Chapter 1: Just another day

It started off as an ordinary day, but I was too obsessed with how life was so unfair that I never noticed how different and important this day really was when it started. All I could think about was that if I'd been just a year older I'd have been allowed to go with my father and Shinji Honda to join the army and become heroes. Unfortunately, he'd ordered me to tend the farm and protect my younger sister while Shinji left to get all the glory. Of course, our family honor demanded I follow his orders, but the battle against the invading barbarian clan to the north was only a few dozen miles away now so sometimes the shouts of a rally cry could be heard ringing off the hills.

So here I'd come, to stand on the tall wooden watchtower overlooking the narrow strip of rocky land that made our small town a peninsula. At some points it was only ten feet between the waves from the beaches on both sides, but most of it was just a rocky trail almost a quarter-mile long. Undoubtedly this bottleneck was what attracted people here in the first place, making it very defendable, but also very boring. Not very far north another town had grown up on the more verdant land, and our treaty with them had demanded we send our army north instead of just defending this pass.

The only other men left are just a few old men that never left their beds anymore, a couple of little boys, none older than ten, and me. I think they set the seventeen-year age requirement just to make sure one able male was left behind... me, and that pissed me off even more. I'm a man as much as that stupid Shinji is, and I deserved my chance to prove it as much as he does. Sure I'm shorter, and not overly muscled, kind of clumsy, and maybe not the brightest, but I'm still a man too!

Well, I say a man, but everyone knows I've not been with a woman yet, and it's no wonder. Who would want me? My mother died when I was born, and my father was so upset he began drinking heavily ever since. Then of course he lost most of his money, honor, and property during my childhood as my baka father gambled and sold everything to drown his misery in endless bottles of sake. And to top it off he a girl while he was drunk and was to take her as his wife only a year after my mother died in childbirth.

InIn) fact, my first real memory from when I was very young is a woman screaming out as she gave birth to my sister Kouki. I remember the blood everywhere, so much blood it covered the entire floor and ran out of the house like a river. Then when her screams died with her, my new baby sister took them back up as her own. Some told rumors that it wasn't the child-birth that killed her, and that instead, it was suicide, but I was too young to say for certain. They said it was to end the suffering of being to marry my drunken father, but either way, the Matsumoto name was considered worthless, or worse, cursed.

Kouki and I were raised by dad when he was sober and hid from him when he wasn't. It was almost a blessing that the war came and he'd been conscripted as we were free of him for the first time in our lives. These last few months had been the happiest we'd ever been, but still, I felt slighted that I couldn't go to war with him. As much as I hated that man something in my soul burned to prove myself to him. Maybe he just needed to see me as a man and then he'd love me? Well, I would do just that. The sole defender of Greytown, lonely yet vigilant at his post.

"MATSUMOTO!" I heard a shrill familiar shout from the ground. I looked down off the side of the tall wooden watchtower at the giant of a woman who was the law around town, Natsumi Honda. "GET DOWN HERE NOW!"

Broken from my reverie I climbed down the ladder back to the ground to face the angry gargantuan auburn-haired woman. She didn't even wait for me to reach the ground before she began to rip me a new one, but I'd heard it all before from her. How I was a lazy, dumb, blind, worthless daydreamer. It was all sadly true even if it wasn't me she was really mad at, so I just let her scream at me in the face, her warm spittle sometimes flicking onto my face as she unleashed her raging pain out on me.

I didn't take it personally because it was only yesterday that word arrived that her husband had fallen to an arrow wound in battle in the war against the invading northern barbarian army. The messenger had already returned, but the only family Natsumi had now was her husband's younger brother Shinji who was at least fifteen years younger than her and about two years older than me, but he too was still away at the front. My mind playfully wandered into hoping that Shinji would break his engagement to the beautiful Setsuko Takahashi to marry his brother's widow, but that insane thought passed quickly enough. This angry woman had always been a mean brute before, at least with me, but then she had truly turned bitter against the entire world now and I couldn't see anyone ever marrying her again.

She was actually kind of an attractive woman if you liked one who could crush you with their bare hands. She kept her dark red hair short like a soldier's, saying it prevented someone from grabbing it in battle, so it suited her warrior image. She was slight of breasts, almost losing them in her muscles, but did have wide hips and was still young enough to have kids. Strangely she never had any with her now-departed husband, but that might have been due to him being quite a bit older than her.

My eyes continue to examine her body though she never stopped cussing me out. She was over a foot taller than me, but with her sinewy biceps, she could have out muscles half the men in town before they all left for the war. Now she was the single most scary person I knew, and yet I couldn't help but think of her in bed, using those loud lungs with unending breath to cry out her pleasure as I took her and pounded my cock between those powerful thighs, showing her what a real man was like in bed. She'd hold me tight with those strong arms, getting into all sorts of crazy positions as I filled her every orifice with my man-butter over and over…

"ARE YOU DAYDREAMING AGAIN?" she snapped at me. She knew I had been, and my eyes did a tiny dart down to my crotch as I realized I'd gotten hard and was tenting out in my pants. I tried to think of concealing it, but her eyes followed a half-second after, clearly seeing my body's reaction. "GET OUT OF HERE YOU FUCKING PERVERT!" She kicked me in the ass, tumbling me to the dirt as she turned her back on me to ascend the ladder to the top of the watchtower. I got up and scampered back to town just trying to escape.

God, that was embarrassing. She was almost old enough to be my mother, and about the single most unfriendly person in the world, yet my groin had developed a dirty mind all of its own this last year. I'd get hard all the time, looking at girls, women, animals, fence posts, and sometimes for no reason at all. I felt disgusting, yet I wanted so badly to know what sex was really like that I'd do almost anything. Maybe I should find a quiet place on the way home to relieve myself?

The north side of town was almost a ghost town with empty shops for the once lively trade our town had done before the war, but with all the men away and traders from other lands a distant memory now they were abandoned and quiet. To my left, the great Honda Dojo, once filled with men and boys shouting their practice strike ki shouts was just as ghostly, yet Natsumi still resolutely kept it open anyway even though she had no students. To the right, the only open shop left was old Mister Cho's. He ran a general store and pawnshop with various goods, but now at such outrageous prices that very few could afford anything. "There is a war on," he'd said, but to me, it seemed that he just liked getting rich on the misfortune of others.

"Kenji…" Hazuka Daishi whispered at me as I was walking by a dark alley. I had been so deep in my own thoughts that I hadn't noticed her get right up behind me. Before I realize what was going on the young girl yanked on my arm and pulled me into the small cramped alley between two of the old abandoned shops.

"Hazuka, what gives?" I complained to the cute girl who has been a lifelong friend to both me and my sister. She had even been one of my first crushes being only a year younger than me as well as the girl I'd spent the most time with other than my sister. She was pretty with her petite yet curvaceous body and silky shoulder-length black hair that gave her a sometimes mischievous look.

In fact, a few years ago when we were really still kids she'd told me she loved me and asked me to marry her. I'd been thrilled and confessed that I loved her too, but it was just a silly joke with her and my sister who both howled with laughter at my confession. I ran away trying not to cry and vowing never to get fooled by her again, yet she still always knew how to get me to do anything she wanted. I'd steeled myself against getting burned that badly again, cause she was always up to something, usually that wound up getting me in trouble.

She looked oddly shy now, constantly looking at her feet, her long raven hair covering her pale cheeks and refusing to look directly at me after forcibly dragging me out of the street. "We have known each other for a long time, haven't we?" she asked cautiously.

"Yeah, our whole lives, so what about it?" I ask confused.

"I was thinking... I'm a girl... and you're a guy..." she said bashfully and twirled a strand of her hair around a finger as she twisted one toe of her black shoe into the earth.

"Yeah," I said cautiously.

"And I hear that guys would do anything to have a little fun… with a girl…which I am," she said as she pulled on a string to untie one on the laces holding her the top of her short dress closed at her bosom.

"Yeah," I said mechanically as my mind shifted gears. Could she really be interested in me after all? This wasn't another trick, was it? I looked around suddenly. My sister wasn't here, in fact from here we are cloaked in shadows and the street was empty at the moment anyway. Growing hard in my pants again my mind was filled with all sorts of lusty scenarios, making it hard to think clearly.

Hazuka slowly pulled open her tight white top down to actually reveal one of her round swollen pink breasts with its brown nipple and all. I was completely transfixed by then, and while she kept speaking I could barely comprehend her as she was disrobing before me as her other breast came into the open as well. "I'll bet you would easily pay fifty silver to touch me."

"Yeah..." I droned gazing at pert brown nipples crowning those beautiful pink fleshy melons. They were the most perfectly amazing things I'd ever seen that I was completely taken aback when she held out her hand in front of my face.

"What?" I ask confused now only starting to understand.

"Fifty silver," she said with all seriousness. "Then you can touch 'em," she added as she squeezes her one naked breast and caressing her hard pointed nipple. I almost came in my pants seeing her supple flesh bend in her palm.

"But… I don't have that kind of money!" I moaned at her incredulously, almost reaching out to touch her anyway.

She furrowed her brow and slapped my hand away, "Fine. Since we've been friends for so long I'll give you a deal and make it only twenty."

Now seeing this as just her trying to extort money from me as she often had in the past, only now sinking to a new low of using her body since she'd developed breasts instead of trying to sell me something she'd stolen, or worse, something that didn't even exist, I started getting mad. "If I had five I'd buy some more feed for my ox Ushi, but I don't!"

"But Setsuko said…" she began, then realized that she herself was the butt end of a bad joke this time. She quickly pulled her top back into place, concealing her perky little tits, and stormed off. "Oh, I am gonna kill that bitch!"

Alone and frustratingly hard I almost decided to jerk off right there in that alley when another voice called to me, "Hi Kenji. What are you doing hiding back there?"

I shifted my cock quickly back into place in my pants and turned around to see the friendly face of Yuki Yamada. She was a little older than me and very friendly, but since she lived on a farm on the far side of the town I don't get to see her alone that often except when she's here selling her produce. Most of the time she's with her best friend Setsuko Takahashi like a remora with a shark, but lately with her grandmother getting older and both her parents dying in a fire when she was a child, she's taken up more of the vegetable selling duties.

Setsuko is the undisputed queen bee of the girls my age and was stuck up as she was rich and beautiful. Luckily none of that ever really rubbed off on Yuki even though they were inseparable when they were together. And while no one would say she was dumb, she's never been very intelligent; just kind of a happy go lucky ditz, but she had always been kind of nice to me for as long as I'd known her.

"Nothing," I said hurriedly walking out to meet her. "How are things?"

"Great! Thanks for asking," she said energetically. "I was just carrying these vegetables to sell at Granmama's stand down by the fountain." She had two large and obviously heavy baskets of red potatoes, a cabbage, several long daikon turnips, carrots, leeks, cucumbers, and even two shishito peppers.

"Here, let me help you," I offered and took one from her so we could each carry one as we walked south toward the center of town.

"Thanks! You're so sweet!" After that Yuki just talked endlessly about her harvest, her grandmother, the cows in her barn, the weather, everything so mindlessly mundane. She could talk happily forever about anything, but I just enjoy looking at her and the sound of her pretty high pitched voice. She was very tall and lanky thin with incredibly bright red hair that was almost pink. Not much for breasts or hips, but apart from Hazuka or my sister Kouki she was probably the closest thing to a female friend I had. But then she was friendly with everyone since she is just an easy-going person. She particularly liked hanging out with Setsuko and her fiancée Shinji, Natsumi's overbearing brother-in-law, so I usually never had time to talk to her on her own.

"Anyway, I was wondering if you've ever heard of jellied salt and if you know where to get it?" she asked and the question was just so odd it snapped me out of my thoughts. I guess I’d been so wrapped up in my introspection that I had mostly been ignoring what she was saying.

"What?" I boggled trying to grasp what she meant as I wasn't paying full attention.

"Well, before Shinji left for the war he would sell me a small bottle of it every now and then, but since he's left I don't know where to get more," she explained.

"Maybe I just know it by another name, what does it look like?" I asked suspiciously.

"Well, it's a sticky white jelly that is quite salty. Shinji said he made it himself, but never told me how," Yuki explained innocently, yet licked her lips as she obviously enjoyed its taste.

She couldn't mean... Luckily we were just reaching the produce stand that her grandmother ran so I dropped the basket and quickly said, "Sorry Yuki, gotta go!" My poor cock was aching to be touched badly now and I couldn't hide it anymore without carrying the basket to conceal my waist.

I ran up the hill out of the market as fast as I could, passing the few people who still attempted to shop and sell their wares. I tried to redirect all my sexual energy to huff and puff my way up the hill and didn't stop until I was looking at the old ruins of an ancient temple that had been here long before the town had been built.

It was just a few rocky walls and a lone vine-covered obelisk of some long-dead religion someone had worshiped maybe hundreds of years ago. No one knew for certain, but this was the one place no one else ever came so it was often a sanctuary that I'd come to when I needed some privacy, which was exactly what I wanted right now. The west side of the temple opened up onto the side of a giant cliff overlooking the ocean and the massive rocks at the base. Some people said that the followers of this old religion used to throw people off these cliffs if they were unworthy, and that they would practice holy orgies to worship their god.

Truth be told, I had often dreamed of living in those times and happily envisioned participating in mating with dozens of women at once, and those thoughts let these cliffs often enough taste my own salty spray merging with the sea's. This was my own form of prayer as I wished that this long-dead religion was still practiced and imagining myself as the head priest, dutifully performing the sexual rituals over and over again as often as required.

Today had been a trying one already and my manhood could certainly use some release, so I had already unlaced my pants as I rounded the last full standing wall to enter the stone-floored temple area when I was startled to see someone here. Thankfully they had their back to me, but were unusually dressed in a long white robe, including a matching veiled hat making it impossible to see who it was. I was so surprised and worried about pulling my pants back on that I almost angrily yelled, "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

I quickly was back to being properly dressed as the man slowly rose from his knees looking out at the sea before he turned around and greeted me, "Hello my boy. Fear not, for I am just a traveling monk who has heard of this ancient shrine and wished to examine it for myself." He spoke clearly, though the smooth silk veil obfuscated his face to clearly distinguish his features, his voice was strong and clearly male and not anyone I knew. "Might I ask your name?" he asked as I tried to puzzle out why a monk in such strange and obviously expensive clothing would visit a ruin like this, much less brave through a war zone to get here.

"Me?" I stammered, unsure of why he would want to know who I was. I was no one special. "I'm Kenji Matsumoto, but if you want to talk to someone important…"

"Kenji," he interrupted and quickly came right in close to me. I could just make out his lips and nose as I looked up at the much taller man through the mesh, but it was so shadowy through it that I couldn't make out any real details. "You are very important. Never forget that." I was taken aback and had no reply to that. "I will be restoring these sacred grounds," he continued as if his unusual outburst had been nothing at all. "It is a powerful place and deserves… respect." Then he cocked his head to the side, still looking at me, but it felt like he was actually looking through me. "I can tell you think so too. Feel free to visit me any time you need to talk, but for now, it's getting late."

His voice was hauntingly familiar, but I just couldn't place where I might have heard it before. Maybe he had some relation to my father, but he'd been an only child as far as I'd known. The whole exchange was just so unnerving that I really wanted to get out of there. "Sure, no problem. Yeah, so..."

"Farewell and good luck," he said as if his mind was far away and I turned to leave back down the east side of the hill, over to the sprawling Takahashi manor that was my home, though not exactly as it once had been. This was the richest home in our village, complete with over a dozen rooms and even a bathhouse across from the spring-fed koi pond in the back yard. But more importantly to me was that it had once been called Matsumoto manor in my youth.

My father had been a strong and proud man who took over the family wealth when his parents were killed in an accident before he married. I don't know much about my mother's family because my father refused to ever speak of her, so I think it was her that drove him to drink and gamble. Then after his second wife died with Kouki's birth he totally crumbled as a man. I was seven when he officially sold the manor to the Takahashi's to pay his debts and we'd moved into the servants' quarters inside the house to work for them. I grew up helping with doing chores for the beautiful blonde matron of the house, Azami Takahashi, and following the orders of her spoiled brat of a daughter Setsuko. She was almost the same age as me, but with her upbringing always reinforced that she was almost a full year older.

As my father continued to drink we got expelled from the house proper and delegated from servants to mere field hands to live in a tiny two-room shed that was little more than a storage building for the tools. Our barn was actually bigger, and sometimes when we needed to get away from dad Kouki and I would sleep in the hay with Ushi the ox.

As I approached the well-manicured hedgerows that surrounded the property around the manor I heard someone. I peeked through a gap and saw Setsuko speaking with Chizu, their only remaining servant they had left due to Mister Takahashi taking all the others with him to support the war effort. She was an odd purple-haired foreign who had been captured at the start of the war last year. I often laughed talking with her, though she rarely understood why. She hadn't spoken our dialect completely so her words would sometimes make funny disjointed sentences, or she would use the wrong word altogether. She was shy at first, and she was often kept on a tight leash by Azami and Setsuko, but not literally of course.

And while her unusual foreign hair made her exotic, it was the blonde vision of beauty she spoke with that my eyes were locked onto. I knew Setsuko was a vain and bossy young woman, exactly like her still beautiful and haughty mother, but the curve of her silk kimono against her perfect skin was just too riveting to look away. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but Chizu bowed and returned to the house while Setsuko passed the pond and moved into the bathhouse where I could see the smoke already rising out indicating she had a hot bath awaiting her.

The thought of the lovely naked teen dipping into the clear hot water was itself too much for my already aroused psyche. I'd already pulled out my manhood and was pervertedly stroking myself, just biding my time for a few moments before trying to sneak around and peep in on her through a small knothole in the back of the bathhouse that I'd found last year. I had peeped in on her dozens of times since finding it and was just about to head that way when someone spoke to me.

"Matsumoto! What are you lurking around here for?" Azami Takahashi said with annoyance at spotting me as she was walking by. She was the rich and influential matron of the Takahashi clan that owned a vast trading merchant business. Recently with all her half dozen servants she was accustomed to departed with her husband to the front, she'd been ordering me around much more as her go-to handyman for physical labor.

She wasn't close enough to see more than just my face yet, so maybe I had a chance to conceal myself again. "Just cleaning up a broken limb here in the bushes," I lied as I tucked my cock away and broke off a limb to have something to show for my fidgeting. I held it up to show her as she got closer, but this didn't make her any happier.

"Now there's a damn hole in the hedges I can see right through!" she shouted at me like it was my fault.

Well, I guess technically it was, but she didn't need to know that. "I should be able to splint it and fix it," I suggested, but then she was right up on me and my eyes couldn't help but fall to her massive breasts that bobbed and swayed with every movement in the upper part of her revealing dress.

"Good, then fix it quickly," she pointedly insisted before pointing at her face. Crap I was caught looking at her tits again! I focus on her face as best I can and she demanded again, "Are you listening to me?"

"Yes ma'am," I answered soberly. "I'll get right on it."

"Good," she said curtly and stormed off angrily. I wasted another hour just fixing the damage I'd done to it myself, and worse when I was done it was already late in the afternoon and I was getting pretty hungry. I headed around back across a large unplowed field to the small shack that Kouki and I called home now. I'm am responsible for the farming nowadays, while Kouki earns her keep with sewing for the Takahashi's, but I've done some gardening from time to time and did an okay job mending the hedge.

Inside our rundown shack, I didn't see Kouki, but I could hear someone moving around in the back. That small second room was really just a tiny closet that dad used to use for drinking without being in the way while we did chores and was just filled with old empty sake bottles. What could Kouki want back there? I almost said something, but then just decide to sneak open the door and have a peek without disturbing her. If she was cleaning I didn't want to get roped into helping.

To my surprise, I saw my younger sister as I'd never seen her before. Her clothes were disheveled and open as she had one hand on her small breast rubbing an erect pink nipple while her other hand was moving between her legs. Sure I've seen her naked before when we were kids, but that was about a decade ago before she learned modesty and developed into such a lovely young woman. I'd been peeking at other girls in town from time to time as best I could for a few years now, just like all the other older boys, but that was always at a distance and they were always just acting normal usually bathing or washing clothes.

This was totally different! Kouki had definitely grown into a looker, just blooming into fertility, and not only was she nearly naked before me and so close, but she was acting so lewdly touching herself in such a naughty way! I'd begun masturbating last year when I was alone sometimes, but never in the house because it would be too easy to get caught, as Kouki now proved me right.

"Ohhhh..." Kouki moaned as she pinched and tweaked her hard upstanding nipple and my mouth watered. Then I gazed down to her slit, only barely visible under her hand. This was the first time I'd seen a real woman's vagina, and I was bewitched, even if I couldn't really see anything. She wasn't pushing any fingers inside as I would have expected, but had two fingers just above it making slow circles, allowing me to see just a sliver of her puffy crimson folds shimmering with wetness in the sunlight around the short fuzzy hair that had grown around her private area.

MyMy) manhood was instantly rock hard again and even though it was my sister, my hand was magnetically attracted into my pants where I began slowly mimicking her motions on her own groin along with her. I was getting really turned on, when I must have made a sound because she snapped open her eyes and quickly closed her robe with a cry of surprise as she spotted me. "EEK! Pervert!" Kouki screamed! Then suddenly an empty sake bottle came flying at my head!

After the birds and stars stopped spinning around me, I found myself alone with an uncomfortable tightness in my pants, still thinking about the sight of Kouki touching herself, but she was long gone.

I thought about finishing off, but the pain from the swollen bump on my forehead had countered the swelling in my groin. I scrounged around for some food, but found that we were getting awfully low on both corn and rice and already completely out of everything else. I knew supplies were low all over town due to the war and that reminded me I still needed to plow our field soon if I wanted to get it planted before the rainy season. While I hated sweating in the sun I decided I preferred eating over starving and that I had procrastinated far too long.

I walked out to our small barn that wasn't much more than a chicken coop so the Takahashi's have fresh eggs every day and looked at the large plow and Ushi, our poor old skinny oxen that was on his last legs. I told Azami last year it was time to get a younger ox, but she wouldn't listen. I lashed the worn leather straps onto the beast of burden and attached them all to the heavy metal plow and gently lead him out into the daylight.

I really should have started sooner before the heat of the day had set in, and it would be nightfall by the time I was done, but now there was nothing to do but work. I got the prow dug into the unfurrowed earth and used a thin stick to prod Ushi into doing the real hard work of pulling the contraption along behind him. Not to say it was easy on me either. It takes a lot of work to hold the plow in the right place and correctly guide the oxen to keep the lines straight. It was toiling, boring work in the hot midday sun, but I pushed the metal prow on and guided Ushi back and forth across the field, turning the soil to prepare it for planting.

Several grueling hours later I regretted goofing away the much cooler morning, but at least I was getting it done and could relax this evening knowing that I did a good job. I should have known not to let my spirits up though since just then the plow hit some large rock hard, twisting the whole thing and snapping several of the straps. I was thrown to the ground, driving my knee right into the back of the plow.

"Shit!" I exclaimed as now I had a freshly skinned knee to go with the large bump on my head. I dusted myself off tenderly and figured the cuts on my knee weren't serious; it was just a little blood and a small flesh wound. Unfortunately, the plow was in much poorer shape with broken straps and the plow head itself completely broken off. This would need quite a bit of work to get it back in working order, and I wasn’t sure if there was enough sunlight left to get it done today. I was examining it when my bloody knee touched something freezing cold, the rock I'd hit caused a sharp pain to course up my leg like lightning.