The Way of Death

by James Von Ohlen

  A lighter flicked open with a clicking sound and a small flame appeared in the darkness. Reiji was instantly armed and searching for other foes in the room as he began to close.

  “Relax, Reiji.” A man’s voice said as he began to take a deep drag on his cigarette. The cherry glowed just enough in the darkness to show the outline of a mouth and nose. The lights in the room came on as though remotely activated, and Reiji saw three men seated in the room against the far wall. Another lay face down in a puddle of blood. Little Brother’s distinctive crimson and black handle emerged from his back. They had to have been there when he passed through earlier, motionless and silent as he had retrieved his prizes from their hiding place in the bathroom. Waiting for him.

  One held a loaded crossbow, which forced Reiji to laugh. Overlord had proven so effective in reducing advanced firearms that the ancient weapon represented the epitome of long range lethal technology.

  There was a moment of confusion as Reiji looked at the three men. The one in middle sat smoking as if he was in a trendy uptown lounge. Casually sprawled on the couch. The other two looked like mirror images of one another with the exception of a second crossbow missing from the reflection. Both tall, and stone-faced. Pale and clad in heavy black coats that probably concealed a myriad of weapons and armor. Heavy black boots covered their feet and gripped the floor, ready to propel them upwards and into violence if the need arose.

  “We’re not here for the bounty,” the smoking man said as Reiji realized he was wearing sunglasses that reached back into his shoulder length salt and pepper hair. Likely night-vision goggles of some type. What kind of jackass would sit in the dark and wear sunglasses otherwise?

  “And as a sign of our good will, we have dispatched a man who apparently was here for the bounty,” the smoker said as he motioned dramatically to the dead man on the floor, exhaling a puff of smoke as he did so. The sleeves of his shirt cinched up with the motion, exposing the pale skin of his arms. Thin and pulled tight over heavy muscles. “And in doing so we used a weapon he apparently intended to steal from you and then murder you with.” The man who spoke pushed himself up into a more dignified position and flicked ashes on the floor.

  “And might I add, it is quite a fine weapon. Nanoforged if I’m not mistaken.” Another drag of the cigarette and the cloud around him grew a little as Reiji considered his options.

  The smoker was apparently unarmed, but scarred heavily. Not the kind of scars a man received spending time behind a desk. He was a fighter of some type, then. He exhaled the smoke from the cigarette. “Please have a seat, and let’s talk.” He motioned to a chair placed deliberately in the center of the room a few feet from the dead man.

  “No thanks, I’ll stand. And I’ll even give you the opportunity to explain yourself before I start cutting.” Reiji’s right foot slid along the floor as he adjusted his weight. The man with the crossbow would have to die first. Something about him and his twin bothered Reiji. Something that he could almost put his finger on.

  The smoking man took another drag from his cigarette and glanced down to Reiji’s feet, raising an eyebrow that showed above the edge of his glasses as he did so.

  “There’s no need for that. The crossbow is merely a…precaution. You’ve been known in the past as a man with an unreasonable temper. As well as a capacity for great violence. And there was no guarantee that you would be the next man into the apartment.” The man’s voice remained steady and even.

  “Speak, then. Before my patience is exhausted.” Reiji replied, but didn’t relax his guard. Kai’s point leveled at the throat of the man smoking.

  “You seem to have found yourself in quite a bind.” He began, taking another drag from his cigarette. Reiji made sure to check for burns in his furniture after he killed these men. If there were any, he was going to dig this one up and kill him again.

  “You’re a wanted man. No money. And no friends. Armed men hunting you, exactly like you’ve hunted so many others.” He exhaled the smoke all at once, blowing it about the room. “Things have been better, haven’t they?” He waited for Reiji’s response, but none came.

  “Clearly, someone has it out for you. And I,” the man paused and gestured to himself dramatically. “I am here to offer you a way out.”

  Reiji bored a hole into the man with his gaze.

  “I’m listening.”

  “RONIN.” The old man spat the word as it if were a curse. His face twisted as though he had just tasted the sourest of lemons. Reiji felt the urge to laugh at the expression, but he remained stoic.

  “You are thirty-five years old and you’ve not found a master to serve. No powerful man or woman to protect with your skills. You’ve not even moved to establish yourself as a warlord. Your half-blood has ruined you. Made you weak. Instead of establishing yourself and making something of your life, you play hired thug and run around in the dark of night, murdering weak men with no real chance of fighting back. Cavorting with whores and drinking your life away. Wandering trash, floating on the seas of chance.” The old man turned and literally spit this time. Never taking his narrowed eyes off of Reiji’s face.

  “It is as you say, grandfather.” Reiji called the man grandfather, but he was actually his great-great grandfather. Or was it great-great-great grandfather? He counted the number of seats by which the old man was removed from the head of the table. That would give him his answer. But it was wasted effort. He was old as fuck, Reiji concluded. And it didn’t really matter, because Reiji didn’t really care. Everyone here who wasn’t his father, he called ‘grandfather’. And they all answered to it.

  “And not only do I spend my nights drinking and whoring, but I spend my days doing so as well.” Reiji looked at the old man, holding his gaze as his great-however-many-times grandfather sputtered in rage.

  “Enough, son.” A friendly enough voice spoke from his left. There was no mistaking the voice of his father. Dead some twenty years, but here he sat along with all of the others.

  “You make sport of your grandfather, but what is there to be gained in antagonizing us?”

  Reiji mulled the question over for a moment. There was literally nothing to be gained in mocking them, other than his own amusement. And what would they do? Refuse to train him? Reiji doubted that. As much as they liked to spit and show their disgust with what he’d done with his life, they never refused to train him.

  “I have come here to train with you. With all of you. Father and grandfathers alike. Will you fulfill your stated purpose of furthering our family line, bringing honor to our clan, and help me become a more formidable warrior that I might survive and thrive, and spread my seed near and far?”

  “And how far have you already spread it? How many bastard children do you have on Lexington?” Another wizened old man asked from the table stretching before Reiji. “A dozen? A score? Do you even know?” The man immediately followed his first question with more questions. An infuriating habit, Reiji thought. Even more so because Reiji did not, in fact, know how many bastard children he had running around. There were at least five, but by no means was that also the max.

  “Why should we not try to find one of your many scions and begin crafting them into an honorable man? It is clear we have failed with you.” The old man lowered his head in a show of sadness as he spoke.

  “You ask rhetorical questions old man.” Reiji said as he rose. “Or did you forget that you are completely powerless out there? Without me, you have nothing.” He let his words echo in silence for a few moments before speaking again.

  “Now, I face many potential dangers ahead. If you will not train me, and train with me, you place our family line in danger. I have no legitimate heir. I am the last of our line, and I carry the burden of all. If I fall, we are all lost.” Reiji spoke. He wasn’t sure if he really believed those words, but he knew they would have the desired effect.

  The digitized personalities of his male-line ancestors for some hundreds of years, conferred with one another before ris
ing from the table. It vanished into nothingness, leaving all of them standing on a wide tatami-matted arena. Each of the old men transformed from the withered frame of skin stretched over bones that they had been moments before, becoming armored monsters of muscle and steel in the blink of an eye.

  “We will train you Reiji,” a voice filled with anger boomed, drowning out all other sounds. “We will train you because we have not given up on our line. We have not given up on you. There may yet be honor hiding somewhere within you. And through pain, we may yet expose it.”

  Not fucking likely, Reiji said to himself.

  One of the men stepped forward, clad in the traditional armor of the samurai. Utterly ridiculous, Reiji considered. The Ikeda clan left Earth hundreds of years ago. At a point in time when the samurai had been hundreds of years dead and gone. But the old man had fancied himself a samurai, and now there he stood. Towering over Reiji, clad in thick lacquered steel armor and wielding a long sword in his right hand and a short sword in his left.

  “Come.” The enormous warrior motioned towards Reiji and the others murmured their agreement. “Face me and learn.”

  Finally, Reiji thought. What I came here for. The old man would no doubt hold nothing back in an effort to humble Reiji. All the better to learn.

  The crystal interface Reiji had removed from his apartment along with the hard drive stash of money and his matched weapons had been a rare thing indeed. A rare and valuable thing, even more so than his swords. In fact, he knew of no other object like it on all of Lexington.

  It held the digitized personalities of the last twenty members of his father’s line who had seen fit to allow themselves to be copied for the sake of future generations. The old men who now stood before Reiji in this place, the arena of his mind and the crystal interface meeting and coalescing, were exact copies of the old men, with the same personalities and memories. But that was all they were copies.

  The real men were all long dead.

  But that didn’t mean that the dead couldn’t teach the living a thing or two. Reiji trained just as hard here as he did in the real world. The men who dwelled here were veritable storehouses of arcane combat techniques. Each a master of the blade and unarmed combat as well. When Reiji’s father had died, he had inherited the crystal and the neural interface implant necessary to use it. They had become his teachers.

  And true to form, they had immediately begun to tell him what a disappointment he was. When it became clear to them that he was unlikely to change his ways, they had decided that he was a man without honor and a stain upon the family name. But they continued to train him nonetheless.

  Countless hours spent fighting here translated into new neural patterns mapped onto his own brain, allowing him to perform in the physical world what he learned here. Far more efficient than spending time figuring out new techniques on his own, but far less of a workout than sparring with his dummy had been.

  Of course, the dummy wasn’t an option now. It lay some two thousand or more kilometers behind Reiji. The memory crystal and its data plug interface were all the training he was going to get any time soon. Best to take advantage of it while he could.

  Besides, he thought, there was no other way to pass the time. Laying on a stainless steel bunk, a scrawny mat barely protecting his skin from the assault of the frame, in the back of a group transport that rivalled just about anything that Cent-Sec fielded had been interesting for all of about five minutes. Then he realized that his companions on this trip were a bunch of fucking morons hired to act purely as muscle and not as brain. Definitely not as conversation partners.

  Yes, the time would be much better spent in training than listening to them talk about things they’d done or seen when drunk. Especially when Reiji knew for a fact that about half of it was pure lies and the other half was mostly lies. These men could teach him nothing, and their discussion was inane at best.

  The huge warrior moved forward with fluid grace and landed a solid blow from his weapon across Reiji’s chest, sending him sprawling. “Always focus on the here and now. Not the past. Dwelling on the past leads to the path of defeat.” The old man spoke as if it was some great revelation.

  Pompous old bastard, Reiji thought but kept it to himself.

  Reiji rose to his feet, unwounded but feeling the pain of the blow. A useful feature of training here, with his ancestors, was that he might feel as though he had been injured but it was all in his mind. No broken bones or spilled blood and guts. No missing limbs.

  And when a contest was decided, the program that ran the simulation dissected each individual aspect of the fight. Showing in excruciating detail exactly what had happened. A potential bore to most, but Reiji watched intensely each time he was defeated.

  There was no way he would make the same mistake twice.

  But this time, the contest hadn’t even begun and the old man had struck him while he was preoccupied with his thoughts. Fair enough, then, he mused. In the real world someone trying to kill him wouldn’t hold back because he wasn’t fully focused. An age old lesson that he had just relearned on the cutting edge of a blade.

  Reiji rolled his shoulders, loosening them, and adjusted his grip on his twin blades. He had brought both with him on this journey, and so he would use both of them. Training with Kai in his right hand and Little Brother in his left, as he was likely to do in any fight. The matched weapons rose and he held them at the ready. He could see the old man smirking behind the faceplate of his armor.

  Calm, he told himself. You’re not here to humiliate a shadow of one of your ancestors. You are here to learn from him.

  “Niten Ichi.” The old man said as he took in Reiji’s arms and stance. “Difficult to master. It might be beyond your mental abilities, boy.” The old man was at least partially correct. It was difficult to master. Many who tried to wield two blades at once presented as much a danger to themselves as to their opponents. Often, even more of a danger to themselves.

  Since Reiji had crossed blades with the nameless warrior who had caused him to flee some years ago, he had begun training more and more with both weapons. If someone else could do it, there was no reason at all why he couldn’t. His progress had been good, even acceptable. But there was still much more to learn. And his ancestors would teach him, even if he had to beat it out of them. And that was exactly his plan.

  Reiji said nothing as he advanced, holding both swords in front of him so that the points angled in towards one another. The expected first blow as delivered by the old man, a downward strike from above the head, aimed at cleaving Reiji’s collarbone in half, came without surprise.

  Little Brother snapped up and took the blow with the flat of the blade, deflecting it as Kai stabbed forwards towards the old man’s neck. The old man spun quickly, ducking the stab and sending a back-handed sweep of one of his blades aimed at eviscerating Reiji.

  Both blades he held swept down and to the right, Kai’s point sweeping the surface of the tatami mats, and slammed into the attack. The impact jolted up Reiji’s arms, jarring his teeth. But he didn’t miss a beat. One hand rolled atop the other as he lunged forwards, rotating his arms into a stab with both weapons that would take the old man in the chest and the gut.

  The old man rolled to the side to avoid both stabs, armor clanking as he did so. He regained his feet in the same motion and attacked Reiji with another downwards chop with one blade as he approached, and a follow-up diagonal slash with the other. Reiji blocked high with his blades crossed and pushed the attack off to his right side where it met the floor, splitting the tatami mats beneath the blow. He twisted slightly to his right to wind up and then drove the point of his knee into the old man’s gut with a blow that staggered his opponent, causing him to stumble backwards several feet as the wind was knocked from his lungs.

  Reiji moved in for the kill and then found himself on the ground looking up at the ceiling as the feeling drained from his body. The replay showed in exquisite detail what had happened.

 
The old man had been playing possum. Having trouble breaching Reiji’s defense with the two blades, he had lured Reiji into attacking what he thought was a defenseless opponent. The old man’s blade flashed like lightning as it gutted him, dropping Reiji to his knees. The kick to the face that sent him over backwards was the icing on the cake.

  Reiji watched it all, over and over until he found the correct defense against the strike. Part of what the program allowed him to do as the primary user. He paused the replay and began the fight again at the split second before he had been struck down.

  Scores of times he did this, putting himself in the fight the blink of an eye away from defeat. Reiji repeated the process until his defense against the attack was impregnable. When he found the best defensive measure against the attack, he began working on follow-up counter-attacks.

  No small amount of time passed as he dissected the armored warrior in various ways. Finding all possible angles of approach and points of attack. Fatal combinations that threatened to stretch into infinity.

  “Reiji.” A hand grabbed his shoulder and shook him roughly, breaking his concentration. Reiji opened one eye and looked up to see a man he knew only as John looking back down at him. “We’re stopping for the night.”

  John was peculiar among the group traveling together. He had the look of a boy about him, despite his being well over two meters tall. Relatively narrow shoulders and a long neck. Freakish in appearance even. And an odd smell to match. Like deli meat or some chemical sprayed on the same to preserve it.

  John had told the same story to every man traveling with him at least twice. About how he had seen a beautiful woman walking home by herself one night. He had followed her and when no one was looking, grabbed her by the hair and then dragged her into an alley and raped her repeatedly. But he’d been so good at it that she had fallen in love with him and had begun stalking him.