Chapter 1049: That Creature Is a Harmful Creature (4)

After leaving the village, the group pushed deep into the Shanghai cape, into little copses and wetland reed beds thick as a wall.

Their guide was the self-proclaimed prince.

The prince was hanging face-down from the cross-shaped punishment rack, after all. If he was going to guide them, he had to be able to see what was ahead.

Besides, tying him on backward would have looked a little weird.

Anyway, from the cross frame strapped to Qing’s back came a constant stream of directions—“hidari,” “migi,” “ah, soko da”—and she couldn’t shake the feeling that the voice-navigation language setting had somehow been configured wrong.

Then, all of a sudden, came a small complaint.

“Hey. It’s raining. Couldn’t you at least cover me with something?”

“Sometimes getting rained on feels pretty nice, so try enjoying it while you can. Anyway, enough of that. Which way from here? And if you try some ancient joke like, ‘Guess it wasn’t this hill—oh, wait, maybe it was the one back there,’ you die. Understood, Prince?”

“Ahem. Ah, we came in through those reeds over there. That collapsed patch—someone lost his footing there. Ahem. Not me. One of my retainers did.”

“Sure. Of course.”

So they went on like that for roughly half a shichen.

By the time they reached the sharp southeastern tip of Shanghai, there was a tiny rise ahead of them—too pathetic to call a mountain, really, more of a low hill.

“There! Behind that! My country’s encampment is on the far side!”

“Oho.”

Qing looked over her shoulder.

“Girls, hm? No, not girls. There’s only one Yoye. Ha. Now that’s wordplay.”

At that, the look on Seol Iri’s face was as if she had just seen a fly bobbing in soup.

Qing snickered.

Ah, that was fun.

But that was the beauty of stupid little jokes like these. They never lost. If the other person got mad, great. If they stared at you in dead seriousness, great. If they laughed, even better. Truly the undefeated form of humor.

And Gongsun Yoye’s own reaction—complete bewilderment, like she genuinely had no idea how she was supposed to respond—was just as satisfying.

“It’s behind that hill. From here on out, quiet. You remember the hand signals, right?”

Qing added a few quick gestures.

I take the lead. Yoye watches the rear. We circle in from that side.

The side Qing indicated was, naturally, the reed bed.

Since ancient times, reed beds had been sacred ground for ambushes. Their one weakness was fire, but in monsoon season even that vanished. At times like this, a reed marsh was practically unbeatable.

It was also filthy and wildly inconvenient.

The ground beneath was swamp, so water seeped into your feet almost at once, and wetlands in this era were breeding grounds for leeches and mosquitoes.

Leeches were surprisingly clean, so whatever. But mosquitoes were dangerous things that spread disease, and on top of them came the fleas and ticks crawling everywhere.

That was the real reason people avoided reed beds despite their tactical advantages.

Of course, none of that applied to masters.

A master’s skin was tough enough that even if mosquitoes or leeches latched on and bit furiously, they couldn’t pierce it. At worst, it was just the disgusting sensation of tiny clingy things crawling on you.

For anyone who wasn’t a master, though, it was absolute misery.

“Cough—ptui. Could we not simply take an easier path? At least loosen my hands. Hwaaagh. At this rate, every drop of fresh blood in my body will be sucked dry.”

“Oh, think of it as a valuable commoner-life experience. And if you open your mouth one more time, I’ll drag the bridal chair across the ground. With you hanging underneath, of course.”

Faced with the truly horrific threat of being made to experience the swamp with his entire body, the prince snapped his mouth shut.

Either he was surprisingly weak-nerved, or a few rounds of hammer treatment had broken his spirit.

Then again, would Qing really go that far?

Of course she would.

Still, this bastard did seem to have some sense. The type of evil scum who caught on quickly was exactly the sort she disliked.

How long had they been quietly forcing their way through the reeds like that?

At last, the dense reed forest began to thin, and beyond its thick curtain they could finally see the slope beneath the hill—the place the prince had identified as Ippen’s encampment.

Frankly, when she heard “pirate camp,” Qing hadn’t expected anything that impressive. She had figured it would be about the same as a rough field camp a man from her hometown might throw together while out serving military labor.

But the pirate bastards really were different.

The first thing that caught her eye was the line of long poles driven into the ground from the entrance onward, and hanging from them were people—or more precisely, all or part of what had once been people.

One pole had heads on it.

Another had arms and legs threaded through it in tidy order.

Another had entire corpses hung whole.

And the remaining pieces had been neatly piled below into little mounds.

Well now.

Pirates indeed.

Even the decorations outside their camp were out of the ordinary.

Was it a warning, maybe? Come closer and we’ll turn you into this?

A baleful color flickered through Qing’s eyes.

And that was the very moment—

“Lord Songdo! Lord Songdo!! Untie me! Damn it! Lord Songdo! What is this?! No! What in the—untie me, damn you! Untie me!!”

The prince suddenly exploded into anguished shouting and began thrashing violently.

He struggled so desperately that he was actually rocking even Qing’s body, and his voice was so stricken it sounded ready to spit blood.

This was right in front of enemy lines. They needed to shut him up at once, but with him tied to the rack on Qing’s back, her hands couldn’t reach him.

Qing hurriedly unstrapped the frame.

SPLAT.

The prince slammed face-first into the swampy mud of the reeds.

Even so, the screams kept coming.

“Aaaagh! No!!”

Qing had no idea what had set him off so suddenly, but after this kind of racket, the ambush was as good as ruined.

“Damn it. Get ready. They’re coming!”

SHIIING.

Steel left its scabbard.

In the middle of all that, Seol Iri swung that canteen-shaped water bottle of hers—SWASH, CRACK—and formed an ice sword in an instant, looking pointlessly cool while she did it.

And then?

The prince kept screaming in Japanese—Untie this, untie me right now, untie me!—and at last the enemy emerged...

...except they didn’t.

Even after waiting a quarter of a gak, which was a fairly long time, there was still no sign of anyone at all.

“Huh? What the hell?”

Come to think of it, the condition of the camp was a little strange.

The shock of those avant-garde corpse decorations had distracted her before, but now that she looked properly, some of the tents had collapsed and been left that way, and the camp itself showed no sign of life whatsoever.

Qing bit down on her lip.

Had they been too late?

If those human filth who carved people up and hung them like decorations had already moved on—if they were still carrying out the same atrocities somewhere else—

She should have hauled the prince bastard out earlier and butchered him on the spot...

Of course, even if the men who had moved on were now slaughtering and plundering somewhere else, that could not be Qing’s responsibility.

She had that much sense.

Still, the weight in her chest, the feeling of a stone laid there, would not go away.

Qing couldn’t hide the bitterness on her face.

...And then?

“Damn it, what is this?! Which bastard—what bastard dared do this to the retainers of great Ippen?! I will avenge them! I swear I will avenge them!!”

Qing had, in fact, made the prince a firm promise that if he spoke one more time, she would drag the bridal chair across the ground.

And promises were meant to be kept.

So she grabbed the cross-frame and started dragging it straight into the pirate camp.

Which was when the prince’s lines suddenly started sounding a little strange.

“Prince? Do you know them?”

“They are my loyal retainers. Who in the world—what kind of men would commit something this cruel...”

“Oh. So they were pirates.”

Qing let out a long breath of relief.

Oh.

So it was pirates.

For a second there, she thought that while they had been wasting time waiting around for pirates, powerless ordinary people somewhere else might have suffered some great catastrophe.

“Girls, these were pirates. Looks like somebody besides us went and exterminated some pirate scum.”

“Oh. Really?”

Gongsun Yoye had been carefully holding one of the poles, trying to gather up the body hanging from it.

The instant she heard that, she let go.

The half-pulled pole toppled at once and fell into the mud with a wet thud.

The worry on her face brightened in an instant too.

Apparently she had been thinking along much the same lines.

“I don’t feel any presence, but just in case, maybe there’s a survivor—or not a survivor, I guess, but maybe there’s still somebody alive. Let’s spread out and look. If anything happens, just yell.”

They left the prince beside the familiar faces and began searching the camp for stragglers.

It wasn’t hard to find traces of battle in the interior either.

The rain had already washed away the blood, but there were chaotic footprints stamped all through the mud, severed fingers and wrists lying around in plain sight, and so on.

It was while they were lifting one tent flap after another that she heard it—

Splash, splash.

Measured footsteps.

Without even looking, Qing knew they belonged to Seol Iri.

“Hm? What is it?”

“There’s something.”

“Huh? I told you to yell if you found something.”

“I didn’t want to.”

Apparently she had not wanted to yell.

Honestly, sometimes Qing had no idea what kind of logic that girl ran on.

What now?

In any case, she followed Seol Iri and found one of those pirate-looking armored warriors pinned to the ground.

A Japanese sword had been driven more than halfway through the man’s belly, fixing him solidly to the earth.

“Who’s there... who is it...?”

Qing met Seol Iri’s eyes.

And then, a moment later—

“Jangchon—is that you? Lord Jangchon? What in the world... how did you end up like this?”

“Your Highness? Is that Your Highness? Thank heaven. You’re alive. You truly lived. We heard you had encountered three thousand troops of the Central Plains... thank heaven. Thank heaven...”

“Yes. It is I. Saruta Tadamasa has come. Lord Jangchon, what in the world happened here?”

“That cunning wretch Yeongsi...”

Seol Iri and Gongsun Yoye stood there blankly, unable to understand a word of what came after that.

Only Qing cocked an ear and listened.

From what Qing overheard, the story went like this.

Saruta Tadamasa, Crown Prince of Ippen, had personally led a royal campaign.

As crown prince, he had advanced into the Central Plains at the head of one hundred warriors.

And as the commander leading that force, he had personally undertaken the most dangerous assignment of all—

scouting out the enemy’s position.

Now, someone might reasonably ask what kind of nonsense that was.

The crown prince leading a royal campaign was one thing, sure.

But the crown prince personally acting as a scout?

What kind of idiot-brained absurdity was that?

Then again, if you changed “royal campaign” to “raiding” and “scouting” to “looking around for people to loot,” it started making perfect sense.

After all, what real danger could scouting possibly pose to men who made a living preying on powerless villagers?

If anything, it was the perfect job for taking personal credit.

Look, there are people over there to rob—I found them myself.

If you wanted to put it more grandly, it was ideal for building military merit.

Except—

The problem was that the prince had died while out on that “scouting” mission.

Well, the prince hadn’t died.

The real problem was the testimony of the warrior who had survived the villagers’ ambush and fled back alone.

Because what if he returned alone after losing the prince and admitted the truth?

What if he said, “The prince got startled by the villagers’ crude arrows, ran, fell into a trap, and died”?

Then what?

The obvious answer would be: Why are you still alive, you pathetic bastard?

And his head would roll immediately.

So the fleeing warrior gave a different report.

He said that the Central Plains bastards had somehow discovered Ippen’s invasion in advance and come swarming down on them with three thousand troops.

He said seven warriors had fought a heroic last stand against that force.

He said the prince had ordered him to flee at the very end, and so, wiping away tears, he had returned only to deliver this news. He begged not to be forgiven for his inadequacy. He would commit seppuku at once, right here, hyaaaah! No, please, don’t stop him! But—but—sob—the prince had commanded him to live...

And just like that, the prince was transformed into a great war hero who had perished gloriously in battle against three thousand elite soldiers of the Central Plains.

Which left a problem for the men who remained.

One side shouted that they had to avenge the prince at once.

That they had to show those Central Plains bastards the true ferocity of an Ippen warrior.

That at the very least they had to recover the prince’s remains.

Immediate vengeance. Absolute vengeance. The fight-to-the-death faction.

The other side argued that they needed to retreat while they still could.

If three thousand Central Plains troops came pouring in right now, they would all die.

It wasn’t that they feared death, no—if they died like this, wouldn’t it just be a dog’s death? The real revenge would be to carry the news home, gather all the military strength of Ippen, and return in force.

The let’s-live-for-later-revenge faction.

The words sounded noble enough, but in the end it was just a fancier way of saying, I don’t want to die.

And men who talked about running because they feared death were never loyal retainers.

So one night, the let’s-live-for-later-revenge faction ambushed the fight-to-the-death faction.

And a one-sided massacre began.

Naturally.

How could the men caught barehanded in the middle of the night ever defeat an enemy that had already armed itself and waited for the moment to strike?

And after that, they had even decorated the camp beautifully with the bodies of their fellow men, in order to disguise the whole thing as the work of Central Plains soldiers.

“This is treason! Treason, I say! Those traitors!”

“To see you... safe like this... what a blessing. Please... when you return home... clear our names. Prove our loyalty...”

“I will! I swear that I will!”

It was almost moving, in a way.

But Qing’s gaze had already shifted to the pirate warrior with the sword in his belly—

more precisely, to the necklace hanging from his neck.

It was a necklace strung with countless shriveled pieces of flesh.

And Qing recognized what they were immediately.

Human ears.

There had to be over a hundred of them threaded on the cord.

None of them looked fresh, so apparently he hadn’t added any recently.

It was one of the distinctive trophies favored by Japanese pirates.

The cruelty of the pirates had been infamous for ages, and even in Qing’s homeland, there were endless records preserving their atrocities in exact detail.

When pirates raided a village, they left not a single survivor.

Because to them, killing was a game.

A form of pleasure.

When they looted a settlement, they tortured people to death in every way imaginable.

There were more than enough records of them committing every possible act of savagery—forcing parents to watch them cook their children alive and eat them, or shoving swords into family members’ hands and making them kill one another while the pirates gambled on who would win.

Then they would string up the body parts of the people they had killed and wear them as necklaces and bracelets.

That was why, after pirates swept through a place, the corpses themselves became unbearable to look at.

One man collected ears.

Another collected noses.

Another upper lips.

Another fingers.

Still another hacked off genitals and took those.

What remained behind were only hideous wrecks of bodies, stripped of almost everything.

A baleful color spread through Qing’s eyes.

Because this was the thing she hated most.

Bad bastards ought to act like bad bastards.

They ought to kill each other, tear at each other, betray and betray again, showing the inhuman filth they truly were.

But some dog-butcher bastard—not even worthy of being called a dog butcher—who murdered people and proudly strung their body parts around his neck, what right did that kind of trash have to sit there pretending to be human?

Loyalty and honor were things humans did.

Things that weren’t human had no business doing them.

Villains with bright-red numbers hanging over their heads were supposed to behave like villains.

And of course they were supposed to meet a miserable end.

That was the right way.

That was how it had to be.

Qing looked down at the prince expressionlessly.

He was still tied to the cross-frame, staring at his dying subordinate with every appearance of grief.

Hm.

How to use this properly?

If she played it right, she might be able to wipe the pirate bastards out to the last seed.