by E. M. Hardy
The three exhausted samurai shook from the effort, their hands barely able to hold their swords. They steeled themselves for death, knowing that their enemy was simply toying with them. The faceless clay men could have finished them off with a concentrated thrust of spears or a timed barrage of javelins, but they instead chose to duel them one-on-one with their blades. They expected to die, ready to give their lives to the cause.
Twelve more walkers perished before the first samurai fell, more to fatigue and blood loss than to the swordsmanship of the walkers. The tired muscles of the injured samurai reacted half a second too late to a thrust from one of the walkers. He gurgled pink, frothing blood as he collapsed, slowly and painfully choking to death as the blade slid through his ribs and into his lung.
The two remaining samurai fought on as walkers came at them two at a time to test their blades. The second samurai fell from a mistimed cut, baited by a feint. The swordsman may have been fatigued and fighting desperately, but Martin had finally pieced together the pattern of the man’s stance. He would pull back, retract his sword in reaction to an incoming strike, before stepping in with a right foot to add leverage to a stroke coming from the left-hand side of the body. Armed with this knowledge, Martin was able to counter the stroke by pretending to step in and then quickly switching his stance to cut from the right. The man’s stroke glided up, lightly cutting the walker’s chest, while the walker’s blade bit deep into his neck. The man bled out quickly, a fountain of blood spurting from the severed artery.
The last samurai shook, though Martin didn’t know if it was from fear or anger or fatigue or some other emotion. A walker closed in, blade in hand and ready to continue the duel.
“No!” shouted the man, holding the hilt of his blood-blade with both hands. “No more games! No more toying! DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR!!!”
The man charged the walker, and Martin responded with a slash that would have taken the man’s fingers. The samurai leapt high into the air, screaming a bestial scream as he swung his blade down at the walker. It rolled off to the side, dodging the telegraphed stroke.
But the samurai didn’t turn around to face his designated opponent. No, he charged straight into the walkers watching the whole display. He swung wildly, no longer caring for finesse or technique as he sought his death to end this charade.
Martin obliged. Only crumbled clay and cooling corpses greeted the mounted samurai riding in to check on the doomed patrol.
Martin would continue these raids in the coming days to great effect up until the Shogunates finally broke free from the forests. Martin managed to destroy eight more patrols and isolate three others, taking down nine more samurai in duels. He lost more than five hundred walkers in the process, especially when the officers finally tightened up the patrols and added more bodies to the mix. Most of these casualties came from isolating the patrols and buying enough time for him to duel the samurai. The training he gained from the duels, however, more than paid for the casualties. The experience he gained from battling the samurai complemented the reflexes and the instincts gained from their bloody, crimson souls.
The Shogun continued sending out patrols, despite the risk and the losses. He may lose the occasional patrol, but their horns ensured that no major force could sneak up on the main army and catch it unawares. Better to lose a few dozen men every now and then than to lose a few thousand from a bad engagement. It was a sound decision from a tactical perspective, but it didn’t help the morale of either the elite swordsman or the simple footman. They were the ones who had to walk into the dark, foreboding forest to die if they had the misfortune of getting cut off from other patrols. Even the vaunted samurai ended up exhausted from having to constantly dart around, assisting beleaguered patrols whenever they came under attack. These relentless day-and-night raids made them realize, for the first time, just how frightening their faceless, inhuman opponents were…
…especially since they could no longer find the blood-bound weapons of the fallen samurai.
***
Day 18
Wu Er was a major city located conveniently between heavily-wooded forests, fertile farmland, and a fast-running river. The first Renese survivors had rebuilt the ruins of the last city erected on this location more than a thousand years ago, the memories of the most recent invader purge still fresh in their minds. Those harsh memories faded into bland lessons, then fantastic legends, and finally cast into obscurity in the few hundred years since then. People were simply too busy tending to the land, building wealth, fighting off bandits, and forming young empires to care much about the past. Why worry about old legends when your youngest is dying from dysentery? Why fuss about cryptic prophecies when you’re too busy dealing with pests eating up all your rice seedlings? And why leave your prosperous dry goods store to thieves and looters just because of some rumors about an invading army?
The answer to the last statement became all too obvious with the rumored army almost at the gates of your city. Which is why Martin’s walkers manned the walls while the last holdouts of Wu Er finally decided it was a good idea to listen to the soldiers telling them to leave. You would think the threat of death and destruction would be enough, but there were those who simply refused to look past their own noses. They forced themselves to believe that it would be an easy matter to repel the Shogunates, that they wouldn’t be able to scale the tall stone walls or tear down the thick gates that had been protecting the city for so long. The residents of Wu Er were particularly stubborn in this regard, practically rebelling when Bai Yu’s troops began forcibly evicting people.
Not that agents from the Order of Rats were helping any. Strangers began spreading rumors that the Imperials were lying, that Yan Bao was safe and sound, that an impoverished Empress was using fantastic rumors of a Shogunate army to frighten people into leaving their homes. Her thugs and goons would then evict honest shopkeepers so that they could confiscate their goods to finance a weak, crumbling empire. These agents convinced many people that there was no reason at all to leave the fair city of Wu Er. The local guards were able to kill or capture a handful of Rats responsible for the rumors, but the damage was done. People became complacent and resisted the calls for evacuation, sneering at those who wanted to save them.
Now the proud and stout-hearted folk of Wu Er practically bowled over one another in a desperate bid to escape the city. All it took was one look at the swarm of soldiers arrayed against them, more than forty thousand of them crawling all over the countryside. That, and the huge battering ram they lugged along. Red root-like veins crawled over its surface, fed by the blood of villagers too stubborn to heed Martin’s warnings.
“Are you sure about this?” asked the grizzled commander atop the walls, eyeing the mass of Shogunate troops circling the city, preparing to storm it from all sides.
“Yes,” replied the walker standing beside the commander, loudly enough for all around them to hear. “You need to go now, while you still can. Take as many evacuees as you can and go. This city will fall, no doubt about that, and I don’t think my eight thousand walkers will make much of a difference defending it.” Commander Li Tai winced at the volume of Martin’s words, steeling his face to avoid the forlorn eyes of the nearby guards.
“We’ve got a good defensive position here,” countered the commander, shaking his head. “The walls are tall and strong. My archers and your javelin-bearing walkers can rain down hell as they try to assault the walls. Surely your walkers and my troops can hold off these Shogunate barbarians long enough for the General of the White Tiger to arrive with reinforcements?”
“No. We don’t have martial artists to counter all those samurai archers when they start raining their blood-arrows through the sky. They’ve depleted their reserves of arrows somewhat, but stubborn villagers provided enough blood for them to empower a few thousand more. That means they still have enough to provide cover for an assault. That, and the Shogunates will blow through the gates with the new ram of theirs.
The fighting will spill into the streets, and it’s going to be ugly for anyone trapped inside… assuming the Shogun intends to storm the city in the first place.”
The commander turned an unbelieving eye at the walker standing beside him. He was just about to ask something when that walker drew the ceramic sword sheathed at its waist and slashed at the air in front of the commander. One half of a blood-red arrow slapped the armored vest of the commander with its feathered shaft while the other half spun off to the side—the pulsing arrowhead cracking the solid granite block it struck.
“Get down,” Martin said, pulling the pale-faced commander to the ground. “We’re already within striking range of the samurai’s blood-bows.”
“Thank you for that, honored… honored comrade,” the man stammered, visibly trying to regain his lost composure. “I didn’t… I can’t believe how far their arrows can reach!”
The walker nodded, peering atop the crenellations to watch the advancing army. This feat of swordsmanship, of reflexes, had come as a result of hundreds of idle walkers training with ceramic blades. Those coming off the production vats of the Leizhu Swamp and the Qleb Sierra practiced day and night, massing up into groups of a thousand before Martin sent them north then east to join up with Shen Feng’s marching army. The souls of the fallen samurai lingered within Martin’s core, granting him the skill and reaction time he needed to utilize the blades. He still wasn’t as good at the blades as he wanted to be, but he was getting there.
“Go now, commander Li,” Martin said. “Get the refugees out of here before the Shogunates manage to circle around and bypass the city altogether. He postures like he’s going to take the city, but his real objective is the people living in it.”
Commander Li Tai clicked his tongue and shook his head, recovering from his brush with death. “My apologies for not forcing them out sooner. We could have avoided all this if they just evacuated instead of fighting us at every turn.”
“I’m not blaming you,” Martin replied, nodding with his walker, an edge to his voice. “I’m blaming those sorry idiots for not believing you in the first place. Now go! Take as many people as you can before the Shogunates spot movement. I’ll pull up as many walkers as I can on the walls, make it look as if I’m holding the line.”
Unbeknownst to Martin, a handful of rats—the small, furry kind—slipped through gaps in the walls. These were released by a man wearing the colors of the Wu Er guard, a man who stood near the walls and had listened to the exchange between the walker and Commander Li Tai. The rats made their way through the rice fields outside Wu Er, following the scent of their master. The trained vermin found him, and he rewarded the creatures with bites of cheese as he unfurled the small rolls of paper they carried on their backs. The Rat smiled as he read the report, then dashed off to report the findings of his fellow Rats to the Shogun.
Martin’s eyeballs and walkers could only watch as the Shogun circled the city of Wu Er. He prepared for a breakthrough, his walkers hunkered down in the alleys and basements of the city. Instead, the mass of ashigaru simply encircled the city and dug in. The light foot held the battering ram back, not bothering to risk it in an attack, while a thousand samurai mounted their horses to chase down the fleeing refugees. Five thousand ashigaru followed them on foot, preparing to support the elite swordsmen and manage the captured as the samurai conducted their ritual executions to empower new blood-bound weapons.
They moved boldly, confidently, with the knowledge that Martin’s walkers were trapped behind the walls of Wu Er. They only realized too late that Martin had laid a trap of his own—one that he intentionally leaked to as many listening ears as possible.
***
Day 19
One moment the lead elements of the mounted samurai were thundering after the slowest of the refugees, shouting battle cries and preparing to cut down the guards who had volunteered to slow down the horsemen chasing them. The next moment, a hundred walkers burst out from the ground and shoved their pikes deep into the flanks of their horses.
Man and beast fell down in a violent clash of clay and flesh. The violence of the initial encounter caught the samurai completely by surprise, halting the charge in its tracks. It didn’t stop there, though. Hundreds of walkers emerged from underground bunkers dug out by dolls, bearing pikes and javelins and blades. Five thousand other walkers swarmed out from the tunnels and bunkers just beside the road.
Martin had prepared for this, counting on the Order of Rats within Wu Er to do his work for him. He had marched the bulk of his walker army inside the city in broad daylight, making sure that everyone saw thousands of walkers spreading out on the streets. He had made sure that he spoke loudly of his plans to hold the city, to trick the Shogunates into attacking the city while its residents fled. He wanted everyone to know what he planned, what he expected. His dolls then dug tunnels leading out of the city, allowing him to quickly and quietly move his walkers out under the cover of darkness. Other dolls got to work building tunnels and bunkers in the hidden parts of the land, tunneling underground to ensure secrecy. These tunnels would have been far too narrow for ordinary humans, especially if you planned to move them en masse. Martin’s walkers, however, needed no air while Martin himself felt no sense of claustrophobia from crawling around in the tiny little tunnels. He could literally pack his walkers like sardines inside little compartments until he needed to move them out.
All for this one chance to catch a part of the Shogunate army unawares.
The samurai didn’t break as quickly as Martin hoped, however. They may have lost a dozen men in the initial strike, but they quickly reorganized themselves for battle. Those nearest the walkers jumped off their mounts and drew their blood-blades, ready to engage their ceramic opponents. Those immediately behind them stayed mounted while drawing their blood-bows and pulling arrows out of the quivers at their waists.
Martin didn’t give them a chance to regroup even further. His walkers charged quickly, pikes in hand. The blood-blades of the samurai were razor-sharp, capable of cutting into the pikes if they so wished. They would most likely cut through the walkers if they managed to close the distance, considering their superior skill and equipment. This was why they often charged in as dragoons, rushing to the battle site with horses while dismounting to fight on solid ground. Their value as shock troops was second to none, able to turn the tide wherever they were needed. This time, however, they did not have the bristling wall of spears from their light foot counterparts to defend them. They only had their swords, and even the quickest of samurai couldn’t cut off a dozen spears coming at him from the same direction when they had their backs to one another. More than a hundred samurai died in the initial charge of pikes, with only a handful able to loose blood-arrows into the cluster of walkers before javelins and waves of force ended their lives.
Under the right circumstances, the samurai’s blood-bows and blood-arrows could rain devastation from afar. Extended range, guided projectiles, and deadly kinetic force would normally decimate Martin’s walkers in the open field. This time, however, the ambush made sure that the samurai were well within the range of javelins. The elite warriors would not be able to fire with impunity while their ashigaru escorts protected them. No, they only had enough time for a few seconds of staggered shooting before the walkers reached their lines. Another hundred samurai fell, mostly archers who weren’t able to draw their blood-blades in time to deflect both the pikes jabbing at them from the front and the thrown projectiles hitting them from above. Soon enough, the leading elements of the samurai were all but lost, decimated on all sides by a wall of pikes and javelins.
Martin drank in the souls of the fallen samurai, the crimson orbs of pure power fusing into his core and his walkers. The first bodies were already twitching to life, the vengeful shayateen claiming their husks, when the samurai in the rear ranks—more than six hundred—managed to withdraw from the ambush and regroup their lines. They formed up, drew their blood-bows, and loo
sed upon both walker and undead.
The arrows shattered the bodies of their once-living comrades, the shayateen screaming in rage as their bodies broke and bled under the barrage. The walkers, however, were a different story. The walkers wielding spears and javelins fell back, some unable to escape the deadly barrage of blood-arrows. Most of the arrows, however, were sliced out of the air by walkers wielding ceramic blades eerily similar to those the samurai used.
The walkers in the front swung their blades quickly, neatly, and precisely—slicing the shafts of most of the arrows before they could find their marks. Some walkers were struck by the arrowheads, but their ceramic bodies simply stumbled and cracked instead of disintegrating into chunks of clay. It was one thing to take the full focused impact from the point of a blooded arrowhead, and quite another for it to haphazardly bounce off a limb.
Not to mention how the souls of the fallen contributed in strengthening the ceramic bodies of the walkers. They now moved even faster, hit even harder, and could take even more punishment. Not only that, but Martin’s duels against the samurai and his constant drilling to slice arrows out of the air had helped hone his skills to a razor’s edge.
The samurai stood stunned, unable to believe what they were seeing while the walkers assaulted them with swords in hand. The warriors managed to loose two more flights of arrows, inflicting minimal casualties, before they drew their blood-blades and charged into the mass of walkers. They were outnumbered—six hundred surviving samurai against almost five thousand walkers coming at them from all sides—but they were samurai. Death before dishonor, or so they shouted as their lines crashed into one another.
They were still shouting the words as a sea of clay drowned them, armed with sword and spear and javelin. Martin gave no quarter to the trapped samurai, so eager was he to inflict vengeance upon the bloodthirsty animals responsible for slaughtering so many innocents. Any admiration he had for their skills in war, for their bravery in the face of certain death, was wiped out by the memory of screaming daughters, pleading fathers, raging sons, and crying mothers. He greedily drank in the souls of the samurai as they dropped, reveling in the power they brought to him. The roiling balls of crimson energy left him feeling euphoric, practically glowing with bliss. He rejoiced in the sprays of blood resulting from each stroke, each thrust. He learned from the dying samurai, further honing his skill with the blade and pike as he dueled with them. Spear thrusts quick enough to break through the samurai’s lightning-fast reflexes. Not always, but often enough. Perfectly-timed parries aimed at the flat of the blood-blades, altering the flow of their deadly strokes and opening their wielders up to a quick counterthrust. He even took the measure of the longer blood-blades, cutting just deep enough to reach their fingers before following up with a cut to the elbow and then a cut to the face.