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“Everything will be fiiiine, Sooga! Just follow my lead, and it’ll all turn out alright. I got us this far, didn’t I?”
The man was correct. Sooga had never been let down before. He trusted Kohga with all that he was, all that he had to give. He had since day one, and he would until the end of their days together.
“As you wish.” he had said.
Master Kohga’s laugh had been infectious. A mad cackle that rattled his entire frame with the force of it, loud, joyful, and unrestrained. He had leaned close, clacking their masks together. Then again, but that time pressing his mask to Sooga’s uncovered lips.
“Buuuut!” he had grinned, evident in his body language alone, fingers waggling. “He pulls another stunt like that? Aim for the forehead. A giant target like that, there’s no way you’d miss!”
Sooga had smiled back just a little, truly pleased with an order for once. “As you wish.”
Master Kohga had cackled again, slapping his knee like Sooga had said the funniest thing in the world. He had laughed so hard, he’d slumped, breathless, and had fallen right off the bed.
“Master Kohga!”
The attack tore Sooga right from the fond memories, now colored by the frustration and horror of having the knowledge, but inability to just turn back time to fix the mistakes made.
Sooga’s master stumbled back, the Hollow’s sword sprouting from his chest like a diseased weed. He glanced down at it, head slowly twisting to try and look at the other end piercing clear through to his back. The realization hadn’t dawned on him yet, the shock still so prevalent it seemed to be keeping him alive.
Then Master Kohga let out a disgusted sound, grabbing the handle of the Malice formed blade. “Really? Right through the chest? I work hard to keep perfection like this up and running, you know!”
Sooga could hardly believe it. Neither could the wretched seer and his wretched Hollows.
Kohga pulled the sword from his chest, the slick scrape of false metal on bone grating. Fully free, he pitched the sword back like a boomerang. Sooga watched the wound knit itself back together from behind, the flesh sealing over without even so much as a tear in the fabric of his uniform or a hint of blood. That should’ve killed him. It did not.
Astor took half a step back, the orb and Hollows going with him. “How did you—?”
Kohga waggled a finger, his wide grin evident solely through the sweep of his hands and the playfully malicious sway in his step. “Watch closely, prophecy man!” he sing-songed.
His back to Sooga and the remaining members of the squad, he reached up, and Sooga nearly gasped. Kohga just pushed his mask up a little, not nearly enough to show his face, but enough to catch a glimpse of.... something.
Astor’s eyes went wide, mouth agape and stumbling back. He looked sick, horrified, and flabbergasted all at once.
“What in Lord Ganon’s name are you!?”
Master Kohga resettled the mask over his face, hands waving and fluttering in practiced motions that his Right Hand recognized. “The one and only! Stupendous Chief of the Yiga Clan, Master Kohga!”
He snapped his fingers. Sooga lunged. In an instant, they had traded places, smoke obscuring the switch for the few precious moments they needed.
A single slash with both blades split the Hylian Hollow in half, falling to pool on the ground. The most troublesome Hollow dealt with, it was too easy to fend off the seer and the remaining Hollows. Far, far too easy.
They fled with the few remaining members of the team, Sooga scooping up the wounded footsoldier on the way. It barely slowed him down, the teen tucked under his arm like a sack of bananas.
Monsters were suspiciously absent from their path. Even as they trudged through undergrowth, hacking at overgrown foliage, hiding from the still red skies, there was only silence. Not the chirp of a bird, the chittering of a squirrel, or even the faint rustle of another small animal in the far off bushes. Sooga would’ve guessed that they’d scared off any wildlife the second they’d gotten to the woods, with how loud they were being. The goal was simply to get away as fast as possible, as soon as possible.
Master Kohga was barely an arm’s length away, just a ways in front of him, grumbling at having to wade through so many ferns and prickly bushes. He wondered what sort of illusion Kohga had conjured up that had horrified the seer so badly.
“Master Kohga.” he began.
Kohga twisted his head around, cocking sideways like a curious owl. “Yeah?”
Sooga paused for a moment, ducking under a tree branch that his master could just walk under without bending at all. “What did you show the seer?”
Kohga hummed, falling back to walk beside him for a moment. “Nothing you need to worry about, big guy. Just needed something to shock him for a second.”
“Ah.” he nodded. Sooga took a moment to hack away at a particularly large prickly plant that was very annoying to deal with, kicking the worst of the thorny vines away to clear the path.
Master Kohga continued on now that the trail was clear, and Sooga couldn’t help but eye the space between his shoulder blades. The spot that the Hollow’s blade had pierced straight through, and had sealed itself up. If there really was a tear anywhere in his uniform, Sooga couldn’t detect it.
He frowned, just the barest hint of the corners of his mouth turning down. He opened his mouth to ask his second and final question.
The Guardian spear struck like a bolt of lightning, scraping by and just barely missing him where he jerked his head. A hair floated away, lost to the wind. Blue light filled his vision on the opposite side, sprouting from his blind spot like a tree from the earth.
He parried the half unseen blow, the sword bouncing off. He struck, his own blade sending a shower of sparks against the blue energy of Thunderblight’s shield.
It was pure chaos from there. Every strike of his swords was met and parried, the blight whizzing around with all the speed of the lightning it was designed specifically to fight. He spun, putting all his weight into the blow.
Blocked. Tremors ran the length of his arms, the energy shield shattering with a sound like breaking glass. A much smaller blademaster ducked under, her windcleaver catching the blight under one of the many metal plates that ran the length of its shiny Malice-fueled form.
It disintegrated for now, he turned his attention on the next one. The blights circled like vultures, now only three in number. Wounded Yiga fell back closer to the center, enclosed in the protective circle. Master Kohga was somewhere a few spots down in the circle, he could tell by the occasional boulder flung into the skies, or the shattering of glass and blue geometric particles with every broken shield.
Fireblight was next to go down, a combination of beating it’s face in with summoned balls of spiked iron and a couple of soldiers just whaling on it when it finally hit the ground turning it to glowing particles of corrupted tech.
It left two, and two blights were borderline easy compared to four at once. Sooga had hope they’d all make it out alive.
Master Kohga was in his blind spot. He didn’t catch the initial strike.
“I swear in the name of me, if these moldy sacks of overripe bananas come back AGAIN I’m gonna blast a new hole right in their—!”
A loud, solid thwack cut him off. The six pronged mask went sailing across the air, popping out of Sooga’s blind spot and into his vision like a daisy from the snow. The world slowed to a crawl.
The mask bounced once, twice, thrice, before coming to rest in the dirt. He had to twist his head, turning precious seconds too late. Master Kohga crumpled like a broken doll, hitting the ground face first with a dull thud. He didn’t move. Not even a pained groan left him to let those closest to him know he was fine as usual.
Kohga had survived the Hylian Champion. He had survived battles with Urbosa time and time again. He’d even survived taking a Malice sword to the chest without even breaking a sweat.
A single stray hit was all it took to make him fold like any other common traveler.
Sooga saw red.
When Sooga next blinked back to awareness, everything ached. His arms, legs, fingers, all of it. Every muscle burned like fire, ghosts of chilled air skimming over small wounds he didn’t remember sustaining. His own blood ran down a particularly long gash in his chest, soaking the already red fabric.
He was only half stood, twin blades at the ready, one stabbed clean through what had once been a blight’s face. He sucked in air, each breath colder than ice piercing his heaving lungs. Lifting his head, he caught a glimpse of the devastation.
Trees torn up, gashes in the earth, foliage and plants ripped out at the roots. He saw cyclones still spinning themselves out in his spotty vision, way far off in the distance. The woods were half demolished it seemed.
The energy left as quickly as it possessed him, stumbling to his knees. A small scout, one who couldn’t possibly hope to hold Sooga’s weight, rushed to help him. Ducking under Sooga’s arm and standing as tall as they could to minimize the ridiculous height difference, they babbled in his ear. He didn’t catch all the words, the fog to thick in his mind, but short phrases poked through.
Enough to know the terrible news.
A second Yiga, the only other blademaster even close to his height, stepped forward to help him stand. It was all the help he needed or wanted, waving them off when he was on his feet. The effort to stand and stay that way was less than the effort it took to actually get up.
He approached slowly, something in his knee feeling all sorts of out of place, limping to the gathered crowd. His blades left behind where he’d stabbed them into the ground.
They parted like lizards scattering from under a rock, letting him through. Master Kohga laid in the dirt still, facedown. Up close, Sooga could see where something had struck him in the back of the head. There was only a smudge of dirt, and a dent in the skull. No blood.
Had Sooga ever seen Master Kohga bleed before? He suddenly wasn’t sure. Master Kohga was simply that skilled, he’d never truly taken a hit before that would cause him any blood loss.
He tilted his head, blinking slow. Something nagged deep in his mind, a minor detail that hadn’t been important at the time. He brushed it off, it wasn’t important now either.
He glanced around. Someone had picked up the mask, and she was simply staring at it. Holding it delicately in her hands and gazing at it as though it was genuinely difficult to look away. He cleared his throat, and the Yiga twitched her blank gaze up.
After a moment, she shuffled over and held out the mask to him. The second it changed hands, she seemed to come to her senses, shuffling half a step back and humming in confusion.
The mask stared back up at Sooga innocently. The three sets of prongs, lightly smudged with dirt, seemed almost to droop. He carefully rubbed away a smear with his thumb, and was startled to find that the mask was.... warm. Not the inside where it would be against his face, but the outside. The inverted weeping eye the world saw as Master Kohga’s face was warm.
Wasn’t the eye symbol.... open? It wasn’t always closed, was it? Sooga wondered, running a finger over the red design. He genuinely couldn’t remember. Did it matter?
The most absurd thought occurred to him, and he nearly recoiled. There was simply no manner in which it could be true, and yet. Somewhere, he had the notion that Master Kohga would be pleased if he wore the mask.
A chorus of shrieks broke him from his staring contest with the mask, and he lowered it (when had he brought it so close to his own face?) only to nearly throw up in his own mouth.
Someone, perhaps with the idea to prepare to carry the body of their fallen Master with them the rest of the way, had turned it over. Master Kohga’s face had melted away, the skull underneath exposed. Skin stretched and snapped like threads, a gooey mess of flesh and deflated eyes sloughing off onto the ground with a wet slap.
Quickly, Sooga flipped the mask over, his good eye wide. Bits and pieces of flesh remained on the interior of the mask, caked on the surface and taking an unfamiliar texture. Fighting to keep his fingers steady, he picked the gunk off. It came away easy, easier than scraping burnt food from a cooking pot.
There was one spot, near where an eye would’ve been located, that just wouldn’t come off. He brought the mask closer to pick at it.
It retreated into the mask.
Sooga just blinked. He pushed his own mask up, rubbing at his good eye to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, and looked again.
His hand moved of its own accord. The mask clicked onto his face, his own mask flicking off and falling.
Sooga buckled like a Guardian without its power source, going down like a castle wall faced with siege weaponry. A particularly small Yiga soldier leaped out of the way as Sooga crashed, sprawled out on the ground.
Within the same instant, Master Kohga’s body steamed. There was a sound like a bubble popping in a tar pit, and the gathered crowd scattered as the body just fell apart. Muscles ceased holding bones together, the entire spine and ribcage caving in. From there it was like dominoes falling.
Bones dissolved, flesh liquified, and everything meshed and molded together until the Master’s body was a boiling puddle of oozing blood and bile that slowly seeped across the grass.
For a long moment, all was silent. There was not a sound, not even a breeze dared to whistle through the destroyed trees. The Yiga all held their breath, the younger members among them clinging to each other and trembling in fright.
A crack rent the still air.
Sooga’s body convulsed, throwing itself. His limbs contorted, twisting, snapping and squelching as flesh and bone tore apart. Muscles ripped themselves free, the fabric of his uniform bulging like a pustule ready to pop.
Tendons and meat snapped, flapping and shifting and reknitting into shapes anew. Skin peeled and rewrapped, stitching back together as though it has never been any different at all. Back arched, every vertebrae in Sooga’s spine breaking with rapid fire pops and cracks, snapping back into place with the force of a whip.
Minutes passed to a symphony of splitting flesh and shattering bones. There was a final, wet shlop as organs wiggled themselves back into place, and the twitching stopped. The body laid still in the grass. Not even the wind dared to breeze by.
It was not Sooga who got back up.
Master Kohga hauled himself to his feet, groaning, knees creaking. He popped a shoulder back into place, wincing and stretching. For but a moment, the eye on his mask almost fluttered, heavy with exhaustion, then it was as wide open and still as the day it had been painted.
“Ouch. I did not appreciate that!” he said, rolling his neck. One final, sickening crack echoed in the quiet. “Alrighty! Back to business! So, what’d I miss?”
The silence, profound and deafening, remained unbroken. Then one of the blademasters, windcleaver abandoned on the ground, hands over where his mouth would’ve been, bent over. He held up a finger, then spun on his heel. He made it halfway into the turn before bile forced its way up his throat, spewing into the grass.
Master Kohga’s head tilted, a bit in the manner a confused owl would. He glanced around, hands on his hips, twisting just enough to look behind him. “Alriiiight. Ignoring whatever just happened, let’s get on out of here while we still can. Where’s my best lackey?”
Collectively, the gathered Yiga exchanged glances. Several were dry heaving, gagging, not able to look at the melted puddle of blood and gore just a few feet away on the ground. One brave scout waved her hands silently, unable to formulate words beyond a strangled sounding, “Eeehhh??”
“I’m serious, where in the name of me is Sooga? He’s supposed to be protecting me here!” he huffed, tapping his foot.
The youngest footsoldier, a boy barely seventeen and who would’ve never been on the battlefield if the circumstances hadn’t changed so suddenly, raised a trembling hand. He pointed, a shaking hand over his mask.
Kohga followed the point, the poof of hair that had begun to glow a faint pink cutting to his natural hair color instantly. The pool of still steaming viscera hadn’t gone away, it had only continued to slowly ooze across the grass. The last remainder of his original body. Of whom everyone had thought had been Master Kohga.
His head whipped around with a near audible crack, searching. His gaze locked on the dual windcleavers and the mask both laying innocently in the tall grass. Lifting his hands, he turned them over. Waggling his fingers, twisting his wrists, looking for something only he could see in the dying sunlight.
He stopped. Hands hovering, he just looked between them and the items left behind. He took half a step back.
“He didn’t— Sooga— he’d just late again! Right?”
No one moved. The blademaster was still leaned over, hands on his knees, retching.
Kohga gripped the sides of his mask, fingers digging into the wood. A couple slipped under, feeling at the face underneath.
And there it was. The long, jagged, decades old scar that near perfectly matched the crack in the mask abandoned on the ground. The missing eye. The slender tendril dug into the empty eyesocket and straight through to the soft and squishy grey matter, curled around inside the skull, the anchor that held him in place.
Oh.
Oh.
The wood of the mask creaked, pain spiking through him. He let go, arms hanging limp at his sides. How horribly funny it seemed now, that his face was a weeping eye, and between the two of them, Kohga now had two functional eyes. He could’ve cried.
“Alright. Yeah. Alright.” he breathed. The action was easy, familiar, though it was not his breath to take. Not his lungs to use, not his heart to beat.
He straightened. In an instant, both the blades and mask vanished from their spot in the grass. They reappeared in his hands, smoke and paper talismans fluttering in the wake of the teleportation.
“Come on, boys. We’re getting as far away from here as possible.”
The rain pattered down, the heavens rent by flashes of lightning, the somber quiet shattered by booming thunder.
Master Kohga sat on a rock at the mouth of the cave, legs crossed, chin in hand. His chest, stolen heart thudding silently within, ached. He wasn’t looking out over the wet grassy hills, wasn’t watching the lightning flash, wasn’t hearing the thunder roar.
His thumb rubbed away a green stain on the usually pristine white paint of Sooga’s mask, the inverted eye that matched his own staring blankly back at him. He’d always taken such good care of his mask, even when confined to the medical wing and recovering from the incident that cost him his eye. Kohga had almost been jealous of the care shown to a mask that held no such perfection like himself.
He sighed, gently setting the mask aside. He arranged it carefully, resting against the dual blades on the rock beside him, facing out to watch the rain with him.
Kohga poked at a loose pebble listlessly, much more careful in how he moved and treated his fleshy form now. It was late, he should’ve been sleeping. But his body—
Sooga’s body. You stole it. You stole his body. You stole it, you stole it, you STOLE—
—wasn’t quite yet fully adjusted to his usual routine. He’d be up for a while longer yet, and then up at the asscrack of dawn the same way his best lackey had been. He held back his sigh. He was sure he was the only one still awake. The entirety of the Yiga Clan rested deeper within the cave. The battle ready were closer to the front, and those who couldn’t fight for whatever reason to the back.
“Sorry, big guy.” he said. “Wouldn’t have done that if I’d known. Just kind of a.... just sorta instinct. Can’t really control that. I’m not old enough to be really aware when I’m not, y’know. Being worn. Not like.... not like the other guy.”
Sooga wouldn’t answer. He couldn’t.
Kohga couldn’t muster up the strength to even let out the tiniest huff of laughter. “Real piece of work, the other guy. You wouldn’t wanna meet ‘em anyway. They’d definitely turn you into your kid self or something for fun. Or, ya know, just send the moon crashing down on your head just to prove they could.”
“Probably a good thing there’s only legends about that guy left.” he hummed. “I’m not nearly old enough to have a legend like that about me. Maybe another ten thousand years and I’ll be that legendary.”
Sooga still couldn’t answer. He never would. Kohga shifted his fingers, pushing them up under the mask just enough to trace the scar. The space under the one good eye left was damp. Whether it was blood or tears, Kohga would never know.
His chest tightened, stolen breath caught in his throat. The words scraped themselves from stolen vocal cords.
Not his lungs to use. Not his breath to take. Not his heart to beat.
“I’m sorry, Sooga. I’m sorry.”