Upon a battlefield where only birds were permitted to eat from the corpses of the dead, a man crouched between the bodies. Senjaemon wrapped his fingers around the handle of a sword that had been left between the ribs of a man in grey armor. Without a word of consolement to the slaughtered man, Senjaemon tore the blade from his chest and tied a string around it. He crawled on, hauling behind him a bundle of blades and helmets. He next pressed his hand against the cold fingers of a slain general, resolutely holding his weapon even in death. Senjaemon could not pull the sword from his grip. At a loss, he grabbed at the fishing knife he had in his waistband and, one by one, cut off the fingers which bled black and swollen. 

Then he heard the pattering of footsteps on metal. Senjaemon looked up to a fox standing atop the overlapped bodies of two men. It stared at him with its sharp eyes. Its fur was red and smooth, flowing evenly through its body until reaching the white tip of its illustrious tail. The pelt would be good money, Senjaemon thought, and so he held his knife at the ready. 

“You look to be quite the fox yourself.” 

Senjaemon watched the beast move its mouth as the words came to his ears. 

The knife clattered as his grip on it wavered. The waistband to which his bounty of loot was tied became loose and fell off. His eyes grew further apart as his nose extended beyond his mouth and every tooth therein ruptured and departed as sharper replacements cut through the gums. It was not painful as he spat out the blood onto the face of the dead general. Each of Senjaemon’s limbs were now paws and his bald head was covered in brown fur. The top of his head felt light and he wiggled his ears in curiosity. He had been turned into a fox. 

“Please!” Senjaemon pleaded. “Change me back to a man!” 

“You have not seen it worth your time to live as a Man. You are more of a fox than a man. So you shall live as one like I do. Grow fat and comfortable in your uncivilized life. If you had truly wanted to be a man, you would not crawl and steal from the dead what is theirs by the quality of their death.” 

“Please! I will change my ways and go to a sword school! I will learn to live as a Man if only you would find mercy upon me! I do not want to live as I do, but I must! How else can a peasant survive this era of war we live in?” The fox that was once Senjaemon put his nose to the ground and folded his ears in reverence. 

The fox considered his words as it gazed into the murk of the corpses' eyes upon which it stood. After a moment it returned its look to Senjaemon and nodded. All at once the nose retracted into his face, his sharp teeth fell from his mouth and were replaced with ones that were flat and white. The waistband lay on the ground. Senjaemon bowed deeply to the fox.

It looked down at him with an imperial Will. 

“Leave.”

The man bowed to the beast. He pressed his forehead into the bloody earth and came back up covered in red. A grin tore across his sullied face as he grabbed his knife from the ground by his waistband. His hand hesitated upon the hilt, shaking as he glared at the sash which held the bounty he had previously stolen from the dead. With a new wave of fire flashing through his eyes, he took the blade.

Senjaemon threw his knife at the beast and grabbed up his pile of swords by their leash as he began to run. Soon he could no longer keep himself up, so he put the waistband in his teeth and crawled fast on all fours. His teeth fell out and his fingers curled in. Soon it was as easy to run with all four limbs as it was his two feet. The waistband fell from his teeth and the swords clattered together uselessly. Senjaemon stopped at the edge of the field, where the trees gave birth to more bodies and the decaying flesh of murdered horses. 

Out there, upon the two bodies, the fox remained. Its gaze shot out across the fields with singularity. Amidst the vastness of the sky into which he would fall upon his own death, the fox who was once Senjaemon could feel an immense pressure. The clouds of the dusk glared down at him and judged the actions he had taken for all of his life. Senjaemon cowered, his snout touched to the ground, and ran into the trees. His brown fur caught on twigs, making him look as though he were no more than a rabid animal.