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On a full moon night, a wandering swordsman with a white cape with red trim happened on the scene of a massacre. Moving with speed beyond human comprehension, he killed all the bandits, but saw that he had been too late to save any of the people they had been accosting, that is until he set eyes on a tiny boy with red hair. Hiko told the boy that hating the bandits wouldn't bring his family back and that he should leave that place and go to a village where he would likely be taken care of, then left. A day or two later, Hiko returned to the scene of the massacre to bury the bodies, only to discover that the tiny boy had already done so and even buried the bandits who had killed his friends. Hiko was amazed by the generosity of the child's heart and took him as his apprentice then and there.

For four years, Hiko wisely and patiently instructed the boy in his sword style, Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu. One day though, the boy declared that he was leaving the mountains to become a champion of the downtrodden in the world below. Hiko tried to talk the boy out of, telling him that a sword style as powerful as theirs would distort human affairs by guaranteeing victory to whichever side the boy fell in with. Hiko's words fell on deaf ears in in the end, the boy left to profane the sword style he had been taught in the way he saw fit.

At first, Hiko received news of his former student's exploits during the Bakumatsu Revolution, hearing that the boy had fallen in with the revolutionaries and become an assassin. After the war ended, ten years passed with no further news and Hiko banished all thought of the boy from his heart. One day, over a decade later however, the boy, now a man, showed up out of the blue and asked Hiko to continue his training so he could fight a new enemy that threatened all of Japan. Hiko was left to make a choice, take the little ingrate back in and retrain him or show him the door.