The silence in the clearing was heavier than any sound. The only noise was the choked sob of the bitten woman and the wet, hungry chewing of the newly-turned villager as two others struggled to pin him down. The black-eyed man watched it all with no more interest than a man watching ants.
Kei broke the spell. She rushed forward, medical box in hand, toward the wounded woman. The black-eyed man's head swiveled to track her, but he did not move to stop her.
"Do not," Hayato said, his voice a low command. But Kei was already kneeling, pulling bandages and a small bottle of distilled sake from her box to clean the wound.
"She will be dead or turned in hours," the mental voice rustled, amused. Your little doctor wastes her tools.
"She is doing her duty," Hayato said, stepping forward to stand between Kei and the prophet. "You talk of a master. Of a trade. Who is your master? What do you really want?"
The master is the pattern-maker. The weaver of the new world. He sees the truth you fear: the Rot is not an end. It is a beginning. A cleansing fire. From the ash, a stronger order grows. The black-eyed man's empty gaze felt like cold fingers on Hayato's spine. You are a flaw in the pattern. A still point in the storm. The master would understand you. Or unmake you.
Jubei edged to the side, his nagamaki held loosely but ready. "He's a puppeteer. Not a fighter. If we take him out fast, his hold on these people breaks."
"Try," the voice whispered, and this time it sounded only in Jubei's mind. The ninja flinched, as if struck.
One of the villagers, a burly man with a woodsman's arms, stood up. His eyes were glazed, compelled. He picked up a heavy hatchet from the ground and turned toward Jubei.
"See?" the voice echoed for all of them now. The flesh is weak. The mind is weaker. I do not need teeth to spread the Rot. I need only their fear.
"Stop this!" Sakura cried out, tears streaming down her face. She was pressing her hands so hard against her ears her knuckles were white. "Your thought is so cold! It's hurting them! It's making holes in their thoughts!"
The black-eyed man looked at Sakura for the first time. His head tilted. Ah. A little listener. A broken mirror. You hear the chorus but cannot join it. You are a tragedy.
"Leave her alone," Hayato growled, his hand tightening on the wakizashi. He was calculating the distance. Could he cross the clearing and strike before the prophet could force another villager to attack? Before he could somehow turn Sakura's own mind against her?
"What is the trade?" Hayato asked, buying time. "You said 'the silence for the noise.' What does that mean?"
You come with me. Quietly. The little listener may come too. The master is curious about broken mirrors. The rest… The prophet's gaze swept over Kei, Kenta, the old ones, Koji. They are noise. They stay. They become part of the new order here. Or they die. Their choice.
"We're not leaving anyone!" Kenta shouted, his bravado returning with his fear. He raised the tanegashima pistol, aiming it shakily at the prophet's chest.
The black-eyed man smiled. It was a terrible, mechanical stretching of the lips. A noisy tool.
Kenta's finger tightened on the trigger. Click.
Nothing happened. The damp powder from the river crossing had ruined the charge.
The prophet's will slammed into Kenta. The young man cried out, dropping the pistol and clutching his head. He fell to his knees, his eyes wide with a terror that wasn't his own.
"Stop!" Hayato roared. He took a step forward.
The woodsman with the hatchet and two other villagers—a woman and a teenage boy—stood up in unison. They moved like sleepwalkers, blocking Hayato's path to the prophet. Their eyes were empty of everything but compelled obedience.
"You cannot fight them all without killing them," the voice stated calmly. And you are still a samurai at heart, are you not? You will not cut down innocent farmers. It is your weakness.
He was right. Hayato could see the fear screaming behind the villagers' eyes. They were prisoners in their own bodies. To get to the prophet, he would have to go through them. He could disable them, perhaps. But it would take time. Time the prophet would use.
It was a perfect trap.
Then, Sakura did something unexpected. She stopped crying. She lowered her hands from her ears. She walked forward, past Hayato, and stood before the three compelled villagers.
"You're scared," she said to them, her voice soft but clear. "You're so scared. The cold thought is sitting on you. It's so heavy."
She reached out and touched the woodsman's hand, the one holding the hatchet. He trembled but didn't pull away.
"Listen to me instead," Sakura whispered, not just to him, but to all the villagers. She closed her eyes. "Listen to my thought. It's warm. It's a little fire. Remember warmth? Remember the sun on your back in the fields? Remember your daughter's laugh?"
She was pouring her own empathy, her own quiet, strong presence, into the psychic space the prophet dominated. It wasn't an attack. It was an offering. A memory of being human.
The woodsman's grip on the hatchet loosened. A tear rolled down his cheek. The woman beside him began to weep silently.
The black-eyed prophet stiffened. NO. The mental command was a whip-crack. The villagers shuddered, their brief clarity fading, the cold weight pressing down again.
But Sakura had given Hayato an opening. A second of distraction.
Hayato moved. He didn't run at the villagers. He ran past them, around the edge of the circle, his eyes locked on the prophet. The black-eyed man turned, raising a hand. Hayato felt a sudden, sharp pain behind his eyes, a pressure trying to blind him, to freeze his muscles.
He focused on the memory of the dungeon's cold stone. On the certainty of his own death that morning. The pressure was just another form of prison. He pushed through it.
The prophet took a step back, a flicker of something like surprise on his dead face.
Hayato was upon him. He didn't use the wakizashi to kill. He reversed his grip and slammed the heavy brass pommel into the side of the prophet's head with a sickening thud.
The connection shattered.
The black-eyed man dropped like a sack of grain. The oppressive, cold thought vanished from the clearing, snuffed out like a candle.
All around them, the villagers gasped as one, as if surfacing from deep water. They looked around, confused, terrified, free. The woodsman dropped the hatchet. The woman Sakura had comforted fell to her knees, sobbing.
Hayato stood over the unconscious prophet, breathing hard. The mental assault had left him nauseous and with a pounding headache.
Jubei was at his side instantly. He put a foot on the prophet's chest and leveled the blade of his nagamaki at the man's throat. "Do we kill it? It's not really a man anymore."
"Wait," Kei said, stumbling over. She was wrapping a bandage around the bitten villager's arm, but her eyes were on the prophet. "He's a new variant. A psychic controller. His biology… it could be the key to understanding how the Rot affects the nervous system. We must study him."
"He's a weapon," Jubei argued. "A dangerous one. He turns people's fear into the plague itself. You want to keep that in a jar?"
"We need to know what he knows," Hayato said, his voice tired. "Who is this 'master'? What pattern is he weaving?" He looked at the villagers, who were now clustering together, staring at them with a mixture of gratitude and new fear. "And we need to deal with this."
The village elder, an old man with a bent back, approached, bowing deeply. "Strangers… you have broken the demon's hold. But he has been here for two days. He made us send our young men away. 'To the master,' he said. And he said… he said more would come. An army of the quiet dead, led by the seeing dead."
"An army of Silent Ones," Hayato translated, his stomach sinking. "Led by prophets like this one." The Ghost General had an army of mindless dead. This "master" was building something worse: an army of the intelligent, the controlled.
"You cannot stay here," Hayato told the elder. "He found you. Others will come. You must take your people and flee. North. To the mountains."
"We have nowhere to go! No food for a journey!"
Hayato looked at Jubei, then at the supplies they had scavenged from the way-station. It wasn't enough for themselves, let alone thirty more people.
Kenta, rubbing his temples, spoke up. "The way-station. It's overrun, but its storerooms are still full. We only took a little. If we could clear it… truly clear it… there's enough there to feed this village and us for weeks. And it has walls."
"It's a nest," Jubei said flatly.
"It was a nest," Kenta insisted, a desperate plan forming. "But the main horde followed you and Ren away. Sakura said the fast one was gathering them downstream. What if… what if the station is mostly empty now? Except for the few left behind. And the person inside."
The face in the window. Hayato had forgotten.
"It's a huge risk," Kei said.
"Staying here is certain death," the village elder pleaded. "We will help you fight. We are not warriors, but we are strong. We want our home back. And you need the food."
Hayato looked at the desperate faces of the villagers, at his own exhausted group, at the unconscious monster at his feet. They had no good choices. Only desperate ones.
"We rest tonight," Hayato declared. "We post strong watches. We tie up our… guest. In the morning, we plan. For the way-station."
That night, in the charcoal-burner's longhouse, a tense quiet reigned. The prophet was bound with multiple ropes in a locked shed. Sakura sat outside it, listening. "His thoughts are fuzzy. Like a broken song. But the cold is still there. Sleeping."
Hayato took the first watch on the village's crude palisade, looking south toward the forest that hid the road, the river, and the way-station. Kei brought him a bowl of thin village gruel.
"You're thinking about the person in the tower," she said, not a question.
"I am."
"You feel guilty for leaving them before."
"A leader cannot save everyone. He must save the many."
"Is that what you're doing now?" she asked gently. "Or are you trying to fix the choice you made at the river?"
He had no answer for her.
Below, in the clearing, Jubei was teaching Kenta and three of the braver village men how to thrust a spear properly, using the weight of the body, not just the arms. "Aim for the knee, then the head when it's down. They don't feel pain, so disable them."
A new, fragile community was forming in the crucible of terror. Farmers learning to be soldiers. A ninja teaching for a favor. A doctor tending to a bite that would doom her patient. A girl listening to the dreams of a monster.
And Hayato, the silent, unrotting center of it all, held a bowl of cold gruel and planned an assault on a fortress of the dead. The path to Edo was gone. Now there was only the next fight, the next mouth to feed, the next step into a darker, stranger war.