was all that was left.
Fleeing had become instinct.
"I have something I need your help with — a Recasting —"
"I don't forge! I've sealed my furnace! I don't forge for anyone who comes!"
"I can pay you —"
"Don't want it! I lack for nothing!"
"Just let me finish —"
"Won't listen!"
The fire ox changed course again, this time charging due east, and its speed rose instead of falling — the old man ripped that enormous iron hammer from his belt, the head of it bigger than his own skull, and swung it hard behind him.
The yokai power gathered on the hammerhead became a fist-sized ball of fire and came roaring at Kobe Hikaru.
The fireball was scorching hot, but its force was negligible — pure harassment.
Like a cuttlefish squirting ink as it flees.
Kobe Hikaru twisted aside from it, and purple arcs cracked beneath his feet again.
And so it went, the best part of ten minutes of chasing, all of it circling the same patch of sky.
The fire ox the old man rode was no slower than he was, and it changed direction with absurd agility — its maneuverability in the air far outstripped that of an ordinary flying yokai.
Every time he cut it off it simply turned, never travelling in a straight line at all.
He could keep up. He could not catch hold.
And Kobe Hikaru knew that even if he did catch hold, pinning the old man down would be another matter — this was a yokai aura of the Nine Mutations tier as well.
As a smith he was certainly no fighter, but the sheer density and depth of that aura were what they were. Trying to suppress him by aura alone would mean a long, ugly struggle once he started thrashing.
In that case — he would stop being polite.
Kobe Hikaru halted in midair.
The purple arcs drew inward.
A bone forest erupted from either side of his spine, white bone spikes weaving themselves into a frame; thunder burst out through the gaps between the bones and packed itself in as muscle.
Blood mist congealed into a half-transparent skin.
A six-meter colossus of bone and lightning took shape above the volcano.
Asura Mutation.
The vast humanoid reared up against the orange-red backdrop of the mountain, purple radiance lighting the ground for hundreds of paces around.
From Imagawa Yoshimoto's column in the distance came the ashigaru's cries of alarm, and right behind them Motoyasu's shout — it was the first time she had ever seen such a thing.
Totosai looked back too.
At last, he looked back.
The instant those bulging eyes took in the six-meter titan of bone and thunder, they swelled to the size of temple bells.
"An — an Asura?!"
His tone had changed. His flight had not.
If anything, it got faster.
The flames at the fire ox's four hooves seemed to hit their limit, orange-red shifting to blue-white, its speed rocketing —
The Asura Mutation's right arm swept across.
The enormous bone limb carved an arc through the air, trailing purple lightning, and cut the ox off.
The soul-hunting archer: once loosed, it never misses!
Interception.
Like swatting a fly out of the air.
The fire ox slammed into the side of the bone arm.
A thunderclap of impact.
The force was tremendous — and the Asura's frame did not shift a hair.
Nine Mutations against Nine Mutations. The same structure, utterly different contents.
As stated before, Kobe Hikaru's Nine Mutations were the chain transmutation of three Overload Transformations bursting their banks at once — the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer, the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body, and the Bone Soul Transformation stacked into a single composite, then projected and magnified through the Asura Mutation. His actual output came to roughly twice that of a normal being at the same count of mutations.
Totosai's Nine Mutations, by contrast, were plainly the accumulated foundation of centuries at the forge: heavy, steady, but angled entirely toward smithing. Those centuries of accumulation meant his combat power was not inferior to yokai of his own tier — and that was as far as it went.
Like a blacksmith who had trained his arms for a few hundred years. Strong, certainly. But put him in a fight against a warrior with pure technique and no small amount of strength besides, and it would not end well for him.
He was stopped.
The fire ox rebounded off the side of the bone arm and tumbled twice through the air.
The old man nearly went flying off its back. The iron hammer tore loose from his hand, spun a few dozen times in midair, and buried itself in the lava crust below.
But Totosai had not lived several hundred years for nothing.
The moment he was knocked back, his reflex was not to counterattack, and not to defend —
It was to use the impact.
Even as it rebounded the fire ox wrenched itself around, hoof-flames relighting, and rode the momentum of the deflection due north.
The exact opposite of the direction the Asura had come from.
Flat on the ox's back, the old man hollered at the top of his lungs.
"Wind's up — scram!"
Kobe Hikaru stood inside the Asura's body, crimson demon eyes on that shrinking black dot.
The corner of his mouth twitched.
The Asura Mutation burned through power at a ruinous rate; it was not suited to long pursuits.
He had learned that much after the battle with the Tsuchigumo.
The exoskeleton could only be maintained for so long. For interception and suppression it was more than enough. For chasing someone down, it was a bad bargain.
But he had never intended to chase with it.
From the very beginning he had guessed how Totosai would react on meeting him.
And from the very beginning, he had never planned to rely on himself alone.
This far was enough.
He had driven Totosai back along the very road he himself had travelled to get here.
Yes. That had been the point all along.
And so.
The Asura Mutation drew in, the frame came apart, the thunder dispersed.
The glare faded away.
Kobe Hikaru dropped from six meters up and landed, the soles of his shoes settling onto scalding lava rock.
He raised his eyes.
He looked into the distance — toward where Imagawa Yoshimoto's column waited.
Forty ashigaru, six mounted samurai, eight bearers, one palanquin.
And —
All along this road, the stones he had spoken to, the hollows in the old cedars he had stroked, the map he had folded and unfolded again and again —
None of that had been madness. None of it had been some fit coming over him.
He had been farming favourability.
Every stone, every dead tree, every object — over these three days on the road, whenever no one was watching, he had touched them one by one, poured himself into them, spoken with them.
The favourability was not high.
Most of them sat somewhere between 1 and 5.
A few he had gone back to again and again had reached 10.
But it was enough.
It did not need to be high.
It only needed them to listen to him.
"Come now — lend me a hand, all of you!"
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