[BT]Crescent blade beneath a Crescent Moon: Kisaragi/Kenshin

[Mizuyuki]

Kenshin wasn't as hard a man to track as he would've imagined. That was likely what happened when you were a famous hero from all Elibe and back with long red hair. A fairly uncommon hair color. Especially for a Sacaen male. At this point, Mizuyuki had tracked him to an approximate location. From here he simply had to follow the answers. It'd led him to a small town in Caelin. Most of them he'd run into weren't very large. The wandering hadn't taken too much effort really, at-least not for someone used to a nomadic life-style. Then there was Kisaragi.

Traveling alone hadn't been difficult but it had been boring. Though he could find constructive things to do, the tedium of solitude was not an appealing life-style for he who was used to a community of hundreds at all times. Mizuyuki strode a few steps ahead of Kisaragi. Quietly walking with his left hand resting in the folds of his yuakata. His right one dangled at his side idly. More of just adjusting to a more comfortable poise. The steady rhythm of steps in the silence as a quiet disturbance to quiet. It'd given him time to reflect.

His family. His tribe. Everyone he'd known and loved from his childhood on-wards was gone. He alone survived. The arrows resting within the quiver around his waist was all he had left of them. The weight of each feather, a crushing one. As if each small avian feather housed the weight of the life from whom it'd belonged to. The sight of them alone brought a powerful wave of emotion. A terrible agony that gripped his lungs, sundered his heart, and robbed him of the will to move. The only thing that had fueled him was his singular desire. That one reason. His purpose. For when they'd taken that life from him, the traitorous beasts had robbed him of everything. He was a warrior. A guardian. However it had become unbearable. To lose his home. Something else had been taken from him though. Something even more important. That was what hurt most. His purpose. No one, in all the world needed him in that moment. He, a single member of his entire tribe, in that dark and lonely place. When he closed his eyes, and saw with his mind, the only path he saw before him was the one stained in blood. The blood of those who robbed him of everything. And yet...

His knuckles whitened in the silence, as he balled his fist quietly for a moment. His throat felt swollen with a colossal lump that briefly prevented him from anything. Even breathing. That burning flame of hatred and rage and despair and anguish all mixing into a terrible storm. It wasn't right. He was raised under morals. Honor. Yet his entire core was composed of nothing but pure hatred. With no purpose, he'd given himself the only one he could think of. Revenge.

He was drawn from that void, and forced out of his thoughts when a distant shrill cry broke the silence. Mizuyuki's gaze lifted to the sky. The tree-line had broken free and the forest cleared. A bulbous plume of smoke drifted into the skies. Swirling in an ascending path to the heavens. A small village. A few dozen houses at most. Several ablaze. Mizuyuki turned to Kisaragi for a brief moment, expression serious while he looked to her. His eyes speaking what he did not know his words could, effectively in his moment of internal turmoil. His desire to help. Turning back to the village, he began to run with left arm slipping out of his yuakata and beginning to pump back and forth. His right also began to pump, though he kept mentally preparing himself for that instant when he'd have to grip at his weapon's sheath and release it.

[Kisaragi]

For her part, Kisaragi had mostly just been walking down the road with her head in the clouds, not paying a great deal of attention to Mizu at all as she mentally reviewed the previous day's spar and what she could learn from it. Also this tournament in Bern... okay, so supposedly the last one had gotten ruined by some random dragon, but that didn't mean she couldn't go, right? And maybe there would be a dragon here too. Maybe they would be fun to fight. Or want to be her friend... and still fight. Look, it would be super cool to fight a dragon, that's all she was saying. Thinking. Whatever.

The scream in the distance certainly served to help the smol Sacaen get her crap together though, just jamming it all into a small bag, all in one place, all together. The wordless glance she exchanged with Mizuyuki when he looked back communicated all that really needed to be said on the subject of if they were going to help. She had intervened to help Ito. She had moved in one on five against the brigands in that Caelin town to save the girl from being raped. She had interrupted Leiva in her petty thievery. Regardless of whether it was easy, or safe, or bloodless - Kisaragi always tried to do the right thing. That wasn't to say she always succeeded, or that she always made everything better, but she HAD to try. That was how she lived. That was how she wanted to live. And that was how she would live.

-And probably die.

Eventually, anyways. When Mizuyuki started moving, she was right behind him, her legs a fair bit shorter but pumping faster to make up for it as best she could. Aside from a quick pass of her palm over the hilt of her blade she hadn't kept her hands there, no reason to draw it too early if she could run faster with it un-drawn, but as soon as it was needed she would most definitely join in the bloodshed to protect those left alive - if any still lived.

[Mizuyuki]

Frantic long strides carried his lithe frame swiftly across the rustling grass and dirt path, running a straight line and ignoring the winding path that led to the small town. It looked as if they'd attempted to build some semblance of a wall over time. Small rocks with a poor job of masonry held together a three foot stone wall. Two points near the intersecting road marked twin columns made of raised stone. It looked closer to a wall laying out the perimeter of a farm than a village wall, but the effort's scale and small size made it all the more obvious that this was in-fact just a small town trying to scratch out an existence. The wooden gate, no more equipped to bar entry to a small ranch let alone a decent village, was shattered and in fragments. Chunks of lumber cast aside on either ends of the entrance. Who ever had broken in, what ever at this point, was clearly a beast focused on brute force and shows of such. He could not rule out the possibilities that it was in-fact monsters who had done such. Lycia was plagued with them after all.

He heard dis-embodied shouts. Faintly, and barely over the repeated clapping of his sandals upon dirt road, he could hear the sounds of strife. The odd wooden crashing of some crate or door or other object being destroyed. The shrieks were what filled him with an ever climbing dread. Darkened gaze widening with horror as he managed to enter the street leading into the village. Bodies lay strewn. Butchered. Not just killed, but legitimately butchered. Limbs hacked from their corpses and cast idly aside. Arms. Even a few separated legs were parted from their hosts. The terrible reek of death filled his nostrils as he inhaled heavily to keep himself in regulated breathing from his sprint. The dirt path had gone from a dry brown to a darker shade. Almost a velvet red as colossal stains and pools of blood slickened and darkened it from the corpses of men and women. That was when he saw it. That was when deep down, Mizuyuki broke just a smaller portion more.

Children. Three of them. One was bisected. All clearly dead. Though he felt an uncontrollable flame instantly erupt within that threatened to consume him entirely and in that moment it did not dry the small wells of water that built up behind his gaze. Memories flooding him so quickly of his home. Of his family lost. His right hand flew to his hilt and gripped it as he heard yet another scream from around the corner. Without waiting for Kisaragi, he ran. Stride dancing over and between the corpses and their limbs, he rounded the corner and skid to a halt. Hearing the frantic cries of a woman while he turned the corner had him gritting his teeth in anger. Such was the force of them grinding that he might've feared damage to them on a normal occasion. A woman's voice however filled with the unmistakable tones of terror erased that concern.


"No. No, no no no no please. Please. Please let me go. Please let me-"

Crack!

A gormless bass tone of masculine origin followed the meaty sounding blow. At this point, Mizu had rounded the street corner and was staring down a group of six men. Most were fairly muscled males toting ax's and torn shirts or no shirts in general, one of which in the center was holding a sable haired woman. His grip at her shoulder and forcing her from escaping while he kept his ax dangerously close to them. Mizuyuki's palm tightened with fingers coiling around the dark hilt of his blade. The purple fabrics wrapped around it shifting from the tightness of his grip as the man taunted the woman.

"If you wanna keep dem' pretty teef in your mouf I'd shut it!"

Another one lifted their ax before gesturing to Mizuyuki.

"Eh? Who's this then? Another farmer?"

"No, ain't no farmer. He looks too clean."

At that moment another voice punctured the silence. A second female tone. It was higher pitched though. Younger. And it wasn't Kisaragi's. Which scared Mizuyuki more, because it meant...


"Momma!"

A girl shouted from the broken door of a house on the right side of the street. A small girl. No older than six or seven maybe. Face red, tears having made their mark already. Fear for her mother overriding sense of preservation. The woman shrieked in fear as one of the men pointed his ax at the girl, pleading furiously.

"No! Leave her alone. Sweetie, go inside! Please. Please leave her be!"

Mizu called out abruptly. Commanding attention from the child as he took a single step closer.

"Leave the women alone. Men would not do this. They would not strike a woman... Unless you vermin are less than men. Unless you are honorless beasts."

He spat the final word out. Hoping to draw their ire. Hoping to make himself the focal point of their aggression. Perhaps if that happened, they would ignore the women. At this point, he had no sense of self preservation.

[Kisaragi]

As if the plumes of smoke rising into the daylight had not been itself enough of a warning, the gates to the small village had been savaged beyond easy repair. Kisaragi bit down her own frustration. She didn't know much about Mizuyuki's past exactly, but from what he had said it sounded like he was pretty used to a larger clan. For her... small villages were home. There probably hadn't been fifty people total back home, it was pretty far from the Sacaen standard of entire tribes of legendary warriors. A few who could fight, mostly thanks to her dad's dojo, but not many. So these people hit a little too close to the heart for her. In some ways it was liek watching her own village burn, though without quite the personal edge to it that would really seal the deal.

Fortunately the good sirs who had done this remedied that problem rather rapidly as she took in the sights and sounds. The brutalized bodies strewn in parts across the road. The front half of a woman's body hanging out of a broken window, blood dripping from her downturned face - what had happened to the rear half, or why one of the woman's arms seemed to be missing, the Sacaen didn't want to know. She had seen some pretty... dire things since arriving in Lycia, and it wasn't like she was some coddled child that had never seen another man die before, but this kind of... senseless, savage brutality, far beyond war and murder moving into the realm of outright bestial savagery, was beyond her. As much as she had always tried to be the big sister to the fatherless in the village, the caring daughter to those who had lost their real children, the invincible warrior of red and silver, she was... not an elite warrior that had been raised on the blood of her foes. She still thought of people as, well, people. Assholes maybe, and she had killed a few of the worst herself, but they had still been human.

She... didn't think that humans could have done this.

Her knuckles whitened with the force that Kisaragi held her left hand around the hilt of her sheathed blade, taken aback to the point that she couldn't think of anything to say, even when Mizuyuki confronted the monsters who did this, her face as white as her knuckles. These... these people deserved some respect, at least. It was like the village attack by the Mauthe Doog, watching her benefactor's detached head sail past, the lifeless eyes staring directly at her as they passed. And Sacaens were the monsters?