Riposte

Chapter 5

These were the demons from Christian hell, the type you’d see in horror movies in America. They were fiery red creatures with horns sprouting from their foreheads and barbed, whip-like tails. I’m not sure who came up with that—I think it was some feverish, sex-starved monk in Europe during the Crusades—but it’s obviously been an enduring and compelling image for several centuries. Some of them flew on leathery wings into the desert night air, with fingerlike talons outstretched to rip into something soft; some of them bubbled across the ground in uneven gaits, owing to the uneven number of legs they had and differing lengths of their limbs; a few of them galloped on those infamous cloven hooves; but all of them, without exception, had lots of sharp, pointy parts, and they stank like ass.

I could not believe that he had made a deal with hell.

Susanoo didn’t waste time with introductions or even a respectable arch villain laugh. He didn’t taunt me or inform me I was about to die; he just pointed at me and uttered the Japanese equivalent of “Sic ’im, boys!”

Almost all of them did, but a couple of the bigger ones didn’t—I distinctly saw one of the cloven-hoofed beasts take off for the hills, and the largest thing on wings disappeared into the sky somewhere. Christian Death just remained on the edge of the fire pit, riding atop his pale horse. 

Susanoo had the gall to be surprised at their defection—he actually shouted at them to come back, and I supposed he must have been counting on them to finish me off after the smaller ones roughed me up a bit. I saw the Mami move to protect Tomomi, who was chained up and unable to defend herself, and that gave me a brief moment’s relief.

“What did you expect, Susanoo?” I mocked him as I beheaded the front line. “They’re bloody demons.” And then there was no time for me to talk, because they were upon me and all I could do was concentrate on what to kill next and on keeping down the contents of my stomach.

Yumi suddenly materialised in the center of the demon horde and screamed a word of power. A circle of energy appeared around her and instantly obliterated a whole bunch of the demons. I ran forward, stabbing and cutting my way through toward Susanoo. He knew I’d make it through, and made a o-yoroi materialise on his body.  He stood right there, waiting for me to come, knowing that I was draining my energy. Yumi knew this too, she gave me a little bonus, and nuked all the demons in the area in the general radius. A thin wall of demons now stood between me and Susanoo. Using my scabbard for leverage, I vaulted over this wall and came up right beside Susanoo. He took a swipe at me and I dived below it. I shoved my scabbard into the back of his knee and he collapsed.

Taking a few steps back, right out of his range, I laughed. I knew I couldn’t fight him head-on, he could still draw unthinkable amounts of energy from the moon while I couldn’t. I needed him to make mistakes. Go ahead, Susanoo, get angry. Throw some magic at me and spend yourself, and see what happens. He struggled to get back up, since his armour was not light. Since most of the demons had been cleared off my Yumi already, the three of them present could watch the spectacle. They laughed too, since there was nothing much else to do.

His face red and flushed, he gave me one of those “You will pay!” looks and whipped his left hand at me as if he were throwing a Frisbee. But what came at me wasn’t a pleasantly spinning plastic disc—it was a bright orange ball of hellfire, the sort that you get to fling around only if you’ve made a deal you really shouldn’t have.

I’m not going to pretend my sphincter didn’t clench—my survival instinct is too well developed—but other than that I gave no outward sign that I was concerned about the hellfire as I stood my ground. Now I’d find out how good my amulet was.

You know how it feels when you’ve nuked a Hot Pocket and you touch it too fast before it cools down? Well, the hellfire was like that: a flash of intense heat that was gone in less than a second, leaving nary a mark but setting my entire body to sweating.

Susanoo couldn’t believe it. He thought he’d see a crispy critter clutching a glowing sword, but instead he saw an annoyed, very live Haruna staring back at him, clutching a glowing sword.

“How is that possible? You should have no defence against hellfire! You should be dead!”

Instead of answering him, I took the time to find an area that was flat and smooth, so that I could keep my balance and attack him properly. I wanted to finish him off quickly, ending with a stab in the guts, like in an anime scene. But that was not to be, he had real battlefield cred.

He parried my first flurry of blows, cursing all the while and promising to mutilate my body and then dig up the bones of all my descendants and turn them into glue, blah blah blah. He tried to back up, disengage, and give himself some space to begin a counterattack.

That was precisely the moment I needed. I adopted my battoujutsu stance and watched him closely. He watched me too, with his eyes filled with rage and hatred. I just remained cold and calculated. He thought he was making the right move, but he was too rash. He thought that my battoujutsu stance was immobile, but in fact, it was the complete opposite. His blind thrust straight toward me would not hit me if I dropped to the ground. He was passing over me and I cut towards his throat. He could not avoid the blow since he put all his weight into his charge, and I cut off his head.

His head tumbled backward, eyes wide in surprise, and wound up bouncing off his back as he fell to the ground. Death laughed and goaded his horse toward us. I stood aside as the rider reached down and scooped Susanoo’s head from the ground, then began to tack his horse back around to the fire pit, laughing maniacally all the while.

His mouth did not move, but I heard him protest: “NOOOOOO.”

The pale horse of Death leapt with its rider and cargo into the fire pit and descended back to hell, and I was finally free of Susanoo.