XV. The Heart Awakens
You don't answer at first; instead you turn your head and scan the fort, gauging it.
"I could take that wall," you say matter-of-factly. Gozen frowns.
"I know you command a Falling Mountain, but-"
"I don't command
a Falling Mountain; I command Hope for the Harvest. I can see that wall, and I can tell you I could break through it." You turn around, looking confidently at your commander. "Ondo's Chasing Star can jump that wall, but once inside the fort it forfeits much of its mobility and is the most vulnerable of us. A Rising Tide would be well-suited for the task, but we can't risk the commander on such a dangerous venture. It follows that Ondo should charge the fort, and I should follow behind, smashing the wall and bringing in close support. Lady Gozen, you have the mobility and field leadership to organize the diversion; once there is a breach in the walls the ashigaru can enter there while you have the enemy distracted."
You pause, then give a nod to your companion. "That is, I agree with Ondo's suggestion, but I would amend it with my suggestions."
Gozen gives Ondo a dubious look, and he shrugs. "I've got not objections to that."
"All right," your commander says after a moment of reflection. "I am trusting you on this. This plan will divide our forces and put much of the responsibility for success on your shoulders. Do not fail."
You bow in acknowledgement, and Gozen's bunraku steps back, closing its hatch. You do the same and turn to face the fort; from a distance flower-eyed Kakashi stares at you, the faint outline of the bear-kami in the grass around him. For all his polite talk there is not an ounce of friendliness in his posture as he watches you.
"Let us show our lord how puppeteers succeed where mere soldiers fail," Gozen says and turns her back on the fort.
***
You left an hour ago, marching off into the hills, and for a time you felt watching eyes on you; dog-like kami hounding you to make sure you were retreating. Then, when they were satisfied and returned to their fort, Ondo made the signal. You and him left the marching column, circling back to come at the fort from a different angle. Soon after Lady Gozen would split along with the rest of her samurai, leaving only one to command the ashigaru in the third prong of your assault.
Night falls as you come back to the fortified hill, yet it does not matter. At the edges of the horizon you can see darkness pearled with stars, but where you're headed the Heart is a trapped sun; the air glows turquoise, bright as daylight. You hear the distant cries of alarm and the rush of men moving to defend the other side - Gozen's diversion in progress. Ondo's Chasing Star takes the cue and sprints ahead of you, his gracile legs carrying it several yards with each step; you soon follow and as you rise on the hill slope you see the skirmish in process on the other side. Gozen's samurai are harassing the tree-people with arrows; the asynchronous walk of the resurrected is too slow for them to even hope catching up to the riders. A few kami - more than you had seen at first, at least three bark-dogs and the bear - are doing better, having both speed enough to threaten the horses and being resilient enough to withstand arrow fire; but Lady Gozen, katana in hand, protects the flank against them. Even though none of the kami has fallen yet, they are forced to withdraw from her attacks.
And all these forces are focused on the samurai, leaving nothing to stop Ondo. The pace of the Chasing Star grows even quicker, if that is possible; a few of the revived who stayed to defend this side turn their heads at his passing, shout alarms, but he is gone before they can do anything. When he reaches the wall, he coils in on his ankles, launches himself up, and his hands catch the top of the wall, from which he boosts himself and disappears inside. You lag behind, and the handful of revived - one of them so thickly overgrown he is almost a walking tree, branches sprouting off its back - gather in a bloc to stop you. You snort derisively, and your naginata sways, scattering the group easily. You barrel through the stunned defenders, climbing the hill with giant steps.
You see their eyes as they look up in a daze - she's too heavy. She's never gonna make the jump. Wait, she isn't even trying to jump, is she? In the blink of an eye you see wide disbelieving faces. It's a wall supported by magical trees, it will never cave in, she's only one bunraku without a ram.
Your hands move with frantic swiftness, throwing the spear over the wall so it doesn't burden you, then wrapping Harvest's arms around its head, hunching the back, and - the impact shakes your world, the pull on all strings wrenches both of your arms, your legs strain at the knees. The hatch around you quakes as if it were tumbling down a hill. You bite your cheek and taste blood.
And then it's over and you're emerging on beaten earth in a shower of splinters, wooden beams falling with great clamor to the ground around you. Harvest slips, its knee and hand raking the ground, but you stabilize it before it can topple.
There is a moment of silence, and you exhale, grinning. That felt
good.
You are covered by a canopy of trees, yet they cast no shadow, a disquieting sight; as you gather your bearings, you realize that this is because the ambient light originates from below the foliage. Around you are small buildings of earth and wood, barracks or storerooms you do not know. The pressure in the air is stronger now, the same throbbing pulse as with the golden skull, making it hard to think. You instinctively turn to the direction of the pulse of the feeling, raise Harvest, and pull its spear out of the ground. You spot a few bodies on the ground, fell by long slashing strokes - Ondo's handiwork, you'd wager.
All of a sudden the fort starts moving. The walls and buildings creak and groan and shake visibly, their individual beams and planks buckling; the ground quakes and you feel yourself slowly rising, as if the hill were standing up. It is all you can do to keep Harvest's balance. Even more ominously, what slivers of the sky you can see through the trees seem to be… Moving.
***
The dead tree-men throw themselves at Gozen's samurai, and she cuts them down relentlessly. To her, it is a kindness; their existence is a wretched, unnatural one, not meant for humans and honored soldiers of Summer. They lack the self-preservation of true soldiers, this fearful lot that is always one scare away from routing; they seem not to fear death. The kami are more selfish, and thus more careful; they dart in and out of her sword range, and she deals them no more than shallow wounds. As the samurai pull back after a last volley, still leading the defenders further away from the fort, the ground shifts and an enormous bear leaps out of the grass, taking down a horse and its rider both in a spray of blood and screams. Shouting her anger, Gozen locks in with the beast, and her katana strikes it down before it can raise its head from its bloody slaughter.
Then comes a lull in the battle, a surprising stillness. Sword wet with blood, Gozen stands at attention; the tree-people are backing up, some not looking at her or her samurai but only gazing at the fort in awe. In a moment awe is what Gozen feels too. The fort is moving, its walls tightening, gathering closer to each other; cracks run through the top of the hill, dirt and rocks tumble down its slope, and under the amazed eyes of both sides the fort begins to pull itself out of the earth. Low, thick limbs like a tortoise's leg struggle to pull themselves free of the ground; a massive head crowned with a wooden palisade and a watchtower moans a low, guttural call. The fort is like a shell on the monster's back, and yet a part of its very being; roots run like veins through its earthen skin.
The kami, incomplete, underfed, half-slumbering, is nonetheless slowly rousing itself to respond to the assault.
***
"Tomoe!" comes a shout from nearby, Ondo's voice. The fort isn't that big, you would already be seeing him were it not for these damned trees; you turn a corner, working hard to keep your balance on the shaky ground, and there he is, in front of a wider, taller building than most. A question flies through your mind, of asking why he isn't working to retrieve the relic yet, but the answer comes before you have to ask.
The building is not actually taller than the rest - or rather, it didn't use to be. But now it is a mass of crawling roots, twisted trunks creeping like vine over its walls until there is no telling where begins the wall and where the rampant growth. This is the source of the vegetation in the rest of the fort, you realize, its epicenter; these roots dig into the ground and surge elsewhere as trees. The pressure is more intense here than anywhere else, and the glow radiates such that you can see the faint outline of a green orb at its core. It is a cyst in the fort, bloated with power, and Ondo stands in bafflement before it.
"I think there are openings between the roots," he says as you walk up to him. "If one of us stands guard, the other can exit their bunraku and wriggle through down to the Heart, then take it."
"Good plan," you say, "no time." With a friendly shove you push the Chasing Star aside, grabbing your spear in both hands and raising it over your head.
"What are you doing-"
"I am Tomoe
Naishinno, horde-slayer, wall-breaker, ghost-eater, and I will not be thwarted by some trees."
You bring the blade down, and the roots part under it. Like an octopus's tentacles they writhe, standing up on hand, and a blue-green flame starts to wreathe around them; without delay you strike again and again, slicing the tumorous vegetation around the building, which starts quivering like a nest of snakes, trying to weave themselves back together.
"Pull out the roots!" you shout, and Ondo quickly moves in, his bunraku's deft hands reaching between your blows to seize the pieces of wood you cut off and tossing them away; as soon as they hit the ground they shake one last time and solidify again as ordinary wood. Soon you are hitting the structure of the building itself, striking packed soils and wood beneath, and the roof caves in. Abandoning your naginata, you instead start grabbing fistful of walls and tearing them away to reveal the Heart's inner sanctum. Gnarled, deformed wooden growth twist in the turquoise glow, metal shards jutting out of them like teeth in a stunted jaw - the armory of the fort, where all its spears and arrows were the first to bathe in the Heart's glow.
And the Heart is there. You can see it through the hole in the walls that you are progressively widening, a literal heart, a beating thing of green jade thinly engraved with ideograms, its open arteries bleeding turquoise ichor. It sits at the heart of a joining of roots denser than any other, so oddly contorted as to look almost like a
body -
Two burning eyes open, staring into your mask. Harvest's outstretched hand freezes in the air, and its very fabric buckle under your control. The heart recedes into the ground, into the knot of roots, and they coil upon themselves into limbs and a chest…
You feel a punch to the gut and you are hurled backwards, your bunraku's back sliding along the ground in a shower of dirt. As you correct your grasp on the strings and slowly pull yourself up, you see the armory explode before you, earth and splinters billowing out, and out of the gap comes a figure of horror. It is taller than Harvest, its entire body made out of wood, spear- and arrow-points jutting out like so many quills and claws, its chest and shoulders contorted into the design of a samurai's armor; but its visage, though carved out of wood, is all too human, a face half-anger half-anguish, eyes burning green, hair of leaves flowing down its shoulders.
"That's Captain Akamine," Ondo says in a baffled voice, his bunraku fallen not far from your own.
"Captain who?!"
"The samurai in charge of the fort. The man who triggered the heart. The one who was left behind in the collapse."
Oh.
The creature that was once Akamine angles its neck to look at you, coils of wood twisting obscenely. In its chest you can see the heart - receded but not fully buried, its glow casting shadows at the fort around you. The trees that have overtaken the structure are moving, their branches probing the air towards you, as if hoping to catch and strangle your Harvest. The ground still shakes. As you pull on Harvest's string you feel it resist your commands - not enough to make it inoperable, but enough to make it harder to fight. New sprouts are budding from your wooden plates. Not far, Ondo is having troubling standing up, his entire bunraku evidently rebelling.
"Well," you say, clutching your spear. "That's inconvenient."
Akamine no Kami
Vessel of the Heart of Jade
[ ]Your advantage lies in numbers and weapons. Flank Akamine with Ondo, exploiting your superior reach to overwhelm him with a dual assault before his control can take hold.
[ ]Harvest includes large amount of steel, and will resist Akamine's influence much better. Tell Ondo to stand back and take Akamine head-on, pitting your terrible strength against his.
[ ]The bunraku are a liability in a fight like this. Use yours to charge Akamine but exit the hatch at the last moment, jumping onto him to rip out the Heart with your own hands.
