Kensaki Kashou vs Eri Tetsuken

[Kensaki]

The assassin looked somewhat shaken, although only his eyes showed through the mask, and Kensaki couldn't blame him. The four who had attacked him so brazenly had been confident at first, moving to surround their opponent. They obviously had known something of him, as the song had not unnerved them in the least. Such overconfidence was almost amusing. When the first man fell, the others barely faltered. The second death put the remaining pair on the defensive. The third man to fall still lived; his screams still washed over Kensaki's ears, seeming a perfect complement to Darkstar's dark melody. His legs ended at the knees, having been sheared off moments ago.

The last man, to his credit, did not try to run. Perhaps he knew that it would not be allowed, and perhaps not. He lunged in an overhand strike, a bold move, but one born of desperation. His life ended relatively painlessly. Kensaki stepped toward the legless assassin, still writhing on the ground, and ended his screams before deftly flicking the scarlet blood from his blade and sheathing it. In less than half a minute, four men lay dead. In the depths of his mind, a childish voice positively chortled with glee.

Who would have sent assassins after him? He made a brief search of their bodies, and found a drawing that was a fairly good likeness of him tucked beneath one man's belt. Interesting. Kensaki wondered briefly where they had gotten such a thing; few who knew him for what he was survived. He pocketed the drawing and began to stow his gear into his pack. It would be light soon, and he might as well get an early start.

[Nayt]

The moment Kensaki took a few choice steps, he'd feel a slight tug on his boot. It'd only take a quick glance to the ground to realize there was a small string across his boot. Were he to look even closer, he'd find the string seemed to go across the road from the left to right side. In the last throes of night, it was difficult to see if it extended into the grass around the road or not . . .

A chilled breeze traversed the path in resistance to Kensaki. Most warriors would have passed through mindlessly, absolutely thoughtless to what stood around the next corner--content that they had nothing but a rolling hills ahead of them and a seemingly never-ending road that cut through them. But Kensaki, on the other hand, was not likely the average warrior. He was likely a warrior with intuition--the kind of man who was smart enough to know that a few strokes of a blade hadn't yet bought him a day's freedom.

Kensaki Kashou was not alone.

[Kensaki]

As he encountered the tripwire, Kensaki's mind whirled from within the Void. It's comforting calm was nearly always with him now, he had even learned to sleep within its embrace, a fact that had saved him minutes ago from being killed in his sleep. The presence of the obvious trap, combined with the drawing he had found, pointed to one likely conclusion. Perhaps he was giving his opponents too much credit, perhaps this trap had merely been placed by the four assassins in order to prevent him from fleeing, but Kensaki doubted it.

It seemed far more likely that the four initial attackers were a feint, meant to inspire confidence and lower Kensaki's guard to the real threat. He suddenly had little doubt that he was being watched at that very moment. Kensaki stepped over the tripwire, moving down the road as if he were oblivious to the danger. All the while he quested out with his senses, listening for any movement and subtly watching for any sign of his enemy.

[Nayt]

A misstep.

Kashou's second step prompted it, a casual step down a path he was never meant to traverse. At first, there was nothing, just the empty stillness of a chilled morning. No wind. No sizzling. No rumbling. Just unlimited calm across an unlimited road. The fifth step finally broke it.

Before he'd know it, Kensaki Kashou would find himself the sole inheritor of a full-force explosion beneath his feet. Dirt and dust kicked up instantly, chunks of the road expelling themselves from the earth itself and battering the hills from dozens upon dozens of feet. The early morning calm was wrecked; the stillness was replaced with pops and cracks and the settling of debris, with nearly a ten foot space of road empty, ripped from the hillside and scattered in every direction. The dust cloud spread to nearly thrice the distance, spat from the ground like hellfire and cast upon the early morning like a forced eternal night.

Kensaki Kashou, on the other hand . . .

[Kensaki]

Had he not been made wary by the wire across the road, Kensaki would likely have been destroyed by the clever trap. As it was, the swordsman had the merest fraction of a second once the ground started to bubble beneath his feet as the force of the explosion built. He hadn't even the time to complete a full thought, yet his body reacted to the danger seemingly of its own accord, the product of his years of harsh training. A shinsoku aided burst of speed threw him clear of the majority of the explosion as he attempted to leap to the right, but he was unable to clear the entire blast and was flung violently away amidst a flurry of falling debris.

The dust choked the air in an enormous cloud, completely obscuring all vision. A mere moment later, as the last chunks of rock and dirt hit the earth, the sound of a sword being unsheathed rang through the night, sounding as though it came from partway up one of the hills that flanked the road. It was followed immediately by a strange, humming vibration that crescendoed gradually, oscillating through the range of pitches and sounding almost like music. The song somehow conveyed at the same time both sorrow and malice.

As the dust began to clear, a figure became visible on the hillside, holding what appeared to be a sword made of shadow itself, somehow standing out darker than the night around it. The man who held it was murder personified, features cold and emotionless, but eyes promising death to the next person to meet them. His fine, if often repaired, Haori had slashes riddling it from debris that had pierced it as it flapped behind him. He appeared to be bleeding from multiple small wounds, although if he felt any pain it did not show, most notably from a shallow, if long and ragged, cut beneath his eye that oozed crimson blood down the left side of his face.

[Nayt]

A small animal cried--a howl? It barely sounded like a wolf, but it was close--the faintest howl on an insignificant wind. The dust still cloaked the air; it would for several hours at this rate. The best images upon the road were vaguely detailed shadows, a silhouette of a man upon a hill and the outlines of debris scattered around him. The night would remain unstill, too, even if Kashou were to walk away now; debris were to continue their descent and settlement until the sun came up, which appeared to be less than an hour from now.

In time, though, Kashou would see something--another shadow, vaguely detailed like himself, standing upon the road. It stood near the hollow of the crater on a pair of shaky legs. Near the center of the dust cloud, it was especially difficult to catch the image of the person, only that he or she seemed to wear thick clothes and was having noticeable trouble standing up, as if visibly shaken by the explosion, if not worse than Kashou himself.

The howling rang out again, a slight shudder of the wind across a still settling road.

[Kensaki]

Several things ran through Kensaki's mind at once as he noted the silhouette near where the explosion had happened, making him immediately suspicious. He had felt the force of the blast, and anyone that near to it would have been flung away, as he himself had been. Also, he had been on the road only moments ago, and there had been no one there. It seemed impossible for this person to be where he or she was, and even more impossible that they were still alive considering their proximity to the blast.

Kensaki drew two conclusions, the first being that this person had moved to where they currently were after the blast. Secondly, whoever this person might be, they were extremely skilled to have somehow escaped Kensaki's notice, even with the distraction and general chaos caused by the blast. After many years of fighting with a sword whose strange powers revolved around vibration, Kensaki's ears had adapted, growing more resiliant to loud, harsh noise, as well as, in ways, far more sensative. This person had somehow moved very quickly while making almost no noise his ears could discern, a feat not easily accomplished in his experience.

He lifted his free hand to rest the two fingers not capped by steel on the shadowy blade, immediately silencing the dark song. At the same time, with a mental effort he extinguished the voice in his mind, which had begun raging against the Void once again as soon as he recovered from the explosion. His voice rose to address the figure below him, each word frosted with ice.

"I can only assume that you are responsible for this nasty little surprise. Tell me, are you really so eager to die?"

[Nayt]

With the dust and debris permeating the air, it remained impossible to see the figure all that clearly. So long as it stood near the center of the explosion, it would remain impossible to fully discern.

The figure didn't reply. Instead, with shaking arms, it reached down and grasped a blade, took it in both hands, and held it out before its body.

Indeed, this was an affirmative answer to Kashou's question.

Perhaps as any good assassin, though, it wasn't about to mount an attack where it could be easily seen. It remained instead within the dust cloud, awaiting Kashou's attack.