Eye Patch Girl (KnY)

🎶It's The Ten Duel Commandments!🎶

        Himo did this day after day, jumping down the cliff or running down the mountain and then arriving to fight Kako but she always lost, her hair grew out in a frazzled mess, the band that held her hair up had snapped long ago, it'd been two years since she'd seen both Tanjiro or Nezuko, anyone besides Kako for that matter, they were in a forest in the middle of a mountain, she knew the forest by now at least so she didn't get lost. She'd finally gotten the courage to take the kilometer long sprint to the house instead of going around and wasting precious time, avoiding the traps as always.

        For the second year, before she jumped, she heard yelling and some other noises, she didn't know where they were coming from but she always heard them for some reason, her breath was surprisingly, The Dead, necromancy and other things were her specialty, Shadows and Bones were her main. Kako was surprised due to the fact no slayer she'd ever trained, even with breaths as minor as wood, had never used death as their breaths. People tended to respect and stay away from the dead, however Himo seemed to disregard that rule quite quickly and willingly.

      For the last time, she was running through the forest again, though most of the fear you experienced the first time she ran through, in this part of the forest those fears had even briefly evaporated to her surprise. And yet she couldn't shake off the feeling of paranoia from the last time she was in the forest, her parents died that night so of course she was slightly paranoid, especially with all these traps set by Kako, specialized for killing, and all in the dark.

        Her body was full of bruises and new scars, but her eye patch never came off, neither did her resolve to win budge.

Every night Kako simply sat in the clearing on her own, waiting patiently for her to arrive, but she couldn't help but wonder why Himo never took off her eyepatch, maybe it had something to do with her parents, hopefully not her father or Kako would punch him while he'd be sitting in the afterlife. Something just made the girl rather curious to hear mentor, she wasn't even close to her father in terms of personality, quiet and watchful, though can be defiant and very loud, occasionally quick to anger and hardened ways of doing things that take a while to crack.

Himo arrived in the clearing but Kako felt something was different this time, she was calmer and more prepared, almost angrier in a way as well, like she was sick of having to do this every day over and over again. Himo unsheathed her sword with a clank as she kept sprinting at Kako, the sword clashed on her own, metal against metal, the golden and silver sword making a horrible scraping sound as metal hit metal.

        She back flipped away and continued to attack and parry Kako's attacks, whirling around in a mess of blades and attacks, Kako uses Traps, which is why she sets them up so quickly every single time.

        A tornado of colors were all people would see if they saw them in the forest, but of course this area was cleared of all humans and demons alike, no one was willing to get in the way of their fights, especially when they both were equipped with the mindset of anything goes. Himo had been watching Kako's fighting patterns, she was flexible and liked contorting her body while fighting, what the girl had picked up on was that Kako used similar fighting methods basically every time, she had a sort of style that became natural to read after a while.

        Himo found an opening, one slice down and the mask comes off, so she did, a clack rang through the forest like someone had screamed and silence so thick followed that you could drop a thumbtack a mile away and hear it, her heart jumped and her ears rang as she steadied her breathing, confused but calm, trying to seem like it was all part of her plan. Kako relaxed and stood up straight from her former stance, her black haori was dirty from all the mud and dirt, it had rained yesterday and the ground was wet.

        She took off the red and white fox mask and looked at it as if to inspect it, Himo noticed that there were scars over her face, one of her eyes was gone and replaced with a scar, she slashed past the mask and grazed the ribbon keeping the eyepatch together. Himo fet a bit of joy knowing they were eyepatch buddies together, the mask fell to the ground in half, only held together by the red rope. After what seemed like hours, she turned to Himo, "You win..." Kako smiled for once, her features were weathered but still looked young.

        On the other side of the mountain, a person with peach colored hair and had a fox mask fall off as well in half from Tanjiro cutting it, but instead, he'd cut a boulder in half that'd been wrapped by a thick rope about the size of a fist.

        But little did he know, the person named Sabito, and a little girl with a flowered Kimono named Makomo were both from the dead.

Going inside it felt like new fields were ahead, Himo was bouncing as she sat happily looking like a little kid, happy to have finally completed the last step. "Ms.Kako, may I ask, how did you lose your eye? And why do you wear a fox mask?" Himo asked finally and very very politely in case it was a touchy subject, she could tell Kako had frozen in the kitchen from the living room as Himo was tying up her hair and cutting it so it was neater and combing it out of it's frazzled mess from before, her hair was dirty from a few weeks of neglect due to training but soon it returned back to it's former self, soft and untangled.

        "Your father...do you know why he left the Slayer Corps?" Kako asked with her back turned, wording every part of her sentence carefully and delicately. Himo began wondering if maybe it was a sensitive topic and she never should've brought it up. "Yeah....from what he always used to tell me, he was injured and couldn't heal the injury in time, he couldn't fight as well afterwards so they let him leave to save his life in a way." She tilted her head questioningly, this question had been asked by her mother once and her father was had answered rather sharply. It was one of the few times Himo had ever heard her father angry both slightly at her mother just since he'd been in a bad mood and at the Corps for making him leave. Though rude and scathing with Himo, (f/n) was never very unkind to her mother.

        "Yes, but he also lost many friends, during his last fight, he thought I had died but I was barely alive. I got to a healer but lost an eye from that fight, the demon did die but not before slaughtering maybe twenty people." Kako sighed, watching the girl go into her bedroom then come back out with the book she had since Day 1 of being here. "For Final Selection...please come back alive, rumor has it that there's a demon who has killed over fifty people. It's so dangerous and I genuinely appreciate your presence, so please, come back alive." A hint of pleading but also warning lingering in her tone. It seemed Kako wanted her students, those survived at least, to survive the seven days.

        "I will." Himo said, Kako detected that she was serious, her students didn't come back either, only two had come back from all her students, which was thirty, Urokodaki was a minor friend of hers, she heard even after all this time that he'd only had a student or two come back, he had another that seemed different from her latest news.

        "What about your eye Himo?" Kako asked the girl, not expecting her to open up, but surprisingly, "I almost died by a demon. My dad killed it before it killed me but I got stabbed in the eye before that happened, the weird thing is that it hesitated and yelled at me, something about half." She sighed miserably.

"So we have something in common."