Demanding Stare

“You used to struggle much more, rather disappointing.”

“Pieces on a board and human lives are two different things. I’m not going to sacrifice lives pointlessly out of a point of my own pride.”

“Then this is where your path ends.” Aya suddenly pulled out her sword and stabbed me in the chest to my shock. It happened so quickly I couldn’t even feel the pain from my heart being pierced.

My body started to shake as the life began to drain. I clutched on the blade looking across at her. “Why? It was over.”

“Not until you’re all dead is it over.”

Chapter 537 – Demanding Stare

Yuki returned with Seiji and Nerine in his custody to the base camp outside the city. He crossed by Saki as she left. Opening his mouth to speak to her, he stopped himself as she didn’t even pause before leaving his range. His forehead pinched in confusion as he watched her leave. Looking between his friends, who had no more answers than him, they resumed their walk inside the tent. “Lady Aya, I’ve brought Lord Nagahama and his aid Hotaru Shinozaki. They wish to speak with you about—“

She didn’t even bother to look up from the map as she spoke. “Execute them.”

“Lady?! You haven’t heard what they have to say.”

“And I don’t intend to, kill them.”

Hearing her so casually order the death of his friends made him step forward ignoring rank. “You will listen to them.”

That actually got her attention as she looked up at him. Her fierce presence quickly turned up in front of him. “What did you say?”

“I don’t believe you’re deaf.”

She watched him for a few minutes in silence leaving the tent in a very awkward stillness. Her poker face remained intact the whole time, but there was clearly heavy thought happening behind her eyes. None of them knew what it was. Yuki acted quite boldly before his commanding Lord, something that should get him executed or at least stripped of position. They all knew how the Lords treated insubordination. Aya unlikely had a different sort of mindset. So perhaps she simply tried to devise the most effective method to kill Yuki.

All three had different ideas to what she might have been considering, but Aya proved them all wrong. In the end, she smiled for some reason before speaking and making it clear. “For all the time that I’ve known you, you’ve never spoken to me like that. You always were nervous, even when you were trying to be confident, you lacked that small bit of resolve. But not now, you don’t see me as your Lord. You don’t care about anything. I’m just a woman in the room.”

“And what’s your point, besides stating what’s already obvious?”

“Stay like that.”

“Huh?”

“You wanted me to listen to what they had to say, is that right?”

“Yes,” he answered immediately, his confusion came a moment later. It was a bigger flip than he imagined from her. Now he wasn’t certain what was going through her mind. ‘If I didn’t know better, she enjoyed me talking back to her like that. She’s an odd one, but I got her to listen to Seiji and Nerine!’

“Thank you,” Seiji said politely. He stepped forward to join the conversation. “We wanted to join you. As you no doubt have already heard, Lord Komagata had fled.”

“Yes, sooner than even I predicted.”

“It shocked us all. He abandoned his people and us to save himself. He showed us what little loyalty he had to us.”

“And what makes you think I have more loyalty than your previous Lord?”

“I know your history. As you know me already. My assistant has quite the vast network. I know how you work. You value worth and usefulness. As long as I have value to you, you’ll keep me around.”

“What do you offer?”

“My services as a General and the men that follow me as well as my spy network that my assistant has built. It’s still intact despite your best efforts.”

“Is it now?”

Seiji grinned a little seeing that she might be turning around on her opinion. “You’re not the only clever one. As your General can no doubt confirm, I’m quite talented. My father and I trained many of the men that currently follow Komagata in his escape. I would be able to grow your military strength with their ranks. Many were unhappy with his decision to abandon families and soldiers. I would be able to return your strength back to before the war began. That would be of interest to you, yes?”

Aya walked around the table to meet the two directly. She looked over at Yuki who didn’t change his disrespectful gaze. “It would seem that you’re correct. They are worth listening to. You’ve changed quite a bit since the last time I saw you. You know how to show value.”

“Responsibility has a way of maturing you.”

“Yes, I would agree. Welcome, I accept you under my banner.”

Yuki looked around the tent now that the situation had been defused. It was then that he realized that Yumi wasn’t present. “Where’s Yoshiko? Was she not with you before?”

“I haven’t seen her since the battle ended.”

“I’ll go find her.” He went to leave the tent quickly worried about what might have happened to her. Many different thoughts came to mind. The fighting shouldn’t have reached her, but anything could have happened once things broke out. None of them were present to steer anyone way from her.

“She’ll be fine. She’s probably just looking into the investigation of the mountains and neighboring region for our next campaign.”

Yuki looked back at Aya. “Until I know everyone is safe, my job isn’t finished.” He didn’t even allow her a reply or order to stop him. Looking around the immediate area there was no one that looked like her. The soldiers were still working on recovering wounded or dead from the battle. Now that things were officially over, they could safely see to their comrades without fear of attack. It would be the first time they could properly give the dead their final departure.

Remembering Saki from before, he went to her tent imagining that she might have seen her. He entered her tent without notice and found Saki sitting alone still in her field armor, light as it might have been. “Is something wrong?” For someone so focused and confident, he found it unusual to see her looking so solemn.

She immediately pulled out her blade thinking that it was an intruder, but stopped seeing that it was Yuki. The blade returned to the sheath as she relaxed. “It’s just you.”

“If I had been an enemy you’d be dead. What’s wrong? You looked off when I saw you leave Aya’s tent.”

A sigh came from her lips. She had already prepared for it. Accepted that was the reality, she thought she had been fine. Considering the blood on her hands already, she should have been able to deal with it. It wasn’t as though they were really dead either. All of it was facts that she knew, but it still troubled her. And he didn’t even know. “Aya killed them all.”

“Who?” It didn’t surprise him anymore hearing Saki say it. Considering his conversation with Aya, he would have been surprised by any other answer. There was something odd about how final Aya acted about the killing of Seiji and Nerine. She was so close to anything other than their deaths. He wished that he knew why she felt that way. But that was going to have to be questioned for another day. He knew that he wouldn’t get an answer from her.

It troubled him though that Saki was troubled by it. Their friends were alive. It might have been some low ranked Lords that she had to kill, but that shouldn’t have bothered her. The dirty work that Aya had her doing, while he disapproved of the woman using his best friend in such a way, he had nothing he could say to convince Saki otherwise. So he couldn’t be certain what was changing her mind now.

“Every single Lord and member of their family. She had them all executed.”

“What? Why? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“She did not listen to anything that I had to say. She just kept telling me to kill them all.”

Yuki hurried over to her side. This was far worse than he imagined. While morality shouldn’t matter about age or gender, there was an inherent bias. She had only been killing those with direct connections to those in power or in power themselves. This went beyond anything Aya asked of her before. “But you didn’t do it right?”

There was only silence from Saki as it told him more than any word could. He hung his head down at a loss of what to do for his friend. She suffered and he could do nothing to help her. If he could run to Aya and demand her stop he would immediately, but that would be a futile cause. In such a structure, while a tragic and immoral act few would actually see it as anything but necessary. The fact that he could even rationalize it felt like the world had corrupted him.

In a sense, that seemed to be what Saki felt too, he thought. The shame and guilt for everything finally came to a head. He didn’t know if she could keep going with the job. It was a tall order to keep doing the dirty work of Aya, someone hell bent on her goal.

For about half an hour, he stuck by her side in silence. Words continued to fail him. Nothing would really help the situation. She was going to have to find a way out herself, he realized. Once he understood that, he stood up and started to walk to the tent. Yuki turned back to her, remembering why he came in the tent. “Have you seen Yumi? She wasn’t in Aya’s tent.”

“With the dead most likely, if not somewhere mourning possibly.”

“What happened?”

“The low ranked Lords and family weren’t the only ones that she had killed.”

He paused looking closer at Saki, getting an unsettling feeling in his stomach. Part of him already knew what she was going to say before she did. Yet the other half refused to listen, it wanted to know from Saki directly what she had to say. It could have been something else. That was what it hoped for anyway, futile as it knew it would be.

“Yori’s dead. She killed him on the battlefield personally.”