Engineering, Magic, and Kitsune

John sat patiently as Rin reviewed the notes, her face bearing a deep frown as she stared at them like arcane glyphs, despite his assurances that she didn't have to learn all this at once.

Turning to look, he saw Yuki dipping through the door, alone. Behind her, he saw the undead still calmly kneeling, and Shirai shivering on the ground, still bound, but otherwise unharmed. The kitsune closed the door as she left the room, leaving the pair alone, which was probably a good sign. After all, why would she trust uncooperative captives alone, especially in a room with a window? Or, well, captive at least, given Shirai was still on the ground.

"Am I interrupting something?" Yuki asked gently, her eyes flicking to the freshly repaired holes in the beam above.

Oh, she absolutely knew. John only hoped she managed to keep a straight face during the interrogation. Still, how the hell did she notice where exactly so fast? He thought he did a pretty good patch job, even if he had to hover to get at it.

Rin resumed her tomato impression and re-locked eyes onto the notes, refusing to meet the kitsune's gaze.

"No, I think we're just about done here. I gave Rin a few things to think about," John politely stated, saving the poor Unbound from further embarrassment. "How did your interrogation go?"

The kitsune smiled. "Well, the undead's name is Segawa Yosuke," she explained, "and he was a soldier of four decades before being turned, although not an Unbound. Apparently, he was a deathly ill widower and traded servitude for a second chance to help his country, only to be assigned here. He was quite pliable."

John winced on the man's behalf. He had known something of a war down south, but the mere concept of believing you'd be helping your people in some sort of conflict only to end up extorting them, magically bound to the commands of others, was terrifying.

"I can see why he wasn't happy. Can we trust him?" John asked.

Yuki turned her palm over, revealing a small charm of some sort. He first noticed the paper talisman, bleached yellow as if left under harsh sunlight for years and painted in jagged-edged characters that he couldn't read. That was not the local language; it was from elsewhere. Something about it felt wrong. Perverse, like they were trying their best to crawl into his eye sockets and into his brain from sight alone. A thousand little bladed limbs that fought to be seen, to be known despite the viewer's wishes.

He tried his best not to focus on the characters, tearing his eyes away to focus on anything else. His gaze trailed upwards, focusing not on the sheet, but on what it was wrapped around. Pale, faded flecks stuck out from either end, and darkened chunks that almost seemed to seep from it like an open wound. Sun-bleached, bare, jagged chunks stuck out from below, and John's breath caught in his throat.

That was a section of a rib, sawed off into a clean bone totem, bound up in curses like a mummy.

"He just gave you that?" John barked in disbelief, jaw slack.

"He had no choice," Yuki sighed, shaking her head. "It's a shame."

"The hell do you mean he had no choice?" he quietly muttered, glancing toward the door. She wasn't implying what he thought she was, was she? She didn't press him into service again after the poor bastard broke free, right?

The kitsune's golden eyes dimmed, turning pensive, maybe even mournful, as she rolled the grisly totem around in her palm. "If Yosuke goes without fulfilling orders from a master for too long, he dies again. Standing orders don't work," Yuki stated, her voice low, and a burning, hateful ember lit in the back of her eyes.

Bile inched upward in his throat, and he looked away. Right. How silly of him. Yuki wouldn't force his compliance. No, Yosuke was remade to be compliant by nature, and he just had to pick who held his leash. A perfectly obedient weapon that can't go rogue without keeling over and dying. At least, not without much more going wrong first. He was too on edge for this. The stress was getting to him.

"Fuck," John swore, crossing his arms.

A beat of silence passed between them.

"And there's no way to free him?" John finally asked.

Slowly, Yuki shook her head, ears drooping. "No, not within my power, at least. This magic is unknown to me."

"My last teacher told me this technique was imported from the far west, and adapted by our priests to work with local materials due to the war," Rin finally cut in. He had almost forgotten she was in the room, which was impressive given how showy she was. "I don't know anyone with priestly training, so I can't tell you more, Lady Yuki, Lord John."

What went unsaid was how getting information from the priests nearby was not an option.

His sides burned for just a moment, and his gauntleted arm twitched.

"That's fine," Yuki said, waving off her concerns. "Finding out more about the nature of what he is can wait for now. What is more important is what he told us, and what Shirai confirmed when I talked to him… after I removed the wax earplugs. The previous leader of this little band, Baisho Fuma, has sent out orders to five other branches of this little operation in surrounding areas to drop their goods off as well. Remember the letter I found?"

John hesitantly nodded. "The one from…" he glanced at Rin for a moment, "The nogitsune, yes? If I recall, Fuma is supposed to be under someone called Nomura Shinji, but was also taking orders from the nogitsune via letters." The term was strange on his tongue, but the way Yuki described it to him in private as the local term for, effectively, an evil kitsune felt fitting for Kiku, if nothing else.

"Correct," Yuki said. "When he got that order, he told Shirai to hold down this area and do their portion of drops, sent out messengers to anyone under him in the surrounding area, and said he would deliver the last one himself, taking a horse and a cart. Apparently, he told them he'd drop off a load himself on the way by."

Oh yeah, that guy was gone gone. If there was the equivalent of a tropical tax haven in this world, he was well on his way while Kiku was busy with them. Of course, he'd probably be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, but he'd probably be doing that anyway, given how many enemies he probably made with the whole tax collector thing.

Of course, assuming he wasn't just dead or worse. Carrying all that must have been a beacon for the Nameless, and he knew they were ambushing caravans. He probably left the undead with Shirai because it would be too obvious, and people might start asking questions. He couldn't imagine the average official would be too pleased with a "civilian" of some sort actively walking around with a government weapon that should be in service somewhere, but walking into those woods without significant protection seemed like asking for death.

"Well, at least that's one problem dealt with. We don't have to worry about anyone having the authority to rally everyone together and come down on here all at once, at least for a while," John grumbled, thinking of the other towns and villages throughout the area with their own tax collector problems he had heard about only tangentially.

They're going to dump it off in the local warehouse, weren't they? The Greater Nameless couldn't control things at a great range and needed puppets to receive goods believably. Assuming they don't cut and run, too. Shit, they could have a small siege coming.

John groaned.

"This is going to be messy," he complained. "What do you think the odds are that the messenger was just her in disguise, too?"

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"No, I don't think so. The risk of me detecting her if I happened to be in town would be too high, but I wouldn't be surprised if she had someone she had broken the mind of to do it," Yuki sighed in response. "We'll probably only see a trickle of them, at least. We should probably burn the place down, while they're still reeling. At worst, it'll create confusion about where they're supposed to drop their goods, delaying things. At best, it'll spook them into fleeing entirely, denying the Nameless their prize, or forcing them to chase it all down."

He saw the logic, despite how the thought of committing arson in a forest set him ill at ease. "Isn't that risky? We still have to live here afterwards," John commented.

"Why?" Rin curiously asked. "A common fire in a forest like this won't spread farther than a handful of Chō, as long as you don't put too much effort into it. Is the Shape of All Things weaker where you come from?"

John tensed, finger tips digging into his palm. Shit. Rin spoke of it as if it were a physical law, but the term made it sound almost holy. He had seen it a few times, mostly in esoteric or religious texts, but nothing ever explained what it was. He bit the inside of his cheek, wondering how one would lie their way out of not knowing that the sun goes down every night after awkwardly asking why everything hasn't boiled yet.

"It has been a long day, Rin. You may not know it, but he hardly slept last night, working on solutions as he was," Yuki interjected, expression morphing into something sympathetic.

Internally, he slumped in relief. Externally, he made zero movements that might give him away. There Yuki was, as usual, with the absolute clutch! He could only aspire to one day achieve that level of sheer improvisation skill.

Admittedly, the thought of razing that horrible place to the ground appealed more than he expected. If he could press a button to smash it into a crater, he certainly would, but the thought of seeing that cursed clearing again filled his gut with inky dread and made sweat bead on his brow.

"Yuki's right. I've not really been myself the last while. It's a shame this couldn't be resolved peacefully and quickly, but I really shouldn't be letting it throw me off so much," he quickly added, corroborating the lie on instinct.

"Of course, sensei," Rin replied, bowing her head.

Still, a Chō wasn't very far, perhaps a bit over a hundred meters. He was still clueless about the Shape of All Things but could put together some things from context.

One, Rin implied that it had protective effects for the environment, and when Yuki cut in, she didn't contradict the Unbound about her plan being harmless. That meant she was likely correct, and the fire would cause no problem other than a minor blaze, which he had seen a few of in the distance over the years.

In the past, he had just assumed he'd been lucky not to have them turn into true infernos. Could there really have been something suffocating them that he didn't know of?

Two, she specified common fire, implying that different types of fire would spread further. It was likely that these fires weren't special because of what they burned but why they burned, as once past the initial radius, it wasn't like a blazing tree would burn extra hot because some started a brushfire some distance away with a blowtorch rather than a matchstick.

She mentioned that it was fine as long as he didn't put too much effort into it, meaning it was probably a matter of magical power, and potentially intent, given how much of magic seemed to be tied up in emotions.

Maybe if he fit some extra capacitors to the hoverboard, took off at a distance, and packed some "mundane" combustibles that he could drop… Yeah, yeah, that could work.

Ideally, he'd want to ensure that the people who might gather wealth for the Nameless wouldn't show at all, but he lacked any sort of force projection to ensure it. Yuki was right; the next best thing was making it so they didn't have a place to cleanly drop loot off into the waiting webs of their foe. With all luck, they'd skitter away with it, never to be seen again. If they were less lucky, they'd get hunted down, and the Nameless would ultimately get it anyway. However, that would still require more effort and disrupt any ongoing mobilization, especially given that the range where they can control their minions seemed limited.

The ever-present threat of Kiku loomed over this plan, and he still had no way of stopping her from repeating the last time. It was a reasonable assumption that she needed to get close and make contact with him, or at least talk to him, to take control. Otherwise, she would have just hypnotized him to walk off into the woods without needing to expose her presence, and that would have been that. What could he do with that?

She might not even be around the warehouse, instead accompanying the Greater Nameless to wherever it needed to go to heal up, but he refused to risk that. He had to assume she WOULD be there.

The first line of defence would be not to be detected, but he had no delusions about trying to defeat a kitsune's senses, if Yuki's were anything to go by.

The second line would be to not be found; if she knew of his presence but couldn't find out exactly where he was, that'd serve just as well to get in and out. Alas, that'd be inconsistent at best, and any wild ideas he had about forming a fog bank to obscure his attack were hilariously impractical, especially on such short notice.

The following, obviously, was not to be grabbed. John'd put decent money on having a better straight-line speed than her while on his disc. The kitsune was comparable to Yuki by her very nature as a paired sister, and she wasn't flying everywhere at high speeds, which would have been damn useful when the Nameless were chasing them that one time. While she was pretty damn fast on the ground, it wasn't like she could just ignore the terrain, so with enough open space, that should be doable. The issue was seeing her coming to put that speed into action…

Wait. John hadn't exactly cleaned up since yesterday, and Yuki probably hadn't either. She had to have torn him from her grasp, so even if she didn't shed…

He looked over Yuki.

"Hey, Yuki? Do you have any of the nogitsune's fur on you?" John hurriedly, almost excitedly, asked as he started to check himself over, too. "Rin! Do you see any pinkish or purple fur on me?"

Yuki blinked, but complied, and Rin slowly shook her head as, from her perspective, John must have become possessed, twisting and turning as he tried to spot any scraps against the dark coloured fabric.

"No, sensei, I don't," she said.

"Come on, there has to be something," he muttered, methodically going over himself.

Motion caught the edge of his vision, and he jolted back.

"Something like this?" Yuki said, holding out a small tuft of pinkish fur.

John's smile only widened as he snagged it, putting it off to the side with some weight on it so it didn't blow away.

"Would you mind giving me a bit of your fur as well? I have an idea!" he spilled, quickly digging through his bag and pulling out some unused sensors from that fateful day when they tried to set some up around the Nameless nest. He had never quite managed to put all of them up before the incident, and never remembered to dig them out of his pack afterwards, but now they'd have a new life.

Rin looked like she desperately wanted to say something, jaw hanging low as she floundered, but Yuki just quietly snipped a few hairs short, which he graciously accepted.

"Thank you kindly," he said, a slightly manic giggle creeping into his voice.

The detectors were barely altered compared to the standard ones surrounding the fort, which detected anyone or anything with any shred of magical power going through their field of view, and tweaking them only to detect the Nameless was easy. The key factor was that you needed a sample of the material to use as a filter for the device, to prevent the sensors from seeing anything other than what you wanted, since magical materials tended to repel unalike energies. Yet, energies that are the same could easily flow through. It was just a matter of altering the usually very sensitive sensor to not trigger on the sample alone in front of it, making it so it needed a bit of an extra push.

Since the Nameless were such a homogeneous group, it worked just fine. It would never work if he wanted to have a sensor that would detect all people but not any yokai; the range was too broad.

But what if he just wanted to detect one person? Why wouldn't it work there?

Widen the detection area a bit more, salvage a few extra, mount them to the corners…

He pulled out the focus from the device, which immediately incremented the attached counter upon detecting his hand, but he ignored it. After a quick bit of heating, he removed the Nameless material from the lens and inserted Yuki's fur instead.

Perhaps lens was the wrong term, since it was effectively a sap stopper shield with a bridge of a specific material through it.

"Now, let's see if this works…" he trailed off, pointing towards his kitsune companion.

Click.

His smile grew.

"You seem pleased. What have you figured out?" Yuki inquired, leaning in, eyes lingering on the small focus for a moment before slightly widening. "Ah!"

"One more test, just one more. Would you mind disguising yourself for a second?" John half-asked, half-begged.

Yuki's eyes took on the same, energetic sparkle that his did, and a grin bloomed on her face as gold-black flames washed over her like a tide, burying her usual visage as she contorted and shrank, the fire finally fading away to reveal an ordinary woman a few seconds later.

A moment passed as he let whatever energies still coating the kitsune dissipate to get a reading as close to normal levels as possible. With shaking hands, grip tight around the focus, he slowly, haltingly pointed it at her, praying that—

Click.