Chapter 2 - Borrowed Steel

“Fast like the wind, Silent like a forest, Intrusive like the fire, Immobile like a mountain.”

- Danny Chaplin, Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan.

Shimon Ayanokouji had always considered himself a fairly decent human being. Not heroic, because heroism has little opportunity to rear its head in the modern age. Not noble, because that was mostly a branding exercise performed by people who were rich enough to worry about such things. But decent, in the ordinary, limited, socially functional sense. He held doors open when it cost him nothing. He returned wallets when returning them did not involve talking to police for more than ten minutes. He did not kick vending machines even when they stole his money, and he did not litter.

And, most importantly, he had never robbed a corpse before.

That was the sort of line a civilized person should have. Unfortunately in this strange place, civilization was no longer answering the phone.

The battlefield stretched around him under a sky that had begun to lose its color. It was not the dramatic red of an expensive period film, nor the picturesque gold of a historical drama where everyone died beautifully. It was a wet, filthy, exhausted sort of evening, with clouds smeared low over the horizon and smoke flattening itself against them. The air stank of mud, blood, shit, trampled grass, and the sour heat of opened bodies beginning to cool. Somewhere to his left, flies had already gathered in such numbers that their buzzing had become its own weather.

Shimon stood with both hands around the broken spear he had taken from the man he had killed. 

No, from the man who had tried to kill him, he corrected himself because the distinction mattered. It mattered so much that he repeated it a few times in his head while carefully avoiding looking at the body again.

The spear shaft was cracked near the middle and rough enough to bite into his palm, but it had a metal point still attached and it had already proven, in a deeply unpleasant practical demonstration, that it could keep another human being at a distance. In a world apparently committed to murdering him with agricultural equipment and historical authenticity, that made it more valuable than anything else he had ever owned.

Except maybe Mochi. A thought of his pet struck him with such ordinary cruelty that his throat tightened. Mochi was alone in the apartment. Mochi would have food for the night. The automatic feeder had been filled that morning, because Shimon might have been many things, but he was not the sort of man who let a cat suffer. There was water. There were two litter boxes, because Mochi had strong opinions about hygiene for a creature who enjoyed licking his own backside. Eri was supposed to come tomorrow. Daigo would probably call when Shimon did not answer. Someone would notice eventually. He would have to hold the universe to that.

Shimon looked down at the corpse nearest his feet.

The man had been young. That was the worst part, and not younger than Shimon by much, maybe not at all. His clothes were patched. His armor was cheap, more laced plates and hardened leather than anything and the man’s sandals—waraji a bit of his mind corrected—were almost falling apart.

There was a small pouch tied at his waist which the young man stared at for a long, long moment.

“No,” he said, but his voice came out too thin.

The man had tried to rob him. The man had come at him with two others. The man had been part of the reason Shimon was standing in a corpse field with blood stiffening on his hands and a spear he did not know how to use. If morality worked on a points system, Shimon was almost certainly allowed to take the pouch. 

So he took it.

Because money meant there was civilization somewhere. Money meant markets, contracts, wages, rent, debt, tax, and therefore shelter. Money meant there were places where having money mattered. 

And he would need a weapon to protect himself and his money. He found the first sword on a body half-buried beneath two others. It was not a glamorous discovery. There was no beam of light, no swelling orchestra, no ancient blade waiting for its destined master. There was only Shimon kneeling in the mud while trying not to vomit as he pushed aside a dead man’s arm with the butt of the broken spear. The body wearing the sword had no head.

That made it both worse and, somehow, easier.

The corpse lay face-down, or would have if it still had a face. A short banner frame had snapped across his back, the cloth dark with mud and blood but still visible enough to show some kind of crest Shimon could not identify. The little flag had been mounted behind the armor, not carried in the hand. Sashimono, his brain supplied with the slightly smug helpfulness of a search engine that did not understand context. Very cool when it was not attached to a headless man in front of you.

“Sorry,” Shimon whispered.

The corpse did not object, but that was of little comfort. The sword was caught beneath the man’s weight. Shimon had to hook the spear under the body’s shoulder and lever it upward, an action that produced a wet shift in the mud and a sound from the corpse that made him gag hard enough to see sparks. He stopped, breathed through his mouth, regretted breathing through his mouth, then pulled again until he could get at the belt.

His hands shook while he worked the weapon free.

The blade in its scabbard was heavier than he expected. He drew it for a moment. It was not huge, not the ridiculous oversized slabs of metal that fantasy games depicted, but of a killing length. The scabbard was lacquered dark beneath the grime. The fittings were plain, but they were not crude. Even Shimon, whose expertise in swords came mostly from entertainment, could tell that despite failing its master that this was a good weapon.

A better than average blade, he thought.

Then, with a sort of sick practicality that disgusted him and kept him alive, he checked for the second one.

The shorter blade was tucked close, easier to miss beneath the torn cloth and the wreckage of the man’s gear. A wakizashi, or close enough that his ignorance could safely hide behind the word. It came free with a little resistance.

“Borrowing,” he said, because apparently he had begun negotiating with corpses. “Emergency borrowing. I’ll return it if there’s an afterlife and a claims department.”

The line should have made him laugh. It didn’t.

He wiped mud from the scabbards with the least bloody part of a dead man’s sleeve, then froze because he had just used a dead man’s sleeve as a cleaning cloth. This place was already changing him.

The longer sword went through his belt badly. Everything about it sat wrong. He had no idea how the knots were supposed to work, no idea what angle made sense, no idea whether he looked like a warrior or an idiot. The shorter blade he tucked beside it, adjusting and readjusting until they felt vaguely comfortable. The weight at his hip felt obscene at first, then reassuring, then obscene again for being reassuring.

Two blades. He could probably barely use one. If he tried to draw a sword in a fight, he suspected he would cut his own thigh open and die with the expression of a man betrayed by cinematography. But two blades meant something. It sang to his soul.

Maybe not here, maybe not exactly, maybe not in whatever insane version of the Warring States period had decided to install orange quest text, and looters with very real weapons, but it meant something enough to risk. A man with two blades might be treated differently from a peasant. A man with two blades might be mistaken for someone with backing, rank, protection, a family, a lord, consequences. In a world where clothing could be identity and identity could be armor, Shimon was willing to commit fashion fraud.

The spear stayed in his hand only until he found its unbroken brother, an almost identical weapon that had survived in better condition. The spear had seniority over the swords.

Despite gagging, the young man searched the pouches. He took the coins.. He took a half-empty gourd because water was not money either, though the liquid inside was probably stale. He took a strip of relatively clean cloth to wrap around his left palm. He took pieces of armor and period correct clothing, adoring himself the best he could. Not wanting to draw attention, he stored his modern clothes in a container he had made from dead men's funeral garb.

The orange screen appeared at the edge of his vision, a polite reminder of this world’s insanity.

Condition Updated:TiredShocked

“Thank you,” Shimon said. “Very useful. Love the customer service.”

The screen did not respond and the world in general did not respond. He hated that it did not respond. Shimon hated even more that a part of him wanted it to. A system with dialogue would have been terrifying.

He turned in a slow circle, taking in the mess that the universe had laid out for him.

The battlefield rolled away in uneven stretches of bodies, torn banners, discarded spears, broken shafts of arrows. Beyond it, through the early evening haze and mist, he could see water.

A river broad enough that the far bank looked far away indeed. Its surface reflected the dying light in dull broken strips. The sight of it struck him with such relief that he almost laughed. Big rivers meant people. People needed water. Settlements grew near rivers. Roads followed them. Boats moved along them. If there was one thing geography, civilization games, and basic human laziness agreed upon, it was that rivers mattered. It was a place where his newfound wealth would prove useful.

He did not know where he was. He had no clue in the slightest

That should have been impossible. He had not been unconscious for long, he thought. He had been in the New Kanda Metropolitan Archive Annex, looking at a strange book. The Crimson Age of the Warring Kingdoms, or something like it. Then mist, cold, shouting, blood, men trying to rob him, a spear in his hands, a man folding around the point of it.

There were several conclusions available.

One was that he had suffered a catastrophic neurological event and was hallucinating in a hospital bed while his family argued over insurance forms.

Another was that the archive had contained some kind of illegal full-dive system or experimental historical immersion rig, which was an idea so stupid and lawsuit-generating that it almost became plausible again.

One was that he had been transported to another world.

Shimon did not like the third conclusion because it was the sort of conclusion only acceptable in fiction, and fiction was written by very dubious people indeed.

The river pulled at him with promise and direction.

He moved toward it with the spear in one hand and the stolen swords bumping at his hip. His legs felt weak. Not broken, not injured in any obvious way, but loose and unwilling beneath him now that adrenaline had left. Every few steps he looked back, morbidly expecting one of the dead to rise and to accuse him of some sort of crime.

The dead, however, remained very quiet.

At the riverbank he crouched, then stopped himself before drinking. There might be bodies upstream and all sorts of deadly microbes and parasites in the water. That was not paranoia. Instead, he splashed some water over his hands anyway, the cold biting deep as blood thinned and swirled away from his fingers.

For a moment, he almost felt better. That was until he saw his reflection.

The man in the river was pale under mud and blood, with black hair stuck damply to his forehead and eyes too wide for his face. He looked younger than Shimon felt and older than Shimon wanted to be. Wearing a mix of lacquered armor and period correct clothing, there were two swords at his hip and a spear in his hand.

The reflection looked like someone pretending to be dangerous. He stood and began walking along the river, away from the battlefield. Away from the dead. He kept the river on his right because it was difficult to get lost if one half of the world remained water, though after twenty minutes he realized this was the exact kind of thought that was pointless without any point of reference.

The ground rose and dipped. Mud pulled at his sandals. Grass slapped wet against his legs. The spear served as a walking staff, focusing on just placing one foot in front of the other.

The noises reached him before the castle did.

He dropped into a crouch so fast his knee slid in the mud, heart hammering hard enough to hurt. But the sound was wrong. Not the crashing animal roar of men running into each other with death and murder in their hearts. There were shouts, yes, and drums or something like drums, but beneath them came laughter, singing, the scattered rhythm of celebration. Human joy carried across the riverbank with a cruelty all its own.

He crept forward hoping that he would not be spotted.

The castle stood ahead on raised ground, more earthwork and timber and layered defenses than the clean white towers his modern brain insisted on filing under Japanese castle. It looked rawer, lower, more practical. Fires burned within and around it. Torches moved along the walls, figures crossing through the light. It was the sound, his brain suggested, of celebration.

The defenders of the castle had probably won.

Shimon did not know that, not in any clean historical sense. He only knew that the people inside the castle sounded alive, organized, and numerous, which meant they were either the safest thing he had found so far or the most efficient way to die next.

His mouth had gone dry.

He had two stolen blades at his hip and a spear in his hand. He was covered in blood. Though still vaguely understandable, he did not speak the local language as the natives did. He did not know who owned the corpse he had taken the swords from. He did not know if what he wore made him an ally of the castle or an enemy of it. He did not know whether walking up to the gate would result in help, interrogation, recruitment, enslavement, or even execution.

A drunken cheer rose from the castle and Shimon flinched as if struck.

No. Not yet. I need more information.

He backed away one step, then another, the spear butt scraping behind him. He turned, crouched low, and moved toward the darker shape of trees beyond the riverbank. Slowly, his unhurried walk became a jog, became a run.

Branches whipped at his face as he entered the woods. The world narrowed to trunks, undergrowth, breath, pain, mud, the slap of his own feet, the clatter of stolen swords, the spear catching on vines and shrubs until he nearly threw it away. He did not know what he was running from.

Nothing chased him, but the man so out of place ran anyway.

The woods swallowed the sounds of the celebration behind him. The trees grew closer, the ground rougher. Twice he almost fell despite his enhanced reflexes granted to him by advanced science, the spear skidding away through dead leaves. He scrambled after it and picked it up. The spear was necessary.

When he finally stopped, it was not because he had chosen to. His body simply refused another step.

He leaned against a tree, bent double, and dragged air into his lungs in ragged strips. His chest burned and his throat tasted metallic. Sweat chilled on his skin beneath clothes that were already damp from the evening's chill and mist. The two blades at his hip seemed to weigh so heavily.

“Good job,” he whispered to himself. “Excellent tactical withdrawal from the possibility of shelter.”

The woods around him did not make any comments on the matter.

At first he found that reassuring. Leaves moved, branches creaked, and insects called from hidden places. Somewhere far away, a bird gave a sharp cry and went silent. Normal forest noises. Ancient Japan, or ancient not-Japan, would have normal forests. Normal forests had boars, deer, foxes, bears, snakes, mosquitoes, parasites. But normal was still a category he could endure.

Then something clicked in the trees. Not a branch breaking, not quite. A dry, hollow, double sound then a click-click, pause, then click.

Shimon slowly raised his head. Between two trunks, something pale moved.

He froze so completely that even his breathing seemed to stop. The shape was low to the ground, but not small. Too narrow for a boar. Too angular for a deer. He caught only pieces of it through the brush: a pale flank, or maybe hide; a joint bending the wrong way; the gleam of something wet; a head that dipped and vanished before his eyes could settle on it.

Boar, he thought. It was a boar. 

It had to be a boar. 

Boars were terrifying enough. People forgot that because modern civilization had successfully put pigs between buns that the original animal was quite fierce indeed. A wild boar could open up a man’s stomach like a zipper. That was bad, but bad was fine and could be dealt with, a part of his mind analyzed. The problem was that the creature had scanned the forest with reptilian eyes.

Another sound answered it from deeper in the woods.

This one was not a grunt. It was not a growl. It was a thin, rising whine that broke halfway through into a chittering rattle, as if a fox, a cicada, and a broken printer were having a party.

Shimon’s skin crawled. Bear, he tried to suggest to himself and failing miserably.

The brush shifted again.

Three shapes this time, or one shape moving too quickly between the trees. His biochip tried to help. Peripheral attention sharpened. Motion sorted itself into fragments filled with calculations of angles, distance, and threat lines. However, none of that told him what he was seeing and could answer his fears.

The spear trembled in his hands before the orange text appeared.

Warning: Unidentified Hostile Presence Detected

“No, damnit. No…” Shimon breathed, schooling himself to some semblance of non-panic.

That was it. No helpful taxonomy. No level. No little red outline hovering politely over the bushes to show him where to point the spear. Just “Unidentified Hostile Presence,” thank you very much.

He backed away, his heel sinking into soft loam and mud.

When he looked down, he saw the footprint.

It was pressed deep near the base of the tree where water had gathered in a dark patch between roots. Three toes spread from a narrow heel, each ending in a sharp triangular point. The print was bigger than his head. Not a bird, or at least not a bird that one could not describe as anything but a monster. 

Something clicked again, closer this time.

Shimon turned and walked away from it very calmly for two dozen paces before he ran.

Civilization had regained much of its appeal.

It was almost embarrassing to think that once being possibly killed by humans had seemed frightening. Being possibly killed by humans seemed almost nostalgic now that the alternative involved monsters in the woods. Humans were terrible, but they were terrible in a familiar way. Monsters wanted whatever monsters wanted, and Shimon did not really wish to find out.

The young man from the modern age tried to retrace his path, but the trees that all looked like brothers did not cooperate.

The light failed faster under the trees and dusk thickened into a blue-grey confusion. Played with by the mist, the river sound came and went, sometimes on his right, sometimes ahead, once horribly behind him. The castle celebration had vanished entirely.

He stopped twice to listen and heard only his own breathing. Then, once again, from far back came that chittering whine again that pushed him to move.

Cold settled into him with patient fingers. It crept through wet cloth, under his sleeves, around his neck. Thirst arrived next, dull and humiliating and he was forced to drink the liquid from the gourd.

The spear caught under a root. He yanked it free and nearly fell. His swords banged against his hip with a clatter and his palm hurt from gripping his spear too hard. Somewhere along the way he had begun talking under his breath, not words exactly, just fragments.

“River. Castle. People. Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.”

The forest opened without warning.

He staggered into a stony hollow between low slopes, where the trees thinned and the ground rose toward a dark seam in the hillside. At first he thought it was only shadow. Then he saw a firelight. It was not much, just a small orange flicker, barely visible from the wrong angle, breathing against stone.

A cave with a fire within.

Shimon stopped at the edge of the hollow.

Every sensible instinct in his body advised him that approaching an unknown cave at night in a hostile fantasy-adjacent environment was one of the classic methods by which idiots volunteered for natural selection. 

The fire changed the calculation. A fire meant warmth and fire meant someone had already checked that the cave did not currently contain a bear. And a fire meant a human being, or something close to it.

Shimon crouched behind a tree and watched.

The firelight flickered from somewhere just inside the cave mouth, throwing an uneven glow over the stone. Smoke drifted out low and thin, hugging the dark. He could smell it now: woodsmoke, damp ash, and something fatty beneath it. Food? 

He waited, but nothing emerged.

His legs shook. Not dramatically, just a small incessant thing that reminded him of his weakness.

“Hello?” he called, but his voice barely carried.

He tried again, louder, shaping the word in Japanese. “Hello? I don’t want trouble.”

Something moved inside the cave. Shimon tightened his grip on the spear until his fingers ached.

A man’s voice answered, cracked and frightened. The words came rough, distorted by an accent Shimon could not place and by the strange half-second lag in his head before meaning settled.

“Who’s there?”

“Lost,” Shimon said. “I’m lost. I’m not…”

The man inside shouted something, its meaning striking Shimon a heartbeat later.

Enemy.

Then the man came out of the cave.

He was limping badly, one hand clutched against his side, the other holding a short blade. Blood had soaked through his clothes from somewhere under the ribs or belly. His armor was gone if he had ever worn any. His hair had come loose. His eyes were huge in the firelight, white showing all around the dark, and in them Shimon saw not malice but terror.

That made everything worse.

The man probably thought Shimon had come to kill him.

“No,” Shimon said, backing up. “No, wait, I’m not—”

The man lunged.

It was not a good attack. Even Shimon could tell that. The man was wounded, exhausted, half-mad, and probably running on the last cruel reserves of panic. His step faltered as soon as he made it. The knife came forward too low, more desperate than aimed. Even without his enhanced reflexes he could have dodged it easily.

But a bad attack could still kill.

Shimon’s body moved before his thoughts formed. The spear came up between them. Not cleanly, not with skill, not yet, but strangely more than it had before.  He did not thrust so much as shove the point into the space the man was entering, both hands locked around the shaft, his feet sliding in the mud.

The man impaled himself, or that was the truth the young man told himself.

Shimon felt the awful resistance of flesh protesting steel. Then the give, the awful, unmistakable sensation of metal entering meat, transmitted through wood into his palms. The wounded man made a small surprised sound, almost offended, and his knife dropped into the leaves.

For a moment they stood joined by the spear, the man staring back at him with dying eyes.

Shimon stared back. “I said wait,” Shimon whispered.

The man tried to speak. Blood spilled over his lower lip instead. He grabbed the spear shaft with both hands, not pulling it out, just holding it as if it were the only solid thing left in the world.

Shimon yanked the spear out and the man sank to his knees. He remained like that for a few seconds before he fell sideways near the cave mouth, and the firelight caught his face.

Shimon did not move.

That frightened him enough to move again. He bent and snatched up the dead man’s knife, then immediately hated himself for doing it. The longer sword at his hip remained sheathed. Of course it did. He had not drawn it…

The orange screen opened, confirming his sins.

You have defeated a hostile combatant.16 Experience gained.

“Don’t,” Shimon begged, but the screen vanished.

He stood in the hollow, shaking harder now, while the corpse lay between him and the cave.

The dead man had attacked first. The dead man had been wounded and scared. The dead man had attacked first. The dead man had thought Shimon was hunting him. The dead man had attacked first.

Shimon repeated his mantra until the words lost meaning. Then he stepped around the body and entered the cave.

The warmth struck him like mercy.

It was not much of a cave, more a shallow hollow in the hillside that narrowed into darkness farther back. The fire burned in a ring of stones near the entrance. A few branches lay stacked beside it, not enough for the night but enough for a while. There was a bundle of cloth near the wall, a cracked bowl, and something wrapped in leaves that might have been food.

Shimon lowered himself beside the fire.

His knees did not bend properly. They simply gave out, and he sat hard enough to jar his teeth. The warmth reached his hands first. Pain bloomed as feeling returned to his fingers. He held them toward the flames and watched them tremble.

He should move the body.

That was the obvious thing. Bodies attracted things. The man was lying too close to the entrance. If Shimon needed to leave quickly, he would have to step over him.

He did not move the body. He could not, for he did not have the will nor the energy for it.

Instead, he fed another branch into the fire and watched sparks spiral upward toward the cave roof. His mind began to narrow around the flame. Orange. Gold. Black wood becoming red. Smoke sliding out into the cold. The small language of combustion remained the same here, at least. Fire still ate. Fire still warmed. Fire still made darkness stand a little farther away.

At some point he drank again from the gourd he had taken earlier, because thirst overpowered caution. He found the leaf-wrapped thing and discovered a lump of cold millet or rice mixed with something salty and sour. He ate half of it with shaking fingers.

“I’m sorry,” he told no one in particular.

Night gathered fully beyond the cave mouth. The woods became a black wall. Sometimes things moved in it. Sometimes the movement was only wind. Sometimes it was not. Once, very far away, the chittering whine rose and fell again, and Shimon fed two branches into the fire at once.

He sat with a spear across his lap, the stolen swords at his hip, and a corpse just outside his current accommodation.

He really should do something about the body, his mind insisted. But, his stomach turned at the very thought.

So he stayed by the fire and tried to think.

The system had given him experience. Thirty-seven before. More now. There was a quest. Survival. Survive until dawn. Optional objectives: kill more hostiles, find suitable shelter. Basic Class Selection as a reward. It was absurd. It was monstrous. It was, from a game design perspective, embarrassingly direct. No tutorial NPC. No safe starting village. No helpful inventory menu. Just trauma, murder, and a cold little promise that if he lived long enough, he would be offered a way to specialize.

Class Selection.

He hated that some part of him cared.

Shimon leaned closer to the fire. “Tomorrow,” he whispered.

Tomorrow he would go to the castle. Tomorrow he would find people, surrender, lie, beg, negotiate, pretend to be a very confused low-ranking samurai, or whatever combination of social inputs seemed least likely to result in immediate decapitation. Tomorrow he would figure out whether this was Japan, another world pretending to be Japan, a game, a hallucination, or some cosmic clerical error. Tomorrow he would be rational, but tonight he would try to stay warm.

The fire blurred.

He did not remember deciding to lie down. One moment he was sitting with the spear across his lap and his hands held toward the flames. The next he was curled on the hard cave floor with his back against stone, the stolen swords awkward beneath him, and his mind floating somewhere above his body where fear could not quite reach.

He dreamed of home. Not clearly, his mind was too scattered for that, but a dream he had in fragments. The quiet hum of his apartment. The feeder clicking open. Mochi’s paws on the floor. Daigo’s voice saying his name in that particular older-brother tone that turned concern into an accusation. Eri at the door with that annoying look on her face. The archive. The book. Red letters. Mist. A battlefield. A dead man’s eyes.

When Shimon woke, the fire had burned low to almost nothing as grey morning light seeped into the cave.

For a few seconds he did not understand where he was. His body knew before his mind did. Cold stone under his cheek. Smoke in his throat. The weight of swords at his side. Dried blood tightening the skin of his hands.

Then he opened his eyes and the corpse stared back at him from the cave mouth.

At some point in the night, the man had shifted. Or Shimon had, or perhaps the world had arranged itself for maximum cruelty. The dead man lay on his side facing inward, eyes half open, his mouth a dark hole. His expression had changed; In the firelight he looked terrified, but with the morning light he looked merely surprised.

Shimon stared into those dead eyes and the orange screen bloomed between them.

Quest Complete: SurvivalObjective Complete: Survive until dawnOptional Objective Complete: Find suitable shelterOptional Objective Complete: Kill more hostilesRewards Unlocked: Basic Class Selection45 Experience gained.

A second line appeared beneath the others as if mocking him.

Congratulations.

Shimon began to laugh and it was not a good sound.

Notes;

Total EXP: 98

Needs to choose class