Chapter Text
-
“So,” Shuten Doji begins conversationally, swirling the wine in his cup in a slow, two-beat rhythm. He stops when the edge is tipped towards Asura. “You…tried to reset the timeline?”
“Don’t laugh.”
Asura’s grip on the cup of wine Shuten had poured for him is white-knuckled, barely shy of cracking. One unwanted reaction and the porcelain is doomed to shatter into pieces all over the table between them.
Shuten holds up his free hand in a placating gesture, palm towards Asura and showing off the yellow prayer beads around his wrist. “I won’t laugh,” he says, biting his tongue to keep from laughing like the hypocrite he is. “I won’t, I swear. Just — Really? You didn’t think that’d come back to haunt you?”
“...No.” Asura replies with utmost honesty, though his eyes stray to the side and away from Shuten’s face. The movement is the only manifestation of any embarrassment he may be feeling Shuten had seen on his stoic countenance thus far. “I wasn’t thinking forward . I was thinking back.”
“Back to the — ha. The past. I get it, it’s funny. Good joke.”
Asura’s expression sours, like he’d bitten into a pepper and found it filled with honey and lime. A small chip appears in the rim of the cup he’s holding.
“Not a single thought for—“ Shuten waves his hand in a circle, snapping twice as if it would kick his thoughts into gear. “The thing that happens when you try to mess with time. Not like anyone before has ever achieved as such to ever find out if it’s real as far as we’ve seen. You know?”
“Causality?” Ibaraki Doji offers from Shuten’s right.
“That one,” Shuten Doji snaps a third time. Ibaraki looks pleased with himself for his contribution. “I never took you as the reverent type, Lord Mara, but you’re really exceeding my expectations here. There’s hubris and then there’s hubris, and you’ve landed yourself as even more extreme than the second one.”
“When a god gives me a reason to respect their fate, I’ll do so,” Asura says, his lip curling with the declaration and his eyes rising to the skies as if issuing a challenge. “Until then, I’ll do as I please.”
“Hah!” Shuten Doji responds to his statement with a warped grin of his own. “I like that mindset of yours! Linear time be damned if you’ve got enough raw power to snap it like a stick and rebuild it as you see fit.” There is poorly concealed amusement in his tone just bordering on the laughter Asura is adamant about not receiving.
“You and I both have dabbled in deicide in the past, but I have to admit, you’ve thoroughly one-upped me in this case.”
Asura’s glare holds up for only a fraction of a second in response before it folds, seemingly entirely against his will, into the closest thing he’s ever achieved in his life to a pout.
Shuten Doji’s composure fails on the spot and he breaks into uproarious laughter.
-
When Lord Taishakuten defeats The Mara, everyone’s memories begin to return.
And by defeats present-tense, it is actually past-tense, because the defeat of The Mara occured in a past-event inserted directly into history by the hands of The Mara himself. It occured in description, in planning, in execution, but never in an actual linear fashion that made very much sense at all.
(Did it ever happen, then? The question remains unanswered. It’s one that can never be answered. If the only thing that changed is everyone’s memories — and if no one remembers the truth — then has the truth itself changed?)
Some higher god beyond Asura’s amassed divine power probably thought it would be funny to couple The Mara’s defeat with the foundation for the new memory-line, and once it had been achieved, the edits became obsolete. Memories were inserted, but never cemented properly. Nobody quite realizes they’re holding two histories in their memories either, until it is made apparent to them: one whisper of the Ten Precepts or the War God is enough to cause a silent dam to break in the listener’s mind, recalling the Tyrant’s regime in all its bloody glory.
The peace brokered between the Celestials and the Demon clans remains stable, despite it never truly existing in the first place; Lord Taishakuten is still sitting on the Celestial throne, a reign of benevolence written by someone else’s hands trailing behind him like a wispy, oversized shroud.
(Lord Taishakuten is not an amnesiac as he continues to play as. He is instead experiencing a rather dramatic division of the self in response to realizing what was done to him was what he had intended to do to everyone else, and is coping with it in the way he knows best: by putting a peaceful smile on his face and acting as if he has everything under control.)
As a collective, the entire Celestial realm decides to accept a gift given to them. No one discusses it out of fear it may dissipate under too much scrutiny. Life returns to the edited normal with a renewed appreciation for its peace bestowed upon them, even with the remembered truth that something isn’t quite right.
Asura makes the executive decision to never mess with the timeline again.
The simple fix he’d thought would work — tampering with the entire collective’s memory to interpret events as he saw fit, shaped to create an ideal they’d dreamed of and tossing his own self into the depths of the Abyss — has just left matters much more complicated than they were before. He’ll stick to necromancy, or moderate heresy, or never getting himself into a situation that would call for a complete rewrite of time ever again, like a much more reasonable devotee to a determined martyr set on killing himself, but only after triggering the non-consensual mind-melding of the entire world.
(Elsewhere, Susabi breathes a sigh of relief as his migraine suddenly disappears.)
Asura is also a little concerned, but not concerned enough to search, that the conceptual “evils” he’d absorbed from the shattered heaven — the price for his world rewrite, taking on all of the sins Taishakuten had amassed with the Precepts — have suddenly up and… vanished.
The time between then and now is foggy in his mind, but what he can recall was a lot of screaming and a lot of crying and a generous dose of wailing during every conscious hour as the Sins became some rancid, parasitic divinity tearing him apart from the inside. He can say now, after experiencing it first-hand, that theoretical evils like to manifest as a chaotic, noisy monster he would’ve preferred to crush under his heel than invite into his brain for a chat and a free Mara title to go along with it. Perhaps his self-declared infinite mind-power burned through the sludge like dry brush caught alight far faster than he’d anticipated; perhaps whatever entity was responsible for returning everyone’s memories, thumbing their nose at him, decided take-backs were permitted under these circumstances and chose to snatch back his end of the reality-breaking exchange. Like he ever wanted them in the first place.
Asura is not sure where this leaves him, which is a drastic change from the surety he’s felt for each and every one of his decisions up until now.
At the very least, now, it’s quieter.
-
No amount of longing for companionship could overcome the fact that Asura has believed, and has believed he always will be, incapable of leading an average life. Power at the price of solitude resounded in his veins; there existed a devastating divide between Asura himself and the individuals around him carved solely by the sheer potential held in his hands that they did not. His bottomless well to the puddles after a light rain separated him, on a foundational level, from each and every person he had encountered since the day his spiritual entity manifested.
He was not out of their reach; they were out of reach from him.
Taishakuten had been the first to breach that self-constructed, self- destructive gap between himself and everyone else. That shining white light didn’t waste a second to sink its hands up to its elbows into the howling, writhing mass that was Asura’s very soul and pull, until something in him responded to its insistence and decided to pull back.
“—You’re like a bird, Asura,” Taishakuten had so often said to him, arms in the air and his fingers splayed wide, like feathers. A look of pure, exalted joy painted his features. “Flying so high above the rest of us, you climb ever higher on the drafts that would upturn anyone else and send him spiraling towards the ground.” Over his shoulder, he smiles. “Never will you reach a thunderstorm you can’t surpass to reach the skies above.”
“That sounds lonely.” Asura tilting his head to the side in his musings. Taishakuten glanced down at him, as if seeing him for the first time that evening, with a look of something incredulous on his face.
“Lonely?”
“There’s far too much empty sky up there. Why would I want to climb to where there’s nothing left?” He was seated when Taishakuten was standing, leaning forward with an arm braced on his knee and his fingers dangling alongside his golden necklace. “Way up there, the only sight to appreciate is the ground so far below. Everything I want is already down here, right by my side; I wouldn’t want to leave that behind.”
Taishakuten wore an expression of bemused good humor, spinning to face Asura so that his robes swished like the clouds he spoke of. “You wouldn’t want to fly at all? That’s not a very bird-like wish to have, Asura.”
“This bird wishes it,” Asura said.
The shining light moved to sit in front of him, his sleeves flicking as he settled onto his knees.
“Every time I believe I have you figured out, you always come around with another perspective.” Asura followed the amused uptick of his smile as Taishakuten spoke, the way the corners of his eyes crinkled with a fondness despite his words admitting to a shortcoming. Every twitch of the muscles in his face was trained, deliberate with meaning. “You make me see the world in ways I never would have otherwise.”
“You’ve got far more eyes than I do,” Asura had scoffed with a bit of a simper. “I don’t think you need me to show you any other point of view.”
Taishakuten then raised both hands and made the eyes on his palms blink at Asura, as if confirming his statement. He raised his eyebrows, the smile on his face turning a little more teasing.
“If you do not want to be a bird,” Taishakuten began, the eyes blinking again with a click of eyelids on flesh, “what else would you prefer to be? I’d like your input, for future reference in my metaphors.”
“—A goose,” said Asura without a moment’s hesitation.
“—You’d rather be a goose.” Taishakuten looked at him. “You do realize that’s still a bird, Asura. As monstrous as I believe them to be.”
Asura’s mouth pulled into a sideways grin. “I like geese. They’re mean. They stay in ponds. They solve most of their problems with violence — it’s a respectable way to live.”
“They eat dirt, Asura,” Taishakuten said, grimacing, “And insects and worms. And lotus seeds.”
“The Wings eat lotus seeds,” Asura replied reasonably, “Would you condemn them?”
“Never,” Taishakuten said, eyes narrowed by the width of his returned smile. “I would honor them.”
“Then I would be a goose,” said Asura with finality, shifting to a kneel mirroring Taishakuten’s own in front of him. He leaned forward slightly, bracing his hands on his knees with a rustle of bracelets and fabric. “As it is what I wish.”
“To my dear goose, then,” Taishakuten closed his eyes, taking one of Asura’s hands into his. He pressed his forehead to the back of Asura’s hand when red demon marks dot a cross on his skin, his exhale ghosting over Asura’s knuckles. “Who has won another battle for the Celestial Realm, and will win us many more in the years to come until we can achieve our peace.”
Asura stayed quiet as Taishakuten cupped his hand between his own, the other’s expression pensive yet tinged with hope. Another thought seemed to dance across Taishakuten’s face, and Asura was given a rare chance to watch him think openly, honesty pooling in and escaping through his eyes, as to whether he wanted to voice it or not.
The first option was chosen. Asura breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief.
“...Asura,” Taishakuten raised his head.
“Mn?”
“And if I said I wanted to see the sky,” Taishakuten said, meeting Asura’s eyes with a sudden overpowering intensity, the weight of the world settling between both of their bowed shoulders, “—Would you fly for me then?”
Asura clasped his free hand around Taishakuten’s hands, returning his stare with an equal severity.
“You only need to ask it of me,” he said, “and I will become your wings.”
Asura paused suddenly, contemplating a caveat.
“Could a goose carry an entire person?”
Taishakuten’s laughter — his genuine laughter, not a usual hum or a placating chuckle for a noble trying too hard in court — was so very un-Taishakuten that Asura was startled every time he got to hear it.
It was a shrill, cackling sound, void of any elegance or poise. His laughter would hitch in his throat as the hooks Taishakuten lined his own tongue with to maintain a guise of verbal restraint caught on each escaping wheeze. The first time he heard it, Asura had assumed Taishakuten was having a coughing fit and smacked him so hard on the back to get him to stop choking it sent him sprawling.
Taishakuten had doubled over in response to Asura’s words, clutching his stomach as tears beaded in the corners of his eyes. Asura openly stared, clinging to the moment with every ounce of strength he possessed.
(Even his strength was not enough; time passed on back then, anyways.)
“I think we’ve long since killed the metaphor, Asura,” Taishakuten had said, wiping at his eyes with his sleeve, his face flushed in a way it only ever was when he was content.
Asura’s expression twisted into an ironic smile.
“Dug its grave and tossed it in, knife in its gut and all.”
-
Despite himself, Asura had always subconsciously found himself leaning into the metaphors Taishakuten so passionately ascribed to him; the soaring eagle, his God of war, abnormal in his excellence and utterly, entirely disconnected from the people around him because of it. Perhaps it was due to how frequently Taishakuten melded his own mind to Asura’s in his efforts to subdue his rage, blurring the lines between what either of them truly wanted until they’d entered a muddied and contradictory unison.
For years, Taishakuten was the only one who remained by his side through sheer force of will.
(Taishakuten himself fell into the same trap as Asura, though the nature of his separateness couldn’t have been more dissimilar; arrogance — seeing oneself as unique in their perspective, their insight, and their responsibility — is an inevitable byproduct of the ability to peer into the minds of those around you.
Taishakuten is comparatively balanced out, however, by a contradictory inferiority complex that could fill a small ocean with its volume.)
Asura had never considered that the fastest way a man like him could find himself connecting with someone would end with Asura being dragged down by force from the sky.
Shuten Doji has him held face-down in the dirt at the border of Mt. Oe within half an hour of his arrival. The Demon King has his arms pinned against his back; Asura’s spiritual entity, stretched out like a child’s string toy, is immobilized by a multitude of glowing purple hands.
“Good fight,” Shuten Doji says briskly to him, releasing his hold and helping Asura to his feet. The demonic hands dissipate into smoke as quickly as they’d erupted from the ground moments before as Ibaraki Doji approaches them from a few meters away. Both the Demon King and his Second regard Asura with an approval he’s thus earned.
You are one of us, Asura hears in Shuten Doji’s voice, and a part of him that has been waiting centuries for those words rises to meet them. Not a monster, not a prince, not a hero. You are now part of the earth you have watched from above and longed to return to.
Such an identity, a place within a greater whole, is not a gift the Demon King has knowingly given to him, but it is one Asura receives with desperate hands.
“I was beginning to worry you’d forgotten what I owe you,” says Shuten Doji, his hand under Asura’s forearm naturally moving to Asura’s elbow as he gets to his feet.
“Not at all,” Asura replies, his head swimming in a way it never has before after a fight, “I just had a few things to confirm.”
Shuten Doji laughs a harsh, grating noise, all sharp edges and unrestrained excitement. “That’s understandable, friend! I’d like to ask you a few questions later about the details from your perspective, if you’ll let me.”
On Asura’s other side, Ibaraki Doji mimics the hold Shuten has on his other arm. He notes that Ibaraki Doji looks a bit dazed as well, though Asura assumes it may be due to the very concussion-inducing hit he’d endured during their fight.
Ibaraki Doji looks up at him with a thrilled spark in his eyes Asura feels isn’t quite deserved, considering he’d thrown the demon straight off a cliff a few minutes ago.
(It could be deserved, but he’s too perplexed to consider admiration at the moment. People do not feel joy after fighting against Asura; they feel dead.)
Asura finds himself being guided by the two demons to a path covered in scorch marks and a partially fallen tree wrecked in their spar. It is a frequented path, if the number of footprints and crushed vegetation is anything to go by, and he cranes his neck upwards to see where it leads.
“This path goes all the way up to the Throne,” Ibaraki Doji says at his side, following Asura’s eyes.
Asura glances up at the looming figure of Mt. Oe rising high into the sky, high enough that its tallest, jagged peak disappears into the clouds, then back down at Ibaraki dubiously, because they have at the very least two shattered ankles and four fractured hands between the three of them and free rock climbing does not seem like the wisest course of action.
Shuten scoffs on Asura’s other side. “He never said we were going there,” he says, elbowing Asura right in one of his cracked ribs and Asura has to suppress an undignified wheeze. He tugs his arm in a different direction, right at the same time Asura notices another path. “There’s no need to look so concerned. We’re not going to haze you by making you climb a mountain right after a fight.”
“—Oh. That… makes more sense,” Asura nods once, twice, before the statement clicks and he stops nodding abruptly. Shuten Doji snorts.
Asura begins to question if his initial impression of the Shuten Doji he’d met months ago in the Abyss — distant, calculated, only reacting when really prompted — was only half a character he’d gotten to meet. Shuten has already displayed more of a personality while in his own home than he had for his entire visit to the Celestial Realm.
“We can climb to the Throne if you’d like a challenge!” Ibaraki Doji offers, jostling Asura’s other broken rib. The pair of them seem to really have it out for the integrity of his bones even in a common setting. “My good friend and I have raced from the border to the peak countless times, and he has won every one. You’ll have to be able to beat me first to have any hope of winning against him!”
His first impression of Ibaraki Doji still holds true. That’s far from a bad thing, though; Asura appreciates straight-forward people.
“Hey. You almost won a few times,” Shuten Doji amends, as if the compliment was instead offensive to him, and narrows his eyes. He reaches behind Asura’s back to smack Ibaraki’s shoulder. “It was close.”
“I know which one you are referring to,” Ibaraki Doji replies just as seriously, but there is a widening smile on his face that doesn’t match his spoken tone at all. “That one does not count.”
“Doesn’t count?” Shuten hisses as if he’d been truly insulted. “I thought we’d talked about this! It was still fair!”
“Yes,” Ibaraki says as if it is the most reasonable conclusion in the world, “And you were also very drunk.”
“Irrelevant. When am I ever sober?”
“Very drunk. You couldn’t stand up, my friend.”
“Hello,” Asura cuts in suddenly, because he’d had to steer Ibaraki away from walking right into a bush at the edge of the path with a sharp tug, “Where are we going?”
The rest of the walk isn’t very long, sloping gently upwards into the crevice between the two peaks until they’re walled in on both sides by each half of the mountain. Asura receives more narration about their surroundings along the walk: pointing out felled trees that were the collateral of various recent sparring bouts, showing off what looks like the world’s first attempt at environmentally hostile farming in an open field, passing a particular pond that used to be occupied by a rude, intangible water spirit, until some demon named Hoshiguma figured out it liked pastries and bribed it to stop trying to drown people. Pointing out a few areas on the peaks that looked more developed, more deliberately carved; the Throne, apparently, is actually more similar to a small palace fit on the confines of a mountain top and dug to extend within it than any kind of seat.
“There used to be a god right there,” Shuten Doji says at some point, pointing at the shorter of Mt. Oe’s two peaks that bordered the Demon Domain. Its top looked like it had been broken off like an icicle rather than naturally weathered by erosion.
Asura glances over at Ibaraki, hoping for some clarifying addition to that single sentence. He’d been the more detail-oriented of the two in his explanations, reliably giving more thorough answers that veered into either entire stories or boasts rather than contextless comments. Shuten had so far either given him ten words or an entire unstoppable torrent of a verbal essay, and there was no clear way to predict which one he would receive.
Ibaraki simply grins back and nods, offering nothing. Useful.
They reach their destination not much later; from what Asura can see of it, the path opens up into a courtyard that branches off into more paths, but these paths have walls cropping up on their sides and what looks to be the beginnings of a building. Further along, the structure disappears into the rock face covered in ivy and moss behind it, melding with the landscape like it had sprung up with the trees alongside it. Shuten catches him staring at it, trying to decipher the architecture.
“You’ll see the guest house later,” Shuten says, changing direction towards another corner of the courtyard. Under the maple trees is a low table at the edge of a cliff, overlooking the mountain path they’d just climbed and giving them a view of the descending sun. “For now, a drink after a good fight.”
Cups are already laid out on the table, as if prepared for any arriving guest being coerced into day drinking by the mountain’s owner. Shuten settles on one end of the table, Ibaraki settles at his right. Asura sits across from him. From seemingly nowhere, Shuten produces a jar of some strongly-smelling alcohol out of thin air and starts pouring some into each of their respective cups.
“How did he…?”
“I’ll answer that question if you answer a few of mine,” the Demon King says with a lilt to his tone, leaning back on one hand and raising an eyebrow. He gestures with the jar in Asura’s general direction, tipping it side to side. “I think I have a vague idea as to what you did, but I’d like to hear it from you. I’m curious as to what led up to it as well.”
They begin to talk. Asura gets made fun of, just a little bit. He’s never been made fun of like that. He ends up breaking a cup.
...
Asura explains to them, from start to finish, his side of the story following the destruction of the original Tower of Zenken.
“...The monster gods were unaffected, but I don’t think they had much of a mind to affect in the first place.” Asura taps the side of his new cup with his finger, loathe to hold it as he speaks at the risk of cracking another. “I’d returned to the Abyss with the intention of playing a role, and then suddenly found that there was no role to play anymore at all. I never even saw my own defeat. It’s possible it happened before I came back to my senses with the disappearance of heaven’s Evils, but it also could’ve just... never occurred past the spoken stage.”
Asura reiterates to himself, again: he will never mess with history.
“And the Celestial’s capitol?” Ibaraki Doji presses, displaying an investment in the topic Asura wasn’t expecting from him. “How have they responded to regaining their memories?”
“I went to check before coming here.” Asura recalls climbing out of a barrier-less Abyss when he felt something change and assuming a commoner’s disguise, blending in with the milling crowds and dropping a few probing questions to anyone he bumped into. “The people are fine, if not confused. The majority of them have already adapted to the new reality, and to knowing of the new reality, too. Can’t say much for the palace, though; I didn’t go anywhere near it.”
“Why?”
Asura rubs the back of his neck, looking chagrined. “I was afraid he might’ve heard me if I got too close.”
“...Oh. I see.”
“Everything seems to have stabilized now, and I’d prefer not to disturb that. It would’ve been simple had his memories stayed lost, but now… I’m not so sure how he may react.”
I'm not so sure if he’ll accept my intentions, remains unspoken. If he’ll lose the peace I wanted to give to him.
“...Hah. Sounds like they’re responding a lot better than you did, Ibaraki.”
Shuten Doji’s tangent is well-timed as it is blatantly self-serving, if the widening grin on his face is anything to go by.
Ibaraki’s pensive expression changes instantly to one of alarm. “My friend, please don’t tell him,” he says, reaching across the table to hold Shuten’s wrist. He manages to convey a pleading severity in his tone that would sound excessive coming from anyone else, but most of Ibaraki Doji’s words carry a severity of some sort regardless of their actual intent. Asura would believe Ibaraki could read out the recipe for a simple lunch dish and give it the weight of a war declaration.
“He doesn’t need to know. It wasn’t even that funny.”
“Oh, come on. It was a little funny,” Shuten Doji insists, grabbing his wrist back and tugging on Ibaraki’s arm in physical reply. “How often do I get to see you rendered completely speechless? You’re always running your mouth even when there’s nothing to say, so I think I’m justified considering it a rare exception.”
“My friend.”
Shuten Doji gestures for him to continue. “Right! That was how you started,” he says, nodding, “so either you can continue yourself, or I’m going to recite it for you.”
Ibaraki’s head falls into his free hand, his entire posture conveying a degree of acceptance for his fate that would’ve been a lot harder to coerce from him had the person asking not been Shuten Doji. Evidently, not even petty, pointed teasing crosses Ibaraki’s metaphorical line drawn for the Demon King: whereas the line representing his patience for almost everyone else is drawn just a few centimeters from Ibaraki’s toes, Asura would estimate he’d have to run at least a mile to even catch sight of the line drawn for Shuten Doji appearing on the horizon.
Shuten pats his arm consolingly, despite being the one causing the distress requiring the consoling with glee.
(Ibaraki Doji had suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the Demon Domain.
“My friend.”
Shuten Doji halted mid-step and turned around to face him, raising his brows. “Yeah? Something wrong?”
Ibaraki was staring at his right hand like it had grown another head in its palm and had begun to swear at him. He then tore his gaze away from it with a considerable amount of effort, and looked at Shuten with a face that would contend with the most perplexed expression in the whole history of time.
“My friend, it’s gone.”
“Your arm’s still right there, Ibaraki. It’s been back for a few months now.”
“No, the—“ Ibaraki cut himself off mid-sentence. It was another action that went completely against his character; even when being aggressively interrupted, Ibaraki Doji would usually respond by talking even louder, not by silencing himself. Shuten’s initial concern was immediately replaced with a morbid curiosity about what caused it.
“The…?”
Ibaraki had gone back to staring at his hand. He then flexed his right arm, exercising its whole range of motion. Stared at it with his eyes narrowed. Set his hand alight with purple flames, then extinguished them just as quickly by shaking out his fingers. Seemed to conclude it was still very much purple, very much on fire, and very much attached to the rest of his body, which was a novelty he’d still needed time to adjust to.
“The — shard, my friend. The Celestial’s blood. It’s gone.”
Shuten blinked at him. “...Oh, you’re just now noticing?” He leaned to one side, a hand on his hip. “It’s been gone for a while. We took care of that day one. Really surprised how little effort it required, if I’m being honest…”
Ibaraki Doji stared at him like he was now the one who’d grown the second head.
The aforementioned dam broke in Ibaraki Doji’s mind.
Shuten Doji got to watch him go through a whole spectrum of emotions in hardly a second, each one painted as vividly on his face as they’d been the first time around. Having never lost his memory of their time in the Celestial Realm for one reason or another, Shuten’s single experience with having memories shoved back into his skull still remained by the hands of the mountain god; this enabled him to extend a bit of sympathy, considering he’d been reeling himself for months after and still felt a bit jumbled mentally sometimes. Even if he’d received centuries while Ibaraki was only recalling weeks, the overlap wasn’t entirely irrelevant.
A new clarity washed over the turmoil in Ibaraki's expression, but it lasted hardly a second as well before he suddenly looked completely and utterly incensed.
“My friend, I—I’m sorry, but... what the hell?”)
...
“Pre-preparation, sleight of hand, and a predictable welcoming habit I’ve practiced for centuries,” is the only answer Asura receives from the Demon King after he finishes his story.
-
Asura meets Hoshiguma Doji on his second day at Mt. Oe, and almost gets bludgeoned with a wooden spoon for it.
He’s awake early: habitual practice from time in the military he’s never quite broken, and never quite seen a reason to try and break. Calling himself a morning person would be skewing the truth considering the fact he’s just never been much of a sleeper at all.
His body is not as sore as he expected it to be from the fight yesterday; aside from healing quickly, he’d been provided with a few ointments and some bandages for the more serious injuries he’d sustained. His hand still tingles from the unlabeled numbing gel he’d assumed was a disinfectant. Asura has never been very good with first aid; most of his attempts at bandage dressings double as an unintended tourniquet and his personal approach to any kind of painkiller remains “take more until it stops hurting,” terrifying most medics he’s met with both his enthusiasm and his poison tolerance.
The room in the half estate, half hand-carved cave system climbing its way up the side of Mt. Oe Asura wakes up in smells faintly of wood rot and mold. It’d been called the guest house in passing, specified later as the Slope House, and implied the existence of more yet-unseen houses scattered on the mountain and the territory around it. When Shuten Doji brought him here last evening, Asura had asked about the spirits he’d seen replacing the patchwork wooden walls with new beams and stone, carving out pieces that look like they’d been logged with a great excess of water.
“We got flooded a few months back,” was the noncommittal answer he received from the Demon King. “I can tell you the whole story some other time.”
There is a natural feel to the estate’s construction, Asura thinks, as he slides open the guest room’s door and walks out into the hallway. Entire sections look as if they’ve been grown out of the mountain itself; the layout is sprawling not in an overwhelming way, but in a way that betrays its construction being the work of multiple, independent minds expanding from the same foundation. Just in the guest wing alone, he’s seen at least four different styles of wall, alternating without a coherent pattern, evidence of the builders or the repairers or just some rebellious soul doing their own thing. What little Asura knows of the people here is starting to take shape.
It is a stark contrast to both the pristine marble of the Celestial capitol, as well as any attempts at developing the bottom of the Abyss that always turned out just a little too sharp or a little too gloomy.
Asura decides he likes it. It feels like freedom in its unrestrained disorder.
He isn’t quite sure where he’s trying to go this morning. Aimless is never, ever a word Asura has ever described himself as, so he settles on investigating instead. Investigating is not quite like him either, though, because he has rarely, if ever, sought out reconnaissance unless the situation desperately called for it.
This is not a situation calling for it. Asura investigates anyway.
He passes through what could only be described as an open-air cave mashed with a balcony’s design, one wall completely open to the mountain’s slope and lined with a railing between pillars. The walls are uneven in the way that makes them look like the carver had a field day with a giant hammer, but then got bored halfway through polishing them down past basic functionality.
A gust of cold wind blows in through the opening, and Asura feels the hairs on the back of his neck rise in response. It’s the closest thing to a shiver he’s ever felt in his life. Autumn and winter are new to him, too; the everlasting spring of the Celestial Realm doesn’t extend to Heian Kyo, as there is nothing here to halt the cycling of seasons like around Zenken.
(The Hell of Ice was far colder, but it was an artificial cold, easily staved away by his own internal surplus of energy overwhelming the external drain. Winter is simply nature at work. Asura considers investing in some heavier clothing in order to adapt.)
Past the balcony is another hallway. He sees only a few spirits in this wing working quietly on repairs, most of them either groggy or leaning all the way into half-asleep over their projects. The sun is barely up in the sky at this point, but Asura still finds it strangely empty; part of him wonders if being awake before dawn is considered some kind of taboo on this mountain, whereas he considers it customary himself.
One demon he passes mumbles a “ Good morning,” to him over the grating sound of her spreading mortar on the underside of floor tiles. He pauses in his step to acknowledge her.
“Good morning,” Asura replies back, giving her a curt nod.
The demon looks up at him, then squints, as if squinting at him would help her recognize him rather than simply distorting her sight. She then shrugs, completely unconcerned with the presence of a stranger in the estate, and goes back to her work.
It is another strange, strange interaction adding onto his growing list of things Asura finds strange about this place, but not necessarily in a bad way.
(He’s never considered himself uptight before, but he’s beginning to wonder if that was only in comparison to a city of people who greatly out-uptighted him in every conceivable way. Finding himself on a mountain whose collective disposition tests the boundaries of just how carefree a community can be has thrown him for more loops than he ever thought he could be thrown for, making new loops he hasn’t even heard of.)
The first signs of genuine, exuberant life Asura has heard all morning echoes from what he believes must be the kitchen. From an open doorway, he can hear the popping of oil in a pan, the rhythmic sound of a knife hitting a chopping board. There is muttering, too, but it is either too quiet for him to hear over the other sounds or simply intended to be incoherent to anyone else but the speaker.
Asura lingers in the doorway for a moment before entering. There’s another one of those open windows spanning the entire wall, while the other walls are lined with an area clearly intended for cooking. A single demon occupies the counter, moving back and forth between a pile of chopped vegetables growing at an impressive rate and a row of boiling pots, all containing a slightly different shade of broth. The demon hasn’t noticed Asura quite yet, which is something he doesn’t often get to experience unless someone is very distracted. Asura knows himself to be a bit of a difficult person to miss; aside from his force of presence alone, the simple fact that he has to stoop to avoid hitting his head on most door frames makes him anything but unnoticeable.
There is a sitting area to the side of the counter with a low table. Asura walks over to it none too quietly and settles down. He waits for about a minute, watching curiously as the demon scoops up the precarious pile of vegetables amassed since Asura entered and dumps the entire heap into the pot with the lighter broth.
“Your third pot is about to boil over,” Asura says suddenly.
“—Ah!”
The demon whips around and throws the wooden spoon in his hand at Asura full-force.
Asura is fortunate “full-force” from this demon in particular is still a manageable amount of force for him to receive, otherwise he might’ve ended up down one eye for trying to help. He quickly catches the spoon mid-air before it can smack into his face, then looks back up.
The demon in question looks back, completely mortified.
“—Sorry for startling you,” he says, holding the spoon out by the handle.
“I am so sorry, I didn’t hear you come in—!” The demon leans back against the counter, a hand over his heart. “I — Are you lost? I don’t think I've met you before, but we’ve been getting a lot of new people ‘round here lately. Unless we have met before, and I’ve both managed to misplace your face and attack you for a fantastic first impression.”
“I’m fine,” Asura says, bouncing the spoon’s handle a bit to indicate he was trying to give it back. “Your pot is still boiling.”
“Oh — Right, right!” The demon darts over to him like a fish in water to retrieve the spoon, then darts back over to the pot, stirring it to reduce the bubbling. Over his shoulder, he throws: “What’s your name? I’m Hoshiguma Doji. Usually I keep things from falling apart ‘round here instead ‘a contributing to any more mess.”
“...Asura,” Asura replies. “Do you usually attack people with spoons too?”
Hoshiguma winces as he starts laying out a few bowls. “Not ever, no. Not the solvin’ my problems with violence type at all. Keep this between us, can you? Shuten would never let me live it down.”
Asura finds himself smiling a little. “Sure. I can omit it.”
“...That’s a nasty bruise you’ve got there,” Hoshiguma comments, gesturing at the side of Asura’s face with the spoon he’d just tried to assassinate him with. He’s started filling a few of the bowls with the soup he’d almost turned fully into steam, setting them out on the counter in a neat row.
“Courtesy of Ibaraki Doji,” says Asura, “He threw a tree at me.”
The tree had been an escalation of the boulder Asura threw at Ibaraki, which had been an escalation of the fireball Ibaraki threw at Asura, which had been an escalation of a clean punch Asura landed to Ibaraki’s face. Asura then further escalated the tree by throwing Ibaraki off a cliff, which Shuten Doji followed by throwing Asura himself off the cliff too, and they all ended up fighting at the bottom of the ravine anyways. The whole sequence of events happened in under a minute.
“Ah. Forgive him, then, it’s how he welcomes people,” Hoshiguma scoffs.
“Funny way of doing so he’s got.”
“It’s considered flattering if he tries his level-best to break your bones here,” Hoshiguma explains. “Grievous injury — either inflicted or received, ‘cause the guy’s gotta few screws loose — is his love language or somethin’, we’re pretty sure.”
“...It was interesting, to say the least,” Asura says, a hand under his chin. “It’s been a while since I could go all-out, even if it was just intended as a spar.”
“And you’re visiting for…?” Hoshiguma asks over the bubbling. “We’ve got a whole bunch of people here for different reasons. Lotta them from the Demon Domain hoping to settle in a friendlier territory that’s not constantly trying to kill them. You one of them?”
“Sort of. Not quite,” Asura says. He then laughs, though it’s not with any kind of mirth. “I’ve...been fighting for a while. A long while. It’s what I usually do, and it’s all I’ve ever really done.” He pauses for a moment, his face pulling into a frown. “What I’d thought would be the end of it wasn’t as conclusive as I’d believed.”
“Hmm. That’s rough, buddy.”
“I’m trying a bit of space, I think,” Asura says, because he refuses to consider it avoidance. It is not avoidance: it is a healthy step back from a situation he and everyone else involved became far too wrapped up in to a point it choked out the whole sky and they couldn’t even comprehend seeing anything else.
“I… want to see things from a new perspective.”
This marks the second time today someone has tried squinting at Asura like the act would achieve anything. He considers momentarily scrubbing at his forehead to make sure ‘squinting at will reveal all the secrets of the universe’ wasn’t written there while he was asleep. Hoshiguma squints at him, tapping his foot, pausing halfway through the motion of pouring another spoonful of soup into a bowl. The demon then suddenly seems to come to a realization, and gasps.
“Oh — You’re that Asura!”
“That what?”
“Pardon that I wasn’t so quick to catch on. You do share your name with a whole kind of people after all,” Hoshiguma waves a hand at him. “Shuten’s mentioned you a few times before, Lord Mara — I didn’t know it was you causing that ruckus at the border yesterday, though.”
“Just Asura, please,” Asura corrects with something slightly less than a grimace. “I don’t want that title here. Not now.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Hoshiguma says. However, there is now something a bit more critical in his eyes Asura notes with a growing concern. “Boss forgets to inform me of a lot of his guests unless it’s an offhand comment the minute before their arrival. He forgets to tell me a lot of things in general, really, ‘cause the guy’s a bastard. Swear he thinks I’m a lot more adaptable than I really am. It’s especially bad when I try to visit the west slope of the mountain and find the tree spirits two steps off from rioting ‘cause there’s now a new scorched clearing where there was definitely once a lot of forest.”
“Ah,” Asura says eloquently, thrown for his third loop of the morning at the sudden scapegoatism directed his way after his own expression of raw honesty. Maybe he can use the attempted assault by wooden spoon as leverage to get out of it. “Hmm. I can see how that’s… startling.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Hoshiguma says, when it is clearly not fine in the slightest for him or the tree spirits. “They’ve gotten burned a lot. And then they got really burned that one time. And then they got drowned that other time too. Bit more burning isn’t anything new, we’ve got good soil from all the forest fires. It got kinda messed up by all the salt water, though.”
“I’m… sorry?” Asura tries without much else to offer.
Hoshiguma looks a little appeased by that. “No worries. Just try and keep it in mind, since the other two probably won’t and never will. Neither of them ever help with anything.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to make it up to the…tree spirits.” Asura adds in his most sincere voice, which would probably get him eliminated round one in a bluffing game. “...I like gardening,” he throws in as an afterthought to really sell the apology.
Hoshiguma looks even more appeased by that, and he nods to himself. He’s started the process of balancing a concerning number of bowls in his arms. “Good! I’m glad to hear that. We don’t need a third pyromaniac running around this mountain.”
“Do you,” Asura starts, raising one hand to point at the disaster waiting to happen perched in Hoshiguma’s arms, “...want any help with that?”
Any of the criticism on Hoshiguma’s face melts away as quickly as it has appeared.
“I’d appreciate it immensely,” he says, throwing Asura a bright smile.
Asura wonders, as even the arms of his spiritual entity are employed to carry a few trays of fried food and an entire basket filled with various dried fruit, if he’s just been manipulated into an uncharacteristic display of altruism by way of guilt-tripping.
He finds himself assisting Hoshiguma pass out food to the spirits working on the repairs around the estate and the buildings beyond its walls for most of the morning. By around eleven o’clock, the sun is high in the sky, and the number of names of the residents he’s attempted to keep in an organized mental list has long since collapsed under its own weight.
It is nearing noon, and Shuten Doji is still nowhere to be seen.
-
Asura ends up climbing Mt. Oe anyways, despite being told specifically he would not be climbing Mt. Oe.
“Y’know,” Hoshiguma had said once it officially passed noon, “he could be waiting for ya at the Throne. Boss does that sometimes. Waits for people to figure stuff out and sees how long it’ll take ‘em. He’s downright terrible at communication a lotta the time.”
Asura blinked at him, halting mid-cut on the piece of wood in his hands. Hoshiguma had given him the wood along with a small whittling knife when they’d finished their rounds of the estate, and they’d settled down on one of the porches on its east side. The demon had then started showing him how to whittle a little cat from the block, and seemed so enthused by the prospect of showing someone his process Asura deliberately left out the fact he already knew all the basics of carving.
“ Could be?”
“Or could not be,” Hoshiguma had shrugged, flicking a wood scrap into a bush, “but my bet’s on probably.” Another shff , another wood scrap into the same bush, “If I don’t know where to find him I usually start up by the Throne, or near it, anyways. I’ll check under a few usual trees before I start yellin’ for him.”
“...What happened to not climbing the mountain?”
A pfft sound from Hoshiguma that sounded oddly similar to the scrape of the whittling knife. “No chance of that. You’re gonna have to go up there at some point, so you might as well start building your altitude lungs now.”
“Hmm — I’ve been lied to, then.” Asura had placed the knife and his half-finished wooden cat onto the porch next to Hoshiguma. “Thank you for showing me around this morning.”
“Nothing at all, nothing at all,” Hoshiguma waved his hands at Asura in a minimizing gesture, placing his own wooden cat next to Asura’s. “And thanks for your help, too, ‘specially with those spirits that took offense to being served any kind a’ meat.”
Asura’s wooden cat looked a little meaner than Hoshiguma’s. He’d managed to somehow make its face look perpetually pissed off, if a cat’s expression could be compared to that of a person’s.
“They did react rather violently,” Asura agreed. He’d lifted a couple of the spirits in question into tall trees with his spiritual entity and left them there to make them think about their actions. “You’d think people from a place like the Demon Domain would be accustomed to eating whatever was available to them.”
“I wouldn’t be lying if I said I wasn’t too keen on what you’re implying.”
“Hah. Just speaking from experience.”
“Eugh. Make a note of that when you find Shuten Doji!” Hoshiguma then picked up Asura’s unfinished wooden cat and started to carve it a tail, “We’ve got some new, pickier visitors and they’re passionately vegetarian!”
..
A few minutes later, Asura finds himself at the base of Mt. Oe, his head craning back so far his neck is perpendicular to the ground and his spine is trying to incite a revolution against him for mistreatment.
By following the path Ibaraki Doji pointed out yesterday, he walks to a clearing right where a sheer wall of the mountain intersects the ground, noting what look like a multitude of scratch marks and scuffs all the way up the rock. A part of him feels a little spiteful against the mountain’s very design; the sharp, ninety-degree angle at which it juts out of the ground at feels like a deliberate challenge for anyone wanting to scale it, making the process as difficult as possible by remaining perpendicular almost the entire distance up. If a mountain could be described as rude, or smug, or some terrible combination of the two, Mt. Oe would fit the bill perfectly and leave a triple tip.
Another part of him really, really wants to climb the mountain.
It’s given him an obstacle to conquer with its very design and there has never been a time in his life he hasn’t risen to meet such a direct challenge.
“It’s not that tall,” Asura says aloud, a hand on his chin as he muses over which path of handholds to take up the first stretch of rock. Above the sheer face is another cliff, and then another, and then some more irregular rocks begin to amass on the side of the mountain and he begins to understand what Hoshiguma meant when he ranted about avalanches.
“Invert the Abyss and stack it thrice and it’s just about the same.”
He’d climbed the path out of the Abyss enough times to be able to do so blindfolded. He’d climbed it enough that it ended up being a bit boring by the thirtieth time loop or so, regardless of how much he enjoyed the process of climbing itself. The offer of some new, hostile terrain that seems to have made itself as unclimbable as possible on purpose makes his heart rate start to pick up with excitement.
Asura backs up one step, two steps, then a whole twenty, and his spiritual entity unfurls from his back all at once. Six limbs become two as each set of three spirals together like yarn being spun on a loom, the black plating making a clicking noise as it fuses together into a single pair of arms. The new, jagged limbs aren’t ended in perfect hands, but rather wicked-looking hooks, shaped to fit into the gaps between the rock or to carve a new hold if need be.
He takes a step forward, and then a second. He runs another three, and then at the gauged distance from the rock, he leaps with all of his strength.
Asura clears a few dozen meters with the single jump, slamming into the cliff face and catching the first handhold in his reach. The hooks on his spiritual entity snag on the smooth rock first, making him lurch to a sudden stop and hang suspended in the air before he can begin to fall back down.
He almost made it to the first ledge with the jump, but there is still distance between himself and the next step. Past there, he can’t see any of the details of the slope, it either being obscured by the angle or by vegetation and more rocks.
Asura digs one hand into the rock, assuring the handhold is stable, and retracts his spiritual entity into his back. He lets go with his other hand and leans back into open space, supported only by one single hold and his feet braced against the side of the mountain.
There’s not much of a view, yet. He can see the roof of the estate amidst the trees, a few other landmarks, and the faint darker haze of the Demon Domain on the horizon.
It’s far from a breathtaking height quite yet, so Asura continues to climb.
He ends up climbing for a long while, actually. It takes a lot longer to scale the mountain than he’d anticipated.
He doesn’t really stop for a break, going at a sustainable-enough pace that he doesn’t have to; he passes the halfway point later than he’d expected and continues onward, living up to his unstoppable force moniker with a dedication befitting of its meaning.
(Asura almost falls a few times, because Mt. Oe decided it also wants to live up to the description Asura gave it upon his initial inspection. He doesn’t completely fall, but does manage to acquire a few more scrapes on top of the bruises he’d gotten yesterday. Barely a day and a half in and he’s already amassed a substantial injury collection, more than he’d ever gotten in one day on a campaign, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of his stay on the Demon King’s mountain.)
“What on earth are you doing?”
The sudden sound of a voice startles Asura near the ending of his climb. He cranes his neck to see where it came from, honing in on a pathetic barely-a-thicket of trees to his right anchored to a steeply angled stone shelf.
There is a familiar demon leaning out of the woods on the shelf and staring at him incredulously.
“—Ibaraki Doji?”
Ibaraki Doji has one hand on the most stable of the thin trees, and he’s leaning out in a rather hazardous manner in order to see Asura. Most of his hair is tied back in an unruly attempt at a braid, and there are a few dark red stains that Asura can see on his robes.
“...Is that blood?” Asura asks, without much else to say in greeting.
“Yes,” Ibaraki replies, glancing down then back up only momentarily, clearly unconcerned, “It’s not mine.”
“That’s… good to hear?”
“I’ve just come from the Demon Domain,” Ibaraki is still staring at him. “...Why are you on the side of the mountain?”
“Hoshiguma said I should look for Shuten Doji at the Throne,” Asura says, suddenly getting the feeling he’s missed something important.
“And you’ve climbed the whole way up here, all the way from the ground?”
“Where else am I supposed to start? Halfway up?”
Ibaraki’s dumbfounded expression lasts only a heartbeat more before he throws back his head and starts to laugh, shaking the tree he’s leaning on so much that dirt begins raining down from its roots and Asura has half a mind to worry it might dislodge itself from the cliff. His laughter is loud, bouncing off the mountain in echoes that amplify it to make it seem even louder, even larger.
“—Neither of you were serious about climbing the mountain, were you?”
The demon manages to compose himself as the role of dumbfounded staring switches to Asura.
“Asura,” Ibaraki Doji says gently, his tone a mock-replica of patience put on by someone who’s never waited for anything in his life. He uses one arm to lift the branches of the tree by his side.
“Asura, there are stairs .”
“...Hm,” Asura says, looking through the gap in the foliage under Ibaraki Doji’s arm, “So there are.”
Ibaraki starts to laugh again when Asura slowly bumps the rock wall with his forehead and exhales a heavy sigh.
Right when Asura decides that climbing down to the ledge and taking the stairs the rest of the way up to the Throne isn’t a form of admitting defeat to a no-longer sentient mountain and is instead a respectful display of efficiency towards his host, he hears the sound of scrabbling on the rock to his right. Asura opens his eyes to see Ibaraki Doji pulling himself up onto the cliff face alongside Asura, his claws digging easily into the stone like a hot knife through butter.
“That doesn’t matter, now; you’ve almost made it to the peak, regardless of the method!” Ibaraki inclines his chin at Asura, his expression far too bright for someone actively choosing to suspend himself almost a thousand feet in the air on a whim. “There’s no sense in quitting when you’ve made it this far!”
Asura would argue that there’s a little sense, but more of him is inclined to agree. Ibaraki seems dead-set on joining him on the last stretch of the climb, too, if the obstinate level to his stare is any indication that he’s waiting for Asura to tell him to climb back down. Asura makes a show of contemplation, letting his eyes flick between Ibaraki and the stretch of rock above their heads in a dragged-out motion. He then gives a short, inviting shrug, and Ibaraki grins at him, as if he’d never doubted any other outcome.
He begins to wonder if his earlier comparison was a bit too on the nose when he notes the rock around Ibaraki Doji’s right hand is glowing red-hot.
“Move your right,” Asura says over his shoulder as he begins to climb again, “You’re melting your handhold.”
“Ah, thank you!”
Asura’s self-described sustainable climbing pace is promptly ruined by Ibaraki’s presence; something about the way he increases his pace to first match Asura’s, then deliberately increasing again to overtake him, shatters any moderation Asura attempted to preserve in his climb and ultimately sends them both into the vertical equivalent of a dead sprint. Ibaraki Doji is a challenge personified in every small act, and Asura isn’t even sure if he does so on purpose. It’s the second escalating action loop they’ve caught each other in during his stay; Asura expects it won’t be the last based on how their personalities have melded thus far.
Ibaraki knocks Asura’s elbow with his own for the third time. “So,” he starts suddenly, seeming to decide that climbing at a breakneck speed alone simply wasn’t enough exertion and that he needed to start a conversation as well, “How was your morning?”
“Your guest house smells like salt, and—“ Asura stops mid-reply to breath, “—your caretaker manipulated me into doing his chores within five minutes of meeting me.”
“Hmm. That’s not so good,” Ibaraki observes, “You’ve set a precedent for yourself.”
“He does that a lot?”
“Quite frequently, yes. You may want to be careful for the next while so he doesn’t rope you into renovating an entire building.”
“Sounds like there’s a story behind that.”
“He claims I’m easy to trick,” admits Ibaraki ruefully. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t wrong on multiple occasions.”
Asura snorts. “I’ll break the precedent, then. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done so.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Ibaraki says, nodding. The stretch of rock under their hands becomes more porous. “Hoshiguma’s enthusiasm for chores is only matched by his tendency to distribute them; unless you’d come here with the intention of doing housework from sunrise to sunset, it’d be wise to learn how to tell him no.”
Asura catches a handhold that begins to splinter under his fingers. Ibaraki Doji grabs his wrist and moves his arm before he can start to fall.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Asura says, glancing upwards. He can see where the cliff face abruptly ends just above their heads; they’ve almost reached the peak of Mt. Oe. “I’m fine with helping out around here, anyways. It’s not as if cleaning or cooking is anything strenuous.”
“If anything, it provides an easy sense of purpose,” Ibaraki summarizes. “Feelings of aimlessness can sometimes be more tiresome than a full regime.”
“...Yeah. It does.”
Asura is a bit taken-aback by how immediately Ibaraki picks up on the plight buzzing in the back of his mind, leaking through into the undertone of his response. It feels as if something that has been stagnant for years has suddenly been cut loose; like a building with a piece of its foundation removed beginning to cave in from the ground-up.
He hasn’t put the dark smudge under enough scrutiny to describe it properly. He begins to wonder if it may be more simple than he thinks.
“We’ll find you something much more fulfilling to do than cutting vegetables during your stay,” Ibaraki says, giving Asura a quick grin when he notices they’ve reached the end of their climb, “If having a task brings you comfort, we have plenty available.”
“What if I like cutting vegetables?” Asura asks, inclined to be a little indignant for his own sake.
“I wouldn’t ever think of stopping you, then.”
Ibaraki Doji clambers up onto the flat top on the mountain’s peak first, then reaches back down to haul Asura up over the edge. The area is ringed with trees, and there are a few standing lanterns dotting the beginnings of a path. From here on out, the walk to the Throne is easy, the dizzying climb committed to and completed in its entirety.
“Good,” says Asura.
He then promptly collapses face-first into the grass.
...
A hand prods at his hair, then shakes his shoulder. Asura rolls over onto his back and has to suppress the impulsive urge to bite it when it starts patting his cheek to make sure he’s not dead.
“...Are you alright?” Ibaraki Doji asks, a vague echo of concern in his voice that doesn’t quite hit the right, honest notes. He’d crouched down in the grass by Asura’s head some time between Asura’s knees giving out and his unplanned introduction to the ground.
“I'm a little alright,” Asura replies, batting the demon’s hand away from his face. “Mostly less than alright. But I’m not entirely miserable. I’ve been far worse off because of less, and I’d be insulting quite a long line of people who’ve made attempts on my life if climbing a mountain killed me.”
Ibaraki’s eyes narrow. “You’re talking in circles — I don’t follow.”
“You weren’t supposed to — I wasn’t being serious, anyways,” says Asura, investing all of his remaining energy into trying to smack Ibaraki Doji with an arm. The demon shrugs the assault off, much to his own annoyance. “Truthfully, I feel like shit.”
His chest heaves with every inhale, but his desperate breathing has already begun to slow down. There’s barely a tremble in his limbs from muscle fatigue, but he hasn’t yet tried standing again, so it could be too early for such a positive conclusion. Ibaraki picks a few stems of grass from the mountaintop and tears them to shreds idly as Asura recovers.
“...Are you alright now ?” Ibaraki asks after barely a minute, patience already wearing thin.
“You just asked that. Weren't you already satisfied by an incoherent answer?”
Ibaraki shrugs, scattering green flecks of grass into the wind. A few flutter into Asura’s face. “You might’ve not been serious again.”
Asura tilts his head to glare at him. He musters up all of the threatening force at his disposal; unfortunately, any intimidation factor is sabotaged by the tufts of grass sticking out of his hair and the fact his lungs are trying their level-best to shrivel up like corpses and die. Most of his effort is directed towards catching his runaway breath instead of fueling any kind of genuine irritation, anyways.
Ibaraki Doji gives him a contented smile back, unfazed.
There’s a substantial patch of grass that’s been rendered barren by Ibaraki Doji’s erratic switching between interest and boredom (—in his head, there are echoes of You wouldn’t believe the habitat destruction goin’ on at the hands of these two—!) so Asura heaves one last exhale trailing into a sigh and pushes himself up into a sitting position. “Okay,” he says, holding out an arm as Ibaraki is already starting to stand, “I’m fine enough now. Help me up.”
Ibaraki doesn’t take the held-out arm as a hint to just pull Asura to his feet; he instead guides Asura’s arm over his shoulders and stands with him, Ibaraki’s other arm supporting his back. Even if he’d believed himself to be mostly recovered, Asura ends up leaning most of his weight on Ibaraki Doji as his physical fatigue from the climb sets in again. He thinks a silent thank-you at the grass for the momentary respite it provided.
(The universe desperately wants Asura to be a pessimist. He has yet to comply.)
“You don’t look fine,” Ibaraki Doji comments, giving him a critical side-eye.
Asura returns the side-eye with an unamused stare and by very purposefully stepping on his foot. “I thought you said you wanted me to hurry up and be alright, and now you’re arguing with me when I say I am?”
“I am concerned about your well-being,” says Ibaraki Doji, lying through his teeth. “Consider it an attempt at empathizing.”
“You’re closer to the edge than I am,” Asura informs him mildly, “I could push you off again if you’d like to climb the same distance I have and really practice your empathy.”
Ibaraki shoots him a rather terrifying grin in response, all fangs and violent mirth. His claws dig into Asura’s shoulder.
“I’d bring you down with me.”
“Fine — On the condition I’m taking the stairs back up.”
(Asura gets his breathtaking view when he looks back down the mountain; land sprawls out before them as far as the eye can see, fading into the far horizon in a haze of white and distant blues. Slashes of reddish brown earth and green forest form lines down the slope below them, getting thinner and thinner towards the peak. At this height, it’s as if they could almost touch the clouds while remaining standing on their feet.
The clouds in question also look like they want to rain soon. Mist gathers in the air and makes the grass slick with dew as the sky begins to darken.)
From the edge of the cliff to the Throne isn’t that far. In fact, the walk from the backside of the cliff to the main body of the Throne happens to be shorter than the walk from the stairs. Ibaraki informs him as such; Asura finds it a little ironic in a sort of roundabout effort-paying-off way.
He’s then also informed the walk is only shorter because they’re going to break in through a window at the back.
“We can go around to the main entrance, but we’d have to—“ Ibaraki raises his free hand, and then a second glowing, spectral hand rises from its outline and completes the visualization, balling into a fist to represent the mountaintop in his palm. He seems perfectly adept at communicating with just one hand available as a prop. “—Climb around another sheer cliff. There’s no flat path from where we are around to the front of the Throne.”
“Hmm. Seems a little anticlimactic for a break-in,” Asura comments, readjusting his grip on Ibaraki’s shoulder. The path under their feet has turned to gravel and stones, which keep digging into his heels and making him skip a step to dislodge the rocks.
“We aren’t breaking in,” Ibaraki corrects, sounding a little offended by Asura suggesting he’d ever do something so underhanded and deceptive. If the demon wanted anything, Asura could imagine he’d march right up to the owner in question and simply take it from them by force. “There are plenty of windows open to the back cliffs. We can cut through the Throne itself to the main hall and meet with Shuten Doji there.”
“Mt. Oe doesn’t lock its windows?”
Ibaraki snorts. “I think that anyone who has put the effort into making such a climb, without falling to their death, has fully earned the right to enter unimpeded; they’d have proven themselves worthy by surviving alone.”
“Fascinating,” Asura says, “I’ll remember to earn your respect before ever trying to steal from you.”
Ibaraki’s responding laughter shakes the both of them, rumbling in his chest and against Asura’s side. It’s like peals of thunder right next to his ear, loud and unbridled as a force of nature; Asura winces with the proximity of the noise, but finds himself leaning into the feeling, tightening his hold.
When the Throne was described as a sort-of palace in the mountain, it was an accurate claim. The peak itself had been hollowed out and turned into an artificial cavern of sorts, its halls carved to look like a building’s walls and decorated unobtrusively to look like the interior of an actual structure instead of a glorified cave. The only aspect that gave away its original form were the inconsistent slopes of the ceilings; each room had to follow the outline of the mountain’s shape in the angle of its ceiling, if it wanted to remain contained within the building itself. Open balconies spiral up the sides of the mountain, propped up by stone and wooden pillars detailed with carvings.
One of the back rooms has an open window a few feet up from the ground. The screen covering is half-open, letting them in easily as he and Ibaraki step over the threshold and into the Throne proper. There are storage cabinets and rows of rolled scrolls on the shelves lining the room, and a low table near the window with some abandoned writing utensils on it. It appears to be an empty office of sorts, recently occupied if the papers on the table scribbled on with wet ink are any indication somebody had just left.
Ibaraki leads him out of the room and through a couple of hallways towards the front of the Throne. They bump into a few spirits who address him with a respectful nod or a quick word depending on how bold they are. The halls of the Throne are similar to the guest house’s if the house had abandoned all semblance of wood and committed entirely to the stone aesthetic; they’re not more clean-cut by a long shot, but the material is more consistent, and the style more unified.
They stop in the entrance hall. As the most palace-like of all the rooms he’d seen so far, the ceilings are high and vaulted, each wall lined with columns carved from a darker rock. The room radiates an unusual inner warmth despite its vastness, fitting of the main hall for a mountain that’s often on fire with a dubious volcanic status.
“Ah. Throne,” Asura says suddenly, gesturing at the raised seat at the opposite of the foyer to the doors. “Namesake?”
“Not in the slightest. That’s just a chair,” says Ibaraki Doji. “The real namesake is outside on the peak.”
“Huh.”
“…You don’t look so good,” Ibaraki Doji observes, giving him an attempt at a concerned look instead of a critical one. It’s an improvement from the last look, at least.
“I did tell you I wasn’t quite fine yet , didn’t I?” Asura says dryly.
“Do you want me to put you back on the ground?”
“…Yes, Ibaraki. By all means, drop me on the floor.”
Ibaraki Doji drops him unceremoniously on the floor. Asura doesn’t even grant him the courtesy of an oof.
He spends more than a few seconds staring at the ceiling laid out like a discarded starfish. There are cracks in some of the pillars, and what looks like a scorched hole from a blast of fire on the left side crudely half-patched with a tarp. He follows the line down to the area beneath the tarp and sees a wooden bucket placed below it to catch any leaks. Everything on this mountain continues to tell a story with only a single glance; with how forthright it is, nothing has demanded any scrutiny for a truth.
The sound of doors opening sends a loud clanking noise down the hall, which is quickly drowned out by an even louder My good friend, there you are! Asura hears the sound of footsteps approaching before he sees who’s just entered.
…
The demon king enters his line of sight with a fantastic expression on his face.
“Where have you been?” Shuten Doji asks, standing over Asura with one hand on his hip. His hair is loose around his shoulders, drifting lazily like a cloud of smoke.
“Taking your words far too literally,” says Asura, spitting out a strand of hair caught in his mouth with a pfth.
“He didn’t know about the stairs,” Ibaraki Doji fills in the gap, keeping his voice down in his own version of ‘low’ as if to avoid letting anyone overhear about Asura’s blunder. “I ran into him climbing around the upper path. He’d started up the mountain on his own.”
Shuten Doji doesn’t laugh at him, which was the reaction Asura had expected, but rather just gives him a look somewhere between horrified and dismayed if the two emotions were put in a bowl, crushed into a fine powder, and then promptly set on fire like gunpowder without a single warning.
“I was going to come find you in,” the demon king leans to the side to peer out a window, “an hour, at most.” His hands are back on his hips, and he’s got almost a chastising expression of all reactions on his face. “Aren't both of your hands still broken? What are you, allergic to resting?”
“Terribly so,” Asura grunts in reply, pushing himself up onto his elbows, “I’ve been told it’s chronic.”
Shuten Doji heaves a heavy, long-suffering sigh. “Another one,” he says, now addressing Ibaraki, “We’ve got another one fundamentally incompatible with taking a break. Isn’t there anyone irresponsible in this doomed world anymore?”
Ibaraki pats his shoulder in comfort. “It’ll be okay, my friend,” he says, before turning and smiling at Asura in a way that is significantly less comforting, “He’ll learn otherwise.”
“You’re one to talk,” Shuten Doji says miserably, “I wake up and you’re just — poof! — Gone! Every day. For the past week.”
“I’m concerned about an approaching group of demons that seem to be more organized — Yamawaro and Sasori agree, though we’ve little information on them yet.” Ibaraki shows off the dried blood on his sleeves, looking far too pleased with himself for implied violence, “I found one of their scouts this morning, but I was only able to confirm that they’re both arrogant and hostile; we should remain alert in case they try to start causing problems.”
Shuten Doji pinches the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb. “When I asked for your help watching the Demon Domain’s border, I didn’t expect you to be so… relentless about it.”
“It’s quite a few birds with one stone, my friend!” Ibaraki Doji says cheerfully, that unsettling grin still on his face, “For one, it’s functioning as good training. Many of the things crawling out of that place are eager for a fight, though almost none of them have made for very powerful opponents—“ he then tacks on as an aside, “—With the exception of yourself, Asura. You are very strong!”
Asura gives him a thumbs-up, still on the ground.
“What’s the other bird?” asks Shuten Doji.
“Helping you, of course.”
“…Of course,” Shuten Doji tilts his head back as the smallest bout of laughter escapes him. “Shouldn’t have expected any other answer.”
The smile on Ibaraki Doji’s face turns gentle, open, reaching his eyes to make them crinkle at the corners.
His expression still doesn’t change when Shuten Doji abruptly claps his hands together with a Well—! Now that you’re up here— and moves to pull Asura to his feet.
…
They lead Asura out of the entrance hall in the way he was supposed to enter; through the large archway at the opposite end and up the intended path. There are complex carvings on the arch like the pillars, but they’re close enough to make out now. Abstract scenes of the region around Mt. Oe and larger-than-life spirits crawl up the dark stone’s facets and converge towards the sky.
Shuten Doji does eventually find Asura’s mistake a little hilarious, evident in his emphasis of the mountain’s staircase with a sweeping gesture and a few pointed jabs.
A recovered Asura is an Asura that knows no fear, so he offers a few jabs back — with an elbow instead of words, though.
The top of the mountain alternates between black rock and scattered trees, maples glowing red even under the cloudy sky. There are shattered boulders scattered about, some freshly broken while others are older, coated in moss and lichen. He sees a few unnatural fires burning in the crevices in the ground, spewing small bursts of ash and sparks from the living flame within the mountain.
At some point, Asura glances back over his shoulder at the Throne.
Asura looks over at Shuten and then back up at the mountain’s true peak.
“That’s a giant statue of you.”
“Yep,” Shuten Doji confirms matter-of-factly, following his gaze to the statue in question. “That’s the Throne. Excuse the fact it’s missing an ear — Got knocked off in the last invasion and I haven’t fixed it since.”
“You carved it yourself?”
“Who else would have? I got bored a few centuries ago.”
“…The hair’s different,” Asura says, feeling the need to comment but not quite sure what else to say that wouldn’t sound strained. Or a little horrified. He’s pretty sure the emotion he’s feeling right now is a mounting sense of horror at the Demon King’s… gaudiness.
“Couldn't be bothered to re-carve it every time I change my hair.”
“That happens a lot more frequently than you may expect,” supplies Ibaraki Doji.
Asura stares up at the statue. The statue seems to stare back, even without carved pupils. It’s a very unsettling landmark if he’s ever seen one — a flashy display of power in its presentation but undeniably intended to be threatening at its core. Some sunlight breaks through the clouds and leaves it backlit like a god, granting it an even stranger sense of sentience.
Asura doesn't like how it looms. He kind of wants to break off its other ear just to make it stop staring at him.
Shuten Doji pats him once, twice, in the center of his back, then clasps his hand on Asura’s shoulder.
“—You’ll get used to it eventually.”
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