Kuroba Asashin's Arc

Chapter 46 of 51

The king's fire drove the front rank back and gave Kuroba one clean breath. He used it. He set his feet on the packed dirt inside the north gate and looked at the odachi in his hand. The blade felt like iron again, not like part of his arm. The river was gone. Something older was already moving up in its place, and he knew what it was before he named it. Before the monastery, before Kenji's porch, before the mask, Kuroba had killed men for a living. He was raised and kept as part of an assassin syndicate until he realized their evil and had to wipe out every one of the assassins in the syndicate as a child just to escape. The most dangerous assassins in the history of the world. The chi had come later. The chi had taught him to stop. Without it, the old thing in him stood up and stretched. A brute climbed the pile of dead and swung a heavy axe at the king's shield. Kuroba stepped past the king before the swing finished. He cut the brute open from hip to shoulder and kept walking. "Hold the gate," he told the king. "I am going out." The king did not argue. He set his shield and let Kuroba pass. Kuroba walked into the second wave. He did not shout. He did not set stance. He cut the first brute's leg out and took its head as it fell. The second one raised its axe and he opened its belly on the upswing. The third he killed with the pommel because the blade was already moving elsewhere. He was not any less fast than the way chi made him fast. He was economical. Every cut ended a life and set up the next cut. He did not waste a step. He did not waste a breath he could not feel. He walked a straight line through them. A brute caught his cloak and pulled. Kuroba turned into the pull, drove the odachi's guard into the thing's throat, and cut sideways as it dropped. Blood soaked his sleeve to the elbow. He noticed the way a man notices weather. Twenty dead behind him. Forty. He counted without meaning to. The count steadied him the way breath used to. Above the field the fenced tower of the Lotus Horizon threw water down its face in a white line, indifferent. He kept walking toward the banners at the rear. The brutes in front of him stopped coming forward. One turned to run. Kuroba killed it from behind before it made three steps. He killed the next one that turned. After that none of them turned. Kazrik saw him coming through his own army and pulled his rear guard back a full length. The lane Kuroba had opened stayed open. Brutes pressed against the sides of it and would not step into it. Kuroba stopped at the edge of clear ground. His arms shook. His knee held. The old thing in him wanted the rest of the field and would have taken it. He did not sheathe the odachi. He planted it. He looked for the hooded shape in the crowd. The lock on his chi was still clean, and he understood now what it had been holding down.