The Anti Oni Autonomous Response Unit loomed balefully in the distance, the clank of moving metal was unnerving as it turned itself to face our position.
To add insult to injury, a dozen battle tanks and vehicles came out of the portal on the heels of the immense robot. They weren’t taking any chances with their centerpiece. Things looked more than bleak.
“Charles, this is…” Anzuki trailed off, head hanging.
“Oh Hell no,” I called out. “We did not come this far just to give up because of some killer robot and a handful of tanks.”
I turned to Anzuki and grabbed her by her shoulders. It was sudden enough to make her freeze up completely.
“Kunshu Anzuki. If you don’t win here, everything your Dad, his dad before him, and his dad before him worked towards will be gone forever. You have a home field advantage. You have magic at your fingertips that most everyone else only dreams of having. Are you just going to give up without ever swinging your sword.”
“Never,” she whispered.
“Momo. Nobody knows the enemy forces better than you. Use your magic. Use your anger. Are you going to let some dumb monkey like Kuroshi get away with killing your dad and stealing all that he meant for you to have?”
Momo grit her teeth and shook her head. “I’m gonna crush their skulls beneath my step.”
“Perfect. Stay exactly that angry. Anzuki. Ideas?”
Anzuki jerked her head towards me before shaking, discarding her demonic mask. “I have one. A good one. But I don’t think I have enough power.”
“Do it.”
“But--”
“Anzuki, trust your Demon General.”
A flash of emotion washed over Anzuki’s face. She gripped the hilt of her blood red katana with both hands and turned to the gathered Oni.
“If you can fight, get up on the flanks. If you can’t? Get to hiding.”
She let out a roar that made the hills tremble, gathered more magical essence into one place than I’d ever seen, and then she stabbed her katana down into the bony hill.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all? A chill of fear shot through me. Anzuki might have known her limits better than anyone when she warned me she didn’t have enough power. Did the might of the Oni finally fail them?
No sooner had the thought entered my mind, than the ground began to rumble, tremble, and shake.
A skeleton began to rise from the ground. A dozen gnarled horns crowned the skull, leering eyes filled with bale fire housed in the sockets. The whole hill shook and shrunk as the immense skeleton, with Anzuki riding atop the skull, reached full prominence.
Five stories tall. Greasy with magic so thick I could see the red wisps flickering at the joints. It picked up an equally colossal club that I’d mistaken for a particular spiky cliff and brandished it menacingly. It rose from the bony hill like a kid would crawl out of a pile of leaves in the Fall, and it cast its monstrous gaze onto the Tengu’s mech.
“Tch. Overcompensating,” Momo said, picking me up with Cotton Candy and flying the two of us up to the skull.
“Anzuki,” I called out.
The Oni swordswoman’s gaze didn’t stray from the enemy. The battlefield was different now. Deathly silent.
I licked my lips. I doubt Kuroshi or the Tengu ever dreamed that they’d have a clash of the titans on their hands. The bird men looked confused. Dazed. Ready to break and fly for the hills.
The mech was not amused. Spiked metal poles fired out of it’s heels and dug into the ground, steadying it’s gargantuan frame as the lids on the shoulder mounted missile launchers blew off. A swarm of smokey trails arced after the heavy missiles shooting into the sky.
“Charles?” Anzuki asked.
I cocked her a steady grin. “Do what comes natural to you.”
The enormous skeleton creaked and groaned, bringing up it’s foot and stomping it down with all it’s might, pulverizing half a sea of bones. It bent it’s head back, and let out a long defiant roar that sounded exactly like Godzilla’s.
It didn’t actually. Skeletons don’t have lungs or tongues after all, no matter how much magic is pumped into them. However, I’m going to pretend that the hundred foot tall Oni skeleton roared like Godzilla, and anyone with an ounce of imagination should too.
The bone behemoth broke into a lumbering run down the hill full tilt as the missiles crashed around us. Momodara chanted words of power, flicking her hands to and fro as she sent heaving gusts of wind to steer missiles off course or lightning bolts to prematurely detonate others.
My kind of double date.
We crashed into the giant mech like a wrecking ball. Metal groaned and shivered at the sheer weight behind our attack, but the machine wasn’t fighting on its own.
The sound of cracking bones reached my ears. I had to grab hold of Momo and hold on to a horn for dear life as the giant skeleton fell to a knee. One of the tanks must have struck a joint. Even now they were shooting shells at it as fast as they could reload, leaving the Oni to the foot troops to handle.
“Lucky hit,” Anzuki growled.
The colossal skeleton smashed it’s foot down onto the Tengu throng. A chorus of screams and shattered metal filled the air as bird men and modern armor were sent flying every which way. A distraction, but enough of one to work.
The mech jettisoned the missile pods, and drew the heavy metal blade it had strapped to its back. Not just a cool aesthetic piece. Deadly sharp too. Anzuki’s instincts were sharper. Her anticipation was steps ahead of the clumsy bot.
The giant skeleton’s club was already in the way of the sword as the mech swung catching the blade deep. A wrench of the skeleton’s hand shattered the blade as car bumper sized shards of the sword rained down. The bot’s visor flashed red.
“Ah. Watch out for--” Momo called out.
The robot’s left hand fired an immense claw that clamped down hard on the skeleton’s elbow joint, the right hand did the same in short order. The robot’s chest whirred and metal plates groaned aside to reveal the crackling barrel of an immense cannon.
“--Artillery mode,” Momo groaned.
“Really? This thing can transform into an artillery piece? Goddammit Momo, that cannon’s going to turn us into dust!” I shouted over the crackle of electricity as the cannon primed and the skeleton struggled to get free.
“It’s an electromagnetic rail gun,” Momo corrected me matter of factly. “But you’re right. It’s not going to leave one atom atop another if it hits us directly.”
“Then it ain’t gonna hit,” Anzuki called out.
With a snarl, she poured her will into the giant skeleton, pulling an arm free and curling the knuckles around the rail gun. Shaking, straining, the barrel of the rail gun shifted, struggling to stay on course.
The skeleton listed suddenly, as the railgun hummed, glowing brighter. I peered over the side of the skull and cursed. The tanks were going to town on the fragile ankles and knees of the giant skeleton. If this kept up, the whole thing would unravel without them even needing the rail gun.
Something had to happen fast. We were all out of options. Pistols didn’t mean a damn thing to a robot that big, Cho would take too long and…
I felt a familiar rectangular shape in my breast pocket. The tide jewel? Equally useless. It only reacted when it got hit. The only thing it could do to the bot was give it a nice car wash before it pulverized--
Staring at the rail gun, a wonderful, terrible idea blossomed in my brain. Just as Anzuki pushed the rail gun off course, I drew back, and threw the tide jewel right into the cannon’s mouth.
Chapter 34
My ears rang. I found myself on my hands and knees. You don’t really realize what goes on when a rail gun large enough to blow a hole in the moon goes off. You just sort of find yourself with ringing ears and shaky limbs amid the aftermath.
A lot happened in that one second. As I cast my gaze over the side of the horned skull, I saw that Anzuki had only been partially successful. Half the giant sk
eleton’s rib cage was atomized, the crumbling roots of the ribs that survived glistened stark white, and the flickering magic that held the immense skeleton together quivered.
It was on its last legs.
I turned my gaze to Momo, hands pressed to the side of her heads, only slowly realizing that Anzuki was saying something to me over the whine of reeling eardrums.
“What did you do Charles?” I think she said.
It was enough to make me laugh.
“Won us the fight,” I replied.
A tiny, fiercely shining beacon slowly fell through the air. Taro’s tide jewel. Supposedly indestructible, it only ever reacted to kinetic force. The greater the force, the greater the resulting explosion of pure aquamancy. I’d slammed it against concrete to get a blast out of it and shot it with a pistol from point blank to get a torrent worth of water.
So what would happen, I wondered, if I hit it with a rail gun so powerful it could shatter skyscrapers in a single shot? There was only one word I could think of to describe the resulting flood it would reply with.
Biblical.
The Tide Jewel exploded over top of the gathered Tengu forces, dropping a hundred Olympic sized swimming pools worth of water on top of their heads. Screeches of horror were drowned out in an instant as the hundred pools grew into a lake that grew into a sea worth of water.
“Charles what did you do?!” Anzuki cried out.
“Hang on to something,” Momo crowed, holding on to one of the skull’s horns for dear life.
Legendary Jewel of Tides indeed. And the best part? The Tengu had kept their portal open, planning to swarm the netherworld with more troops. Their thoroughness would work against them. All the water was about to go down the drain they so eagerly provided.
Tanks and troopers, Oni and bones, all flooded into the Tengu industrial complex beneath Ten-Ko headquarters. Anzuki’s Ogres would survive the bath just fine. But heavy wings and damp feathers would leave the Crow Tengu and their fancy tech totally crippled.
“Focus on the bot. He’s all yours Anzuki,” I called out.
She didn’t need more of a push than that. Eyes filled with fury, Anzuki swung the enormous skeleton’s waist to the right as the bot fired off a second deafening shot from it’s rail gun.
With a feral roar, she willed the skeleton to heave its colossal club over its head and down onto the robot’s head with an almighty crash.
“That did it,” Momo shouted. “Quick now, before it self destructs!”
“It self destructs too?” I demanded.
Momo shot me a look that could wither flowers. “Charles. You don’t build a robot that big without a self destruct sequence.”
“It’s stuck,” Anzuki called out.
The robot’s head was crushed, but it’s claws gripped onto the skeleton’s wrists even in death. No more time left. If we jumped ship on Cotton Candy, we’d be blown out of the air by the sheer force of the explosion. Just one thing to do. Hunker down.
“Kiss the ground, now!”
I grabbed Anzuki by the waist, wrenched her from her sword, nabbed Momodara by her shoulders and threw myself to the skull just in time for the world to go black.
Once upon a time, I laughed at the thought of specifically insuring separate body parts. You only get your hands insured if you’re a pro tennis player or some kind of musician. For the first time in my life, I seriously considered getting ear insurance.
The ringing was back with a vengeance. The fact that I was squished between two very attractive Supernatural females only went so far to balm my wounds. As my vision and hearing slowly began to patch together again, I took stock of the aftermath.
Aftermath was the only word for it. The robot had gone out in a blaze of glory. The top quarter of it blown to hell, and the smoldering ruins burning angrily a few feet above the receding water.
The real miracle was the giant skeleton. The whole front half of it was covered from head to toe in shrapnel big and small. There was a pipe the size of a lamp post jutting out of the skull three feet ahead of us. The colossus listed and groaned.
As I turned my eyes to the sword Anzuki used to control it, I saw exactly what the problem was.
Sheer misfortune had seen fit to send a piece of shrapnel at just the right angle to hit the blade. It doesn’t matter how many times you fold the steel of a sword and temper it if it gets hit by a hunk of iron blown past it at mach speed. The hilt and grip were nowhere to be found. All that was left of the crimson katana was the blade.
Crap.
“Momo, wake up,” I said, shaking the girl.
She was beyond dazed, but we didn’t have the time to indulge. The Tengu groaned weakly at me.
“Where’s the vassal cloud?” I asked, as the skeleton began tilting dangerously.
At this rate, we were going to drown or take a hundred foot plunge into the sea of bones. At least they wouldn’t have to bother burying us.
“Charles. We won,” Anzuki murmured from beside me.
“The only thing we’re going to win at this rate is a one way ticket to Hell. Momo, Cotton Candy now.”
The words finally connected. Just as we slipped off the skull and fell through the air, Momo cawed with all her might, and zipping through the violet sky, the vassal cloud caught us all in one fell swoop.
Setting us down on the towering ramparts of the skull fortress, we watched as the skeleton fell to its final earth shattering rest. Skull leaning against the side of the fortress, spine and remaining ribs pressed against the cliff the fortress stood on, the skeleton seemed oddly at peace.
A warrior’s second death.
“I can’t believe we did it. Charles,” Anzuki said. “Between the two of us we can do anything. Uh, I think Miss Chirpy did something too. I think.”
“Hah,” Momo replied. “Your idiot body would be bits and pieces if I hadn’t been there, cow boobs.”
They both turned indignantly to me.
“What now Charles?” they demanded.
“Only one piece left on the chess board,” I replied, turning my gaze to the sky piercing tower behind me. “The king. Let’s go.”
Chapter 35
Incense assaulted my nostrils. It was so thick in the central tower’s dark interior that it gathered in misty tendrils, grasping at our feet.
“Just how high does your skull fortress go Anzuki?”
“More of a pagoda than a tower,” Momo muttered.
Anzuki shook her head. “Far. And Kuroshi Ro will be at the very top of-- damn it.”
We all stopped in our tracks. At the center of the main hall were a half dozen dried blood stains. It only took us a moment to find where the blood had come from.
Almost completely hidden beneath the grasping claws of mist were five lumps. Turning the nearest over with my foot was enough to reveal what had transpired here.
“The other Demon Priests. It seems Kuroshi really was working alone,” I said.
Anzuki nodded. “They must have disagreed with him, or were used by him til they stopped being useful.”
“And when they stopped being useful, they were taken care of,” Momo added, shaking her head. “Good grief. Kuroshi was always utilitarian but this…?”
“It’s not easy to imagine someone close to you going this far.”
“And for what?” Momo demanded. “We figured everything out except the why. Why would Kuroshi throw me and Anzuki under the bus? What could he gain that was worth nearly wiping out Tengu and Oni alike?”
I drew in a breath. “That’s the million dollar que--Anzuki?”
She seemed fine just a second ago, but before my very eyes, the Oni swordswoman lurched erratically to the side. If I hadn’t caught her at the last moment, she’d have hit the stone floor full force.
“What happened?” Momo asked. “She really did overdo it earlier. I guess it can’t be helped.”
“No,” Anzuki replied weakly shaking her head. “Something wrong here. It’s like I can barely breathe.”
> I narrowed my eyes. “This is bad. Let me think.”
“Charles,” Momodara called out, hands on her hips, “We’re not even on the third floor yet. If we slow down any longer more Tengu might show up. Or Kuroshi will think something else up to kill us.”
“My thoughts exactly. Momo, I have a favor to ask.”
“A favor?”
I walked over to the wall, found a suitable, wood reinforced window, and bashed it out with a single kick.
“Take Anzuki and see if you can’t find another way to get to the top. This mist might be more than just overexertion. It’s probably a measure against Supernaturals. Give this to Anzuki if she wakes up. What’s a swordswoman without a sword?”
I threw the Demon Slayer’s katana into the Tengu’s arms too.
“What about you though?” Momo asked.
“A mage like me has nothing to fear. Besides, I prefer wands. Now go.”
If it is incense aimed to sap or weaken Supernaturals, then I’d like to see it just try to steal my nearly nonexistent magical prowess from me.
The Tengu princess looked upset, cheeks puffed, but in the end she relented. She whistled for Cotton Candy, heaved Anzuki onto the cloud, and zipped high into the sky. I turned back towards the benighted halls and started climbing stairs again.
Dark halls filled with censers gave way to shrines and intricately decorated rooms. The only thing they all had in common was that each was completely devoid of life. It looked like a haunted house.
A rumbling shook the floorboards, and I heard a great sigh emanate from high above. No, not so much heard it, but felt it.
“I bid you welcome to my pagoda, Charles Locke,” spoke an echoing voice.
“Just the man I wanted to talk to. Not that I’d call someone like you much of a man.”
Strained silence. The bubbling pressure thickened on until it felt like I was walking with cinder blocks attach to my feet.
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have underestimated you as I did. One stray monkey wrench in the cogs and the whole well oiled machine becomes utterly inoperable.”
Two to Tengu (Secret Magent Book 2) Page 14