Sureiyazu

Episode 21: Kasai's Forge

The sun was just peeking over the horizon at the Sureiyazu castle, and the team was coming home after slaying a particularly messy demon who had been lurking in a store cellar, and thought it would be funny to throw all the store's food at the Sureiyazu.

Kasai led the team of demonslayers back into the castle. Her grinning face was covered in all different kinds of food, bits stuck in her hair and juices splattered all over her armor and her red dress.

Akuma, following behind Kasai, was just as messy, but not nearly as happy. She sighed as she thought of how long it would take to clean her hair, which was caked with crumbs from different pastries and drenched in watermelon juice.

Yuri followed, bouncing up and down happily, though her leather armor resembled a toddler's shirt right after a meal. She bounded up to her room cheerfully, pieces of food littering the floor as she went.

Aya, as dirty as any other member of the team, looked the unhappiest of all. She headed straight for the bathroom to wash off.

"How about that demon, hey Akuma?" Kasai asked, still grinning.

"Yeah - no," Akuma said. "Having food thrown at me by a crazy demon isn't my idea of fun."

"Has Aya been rubbing off on you?" Kasai replied jokingly. "Watch out or you'll forget how to have fun entirely." She walked off into a room Akuma had never seen before, and Akuma, who considered Kasai's last comment as an insult, followed.

Akuma was about to defend that neither she nor Aya had forgotten how to have fun (though part of her doubted Aya knew had known to have fun in the first place) but her voice seemed to stop working as she entered the room Kasai had led her into.

The room was long, almost like a hallway, with lots of windows letting in the light of the rising sun outside. Along the walls were rows and rows of armor stands, most empty, but the few that held armor were so varied and impressive by themselves that they made up for the emptiness. Each of the armors seemed to have its own personality - ranging from the honorable samurai warrior's armor to the simply, almost crudely designed single chest plate with no decoration whatsoever.

Akuma's defensiveness dissolved away as if she had left it in the other room. "What is this place?"

"You like it?" Kasai said proudly. "Some of these are heirlooms and stuff like that from when this castle belonged to its original family, but I've been teaching myself a thing or two about forging, and so most of the uglier-looking ones are mine." She gestured to the simple chest plate to prove the point. "But I like forging, and I get a little better every time. It makes me feel like I can actually do something, you know?"

"Wow." Still standing in the doorway, it was all the blue haired teenager could manage to say. She had never found armors interesting, but the way that Kasai talked about them it made forging seem more like an art rather than a task. On top of that, she had never thought of Kasai as someone who could create something, not just destroy things.

"You really don't talk much, do you?" Kasai took off the armor she had been wearing - the one she always wore, with the flames - and put it on a nearby armor stand.

"No, I guess it's a habit from when I had Hikari's body," Akuma explained, a feeling a pang of sadness when she said the name. She remembered suddenly that she hadn't seen her since the day she had discovered she could see spirits . . .

"So, you kind of . . . already died, didn't you?" Kasai asked after a hesitant pause.

"Yeah, kind of," Akuma said somewhat uncomfortably. Despite the fact that her whole team already knew what had happened to her, she still didn't like to talk about it.