by K.A. Rose
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Flash Second
They tracked them, who knew how. The boat'd gone
south of the delta into a map's squiggle of an offshoot stream, not navigable
by much anything except a PBR, lucky them. After a while, though, the stream
went rocky and slimmed to a creek and there wasn't much more than a raft
could follow, and Tseng was sure the platoon had been led off somewhere,
lured down the wrong track, because no way in hell the priest and his men
had come this way.
A priest. Not just any priest, but the highest possible
kind of priest. Practically a god on earth, some of mother's stories had
gone on. Of course that couldn't be him. No keeper of holy scripture was
sailing down a river turned stream turned creek, with a bunch of UC mercs.
If that's what they were. Charlie wasn't too big on uniforms.
Tseng asked three times that the general turn back,
before they got lost off track and had to spend the night where they didn't
belong. But Sephiroth was in that place where he didn't hear anything he
didn't want to hear. And Zack Hartzell, good Zack Hartzell, the one guy
he might've listened to, heeled to him like a dog and just went on. Through
mud and sweat and heat nausea and then the swarms that came out at sunset,
mosquitos and wasps that clawed at what bare skin they could get to, well
into the night and the piss little moon came down through the leaves.
They found an embankment at the curve of a swell,
where a boat might be able to push off from if it got the charge right
in its motors. But there was no boat. Only some tents pitched on the sand,
and a dying fire pit hissing out the warmth into blue darkness.
"How the hell did they--" Reno began, and got no
further. Tseng tugged his ear like a schoolmarm and the boy's jaw snapped
shut.
"Surround the area," Sephiroth was whispering. "Move
in."
Tseng held his man back when the troops moved. By
the line of moonlight he said as much in glance as words could do, that,
no, they were staying here. Reno seemed to guess it was a principle of
offense versus defense but that wasn't it, really. If the general had given
the order in daylight, even Tseng would have gone right in. But those men
in there were Wutainese and Tseng wasn't going to help a slaughter.
Growing up, his mother had told him stories about
the honor code of warrior-knights, that believed in fairness and integrity.
She said that even if a samurai came upon his enemy asleep, he would kick
the pillow out from under his head and wake him before he cut him down,
because it was the worst mark of ill character to attack a sleeping man.
But try telling that to some Midgardian brats. Try telling that to the
ever-rational general who wanted to kill anything that insulted him. As
that priest must've, for Sephiroth to drag his platoon this far south.
Let him kill. If he could. Let him drive his bayonet
through the sanzo's heart and feel satisfied that whatever mission he might've
been on, it was done and settled now. Tseng could lie to himself and say
he'd never seen the chakra on the man's forehead, or cared at all for whatever
scripture he had had around his shoulders. This was war. Every wute was
exactly the same in war.
He watched Reno watching with pretty blue eyes as
the soldiers crept in. As the barrel of Sephiroth's rifle lifted the flap
of the main tent. As twenty men held their breaths in the backs of their
mouths and the general knelt down beside a sleeping figure and brushed
the fringe of brown hair away from shut eyes, and felt along the edge of
a gold carved diadem.
There was a child. Reno had been right. A child
slumbering with his arms wrapped death-tight around the red hanyou's wrist,
squirming but not waking with Sephiroth bent over him, silver hair drifting
just above his nose.
You couldn't see the general's expression from the
trees, but you could guess. Because he'd been a soldier from that age too,
hadn't he, so he knew. That's what Zack had mentioned once.
'Course, Sephiroth also didn't give a shit about
those little bursts of sympathy, flashing like fire lights in the back
of his head. Reno and Tseng both knew he blacked that stuff out, just one
more unfortunate little chemical straying through his system, something
to ignore. He had the pistol out before the kid could take another breath.
And now here was the strange thing.
No one stopped him. Not even Tseng. The general
took his pistol and fit it snugly against the little boy's temple, taking
his time, all the precious time in the world, and then he'd squeezed the
trigger.
They even heard the crack.
But then Sephiroth was flying backwards. Spun through
the air and crashed straight into the trees, wood splintering and his pack
shattering, a wheeze-like cry not sharp enough to be a scream.
And then came the gunfire.
Reno ducked. Tseng allowed him, followed. Their
targets were laying fire in a circle, guessing or knowing they were surrounded
and shooting before they could get shot back, all four of them, the boy
and the priest and the hanyou and the smiling quiet man with a rifle as
tall as he was, with something white and leathery flapping birdlike on
his shoulder.
But the boy.
The boy, he was standing. Blood running down the
side of his face but he was standing, screaming with his pistol
true and flashing fire at tree and brush, too terrified to even shake,
his eyes a brilliant bloody gold.
"Return fire!" Zack was shouting from the trees.
"Return fire! Shut them up!"
They did, and it made the wutes break apart like
leaves, split in four directions in smooth, practiced action, the strategy
of a thousand other battles. Leaping, spinning, trails of clothing arcing
in the air and there was the hanyou again, his shakujyou lancing through
blue moonlight and look out! falling tumbling in the mud with Reno
cold and shaking beneath his chest while the metal sickle sailed where
their heads were a second earlier. And then Reno was pushing him off, climbing
up, the pack slipped off his back and the helmet off his head with wild
red hair black like blood in the darkness, his baton flipped out and crackling
at his side.
"--Reno--!"
He blocked in time, the baton and shakujyou shaking
in their hands at cross angles, threads of blue electricity worming in
the air, and then they broke away, leaping backwards into brush and muck
and bracing on low-slung branches, and watching each other, and watching
eyes and Tseng couldn't say a goddamn thing that the kid would hear.
Same red hair black like blood. With two curved
scars across the hanyou's cheek, matched one for one with the tattoos framing
Reno's eyes.
They had to notice. They had to pause a second,
wonder, maybe, was it possible...
And then Reno was charging again and the shakujyou's
chain glinted under the light.
Across the clearing, there was a familiar-sounding
scream directly preceded by a crunch, the little boy with the monkey tail
snapping Zack Hartzell's country folk arm like he was tearing through paper.
He climbed over the S.O.L.D.I.E.R.'s body as he howled and curled up in
pain, not smiling, a long way from smiling, the boy drawing back his brown
little shoe for a kick right in line with Hartzell's head and stopped short
of it for the gloved hand gripped in his hair and pulling with full strength.
"A youkai," Sephiroth told his captain, hoisting
him to his feet by the good arm. "They all are. This will be interesting."
"Youka... Demons?" Zack panted, clutching at the
forearm. The bone was splintered, jutting bloody-white through the skin.
"They don't draft those into UC, do they?"
He couldn't say more. The general hauled him by
the collar back up against the treeline, hit hard against an ancient trunk
while the general's hands went to his pack, scouting out a pistol, a knife,
anything. He'd lost his own rifle with the first fall.
A shot just over their heads burst sawdust down
into their eyes. They ducked.
"Shit! That's their sniper! The white mage!"
"I'm aware, captain."
The boy was on them again. Eyes wild, blood pooling
down his face with a bamboo stick in his white-knuckled fist. Sephiroth
avoided the first swing and blocked the second with his arm, grunting from
the blow but holding his ground.
"And you're a special one, aren't you," he said
to the child in cool Wutai-go. "Headache?"
If the kid understood, he didn't show it. Aside
from the blood in mean streaks down his face there was no expression at
all, just tight-pressed lips and glowing eyes and fast breathing in his
tiny little chest.
The general smiled at him. A strange kind of smile
hardly ever used on anyone. "Don't assume you're strong," he told him.
"Sephiroth," Zack began at his side, crouched and
gripping the bloody gash in his arm. "He's got mineral. I wouldn't--"
But of course Sephiroth had seen an awful lot in
the war, and most of it had bored him. So how could he resist something
that didn't.
The boy swung. Sephiroth blocked, twisted his hand
along the stick, gripped and tugged. But the boy held and the general lost
his grip, staggered, ducked back with hair flying with the stick sailing
through the air between them. He kicked out with the last of his balance,
got the kid in the ribs and knocked him over, solid hard crunch with his
boots.
"Seriously, man!" Zack Hartzell was shouting after
him. "He doesn't even die if you kill him! Lay off!"
And there was no answer at first, as the punches
and kicks sailed, and Zack saw blood on Sephiroth's lips for the first
time in years. Lips drawn into a smile, a grin, with the words:
"Why should I?"
Really, he didn't need to fight. None of them needed
to fight. The wutes could flee into the forest and get picked off one by
one, or run into the river and get their legs shot off from under them
to drown screaming and quiet, or they could give up and maybe live enough
to provide some humor. They had to know they were outgunned, that every
shot the sniper got off there were ten returned, that they were all bleeding,
that the hanyou was panting and clutching at his glaive in the shallow
of a tree, that they were outnumbered and outclassed and no one
showed up General Sephiroth in a battle, least of all with his platoon
in the wings. It was futile, it was useless grasping bullshit. Jacking
off with a trigger. Like it fucking proved something.
The hanyou had to stop in his next charge. A gun
at his cheek and Tseng silent at his shoulder, digging nails into the skin.
"Stop," he said in Norse, because he'd be damned
if he said one word to them in anything else. Let the sound make his meaning
for him.
Of course it was the same thing across the clearing.
But with a blade at a throat, to stop Sephiroth from squeezing his hand
any tighter around the child's wrist.
"Stop," was the word by Sephiroth's ear. Also in
Norse, but with an accent angry and deliberately thick. Pointed like the
blade was sharp against the lines of his neck. Pressed just below his adam's
apple, so that if he just swallowed a little too fast...
The firing stopped.
It was the silence that had Tseng turn his head
and see.
The priest. Had come up behind the general and put
a knife to him, as easily as if he'd caught his arm.
His skin was fair. Nibel complexion, blond hair
deadened without the sunlight. His eyes were narrow and dark and his mouth
looked poisonous, and Tseng couldn't see the scripture he was supposed
to bear around his shoulders, though those same cream robes hung loose
round his elbows, betrayed the shoulder holster for a pistol he'd not yet
drawn. A shotgun in there too, outlined against his calf. Patience for
that too.
"Your men. Tell them to put their weapons down."
It was a short, deep voice. Vibrating somehow, like
a temple bell, resonating in the air, affected the stillness that followed
after.
Sephiroth, the great General Sephiroth, gave the
order. With a careful swallow.
"This isn't very wise of you," he told the sanzo.
More a murmur, really. "Surely you can be rational."
The priest didn't answer him. Just kept his dark
eyes narrowed, the blade tucked against the S.O.L.D.I.E.R.'s throat. "Listen
carefully," he said, in a louder voice. Too loud. Probably expected there
were more men in the trees than they really had. "We have no quarrel with
you. We are not soldiers. This is not our war."
"You were spotted in a Riverine due south along
the Utai," Sephiroth responded. "What's your destination?"
"The city of Houtou."
Houtou, Tseng thought. The ancient former capital.
The southern tip. But wasn't that where the President was going to...
"We are pilgrims," said the sanzo, "on a holy crusade,
tasked by the Sanbutsushin at the temple of Chang'an in the Northern Capital.
This is a mission from the gods. You have no right to interfere."
A mission from the gods...
Pressed to his shoulder, Reno could feel Tseng laughing
silently.
So ridiculous, he heard his boss mutter beneath
his breath, or else just heard the sounds in his head. So unbelievable,
he was hearing. What, are you a fairy tale? A story for the children, a
hero in making?
"There are forces at work set to bring about the
resurrection of the Demon Lord Gyuumaoh," the priest explained. "We have
been called upon by Kanzeon Bosatsu and the Kingdom of Heaven to prevent
his resurrection."
"And if you don't?" Sephiroth asked. His voice was
nearly humoring.
The wute noticed. His eyes flared, and the knife
pressed closer. "Then, you see," he said. "your little war does not matter,
does it, gaijin. If you stop us then you are murderer of the world."
The general went silent.
It was something in the resonance. Something, somehow.
In there. The timbre of the voice, that made him go quiet. To not have
a single thing to answer.
"Your war is a useless war," the sanzo whispered
close to his ear. "Be noble men and leave us be."
And then his hand moved, and the knife drove in.
Slid acid-slick leave a line of black streaming blood and Zack Hartzell
screaming the general's name as he fell.
They fled. Them, the four of them, with the little
white bat thing knotted to the sniper's shoulder. The hanyou ran right
out from Xian Tseng's grip, and Reno snatched at him, grabbed only a few
thick strands of too-red hair.
He looked at them in his palm, glinting dark under
the moonlight, while the soldiers cried out for their general and the sloshing
footsteps of four pilgrims retreated into the deep downriver.
"Shit," Reno heard his boss say.
In the clearing, the soldiers fumbled for their
greens and shelled out Restores as quick as they could, green glow humming
in the dark carved-out forest.
When Sephiroth sat up, rubbing at his mended throat,
he rasped, "We're going after them."
He met Tseng's gaze. And Reno saw between the two
that it wasn't at all the glance they'd shared up to that point.
"You believe him," Zack breathed, reading it too.
"You think he's really..."
"Genjo Sanzo. That's his name. The holder of the
Seiten and Maten Sutras. It's in your goddamn handbooks," Sephiroth added
to his soldiers with a snarl. "Local legends say they're two of the five
scriptures that made the world. He's stronger than any of you could
ever hope. If he admits his fear like that, what's that say about what
he's doing?"
Afraid? some of the soldiers wondered. How can you
tell?
"We're going after them," Sephiroth repeated. "Through
the night if we have to. This creek here rejoins the Utai three kliks south
of the tenth. We're going to head them off."
"And do what, general?" Zack asked, allowing the
medic to reset his arm under a green haze glow. "What's your plan this
time?"
Across the clearing, Sephiroth met Xian Tseng's
gaze again, and smirked.
Tseng allowed it.
It had taken a while to get going, once they were
deep enough in the flood for Boat to transform and get them underway. They'd
left in such a hurry that they'd left a lot of their supplies behind. No
matter; they'd get more. Somehow. Even if they were running out of ports
that would take them.
Cho Hakkai stored his rifle under the helm canopy,
stroked the wheel and went back to see to Gojyo and Goku. They'd both taken
some heavy hits during the battle and would need attention now. Goku especially.
Hakkai had worried that shield magic had deteriorated over the night.
"Man, it was scary," Son Goku declared, squirming
too much for Hakkai to set the bandages. "It was all, like, BOOM! right
by your ear. And then..."
"Hey, Sanzo," Sha Gojyo called up to the bow, where
the priest was either brooding or cleaning his pistol, or probably both.
"Doncha think that was goin' a bit overboard back there?"
"Sou desu ne," Hakkai murmured, knotting the gauze.
"It wasn't like you very much at all."
He guessed they were all changing, this far into
the journey. It felt like years on this river already, and Sanzo surely
had changed the most of any. There had been a time, once, when he'd been
a little less quick to get his hands dirty. Especially with that certain
kind of blood that was sure to stain.
In the silence, they could hear a creak of leather.
Sanzo shrugged. "He'll live."
"You're so sure?"
Genjo Sanzo tapped a little more oil onto his rag.
"No man that unbothered by a knife would be without a way to recover from
it," he said. "Besides that, that man is said to be the persistent sort."
"Oh, oh?" Gojyo grinned, leaning over in his seat
despite the bruised ribs. "Sanzo-sama has a new suitor?"
Growl. "Shut up and die."
"So cruel! Those gaijin like their women soft, you
know."
They saw his head turn, lean around the edge of
the helm block, and was surely about to say something horribly foul, when
an RPG screaming across the waterway interrupted just about everyone's
train of thought.
The grenade sailed like a bottlerocket, spiraling
gray-green smoke in its wake and blossoming into bright orange fire on
the opposing bank. Sanzo turned first to the blue haze of the eastern shore,
up ahead maybe twenty yards. And the gaze had his companions follow, look
to the treeline to see a silver-haired S.O.L.D.I.E.R. waving his rifle
above his head, like a peasant offering tribute to a lord.
"Genjo Sanzo!" he was shouting. Thick accented Wutai-go,
imperious, but not. "There's truth to your words, isn't there? You're off
to save the world?"
"And what does it matter to you?" Sanzo called back
in Norse, leaning on Boat's railing. "Go back to your petty battles, your
thoughtless 'military action.' You're here for your pay, are you not?"
"I'm not," Sephiroth answered. He walked even with
the PBR now, marching along the edge of the shore with a few of his others
behind him. "And if I order them, my men aren't either. What we do here
means nothing if you don't succeed, isn't that right?"
"You trust that?"
"Why not? You do."
"This is not your war."
"Are you going off to die, Genjo Sanzo?"
The priest didn't answer.
"We'll fight with you," said Sephiroth. "These men,
myself. I pledge them to you, if you'll have them."
Behind him, walking in his wake, the two T.U.R.K.S.
marched with heads ducked. Biting lips and gripping the barrels of their
guns.
Sephiroth was a soldier of his own, of course. The
President liked to have him on a long leash. Better that way, usually.
Less worry. That's what all the stories said.
Of course, some of those stories said that on a
long leash, Sephiroth answered to no one but himself, in the worst and
most fatal possible way. Without much care for turn-outs.
But he was also Sephiroth.
And, as Gojyo felt the need to point out, he even
came with a dowry.
From the east bank, Reno felt the hanyou's eyes
on him, looked up, and flushed as red as his hair.
Tseng said nothing. It was gone out of his place
to say anything now.
"General," Sanzo said from the bow, "if you and
your men try not to die, you're welcome to join us."
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