"Go back to hell, you jumped-up vengeful spirit!"
The riveting flashback chapter! What lies within the warrior's buried past?
Here comes a new chapter in the adventures of the princess who lost her nation and the warrior!
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The nation of Kogami — a lifeless wasteland as far as the eye could see.
The barren fields stretched out into the horizon around a large sand dune where the two samurai faced each other.
One of them is our protagonist, and shall be named the green samurai to distinguish him from his compatriot.
The other is a new arrival to the story. We shall name him the pale samurai.
If this were a swashbuckler's tale, then they would have already taken up battle stances. But the two were not here to have a decisive match. They were just facing each other.
"Came back from hell, did you?"
The pale samurai said, the weight of time unknowable lying between them.
"Nostalgic, isn't it?"
The green samurai seemed quite happy.
"I don't get nostalgic over such things."
The pale samurai interrupted rudely.
The green samurai closed their eyes, as if sinking into the abyss of the past.
"'This will all end as long as we defeat the evil overlords.' That's what we believed then. Naive fools that we were — that was just the beginning of the nightmare."
"The thirteen samurai banded together to defeat the Nakura Daimyo who had been destroying this nation."
"But Kogami did not revive with the Daimyo gone, and the life-force of the land continued to bleed away."
"Not only that — Kogami, now bereft of its ruler, became a paradise for those who would plunder it."
"The heroes who had defeated the wicked overlord could not protect it in the end either."
"In the end, only two escaped."
"...Hey now, cut the reminiscence out for a second. We've got things to settle, don't we?"