Authoress' notes: Bankotsu I do not own. That I do not. :)

Sorry it took so long to come up with the next chapter. I have NOT forgotten this story, it just takes me soooooo long to decide what to do with it!

Just wanted to thank you for all your kind reviews and PMs! They're mostly what keeps me writing!

Patience of a Sinner

by artisanrox

Chapter 2.

The humid, warm afternoon air had long ago given way to darkening twilight as Bankotsu continued to escort his prisoner through the dense forest.

Using what was remaining of the quickly fading light and his memory of the occasional landmark as a guide, he made his way though the heavy underbrush, never releasing his slow, clumsy captive for a moment. The arm that held Akiko securely around her naked waist never budged, and though the spell cast upon him by the castle lord made it extremely uncomfortable at first to have any contact with anything, by now it became evident that the effects of the spell were decreasing; where it was sheer agony to touch anything immediately after getting charmed, now it was toned down toward the "blazingly uncomfortable" end of the scale.

However, an awful fatigue was starting to replace the pain, and to prevent the embarassment of a total collapse, the young mercenary had to occasionally stop himself from pressing so quickly forward. He decided that the only way he was fighting anything else now was if it were for top dollar.

After all...I'm still only...human, he thought. I'll never have true demonic power...and spiritual powers, like that half-demon's woman, or that beautiful miko, are sealed off from me. He frowned in disgust at himself.

Spiritual powers. Like that dried-up Hakushin. He had everything going for him...and we ended up working for the same end. Such a waste of good karma.

Bankotsu ground his teeth, seething. Holy men should leave unholy jobs to the unholy.

Because unlike that monk...I'm unholy.

I'm more than that.

I'm...insalvageable.

After a brief silence, he turned his attention again to the demoness. With the decreasing light, Bankotsu could tell that the increasingly cool temperature was starting to get uncomfortable for Akiko, and he looked down once in a while at her to notice her fair complexion becoming even fairer with the impending darkness.

Akiko tried her best to keep pace with Bankotsu. His athletic, graceful gait was clearly much too hurried for her. He didn't care.

Bankotsu effortlessly wound his way through the unstable ground, where Akiko came close to falling with almost every step.

Laboring in a desperate effort to keep his temper from going sour, she made her best attempt to prevent her clumsiness from annoying him, but only succeeded in making herself more nervous as she was callously dragged behind her captor. To add insult to injury, the dew that settled on the ground and the shrubbery she haphazardly brushed against here and there were adding up to a cold blanket of wetness, causing her to get increasingly chilled. She found that the stiffening clamminess impeded her ability to move almost as much as the many-sizes-too-large geta she had on her feet.

Bankotsu became increasingly annoyed with her disinterest in light conversation. "You know," began Bankotsu, facing away from his captive so he could smirk freely, "I could go for a good cold drink right about now. Maybe even a nice short dip in a cool stream." He gritted his teeth. "It might help this spell to wear off. Maybe there's some snow far off in the mountains I can take us to. Of course, it'd be pretty hard to keep it cold enough to-"

"Stop talking about cold things! Please!" interrupted Akiko.

Bankotsu could feel her body shivering under his arm, which, along with the rest of him, was still warm from the rush created by the battle with the castle lord and his lackeys. "Why?" he asked with a wickedly knowledgeable tone.

Akiko grunted, and the two of them came to a clumsy halt, a dense tree canopy above them.

Bankotsu leaned in closer, giving his captive an awfully guilty, "whatever-for?" kind of look.

"So...you're cold, huh?" he asked rather stupidly.

Akiko looked away, scanning the dead leaves on the ground.

"I can keep you warm if y-"

Akiko's head snapped back toward him, a furious look on her face. She wasn't prepared at all to play mind games with her captor. "NO!"

Bankotsu stopped in his tracks to gaze at her with a sly grin. "So, you'd rather be naked and freezing than warm. Fine, then."

Bankotsu's question to her was much more difficult than she anticipated. "Well...um...ah..." she considered her answer for a brief moment. Soon enough, her face fell to absolute torment, and she padded uncomfortably from foot to foot, each of Bankotsu's heavy geta clomping on the ground in turn. She was on the verge of tears for a definite answer.

The young mercenary raised an eyebrow, and tapped a foot impatiently as she vacillated.

"Um...uh-" she began to stammer, as she turned her head this way and that way, trying to consider the consequences of answering either way.

"I'm being unusually patient with you. I usually don't give prisoners the luxury of a decision of their own." He drank her in from head to toe, as he had more than obviously done the entire way from the castle. Haven't had a woman pour me wine in a long while. Maybe I'll have her give me a back massage, too.

She sniffed in some tears. "Ah...no...um...y...YES!" She stated triumphantly, finally deciding on an answer. "Yes, I would!"

Bankotsu was unimpressed with her display of independence. "Oh, OK." he said blandly, then urged her forward again along with him. "Let's move it, then. I don't want to hear your damned whining. You will keep up with me, without any complaints about how cold you are. I'm exhausted by this damned spell and I-"

Akiko was terrified by his lack of a reaction, and by this time, almost too uncomfortably cold to step forward. "W...wait!"

"Hn?" He condescended to stop once again for her.

"Your jacket. Let me...have your jacket...please...and I promise I'll keep pace!" Her head dropped to her chest, and more tears streamed from her eyes. "...please..." She had tried to continue to be just as strong in her expression, but failed miserably. Her words eventually because the desperate pleading of a hopeless captive.

Ah, how annoying. She figured it out. Oh, well, thought Bankotsu, rolling his eyes. With a wry frown on his face, he set his weapon down, and removed the crossbow which hung inconveniently around Akiko. He took his jacket off with a pained "humf", and threw it around his prisoner's shoulders. Seeing that it was many times too big for her, he secured it there by tying the sleeves together. To his disappointment, her eyes never looked up to meet his own.

Suddenly, the warrior's sense of danger was soon awakened after perceiving a sinister darkness above the trees. After studying the canopy above them carefully for a moment, he no sooner finished securing the jacket sleeves around the demoness when he snapped a hand firmly over her mouth, and with an amazing amount of grace, placed his weapon silently on the ground, then used the same arm to pull her closely into him.

"Down to the ground with me, woman!" he quietly ordered.

Akiko panicked, and uselessly struggled while Bankotsu dragged her toward some shrubbery, and pulled her unceremoniously to the ground with him.

The struggle wasn't even close to fair, but with Akiko's every motion under Bankotsu, the agony of the Bridle spell was mounting yet again. He had to stifle a cry. "You need to keep quiet, or else you'll be choosing to get yourself killed!" he whispered menacingly into her ear, pulling her closer underneath him on the mossy, damp ground, the two of them covered by dense shrubbery.

The two big guys nodded, and soon, they were racing out towards the back of the castle. Raidonichi threw a giant bucket in each of their meaty hands.

Raidonichi wiped his damp brow, moving aside the short fringe of hair that lightly covered it. He needed to cough, and after noticing his earthy brown jacket getting covered in dark sooty ash, protected his mouth with a forearm before pressing further through the narrow hallway toward the blazing kitchen area. He figured the two big guys would be better suited to carry the heavy buckets of water, and would have the majority of the blaze out in time before the entire surrounding forest was set ablaze. He quickened his pace through the hallway as the smoke thickened.

On the way to help put out the castle fire, he noticed a flurry of activity to his right, in a scroll-lined room. A figure emerged out of the smoke, and soon a strong hand clapped Raidonichi warmly on the shoulder.

"Raidonichi! You're a hero! A great man among men!" said a tall, sturdy middle aged man cradling a mass of scrolls in his left arm. "We doubted you the whole time when you kept telling us we should overthrow the damned greedy lord. But we're glad you forgave us and have lead us to recover what we all lost!"

Raidonichi grinned, maybe just a bit wryly, in return. When the reports of a murderous demonic entity, strong enough to effortlessly kill the lord's strongest guards, spread rapidly through the surrounding peasants, he had more than enough angry villagers at his door begging him to lead them to the lord.

"Now we have access to the lord's private library! I can't imagine the wealth of information he has kept from us. Why, we-"

The tall scholar was interrupted by another man stepping out of the smoke-filled room. Handsome and elegantly frail, the younger man made sure to get his friend's attention, though his arms were twice as full of scrolls. "We must hurry and save more scrolls! They'll get ruined by the smoke!"

"I'm just telling Raidonichi how greatful we are for having him help us organize our search!"

The younger man's head snapped toward Raidonichi for second. "Thank you, sir," he said formally. Turning back toward the older man, he gestured toward the main entrance of the castle. "Now if you'll try to carry more. I fear that some scrolls have been ruined in the shuffle already," he said, as he nodded toward one badly blackened scroll in his arms, "particularily the ones about the bird-demon kept by the lord."

"The mandarin demon?" asked the older man, his face fallen. "That's too bad. Those scrolls are rare, at least here in the East."

The younger man raised his eyebrows impatiently. "Yes, they are, and there will be none left to read if we don't hurry!"

The older man turned, and was about to enter the smoke-filled library again, when Raidonichi turned him around by an elbow. "Wait, you know something about the monster the lord kept?"

"Why, yes!" cheerily answer the older man, though now obviously worried about taking too much time away from saving the documents behind him. "They do posess some rather daunting magic, but only when flight doesn't work and they are beyond desperate...but their abilities are nothing that I would ever imagine a daimyo needing. In the relative scale of demons to be feared, they're quite low. In fact, rather harmless, they are. Peaceful, intelligent and private. More interested in pairing off with each other than causing trouble, even in this awful time of war. Some even can manage fairly well living aside of humans, as they seem to have similar life spans and physical forms to us. They're more common in the West, as they seemed to first appear in China." He laughed merrily, then leaned toward Raidonichi. "Hence the name."

A loud call was heard in the room, and the scholar recognized his name. "Yes, yes, I'm coming right away!" he called in.

"NOW!" was the now clearly-understood order from the smoky room, heard even above the increading chatter of the villagers crowding around Raidonichi.

The scholar rolled his eyes. Leaning in toward Raidonichi again, his thick grey brow lowered in puzzlement as he confided his information. "Though why a daimyo would want to use an essentially harmless demon is completely beyond us, and is what we are trying to research." He smiled. "We're just glad you gave us the nerve to come here and look for what we needed. Now you take care of precious Kanaye and the little one on the way, and be careful!"

Raidonichi's face was contorted with the reception of the strange information given him by the scholar, but when the older man turned and hurried into the library, his expression brightened, and he called out a friendly good-bye to the scholars.

Turning around again, Raidonichi was pleasantly surprised as the villagers that now surrounded him were more than happy to show their appreciation for the efforts of their makeshift leader. Many, like the scholar, apologized profusely at not taking action against their suppression sooner, some parting quickly to collect their booty of castle treasure.

One large man, one of the two men whom Raidonichi had charged with the task of putting out the fire in the kitchen area, stepped through the threshold. "News! I bear some important news!"

The villagers around Raidonichi collectively turned their heads toward the large firefighter. They fell silent, and all seemed to wait with bated breath for a report. One villager coughed loudly, breaking the tense silence for a moment.

The large man rised his hands in victory. "The lord is dead!" he proclaimed. "His head has been taken off his neck! It seems a mercenary was sent against him, and as a result, he is dead!"

The villagers cheered, though whispers of the word "demon" still were heard, as some of the people insisted that only an entity with demonic powers could take down the castle so frighteningly quickly.

Raidonichi received further congratulations and apologies from the men that surrounded him. "We were fools for not doing this sooner!" one said.

"This killer! Were it a human, he can be Shogun!"

"He can be Emperor!" called out an old man, with a bright yellow shawl around his shoulders.

"He can have my beautiful daughter in marriage!"

A young man waved a small purse in the air, and the contents inside tinkled like newly made gold coins. "He can have all the tax money I paid to the daimyo after all this time!"

The old man with the yellow shawl, who was standing directly behind him, gave the young man a sound slap on the back of the head. "Idiot!" he reprimanded. "Taking our money was the very thing that was killing us!"

An old woman spoke up. "Right! That's one reason why we wanted him dead to begin with!"

The young man's face turned bright red. "...oh...," he sighed, still rubbing the back of his head.

Raidonichi turned toward a short man carrying a long staff of wood.

"Yeah!" agreed the short man, and raised his staff in the air. "It was getting to the point where you couldn't even sell a horse without permission! I couldn't even feed my family for waiting for the paperwork to go through!"

"If we only knew who helped us!" said the old man with the yellow shawl, clapping his hands together and raising them up in thankfulness.

If they only knew who "helped" them, sarcastically thought Raidonichi to himself. Breaking out of thought, he charged a few more men to inspect the castle for any more uncontrolled fire.