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I stood amidst a surreal landscape, a woodland unlike any I'd ever seen before. White wraiths threaded through spindly hardwoods, hinoki, and hemlock. Everywhere I looked, exposed roots—some gnarled and bone pale, others furry with moss—spidered across the thin soil. Although Tetsuo's instructions had been to take a straight path from the cave, nothing before me resembled a straight anything, let alone a path! All I could see were closely-spaced trees clinging to the unforgiving earth as tentatively as if standing on tiptoes.
To make matters worse, the view above my head seemed to mirror the ground below: the canopy crowded closely together, branches intertwining in a living lattice that shut out the sky and created a preternatural gloom, an unnatural twilight made all the more unnerving by the forest’s absolute stillness. Tetsuo was right about Aokigahara being a sea of silence. The lack of sound was like a presence in itself. Though I strained to listen, I heard no bird calls, no rustling leaves, nothing but the pounding of my heart in my ears.
I suppose I should have been grateful for nothing, although at that moment, part of me wanted to scurry back inside the cave and fish for that ball of glow-cord until my hands turned blue. With nothing to mark my trail, how the hell was I going to find my way when everything looked the same, no matter which way I looked? I had to think of something foolproof and fast, because once I stepped away from the cave, there was no going back.
Having no twine or brightly colored cloth to tie around branches, leaving my mark on the forest in a lasting way seemed the best option. Pulling the largest and sharpest knife from my sheath, I started on as straight a course as possible to a hemlock tree. So I'd know the markings were mine, initially, I chose something personal but easy to score into its bark: the bottom half of the Ming-Yi tattoo that Satoshi had given me: a broken line sandwiched between two long ones.
About three trees in, however, I realized the knife was the wrong tool for the job. So much for sentimentality. Struggling with another hemlock, hands fused to the knife handle by the adhesive-strength sap that oozed from each gouge in its rough bark like a slow-motion trickle of blood, I knew I had to simplify the process if I wanted to reach the wrecked airship by nightfall. One glance back at my work told me the markings also needed to be much bigger. Had I not still been standing near the cave mouth, easily within sight of the spot where jagged rock jutted out of the ground at a precarious angle, I wouldn't have known my hastily scored impressions were on the trees at all.
After retracing my steps back to the first evergreen, I put my naginata to work, slicing shallow vertical swaths in the tree bark. Although it proved to be a more efficient method of trailblazing, the differences in bark pliability often made it much noisier. While the naginata cut pine and hemlock like butter, oak and maple refused to succumb so willingly, often causing the blade to become embedded at first swipe. If Yomichi or anyone else had been listening, I'm sure they could have heard my swearing a mile off, when I wasn't dangling from the naginata's shaft and grunting like a pig in my efforts to pry it away from an obstinate tree.
Careful to leave marks at least two to three body lengths apart for optimal visibility, selecting only trees whose inner layers would stand out brightest against a dark ground, I slashed my way through the Jukai. No longer forced to move at tortoise speed, I crawled over jagged rock projections and crept over slippery roots, dodging the ankle traps the fallen needles and leaf mulch over those roots often concealed.
I soon lost count of the number of trees I'd wounded in this fashion, along with the number of times I slipped, barked knees and shins, or sank over my boot tops in muddy ankle traps, only that somewhere around the dozenth tree, the forest became visibly darker, even murkier than it had been only a few moments before. When I looked up, unconvinced that twilight had crept up so soon, I thought I heard a distant rumble. Then, the first cold droplets splashed on my cheeks. Although I couldn't hear or see anyone, as I blazed my solitary trail, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching me. A few times, I caught glimpses of from the corner of my eye: flashes of white that ultimately proved to be errant mist and tricks of waning light. Its funeral gloom finally forced me to switch the spelunking light on its lowest setting.
I was mid-downswing at another large pine tree, when the sounds stopped me cold.
They seemed to come from somewhere ahead of me, just over a rocky projection studded with saplings: erratic dull clangs, followed by a yowl like the warning sound a feral cat made before a fight. Hands shaking, icy trickles coursing down my spine, I doused the light, held my breath, and waited.
When the sounds repeated, their metallic whanging more frantically than before, I swiped in time with them to mask the sound of my blade. Then, head down, after a quick check to ensure no one was following me or about to mount an attack from the side, I crept to the ledge.
The warship had not gone in nose-down but at an angle, creating a small clearing when it crashed, one that still allowed in enough light to see. Toppled trees radiated from its crumpled body and one of its wings had been torn off, leaving a jagged gash along its hull. By the look of it, the enormous cruiser must have been one of the last models to run on enhanced fossil fuel. Even now, the ground around it was bare, poisoned, with only sickly spindly vegetation struggling to survive outside ground zero.
Armed with a large stick, a shirtless Hiro emerged into view. His night in the open had not been kind to him. Long scratches, dark against his pallid skin, covered his arms and chest; twigs matted his hair, plastering it against his head like a helmet; and a dark substance—mud or blood—smeared one side of his face. Along with exposure, nokuru had taken hold of him. Limbs twitching in the Kufugaki's unnatural but characteristic herky-jerk, he shambled atop the ship's dented body. Back to me, he began hammering the hull for all he was worth. Once satisfied Kei was not with him, I clambered over the ledge, intent to slink my way through the blast zone and inch around Hiro by using the rotted hulks of fallen trees for cover.
Tetsuo said Yomichi's home wasn't far from the ship. If that was accurate, he must've heard the commotion. Perhaps he, like me, was watching. I peered into the thick gloom, but could discern nothing. Darkness swallowed everything beyond the edge of the crash site, an uneasy feral blackness that I could feel in the pit of my stomach. If I wanted to find Yomichi, I had to enter it.
I was midway to the next log, when Hiro suddenly turned. Our eyes met—his flaring crimson, just like the Kufugaki at Sawagi! He bared his teeth, growled at me like a wild animal, but then redoubling his ship-pounding efforts, began to scream, "She's here, Mazawa-sama! She's here!"