Basilisk

Synopsis

“Hand in hand, let the two of us break the chain of old hatred that binds our two houses.”

Gennosuke of the Kouga and Oboro of the Iga vow to break the hatred that has lasted four hundred long years between the Kouga and the Iga, and to live together. But the two lovers were fated to kill each other…

The nineteenth year of the Keichou era. Ieyasu, seventy-three years old, was troubled. The dull elder brother, Takechiyo, or the bright younger brother, Kunichiyo? To settle the question of the heir who would be the third Tokugawa shogun, a question in utter confusion, he gave a strict order: the two great houses of the ninja arts would fight each other, the Kouga for Kunichiyo and the Iga for Takechiyo, ten of the best of each against ten in a battle of slaughter by ninja arts, and the matter would be staked on whichever side survived.

The “pact of no fighting” made with the previous Hattori Hanzo is lifted, and the ninja go at their sworn enemies like hunting dogs let off the leash! Their own bodies are their greatest weapon! Ninja of every kind, full of character, each with a secret art beyond human understanding. Old and young, men and women, twenty of them and each one different, superhumans and freaks in a tangle: the war of ninja arts, fought with every secret art they have, begins now!!

At the end of a gruesome fight, comrades lost one after another… Will the Kouga win, or the Iga? And who on earth will be the one to survive!? And Gennosuke and Oboro, torn apart: what will become of their love…?