Kuroba Asashin's Arc

Chapter 44 of 44

Kazrik dropped his hand. The front rank broke into a run. Two thousand brutes came forward at once, their axes low, their feet pounding grit into a rolling cloud. The gate behind Kuroba groaned as spearmen braced against it. Kazrik moved with the second wave, keeping bodies between himself and the odachi in the dirt. The brutes reached the gate first. Three of them slammed it with their shoulders. The bar cracked. A fourth swung an axe into the seam. The wood split. The gate blew inward and the front rank spilled through, roaring, trampling one of their own into the stones. Kuroba did not move for the sword. He watched them come. He read the rut in the ground, the loose grit, the way the lead brute planted its right foot before every swing. He counted the space between the first hundred and the second. He stepped once, sideways, and pulled the odachi from the dirt on the way up. One cut. He moved along the seam between the first wave and the second, low, the blade a flat arc at knee height, then rising. The lead brute's axe fell from a hand that no longer had a wrist. The one behind it opened at the hip. Kuroba did not stop. He crossed the front of the line at a speed the brutes could not track, and the cut carried through them the way a scythe carries through wheat. A hundred bodies dropped in a single breath. The dust had not yet settled from their charge. The second wave hit the pile and stumbled. Kazrik saw it and shouted something short and hard. The brutes climbed over their dead and kept coming. The king moved past Kuroba into the gap. He dragged the great-spear behind him, then lifted it in one hand as if it weighed nothing. He drove the point through the chest of the first brute to clear the pile. He set his shield and took the axe of the second on the boss and turned it. Fire ran down the shaft of his spear and did not touch him. He did not shout. He worked. Behind the king, Kadi stepped through the broken gate with her blade drawn. She did not look at her father. She looked at Kuroba. "North side is holding," she said. "East is thin." "Take the east," Kuroba said. "I gave you my word." She went. Kuroba turned back into the brutes. The odachi found the next rank. The Lotus Horizon spearmen closed behind the king and pushed into the gap. The gate was gone. The line held on bodies instead of wood. Across the field, Kazrik watched the pile of his own dead grow between him and the man he had come to kill. He did not step forward. He did not step back. He waited for the count to change.