Kanamori led Muichiro to Tetsuido’s grave. Muichiro offered flowers and a prayer before setting out to find Kotetsu.
“I know this place …” Muichiro looked around. He’d found himself in the grove where he first met Kotetsu.
Beneath the ancient trees, Kotetsu sat abjectly in front of a clockwork automaton, the Yoriichi Type Zero. From the tools scattered around, Muichiro guessed that he was trying to repair it.
Kotetsu let out a deep sigh. Then he spotted Muichiro. “Tokito?” he cried. “What’s going on? Are you better already? But you were really hurt! You frothed at the mouth and passed out!”
“I slept for two days straight.”
“Whoa whoa whoa. You can’t sleep off those kind of injuries. It’s not like getting over a cold. For most people, anyway. Tokito, are you even human?” Kotetsu was as excitable as ever.
“Say,” Muichiro said casually, “why aren’t you at the new village?”
The boy deflated abruptly. His shoulders slumping, he muttered, “I can’t go. The Zero is still broken.”
“Sorry. Because of me?”
“No, of course not!” Kotetsu shook his head frantically. “I mean, when you knocked the arm off, I did wish your stupid seaweed head would explode. But...”
“But?” Muichiro looked down at the younger boy.
“It still had five arms left. But then, after I recalibrated it to take you down, Tanjiro used it for training.”
“What?” Muichiro was already lost. Kotetsu filled him in on the details.
Tanjiro had used the Zero as a sparring partner, starting with sticks rather than swords in the mechanical doll’s remaining hands. At first the training was a disaster, but after a week Tanjiro’s sword neared its mark. Still, Tanjiro hesitated to land a killing blow on the automaton. Friendly soul that he was, he didn’t want to damage Kotetsu’s beloved machine.
Muichiro nodded to himself. That sounded like the Tanjiro he knew.
“So I told him, swing—it’s okay if it breaks,” Kotetsu continued. “I said I could fix it.”
Urged on, Tanjiro had brought his sword down on the Yoriichi Type Zero at last.
“And then the Zero opened up and there was a katana inside,” the young swordsmith said. “Haganezuka polished it up.”
“What?” This story was more surprising by the minute.
With that blade, Tanjiro took the head of an Upper Rank Four demon. Heartened by the success of the training, Kotetsu decided to get back to his own work in earnest. Tanjiro had trusted him, and his sword had been sure.
However...
“I managed to screw the head and arms back in place, but that’s just the exterior.” Kotetsu shook his head wearily. “The clockwork inside...”
“The Zero’s not moving?” Muichiro asked.
“No, it moves. More or less. But it doesn’t function the way it used to, with all the attacks. No matter what I do, I can’t recreate its battle training forms. I’m useless.” Kotetsu hung his head again.
Muichiro gently touched the automaton’s arm and felt the solid chill of the wood against his palm. The way it had moved when he’d faced off against it in the past, he could almost have mistaken it for a human being with blood running through its veins. He could understand why Kotetsu was so dejected.
“Why don’t you take it with you to the new village and work on it there?”
Kotetsu shook his head. “Tecchin told me if I can’t get it back in shape by the last moving day, I ought to leave it behind. That’s just two days from now.” At the ends of his limp arms, his fists trembled.
Muichiro tried to understand Tecchin’s thinking. The Nichirin Swords were essential to the war against the demons, so the swordsmiths needed to focus on moving their village and returning to their work. If the automaton would compromise the speed and secrecy of the move, it would make sense to abandon it.
“We’re using special techniques to keep the demons from following us,” Kotetsu explained. “There’s a limit to how much we can bring.”
“Meaning you can’t take anything that doesn’t work?”
Kotetsu sagged. “Yes.” The sound of sniffling came from behind his mask.
Muichiro took his hand off the mechanical arm. The old Muichiro would have agreed wholeheartedly with the village chief. There was no point in saving useless things. Or useless people.
But now he found Tecchin’s pronouncement heartless. Kotetsu’s ancestors had built this clockwork automaton centuries ago, in the Warring States period. For Kotetsu, it was more than a machine. It was a memorial from his father, almost a member of the family.
“In that case,” said Muichiro, “you’ll just have to fix it.”
Kotetsu choked back another sob. “But I—”
“I remember the movements. Not all of them, of course.” Muichiro cut Kotetsu off. The younger boy looked up at him from beneath his mask. “Let’s fix the Yoriichi Type Zero together.”
“What are you saying, Tokito? This isn’t like you. Do you have a fever?” Kotetsu’s confusion bordered on impertinence, but Muichiro shrugged it off.
“I’ll reproduce the movements. You remember them,” he said. “Or write them down.”
“Huh? But...”
“We only have two days, so we’d better get to it.”
Kotetsu nodded, still uncertain. “Right!”
The broken mechanical doll watched them with empty eyes.
“The right-two move goes like this.”
“Okay...”
“Here, use right-one and cut in like this.”
“Like this?”
“No. Like this. Faster, sharper.”
There was no way Kotetsu could commit all of Muichiro’s detailed instructions to memory. His pencil raced earnestly across paper as Muichiro, stripped to his shirt sleeves, slowly demonstrated the basic forms used by the Yoriichi Type Zero. He’d taken off his jacket to give Kotetsu a good view of his arm motions. In battle, he preferred a loose-fitting uniform that obscured his movements.
At some point, red had begun to streak across the western sky, and fatigue was showing on Kotetsu’s face. When Muichiro suggested a break, the young smith was clearly relieved.
“Good idea! I’ll go get some water.” Kotetsu dashed off to the nearest stream and soon returned with a full bamboo pail. Muichiro leaned back against the trunk of a maple tree and took a sip of the freshly drawn water. It was cold and faintly sweet.
“You’re amazing, Tokito,” Kotetsu said, sitting down beside him.
Muichiro tilted his head skeptically. “Where’d that come from?”
“You only practiced with the Zero once, but you remember all its forms. Who else could do that?”
“Well...it’s not like I remember every last one.”
“Even so, it’s really something. Compared to that, I’m...” Kotetsu looked away and sighed. It was quite the weighty sigh for a boy of ten. “I mean, even with you helping me, I don’t know how much I can do.”
“You’re only ten,” said Muichiro. “You’ve got a lot of growing up to do.”
“It’s not that!” Kotetsu’s voice rose, then fell again. “I don’t have a knack for making swords. And I’m not much of a mechanic either. I’m nothing. But you...you were blessed with talent from the day you were born. You could never understand how I feel.” The small hands encircling the bamboo pail trembled.