RESPECT
The patrons paid for their ramen with a single drop of ink before shuffling out of the restaurant. Gone were the days when wages and trade goods were paid for with sacks of rice or with copper and iron coins. Now, tamashii ink has become the world’s most single important commodity. In the early years after the fall of the capital, I saw parents selling their babies, children betraying their parents, and siblings stabbing each other in the back for just a vial of the ink’s protective power.
Desperation made monsters of us all.
Most ink was mass-produced in factories, such as the one our ambitious thieves worked in. The factories produced enough ink for the village to keep talismans plastered outside of everyone’s homes and the village walls, but talismans made from mass-produced ink were less efficient than the specialty ink I received from the inksmith and, when activated, only lasted a few hours.
It was procedure for the village guards to activate the talismans during a demon sighting, but that was how they lost the capital. The demon surge had lasted longer than the number of talismans they had on hand. Then the walls fell, and those defending them fell soon afterward.
Most villages learned from that tragedy. Ink rose higher in demand, and now, most of the citizenry was armed with talismans of their own in case the walls and their defenders should ever fall again. I certainly understood their anxiety and distrust. After the capital, I didn’t trust any talismans that weren’t made from my own brushstrokes.
“You’re finished early today, Sistah Samurai,” the chef said as I stomped toward the door. For a moment, panic crossed his face, as if I would forget our unspoken agreement. Okay, fine, maybe I was about to forget. That was how much those punks have thrown me off balance.
“Hn,” I responded, refusing to acknowledge that I had almost forgotten about him. I reached into my sleeve and retrieved one of the talismans I had created earlier, the one I had written with the kanji for PROTECTION. I affixed it to the doorframe. The talismans were activated by nothing but intention, but it was a task that many failed when under stress, fear, or panic.
I activated the talisman, and the ink glowed a brilliant gold. In twenty-four hours, the ink would eventually fade and disappear from the paper entirely, ending the spell. If the demons were ever to breach the gates while I was away, I had no doubt that this restaurant would be the only building left standing . . . and the inksmith’s shop. Probably. If the old man didn’t forget to activate his talismans again.
“See you tomorrow!” The chef called after me.
I nodded and exited through the door without breaking stride. I put on my shades and glared at the smoke snaking through the sky, using it as a point of reference to navigate through the warren of mangled streets.
Of course, those punks had to come from the ink factory. It was admittedly the first place I would take control over if I were some upstart warlord looking to move in and take over territory. Honestly, it was all rather unimaginative, but the tactics often worked. The factory had a habit of overworking its employees, forcing them to toil long hours for little wages and gleefully took advantage of the surge in refugees. It was a place rife with the potential for corruption.
The grumpiness I felt while rushing through lunch was momentarily forgotten as I felt a tingle of excitement skipping on my toes. I rarely got the opportunity to deviate from my usual routine—leave home, buy ink, eat lunch, return home, and kill the occasional demon along the way. Then I wake up and do it all over again.
I knew I shouldn’t be so excited about the detour, but when the days have become mechanical and rote, it was nice when something blunted the routine. Except those days looking to kill me. I could do without those.
I must admit, this place wasn’t as small as the quaint village I first discovered four years ago. The factory itself was also bigger than I remembered. It had gone from the bamboo shack the village elders had hastily erected to produce ink faster than the inksmith, to a privately funded metal behemoth.
I entered through the open industrial doors of the factory and scrunched my nose at the stench of sweat and unwashed bodies. On one half of the factory floor, the paid volunteers rotated between various extraction stations where they bled, cried, and sweated into various containers. Their faces gaunt and their frames thin as their souls were violently wrung out of them.
On the other side, the workers chopped pine wood and burned the pieces in a large industrial wood-burning stove. Then they poured the burned soot, nikawa, musk, and the collected soul essences into large grinding machines that took three workers to crank. And the noise was something awful, like some annoying child cracking ice right into your ear.
After all that grinding, they stirred, cooled, and strained the mixture in large vats and repeated that same process over the next few days until they had vials of inferior tamashii ink. Many of the workers have worked in the factory for so long that the ink had stamped their skin a cobalt black and permanently stained their fingernails with an ebony polish.
The factory floor was a lot of sensory information to take in at once, but I had already identified all the exits and all the impediments in my path.
The young female goon that had fled the restaurant was speaking with the foreman at the back of the factory, surrounded by shelves of neatly bottled ink. Over the girl’s shoulder, the foreman spotted me and fled toward the stairs, upturning tables and shattering ink bottles on the way. He ran into his office on the second floor and slammed the door behind him with the heaviness of a beat drop.
Two of the foreman’s bodyguards stepped into the space that the foreman had hastily vacated. They each unsheathed their respective katanas. I huffed and pinned my sunglasses back into my ‘fro and was disappointed to find the lighting within the factory as dark and grim as when I had my shades on.
One of the bodyguards placed a talisman along their blade. The ink flared gold, and the blade ignited. Tendrils of flames spiraled around the metal.
Cute.
I unsheathed my katana, and the sound of it whispered sweetly, like a song you leaned in to hear and savor. Then, I reached into my obi to retrieve the talisman marked with the kanji for FIRE and pasted it along the curved steel.
I winked, and my katana belted a roaring inferno. My ink had produced a glorious blaze compared to the big guy’s precious little candle.
Through the lick of flames, his eyes widened. Trying to compete, he poured more intention into his talisman, and it burned brighter, but still insignificant compared to mine. Let him try, but the more intention he used, the faster his ink would fade.
The sudden flare caught all the workers’ attentions, lighting up the previously dim factory like summer fireworks. Realizing a fight was imminent, the workers ripped the needles from their arms, dropped their mixing peels, and stampeded toward the factory doors. A distant yelling could be heard from the second floor, where the foreman shook his fist through the grimy and dirty window, a laughable attempt to try and threaten his workers back to their stations.
The bodyguards also tried shouting at people to get back to work, but the shouts went ignored, and the factory emptied out as quickly as sushi on a conveyor belt. The only noise left was the hum of the machines, the growl of the oven, and the excited roar of my blade. The cantankerous noise of the factory floor had been suspended so suddenly the air held its breath in anticipation.
The second bodyguard reached for a talisman from the fanny pack worn over his armor. The kanji written on it was a blur and too far away for me to read, and I braced myself for anything.
A thin film of water cloaked his blade.
Right. Water against fire. That one was trying to be clever. Both bodyguards advanced on me at the same time.
I dunked underneath the first attack, and blocked the second, fire on fire. My opponent winced, blinded by the brightness of my katana. I shifted back my weight and pitched my opponent forward. A slash of flame severed his torso. The stench of burnt flesh singed my nostrils.
Then, I quickly turned and blocked a downward slash of water. Despite the elemental disadvantage, my ink was stronger and purer and thus far hotter. With a hiss, the water evaporated around my opponent’s blade.
“I thought your clan was all gone,” the last bodyguard had the gall to say. The scalding fog clouded his expression and his voice continued as a disembodied reverb, “I thought they died in defense of the capital. What did you do to survive? Abandon them? Run away like a scaredy little girl?”
My jaw tightened, my molars grinding together. The fog made my grip slippery around the hilt. For a moment, a scene of corpses flashed before my eyes—Sistahs I had trained with and whom I considered just as much family as my barely remembered parents. The stench of pine soot and sweat was swallowed by the stench of decay and bloated corpses.
Bright steel thrust through the fog.
On instinct, I twisted on the ball of my foot and countered with a rising strike. Arms went flying, and my opponent’s katana clattered across the floor and slid underneath one of the large vats. The man screamed, and I quickly snapped forward and punched my hilt into his face.
He fell to the ground and the blood from his severed arms splattered the front of my kimono. I slammed my right foot onto the man’s chest and stabbed my burning blade into his throat, finally silencing all of that hollerin’.
I straightened my clothes. The katana from the first bodyguard had dropped to the ground, still burning, but it sputtered out once the ink had faded.
I checked on my own weapon and couldn’t see the color of the ink through the flames, but calculated there was still half an hour of ink left within the talisman. Most katanas would have melted in the face of such extreme heat, but mine was specialty made, forged with tamashii ink that made it more resilient and conductible with other elements.
A motion caught the corner of my eye where a retreating hairline dipped down from the second-floor window. My sandals chimed on the metal stairs as I climbed toward the upper level. The railing warped before the heat of my blade.
When I tried the office door, it was locked.
I dropped my weight, lunged forward, and thrust my sword through the lock. The metal melted around the fire, and I kicked the door the rest of the way open.
Except the blasted thing slammed against the opposite wall, and rebounded back to shut closed in my face.
With a huff and roll of the eyes, I gently pushed open the door.
The office looked like an earthquake had scattered papers all throughout the room, and I shuddered at the disorganized mess. It smelled of hair gel and rank feet. A wall of grimy windows coughed poor lighting into the office, doing little to help a struggling flickering Totoro lamp atop the desk. I distinctly heard whimpering from across the room.
From underneath the desk, I dragged out the foreman by a bushel of his Jheri curls and shoved him against the window. I had to clutch him tight ‘cause he slicked against those grimy windows like grease.
I threatened, “Tell your warlord that he is not welcome in this village. Also, his goons could use better manners.”
“Tell him yourself, bitch,” the foreman spat. Not brave enough to spit at me, but enough to aim at the ground and darken my tabis with his splatter.
I thrust back my arm, the foreman squeezed his eyes shut, and I pierced my fire-coated katana through the window. Spider-webs crawled through the glass, forming a jagged giant web that then shattered at the fault lines. Fresher air muffled some of the stank of the office. Thank god.
The foreman peeked both of his eyes open. Shock and surprise overcame his face to realize he was unharmed. His little mustache twitched as he opened his mouth to say something. But I didn’t care.
I tossed him out the window.
A scream and splash soon followed. I watched unsympathetically as the foreman flailed and drowned in the boiling vat of ink.
Back in the day, there were many who had been jealous of the clan and would lob the word ‘bitch’ at me and my Sistahs. We shut them all up real quick, but there were always those few who had to learn the hard way.
I looked over my shoulder at the huddled and quivering figure in the corner—that same punk who had been smart enough to run from the restaurant. Wouldn’t want her to think I missed her. I approached the girl as she sobbed into her pink bandanna.
“Tell your warlord that this village is protected,” I said a second time. I did not like repeating myself.
“Yes, ma’am,” she sniveled as she bobbed her head like a lucky beckoning cat.
Finally. Someone around here had learned some manners. I just didn’t understand why I had to be the one dishing out the lesson. I didn’t have the time to go around educating folks. I didn’t have the time to correct every ignorant word that fell from the mouths of people who didn’t care to change. Nor should I always have to prove why my existence deserves their respect.
But then . . . there are those days when your patience wears thin, and the cuts are too many to ignore, when you’re too tired but not tired enough, when you’ve had enough of the bullshit and the tomfoolery, and you’ve reached that magical moment when you’ve manifested the ability to make time.
Someone’s got to teach these fools: Never disrespect a Black woman.