07-24-2009, 09:37 PM
His name, or at least the what his friends called him, was Onigumo. At one point, he had been accounted among the ashigaru, the non-noble members of the buke military class, but on this day, he was a bandit.
He had not, perhaps, been the best of men - but neither had he begun as one of the worst. He had, however, been given to gazing into the night sky in those posts at the edge of space, on distant and empty moons... and, feeling the regard of that which gazed back, had learned strength and self-reliance and contempt of the fat and the weak who dwelt in the light. When the blood-painted lifter had slipped from its arrival pirate point, run the gauntlet of his Crab master's orbital defense engines, his file had been sent to meet it, to 'drive the tainted men back'... A simple slowing, a slight hesitation in his steps and his armor's weapons had gutted the fools through their harness's vulnerable backs.
He had boarded the ship of his new brothers and never felt a moment's regret - beyond those times, like now, when military neccessity forced him to miss the pleasures of the sack of a raided town.
Despite that dissapointment, Onigumo was not innatentive, nor foolish, and for all the good it would do him, he spotted the incoming harness the instant it hove into view along the valley, siloutted against the firs clinging to the rocky mountain slopes.
The Iai's wearer spotted him, too - or rather, spotted his Jigoku in its bruise and blood livery - and turned to attack, sprinting forwards.
"HO!" Onigumo bellowed, and his armor turned the words into a thunder that echoed from the far hillsides - and would be easily audible where his fellows had their way with the town they'd come to raid, "THE ENEMY!"
With a laugh rich in bloodlust, he hauled on the armatures strapped to his body, and his Jigoku responded with a rattle of clockwork and a squeal of moving metal, twisting and lunging into motion one ponderous step at a time as he turned to face his victims. One lever, near at hand, triggered the rockets arrayed within the demon-driven machine's chest, sending them arcing out in fire and smoke and a shriek like a chorus of the damned from the noisemakers built into the leering carvings of their noses.
If the fool samurai in the sixty-ton speedster was disconcerted by the rockets raining down around him, he did not show it, instead swerving and charging to bring his own weapons into range.
Well enough. He would regret it.
Eventually the clatter of the loading racks ceased, and Onigumo fired a second time at the oncoming 'warrior of the light', but even as he did two brilliant rays of sunlight stabbed out from his target's raised right arm. One coruscated past the eyeslits of his harness and left purple blotches hanging in his sight, but the other caught his mount dead center in the chest in a flash of noonday brilliance and flying sparks that left him half-blinded as his rockets crashed down on and around the samurai.
Onigumo snarled, a red haze dropping before his eyes, as tiny flecks of molten metal stung his cheeks. He charged to meet his enemy, stabbing at him with the firelight glare of his hell-lamp and shorter-ranged dragonbolt rockets, and ignored the additional yoroi heaving into view at the end of the valley.
He ignored the shivering St Elmo's Fire across his armor as the darts of a pair of electric cannon whipcracked by him, and the hissing rain of fire as arrow-bolts pelted down around him. He ignored the eye-tearing flash and thunderbolt report of a lightning cannon and the more subtle streaks of flashing sunlamps.
He could ignore them, for at the long range, they missed. His target did not, not entirely, striking his armor's thick breastplate in another shower of glare and sparks.
Onigumo swore foully and fired again, with everything his Jigoku could offer, arrow-bolts and dragon-bolts and the strobing fires of hell itself, then roared in fury as that so-despised figure in Crane's white-and-blue danced aside.
And after, he had brief cause to regret his inattention, as the oncoming samurai did not miss a second time. The last thing his demon-ridden soul perceived was the white clouding and burning agony of steam.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
