Age of Darkness

by Brandon Chen

  By this point, the elders had probably sensed his aura and alerted the guards, but Tobimaru knew that Bakaara had been hiding behind its barrier for many years already. Its warriors hardly had any combat experience—if there were any true warriors at all. Most of the soldiers in Bakaara likely enlisted as a guard or a soldier to reap the benefits rather than actually serve and put their lives on the line. They, too, believed that the ward would always protect them.

  As Tobimaru reached the large building that hid the elders, he saw about thirty or so guards outside the doorway with their steel weapons bathed in the moonlight, pointing at Tobimaru. To him, they looked like a bunch of little boys holding pointy sticks that they found in the woods and decided to use as weapons. It was pathetic and almost hysterical to Tobimaru. His sword was sheathed across his back, and he slowly reached up over his shoulder and gripped the hilt. He slid the blade from its sheath, the metal scraping silently against the holder. As he whipped the long katana about, his eye color morphed from its original dark color into a glowing demonic red, which instilled fear in all of the guards.

  “Don’t tell me … it’s a member of the Hayashi clan!” one of the guards gasped.

  Tobimaru sprinted forward. In a flash of steel, Tobimaru cut down the men one by one, relentlessly severing their lives from their bodies, leaving their corpses deformed by the time he was done with them. One by one, they dropped at his feet, forming pools of crimson blood around his leather boots. He continued onward, stepping over their lifeless bodies as if nothing had happened, his soul filled with apathy.

  Tobimaru threw open the door to the silent building. He saw the five elders huddling together, wielding nothing but their canes made of the wood of an old yew tree. They were covered in their red capes and hoods, their faces hidden and their eyes downcast as they accepted their fate. He twirled his sword with a sigh in the direction of the elders. The entire building was completely empty other than the old men—without even a piece of furniture.

  “What do you intend to do once the ward is gone?” one of the elders demanded, raising his head to look Tobimaru in the eye. “Will you give mercy to the civilians or simply massacre the peaceful people that have lived here for centuries?”

  Tobimaru pulled back his hood, revealing his spiky black hair and young face. He raised his eyebrow as he looked over all of the elders, who saw his resemblance almost immediately. He looked almost exactly like the Hayashi clan boy they had been hiding.

  “One thing that you should understand about me,” he said with little emotion, his eyes filled with resentment. “I know what you elders have done to the Hayashi clan. I also know that members of this community contributed to the Hayashi clan massacre, which is why there is a young boy still surviving here. His parents were killed, weren’t they?” he said, tightening his grip on the hilt of his sword. “As he is one of us, I hereby condemn your entire village to death and complete eradication.”

  “What? You can’t just—”

  Tobimaru’s mouth spread into a wicked smile that stretched across his face, his eyes glowing red with pure malice. “Oh, but I can. The Faar army has been waiting to take over this piece of land for quite some time. Its natural resources are phenomenal. It’s been enough to support this whole village for centuries without any need to step outside to trade with others. They will sweep in and murder everyone in this village. There is simply no hope for you anymore.” He whipped his blade downward upon the elders, splaying their ancient blood across the walls. “There is no hope at all.”

  ***

  Keimaro panted heavily as he stumbled through Yata’s house and gently placed Aika down on a bed, his heart pounding rapidly. By now, that Tobimaru guy had probably already located the elders if he had the same magical capability as his white-haired friend. However, on the way to Yata’s house, he hadn’t seen any destruction. Perhaps Tobimaru hadn’t gotten through the barrier after all.

  Then a scream split the dead silence. Keimaro’s eyes widened, and he raced to the window. He could see the barrier. It was a purple force field that formed a massive dome around the entire village. But as he watched, he could see that it was slowly melting away. The assassinations had already followed through and been successful. How was it possible to bypass all of the guards in such a small amount of time?

  Keimaro squeezed the hilt of his metal bat, hearing the thundering roar of soldiers in the distance. He saw what seemed like hundreds—and maybe even thousands—of soldiers, racing toward the village across the lush green plains that surrounded Bakaara. That was the Faar army that Tobimaru had been talking about earlier. His bat rattled in his hand, stirred by his spasm of fear.

  We’re all going to die. That was his first thought. Then he thought about his father and mother and Mai. He couldn’t just let them perish. But, leaving Aika here probably wasn’t the smartest idea either. “Damn…,” he swore, throwing the door of Yata’s house open as he raced outside. He needed to check on his family and bring them to Yata’s house. That way he could try to defend everyone in one place.

  Fear filled his heart at the very thought of his family’s fate. As he ran in the direction of the marketplace, he could see fire engulfing the village as people ran about, screaming in absolute terror. He kept his distance from the actual marketplace but could see people being brutally slaughtered by axes, swords, and arrows from the Faar army. The villagers were being mercilessly killed. What madness was this that the officers would order their soldiers to unleash their fury upon innocent and unarmed people? Flames roared in the air as they engulfed buildings, swallowing them in a cloud of ash. He had seen these buildings every day of his life, and it was shocking to watch them burn down.

  Keimaro ran around the marketplace to avoid any soldiers. Hopefully they would spend their time looting before they decided to head over to the farms, where his family lived. He sprinted forward, his heart pounding when he finally saw the dirt roads that led to the farms. They were filled with bodies—people who had been running for their lives and were brutally slaughtered and slashed to the dirt. The earth drank up their blood, leaving only stains in the ground. His heart was still beating rapidly as he slowly walked forward, stepping over the bodies of some that he recognized from school. Young girls and boys had been killed. Their parents were piled upon them, trying to shield them from the sharp weapons of the Faar soldiers. He stumbled forward and felt sick, his stomach giving out. He vomited onto the ground, gasping. This could mean only that the Faar soldiers had actually struck the farms first before the marketplace.

  Keimaro blinked and began to run home, his breath heavy as he dashed. The wind blew through his black hair as he leapt over the corpses in the road. They had to be okay. They just had to be! When he got home, everything would be just like the way he had left it.

  But it wasn’t. In the distance, he could see his house blazing in bright flames with several men standing outside, watching it burn. They were Faar soldiers, wearing large white tabards emblazoned with a red cross. They wore their tabards over their iron armor and held their brandished swords into the air, calling out victory as if they had just slain a majestic dragon.

  Fire. His house was on fire. His next actions turned him into a beast, but he did it nevertheless. His hands squeezed the metal bat with incredible force, turning his knuckles white as his eyes glowed a frightening red. He raced forward and yelled as one of the soldiers turned around at the sound of his presence. He swung the bat with incredible force, connecting it with the jaw of the first soldier. With a sickening crack, the man’s entire jaw shattered and blood spurted from every possible opening in his face.

  That was not enough to clear Keimaro of his anger. He brought the bat downward as the man fell to the ground. He smashed the defenseless man’s weak skull with relentless force, killing him instantly. Time seemed to slow as he looked into the eyes of the newly deformed man, and his throat tightened, quite sickened at what he had done. The eyes of the man were staring upward and fixed at Keimaro, but
they stared straight through him rather than at him. Blood was stained across his deformed face, leaving him unrecognizable. This man was dead. Keimaro had taken someone’s life. He was just as ruthless as these soldiers.

  Keimaro could hear a roar around him and watched as the remaining three soldiers raced at him from all directions. They had fighting experience, sword training; they had everything. What chance did he have? He whipped the bat and swung it, releasing the handle. The bat spiraled, spinning openly through the air, and connected solidly with one man’s throat, sending him falling to the ground with a gasp. Keimaro grabbed the sword of the first man he had killed and slipped the blade from its sheath, watching the gleaming steel enter the air. It was rather heavy, much heavier than the bat, but he knew for a fact that it was much more deadly.

  He turned around and saw one of the soldiers swinging his sword at him. What was he supposed to do? He had read stories about warriors who battled with others. The proper thing to do would to be to dodge in order to avoid pain, but one could parry the sword if one had to, in order to survive. He didn’t have much time to react, so he raised his sword in a clumsy position and their blades slammed against one another. Keimaro almost lost his grip on his sword, stumbling backward as the man’s blow overpowered him completely. He nearly lost his balance, but the man pressed forward, raising his sword to bring it slashing downward.

  Keimaro’s eyes locked onto the exact movements of the man, and he sidestepped, allowing the blade to come down and smash into the dirt rather than his unprotected flesh. History said that warriors would slash and aim for the throat, unprotected by armor. Keimaro gripped the hilt with both hands and whipped the blade upward, slicing across the man’s throat. The outcome was gruesome and almost too much for Keimaro to even look at. Blood spurted into the air as mere droplets at first and then poured out like a fountain as the man’s face paled as if he were a ghost. The man choked and gasped for a moment. Then he fell to his knees with his head moving slightly as if he were confused and shocked at what had just happened. Finally he collapsed to the ground, his face smacking against the earth, unmoving.

  Keimaro stared at the bodies of the two men he had just killed and saw a third man already swinging at him. That was when another figure leapt outward and swiped his sword in an advanced and fluent motion, whipping it upward and slashing it across the soldier’s arm. Keimaro’s eyes turned and looked to see that it was his father, slashing the man’s arm and then spinning his own sword to cut the man down with a flowing downward blow. The advanced sword style was beyond anything that Keimaro had ever seen, not that he was particularly keen when it came to sword fighting. However, his father’s sword style seemed to involve releasing the weapon in the middle of combat and then catching it to confuse the enemy about where the next blow would come from. This process also would speed up attacks.

  His father twirled the blade and raced at the final soldier, who had been hit in the throat by Keimaro’s bat. He spun his entire body and used the momentum to bring the downward slash across the man’s chest, leaving the man on the ground bleeding. His father slowly straightened his back and stood tall. In the moment of silence, Keimaro and his father listened to the sound of the burning fire.

  Keimaro stood there for a moment longer before growing sick at the fact that he had just killed someone. He coughed, about to retch once more, when his father came over and patted his back gently.

  There was no response.

  Keimaro turned to his father, who finally turned away from the bodies and looked extremely pale as if all of the life had been sucked straight out of him. He looked almost exactly like the men who had fallen on this day.

  “Dad, where are Mom and Mai?” Keimaro asked. When there was no response, Keimaro dropped his sword and grasped his father’s shoulders tightly, giving him a shake. “Tell me, where the hell are they?” he demanded, his voice rising to a yell.

  “Go around the house and have a look for yourself,” his father said quietly, his voice shaky and his lip quivering as he dropped his sword to the ground, staring straight past Keimaro, completely lost in his own thoughts.

  Keimaro could tell from the look in his father’s eyes that something had happened. He knew the fate of his family members before he went around the house to look, but denial kept him from breaking into tears before he actually saw the sight for himself.

  As he walked around the burning home that he had lived in for so many years, he locked his eyes onto his mother, who had been completely skewered with a sharp sword. She was lying there on the ground with her eyes fixed onto the dark night sky. Keimaro’s heart pounded. In that single moment, the world stopped. It was just him and her body—the body of the one person who had cared about him throughout the many years that they were together, now lying dead before his eyes. Her innocent, pure blood pooled around her unmoving corpse, and her pale skin looked the color of snow.

  Like a soldier stabbed in battle, Keimaro fell to his knees as tears began to form in his eyes. Then he cried like he had never cried before, tears streaking down his cheeks and his wails splitting the dead silence of the night. At the moment, he felt like everything was just over. Everything. He heard footsteps behind him and bit his lip, tasting the saltiness of his own tears. “Who did this?” he snarled to his father.

  “The same man who took Mai. An acquaintance of yours,” his father said. “You know the truth about your heritage now, don’t you?”

  Keimaro nodded and slowly stood up, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve. He was drained completely of tears and emptied of all happiness and hope. Someone took Mai. An acquaintance? Could it have been that cloaked man named Tobimaru? Keimaro didn’t recognize the man by name, but he could recognize the eyes. Was it possible that…?

  “Ah! Keimaro Hayashi!” a voice exclaimed. A man with a black cloak thrown over his body appeared miraculously at the foot of Keimaro’s mother’s corpse. His hood was pushed back, revealing a wide smile on his face. The figure was completely bald with a rather interesting purple diamond tattoo located on his forehead just above his brow. He looked to be in his forties, and his expression had absolutely no trace of negativity. He held his hands outward as if giving an imaginary hug to the air. “Oh, what a world it is that we live in!” he said, inhaling a deep breath as he smiled wickedly at Keimaro. “Do you smell that? The burning of your village has a rather unique scent to it. Could it be that it is because you are using natural resources that are different from what I’m used to? The smell is unique. Or is that simply the smell of burning filth? Oh, well! No point in asking. The question is, young boy, do you know why we are here today?”

  Keimaro heard a thump and glanced over his shoulder to see that his father had been knocked unconscious. His heart skipped a beat as he saw his father collapse to the ground. He spotted a shadow looming over his father’s unmoving body and glanced up to find another cloaked figure, whom he recognized immediately—Tobimaru. Meanwhile, the bald man was walking in his direction. Keimaro wanted to go to his father, but he knew that he was trapped between these two cloaked men who seemed to be somewhat associated with each other. They didn’t wear the same tabards as the rest of the Faar soldiers. Who were they?

  “You’re here for the princess, aren’t you?” Keimaro questioned, though he knew that it couldn’t be the only reason. It must’ve been the meteor, if anything. But why were they massacring the villagers and obliterating everything in sight? None of it made sense. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Junko,” the man said with a broad smile as he knelt down and brought himself face to face with Keimaro. “I am a member of the Bounts. As a Bount, I am able to use magic. In fact, we are currently some of the strongest humans that are known to walk upon this very earth. You’re so very lucky to be in the presence of two of us right now. Though, I wouldn’t expect you to know of us. After all, you’ve been trapped in this bubble for quite some time now, haven’t you?”

  Keimaro looked past Junko and at the corpse of h
is mother, his fists shaking at his side with unbelievable rage. “And what is your purpose for being here? To destroy my life?”

  “No.” Junko grinned. “So that you will become one of us.”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Junko exclaimed, standing up tall and putting his hands on his hips as he examined the chaos in the distance. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and sighed. “You are living in a city that confines your potential. You’ve hidden from the world for long enough. The Faar Empire has come in its own personal conquest to conquer the land, take back their princess, and kill you. It’s time to make a choice. Die by their hand or join us.”

  “Why me?” Keimaro asked.

  “You know why,” Tobimaru said from behind Keimaro, his sword unsheathed and dragging across the dirt. The sharp steel carved into the earth cleanly, and Keimaro winced as he heard the scrape of the blade against the ground. He sucked in a deep breath and exhaled his fear.

  “You’re just like me then, huh?” Keimaro said, looking forward, taking his eyes away from Tobimaru. “I recognized your eyes when I first saw you an hour ago back at the apple tree.”

  He lowered his eyes. It was hard to believe that only an hour ago he’d thought he would return to his parents. It was two hours ago that he and his friends had thought they were going to explore the forest for the first time. Tears began to form in the corners of his eyes, and he shut them tight, trying to keep them from streaming down his cheeks. It was three hours ago that he was sitting alone at the apple tree, thinking about what he had just done. It was even less than four hours ago that he had been with his mother and father and yelled at both of them. Why had he done such a thing? Now his mother was dead. His father was unconscious and probably was about to be killed. Yata was in danger, fighting one of these Bounts, and Aika was left in Yata’s house completely unprotected while the soldiers of Faar burned the city to the ground. Why had he been so stupid? He put his head in his hands, looking between his fingers at the ground, his eyes darting in panic. What could he do?