Dororo: A Novel - Part 5 Chapter 4 - The Tale of Hakumenfudō, the Demon Without a Face

Dororo: A Novel

Tsuji Masaki

 

Part Five

The Tale of Hakumenfudō,
the Demon Without a Face

Chapter 4

“No! No! Damn you, demon!”

     Dororo spun, glaring up at Fud ō in rage. He burned with anger, little resembling the child he was. He looked positively destructive, like he was ready to take on the world and win.
    “I’ll kill you! No one hurts my mom and gets away with it!”
     Dororo was incensed, but he didn’t know how to use his savage energy. He bent to retrieve some small stones that had been eroded smooth by the waterfall and hurled them at Fudō.

     Nothing happened. The rocks bounced off the statue harmlessly, making plunking, echoey noises. Then a crack appeared where Dororo had thrown his stones, splitting the rock at Fudō’s feet into smaller pieces.
    “Ha! That’s what you get for being evil!” Dororo crowed triumphantly. He’d lost his chance to run, so now he had no choice but to fight. He threw stones left and right with all his strength. “Don’t come near me, or you’ll regret it!”
    The stones around Fudō kept crumbling to sand. Dororo was stunned, but not unpleasantly so.
    “Oi!” Someone called out from above.
  Hyakkimaru stood on the cliff above the waterfall, looking down at Dororo and the demon. Slowly, Fudō’s face took shape: his eyes, nose, and mouth. It was a cruel face, and all of Fudō’s attention focused on Hyakkimaru.
    “Oh, uh, aniki!” Dororo waved. “I was waiting for you. What took you so long?”
    Hyakkimaru jumped down from the cliff, shouting as he went, “It’s dangerous here, Dororo! Be careful!”
    Hyakkimaru’s reappearance made Dororo feel a hundred times braver. He tried to distract Fudō while Hyakkimaru got into position to defeat the demon. Fudō reached out to grab Dororo, and Dororo climbed up the cliff, trying to put more distance between himself and the demon.
     Of course the demon wasn’t about to let Dororo get away… but how could he keep Dororo from fleeing now?
    Hyakkimaru attacked swiftly and with great strength, leaping at the demon in anger.
    A cluster of leaves landed in front of Fud ō. That was strange because there was no wind above the cliffs. Still, something was making those leaves move; in a matter of moments, Hyakkimaru’s eyes, nose and mouth were stopped up by leaves.
    Hyakkimaru grunted and stepped back. He couldn’t see with his eye covered, and with his mouth stopped up, he couldn’t breathe at all. He wanted to rip the leaves from his face, but he couldn’t do that; he’d left his prosthetics behind and was stuck with only his sword arms.
    Staggering, trying to swallow, Hyakkimaru kept thinking about how to fix this. Fud ō circled around him like a spinning top, waiting to pounce.
    It hurts, Hyakkimaru thought.
    “I want a face!” Fudō insisted. The demon’s voice was suffused with triumph. Fudō believed that he’d already won.
    “I want a face!”
    Hyakkimaru’s own face was more than half-hidden, and he could only just make out where Fudō was. He struck out with his swords, attempting an attack, but he was still too far away.
    “Hm?”
    Suddenly, his sword arms flashed. They moved over his face with precision, shredding the leaves that were covering his eyes, nose and mouth. He managed not to cut himself at all—only the leaves that Fud ō had used to suffocate him. They fell to the ground like so much chaff.
    “What’s this?” Fudō asked. Hyakkimaru had the demon’s full attention. Fudō’s voice shook with outrage. The net that he carried in his left hand shifted slightly as he changed his grip. The net was no longer just an ordinary net—it was made of snakes!
    Hyakkimaru had no trouble with snakes, though. As they coiled and sprang at him, he hacked left and right, chopping them to bits. Fudō raised the sword in his right hand while Hyakkimaru was distracted…
    Ding! There was a high-pitched sound of metal striking against stone. Sparks flew into Hyakkimaru’s eye, making him flinch and lose his footing briefly. “Ah!”
    Fudō had raised his sword above Hyakkimaru’s head, prepared to strike him down. Hyakkimaru dodged to the side when the sword swept down. The sword landed right where he would have been if he hadn’t moved.
    Dororo was terrified of the sword, but he wasn’t about to let Hyakkimaru do all the fighting alone. He threw rocks at Fud ō, running along the cliff above the waterfall as he aimed. “Hehehe! How’re you gonna get out of this one, Mr. Demon? There’s no escape!” He was in high spirits, attacking Fudō along with Hyakkimaru.

    At long length, Fudō let out a low cry, and his head toppled off his stone shoulders.
    “We did it!” Dororo said. He gave himself and Hyakkimaru a round of applause. “What the hell was Fudō, anyway?”
   The roaring of the wind and water hadn’t died down. Hyakkimaru thought that the sound must originate with Fudō. It resonated in the air, foreboding. The sound had color; it swarmed around Hyakkimaru and Dororo like mosquitoes, descending on them from above like a dark cloud.
    As the cloud came closer, it became clear to Hyakkimaru that Fud ō’s body hadn’t actually been made of stone, but this strange black smoke. Like a crumbling mountain, Fud ō’s form vanished before his eyes, rising into the air to join the rest of the dark cloud.
   “The demon must still be in the cloud, if that’s what it’s made of,” Hyakkimaru said. “All right! Let’s do this.”
    The sounds of wind and water grew louder as Hyakkimaru muscled his way into the cloud of smoke. Though his sword arms were sharp, it was impossible to actually cut through smoke.
    “Aniki!” When Hyakkimaru didn’t emerge from the smoke, Dororo cried out to him in hopeless terror.
    Hyakkimaru stepped one leg out of the smoke to show Dororo that he was all right. “Eat this, demon!”
    Stymied by his inability to cut the smoke, Hyakkimaru emptied the liquid out of one of his bombs, threw it into the smoke, and set it on fire.
    “Uh, aniki…” Dororo leaped higher onto the cliff right before the explosion hit. When he peered over the cliff face and down, he saw that Hyakkimaru appeared to be unhurt.
  Or, mostly unhurt. “Ow…” Hyakkimaru frowned down at his right leg, then fell to the ground.
  “Your leg!” Dororo said. “Aniki, your leg’s growing back this time! That’s gotta be it!”
    Dororo was right: the leg where Hyakkimaru had once stored so many of his explosive weapons was growing back in bit by bit, dislodging the prosthetic.
    Hyakkimaru gasped. “Gah! Everything hurts like hell, from head to toe.” It seemed to take a long time, but his leg finally grew in. Hyakkimaru grumbled about the pain the whole time.
     “Hehehe… say, aniki?”
  “Yeah?” He was testing his new leg by pressing his foot to the ground and lifting it again. He was higher than the moon, and barely heard Dororo’s question.
    “Thanks. For coming to get me, I mean.”
    “Huh?”
  “You almost lost your little brother back there, y’know?” Dororo shrugged. “Now I know that I can rely on you in the future, aniki,” he said ingratiatingly.
    “Don’t be an idiot.” Hyakkimaru rested his leg on the ground. “I was there to kill a demon, not to save you. That’s all.” He took a few steps away from Dororo, walking along the cliff and to the river with careful steps. “Rocks hurt to step on. My head aches. The grass feels soft, though.”
    Dororo chuckled. “Hehehe… well, while you’re off doing whatever you want, I guess I’ll have to follow you. For protection and stuff.” Now that the demon was dead, Dororo wasn’t afraid of anything, and his desire for Hyakkimaru’s sword arms returned. That desire was motivated by a bad sort of engine that used theft and selfishness for fuel.
    “Moron! Shithead! Good-for-nothing fool! How many times have I told you not to follow me?! You’ll only get yourself killed, and I couldn’t even give you my sword arms if I tried!” Hyakkimaru kept walking along the river, cursing in Dororo’s general direction. Leaves fell to the ground from the trees above them, blowing in the wind. Dororo rushed to catch up with Hyakkimaru.
    Dororo faced the river. “Bye, not-mom,” he said quietly.
    Hyakkimaru was getting farther and farther away.
    “Oi!” Dororo ran after Hyakkimaru. “If this is how fast you got with one leg, how much faster will you be with two?! You’ll kill me at this pace!”
    The woman who had saved Dororo was dead again, as she’d been before. It was likely that she was now nothing except for a skeleton of bleached bones resting on the river bottom. Leaves fell in the river’s surface, creating ripples. In the distance, the mountains rose to the sky, their peaks capped with snow.
    Where will Dororo and Hyakkimaru go now?