Sengoku [Chapter 3] RAW (Patreon)

Chapter 3 - Yōma

“Life of man, fifty years, Under the sky, nothing but a dream and an illusion. Is there anyone who has lived and not died?” 

- Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582).

Shimon Ayanokouji laughed until his throat hurt.It was not a good laugh. It came out thin, broken, and wet at the edges. The dead man at the cave mouth remained dead, and the orange screen remained open.

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

Congratulations, you have advanced to the next level.

You have been assigned advancement points: 3 Attribute Points and 1 Skill Point.

Bonus points awarded for completing all quest objectives: 3 Attribute Points and 2 Skill Points.

[All advancement and bonus points must be spent within 20 minutes or they will be randomly assigned.]

“No,” Shimon uttered weakly. “No congratulations. This is bad, this is very bad.”

But a part of him realized that it could be much, much worse.

Attribute points? Skill points?

He knew they were important. He had played enough games to know that. Had made a life of it, in fact. A quick look at his status showed him that simply leveling up had increased both his Health and Stamina to ten, while his Mana had risen to twelve.

He sat up slowly, every part of him objecting to the endeavor. His back had spent the night negotiating with stone and had lost. His neck felt stiff, his hands were dirty, and blood lay dark in the cracks around his nails. The spear lay near him, just out of reach. The two stolen swords dug into his hip with the quiet insistence of consequences.

Outside the cave, morning had arrived in shades of grey, dull in its almost-normalcy.

Hesitantly, Shimon assigned one attribute point to Body.

The effect was immediate. He felt more solid, as if some invisible weight had settled properly into his bones. He felt more hale, whole, and stronger. But he could not afford to get lost in the strange sensation. The clock was ticking.

Shimon checked his status again. His Health and Stamina had both risen by one point to eleven, but his Dexterity sub-attribute had shot up by six points to forty-nine.

Alright, this is information, I guess.

Wanting to distract himself, he looked again at the dead man.

The man had attacked first, he justified to himself, and Shimon hated how quickly the thought came now. He hated how well-worn that path of thinking had already become. The man had attacked first. The man had lunged. The man had died.

“That was not my fault. You attacked me,” Shimon told the corpse.

The corpse kept its silence.

He forced his attention back to the experiment and placed one point into Mind.

As if summoned, sharp needles filled his skull.

Shimon sucked in a breath and grabbed at his head as something scratched behind his eyes, thin and bright and horrible. It was over in a few seconds, leaving only a sharp headache and the unpleasant knowledge that the system could hurt him from the inside.

Shaking his head, he reviewed the changes. Nothing had changed. Absolutely nothing.

“Great,” he muttered. 

And, because he was apparently a masochist, he put another point into Mind, wanting to prove that Mind had to be useful somehow.

This time his Mana went up by one point to thirteen, which he had sort of vaguely expected. What he had not expected was his Health also rising by one point to twelve, and that his Charisma going up by one point to ten.

Shimon stared at the numbers and shook his head.

“What is up with that?” the lost man said to no one in particular.

Perhaps the system doesn’t display fractions, he surmised. There was one more attribute to test, Spirit.

Girding his loins, he mentally assigned the point.

He felt odd. Lighter, almost, as if something inside him had loosened by a fraction. Almost serene and less weighed down, as if the world itself had adjusted its grip on him. But, for all that, the result was rather anticlimactic with his Fortune sub-attribute increased by one.

He now had three attribute points left and three skill points.

“That is mostly not my fault,” Shimon amended to the corpse.

The dead man’s expression did not change in the slightest.

The dull orange light brightened at the edge of his vision, and before he could object, a second panel opened.

Basic Class Selection Available.

Class Options: Merchant, Onmyoji, Priest, Gambler, Bandit, Ronin, Ninja, and Classless.

Shimon stared and for a while, he simply had nothing as the options hung across his vision, clean and bright and absurdly tidy. Like a game. This was his life now.

“Merchant,” he said, and the word felt almost insulting to his situation.

Merchant implied accounts. Ledgers. Buying low, selling high. It was not a terrible choice in theory. Money was civilization. Money was shelter, food, bribery, medicine, and the ability to make other people solve problems for you. Unfortunately, Shimon had arrived in a place where people seemed far more interested in stabbing you than making deals.

“Onmyoji,” he read next.

He knew the word. Every Japanese-adjacent fantasy story had an onmyoji somewhere. They usually worked with divination, spirits, barriers, and demons. Very useful, assuming the class came with a manual and not just expectations.

Magic was real. He was fairly sure he had come here by magic, unless the universe had discovered some exciting new branch of physics. But again, the problem was training. He had absolutely no idea where to start, and no formal instruction. Perhaps he could pick it up later, he thought wryly.

Priest was worse, because priest implied moral authority, and Shimon was currently sitting beside the body of a man he had killed, wearing clothes taken from other bodies, with money taken from a battlefield. If there were gods here, he had already made a poor first impression.

He doubted the myriad gods of this land would be eager to answer his prayers. Still, gaming logic dictated that priests might have very useful spells at their disposal. Maybe he would try praying at a shrine once he worked this whole thing out.

Gambler sounded suicidal, though a tiny treacherous part of him noted that Fortune was one of his sub-attributes and he did have nineteen points of it. Winning, if he could win, might be easy. Protecting his gains would be the difficult part and he most certainly did not want to gamble with his life.

Bandit was so offensive that he almost selected it out of spite against the universe. He had, after all, robbed the dead. He had taken money, weapons, clothing, food, and shelter. It was as if the system, or whatever it was, was making a professional assessment of him.

The young man swore at it under his breath.

His gaze stopped at Ronin.

A masterless warrior. A man with no lord, no protection, no place, and no reason to be treated gently. Also a man with two swords at his hip and a spear in his hand, which might be enough to survive the next adversarial conversation. It appealed to his sense of romance, which was embarrassing, and to his sense of immediate survival, which was harder to mock. Ronin would likely provide skills and abilities useful in his current situation.

Then there was Ninja.

Ninja sounded exciting until one remembered that actual infiltration and ninja-ing involved climbing walls, sleeping outdoors, carrying messages, avoiding biting guarddogs, and being executed very creatively if caught. The kanji for it was, in fact, “to endure,” and Shimon felt he had endured quite enough. That, and he had never liked annoying stealth games.

Classless was last.

At best, it would allow him to become a loser jack-of-all-trades, effectively gimping his character. At worst, it would give him nothing.

The lost man, truly lost now, looked at the sky above, then at the trees. And, for one precious minute, he lost himself completely.

“Full diagnostic,” Shimon whispered, willing his chip to obey as he put off the inevitable.

A cool blue interface unfolded beneath the orange memory of the system. It was not the same. He could tell that immediately. The system notifications had a strange weight to them. The chip overlay was cleaner, thinner, familiar in a way that made his chest hurt.

[DIAGNOSTIC REQUEST RECEIVED]

Neural Interface: StableCognitive Load: ElevatedSleep Quality: Severe DisruptionHydration: LowBlood Loss: MinorInfection Risk: MinorExternal VR Feed: None DetectedVisual Projector: DisengagedAuditory Overlay: DisengagedOlfactory Overlay: DisengagedMotor Assist: PassiveSystem Error: None Found

Shimon stared at the final line.

“No error,” he complained.

System Error: None Found.

“That is impossible.”

System Error: None Found.

“Do not repeat yourself at me… you useless…”

The chip, being a piece of experimental hardware rather than a supportive human, did not care. Insulting it would do no good

“Network access,” the young man ordered.

[NETWORK SEARCH INITIATED]

Local Device Mesh: No ConnectionCellular Network: No SignalSatellite Uplink: No SignalArchive Link: No ConnectionEmergency Company Channel: No ConnectionCivilian Internet: No ConnectionUnknown Carrier Signal: Intermittent

Shimon’s breath stopped, then he found himself to put forth his query, “Unknown carrier?”

Unknown Carrier Signal: IntermittentSignal Type: UnclassifiedProtocol Compatibility: NoneConnection Status: Low

For less than a second, he felt it. Not in his ears, not in his eyes. It was the ghost of a connection, a brush against the inside of his skull, the faintest pressure of something vast. Not consciousness, but raw energy. Energy.

“Nope,” he decided. “Absolutely not dealing with that until after breakfast, which I do not have. Too many things on my plate.”

First, he had to choose his class. Shimon chose Ronin because, somehow, it felt right.

This was different from assigning attribute points. This felt like the piece of a puzzle slotting into place, heavy with the importance of the moment. Memories filled him. Not his memories, but they felt like his. Putting on armor. Basic drills. Riding a horse. Drawing a bow. Swinging an axe. Lifting a hammer. The rhythm of footwork, the weight of steel, the discipline of becoming one with his weapons while trying to become a weapon himself. He experienced those moments a hundred times as echoes of his own life.

It was all so dizzying in its power and scope.

His base attributes were boosted across the board, and several new skills bloomed inside his status: Swords, Ranged [Bows], Hammers, Axes, Riding, Unarmed, Spirit Boost, Mind Boost, Heavy Armor, Medium Armor, Light Armor, and Body Boost. His other skills, except for Analysis, had also risen by a single point.

Three attribute points and three skill points remained to be assigned.

The three attribute points he put into Body because it felt like the safest option. The young professional gamer then placed one skill point into Spears and one again into Swords. Again, safe bets. The spear had already saved his life twice, and the swords at his hip were the lie he would use to survive society.

The final skill point, as a test, he placed into his new Body Boost skill. Predictably, it raised his Body attribute by two points.

Shimon stared at the results of his choices for a long moment. His Dexterity now seemed to be his defining attribute, more than double what it had been at level one.

Ayanokouji Shimon [Human]

Class: RoninLevel: 2Health: 8/8Mana: 10/10Stamina: 8/8

Exp: 43/120

Main Attributes: Body 15, Mind 14, Spirit 13

Sub Attributes: Dexterity 92 [Enhanced], Fortune 23, Charisma 12

Skills: Lightning Reflexes 15/20, Analysis 11/20, Spears 3/20, Pain Tolerance 2/20, Swords 2/20, Ranged [Bows] 1/20, Hammers 1/20, Axes 1/20, Unarmed 1/20, Spirit Boost 1/20, Mind Boost 1/20, Body Boost 2/20, Heavy Armor 1/20, Medium Armor 1/20, Light Armor 1/20.

Whatever had happened, whatever he had had chosen, he was in a much better place than he was before when he came here. 

He swallowed against the dryness in his throat and gave the next command before uncertainty could talk him out of it. “Where am I?”

[LOCATION REQUEST RECEIVED]

GPS: UnavailableNetwork Geolocation: UnavailableMap Cache: AvailableAstronomical Observation Log: AvailableTerrain Estimation: PartialHistoric Geographic Reference: Unstable

Processing...

Shimon waited and the corpse continued to stare at nothing.

[OFFLINE LOCATION ESTIMATE]

Country: JapanRegion: KantōHistoric Province Estimate: Shimōsa / Musashi border zoneHydrological Landmark: Large river consistent with Edo River systemTerrain and settlement pattern consistent with Konodai regionConfidence: 61%

Warning: Historic reference data conflicts with observed events.

Shimon read the panel twice. Then a third time, sifting through the meaning there.

“Konodai,” he said.

The name struck some old dusty shelf in his memory. A battle. Or two battles. The details were hazy at best. It was the sort of thing he half-knew because he had once lost an ironman game campaign after failing to secure a river crossing, then spent two hours reading articles to justify his firm belief that the game had in fact cheated somehow.

Konodai vaguely meant Chiba to him, which meant the Edo River,  castles, and blood thirsty regional warlords. A place that existed, or had existed, but not like this. More importantly, to the best of his knowledge, it had not contained much in the way of monsters.

“Observed events,” he said carefully. “What conflicts?”

Observed events include non-standard military banners, unregistered clan identifiers, unidentified biological hostiles, and system-level metaphysical overlay incompatible with known physical models.

Most of that was rubbish, just more technobabble and more evidence of the absurdity of his situation.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until sparks bloomed. 

Japan. That was the first good news. Sort of.

He was in Japan. Not Mars, not a completely alien world, not a fantasy continent where everyone had names involving too many apostrophes. Japan meant food he might recognize, customs he might half-understand, and a language close enough for the chip to work with. Japan also meant that he had been thrown into a version of it where monsters were real and UN charter and human rights did not exist.

“Show map.”

A translucent map unfolded in his vision. It was not perfect. Large sections were shaded in grey where modern roads, bridges, rail lines, and cities should have been. The chip overlaid cached historical geography against what it had observed: river, slope, battlefield, castle, forest, probable road, possible settlement.

The castle sat ahead and slightly north-east by the chip’s estimate, marked with an uncertain red outline. The battlefield lay south-west. The cave had been tagged as Temporary Domicile with a small icon.

Shimon studied the map with great intent.

“Nearest village,” he said. “Not the castle. Village near the castle, preferably one with people, food, and a lower chance of violent encounters.”

Route Planning Parameters: Avoid battlefield. Avoid castle gate. Avoid dense forest where possible. Prioritize roads and inhabited areas.

A blue line appeared. It curved through the woods, down a slope, and joined a road that ran roughly toward a settlement on lower ground near the castle’s outer economic orbit.

Estimated distance: 4.2 kilometers.Travel time: 58 minutes.Threat level: Unknown.

“Threat level: Unknown, that is the least comforting unknown I have ever seen.”

He almost laughed again, but stopped himself because he was not entirely sure he would be able to stop.

Packing took very little time, because he owned almost nothing, and most of what he owned had belonged to dead people yesterday. He took the dead man’s knife. He took the remaining lump of cold millet or rice wrapped in leaves and forced himself to eat half of it despite the way his stomach objected. He drank the last of the stale liquid from the gourd. Of his old clothes and shoes, he wrapped them into a cloth bag. Perhaps he could sell them as curiosities somewhere.

Then he took a moment to adjust himself, because apparently survival depended upon it. The strange thing was that he understood more than he had before. Not perfectly, but the knowledge was there now, sitting under his skin like a borrowed habit. The Ronin class and its new armor skills had left something behind in him: an echo of hands tightening cords, shoulders settling beneath weight, armor plates shifting when a man breathed. He knew, in the same unsettling way he now knew how to stand with a sword, that the dō should sit higher on his torso, that the kusazuri needed room to move over his hips, that badly tied suneate would rub his shins bloody before noon.

It felt as if he had done this before.

The armor he had looted was still not the best. The dō, a battered cuirass of lacquered plates and old lacing, sat badly on his torso until he tugged and adjusted it. The cords were stiff with dried mud and blood, but his fingers found the knots with an ease that did not belong to him. The kusazuri hanging from the bottom of it, those skirt-like armor panels meant to guard the hips and thighs, had been catching against his stolen clothing. He shifted them, loosened one cord, tightened another, and suddenly they slapped less awkwardly against his legs.

Kote sleeves covered his forearms, the cloth beneath its mail and little iron plates stained brown-black, but mismatched. The suneate on his shins were also mismatched, one tied more securely than the other, and the haidate protecting his thighs had clearly been made for a shorter, broader man. 

Shimon pulled, retied, shifted, and cursed under his breath until the whole arrangement felt, for lack of a better word, better.

“I should probably pick up a helmet somewhere,” he muttered.

A kabuto, ideally. Something between his skull and the many exciting ways this era had invented to open it.

He considered moving the body.

The dead man lay at the cave mouth, one arm bent under him, face turned toward the place where Shimon had slept. Flies had already found him. Not many yet, but enough.

“I should bury you,” Shimon said to himself more than anything.

In that moment, a part of him meant it.

He also meant to be a better person, call his grandmother more often, eat vegetables, and sleep eight hours. But, the ground outside the cave was stony. He had no shovel. There were monsters in the woods. He could not spend an hour making a symbolic hole for a man who had tried to kill him.

“I’m sorry,” Shimon said.

Then he stepped around the body and left.

The forest in the morning was both better and worse. Better, because daylight had returned. Worse, because daylight revealed enough detail to prove that imagination had not been doing all the work. The trees were wet and close, their leaves heavy with overnight mist. Spiderwebs jeweled between branches. Mushrooms grew in pale clusters along fallen logs. Once, he found a mark scored into the bark of a tree at shoulder height: three deep parallel gouges from could only have been left by a monster.

The blue route line led him through the undergrowth.

He followed it with his trusty spear held in both hands.

The two swords bumped at his hip with each step, but they felt better now, having adjusted them as best he could. His stolen clothing smelled of smoke, sweat, iron, and damp cloth. His feet hurt inside primitive sandals. Somewhere in the back of his mind, his modern self kept trying to warn and complain to him about blisters.

A sound came from deeper among the trees.

Click-click.

Shimon stopped.

Click.

“No,” he whispered.

He decided to move faster. Not running, because running made noise and burned through Stamina. But he walked with greater purpose, stepping over roots, ducking under branches, letting the chip’s route guide pull him through the path of least resistance. The young man pointedly did not look back.

Another sound came to his left, a thin chittering whine that rose and broke and his grip tightened on the spear until his fingers hurt.

The blue line bent downhill and he followed it with the obedience of a man who had lost all faith in free will. Slowly, the trees began to thin after what felt like an hour and was, according to the chip, seventeen minutes. The ground softened, then opened into a strip of grass and scrub at the edge of a narrow track. Beyond it lay a proper road.

But proper would be a generous term. It was packed earth churned by feet, hooves, wheels, rain. Ruts ran through it like wounds. Puddles reflected the grey sky.

Shimon almost cried from relief as he spied people moving along the so-called road. A stream of them.

Men with bundles on their backs. Women carrying baskets. Boys driving thin oxen. Two old men pushing a handcart stacked with firewood. A woman with a child tied to her back and another clinging to her sleeve. A pair of monks or priests or something priest-adjacent in patched robes, one of them carrying a shakujō—a wooden pole topped with a finial of metal loops, which jangled when shaken. Several men carried spears and an assortment of weaponry.

A kago—a wooden palanquin—passed with two muscled bearers, the passenger hidden behind lowered blinds. Later came something finer: a norimono with lacquered panels and a small retinue around it. Spearmen walked to either side, servants trailed behind with boxes and bundles, and a mounted man with a hard face rode near the front.

Shimon stared as they passed.

The mounted man was armored, but that was not the part that held Shimon’s attention. He was riding a bipedal lizard perhaps seven meters from nose to tail, with powerful hind legs, small grasping forelimbs, and a long snout filled with teeth. Tyrannosaurid, a quiet part of his mind supplied. It was a dinosaur.

The terrified young man swallowed and stood very still until the beast and its rider were farther down the road. Only then, gathering what little courage remained to him, did Shimon step onto the road. A few people looked at him, but not much else happened.

Most of them simply looked away. He had been prepared to be shouted at, accused, challenged, bowed to, arrested, recruited, or killed. But then again, compared to a thunder lizard, he probably looked quite banal indeed.

A few eyes lingered on the swords. A few on his height. He was not enormous by modern standards, but here he stood taller than most men around him, lanky and narrow and pale beneath the accrued dirt. One older woman gave him the particular glance reserved for strange young men who might become trouble. A boy stared until his mother cuffed him lightly on the back of the head.

Shimon released a breath he had not known he was holding.

“Actually working,” he whispered in modern Japanese.

The road, it seemed, did not care about his existence.

So he joined the flow and kept his mouth shut. Questions, he decided, were dangerous. Questions could land him in a very hot spot of trouble. Questions could become the sort of social interaction that ended with someone discovering he did not know who currently controlled the region, what year it was, which clan he was pretending not to belong to, or why his accent sounded so strange.

Best keep his mouth shut, he affirmed.

He walked and deep inside his brain the biochip listened.

After five minutes, a prompt appeared in blue.

Local language corpus expanding.

Observed speech pattern: Japanese-adjacent.Detected variance from modern Japanese: Significant phonology drift, archaic vocabulary, regional register, unknown loan terms, metaphysical terminology.Current comprehension estimate: 64% contextual, 41% literal.

Would you like to begin analysis of local languages and update speech protocols?

A wave of nostalgia hit him. This had been one of the advantages of his parents selling him out to a corporation. Shimon could master languages, and master languages quickly as his grades in Spanish and Japanese had shown.

Yes, he affirmed mentally.

Analysis started.

Warning: Additional data required for accurate speech generation.Estimated adaptation speed: High due to Japanese-language proximity.Recommendation: Continue passive observation. Avoid extended speech until update completes.

“No problem,” Shimon whispered to himself in English. “Avoiding speech is my strongest social skill.”

A man walking ahead of him glanced back.

Shimon looked down at the road as if the mud had become fascinating.

In this manner, he continued his journey, listening to snippets of conversation carried to him by the wind or tossed out by those he passed. Complaints about taxes. Complaints about soldiers. Complaints about the price of rice, the quality of sandals, the arrogance of men with swords, and whether the castle would actually pay what it owed. Civilization, he was discovering, had many forms, but complaining appeared to be universal.

Eventually, the road carried him toward the settlement.

The sound of it greeted him first.

Not the organized celebration of the castle. This was messier, lower, and more human. Voices layered over one another. Packhorses snorted and stamped as men tugged them through the mud. Handcarts creaked beneath bundles of firewood and sacks of rice. Chickens scattered between bare feet and straw sandals with suicidal confidence. Somewhere a drum beat a quick rhythm and smoke stained the sky in several thin columns beyond a low spread of thatched roofs.

The village had swollen for market day into something larger, uglier, and far more alive. Farmhouses stood along the road with steep roofs of straw and reed, their timber frames darkened by age and smoke. Mud walls and woven fences enclosed small yards where tools leaned against sheds, firewood sat stacked beneath eaves, and children watched the passing crowd with the solemn suspicion of village cats. Irrigation ditches ran beside parts of the road, carrying brown water down toward the paddies beyond the houses. A little ways off, he could see winter-bare fields, stubble, and wet earth waiting for the next season’s work.

Temporary stalls had been raised wherever space allowed. Mats were spread beneath reed awnings. Baskets, hoes, sickles, jars, rope, rough cloth, dried fish, charcoal, sandals, charms, bundles of firewood, pickled vegetables, and more things Shimon did not know how to name crowded the edges of the street. A small roadside shrine stood half-hidden behind the market clutter, its stone figure wearing a faded red bib.

And weapons, there were weapons everywhere.

Spears stacked in bundles. Helmet bowls piled like cookware. Armor plates with broken cords. Arrows sorted by length. Blades laid out on cloth, some rusted, some chipped, some in almost perfect condition. One stall had an entire row of damaged swords with little paper slips tied to them. Another man was selling what appeared to be individual armor pieces stripped from different owners.

Post-battle economy, Shimon thought.

A woman ladled something steaming into bowls. A boy turned skewers over charcoal until fat hissed into smoke. A man shouted prices for dried fish in a loud voice. A pair of mummers in masks performed some crude argument that made several men laugh. Dice clattered in a ring of crouched gamblers. Somewhere nearby, someone played a flute badly, but with immense confidence.

There was alcohol too. Men sat under an awning with cups, already loud despite the hour. A few women watched passersby from behind latticed doors painted in tired colors, their faces composed, their clothing brighter. Shimon looked once, understood, and looked away quickly enough that one of them laughed.

He was hungry, thirsty, and rather dirty.

The realization arrived with the cruelty of the obvious. His body had been too frightened to make proper demands earlier, but now that there was cooked rice and something that might have been miso or fish broth or both, hunger woke like a roused beast.

He had money, but he also had no idea what anything cost, what coins he had, whether the coins belonged to an enemy army, whether trying to pay would expose him as a corpse-robber, or whether he could negotiate without sounding like a time traveler with a head injury.

So he stood at the edge of the market pretending to be thoughtful.

The chip continued to listen, his companion true.

Local speech corpus: expanding.Comprehension estimate: 71% contextual, 53% literal.Speech generation pending.

A child ran past him with a sticky rice cake in one hand. Shimon watched the child go with the hollow resentment of an adult who had survived a battle, killed two men, slept in a cave, and still could not buy breakfast.

That was when someone bumped into him.

It was not a dramatic collision. Just a shoulder against his arm, a muttered apology, a body entering his personal space. Then, Shimon’s body reacted before conscious thought did, his left hand snapping down and closing around a wrist like a sprung trap.

The man attached to it froze.

Slimy was the first word Shimon’s exhausted mind supplied, and while it was unkind, it was not inaccurate. The man was narrow-faced, grey-skinned in the way of poor diet and poor intentions, with thin lips, sparse facial hair, and eyes that had been born looking for exits. His clothing was ordinary enough to vanish in a crowd, patched but not desperate. His fingers were halfway under the fold of Shimon’s stolen outer garments and armor, very near the pouch tied at his waist.

For half a second, both of them looked at the hand. Then they looked at each other and the pickpocket smiled. The thief twisted, trying to break free, and his other hand dipped toward something at his belt. A knife, maybe. A sliver of metal flashed.

Shimon moved with a serpent’s swiftness, fast enough that several people nearby gasped. He wrenched the man’s wrist outward until the fingers opened, then shoved him back. The pickpocket stumbled, recovered, and hissed something that the chip translated only as insult-threat-filth.

He was rewarded for his, or rather his body’s 

You have learned Unarmed 2.

The crowd’s attention gathered and that was the true danger.

Shimon felt it before he understood it. People were watching to see what category he belonged to. Fool, victim, warrior, or just plain lunatic? A man with two swords could not simply squeak, clutch his purse, and apologize for being robbed. A man with two swords needed to respond in a way that made sense to the world around him.

A thought arrived cold and horrible. Killing the pickpocket would probably make sense.

A real samurai, or at least the version of one from films and games, might cut the man down for the insult. Or have him beaten. Or do something else publicly educational. The crowd did not necessarily want death, but it wanted a shape it could understand.

Shimon did not draw his sword. Instead, he stepped forward and slapped the man across the face with his free hand, and it was not a little slap.

His whole body went into it: filled with all of his fear, hunger, humiliation. His palm cracked across the pickpocket’s cheek with a sound sharp enough to cut through the market noise.

The man hit the mud. For one perfect, awful second, the crowd fell silent.

Shimon stood over him, spear in one hand, two swords at his hip, face blank because he had no idea what expression to use, and said nothing.

The pickpocket groaned, and somewhere, someone laughed. Then another person laughed, louder. A man near the food stall barked what sounded like approval. The market returned to itself. The pickpocket scrambled backward through the mud, one hand pressed to his cheek, eyes wide not with pain alone but with recalculation. He spat something that was probably a curse and crawled away and Shimon just watched him go.

Inside, his heart was trying to escape through his ribs. But, outside, he remained stoic and silent.

The silence helped. He could feel that immediately. The crowd placed meaning into it for him. Grim restraint, offended dignity, or perhaps that rarer thing, perhaps even mercy. All sorts of things that were more impressive than the truth

The man held up one skewer of something browned and dripping fat, then raised two fingers.

Price? Quantity?

Shimon’s chip, mercifully, highlighted a coin suggestion from his pouch based on observed transactions. He drew one small coin and held it up.

The food stall man squinted, shrugged, took it, and handed him two skewers, causing Shimon to almost believe in God.

He moved away before anyone could ask him anything complicated and ate standing beneath the edge of an awning. The meat was tough, greasy, smoky, and so good that for several seconds he forgot himself. He did not know what animal it came from and he decided not to question it.

Language corpus: sufficient for basic interaction.Speech protocol update at 72%.

“Great,” he whispered around the second bite. “Only twenty-eight percent away from sounding like an idiot with confidence.”

A drumbeat rolled across the market. But this rhythm was sharper, meant to gather attention. People turned toward a cleared space near the center of the market where a man climbed onto a barrel with the stiff caution of someone who had done it before and fallen off at least once.

He was broad through the middle, wearing a short coat marked with a symbol Shimon did not recognize. It was small, about the size of a family mon, worked into the cloth in dark thread: a stepped triangle with a large dot near its top and another set beneath it along the bottom edge, giving the impression of watchful eyes turned on their side. A sword hung at the portly man’s side, but it looked more ceremonial than serious. Beside the barrel stood two men with polearms and the relaxed posture of people well paid to discourage interruptions.

The man on the barrel clapped his hands. Then he began to shout.

The chip translated in fragments at first.

“—men of courage—service—coin paid in good weight—by order and seal—Adventurer’s Za—”

Shimon stopped chewing as the words grew clearer as the speech model caught up.

“Listen well! Listen well! The field beyond Konodai is fat with the dead, and every dead man is a lantern to hungry things. The routed men of the western host crawl through the reeds and woods. Some still carry blades. Some carry wounds. Some carry curses, and where curses fester, yōma gather.”

A murmur moved through the crowd at that word.

Yōma.

Shimon felt the forest sounds crawl back under his skin.

The man on the barrel lifted a string of coins so that they flashed in the grey morning light.

“The castle has no men to waste chasing every rat through the grass. The headmen want the roads clear. The merchants want their carts free from harm. The shrines want the dead burned before worse things wear their faces. So the Adventurer’s Za calls for able hands. Work in groups. Bring proof of kills. Bring word of nests. Bring back the living if they are worth ransom, heads if they are not.”

A laugh ran through part of the crowd, but such gallows merriment did not reach everyone.

Several men had moved closer.

Scruffy warrior types, Shimon thought. They were armed men, mostly young, mostly poor, with the hungry posture of those who owned violence and not much else. Some wore armor pieces that did not match. One had a helmet hanging from his belt. Another carried two swords with the casual comfort Shimon had failed to imitate all morning. A third had scars across his cheek and a spear whose blade had been polished very recently.

Their eyes passed over the crowd. Then several of them looked at Shimon. The two stolen swords, the stolen spear, the stolen armor, the height, and the strength of the slap that had flattened a pickpocket. But, most of all, they registered his silence and a few gazes narrowed in predatory calculation.

Shimon looked back because looking away felt like blood in the water.

The orange screen opened.

[QUEST RECEIVED]

Hunt the Yōma

Issuer: Adventurer’s ZaObjective: Join a hunting party clearing routed soldiers and yōma drawn to the Konodai battlefield.Optional Objective 1: Identify source of yōma activity.Optional Objective 2: Rescue surviving non-hostiles.Optional Objective 3: Acquire proof of guild recognition.Reward: Coin, Experience, Local ReputationFailure: Injury, Death, Consumption, Spiritual Contamination

Accept?

Shimon stared at the word consumption.

“Consumption,” he whispered bitterly. “As in tuberculosis, or as in being eaten?”

The world did not answer him.

He could just walk away. That was the obvious answer. Walk away from the quest, from the armed men, from the battlefield, from yōma, from everything. Find somewhere quiet and become a very quiet farmhand. Live anonymously and avoid combat. Avoid quests and avoid experience. Avoid whatever the world and the system wanted from him.

Except that doing quests meant growing in power, and growing in power meant that he was safer. Farmers died easily in worlds like this. He hated that he knew that.

The world had already explained the design language to him with brutal simplicity. Violence gave numbers. Numbers gave survival. Survival gave tomorrow.

Also, despite everything, he had been overtaken by a macabre curiosity. What were the yōma?

The chip flashed him a blue message.

Speech protocol update complete.

Local Accent Model: Lower-status Kantō region dialect.Warning: High-status speech not recommended.Warning: Prolonged conversation may reveal anomalies.

The young man Shimon exhaled. The sounds waited behind his teeth: older vowels, and rougher edges.

One of the scruffy samurai near the barrel jerked his chin at him.

A question, probably. A challenge, maybe. Come or leave. Declare yourself or get out of the way.

Shimon considered the quest. Accept? The correct answer was no. Progress, however, demanded yes. It was also the only strategy he had, to put one foot forward.

He willed his acceptance and the world answered.

Quest Accepted: Hunt the Yōma.

The orange text faded as he adjusted his grip on the spear, stepped toward the barrel and the armed men, and heard himself speak in an accent that belonged to this place, this impossible version of Japan.

“Let’s do this.”