It was getting late in the afternoon, as Yuki, Miya, Udo, and Rai left Priest Yoshi and the children in the shantytown and moved cautiously into the village. No one was around in any of the outer buildings, and each looked as if it had simply been abandoned and left as is; with a thin layer of undisturbed dust that now covered everything.
Approaching the village square, a loud commotion could be heard ahead.
Quietly creeping between the houses (which really wasn’t necessary due to all the noise), the Samurai looked out and could see the square filled with the older men of the village, perhaps sixty or so – all fist-fighting each other in some kind of massive brawl.
Like Yuki had seen with her Clairvoyance, they were incredibly brutal with each other and gave no rhyme or reason to their attacks – punching, kicking, biting, choking, and throwing each other around with reckless abandon.
Using Spirit Sight, Yuki and Udo could both see another unmanifested Yori, standing in the square amidst the raucous mob.
It appeared as a twelve foot tall O-Bakemono (ogre) and was armed with a massive black naginata that seemed to weep blood continuously, staining the Yori’s hands and arms in a crimson sheen. It wore course iron plates banded with barbed chains across the expanse of its heavily muscular body and a ferocious-looking war mask fashioned of rough iron.
Yuki knew that this Yori was far more powerful than the last one the Samurai had faced – it was Malice – one she knew well from her studies of mystic lore.
This Yori could stir up the hearts of men to incredible depths of hate and anger and was sometimes the cause of much senseless bloodshed and, in one recorded case, even caused a civil war.
The villagers trapped in its power would fight and brawl and do everything short of killing each other, magically sustained by the Yori to do so indefinitely. Anyone unlucky enough to be caught by these men would be beaten senseless and thrown back out of the Yori’s domain – that is, if they did not fall sway to the Yori’s power first.
Fortunately, Yuki also knew how to banish it, but therein lay the problem – it needed to be splashed with the sorrowful tears of the village women…