[Gintama] Immortal

It becomes cooler.

The thick and colorful red maple leaves a vivid impression on the retina. Looking at it again today, the bare branches have been covered with frost, standing desolately under the gray sky in late autumn.

Yae blinked slowly.Her vision started to suffer, which was what happened when Altana's crystals spread to her face.

Now she can still see things with her left eye, but the scenery she sees with her right eye is covered with shadows, like through a thick lampshade, everything she sees is a blurred shadow.

Losing half of his field of vision, it became difficult to judge the depth of the space. Once, Yae stared at the stone steps going down the mountain for a long time, and was finally picked up by Xu, who had lost all patience.

She became very dependent on him, in every sense of the word.

Probably no one would have thought that the former leader of Amaterasu-in Naraku could be a blind stick. When the mountain roads were rough and difficult, Yae would follow him by the hem of Xu's clothes. Wherever he went, she would also go. Don't look at the road at all.

Because she was holding her back, the two stopped and walked in the mountains.The desolate mountains are sparsely populated, and the world before the cold winter seems to have lost all its colors, becoming shriveled and silent.

When I saw the living again, it was by the river beach filled with white mist.

No birdsong could be heard in the forest, and Yae looked at his own reflection in the water. The scale-like crystals meandered from the side of the neck to the cheekbone on the right cheek, undulating in the mirror of the flowing water.

Her attention was not very focused, and her vision on the right was covered with shadows. When she heard the crisp sound of stepping on dead branches on the river beach, she didn't realize what it was for the first time.

The black sleeves suddenly blocked the view, completely covering her, Yae was startled for a moment, and was about to raise her head to ask Xu what was going on, when she heard a terrified voice, uttering very familiar words tremblingly:

"Strange……"

Ah, bad.

"monster--"

In fact, there are not many biological instincts left in Xu Xu's body.

Fear of pain, fear of high temperature—these innate reactions to protect one's life have long since disappeared from this person's body during the long period of time and torture.Therefore, even if his heart and lungs were pierced, he could still stand still and cut open the enemy's throat with a backhand.

But when the exclamation of human beings sounded in the silent air, a burst of hostility suddenly burst out.

Yae couldn't even tell if it was a reaction from Holo himself, or a conditioned reflex created by the past years.

With a clang, the man fell to the ground.

Being held in Xuhu's arms, she couldn't see anything, she subconsciously hugged his waist, and tightly grasped the kimono on his body.

"Void."

She called his name, but her brain was also in chaos, that word seemed to have opened an incredible taboo, and countless memories came like snowflakes—bloody, horrible, the picture she had seen in his sea of ​​consciousness The shards stained everything a blood-red somber.

There was a rustling sound, and the man trembled, crawling backwards on hands and feet.Yae could vaguely hear the chattering of teeth, and the whimpering that flowed from the flattened windpipe of the small animal when its throat was choked.

The smell of fear is so strong, it can almost become substance in the cold air.

Xu didn't do anything.

Yae hugged his waist tightly, fingers so hard that the knuckles turned white.

"You want to let him go?" Xu lowered his eyes and asked softly.

There was a weird smile in his voice, and his tone was gentle and warm, as if he was asking her what she would like to have for lunch today.

The knife in the sheath seemed to sense something, and the blade trembled and hummed eagerly to drink blood.Yae knew that if she let go, the villager would be separated immediately.

"Who do you want to protect this time? Songyang? Don't you want him to be stigmatized as a murderer?"

Xu smiled slightly, the blood in his pupils was dark red.

"It's so pitiful." He said, "You see, I have countless ways to easily ruin the life Songyang desires."

"please stop."

Yae grabbed Xu's clothes and buried his face in his arms, "I beg you, please stop."

"...you will regret it." Xu stroked her hair, leaned into her ear and whispered:

"Letting this one go will only bring in more."

Take a hoe, a sickle, a rope, a bow and arrows, and oh yes, a torch.

Hunting in the dark, that's what it is.

"Then try it." Yae raised his head, "Just try this once."

Xu seemed to show a mocking expression.

He looked at her for a while, and the cold hostility on his body gradually disappeared, and the murderous aura that was ready to go out was retracted into its sheath, becoming something even more elusive.

The sound of hurried footsteps went away, but Xu didn't chase after them.

Yae breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that Xu had agreed to her request, and wanted to see if that person would call other villagers to hunt down her "monster" after returning.

But the two did not stay on the river beach.

Xu took her over mountains and mountains, and arrived at a dilapidated shrine before dark, walking a very far way.

The shrine with overgrown grass seems to have been visited by no one for some years. The red torii has been corroded by time, the moss-covered stone lantern hangs its head, and the shimenawa in front of the shrine is almost integrated with the dark wood.

Yae managed to sweep out a small piece of clean ground in the dusty inner room. Before he could sit down and take a breath, the killers sent by the old shogunate came.

Not knowing if he heard her voice, Xu confined the battle to the outside.The blood mist splashed on the moldy paper door, but did not reach the indoor floor.

As night fell, the movement outside the shrine was like ripples for a short time, and after a moment of waves, it returned to calm again.

Xu returned to the room with a smell of blood, and Yae found a mess of dead branches, and managed to light a bonfire. The faint light of the fire danced on the wooden floor, like plankton in the darkness of the deep sea.

He seemed to have parted out a little more of his blood this time, and the wound on his wrist was slowly healing.Through this method, he has created quite a few puppets, enough to penetrate into the enemy's interior and slowly begin to erode the power distribution there.

The mountains in the darkness were silent, and the flames devouring the dead wood made crackling noises, and the shadows of the two people were stretched long, overlapping and projected on the dusty, decayed wall.

Yae tried to move his position and sat a little closer to Xu.

He didn't raise his eyelids, didn't make any reaction, so Yae got a little more courageous.

She unfolded the cloth in her palm and carefully wrapped it around Xu's wrist.

Yin Hong's incision was no longer oozing blood. If she had been slower to bandage, the wound might have healed by the time she finished her busy work.

...but what to say.

It was something she had always, always wanted to do.

——Why doesn’t it leave a scar?

He had obviously suffered such excessive torture. His body was plowed open with knives, his bones and muscles were burned into coke, his eyeballs were cut off from the optic nerve, and they were gouged out of the eye sockets bloody.

Day after day, year after year.It was obviously such a severe pain, but in the end there was no trace of existence left.Even the past crimes of those people seemed to have never happened, and they disappeared in a long time.

Who should I seek revenge from, who should I cry out my grievances to?

His pain seemed to have never existed. Even if he was burned thousands of times by fire, and chopped into flesh by swords, he would not be left with any guilt in the end.

Why, it will be erased so easily.

Yae lowered her eyes, and the blurred flames became foggy at the edge of her field of vision.

The wound is bandaged.

The light-colored cloth was wrapped around the wrist, and spots of blood coagulated into dark plums.

Yae leaned over slightly, gently and carefully kissed the scabbed wound.

The dead branches made a crisp sound, melting and falling under the scorching heat of the flame.

"……what are you doing?"

Yae slowly straightened up.

"During the day," Yae paused, "No, there are still a few more days."

She thought, this man is an unforgivable villain, the devil who almost destroyed the world.

She already knew these things.

but--

"Thank you for always protecting me."

The fire spreads out in the night, a little bit of light, even in the darkness like the deep sea, can have a brilliance beyond the reach of the stars and the moon.

"Did I hold you back?"

After staring at her for a long time, the bright red pupils couldn't clearly see the emotional fluctuations inside.

"You're pretty self-aware."

A cold, merciless voice.

"Ah, I'm really sorry."

The night stood still for a moment.

The shadows on the wall were stacked together, and when Xu gave her blood, Yae did not refuse.

The author has something to say:

This chapter is all sugar, really