WAP Mayumi Excerpt

Mayumi gripped the tree trunk. Her fingers dug into the rough bark.

The priestess was walking slowly down the path. Her dark eyes were fixed ahead at the cloud of dust heralding men on horseback.

'She looks the part,' Mayumi thought regretfully. 'It's going to be a shame to watch her die.'

The lack of urgency in Aiko-sama's body language made Mayumi feel even more anxious. She gnashed her teeth. She hated this, she hated watching.

Movement in the left side of her peripheral drew her eye. Mayumi frowned and squinted.

Something was coming up the village path behind the priestess. For a moment, she thought it was Mirin. Her breath caught in horror.

Then the figure drew close enough for her to see, no, that wasn't her ninken. That was a human child.

Oh, no.

Her heart sank.

'They're going to die anyway,' Mayumi told herself. It was true, but it didn't reduce the painful grip horror had around her heart. It felt like a vise.

The Priestess hadn't noticed yet. She was narrowing her eyes at the samurai in the distance, unaware of the coming disaster.

The unmistakable sound of a bow releasing an arrow cut through the air. The Priestess blurred.

The next thing Mayumi knew, the Priestess was an impossible distance further back.

'What?'

She leaned forward, struggling to put what she saw into context. Her stomach lurched.

The Priestess was kneeling in front of the child with her hands raised. The arrow was sticking out of her back. A massive red stain was working across the back of her white yukata.

"That doesn't make sense," Mayumi breathed. She thought over what she'd seen again, and she still couldn't make it work. No one was that fast- the Priestess had moved faster than Mayumi could even see.

'Who are you?'

The woman's shoulder drooped. Mayumi felt a pang. The child turned and ran. As if in slowed time, Mayumi saw how the young woman slumped.

She didn't even know how old Aiko-sama was. But she was young. Her face and hands had no signs of age, and she had the kind of brash confidence that came from inexperience. And her thin body was curling down to the dirt, where her body would bleed out and her tremendous promise be wasted because of the greed of a rich man.

Aiko spun around and let something fly from her hand. Mayumi barely caught the motion. She followed the arch. It collided with the head of a mounted samurai.

"No," Mayumi said, far too loudly in her shock.

'Did I see it keep going? Did whatever she threw go all the way through that man's head?'

The samurai fell to the ground in a graceless clatter of armor. His horse cried out in alarm. His fellows looked at him in horror. They broke out into shouts, one horse rearing up in distress.

Aiko was already there (how?) perched on the saddle of the most forward man. She slapped him. Aiko alit in the same instant, jumping into another horse. She didn't see in her wake the man she'd slapped collapsed back on his saddle. His head was hanging at an unnatural angle.

'She just killed him,' Mayumi realized in horror. 'She killed him with a slap. Did she even notice?'

There was a horrible sound. She couldn't describe it, and she would try to many times in the coming days. But it was a loud sound, and it coincided with a ghastly spray of blood and metal.

The Priestess wasn't human. The knowledge rang through to Mayumi's bones, as undeniable as the knowledge that the sun rose every morning. She watched with a dry mouth as the Priestess effortlessly lifted a ring of earth around the whole bloody disaster of dying men and panicking horses. And she still had that arrow sticking in her back, between her shoulder blades.

Then, Mayumi felt an unnatural calm descend.

She leapt down in a haze and talked to the Priestess (Goddess?). She helped Aiko-sama remove the arrow, and she felt confused horror at the squelching sounds and the way that Aiko-sama only reacted to pain. Her pupils were blown wide and she was snippy when they went back to the shrine. But her motion was fine. She wasn't dying. Her breathing wasn't even ragged.

Somehow, she got through the conversation. She drank far too much sake. Mayumi felt numb. But she retreated to niceties and to calculated conversational prodding.

The smile slid off of Mayumi's face when she was safely outside Aiko's village. She made the journey back to her clan compound in silence, turning over what she'd seen. One small thing she'd noticed before the fight was demanding her attention.

'She didn't even get winded. It's the hottest part of summer and her face didn't even get red.'

Maybe it was comparatively minor, but that was the detail that was bothering her. It was one thing to be strong, fast, brutal. But not reacting to heat and exertion was eerie. It was inhuman. And put aside the biggest evidence for that, the fact that she hadn't died or even been inconvenienced by what Mayumi knew from painful experience to be a mortal wound.

'She's also…'

Mayumi struggled to place the Priestess on a scale with other shinobi. Her speed alone would make her top tier. But what she'd done with no weapon in hand?

The memory put a chill up her back.

'We'd be helpless against her. She just has to touch you. What even is that? Is it really a seal or is it maybe a bloodline trait that I've never heard of?'

Disturbed, she waved off her brother when she got home. She needed to be alone with her thoughts for a while.

'The earth manipulation was effortness, too. No handsigns. That must have been basically what she did this morning to make the horse enclosure.'

Monstrously powerful jutsu use was, at least, something she could understand. Some people were just born wrong.

What Mayumi really didn't like about the Priestess' jutsu usage was that it had been an afterthought. She hadn't used any jutsu to kill all of those samurai. Armed with no weapons, she had other skills so developed that she hadn't even thought to turn away the enemy with jutsu at a distance.

'Or maybe I like that. The only active shinobi I can compare her to are the Uchiha brothers and Senju two. They're all brutes. But she's as strong as any of them, and she's living in a farming village and protecting the residents from taxation. This is not a woman plagued by ambition. She took an arrow in her own body for a child, and it clearly hurt her a lot.'

Even for a shinobi, Aiko was unsettling. Mayumi was practical enough to admit that. The seamless transition from friendliness to brutality to being an elegant hostess once more… It seemed mentally unhealthy. It was very normal to need some time to come down or to relax after a fight. Aiko had become a bit snippy at the end, yes, but it was a ridiculously understated reaction considering the amount of pain she had to have been experiencing. Who compartmentalized like that?

'What circumstances make that kind of person?'

She had a difficult fine deciding how much it mattered for her purposes. Of course she could not tie herself to someone who would bring ruin to the clan. She had to step lightly. If Aiko was more danger than benefit, she'd have to die.

'...Somehow. She does seem hard to kill. Trying and failing would be the worst outcome.'

But Mayumi also couldn't ignore the tantalizing possibility that the Priestess could be the person to make the Inuzuka the most powerful clan on the continent.

It nearly seemed too good to be true.

What lunatic had ever let such a powerful kunoichi live without loyalty, bonds to keep her fighting for a cause? Why had no other clan endeared themselves to her? Any clan would leap at the chance to take someone like that into the fold. It was ridiculous. It was as if the Senju had put their white-haired demon out on the stoop and no one had thought to take him home. It didn't make any sense!

It almost seemed ordained by heaven.

After all, Mayumi remembered, she'd seen the teeth on that woman. Aiko was a pack predator without a pack.