Chapter 33

“Katsumiii! Katsumiii!” Ruri cried out.

Katsumi turned to her and started making her way over slowly while using her sword as a crutch. I ran over to help support her. Ruri kept calling for her and crying. The arrow still in her shoulder.

I set Katsumi down next to her. Ruri moved one of her tails towards us. I only now realized Ruri had 9 of them. A lot of things suddenly made sense.

“No. Use it on yourself first, empress. I’m fi-” Katsumi said while trying to put on a strong face, but Ruri interrupted.

“NO! I order you to grab it!” Ruri demanded.

Katsumi hesitated, but didn't argue. She grabbed the tail extended to her. Something flowed from her into it and began turning it from blue to red. At the same time, Katsumi’s breathing started to return to normal and the bleeding on her wounds slowed. She let go before they completely healed up, but she seemed a lot better.

“Now do yours. I won’t heal myself any further until I know there's room for all of yours.” Katsumi said.

“What about you, William? Are you ok?”

“Yeah, I’m perfectly fine. Heal yourself.”

“I can still tell when you're lying.”

Oh, yeah. Crap.

“I'm alright. My ribs hurt, maybe they're cracked? It's nothing to worry about, though. Heal yourself if you can.”

She waited a moment, then hugged her tail to her chest. She winced at the pain of the arrow being pushed out of her arm, but the wound closed quickly after. When she was done, she held it out again to Katsumi. It took a bit more of her wounds away, but turned fully red after that.

A few things happened over the next couple of hours. Katsumi and I went around making sure all the guards were dead and killing any that weren't. I told them about how the towns people, saw them come here and would wonder what happened to them. Eventually, we came up with a plan of dragging parts of the monster's body from near their cabin over, and making it look like the guards fought it, but failed to kill it. Their cabin had been north, along the mountain at a spot where there was a gap that lead into another clearing, though much smaller and without a river. Katsumi told me another one of Ruri’s blessings was for long term illusions, and she would hide the gap in the mountain. It was a small, but seemed peaceful, aside from the monstrous horror creature laying next to it in the grass. By the time we were done, it was almost the end of the day. We sat on the grass in the clearing back at their cabin, in case someone stumbled into the other one.

“So… your immortal?” Katsumi asked.

Ruri turned to me interested too. Not really any point in hiding anything anymore. Besides, I was pretty sure I had way more questions for them than they had for me.

“So… Ruri is a Kitsune?” I countered.

“Oh come on. That should've been quite obvious to you after everything else you'd seen. A member of the Silverwolf family, tails with powers, 9 blessings. Immortality is not obvious, and you gave no hints.” Katsumi said.

“How was I supposed to know that any of those things meant she was a Kitsune? How did she even manage to hide all her tails under that cloak? Also, I’m clearly not immortal. I died like 3 times there.”

“The cloak is the shadow monarch's symbol. He gifted them to us in exchange for something before we left Felaris. They hide things. How does your immortality work? Does it have a weakness?” Ruri asked innocently.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, and are you trying to kill me?” I said as a joke.

“No! Not you! … Someone else.” She sounded worried she had hurt my feelings.

“I guess I can tell you, I’m one of the summoned heroes. The 5th one. A mistake. This is supposed to be my blessing, I guess, but it's done a lot more harm than good. I’m not associated with the royal family anymore. I’m not even a hero now, so don’t worry about me telling anyone.”

Both their eyes went wide at the information, but I guess since Ruri didn’t sense a lie, they didn’t ask more about it.

“The current Kitsune Empress has a blessing of immortality. I don't know if it's similar to yours, but she's been in power for a very long time. She intends to keep her position forever. She seeks out any other Kitsune born and has them killed before they can grow to their full strength. My family served as her royal guards for generations, but one day we found Ruri, and she told us to kill her. That was when we found out what she had been doing. Until that moment it was believed that the Kitsune were just reincarnations of the previous one and there were simply no others because she hadn't died yet. We questioned everything. Some of us decided to adhere to traditions. The current Kitsune is the strongest. She decides what is right for us. Others believed it's more natural for the new Kitsune to take her place so that things would continue to change and evolve. Not become stagnant. The latter faction is not very big right now…” Katsumi said.

We chatted for a bit longer, but I headed back before it got too dark. The next week was quite uneventful compared to that day.