The Lord of the Bad Road

The Yao-guro woodsmen didn’t give up their axes easily. No, Yu-sei had to pry the hafts out of their wielders’ stiffening grips with his knife. He’d first tried asking if they’d lend him their arms. But they were uninterested in changing their fates, complacent in the day-to-day business of banditry.
Yu-sei had gotten what he needed regardless. Yao-guro axes, adorned with signature vultures’ feathers, had the proper heft for chopping through blackened timber yet were well-balanced for hewing through white bone.
He bundled together four axes, the number he could hoist onto his back without overexerting himself. His path was rough and untame, and he couldn’t risk breathing too deeply lest the ashen air should make him wheeze, betraying him.
So it was that he trekked through the wilds of Kuru-Rin, a blightland named for its denuded pines that, seen from afar, protruded from the tormented earth like black needles. But as Yu-sei crossed the treeline, the pines rising high toward the jaundiced sky better resembled fire-splintered palisades, a ward against intruders. Still, Yu-sei chose this course and not the bad road from Afan Yamun. No, that realm belonged to someone else.
The layer of ash that dusted the earth quieted his steps, but he treaded no less carefully, second-guessing everything he saw as he wound his way through the woods. Trees that stood with false life could fall with deadly suddenness. The earth, though it looked inert, could still harbor the flames of midwinter wildfires. The cinder branches swaying about him could instead be spindly limbs, waiting to grope at unaware prey. And the gnarled trunks around him could yet be twisted faces, those of the Watchers whose gazes he felt ever more intensely here.
Yu-sei sensed danger in earnest when the invisible stares, coming from all sides at first, became concentrated somewhere behind him. He bounded through the woods as a hare eluding its hunters. A cloak of wolf’s skin and a dousing of deer’s musk were enough to fool most of them. A clearing, his destination, had just come into view when he pulled his scarf from his nose and mouth to breathe more freely. That was when he caught their scent: burnt hair and dry-boiled iron. The Watchers were drawing near.
Wood and iron clattered as Yu-sei brandished an ax, not wasting a moment more. He could not make out their silhouettes, but the woods behind him looked much denser than when he’d walked through them. If a lifetime of peril hadn’t honed his sense for every single pair of eyes set on him, he’d have had little chance of knowing his foes from their forest.
The haft of his ax grew slick with sweat. Up to this point, he’d only tested himself against ordinary foes—not dead trees conjoined with dead men, bonded in shared hatred of human life.
Warping sapwood and once-living joints creaked as Yu-sei ducked and weaved. He ran toward one Watcher as if unaware of it, then sidestepped and swung low, hobbling the creature as it stumbled past him. A branch snagged at his cloak, but he sundered it, exposing bone and black marrow. A quick draw of his dagger fended off an otherwise lethal blow from a rusty dao, but the blade still sliced through his sleeve and left a long cut down his arm. No doubt he'd need to have the wound treated before too long. Then another branch swung as he turned around, leaving a bright streak of pain across his face.
Finding himself outnumbered, he retreated behind a shattered boulder. He kept the mass between him and his pursuers, swinging whenever he felt them approaching. One Watcher nearly overtook him until a pair of tree-knots betrayed hollowed eye sockets, giving him a target. He staggered the creature with his backswing, then reared back and heaved downward. With an effortful grunt, he wrested his ax from the hateful face and was showered with teeth and splinters.
The battle came to an end, and silence settled in again. Gazes from afar lifted like a burden from his shoulders. He paused only to clear his burning lungs, then gathered his weapons.
Yu-sei stepped into the clearing, a long-abandoned stretch of road, and projected his voice. “I demand an audience with the lord of this realm.”
The dry earth quaked and cracked. Rising above the treetops was a colossus that seeped with decay and glinted with broken armaments of battlefields past. Charred ribs threaded with sinew crowned its head.
A voice bellowed like a landslide. “What audacity! Do you think to cut our brothers down yet stand before us with impunity? Do you not wonder whether more Watchers lie in wait? And surely you know that the highwaymen here swear fealty to us?”
“Surely—I’ve met them.” Yu-sei dropped the axes theatrically onto the ground. The trees rustled all at once, as if murmuring.
“Whose sword are you, Outsider? Has the Shogun returned to Kuru-Rin?”
“Outsider?” Yu-sei raised his chin. “What outsider could evade your Watchers?”
The lord made a rumbling noise, pensive.
“Then what do you seek here? Glory? Vengeance?”
“No. I seek your allegiance.”
The trees shook and the earth churned. Yu-sei guessed the lord hadn't expected this demand. But the demand wasn't refused, either. That, Yu-sei knew because he was still standing.
"I would have your allegiance, you and your Watchers. So, too, the rest of the Yao-guro clan." He glanced down at the axes. "And any other—"
“For what purpose do you ask this?”
Yu-sei sucked in his breath, conscious of just how close he was to inviting the lord's wrath. And there weren't enough axes in all of Kuru-Rin to fell this colossus, if it came to that.
“For a common cause. You guessed correctly: the Shogun’s armies indeed march upon our homeland. I would meet him with a force of our own.”

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A historical note: While this story is set in a secondary world (yet-to-be-revealed reaches beyond Tahuum Itaqiin), the titular antagonist is inspired by historical accounts of Aterui, an Emishi chief nicknamed the "Lord of the Bad Road" (悪路王 Akuro-ō), who resisted imperial Japanese rule during the Heian Period.
A worldbuilding note: The setting of this story is geographically far removed from the deserts and coasts of Northwest Tahuum Itaqiin, not to mention it takes place in the Continent's Grim Era, centuries before the current Revival Era and its relative technological and societal progress.