Her mother packed like she was leaving forever.
Two of everything. Three of some things. Karura sat on her bed and watched the pile grow and didn't say that everything on it could fit in one scroll with room for a house left over.
"Eat real food," her mother said. "Court people probably eat bird food off little plates. You're nine. You're growing. If they feed you bird food you go buy real food."
"Yes, Mama."
"And if anyone, ANYONE, lays a hand on you-"
"I'm a ninja, Mama."
"I know what you are." Her mother stopped folding. She stood with a shirt in her hands and looked at her daughter, special jonin, nine years old, and sighed. "I know what you are. I'm allowed to worry over my daughter. Even if she's a shinobi. Your job might be to go on missions for the Kazekage, but my mission as a mother is to worry over my children."
Karura got up and hugged her, and was held in pleasant-smelling arms for a long quiet minute, and that was her job as a daughter. To try and soothe the worries of her mom.
Her father was just as worried as her mom. His baby girl was going away for who knows how long, and he just had to accept it because she was a ninja! He paced around the kitchen, cooking to keep himself busy and not thinking. But obviously, it wasn't working, not as he set the table, and not as he watched her eat with his big arms crossed over his chest.
Yashamaru sat next to her at dinner with his spine straight. He didn't cry or whine or beg her to stay. His big sister was a shinobi and shinobi went on missions. Sometimes those missions were very long. He too would be doing the same soon. So, it wouldn't be his sister fussed over by their parents when she was preparing for a mission, but him!
"I'm going to be a whole new man when you return, nee-chan! So, just wait and get ready to give me my gift!"
"You're that confident in beating Sasori-kun?" Karura wondered.
"I'm confident in beating anyone around my age!" Yashamaru declared.
"But you're both top of your classes." Karura pointed out.
"Yeah, but I'm older. Sasori doesn't stand a chance against me. Two puppets or not!" He bragged with a clenched fist.
Karura laughed and Yashamaru felt offended.
"I wasn't laughing at you, you're just very cute, Yashamaru." Karura told him.
"Cute?! I'm being serious! Quit playing around, sis! That gift will be mine no matter what! Just wait and see!"
"Okay, okay." She couldn't keep the smile off her face.
…
A hawk landed on the kitchen windowsill with the village seal on its leg. Karura read the scroll at the table. The Daimyo's party had made camp beyond the western cleft. It would move at first light. She was to meet it there.
"Does it say when you will be back?" Her mother asked.
Karura looked at the scroll again, as if there might be a number on it she'd missed.
"No, I don't see anything, Mama."
Her mother grumbled under her breath about missions.
…
Karura left very early. Her parents were already up. Neither of them pretended they'd woken by accident. Her father stood in the front doorway, and when she reached him he bent down and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
"The first day will probably be the hardest," he said. "Hopefully it'll get simpler after that."
"You've never traveled further than the next oasis, Papa." She pointed out.
"And the walk there was terrible," he said gravely, "the first day."
Her mother took her face in both hands and kissed her forehead, and held on a second longer than a second should last. "Be safe. Don't accept things from strangers. Don't be alone in rooms with old men. Always be observant. And don't be the sweet, kind girl I know you are if you need to be the cold ninja weapon the village expects. I'd rather you be safe than anything else."
Yashamaru's door was open when she passed it. His bed was empty and already made. She saw him through the kitchen window on her way out. He was in the courtyard spinning around on his hands, kicking the training post from different angles.
She didn't bother him and simply smiled as she continued to leave. The streets were empty except for water sellers and the earliest shift of the rebuilding crews. She walked west with one pack she didn't need, past the well house where the cactus row stood heavy with fruit somebody would pick today, past the walls coming back up one stone at a time, through the long cleft in the rock where the village ended.
At the mouth of the cleft she stopped and looked back once. Clay and stone and sand, hard light, hard people, the bakery chimney just visible if you knew exactly where to look, which she did.
She thought about two empty seats at her birthday table, and two more at her promotion party, and wondered, the way she always did when it was quiet, whether Mai and Pakura had seen something in her she couldn't hide. Something about how fast she grew. Something unfair.
Beyond the cleft, the Daimyo's lanterns were already moving.
She turned and went to meet them.
Pakura knocked on Karura's front door for Mai.
Mai's forearms were wrapped elbow to knuckle. Ebizo had taken one look at them at camp, pressed his thumb into the meat below her elbow, and listened to her hiss through her teeth. Three days, he'd said. Three days before you make a fist, and the fifth gate stays closed for a month. She'd made a fist that morning anyway, at the village gate, the moment they were back inside the walls. It had hurt like being stabbed.
"Is Karura here?" she said, before the door had finished swinging open. "I need to talk to her. It's important. I've, we've..."
Pakura came in behind her, slower, and didn't say anything.
Karura's mother was at the kitchen counter, a knife in her hand and an onion half-chopped in front of her. She looked at the two of them. At Mai's arms. At the dust from the road still on them both.
"She left this morning." She told them.
Mai stood there.
She'd practiced what she was going to say for two days, out loud, and she'd gotten it down to something she could say without sounding stupid.
"This morning…" Mai groaned.
"A mission."
Mai turned around and nearly put her fist into the doorframe.
She stopped it a finger's width from the wood. Her whole arm shook with the effort of stopping it, and the pain from her forearm went up into her shoulder and made her eyes water, and she stood there with her knuckles almost touching the frame and her face going red.
"I'm such an idiot," she said to the door. "I had months. I had months, and I spent all of it working up to it, and the one week I finally..." Her voice cracked. "I came to apologize. That's why I came. I came here to apologize to her."
At the counter, Karura's mother set down the knife.
"Come and sit down," she said. "Both of you."
The two of them sat at the kitchen table. Karura's mother poured three cups of water, set them down, and sat across from them with her hands folded, and for a moment she looked so much like an older Karura that Mai couldn't look at her straight.
"I'm glad you came," Karura's mother said. "I want to say that first, so you hear it. I'm glad." She turned her cup a little on the table. "And I'm going to tell you something, because she won't. She never tells anyone anything that might make them feel bad."
Pakura's hands went still around her cup.
"You hurt her. Both of you." It wasn't said cruelly. It was said honestly. "You were her first real friends. She talked about you at this table every night for a year. Mai said this. Pakura did that. Mai and Pakura are fighting again, Mama, and then they both helped me. And then the exam happened, and she came home from her own promotion and sat where you're sitting, and she didn't say anything about the empty chairs at her party. She just didn't eat."
Mai stared at the tabletop.
"I went looking for you both before her birthday," Karura's mother went on. "Myself. I knocked on both your doors. I told your families we were throwing her a party and that it would mean the world to her if you came."
"I remember…" Pakura said quietly.
"She turned nine at this table. And every time someone knocked, she looked at the door." Karura's mother let out a breath. "She was broken up about it for a long time. She thought she'd done something. That she'd driven you off somehow, just by being what she is."
"She didn't!" Mai said immediately. "That's not… She didn't do anything. It was me. I said something I shouldn't have and then I was too much of a coward to take it back."
"We." Pakura said.
Mai looked at her.
"We should have come sooner. Both of us." Pakura spoke up. "Mai said it. I'm the one who stood next to her while she said it and did nothing. I didn't come to the party after the exam. I didn't come to her birthday. You came to my door and asked my parents, and I still didn't come." She looked at Karura's mother directly. "I didn't have a good excuse for either one. I'm sorry."
Karura's mother looked at her for a long moment, and then at Mai, and something in her face eased.
"I'm not the one you need to say it to."
"When does she come back?" Mai asked.
"I don't know."
"A month? Two?"
"Nobody knows. Not me, not her." Karura's mother shook her head. "It's the first time she's ever left without a day to come home on."
Mai slumped back in her chair.
It was Pakura who asked. "Can letters reach her?"
Karura's mother tilted her head. "The Kazekage's office sends courier ninja after the Daimyo's party with the village dispatches. We could send family letters along with them." She looked between the two of them. "I think she would count you."
She got up, went into the back, and came out with paper, a brush, and an inkstone, and set them down in front of Mai, and went back to the counter and picked up her knife again so they wouldn't have to do this with her watching.
Mai looked at the blank paper for a long time.
Then she picked up the brush. Her hand shook, from the gates and not the nerves, and the first line came out crooked, and she didn't start over. Pakura sat beside her and said nothing for most of it. Twice she put a finger on the page, and Mai stopped, read the line again, and fixed what Pakura was pointing at, which was the part where Mai had made it sound like it was smaller than it was.
When Mai finished she pushed the paper across the table. Pakura read it over. She didn't change anything. Then she pulled a second sheet toward herself and sat with the brush over it for so long the ink started to dry on the tip. She wet the brush again and started writing.
The desert was awful and Yuuga had never expected any decency from it. The sand got into everything. The lacquered seams of the palanquin. The folds of his robes. The corners of his eyes, so that he blinked grit with every mile. His attendants worked the fans over him in shifts and all they accomplished was moving the heat from one side of his face to the other. He had bathed in rosewater at dawn and by midday he smelled like a man who had bathed in rosewater and then been lowered into an oven.
He pressed a scented cloth to his nose and looked out at the country his family owned.
Nothing. Sand the color of old bone, scrub that clawed up out of it like the desert was trying to grow hair, and a sky so wide and white it hurt to keep his eyes open. Somewhere out there were towns. Mines. People who tilled whatever it was you tilled when there was no water and called the result a harvest. They paid their taxes in coin so thin he could see daylight through it, and then they had the gall to need things. Waystations. Cisterns. Caravan guards. Mercy, when the year went badly. Which it seemed to always be for them.
A country of beggars with their hands out, and his family was expected to fill every palm.
Ahead, his father's palanquin crested the rise on its bearers' shoulders, and beyond it the town came into view at last.
Renge. He'd been told the name twice by now and forgotten it twice as well. It crouched around its oasis like any other insignificant place, a smear of clay buildings and date palms ringing a green eye of water, and somebody had spent a great deal of effort making it look like more than it was. Banners hung from every pole and post, dyed the deep blue of the Wind Daimyo's house, fresh enough that the color hadn't yet been eaten by the sun. They had strung paper lanterns across the western gate. They had laid down carpets in the dust, actual carpets, as if a guest of his standing might be soothed by walking on someone's floor in the middle of nowhere.
It was pathetic, and it was most likely everything these people had. Which made it worse.
The crowd had gathered along the road inside the gate, pressed back by the town's handful of guards, and the noise of them rose as the procession passed under the lanterns. Cheering. Weeping, in places. Old women with their hands clasped at their chests. Children hoisted onto shoulders to see. A whole town turned out in their best, which was to say their least filthy, to look upon the lords that decided whether they ate.
Yuuga let the cloth drop and lifted his chin so they could see his profile.
They had earned that much. A view.
The bearers set the palanquins down in the square, where a fat man in robes too rich for his face waited at the head of a line of officials, bent already at the waist. The governor. Yuuga had been told his name as well. He forgot that too. Not that he cared.
His father, Reizen, descended first, and the bending man bent deeper.
"Most honored Daimyo, sun of the Land of Wind, Renge throws open her gates and her heart. We have prepared a feast. We have prepared lodging worthy, or as near to worthy as our means allow, of so radiant a-"
"Stand up," his father said. "You'll strain something."
The governor stood up.
Yuuga stepped down from his own palanquin and let the heat hit him full and frowned immediately. His robes alone were worth more than this square and everything standing in it, and he wore them beautifully, and not one of these sunburned wretches deserved the privilege of the sight, and yet here he was, giving it to them for free.
His father was already moving toward the governor, already murmuring, already drawing the Five around him without seeming to call them. Kaname at his father's right shoulder, the sword captain, lean and gray-eyed and about as warm as a blade left out overnight. Gōki at the left, a wall of a man who hadn't said a full sentence in the three days Yuuga had been forced to share a road with him. The others fanned wide. Jirō with his war fan slung across his back, grinning at the crowd like he was one of them. Heihachi with his hands tucked into his sleeves and his scrolls on his hip. And the successor of the last Guardian, the cloth one, Tsumugi, turning her head too much, watching too many things at once, eager to prove herself or something.
Five for his father. Five of the finest shinobi in the country, ringed around the man who held the country.
And for Yuuga, the heir, the future of the entire line.
One little girl.
She stood a pace off his shoulder where she'd walked the whole way, small and sand-colored and unbothered, that ridiculous yellow scarf wrapped around her. Her eyes went over the crowd, the rooftops, the gate, the well, around and around, never resting, and her hands stayed loose at her sides. A baker's daughter. A servant had asked on his behalf. A baker's daughter from the Hidden Sand who'd done something or other in two dirt-poor countries that nobody important lived in. Other nobles wouldn't stop writing his father letters about her, the little hero, the puppet girl. So when the Kazekage put her name forward, his father had read those letters and agreed, and decided that this, this was what would stand between his only son and the world.
He hadn't even asked Yuuga. Nobody ever asked Yuuga.
"Girl." Yuuga called out to her.
It took her a moment to understand he meant her, which he found infuriating on a level he didn't have words for.
"My lord," She said, and bowed, and it was a proper bow, and he hated that he couldn't find anything wrong with it.
"When we reach the lodging, you'll stand outside my door. Not in the room. Outside. I won't have a child disturbing my rest." He flicked his hand at her scarf. "And do something about that. It displeases me immensely."
"As you say, my lord."
Her face wasn't red. She didn't flinch. And neither did she get rid of her scarf like he ordered. Just those clear bright indigo eyes, already back on the rooftops. It was like insulting a wall.
Yuuga turned away before his frustration could show on his face, and lifted his chin again, and gave the weeping town one more look at the man their grandchildren's grandchildren would owe their lives to.
The governor had begun to talk again. Something about a difficulty. Something the town had been enduring. Something they prayed the Daimyo's coming might, by the grace of the merciful sky, finally set right.
Yuuga wasn't listening. There was sand in his shoe.
Karura had checked everything before they passed under the gate. She did it without the Byakugan first. Then she let it open behind the Transformation over her eyes and checked her count again, and kept it open.
The town had thrown everything it had at the gate. The banners were new and the buildings behind them were not. The carpets in the road had been beaten so hard that morning that the dust still hadn't settled out of the weave, which meant they were the good carpets, the household carpets, dragged out of homes and laid in the dirt for a man who would walk past them without looking down. The children who'd been hoisted up to cheer were as thin as the people in the Land of Dust had been before her team arrived. The cheering was full of hope.
And under all of it, she heard the governor reach the part he'd been circling, heard the word he'd been saving.
"...the creature, my lord. We have lost four to it since the spring. Two herders, a woman drawing water past dusk, and a boy. We have prayed. We have set watches. We hoped, when word came that your radiance would honor our road, that perhaps…"
"You hoped we'd brought you an army." The disdain could be heard in Yuuga's voice.
The governor's mouth stayed open on the next word.
"You strung up your little flags and you boiled your goats and you laid out your rugs, and the whole time you were hoping to send us home a guard shorter than we came." Yuuga's voice carried. "Is that the welcome of Renge? Bait?"
"My lord, no… We…"
"My son." The Daimyo did not raise his voice. He never had to. "The man buried four of his people. Let him grieve without a performance."
Yuuga's face wanted to twist before he realized who was speaking to him. He stopped himself before his father could see. He looked at his father, found nothing there to argue with, and turned his temper somewhere it would be safe to spend it.
He found Karura.
"You." He pointed past her, into the crowd, at a knot of men near the granary wall. One of them, a lean man with a sun-cracked face and a herder's switch still in his hand, had not bowed. Had not cheered. Was looking at Yuuga the way you'd look at a stain spreading across something you owned. "That one. He's been staring since we rode in. He hasn't shown me a moment's respect. Go and teach him some."
Karura looked at the man. He was a regular person. Not armed past the switch.
"He hasn't done anything, my lord."
"He's done it with his face. Go."
The man in the crowd had heard. Everyone near him had heard. And the man, who had nothing left that fear could threaten, decided the staring wasn't enough.
He came out of the crowd fast.
He had the switch up and his mouth open on a word that started with the name of one of the dead, and he was making for Yuuga, and Yuuga's eyes widened as he stumbled backward into his own attendants.
Karura was already there.
She crossed the gap between them, her scarf swinging behind her as she appeared above him, kneeing him into the ground while wrenching his arm back.
He hit the carpets the town had laid down for a better man, and her knee was on his spine and his switch was three feet away and his wrist was held at the exact angle where pulling against it taught the lesson for her. All of it inside two breaths. None of it hard enough to break.
The man heaved under her. Not to get free but to get the words out.
"Four of us. Four. And he asks if we're worth his trouble." His cheek was in the dust and he was weeping and furious and entirely done with being careful. "My daughter went for water and didn't come back and there's a fat-cheeked boy in silk asking if we baited him. Just kill me! Go on! I will curse you every second in my death!"
"Nobody's killing anyone." Karura said, low, for him. "Be still and breathe for me, okay?"
"Don't be still." Yuuga had found his feet and his voice and the color was coming back into his face. He straightened his robes with hands that shook just slightly, and the shaking made him meaner. "He raised a weapon against the heir of the Land of Wind. Slit his throat. Then we'll see what kind of courage he has in the afterlife." He looked down at the man, at the wet dust on his face, and his lip curled.
Karura didn't move.
The square had gone quiet. The cheering had died street by street as the news of what was happening rippled back through the crowd, and now there was only the wind in the new banners and a man crying into a carpet and a boy in silk waiting to be obeyed.
"My lord," Karura said. "No."
Yuuga blinked, absolutely bewildered at the word he just heard. "What did you say to me?"
"I said no." She lifted her knee off the man's back, kept the wrist, helped him up to kneeling rather than letting him sprawl, because there was a difference and she wanted the watching town to see that she knew it. "I'm your bodyguard. I will put myself between you and anything in this world that wants to do you harm. I'll bleed for it. I'll die for it, if it comes to that." She met his eyes and held them. "But I'm not your tool. This man is grieving, not dangerous, and I don't hurt innocent people for no reason."
"I am the heir to-"
"You're the man I keep alive," she said. "That's it, my lord."
For a moment Yuuga couldn't find anything to do with his face. He had been told no by tutors and priests and, on rare and terrible occasions, by his father, and never once in his life by a servant, a hire, a weapon his house had purchased. His fists balled up and his face twisted in anger.
He looked to his father.
"Father. Tell her. Tell her what she is." He flung a hand at her, at the kneeling man, at the silent square. "She defied a direct order in front of, in front of all of them. She humiliated me. Discipline her, or give her to Kaname, or send her back to her sandpit and find me a guard who understands how to obey."
The Daimyo of the Land of Wind looked at his son. Then he looked at the small girl with her hand glowing green, gentle now, around a weeping man's wrist.
And he laughed.
He turned to Kaname, who had not moved through any of it, whose gray eyes had simply tracked the girl from the first step of her feet to the last.
"What did I tell you?" the Daimyo said.
"You told me she wouldn't kneel." Kaname said.
"That's right, I told you she wouldn't kneel." He looked back at Karura, pleased. "A guard who does whatever she's told is useless." He turned away, toward the governor, toward the business of the town and its dead and the green water it lived and died by. "Boy. Stop embarrassing me. She did her job. Yours, for the next several months, is to learn from me and stay close enough to her that she can keep doing it."
"You're taking her side!? Over me?!"
"I'm taking the side of you arriving home with a pulse, boy. And watch your tone." The Daimyo's voice froze Yuuga solid. "Governor. This creature of yours. Walk with me and tell it to me plainly. I'm not a fan of long speeches."
Yuuga stood in the middle of the square his father had walked out of, in front of a town that had just watched a little girl refuse him and his own father side with her.
His own father. Over some little girl.
The Guardians had their own reactions. Jirō, the fan, was grinning at her openly, delighted. Gōki had not changed expressions. Heihachi, the puppeteer, wore the superior smile of a man watching a child do something a child would do, principle over good sense, and storing it as proof that the rumors had oversold her.
And Tsumugi, the only other woman in the detail and the only one of them anywhere near Karura's age, was staring at Karura with a strange look that was certainly not admiration or respect.
Karura let the herder go back to his crowd. She had a great many months ahead of her with these people. Just as she was about to make her way back to Yuuga's side, her Byakugan caught it before anyone screamed.
A chakra signature the size of a house, rising out of the deep sand under the eastern palms, slow and then not slow at all. Karura understood it in the same instant she saw it. An hour of cheering. Every stamp of every foot on those carpets, every drum, every child bouncing on a father's shoulders. To a thing that hunted by what moved through the sand, Renge had been ringing a dinner bell since the gate opened.
She was back at Yuuga's side in two steps, her hand on his arm and her body turned to put herself between him and the east side of the town before the first roof tile slid loose.
The sand stood up.
That was how it looked, from across the square, in the first half-second when the mind hadn't caught up to the eyes. A whole dune lifted and shrugged and resolved into a thing, segment by armored segment, as it hauled itself up out of the earth it had been swimming through. A scorpion. If a scorpion were the size of a granary. Plates of chitin the dull gold of the sand it hid in, scraping over one another with a sound like millstones, and a head studded with two dark beads for eyes. Two pincers, each wide enough to take a camel in half. And the tail, three jointed lengths of it, rising and rising over its back until the barbed stinger blotted out a piece of the sky, a wet black point the length of a man already beading with something that ran down the chitin and hissed where it dripped.
Four dead since spring. Karura believed it now. She'd have believed forty.
The town came apart into noise and running. The governor's officials scattered. Yuuga screamed and grabbed a fistful of her scarf, nearly choking her. She loosened her scarf to stop that while keeping an eye on the scorpion.
The Five were already gone from around the Daimyo.
"Gōki." Kaname turned toward the giant of a man.
Gōki walked toward the thing. The enormous silent man went out past the last of the palms, and as he walked he wove through several hand signs, then slammed both hands palm-down, and the desert answered him. The sand between him and the scorpion heaved upward in a long curling ridge, a breaking wave of it twenty feet high, and crashed down over the creature's forelegs and held, packing solid around the joints, gripping. The scorpion shrieked and hauled against it and the sand-wave fought it for the half-second the others needed.
Jirō took the opening and ran with it. He'd unslung his fan, a great steel-ribbed span as tall as he was, and he opened it with a snap and swept it once across his body, low to high. The wind came off it in a shearing arc, and it caught the loose sand that always hung in the desert air and made the air itself into a weapon, a sheet of stinging grit driven across the scorpion's head and into its eyes. The thing reared and clawed at its own face, blind, screaming, exactly where Gōki had pinned its feet.
"Eyes are out," Jirō called cheerfully. "Kaname, it's deaf and blind and stuck, what more do you people want from me."
Karura caught the movement at the edge of the square. Heihachi hadn't moved from his place near the Daimyo. His hands were still tucked into his sleeves, only the fingertips showing, twitching. Out past the palms, his puppet was already under the scorpion: child-sized, two arms, a lacquered face with no expression, dragging a sword nearly as long as itself. It darted between the thrashing legs, slashed once at a joint, and was gone before the leg came down where it had been, then came back for another cut on the opposite side. It wasn't trying to kill anything yet. It was keeping the scorpion's attention on the ground, away from the man about to come at it from the air.
Kaname was already in the air.
Karura watched the captain cover the ground in three strides and a leap that put him level with the joint where the scorpion's right pincer met its body, and she watched the blade come around with the whole turn of his hips behind it. The cut went into the armored seam of the joint and did not stop at the chitin; it went through, parting plate and the meat under the plate in one long pull, and the pincer, that camel-halving pincer, dropped off the creature and hit the sand with a deep thump. The stump poured, a thick, milky gray fluid sliding over the lip of the cut plate in a sheet as wide as a door, gallons of it slapping down into the sand.
The scorpion went mad.
Blind and three-legged and pouring its insides into the desert, it did the only thing left to it. It struck with the tail, three jointed lengths of armored death scything down across the whole eastern edge of the square in a blind arc, and the arc passed over Gōki, who flattened, and tore through the corner of the granary, which came down in a roar of clay and grain dust, and swung on toward the carpets and the lanterns and the palanquins and the boy in silk shouting into Karura's ear from behind.
Karura unrolled a scroll from her hip. Smoke bloomed at her side and Million dropped out of it onto the carpets, four arms wide, that carved smile pointed at a monster that dwarfed it.
Karura's fingers moved once.
The barbed tail-tip came down toward Yuuga's skull and Million caught it.
The puppet caught the strike at the last joint, two upper hands clamping the shaft below the stinger and two lower hands driving up into the segment to break its line, and Million's feet gouged two long furrows backward through the carpets as the impact tried to drive it into the earth, and the bandages came off its arms and whipped around the barb and the joint and cinched. Million snapped the tip off and the rest of the tail ripped free and flailed back toward the others.
It flailed toward Tsumugi.
The new girl had been moving the whole time. She had wrapped a length of her cloth around the creature's hindmost leg and was hauling on it with both hands to spoil its footing, and she was so focused on the leg that she did not see the tail come back for her. She was young. She was talented. She had her weight in the wrong place and her eyes in the wrong direction and the thick tail was coming.
Gōki rose up under Tsumugi like a second monster and threw a wall of packed sand between her and the strike, and the tail hit the wall and stopped dead. Tsumugi fell back into the silent man's shadow with her cloth still in her fists and her eyes finally, too late, wide. Gōki didn't look at her. He looked at the tail against his wall and closed his raised hand into a fist, and the sand reached out, seizing the tail and holding it.
"Now." Kaname said.
Heihachi's puppet stopped dodging. With the scorpion's forelegs in Gōki's sand, a hind leg in Tsumugi's cloth, and the tail in the wall, Heihachi sent it up the creature's back in a clatter of joints, and the sword came down upon the scorpion's head.
The scorpion's shrieks became quieter as its head was split in two.
It collapsed with the legs folding and the tail crashing flat and the great armored exoskeleton of it falling to the sand with a long shuddering exhale. Blood spread out from under it.
Quiet came back to Renge a piece at a time.
Heihachi's puppet stepped down off the dead thing and flicked the blood on its blade into the sand. Gōki opened his fist and let the sand fall and walked back toward the Daimyo while patting Tsumugi on the head. Tsumugi was on her feet and shaking with rage at having needed help. Heihachi recalled his puppet with a self-satisfied smirk.
Reizen had not moved from where he stood in the beginning. He turned and went to find the governor, who was climbing out from under a fallen awning, to talk about the scorpion and the four it had killed and what Renge might owe, or be owed, for the privilege of the Daimyo having been present when it fell.
Yuuga let go of Karura's scarf.
He had stopped being loud at some point, and now he stood and straightened his robes for the second time that day and looked at the ruin of the square, the dead animal, the wrecked granary spilling its grain into the dust, the townspeople creeping back out into the open with their hands over their mouths. He looked at the people of Renge looking at him before turning his attention to Karura.
"It seems you aren't as useless as you look." Yuuga said. "But to think a girl who plays with dolls was sent as my bodyguard. Fitting I suppose… Little girls do love their dolls. I guess ninja girls take it to the next level." He burst out laughing.
There was a furrow in Karura's forehead after hearing that laugh aimed at her.
His bearers carried his palanquin across the square, around the blood, around the grain, around the people, while he held a scented cloth to his nose against the smell of their town, and Karura fell in a pace off his shoulder where she belonged.
Karura didn't like the Daimyo's son so far.