Apocalypse had once said he'd waited five thousand years before finding someone as powerful as Professor Xavier — that in his era, truly capable mutants were vanishingly rare.
Himiko understood that feeling completely. Standing here now, she felt as though Amaterasu herself had blessed her. Her luck was extraordinary.
Inside the sarcophagus, the corpse-like body stirred. Himiko's right hand rose slowly and lifted a bronze mirror — its surface engraved with layer upon layer of cryptic inscriptions — up and out of the coffin.
A towering warrior in full armor stepped out of the air. The Stormguard General — commander of all the deathless warriors.
He knelt before the sarcophagus first, then rose and accepted the mirror with both hands.
The instant the mirror left Himiko's grip, it seemed to awaken. The rust coating its face fell away entirely. On its back, the carved images of bamboo, plum blossoms, cranes, and tortoises sharpened into vivid relief. At the mirror's center, ghostly shapes began to appear — men and women, dancing and singing in a scene of ancient celebration.
According to legend, when the sun goddess Amaterasu shut herself inside the Rock Cave of Heaven and left Japan in total darkness, the gods of the High Plain of Heaven forged a mirror from the sacred stone of Heaven's foundation and the iron of the Heavenly Gold Mountain. They danced and sang before it, making such a spectacle that Amaterasu's curiosity finally pulled her back out into the world — and light returned to the land.
The mirror Himiko had placed in the Stormguard General's hands was that very divine artifact from legend: the Yata no Kagami.
The Stormguard General drove Mathias and the rest of the human believers out of the tomb with brisk brutality, then sealed the tomb entirely. This body-snatching could not afford any interruptions. Himiko had even brought out her most precious treasure to ensure it — the mirror she'd kept in reserve for centuries.
The mysterious armed faction outside, Mathias — none of it mattered now. The moment she had a new body, she would need only a breath to kill every last ordinary human on this island.
A deep boom resonated through the chamber as the Stormguard General sealed the tomb completely.
Mathias's expression darkened. He'd been discarded like a used tool.
But he didn't dare fight back. He'd witnessed what the Stormguard General could do. And now, with the power of the Yata no Kagami invoked, a curtain of shimmering light rose like something out of a dream, sealing the tomb completely. Nothing and no one could pass through it.
He'd been loyal to Himiko — genuinely loyal. He'd wanted that loyalty rewarded with immortality. And she'd thrown him away like garbage. The deeper the loyalty, the deeper the betrayal now cut.
The human heart is the most complicated thing in the world. In the space of a few heartbeats, Mathias had made up his mind.
He turned toward the sealed tomb and let out a cold laugh. She thinks I'm helpless? Does she think everyone else is, too?
He gathered his inner circle and left the underground palace. He was going to defect — to the armed faction that had been tearing this island apart looking for Himiko's location.
Could explosives and guns not blast open this tomb? Could submachine guns not handle a few Stormguard? The Yata no Kagami? What was that — just an old bronze mirror as far as he was concerned.
The Stormguard General watched Mathias lead his followers away and said nothing. He returned to his post at the tomb's entrance. Anyone who wanted through would have to step over his corpse.
In the tomb's antechamber, the Doctor hung suspended from the ceiling, both hands bound above her head. Dozens of mummified corpses dangled around her — men and women both — and the floor below was thick with rotting bodies. Directly to her left, a female corpse was engulfed in flames.
The moment the great doors boomed shut, she opened her eyes.
She'd spent her whole childhood on the run with her parents, hiding from one danger after another. Getting to forty in one piece said something about her capacity to handle bad situations.
She looked left. She looked right. Then she locked onto the burning corpse beside her.
She braced her legs, swung herself like a pendulum toward the burning body, and used the flames to char through the rope binding her wrists.
Oh no—
The moment the rope snapped, she dropped — fast. Only then did she see what was directly below her: a length of exposed rebar, jutting upright from a pile of rotting remains.
Gravity did not negotiate.
There was a dull, wet thud.
The rebar punched straight through her abdomen, front to back. A kidney was pierced; the surrounding tissue tore on impact. The rebar had been sitting in a pile of decomposing bodies — completely unsterilized. The pain was instantaneous and total. The Doctor was unconscious before she hit the floor.
Himiko registered the commotion from the antechamber, but she dismissed it. She didn't have time to deal with a supporting character right now.
Himiko's decayed body rose slowly to its feet. Sadako hung suspended in the air two meters (about six and a half feet) in front of her.
Sadako hadn't stopped talking the entire time — "No," "Don't," "Please don't come any closer" — a constant stream of quiet pleading. But Himiko's body moved toward her in a straight, unhurried line.
There was no time for Flame Purification rituals. No time for compatibility assessments.
Himiko only wanted this body. Wanted this power.
Compatible or not — she would take it by force and adjust afterward.
Himiko's body was desiccated down to the bone. Almost no muscle remained on her face; gray, papery skin pulled tight across her cheekbones. Her eye sockets were empty — the eyeballs had long since rotted — leaving two hollow black pits staring out.
Sadako's frame of reference was the 1960s. Nothing in that world could have prepared her for this.
Himiko didn't care about her resistance. She chose the most direct, most efficient method available.
The mummified forehead pressed against Sadako's.
Himiko's soul — eighteen hundred years of it — poured across.
A living body.
That was the first thing she felt: the dense, rushing vitality of it, flooding through her senses like warm light.
Perfect. Absolutely perfect. If she could claim this vessel and apply eighteen centuries of magical knowledge to sustaining it — a thousand years, two thousand years, they were nothing. She would never need to go through this ordeal again.
Sadako's faint resistance didn't even register. Himiko's consciousness pushed deeper, moving inward toward the core of Sadako's mind.
As she went deeper, the temperature dropped. The air around her grew wet.
As the founder of the Ghost Path, Himiko was no stranger to damp, heavy atmospheres — she actually preferred them. This inner world suits me, she thought. Even here, we are compatible.
Inside Sadako's mindscape, Himiko appeared as she had been at the height of her power: her face smooth and lovely, her head crowned with a golden sun-crown bearing Amaterasu's symbol, her body draped in a silk robe embroidered with elaborate patterns, the Shikon Jewel — dark green and luminous — resting against her throat.
The Ghost Path held that all things in the world possess four aspects of spirit: the nigi-mitama (gentle), the saki-mitama (blessing), the ara-mitama (rough), and the kushi-mitama (wondrous). A jewel that contained all four in perfect harmony was the Shikon Jewel, an artifact of immense psychic power. The one at Himiko's throat had kept her soul vibrant through a thousand years of time — still carrying most of its original strength.
That was no small feat. Ogun had only lived four hundred years, and his soul was already on the verge of collapse.
The body has its limits. So, it turns out, does the soul.