Jiro Minamoto's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

The morning after the recruits knelt, Jiro walked the training floor and looked at their weapons. Eighty vampires, and eighty different blades. Curved sabers. Straight iron. One carried a butcher's cleaver. The Minamoto way could not be taught on mismatched steel. A single style needed a single edge. Without matched blades, his army would fight like eighty strangers, not one clan. He gathered the recruits and told them the truth. "Your weapons betray you before the first cut. You will train on Minamoto steel, forged the old way, or you will not train at all." A murmur ran through them. Where would eighty ancestral blades come from? The forges that made them burned in Japan, on holy ground his clan had fled long ago. Hanako found him there, staring at the rack of wrong swords. She did not knock. She never did. "Uncle. I have something to show you." He followed her out of the arena to the open yard below the castle towers. She raised one hand. Cold poured off her skin. Frost spread across the stone at her feet, then climbed the air itself. It thickened, hardened, and rose into a jagged mountain of blue ice, tall as the gargoyles overhead. Jiro stepped back. He had trained this vampire since she could walk. He had never seen this. "When did you learn this?" he asked. "It woke in me," she said. "Old blood. Older than Dracula. I did not learn it. I remembered it." A shadow crossed the moon. A great black hound dropped into the yard, red eyes burning, bat wings folding against its back. It stood beside Hanako like a guard. "His name is Tykor," she said. "He came when the frost did. He answers to me alone." Jiro looked at the ice, then the beast, then his niece. His mind moved fast. "The old stories," he said quietly. "Our clan lost its gods when the witch hunters drove us from Japan. Frost that answers your blood. A winged hound that comes at your call. You are not a queen who married into power. You are the omen. The Minamoto magic is returning through you." Hanako did not argue. "Then use it." Jiro drew his own gold-and-silver blade. He pressed the flat of it against the ice. "Steel takes an edge from what shapes it," he said. "If you can freeze stone, you can freeze water hard enough to grind a blade. We cannot reach the old forges. So we build a new one. Here. From your frost." By the next night, the yard held a working forge cooled by Hanako's ice. Jiro shaped the first blade himself, gold and silver, twin to his own. He held it up before the eighty recruits. "This is Minamoto steel," he said. "You will each earn one." The obstacle was gone. But so was any doubt. His niece was no longer his student. She was the reason his army could exist at all, and word of her power would not stay inside these walls. He says, “Hanako. I will be your ice master of all vampiric clans and covens of Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Mongolia, and China will all fall to me. Jiro says yes. There’s harmony in community than destruction in discrimination.