Only Human

​

 The river roared with the cadence of a hundred ravenous beasts. Violent white waters crashed down three concurrent waterfalls as it carved its way south from the distant snowcapped mountains that covered the northern sky. Faint white clouds wisped across the sky and the sun shone brightly above, leaving the rising broken rocky plains ahead of them free of shadows, yet there were still plenty of little cracks and crevices for a foot to easily misstep on and end up with a twisted ankle. It would have made a desperate place for a human to make a home, but gen could adapt to any environment. From a harmless, tiny rodent, to a towering behemoth of fangs and teeth, to the rock you've been sitting on the last twenty minutes that suddenly decided to have you for lunch, the gen were a constant threat, and one that Taoru and the ten other fresh faced recruits had spent the last few months being trained to deal with.

 Taoru stood three-fourths of the way down the line as field commander Tekkan quietly paced in front of them for inspection. They each wore the red, long-sleeved uniform the komainu had become synonymous with, which was lined with a small layer of leather for added protection and a stylized white stripe on the cuffs of their arms and legs. Every member carried a wooden spear tipped with metal in their hands and stood tall as field commander Tekkan stopped at the center of the recruits, between the line of komainu and the wagon, an old thing of dirtied wood patched up and fixed so many times it looked more patchwork than original wood and the rusty metal joints that held together the large water wheel on its left side had to be oiled extensively to avoid it screeching whenever it spun, which sat at the edge of the river. The four weirun harnessed to the front of the wagon gnawed on the stubby grass without a care in the world. The hooved beasts of burden were bulky masses of curly, dark brown fur, their strength matched only by their selective stubbornness. At Tekkan’s command three initiated komainu pulled and coerced the wheel down into the river which spun as the current pushed through its spokes and dumped water into the open-topped wagon while four others stood watch at the river’s edge, wary of any threat that could appear from its turbulent surface. 

 Tekkan spoke to the new recruits. “Most of the time we can fill our wagon with enough water without being bothered by gen. But any komainu who’s served longer than a season can tell you that ‘most of the time’ is as good as ‘none of the time.’ No matter the task, no matter how simple, there’s always the possibility that it could be your last. You could die today and never see your home and family again.” Tekkan’s gaze stopped on Taoru for longer than a breath. Despite Taoru and Tekkan only sharing a mother, there was no mistaking them for anything but brothers; They were both the same height, shared the same solid jaw line, the same bright hazel eyes. Even their short black hair was a perfect match, though Taoru never bothered combing down his slept in hair. Taoru was also more lean and muscular, a trait gained from pushing himself and training with every spare minute of his day as he prepared to try and enter the komainu. Five years younger than his brother, at seventeen, Taoru was the youngest recruit. It also made Tekkan the youngest field commander, as far as anyone knew. “You must be willing to make that sacrifice for the lives of others,” Tekkan continued. “If you aren’t, then the red robes aren’t for you. This could be your last chance to withdraw. Step forward now if you wish to do so because after today, leaving will be considered desertion.”

 Yoichi, the recruit beside Taoru, shoved him forward. Taoru caught himself after a single step, but his brother noticed immediately. “Taoru? You want to leave?” 

 “No, field commander Tekkan, I just tripped.” 

 “Tripped?” he cocked an eyebrow as he eyed Yoichi.

 “Yeah,” Taoru said. “Tripped right over some stupid asshole trying to get in a quick snuggle.” 

 “You wish,” Yoichi scoffed. “I was saving you the embarrassment of getting scared and running away like your dad.”

 Taoru’s fist clenched around his spear. “Want me to kick your ass again, Yoichi?”

 “Stop!” Tekkan commanded, and the two froze in their tracks. “Yoichi, when we get back, you’re cleaning the wagon. Taoru, your ability to mouth off isn’t a skill that’ll bring you Glory’s attention. Keep your mouth shut before it gets you into trouble you can’t fight your way out of.” 

 Taoru wasn’t the youngest recruit just because his brother was the field commander, he had earned his spot with his talent for fighting. He was likely better with a spear than most of the senior members of the komainu and definitely more skilled with a sword, as most komainu never even touched a sword. They weren’t as efficient against most gen as a spear was, and the amount of iron a sword used could have made a dozen spear tips. They were mostly ceremonially, but that hadn’t stopped Taoru from stealing his brother’s and practicing with it. No, Taoru wasn’t afraid of getting into a fight with anyone, but he stayed silent and nodded, to visible- if not subtle- relief from his older brother.

 Tekkan pointed northeast to the rising rocky hills. “Right now a clan war is going on somewhere up those cliffs.” The outcrops and shattered cliffs were undercut by the massive grey mountains that rose out of the ground like teeth so many kilometers away and had given the continent spanning mountain chain its name; The Maw. “Our scouts report it’s a clan of razorbacks and thistlecats and it’s a fight that’s been going on since early this morning.” Gen evolved into slightly different variants every generation, but most of the time they kept the core aspects of their being intact just enough for nicknames to stick. They were simple names, made identifying the creatures more easily than whatever names the self-indulgent scholars loved to give them. “But just because they’re busy killing each other doesn’t mean we’re safe. That many corpses will bring scavengers and opportunistic hunters.” Taoru could see scavenger birds taking off and landing from up the cliffs beside them and their large beaks looked just as suitable to shredding human flesh as some dead gen’s. “Death can come from anywhere,” Tekkan continued. “If you aren’t careful, your lack of vigilance can get every one of us killed. I don’t say this to scare you. I say it because it’s true. To the beasts out there, we’re just an easy meal or a threat to their territory. Water gathering is one of the more menial tasks of the komainu, but it is also one of the most critically important. Water attracts a wide variety of gen but typically a large group of komainu will keep a single predator from coming too close. But that doesn’t mean we’re safe. Packs of hunters, ambushers hiding in the river, desperate and hungry beasts, anything can be a threat, even one of those birds if they get too curious.”

 The wheel squeaked with every half turn, barely audible over the roar of the river, but to any gen with a descent set of ears, it could have very well been a dinner bell. Taoru hoped gen would show up. He hoped he got his chance to show exactly what he could do against them. And Taoru quickly got his wish as a whistle sounded from the nearby cliff.

 The recruits and veterans alike turned to see one of their scouts motioning to Tekkan below. Taoru had already memorized all the hand signals the komainu used, and he looked upriver where four separate dark shapes had just crested over the first of the three waterfalls and plummeted down into the churning waters and continued toward the next fall which gave Taoru a better look at the shapes. Feline in form and covered in a black hide, each was as long as a human and a meter tall with black fur reminiscent of a thistle bush made up a mane that covered the top of their heads, shoulders, and back. Their heads were a long muzzle of nasty looking teeth and pointed ears. Their paws were large for their size, with four elongated claws and a fifth, stubbier thumb claw. The four thistlecats were dead, though Taoru couldn’t tell if they had died from the slashes and cuts covering their bodies, from drowning in the rapids, or from smashing into the many jagged rocks jutting out from the river’s surface but many more of them quickly joined the grim parade down the waterfalls.

 The river was soon full of the dead thistlecats. Some were intact, others suffered heavy damage, missing limbs, and deep gashes from claws and teeth. A few were still alive, frantically thrashing as the current took them. Some managed to get out of the water. It was a small percentage of them, but there were so many of the cats that at least a dozen had made it to the komainu’s side of the river and they looked angry and afraid and that was not a good combination in any situation. 

 Tekkan was quick to give out orders. “New recruits stay back. Defensive tactics and only fight if you’re attacked.” 

 “I can help!” Taoru shouted. “You know I’m good enough to fight.”

 “Komainu do as they’re ordered!” Tekkan snapped as he rushed to join the already initiated komainu as they formed up into their ranks. Taoru knew all the forms and he could have slid in without a hiccup. The thistlecats were disorganized, injured, and rattled from their trip down the rapids and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to let the new recruits get their spears bloodied. Yet they were supposed to just stand there as the rest of them fought off the gen attack.

 Up on the cliffs, Yusaku, the scout who had given the warning, was fighting off three thistlecats. Tekkan and the other komainu were fighting off the cats and protecting the waterwheel. They didn’t even notice one of their own was stuck in a one-on-three fight with the beasts. 

 “He needs help,” Taoru said quietly at first and then once again louder. He looked to the recruits. “Who’s coming with me?” None of the recruits replied. “He’s going to die if we don’t help!” Not even Yoichi looked him in the eye. 

 Taoru didn’t waste any more time and took off running. If they didn’t know how to act as komainu, then they didn’t deserve to wear the red. As he raced up the shallow inclines and climbed up the larger cliffs, he could hear his brother shouting for him to come back, but Yusaku wouldn’t last much longer by himself. The man’s spear had felled two of the cats but four more had joined and circled around the injured scout who had taken a clawed swipe to his leg. Going around the incline to the east would be safer for Taoru, but it would also cost him vital extra seconds that Yusaku just didn’t have so Taoru stuck his spear into the harness on his back, leapt up to grab hold of the ledge, and drug himself up to the top. 

 Yusaku swung his spear wildly from side to side as he limped backward in a desperate bid to keep the five thistlecats from closing in. The gen were so intent on their prey they didn’t even notice Taoru until his spear took the first one in the neck and by then he still had enough of an advantage that the second fell the same way. The three thistlecats all turned their attention on Taoru, but he wasn’t worried in the slightest. Perhaps if the cats hadn’t been injured and exhausted, he might have considered them a challenge, but as they rushed forward, Taoru only smiled. He charged the one on the left. It seemed to the least injured and so he took full advantage of his spear’s reach to stick the thistlecat in the chest as it pounced into the air. The thistlecat cried out and Taoru pivoted to redistribute the weight of the falling cat. He then slashed horizontally, taking a gouge out of the next closest cat’s face and ruining its right eye. It hissed and rose up on its hind legs, its front paw raised to strike at Taoru, but it had barely gotten off the ground before a spear flew at the reared up thistlecat and stuck it in the throat. Taoru wasted no time in grabbing the thrown spear with his left hand and pushed the gen back before yanking the weapon free. With a spear in each hand, Taoru spun to face the last thistlecat and tossed the spear in his left hand over the cat’s head back to Yusaku. The cat looked up at the object going over its head and Taoru took full advantage of the gen’s momentary distraction and put the creature down with a quick decisive blow.

 “That was a good throw,” Taoru told Yusaku. Typically, throwing your spear was a foolish thing to do, but the man’s aim had been an impressive feat. “You okay?”

 “Fine. Thank you.” The scout was out of breath and the injury behind his shredded pant leg was bleeding, though it didn’t look like a dire injury. The second scout was laying face down on the ground closer to the river. He hadn’t been so lucky.

 “He’s dead.” There was no emotion in Yusaku’s words. It was a common thing for people to die, especially komainu, and that went double for the scouts. It was why they got extra servings of meals. But that didn’t mean it should have been so… normalized. 

 “May Honour witness your deeds,” Taoru whispered the small prayer to the dead man as his eyes were drawn northward. Up here, the rugged cliffs had evened out, giving way to flatter lands with tufts of short, dagger-like blades of grass. Blood and death sprawled across the rock-strewn field. Scavenging beasts had wasted no time in gorging themselves on the thistlecat and razorback corpses which littered the ground. Clan wars were violent clashes that could last days or weeks, each side occasionally retreating to breed new stock that were better adapted to fight their enemy and since it only took a matter of days for a newborn gen to reach maturity, the bodies could really pile up. The thistlecats clan was in awful shape, outnumbered ten to one by the second clan- short, stubby, clay-colored things of razor-spiked backs and terribly long claws on their legs and arms that looked more like scythes than natural claws. The razorbacks had formed a wall and were pushing what remained of the thistlecats off the edge and into the raging river. 

 Taoru’s eyes flickered further up the river as he caught sight of movement. A hundred meters away, at the river’s edge, was an entrance to a cave. And at its mouth a man stood, swinging a tree branch at three razorbacks as they closed in on him. “Who’s that?” Taoru asked. He wasn’t wearing a komainu uniform.

 “I don’t know. I saw him earlier. He’s not from our village.”

 Taoru winced. ‘He’s not from our village’ sounded like that made him not worth saving. Taoru looked down the cliff, back to where the other komainu were. Most of the thistlecats had been taken care of and it didn’t seem anyone was injured. They would be fine without him, especially as the amount of thistlecats flowing down the river began to slow. “Can you make it down the cliff?”

 “I’ll be fine,” he answered. “But you shouldn’t go out there. It’s too dangerous. Wait for help.”

 “If I waited to help you, you might already be dead.”

 Yusaku started to protest, but Taoru was already running across the field of gen corpses and the words were lost to the river. The thistlecats desperately fought back against the swarm of smaller razorbacks pushing them into the river and the cats were killing twice as many of them as they tried to hold their ground but the razorback numbers ensured there was a continually wave of pressure pushing their enemy closer to the edge and neither side paid Taoru any mind as he ran across the rocky terrain. Only the scavengers squawked or hissed as he ran past, but went back to eating after being unchallenged. 

 Less than fifty meters ahead at the mouth of the cave, the stranger fell back as the stick was knocked from his hands. The razorbacks chirped and went in for the kill. Taoru cursed, knowing he couldn’t get there in time but he still pushed himself forward in an attempt to do the impossible when the dark shape of a thistlecat burst out of the tunnel and knocked one razorback off the ledge with its massive paw into the chasm below and immediately pounced on another, its massive muzzle crushing its face. The third ran and shrieked out in a high-pitched alarm before the thistlecat swatted it to the ground, rolled it so the front of its unarmed throat was exposed, and went for the quick kill.

 This thistlecat was enormous compared to the others and quite dissimilar to them in other ways as well. It had no exposed hide. Instead, midnight black fur covered its body. Its muzzle was more stubbed than the others, but far more powerful. The slight differences marked it as the clan’s matron, their leader and sole means of new offspring until it was subsequently replaced by one of its children, who would then give birth to another slightly different generation.

 The matron thistlecat’s eyes were dark slits in orbs of gold. It snarled at the stranger who staggered back against the rock wall, but a chittering wave of razorbacks began clawing their way back up the steps of the rocky outcroppings. The matron lept at the front line and swiped furiously at them before they could gain purchase on solid ground. It was nearly twice their size and a single strike from its paw had no trouble knocking them down, but the thistlecat was just so utterly outnumbered. The host of razorbacks pushed and rolled over each other to get to the cat and eventually they swarmed over it, only for the thistlecat to erupt free in a thrashing frenzy, only for more of the razorbacks to pile on. The thistlecat rolled, trying to shake free once again but as it did, it was unaware of just how close it was to the ledge and it rolled off, along with many of the horde attacking it and fell further down a series of declines away from the river. Those razorbacks that hadn’t been taken down with it gleefully chased after it, forgetting all about the stranger who quickly disappeared into the cave.

 As Taoru passed by the scene, he had no trouble spotting the large black matron dozens of meters below in the sea of clay-colored razorbacks. It was being slashed at, attacked from every angle, but the thistlecat was a superb force of strength and resilience. It fought back and it fought back hard, but it seemed to be a losing battle. With the way clear, Taoru cared little for what happened to any of the gen. 

 "Hey!" Taoru shouted as he reached the mouth of the cave- which wasn’t so much a cave as it was a tunnel through the cliff that abruptly ended two hundred meters ahead. The stranger was barely a quarter through the tunnel and he spun to face Taoru. A head shorter than Taoru, the man had unkempt black hair and a dirty beard, torn clothes caked with stains of all sorts, and even his skin was dusted with dirt. His brown eyes looked wild, desperate even, and with the dagger he held in his right hand, Taoru was going to keep a little distance between them. With his eyes adjusted to the dim light, it became apparent why the matron had been so desperate to defend the place. The air smelled of decay and old blood. Tiny bugs swarmed over the shredded bodies of razorbacks, which were placed around a small incline in the stone where their blood had pooled in the center of a clutch of rust-colored eggs. There were nine eggs and each was the size of Taoru’s head, which, given the size of the matron, likely meant they’d already had some time to grow. Most gen hatched as fully developed-but smaller versions- of their parent and would grow to full maturity in a matter of days if it could consume enough energy to fuel its growth. Just one more reason why the creatures were the scourge of humanity. 

 The stranger, instead of acknowledging Taoru, knelt down and picked through the gory muck of the nest. 

 “We need to get out of here,” Taoru said, hoping to illicit a response this time. “Either the swarm will be back or big mama will and neither is great for us.” Taoru would prefer the thistlecat to a horde. He could best a single cat, no matter how large. Absurd numbers were another thing entirely.

 “It’s here. I know it’s here.” The stranger had a slight accent that placed him as an easterner. He’d heard it spoken enough from his father that Taoru could pick up the minor differences in pronunciation immediately.

 Taoru hurried closer to the man who had set his dagger down to move razorback corpses around. “What are you looking for?” Ignored again, Taoru’s focus shifted to the eggs. Each new generation of gen was an upgrade in the gen arms race, each generation better adapted to kill the enemy just a little bit better. If it wasn’t for clan wars diverting most of the gen’s efforts for survival, humanity would have gone extinct long ago. Taoru reversed the grip of his spear and thrust into each of the eggs multiple times to ensure the little creatures never got the chance to breathe fresh air. The eggs were leathery and wet from the blood they had absorbed, and the end of his spear was coated in gore by the short time it took him to complete his task.

 “Got it,” the stranger said as he pulled a wet, gnawed on, brown leather satchel from underneath a razorback corpse

 “Odd place to keep your belongings. Can we go now?” 

 “I was attacked,” the man said as he frantically dug through the bag. “I got away, but the bag strap got caught on its scales. Then a cat got it and brought it here.”

 “And you followed after it like an idiot? What could possibly be worth going into a gen war zone- into a nest- for?”

 “Only the most important thing that’s ever existed.” The man held two thumb-length glass vials filled with a cloudy liquid and capped with a brown cork. One was nearly completely full, while the other was only half. 

 A noise at the entrance of the cave alerted Taoru, and he spun around with his spear in hand, which was still dripping yolk and viscera from its tip. The massive black cat had already covered half the distance and the other half took as long as the blink of an eye. Taoru got his spear up just in time as the jaws of the matron clamped down on the wooden shaft. The massive cat’s weight pushed Taoru backward to the ground. Hot, rank breath melted across Taoru’s face from its snarling jaws just centimeters away. Blood dripped down onto Taoru’s chin from a fresh slash cross its face, from the tip of its muzzle to just a hair’s width above its right eye. 

 The thistlecat huffed and the wooden spear groaned under the pressure of its powerful jaws and deadly teeth. Hatred burned in its golden eyes, hatred Taoru had never seen, even on a human’s face. The wood cracked and then completely snapped in two in the cat’s jaws and it wasted no time in lunging once more right for Taoru’s face and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

 Suddenly, the brown satchel smashed into the cat’s nose. The impact startled it more than anything, but it was enough of a distraction that Taoru could get his legs up underneath it and shove it off him. Taoru shot to his feet with both halves of his spear in each hand. “Thanks,” he told the stranger without taking his eyes off the thistlecat. “You should get out of here. I’ll distract it.” Taoru wouldn’t have any trouble doing that, it seemed. The cat’s golden eyes burned with so much rage and all of it was aimed directly at Taoru. Because I killed its offspring? He hadn’t thought gen smart enough to make that sort of connection.  

 The stranger had stepped behind Taoru. “Can you kill it?”

 “Yeah, I can kill it.” Even with a broken spear, Taoru was confident in that. Its speed had surprised him at first, but it wouldn’t catch him off guard a second time. But then came the chittering sound of the razorbacks again. The cat hesitantly turned its attention toward the swarm of small spiked gen as they pushed their way into the tunnel’s entrance, a churning mass of clay colored bodies pushing over each other. Taoru cursed and immediately changed tactics. “This way!” Taoru ran toward the back of the tunnel and the stranger followed in stride.

 Taoru hoped the mouth at the end of the cave led out onto a series of cliffy steps, but that hope faded the closer he got. He could see through the exit that it led out only to the air, with nothing but the mountains far ahead of them and the river winding its way through the broken landscape far below. But there was still hope that it was just a really, really steep incline and the chittering cries and scraping sound of hundreds of claws on rocks were good motivators not to stop running. He didn’t even look back. He didn’t want to know how close the wall of death was. 

 Taoru cursed as they came to a stop at the mouth of the cave. If he’d been hoping for a miracle from Fortune, he’d been denied. It was a sheer, hundred meter drop from the exit all the way down to the river below and thirty meters behind, the crush of razorbacks rolled toward them, leaving them only one choice to escape. “We’ll jump for it.” If they made a good jump, there was a chance they could survive by landing in a deeper part of the river.

 “Not yet,” the stranger shouted in his eastern accent. He held the half empty glass vial in his right hand as if he was about to throw it.

 “Some dirty water isn’t going to help us,” Taoru snapped. “If we don’t jump, those things will rip us apart.”

 The man ignored Taoru and lobbed the vial at the front line of razorbacks and the glass shattered against the face of the lead gen, splashing it and the razorbacks beside it with glass and grey liquid.

 “Great. You threw your thing. Can we go-“ Taoru froze as the lead gen and its surrounding companions crashed to the ground in a fit of violent convulsions, causing those behind them to stagger and trip over their frothing, spasming bodies. In a few seconds those that tripped had begun to seizure as well, their own frenzied thrashing sending more saliva and bloody froth into the air and in a less than a handful of heartbeats the entire cave’s worth of razorbacks were down, reduced to quivering bodies that were melting- melting away into dark, bloody ooze.

 A bitter, putrid smell quickly overcame the cave, growing worse as the last of the razorbacks dissolved into nothing and the black puddle spread and crept toward them. Beyond the puddle, which seemed more a pond now, the thistlecat laid motionless. “What in Wisdom’s tome was that?” Taoru turned to face the stranger only to find the man backing away, his eyes locked on the line of black ooze as it crawled closer to them. It became apparent that Taoru should also be concerned about not letting the black goo touch him, but the man was only a few steps away from the edge of the cliff and still stepping backward. “Hey,” Taoru shouted. “Hey!” 

 The man snapped out of his daze. The front of his foot landed on solid ground, but his heel found nothing and he cried out as he lost balance and fell backward. Taoru lunged forward and dove onto his belly just in time to snatch the man’s right arm. The stone underneath Taoru was smooth and he had to use his left hand to hold himself firmly in place while the stranger dangled helplessly from a single arm. “Let go of that thing and grab my arm,” Taoru told him when he realized the man was still holding onto the second vial of liquid.

 “I can’t! It’s too important!” he shouted.

 “Then put it in your godsdamned pocket first!” His grip was tentative at best and he wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer. And the black ooze was no doubt still creeping ever closer to Taoru.

 The stranger mumbled something incoherent before the rest of his sentence became audible. “-hole in my pocket.”

 “You’ll die if you don’t grab on with your other hand!”

 “It’s worth more than my life!”

 "Mine too? Because I'm not letting go of you and if you don’t grab onto me, we'll both going over."

 "I’ll toss it up to you,” the man grimaced. “Let go of me and catch it. It’s too important to lose!” It had killed a hundred gen in less than a few seconds. It was impossible to argue that it wasn’t incredibly important. But the cost of even a single life was more than Taoru was willing to pay for it. “I won’t catch it. I won’t let go. So stop arguing and grab. My. Arm!”

 The man looked so angry that Taoru wouldn’t let him drop to his death, but then that look was replaced by another, like he got a very sudden, very stupid, idea. He put the vial in his mouth, held in place by his teeth, and reached for Taoru’s arm.

 With both hands at the task, pulling the man up was an easier task. “My name’s Taoru,” he said once they were both on solid ground. The black goo had stopped spreading with two meters to spare.

 “Van.” He took the vial out of his mouth and held it softly in the palm of his hand.

 “That stuff is amazing,” Taoru said. “What is it?”

 Van hesitated for a moment. “Genshi.”

 Taoru recognized the suffix ‘–shi.’ It was a word from the Old Language, most of it only used nowadays to name things. He didn’t know what the most of the language’s words meant, but every young boy grew up with a tree branch they pretended was a spear they named Something-or-other-shi.

Death. Shi meant death. “Gen’s Death isn’t a very imaginative name.”  

 “No,” Van admitted, “but it fits.”

 “Glory’s Crown, it does.” Further down the tunnel, the black shape that was the thistlecat matron began to move, and Taoru shook his head at its amazing resilience. “We need to find a way out of here. Can we… step in this stuff or will it melt us, too?”

 “It… would be better to not step through it. It won’t kill a human like it will a gen, but, well…” Van sort of just trailed off. “I saw a way we could climb down the cliff though.”

 “The cliff you almost fell down?” The thistlecat was up on all fours, sluggish and covered in scratches and blood. Drunkenly, it stopped at the edge of the black goo and stared at Taoru. Its right eye was shut, the blood from the gash over its right eye crusting over, but its golden left eye refused to look away. So focused, so filled with rage, Taoru almost didn’t hear Van.

 “It looked climbable, as long as you start with a good toehold.”  

 Taoru turned his back on the cat when he was certain it wouldn’t try to cross the black substance. “Alright. Let’s get climbing then.” And back to my brother. Taoru would almost have rather faced off against another horde of razorbacks. At least they would have killed him quickly, not nag him to death with long boring speeches.