Falling from the sky was a unique feeling Hisako would never forget–if she survived it.
The wind was so sharp and cold, whipping through her, that it felt like she was being cut, but the feeling of her stomach floating up into her throat made the burning seem like a nuisance.
As she and the dragon plummeted, she lifted off its face, holding on by only the large whiskers. The sword felt light without gravity pulling her down, but swinging it felt too weightless to do damage.
If she positioned her body right, she could maneuver around a bit. She eyed the clouds rapidly approaching and raised the blade.
Maybe, she figured, she could generate her own force by swinging herself at the dragon. That was how it worked in platformers or adventure games with ropes and vines. She decided to ignore that, in those games, there was simulated gravity affecting characters.
It would be like a water level, she told herself, floaty but not weightless. You could cut enemies in water.
She swung away from the dragon, then towards it, doing her best to twist to create momentum in her swing. The dragon was ignoring her, probably intent on shaking her off closer to the ground and cratering her.
She slashed as soon as she reached the scales on the dragon's head. The blade caught the forehead, cutting shallowly, and then she continued rolling down its face, across its brow. It roared mid-slash, ruining her swing by easily throwing her off with its movement.
She bounced off the end of the brow and ended up below its jaw from the whisker, her sword caught on the air beside her.
A bulging eye with blood dripping into it rolled down to narrow at her. A wickedly sharp talon reached up, and she made a split-second decision.
She let go of the whisker.
She'd mistakenly believed the wind would carry her up above the larger mass of the dragon. Only after she had to air-tumble out of the way of a claw-swipe did she remember the term "terminal velocity".
She groaned and righted herself out of a dizzying spin, then shouted in surprise when she saw the dragon flying again.
She grit her teeth and scrambled to angle herself away, only for the dragon to whip towards her faster than she could drift away.
It swept by, aiming to bite her, but she was able to deflect off its muzzle with a slash of her blade, half using the sword as a lever to push away. It scraped the scales again, splashing a bit more blood, but didn't do much damage.
The turbulence rattled her violently, and she smashed against its body, rolling down the long form uncontrollably. The scales were just as tough, but without a bone directly beneath, the tumble wasn't as bruising as the face-tumble had been.
It was a no-brainer what to do. Before the dragon could blitz her by, she stabbed out with her blade and ripped into the dragon, catching a stable grip and doing damage.
She could feel the blade catch on the ribs, so it didn't go as deeply as she would've hoped, but she cut through far more meat than on the head.
She clutched her sword with one hand and got a handhold in the wound with another. The dragon twisted and began to spiral downwards swiftly, fast enough that Hisako threatened to be torn away by the speed.
Now the ground really was approaching quickly. If she squinted against the buffeting air, she could see the shine of water snapping to and fro below, in the grassland. Her view slowly obscured as the dragon began to shift while plummeting downward.
The dragon coiled rapidly in on itself. It was going to squeeze her with its body. She could leverage herself above the body, but it changed its angle and kept shifting, closing in on her, trapping her.
She climbed and climbed, but she couldn't beat the dragon's own body movement, especially in such close quarters. Before she was unable to move, she hugged her sword's side, forcing the body to close in on the blade if it wanted to crush her. The blade was just wide enough that, if she tucked her arms in, it would be wider than her.
It would be a war of attrition–would she get crushed to death before the dragon cut itself too badly? She grit her teeth and hoped the dragon would give up first.
The burn of the rough-scaled squeeze graduated quickly to something deeply painful. Something that made her mind spin and each second drag out far longer than it should've.
Pain was not something one could become familiar with. Every new wound always felt different to her.
She hoped that it would change one day, but she also wondered what that would mean for someone's humanity.
She began to sweat when it became more straining than carrying a stack of wood. She huffed out breaths and began to feel the panic of claustrophobia. The only satisfaction she could glean was that she could feel the blood of the dragon's body bleeding as it crushed her.
From "heavy pile of wood," it became "a wall has fallen on you," and when it reached "you've been crushed by equipment," it all just blended: lethal terror and paralyzing pain.
The blood began bubbling up into her face. She gasped for breath, but both the blood and the lack of space for her lungs to expand made it useless.
Her view of the sky falling above her blurred, growing black spots like mold.
She reached out for her door in her fading moments. Maybe her door would force the dragon back some.
As her vision went completely black, she heard the windchimes ring.
She could see them: a little glass orb hand-painted by her grandfather with the thin visage of a morning glory. The paper tail hanging off the bell part featured a morning glory drawn by her unpracticed childhood hands. It hung from a beam on her grandfather's house, just outside the door on the wooden walk.
An instinctual part of her reached upward towards the chimes, and she felt something shift. She felt the deep tug on her heart, like she felt when she summoned her door, and she felt the feeling of falling occur again, but in the wrong direction.
For a moment, she felt like she was falling up, tugged upwards against the diving dragon's descent.
She heard a cracking, deep and hollow like bone, and blood filled her mouth and doused her face. She was sure she was dying.
An earsplitting roar boomed, and it left her dizzy and deaf. Then, she was falling up, freed from the grip of the dragon.
Breath was automatic.
It was the best feeling in that moment. Better than completing a job, better than cutting down Kohaku's Doorwalkers, almost better than helping save Kohaku.
Her vision faded back in.
She was falling up. The ground was moving away.
She shouted in shock, watching the dragon writhe as it fumbled to the ground, bleeding from a ladder of deep wounds.
The segments of the dragon were barely holding on–squeezing her, and her sword had been a self-destroying act. It's last act, if it didn't start flying.
She wasn't sure why she wasn't sharing in its fate, but falling up wasn't good either. If their theory on how her door's world worked was correct, in the best-case scenario, she might find herself rubber-banding back into the ground.
The heart-tug stopped, and she suddenly began to fall the right way again. It confirmed to her that the strange falling was a result of her own ability, but she didn't know how to make it happen again.
She threw her arms out in front of her trying to re-activate the power, and hoping the dragon would hit the ground fatally.
She hadn't gotten much headway in defeating it, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to lift her sword on the ground for a while. She imagined dropping her sword would be a bad thing–Amajiki would've had to re-roll his weapon earlier, so she would probably have to re-open her door to get it back, or find it, which wasn't happening during a battle.
She grit her teeth. If the dragon survived the fall or didn't even make impact, she had to fight it still. The others were busy with the tiger–she could see them slowing down below as the tiger rampaged.
The ground was coming closer and closer. She imagined Kohaku skydiving and figured they'd probably hold off on pulling their parachute, but the average person would get ready to at this point.
Her chute would be the falling-up ability. She could use it like a double jump and cancel out the fall damage, if she didn't descelerate too fast for her body to handle it.
She threw her arms and legs out, creating as much surface area as possible to catch the wind. She narrowed her eyes in focus and reached out for that feeling again.
It was just out of reach–she could touch it, but couldn't grab it.
The ground was close enough to clearly see the fight below, and the dragon, which hadn't recovered enough to fly.
The dragon tumbled below her, breaking apart sickeningly like a broken bottle falling down stairs. Instead of gore, though, the body exploded into a burst of rapidly dispersing fog.
She exhaled in relief. The loosening in her chest made the "falling up" feeling feel more achievable.
She reached out once more, yanking it mentally, and she felt the world spin. In the sudden spin, she didn't initially realize she wasn't going up, but sideways, parallel to the world below.
She was also moving shockingly fast. She struggled to right herself but found that without the usual "up" and "down", she had no idea what the correct orientation was.
She tried controlling it, but her efforts only seemed to make it worse. It was like wrestling with a phantom.
She spun once in the sky, body straining against the rapid change in movement and vision blurring, before she just clung to the power, just hoping she wouldn't smash against the earth.
She flew in a new direction, falling sideways. The tiger and the two Keepers blurred by.
She tried lessening her grip on the power, like lifting off the throttle, and she began to drift below. The grassland was still fly past and becoming something else. Grass turned to low brush, turned to small trees.
"Below" her was a thick forest of jungle-like trees.
The ground was maybe two stories away. She needed to stop falling sideways.
She dropped the power, intent on just feathering it until she touched down. Instead, the power completely slipped from her grip, and she was sent hurtling down and forwards.
She swung out with the blade, catching a massive tree branch she was flying past.
It was a mistake.
Her blade caught, and she jerked to a halt, swinging over the tree as her arms gave out with a painful wrenching in her shoulders. Her grip went next, ripping from the hilt with a burn, sending her up into the air with the momentum and leaving the blade bit into the tree. She swung up, out of control, smashing through needle-sharp and bruising-thick branches and floppy, heavy leaves, and began to fall again.
She hesitantly reached out for the power, but either in her panic or inexperience, or both, she didn't connect with it.
She yelped and braced herself.
She hit the ground and hopped like a stone on a pond, then hit the ground again, and then once more before she barrelled into a tree.
The world went dark immediately, and then she was back on that porch, staring up at the windchimes.
The cicadas buzzed loudly, and the little souzu her grandfather had slaved for months over burbled and clacked. She looked down, staring at the dark corner of the garden, where moss and lichen crept up a shadowed wall, forming an ominous, ambiguous dark shape.
She turned her head and saw her grandfather sitting next to her on the wooden walkway. His solemn, aged face moved with words she couldn't hear, but she remembered that look on his face.
He was talking about the war.
The overcast day had left his tanned skin looking flat and his dark eyes dull and dreary. His silver hair that glowed in the light was flat and dead. She would never forget this day, this hour, with him.
She could not hear his voice over the roar of the summer sounds, but the contents of his story haunted her.
This was the only time she ever heard about his mission in the jungles. He didn't talk about it much, especially not to a child like she'd been at the time, but he'd been trying to comfort her, she remembered.
He'd been lonely then, after the creature in the jungle had killed every other member of his team. He'd been lonely and scared, and he was explaining to her that it was only temporary.
The tiger was only temporary.
The winchimes jingled.
She woke up alone in the jungle, without her sword.
The jungle screamed with alien sounds. Sounds that her heart must've ripped from movies and recordings of jungles and forests she'd never known in person.
She knew the tiger was there with her, but she could not see them, and she had no chance at fighting them.