PSL: And if I seem dangerous

[benibloom]

Ha...

[Killing an oni is only half the job.

A hunter must find its gate to make sure that it never returned from the bowels of hell and to release the spirits of those that it killed. A hunter must do so quickly because a dead oni's spirit will flee back to its gate as soon as its heart stops beating and feed off the energy gathered there before it seeks its body again.

A hunter can do several things to slow the process: cut out the heart, severe its head. Remove its tongue so it can speak no more lies. Scatter the parts. Or better yet -- burn them.

Koujaku's hands are bloody from carving the monster's heart out with his knife, sticky against the tight grip on his sword. He buried it in the snow but not as far as he would have liked. The bright red of his kimono is darkened, stained and stiffening in the cold. The fresh snow starting to fall once more as he finishes this hunt makes finishing this hunt even more cumbersome.

But the village is safe now.

They begged though they could not pay the typical fee to their lord, to conscript the server of a hunter and certainly not the leader of a clan like the Beni-Shigure. Koujaku came on his own, disgusted that this daimyo turned a blind eye to his people's plight. Their sons and daughters lured away by the oni's lusts to ultimately be consumed.

Each step is taxing. Koujaku grips the left side of his chest, rented with deep wounds from the oni's claws as it tried to rip through his flesh to bones and eat his heart. He knows he's leaving a trail of his own blood as he searches his way back to the gate he marked first but there's no helping it. The woods around him screams with the released, mindless spirit oni already looking to put itself together. Powerful. He has no idea how it got so powerful without anyone coming to deal with it.

He moves as fast as he can, favoring his left side and panting out into the cold of the night. The gate is at the mouth of the cave it lived in. It's large, woven of wood and bone with the fluttering fabric of its victims pulled by the wind. Koujaku heaves up his sword as he reaches it and begins a woodcutters work in hacking away. When the scaffolding crumples causing it to fall to one side he goes with his bare hands, to rip it apart.

The oni's shrieks have found him and it tears at him as he works like the wind itself. Furious. It should be getting weaker and dissipating, not more incensed.

Breaking the last connection between the post and the arch releases a burst of energy that throws Koujaku back into the snow and knocks the air from his lungs. He hears, or he swears he hears the oni's voice in the wind and he sees sick red of its energy lunge towards him.

If it cannot have its own body back, it will take another.

The spirit is like fire and smoke. It forces its way into Koujaku's gasping mouth and down his throat and sinks into the wounds left on the hunters chest to infect the hunter's blood, laughing as it finds even this injured body a strong and suitable host. Poetic, to live on turning a hunter into something no better than what he stalks.

Koujaku's scream brings an end to the struggle filling the woods. As his body writhes, as it is forced to begin changing, that scream twists into something hardly human at all.]

Comments

[floofing]

[ as far as kitsune go, kaden is considered odd amongst his peers. and as far as demons and spirits go, kitsune are considered unusual on their own to begin with. there are very few beings in existence like himself, and he takes a great amount of pride in that. sure, his kind lure humans in, play tricks on them, sometimes eat their flesh...but only in their kitsune village.

outside of his small hamlet in the mountains, kaden sees himself as a guest to the human world and expects to be treated as such—with due reverence, with praise, with gifts. those he shows his true form to are often happy to comply, and this lifestyle has led to him making enemies of many humans but finding allies in many more.

it’s on one snowy day in a small village, too poor to pay its taxes, that he hears of a demon and of a demon hunter. it’s enough to set his ears to perking, even if his glamour prevents the humans from seeing the movements of his ears and tail. that’s his old friend, koujaku—though he’s sure the hunter wouldn’t quite use the term ‘friend’ as liberally as kaden does.

it sets him off on a search. he thanks the tavern mistress and the customers, leaving them with valuable trinkets that are easy for him to come by,and heads off into the forest. once he’s far enough away from the village, his footprints turn into pawprints. it takes only a second’s focus for him to land on all fours, coated in white and red fur, nine tails swaying behind his massive form. small flames of mystical foxfire cast a purplish glow on him as he breaks into a run—

—and as he comes to an abrupt stop. so many sounds and feelings and scents hit him all at once. he’s no inugami, his sense of smell isn’t that strong, but everything else hits him. has there always been a powerful spirit living this close to the village here? or is it because kaden isn’t familiar with this land that he’s just never noticed.

he finds himself laughing, but the laugh dissolves into a growl as he breaks off into a run. the mystical presence of the oni doesn’t fade entirely, but it wanes and waxes, pulses like a heartbeat that kaden can but doesn’t want to feel. oni are repulsive to him; they lack the beauty, the refinement and intelligence of his furred friends.

but he also smells human blood—koujaku’s blood, no doubt. it makes kaden sick to his stomach with worry. it’s not the same sort of worry a human could expect from a demon. no, kaden’s worry is more akin to losing a plaything or a source of interest. it might seem cold, but without koujaku he’s down a playmate, someone to bother and mess with in addition to talking to. his sole purpose in coming out to find him hadn’t been to help him fight, after all.

he’d wanted to heckle him and watch the fight with himself.

when he finally comes across a familiar body in the snow, it’s only been about twenty minutes since he left the village. the snow melts as it hits his fur instead of clinging to him like it would a normal fox, and the heat of his fox fire keeps him from getting damp. it’s for these reasons that he’s pristine as he slows his run and then pads over to koujaku. only a ghost or a spirit could stand in the snow and look entirely unaffected by it, and that doesn’t change when he’s engulfed in light and walks the last few steps on two feet instead of four. ]

Yikes. I don’t think you need me tell you this, but things aren’t looking great for you.

[ he squats next to koujaku’s body, frowning, humming in thought. he can tell where the spirit’s gone. the scent of human blood and the surreal sense of an oni’s spiritual presence now come from the same place. the scent of oni’s blood? he’s ignoring that. it’s foul to him. with koujaku screaming like that, he wonders if his soon-to-be-previously-human friend heard him at all! but for now he watches, reaching out only to dust falling snow away from open wounds with a fan. ]

You know, most humans are pretty unlucky, but whatever stars you were born under really have it out for you, don’t they?