Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (26 page)

He didn’t say anything, but he hummed in my hands and when I reached back to put him away he twitched and positioned himself for a snug slide into the sheath. He made me look much better at handling him than I was, and I hid my smile even as I flexed my tight and weakened muscles.

“Who
are
you?” Kaminari hissed, wiping my smile away. She looked furious and I really didn’t understand it; it wasn’t as if we were the only ronin in Japan, or the worst. We’d
fought
the worst.

I straightened, let my arm drop as Jacky stepped up behind my back. “Nobody. We’re nobody. And after we’re done here you’ll never see us again.”

She looked like she really wanted to spit. “Then you abandon your duty? As strong as you are?”

Oh.
Oh
. I opened my mouth and had nothing to say. They hadn’t traced us back further than our obviously fake “civilian” covers, so whatever Agent Inoue might think he knew,
Kaminari
thought we were all Japanese citizens—at least one and possibly three tactically powerful superhumans, refusing to use our powers in the service and protection of our nation. As far as she was concerned, we were utterly without honor.

“We follow our duty,” was all I could say. Her eyes hardened but I refused to back down and she finally shrugged angrily. A low humming sound made me look up, and she followed my gaze so that we both saw the high-flying drone circling above us.

“News drone.” Her mouth had gone back to a sour twist. “Japan is watching.”

“I could shoot it,” Jacky offered.

I just winced. After all my hours spent with The Harlequin practicing “public face,” learning safe media responses, and making quick-and-dirty judgments of how any particular scene might go over with the public, I could see how this looked.

Cordoned off disaster area, check. Wrecked neighborhood, check. Defensenet heroes standing around with new and mysterious ronin…
I could see the same calculations going through Kaminari’s head.

“Wanna fight?” The offer popped out of my mouth before I had time to think it through.

“
Hey!
” Shell sputtered.

Jacky’s objection was a laughing breath beside my ear. “It’s not like you’re really Hikari, Mistress of The Sword.”

But Kaminari’s eyes lit up. “I accept.” Whispering instructions into her own earbug, she nodded to Agent Inoue up on the rim. Then she dojo-bowed to me. “Touch only, and if you fly then stay under five meters,” she instructed and shifted her weight onto her back foot.

Jacky sighed and backed up as I made my own hasty bow. “Okay, what—”

She held out her open right hand and her weapon sprang into existence, one moment not there and in a blink appearing and growing from a charm-sized trinket to a full sized and totally lethal looking spear. One with a long and straight single-edged blade on the end. It glowed. Of
course
it glowed.

“
She uses a naginata!
” Shell supplied.
“
It’s like a sword, a spear, and a staff!
”

“So she pokes, slices, and bashes?” Wonderful, and she had the reach on me even though foot-to-tip it wasn’t
that
much longer than Cutter. “Is she tough enough that I don’t need to worry?”

“
She’s not fragile—A-Class or close to it and
you
should worry about
her
!
”

“Good enough.” Drawing Cutter, I slid my own foot back, holding him point forward and hilt high by my shoulder in the standard two-handed opening form I at least knew from watching Sifu’s martial arts students. It mirrored Kaminari’s stance, point forward and angled down.

And we waited. Still waited.
Any day now
…

Cutter vibrated and turned in my hands before I saw Kaminari’s move and I instinctually put muscle behind the downward swing Cutter dropped into. He batted her low-lunging blade aside and my own reflexes sent me into a high backward leap as the naginata hilt came around in a back-swing off the force of our parry. Kaminari followed with a series of stamping advances—lunges and swings blurring into each other until I stopped falling back and stepped inside her last swing to give her a solid check-push with my whole body—

—which didn’t connect with her own spinning sideways-slide, settling us into our original opening stances.

She studied my stance. “You don’t use your point?”

I shrugged.

“And your shoulder?”

“It’s fine.” Cutter hugely outweighed her weapon but his weight was a negligible issue for me, and her swings weren’t bringing as much force as mine could even if she was
fast
.

“Good.” Kaminari showed no inclination to renew her attack, waiting with sword-spear ready until I realized it was obviously my turn to move first. I opened with a flying horizontal leap, her point came up, and I
spun
with Cutter extended so that his counterweight put the center of our spin between us. We orbited each other as we came down—Cutter batting her extended blade away as I rotated into her with all my spinning weight. She fell hard but gracefully, rolling away without letting go of the naginata and returning a low sweep that brushed my toes as I jumped over it—which gave her time to roll to her feet and come back into guard position.

Neither of us were breathing hard.

She straightened up, looked up to the rim to check on our pair of experts. Their heads bent together in conference, they completely ignored our little show.

“Again?”

I realized I was grinning. “As long as the experts are conferring, we’ve got nothing but time.”

Kaminari
could
fight like a girl; by the time Ozma and Kochi called us up out of the crater we were both covered in dust and she’d “touched” me three times. I’d made it hard enough that I hadn’t looked stupid, but I wasn’t sure she was using her full speed. Plus-side, we’d given viewers enough fight footage to satisfy any fan’s wish for hero vs. ronin action. Minus-side, my shoulder throbbed hotly again, and even though we’d been fighting for touches and I hadn’t been going all-out either I could feel the weakness there. Dr. Beth would tell me I’d pushed it too early and Jacky wasn’t happy; she could tell something wasn’t right.

Kochi looked the three of us over and pulled a stiff paper card from her book, blowing every trace of our sparring match away with a muttered incantation. Nice.

“We think we understand what we’re facing, boss.”
Bos-u
; she used the English word with the extra syllable, and waited. Kaminari made her naginata vanish.

“Are you going to tell us today?”

“Yes.” She folded her arms. “Kimiko-chan and I are in agreement; we are facing an immortal, an Omega Class breakthrough.”

“Well hell,” Jacky said. I wanted to use stronger words; it sucked to know I’d been right.

In theory, breakthroughs had no physical limits. The difference between manifesting a D Class breakthrough and an A or even Ultra Class
or higher
breakthrough was all in the mind; the stronger the personality or the trauma-induced mental spike, the stronger the breakthrough, no limits. That was the
theory
—but in reality A Class breakthroughs were a small minority and Ultra Class breakthroughs were rare enough that each newly discovered one was an event in itself.
Omega
Class breakthroughs, with powers that could only really be described as
godlike
, just didn’t manifest in the real world.

Someone like Doctor Cornelius would simply argue that Omega Class powers were too
real
for what we thought of as the real world and he called the orange peel of reality. And certainly that seemed to explain what actually happened—confirmed Omega Class breakthroughs had only ever been encountered
elsewhere
, somewhere out in the pockets and planes of extrareality. They were gods, elemental forces, omnipotent within their domains.

Like the “frozen” pond and the godfish.

Jacky shrugged. “So it’s going to be a sneak and creep.”

The key to winning is controlling the game. If the only moves open to your opponent are moves you have allowed him, then you will know how to respond whichever way he turns. When you do not control the game, you will not be able to respond to all moves your opponent may make. When you do not
know
the game, any move your opponent makes is likely to be a catastrophic surprise.

Ozma, Empress-in Exile of Oz.

My life had officially gone mythic. Fairy tales? Who needed them; I’d moved on from all that to the story of Orpheus in The Freaking Underworld.

One of my first-year courses at the University of Chicago had been Comparative Religion—a hot Post-Event topic since religious and folk beliefs shaped breakthroughs as much as popular culture—so I knew a
little
of what Kochi was talking about. “Shinto,” the name of Japan’s native religion, meant
Way of The Kami
. Under all the folk-magic and religious festivals it was mostly about keeping good relations between us and the spirits—kami—that shared our world. Which meant that Shinto wasn’t very afterlife-oriented; instead it left a lot of that to Buddhism (because sure, why not?). Newer Shinto beliefs stressed apotheosis, which fit with Japanese Zen Buddhism. But older Shinto stories talked of a land of the dead, Yomi, that sounded a lot like the ancient Greek myths about Hades. The place even included stern judges.

Which was what Kochi thought we were looking at.

Going from “insane godfish” to “fishy judge of the underworld” sounded like a huge leap to me, but I wasn’t the onmiyoji and from what I understood onmiyoji were as much priests or shamans as they were sorcerers. Kind of like exorcists, maybe? Her inferential evidence for the godfish’s localized omnipotence came from its total control of its environment and the yakuza onmiyoji’s reaction to its appearance.

And Ozma totally backed Kochi’s assessment; she even hinted that if her Magic Belt was fully charged she still wouldn’t consider a contest of power. Basically, if all of the Eight and the Nine tried to storm the godfish’s weird kami realm, chances were that Defensenet would need to recruit abroad to replenish its high-powered ranks.

But
, and they agreed on this too, the godfish wasn’t
omniscient
. The yakuza onmiyoji had been using the gates without the fish’s knowledge. Kochi had identified the elaborately caligraphied paper fan as a
deception
, a charm that had made a little pocket of the godfish’s realm invisible to it. We would have been able to finish our fight there in peace and quiet—the yakuza boss’s likely plan—if I hadn’t destroyed the fan.

So yeah, nobody was saying it but the whole subsequent contest and trapping Kitsune in the underworld was sort of my fault. Pretty much all my fault.

Bright side, after explaining what we were up against Kochi pulled a sheet of stiff white origami paper from her big book (which I was beginning to think was a lot like Ozma’s magic box) and folded a new fan to Ozma’s specifications—she’d had a lot of time to watch the yakuza onmiyoji while waiting for us. After Ozma confirmed the shape, Kochi worked over the fan leaves with ink and a writing brush, covering it in symbols. Finishing, she fanned it to dry the ink and then carefully examined her work. Satisfied, she whispered something to it, drew a circle in the dust, stepped inside the circle and opened the fan, and disappeared.

Shell regressed to a fifteen-year old—“
That is so cool!
”—and I burst into startled laughter. Kochi reappeared inside the circle, fan folded.

“The yakuza onmiyoji would have drawn a wider
kekkai
to define the borders of his charm. You described an enlarged room?” When Ozma nodded, she waved at the crater beside us. “We can fix the kekkai to the rim. That will give us a lot of room to move around the fan when we enter the gate.”

“And who do you think should go?” I’d almost forgotten about Agent Inoue, he’d been absolutely silent.

“Kochi-san?” I avoided looking at Jacky. “Can anyone use the fan?”

She nodded. “I need to draw the kekkai, but that is all.”

“Then I’ll go. Just me.”

Jacky’s simple “Like hell,” wasn’t the strongest statement; Kaminari and Kochi had a huge problem with it. Agent Inoue went back to silence, and Ozma just looked more serenely inscrutable than usual.

“Numbers will not be effective,” she said once the volume had died. “Neither will power. Hikari knows how to be cautious even if she doesn’t always display that virtue.”

“Look, I can scout.” I tried to keep my voice reasonable. “If there is a way to retrieve Kitsune quietly, I can do it. If I can’t then I can come back and tell everyone what I learn. If something happens…better just one of us over there than all of us.”

“I agree,” Ozma seconded. “Kaminari-san, Hikari has a relationship with the one we seek which may prove decisive.”

I could see Kaminari choking on it; she was the leader of the Eight, and her breakthrough made her a fight-monster like me—it was her
job
to go through the door or into the breach first, soak up whatever hit was there to take. She led from the front, so how could she trust a ronin to do her job?

She lost her staring match with Agent Inoue, finally nodding, but if her eyes shot lasers I’d be dead.

“No freaking
way
,” was all the warning I got before Jacky grabbed my good arm. “Excuse us a moment,” I said to everyone as she pulled me away.

I let her pull me a few yards before “digging in” and stopping us. She glared down at me and I glared back; we
really
didn’t have time for this.

“Can you
shoot
it, Mamori?” I barely remembered to keep it low and use her new codename. “It’s a
god
, at least in its own little pond.”

“It’s a
crazy
god!” she shot right back. She didn’t try to push me with her vampy powers—if she did I’d…well, I’d
know
, and then we’d see what happened.

“We don’t know that. And I’m not going after it; I’m going around it. And two of us can’t be sneakier than one.”

“Dammit—” The cold logic stopped her; two couldn’t do anything one couldn’t do, and if only one of us were going there was no way I’d let it be anyone but me.

Then she smirked. “What if he’s asleep?”

“Asleep—” I sucked in air.

“Asleep. Under the ice. You think fishy’s going to leave him wandering free-range? And if we find him asleep, how are you going to wake him up? Love’s first freaking kiss?”

Her nasty jab caught me so off-balance I actually squeaked like an infuriated mouse before I could find the words. “Oh, now that’s just not—”

“
Girls
,” Shell drawled in our earbugs. “
We have an audience. And Jacky’s right, she’s going. You’ve got the karmic connection, she’s got the mojo
.”

Et tu, Shell?
I couldn’t make my mouth work. “Ja— I— No! I watched him
cut your head off
!”

“The view wasn’t great from my angle, either. We’re doing this.”

And she had me; everything I’d learned about tactics said you took what you needed, or even thought you might need, and then you took everything you didn’t think you needed but wouldn’t compromise your mission.
You’re not prepared until you’re over-prepared
.

If it was still just about me I’d tell both my BFs to bite themselves (Shell was a cat now, she could do it), but after my interview with Agent Inoue my personal problem wasn’t even in the picture anymore.

When you wear the cape, you do the job.
That thought would always come with an easy Texas drawl behind it, and I sighed. “Okay. We’re going.”

But whatever happened, Jacky was coming
back
.

The Littleton Pocket had been created with Verne-Type superscience, and we’d had to use a big “translation” machine to get us in. If the
godfish’s
extrareality had been created by ritual magic, then it would have probably required circles, incantations, or at least some kind of pre-keyed charm to get us in. Which we didn’t have. But Kochi explained that kami governed their creations pretty much by pure will; if we had “permission” to use the godfish’s gates then we’d be able to just by wishing it.

Kochi drew the kekkai circle, first, and then to be on the safe side she opened and waved the fan herself rather than trying to teach us the words, handing it off to Jacky and trudging out of the crater to where the world had gone blurry and indistinct—a good sign that the charm was working.

One last step. “Shell?”

“
Ready on my end
.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve got to promise me something. If the fish finds us, you
immediately
unplug us from your end—don’t ask, don’t argue, don’t hang around to see what it has to say to us. Last time it was able to pull you in just through your open channel to my earbug, so you
promise
or Jacky and I are leaving our earbugs here when we go.”

I got a minute of sulky silence. “…
fine. I promise. Now
let’s go.”

I was pretty sure that Orpheus hadn’t taken a living vampire and a quantum-ghost on his trip down into the underworld.
And that story turned out
so
well.

Everything depended on the gate staying where it had been, even with all the destroyed real estate around it. Getting up to the gate would take a gantry or platform. Or me.

Jacky turned around and, saying a silent prayer, I lifted her in a front-back hold while she held the open fan before her. And there is was; we could “see” the gate above us as we rose. Permission to enter gave us permission to
see
, I supposed—or not “see” so much as just somehow know it was there. I surprised myself with a giggle.

“You going to tell me?” I couldn’t see Jacky’s face but her tone meant an eyebrow was raised behind her shades.

“If we’re entering the
under
world, shouldn’t we be, I don’t know,
going down
?”

And then we were in.