Totosai rode the three-eyed fire ox in a headlong dash due north.
Blue-white flame trailed from its four hooves in long streaming tails, drawing a searing arc across the sky above the ash-covered wasteland.
The old man lay flat on the ox's back, his bald crown pressed against the base of one horn, his bulging eyes flicking backwards again and again — the Asura Mutation had been withdrawn, and the oni warrior chasing him had not kept up.
"Lost him?"
His voice was a hoarse rasp, full of the relief of a man who had just cheated death.
The fire ox lowed once, which counted as an answer.
The old man let out a breath, panted a few times against the ox's back, and the mass of wrinkles on his face finally loosened a little.
"Close, far too close. What is it about these times that fills the world with unreasonable louts? All this old man wants is to forge in peace and quiet. Why should that be so hard—"
He never finished.
He saw what lay ahead.
Imagawa Yoshimoto's column.
Forty ashigaru, six mounted samurai, eight bearers, one palanquin.
Arrayed in perfect order across the mountain road, sitting squarely athwart his path due north — the one and only way out he had won for himself after a solid quarter-hour of circling the volcano, running rings within a few miles of that fellow behind him.
The old man frowned.
"A human army? What are they doing blocking the road here?"
That number of men, at that level, could not stop a single yokai of his years.
Never mind that he could fly!
On that point, at least, Totosai had every confidence. And then, in the next second—
The spears in the ashigaru's hands moved.
Not swung by the ashigaru.
The spears were moving on their own.
All forty tore free of the soldiers' grips at once, shafts spinning half a turn in the air, points swinging downward, driving into the ground in one clean rank — and then springing back up out of the earth to come flying sideways towards Totosai.
No human being had thrown those.
Those spears were flying by themselves.
A faint dark-red mist coiled around the shafts, fine as spider silk, all but invisible — and it was that thin skin of mist that drove the wooden poles and iron heads which should have had no life in them at all.
Dread.
Dread that came from Kobe Hikaru.
Over the past three days he had poured yokai power into every single one of those spears, spoken to every one of them, built up even one or two points of favourability with every one of them.
Not enough to turn them into yokai.
Not enough to give them awareness.
But enough that, kindled by dread, they could move.
Briefly. For a single instant. Move.
The same way he had dealt with that Kamaitachi before — the same old trick, run again.
Dread was rumour, dread was hearsay, dread was ghost story; more than any of that, dread was fuel, a brief and violent motive force.
Forty spears wove themselves into a thicket of steel in midair, barring the fire ox's path.
Totosai gaped, then snapped out of it, hauled on a horn and veered hard left.
He could have simply smashed straight through, but that would take time, and there was no guarantee the fellow behind him would not catch up.
And then, down in that column, the reins on all six warhorses snapped at once — braided leather cords writhing through the air like snakes, coiling for the fire ox's hooves.
The stirrups came away from the horses' bellies too, iron rings bouncing twice on the ground before rolling towards the ox.
The girth straps on the saddles simply came undone, whole sets of tack sliding off the horses' backs, tumbling along the ground and unrolling ahead of him, trying to trip the beast.
Totosai turned again.
Right.
And the dead wooden stakes along the roadside moved as well.
Grey-white deadwood ripped itself out of the cracked earth — no legs, no hands, simply launching straight up out of the ground and toppling sideways towards the fire ox.
Like a falling palisade.
One, two, five, ten.
The stakes arranged themselves in midair into a semicircular wall, sealing off Totosai's escape to the right completely.
And it did not end there.
The bluestones by the road were trembling too.
Those stones Kobe Hikaru had touched, had talked to, had fed a trickle of yokai power — they rolled a little where they lay, worked themselves free of the soil, and laid themselves out along the fire ox's flight path in a jolting field of obstacles.
Caught off guard, the ox stumbled in its stride, its view suddenly blocked, all four hooves skewing sideways.
The curtain of the palanquin twitched twice.
Yoshimoto's folding fan shot out through the gap in the drapes, spun once in the air, snapped open and slapped the fire ox across the nose.
The round-framed spectacles on Motoyasu's nose came loose as well — the lenses flashing once in the air like a pair of tiny mirrors, throwing the orange-red glare of the crater straight into Totosai's eyes.
The old man reeled.
"Wh—"
That one instant was all it took.
The straw rain-capes on the ashigaru's backs peeled off their bodies, opened out in the air like woven grass nets, and dropped over the fire ox's head.
The capes weighed nothing. They could not stop a fire ox, still less an old yokai of the Nine Mutations.
But they did not need to stop him.
They only needed to block his sight, sow confusion, and buy a second or two.
That was enough.
Purple lightning burst in from due south almost in the same heartbeat.
Kobe Hikaru's silhouette tore through the chaos of spears, reins, deadwood and flying stones, the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body unfurled at full speed, and in the very instant the straw capes came down over the ox's head his right hand closed on the back of Totosai's collar.
His left hand came down on the crown of the fire ox's head, thunder pouring in from his palm, and the paralysis hit hard.
All three of the ox's eyes rolled white at once; the flames at its hooves went out.
It hit the ground with a heavy thud.
The old man dangled from his own collar, a body barely over four feet long swinging in the air, short legs kicking twice.
"Let — let go of this old man!"
Kobe Hikaru did not.
Behind the oni mask, crimson demon eyes regarded him calmly.
"Can we talk now?"
Totosai stared, bulging eyes wide, every wrinkle on his face bunched together, his expression somewhere between terror and fury — but mostly it was shock.
He looked back at the wreckage behind him.
Spears flying crosswise, reins whipping wild, deadwood barring the road, stones rolling over the ground, straw capes dropping over heads — even a folding fan and a pair of spectacles had joined the ambush.
Every last one of those things was an ordinary object.
Not one of them was a yokai weapon. Not one of them had a will of its own. Not one of them was capable of acting in concert, or of moving at all.
And yet they had moved.
In the same instant, towards the same target, each in its own way — they had moved.
Totosai had lived several centuries and more; he had once marched north and south at the side of Toga, the greatest yokai of the Western Provinces; he had forged countless demon blades and divine weapons and seen every manner of unthinkable sorcery. For all that breadth of experience, he had never once seen a technique that brought all things briefly to life and used common objects to pin down a yokai.
Totosai knew of dread, of course.
But not even dread was ever enough to make mundane things move by themselves!
"You little devil, what in the world are you? Where does a yokai like you come from — no, no yokai is as monstrous as you are!"
His voice shook with the force of it.
Whether from the shock or the electricity, no one could say.
Purple current kept spilling out of Kobe Hikaru's hand, flowing on and on like water, and he was just about to speak—
when something exceedingly small sprang out of Totosai's collar.
About the size of a fingertip, six thin legs, dressed in a plain kimono, a flat little body, bald-headed and white-whiskered.
A yokai that had come from a flea.
It jumped and landed again on Totosai's shoulder, lifted a head roughly the size of a needle's eye, and, straining as though to turn its whole body, sniffed hard in Kobe Hikaru's direction.
And then—
"Young Master Inuyasha's scent?!"
The voice was low and aged, but both yokai present heard it clearly.
Totosai's body went rigid on the spot.
His bulging eyes swung sharply to the flea on his shoulder, then back to Kobe Hikaru.
"Myoga — what did you say?"
"It's true, Lord Totosai!"
The flea called Myoga bounced twice on his shoulder, all six spindly legs trembling without pause.
"This man carries Young Master Inuyasha's scent! Young Master Inuyasha is still alive — but it isn't a yokai aura. It smells like the scent Young Master Inuyasha leaves behind when he turns human on the night of the new moon, and yet it isn't quite that either. And besides—"
It sniffed again.
"There's gratitude in it. Very thick gratitude."
"Young Master Inuyasha… is grateful to this man?"
Myoga had been a retainer of Toga's in his lifetime, and like Totosai he was one of those Toga had left behind to support Inuyasha — or rather, to shelter him.
Timid as a mouse, first to run at the first sign of danger, he nevertheless had a nose and a judgement few yokai could match.
He had taken to hiding on Totosai because, once Toga was dead, he had lost the master he served, and Inuyasha was forever wandering off somewhere; all he could do was lodge with the old blacksmith and eke out his days.
And now he had caught Inuyasha's scent again.
On this oni warrior.
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