It is at about half three, usually, that I start contemplating my life. There is something about that hour that did it. It is as quiet as Kabuchiko ever gets, and I start getting restless. I don't need to sleep, not any more, but even so, I think this was when I start to dream, while half awake.
This time, I am staring at my apartment. I throw a ball against one of the walls, and watch as it bounces off all four and back into my hand. It is a small room, this half of my apartment, and messy. I throw the ball again, watching it spiral around the room, bouncing round and round and round, slowly walking closer to the ceiling, before I make a gesture, and it slams back into my hand.
I toss the ball in the air again, before deciding I'm not going to just mope and throw my stupid ball around, and let it fall onto the mess of books and clothes that forms layers across my floor. There is, despite what anyone else would think, a pattern to the mess. The books closest to the exit are mostly medical textbooks - god, those cost a pretty penny - and what few grimoires I own, which were actually even more expensive. Moving towards my closet, books become dominated by clothes, while moving towards the futon I was lying on, they changed into manga. Mostly yuri manga, manga about serial killers, and the couple of series I have that combined both. What exceptionally refined taste I have, ne?
I am slowly shuffling my way across my futon to grab a book without having to leave the covers and deal with the cold, when the door rings. I pause, for a moment, hoping it was just me hearing things in the witching hour.
Then they ring again and I remember I am a witch, so I reluctantly shuffle out of my covers, moving hands through the detritus until I find a pair of leggings to pull on so I don't look like I'd just been lounging around in an overly large shirt.
I slip out of the door to my room, past the little nook that my bathroom nestled in, and into the other room. This room, this is why it didn't feel like my apartment. When I'd taken up residence, this had been the kitchen-cum-main area. Now, beyond the tiny amount of space that the cooker and sink still occupied, I'd done my best to turn it into a mix of a clinic, operating theater, and a modern mages' ritual space. To the extent that one can do that on a thirty-thousand yen a month budget, at least.
After the fifth ring, and the beginning of the hammering on the door by the person there, I finally unlatch my locks, and pull it open to reveal Kido Hibiya. He slips past me and into the main part of the room without so much as an introduction. I wait for a second, but he keeps walking around the tables in the room, studying them. Eventually he flicks his eyes over to me, his handsome face smiling slightly.
"You look awful, Rensei." He says, his own poise almost undiminished by the hour.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm sure."
"Did I wake you up? You look…" He draws his eyes down and then up my body again, his upper lip faintly curling. "Tired."
He knows as well as I do that I'd done that ritual as early as I could. Not exactly well, to my misfortune. I'd tried substituting some of the more expensive materials most people used for something that didn't cost a hundred man yen. It had worked, but that was about all that could be said.
"What you do want, Kido-san." He ignores me, instead picking up a marble from a pot I'd had them in.
"What is this?"
"It's a ruby," I say, rubbing at the bridge of my nose.
"It's coloured glass."
"It's ritualistically a ruby. What are you here for, Kido-san? If Compliance has an issue with me, I'll file whatever paperwork you want me to in the morning." Compliance is run by the old families, and the old families didn't like independent operators. And so, for some reason, the independents like me get more scrutiny. And bullshit.
"I'm not here for Compliance." He says, finally dropping the marble. He pauses for a second, before dragging over a stool for him to sit on. He is still, annoyingly, slightly taller than me, even sat down, and his blue-green eyes look like they were trying to decide how best to start taking apart a particularly complex mechanism, before he shifts his gaze, looking over the room rapidly.
"Huh. Where's the eagle, actually? I like your eagle, that was actually something interesting."
I touch the ridge of bone beneath my right eye at the mention, before pulling my hand away. "Hunting."
"Ah, I suppose you couldn't afford…" He gives a small, sad smile at me, and I scowl at him in response. "I shouldn't needle, I'm sorry. Rensei-san, ah, it's a bit more mercenary of a reason I'm here. You do work by commission, yes?"
It is why I'm not living at home anymore, and I am pretty sure he knew that. My work isn't much - I am a backstreet doctor that some Yakuza occasionally visit, if not one good enough to make that consistent, to my annoyance. They also, on occasion, visit me if the "other side" was making noise around Kabuchiko proper. Otherwise, I occasionally get a few commissions by teenagers who are fiddling around the edges of mage society, but nothing more than that.
"Technically."
"Will you
technically do a job for me?" I glower some more, but gesture with my hand to get on with it. "So. There's an oni in the sewers."
Ah. And now why he is coming to me makes more sense.
"There's a load of shit in the underneath. I think half of the trust's buildings are adjacent to them. What's the oni doing that's such an issue?"
"Politics, mostly. Technically, the oni is the property of the Seo family, born on one of their mountains, but … there's some history and now the oni is in the sewers and eating people. The Seo are being pricks about Suppression going in there without getting paid recompense, and they've managed to stall Compliance for at least a month or so on the basis that it's not technically a breach. However, well. If someone like you comes across it, well, a person has a right to defence, does she not?" He says, chuckling slightly at the end.
And I have no association with… anyone, really. Kido can't move, nor his master, without that being a political act. None of the old masters would go wandering through sewers, and the Witch of The East is apparently fancy enough to still be living in a mansion with more magical defences than I could even name a decade after her exile.
"I see. There's only one problem, and that's how I get paid."
"Yes, that is an issue. I did, however, come up with a solution. You studied with a Reproduction program, didn't you? So, if you do this, I will have a grant for indebted students approved for you."
"Hmm." Reproduction is the Mage Trust's education initiative for independent mages. It's underfunded, has a million ways to trap you in various families' employ, and the decent programs have a tuition cost that was extortionate to say the least. I've taken advantage of those programs, which is why I am living off the income my parents gave me to study near my high school as the mage trust couldn't touch that without risking some more discovery. All the rest falls into that gaping hole. "How much."
"Six hundred and fifty thousand." I try to keep the reaction off my face, but don't entirely manage it. That is a huge amount of money. "I take it you're satisfied with the amount?
It'll keep me in the black for the next half a year, and might allow me to actually start paying down the principal. Satisfied is one word for it.
"Alright. So you just want the Oni gone?"
He stands up, unnecessarily brushing some imaginary dust off his trousers. Fop. I glower at him. "If you'd be so kind. Sooner is better. Could you manage it by twelve?"
I glower at him some more, even though he doesn't react. "I have school."
"Ah." He actually has the temerity to look sheepish for a moment, one hand scrubbing at his temple. "I forgot. Whenever you can manage it, then." He sticks out one of his hands, and I shake it briskly, before watching him leave my apartment.
So, I'll need to hunt down an unnamed oni in an unknown sewer-based location with unknown abilities, and ideally in the next day or two.
I really shouldn't be allowed to make agreements when tired.
---
School is fortunately only a short walk away, which was the entire point of my leaving home, at least on my parent's end. But, for all that, it wasn't exactly a great school. Kabuchiko General High is a tall edifice of concrete, steel, and occasional patches of glass allowing sporadic fragments of light to enter the brutalist structure.
Calling it a bad school is probably unfair. It is a successful school, enough to persuade my parents to bear the cost of hosting me in a nearby apartment to give me more time to study. But the teaching is uninspired, to say the least, and it is in the heart of Kabuchiko, the beating heart of the Yakuza in Tokyo. And the occasional clashes between the expanding Yamaguchi and the native Inagawa have bled down into the school from the made men all the way down to the chinpira to culminate in the form of two rival schoolyard gangs of aspiring yakuza, yankiis, each clustering around the Baseball and Basketball teams respectively.
Fortunately, they are just as sexist as their superior organisations, meaning that I walk past clusters of each gang without much notice, a ghost passing between their posturing.
I step through the gates, and into the genkan, giving a few general greetings as I walked towards my locker. As I shuffle into my indoor slippers, I hear someone walk up behind me and poke me in the back.
"Kaaaamikoo-chan, good morning!" says Aiko, her voice sing-song with the almost-insufferable bounce she has this early in the day. God, I don't even sleep and I still manage to hate morning people.
"Morning, Aiko-san. Looking forward to maths today?" I say, finally slipping my bag back onto my back and turning around to greet Aiko with a brief hug. Aiko is my longest-standing friend, someone who's managed to follow the same twisting pathways between schools that I have, and was kind enough not to give up on me.
"Oh, don't
remind me. Who even needs, like, calculus, really? It's so hard." She moans, slowly walking backwards out towards homeroom, somehow managing to dodge the people standing around in the corridor without even looking at them.
I make a commiserating noise, even if I don't agree. I didn't have a Trust Family flooding my head with a dozen engrams every night, but I have enough natural talent to get by. "Real fun. It's like they don't think we have anything better to do than study."
"Says the cram-school girl. You're going to kill yourself, Kamichan." She says, sidestepping a couple that aren't paying attention to anything but themselves. She points her fingers at me, finger-gun style, and shoots them one hand at a time. "You know what. You should skip tonight. Me and Hinami and Yoriko are going to do some Karaoke, down at Yaskio's, with Yoriko's boyfriend and his friends, and I
know you've got a decent singing voice."
"I've got cram." I say, smiling a little bit. I can probably arrange it so I didn't need to come to school easily enough, Reproduction is more than happy to enable yet more dependance, but… I still do. Because I need this. I need something away from the pressures and worries about the other side, somewhere where I could just be me. And that is what taints it. Because I'm not just Tachibana Kamiko, slightly-nerdy bookworm, anymore. I've taken a shadow name, gained a shadow life, and I can't tell Aiko a single word about it.
"You always have cram." This isn't true, half the time I am doing Other business, but it actually is cram school today.
Aiko stops outside our homeroom, and leans in close to me, bending down and tilting her head so she can look up at me and flutter her lashes at me. I grin, a little, lips still self consciously tight over my teeth.
"Alright, alright, I'll skip cram. If you don't bug me about helping you with calculus." I say, lightheartedly, but I'm already calculating how much that'd hurt my current savings. Ah, well. I guess it'll mean I'll be investigating the yokai earlier, as karaoke surely can't take up as much time as cram school.
---
I am an hour and a half late, by my personal timing, when I finally get back to my house. Unlocking the door and stepping through to my workspace, I walk over to my kitchenette and pour myself a glass of water. Singing for that long isn't easy on the throat, and I'd not been enamoured with the drink price they'd had. I'd enjoyed it all the same, a faint smile still on my face half an hour after leaving the place. It'd been fun to just relax, chat with my friends and their friends, and just be normal for a while.
I miss normal, sometimes.
After massaging my throat, I toss my school bag somewhere into the pile of clothes and books that occupies my actual living space, and spend about five minutes assembling a change of clothes from what I don't mind getting sewer stink on them - an old t-shirt, one of my innumerable floral jackets that was probably from when I'd just started buying them, and a relaxed pair of purple trousers - before I take out the pair of tabi boots I used for sewer walking out from my closet. Looking at the amount of clothes I have in there, a couple of previous sewer clothes still bundled up in the corner furthest from my bed, stuffed inside carrier bags, I decide to visit a laundromat if I have enough time afterwards.
I pop back through into my workshop, and fill my pockets with some supplies for the endeavour. A torch, one of my masks, a couple of sticks of differently coloured chalk - I remember to wrap them in something this time, stop the dust infesting my pocket - my switchblade, which got a pocket all to itself, and my ball, picking it up from where it has been bouncing up and down on top of a table all day.
Locking the door behind me, I take three steps outside, and hold out my arm for a couple of moments. It only takes a couple of seconds for Muninn to arrive, large wings flapping down onto my arm. Muninn is my witch familiar, bound to me through mechanisms mystical, arcane, and one remarkably organic.
She is a golden eagle and after she gathered her wingspan in, preening a little as she did, she tilts her head so that her right eye is staring into my own. My right eye had been hers and her right eye was once mine. I have a constant low-level illusion running to obscure the colour change on my face but Muninn bares my mark with pride, or something close to that. I can feel the tangle of magic that bound the eagle to me as she walks up my arm and perches on my shoulder, magic that extruded and fixed a part of my will to her. But she isn't a simple automaton, a construct bound to nothing but will. No, she lives and grows, and with every breath she took we entwine deeper, a twinned trunk organic existence growing and forming.
She pecks at my hair several times, and I fruitlessly try to slap her head away. She uses it to line her nest, and I hate regrowing bald patches.
With the impressive weight of the eagle on my shoulder - Muninn might have been a Japanese gold eagle, to begin with, but a year and change of magic running through her had given her a boost in growth - I start walking to the street outside my apartment and stop about six yards down the road.
It is probably one of the strangest considerations someone had ever had when viewing apartments, I think. How close is the nearest sewer access?
The manhole is nicely engraved with the cherry blossom, and the rightmost number - 08 - showed that it's relatively new, barely a decade old. And, hiding in the edges of the cover, are the runes I'd painstakingly painted on that lets me lift it up with one hand and jump down into the darkness.
I gag, almost immediately, at the smell, and hurriedly pull a mask over my mouth and nose, imbuing the rune I'd inked in it to filter the smell out. Breathing better now, I clap my hands once, wincing a bit at the bite to my stored mana, a pinch in my soul, and the manhole cover drags itself back into place.
Fumbling for the torch in my pocket, I illuminate the dull walls and slowly flowing channel of the sewer. I could have made my eyes see in the dark - I'd given Muninn that gift permanently, although that had been pretty expensive - but a torch was cheaper than the constant drain it'd be on every erg of mana I can drain from the air I breathed. Even the smell-blocker is honestly a damaging luxury, a notable hiccup in the flow every time I breathe, but I don't want whatever food I had tonight to have an aftertaste of rotting eggs and methane.
Muninn had left my shoulder while I was fiddling with my torch, and started strutting along the concrete deeper into the sewer without waiting for me. I sigh, and step into the main channel. These boots don't have runes or anything carved onto them to allow me to walk on top of the water through imbuing them with my mana. No, they were the product of a solid week of gathering mana, fiddling with ingredients, swearing at costs, and ultimately performing the ritual such that it was an innate property of the footwear themselves.
It's necessary, really. I'd burn through my supplies after maybe ten minutes of water-walking, maybe a bit longer if I devised an intricate enough spell, and Tokyo's sewers aren't what you'd see on TV. Sure, there's that huge cathedral-like storm surge overflow- I'd even been there once, just to have a look. But most of it is as most sewers are. Cramped, narrow, and with large parts completely inaccessible unless you could do something like shuffle along the surface of the sewage for meters at a time. Or swim in the stuff, but there are limits to even my tolerance.
I'm not really picking a particular direction to head in, as I walk down the tunnels and chambers hidden beneath Tokyo. This is the reason Kido had come to me, beyond my complete lack of ties to anyone important in mage society. It had become known, through whatever methods it had, whater channels of gossip, that I know my way around the myriad of wastewater pipes, abandoned subway tunnels, and other things that had been excavated beneath the city. And, more importantly, the things that live down here.
As I walk among the brick and concrete tunnels, whose dirt and colour are leached out of them by what little light my torch gives out, I listen. Down beneath the surface of the world, things are quiet, but they aren't silent. The sewers themselves have their own rhythmic patterns of noise, tiny gurgles, little susurruses as they lip at the edges of their channels, the occasional rushing flow of turbulence when one flow joins another. They are the background noise of the underground, what you learned to base your hearing on.
I stop near an empty storm-drain inflow, and turn my torch down it, revealing the creature inside. It is… horrible. They look like caricatures come to life and made filthy; twisted, deformed creatures. I can see them, now, see the slight twists of mana that make up more of their body than physical reality did. They are, I think, the accumulation of humanity's more vulgar natures. I call them Gremlins.
They are far more common in Kabuchiko than where I used to live, which I attribute to the red-light district and pachinko parlours. Dozens, at least, live in the tunnels beneath here, and not many of them live long lives. Vulgarity wasn't a stable basis, even if it was a constant one.
"Hey, I'm looking for something. Tell your master." I say, as firmly as I can.
It hisses back at me, before somehow scurrying further backwards into the pipe, vanishing beyond the light of my torch. Hmm. Must be very new, or very weak, if it can't speak. There are a couple of the Gremlins - the ones who are disquietingly older than me - who have names, but almost all of them could talk. Even if I wish they couldn't. Creations made from humanity's vulgarity spoke as you expect them to.
I keep walking forwards, now, relatively assured I'll get something out of tonight's visit, even if I can't find the Oni today. Even if they don't respect me - and Gremlins don't respect anything - they fear the greater creatures of the depths, whom I've established relations with.
It takes another thirty long minutes of walking down the tunnels, crouching low in places, until something changes. The light of my torch starts flickering, cutting in and out at irregular intervals, until I turn it off, putting it in my pocket and advancing further down the black abyss that has swallowed me. I hear Muninn quork once, questioningly, before coming back to settle on my shoulder.
We advance in the darkness, every now and then pressing a hand against the brick wall to reorient myself, until I can hear the sounds around us change. I've entered one of the larger rooms inside the sewers, a place for inspections and for three streams of sewage to meet and mix, before heading down towards the treatment plants.
I stand there, one hand gripping my switchblade, the other loose and by my side. A swell of water rushes beneath me, and I ride it, and as it passes over the weir in a surge of noise, I hear a chuckle echo from the darkness.
I trace a glyph on my thumb, a simple rune of fire, and then snap my finger, a small ball of flame blossoming in my hand.
He's there, his face millimeters away from my face.
Grinning.
I yelp, almost overbalance, blindly stepping backwards, and after a moment windmilling furiously I straighten back up to his chuckles. He's tall, too tall, with limbs thin and long.
He straightens up in turn, unfolding yet more height from somewhere, running his hands through his greasy dyed blonde hair, thick with dark roots. He's dressed in a black suit and a pale blue shirt, buttons open to his chest. At the edges of his clothes it seems like you were looking at the edges of tattoos, until you notice how they slowly, softly, move. Writhe. He looks like the slickest, most unctuous yakuza wannabee you'll ever see.
"Faan Shi San-sama," I say, bowing, but not too low. I am already on the back foot from his appearance and my reaction, and I shouldn't have given him even a single inch. "Thank you for meeting with me."
His lips pull open again in a hideous parody of a grin, revealing the rows upon rows of needle-thin teeth, the bases stained rust-red. He adjusts the sunglasses I'd once given him, producing a battered packet of cigarettes with his other hand.
"Oh…. Kotoba. Rensei Kotoba. Renseiii-senseiiii. Surely, surely we're good enough friends you can call me Faan-kun, no? Would you refuse my… charity?"
"Faan… san." I say, hesitating for a second. "You seem to be in a good mood tonight."
"The pachinko machines were kind to me tonight. A light?" He indicates the cigarette he has in his hand, and I move my own to near it, before he reaches out and snatches my arm, placing the fag in his mouth and slowly moving my hand near his teeth until the tip of the cig glows a cherry red.
The flame in my hand, slowly draining my mana, cast the first cloud of smoke he exhales every colour of the setting sun, even as I try not to cough as it washes over me. And then he suddenly releases my hand from his steel-cold grip, taking a few steps backwards.
"Ah, that's nice. Tastes of death. Death and mint. Menthols, you see. Now, how long has it been since we've met, Rensei-Sensei?" I'd told him of my aspirations to be a doctor once, and he'd called me by that ever since. He tilts his head forwards, threatening to reveal what was behind the sunglasses, grinning slightly, and holdsa hand up when I start to answer. "No, no. Fifteen days. All alone, in the dark, Rensei-sensei. Fifteen days. How cruel of you. And now you come down here, and I wonder why you do so now. Perhaps, if you'd been down here a few days ago, then you wouldn't be running errands after trust-kids."
I swallow my first reply, before eventually speaking. "If I'd dealt with it earlier, then I'd not be paid for dealing with it now."
"Oh, excellent. Nothing more than self-interest. I'd been worried you were getting altruistic, Sensei-Rensei." He leans in, his entire body tilting in one straight line, until his face is at the same level as mine. I don't need my witchsight to feel the violence in his essence, all edges and points. He is unstable, just as the gremlins are, but on a longer time-scale. They all are, the new yokai, born of the new Japan. The Mononoke, as they call themselves. They are swords without hilts, to use an overused metaphor, all buried in the earth. If you don't mind getting cut, they are there for the wielding.
"Now, what do you want?"
"The Oni."
"And what did you promise to do to it? Are you a dog-catcher now, doctor? Come to take the puppy to the pound?" He puffs on his cigarette until the features on his face are all blurred by smoke.
"I'll make it go away." I try to be as curt as I can. He liks the bluntness when he is in a good mood.
"Ah. Gone. They want it gone, and so gone it shall be, ne? No moral objections, Rensei-sensei? It is eating more of your delicious species, one or two every day. And yet it never leaves the sewers. Such art, there."
I let my face relax, as best I could, and try to smile at him. "What does that matter to you?"
"Defiance. I like it." He blows out another cloud of smoke, the firelight wreathing his head in a perversion of a halo. "Want a cigarette?"
"I don't have the money for the addiction," I say, before I pause, reviewing the sentence back in my head. He chuckles all the same.
"Ah, lovely. If you ever do, please tell me. I enjoy watching addictions develop." He grins that mouth somehow still visible beneath the clouds around his head. "So, the Oni. The location of the Oni. What's it worth to me?"
"Not having suppression wander through the tunnels in a few weeks?"
"Hmm. No, no, that's a solid payment. Have you ever noticed, Rensei-sensei, that nobody in the mage trust, actually in the mage trust, has the slightest sense of humour?" He chuckles, like I hadn't seen him reach out and slowly tear a rat apart, piece by piece, just to keep his hands occupied as he walked.
He pauses, the light at the end of his cigarette growing dim, until I realise that wasn't rhetorical.
"I have. I wonder, if you took one apart, if you'd be able to find what keeps them all so constipated."
"Dignity, my little doctor. Dignity." He takes another drag on the cigarette, the embers growing bright for a moment, before they extinguish, taking the little ball of fire in my hand with them.
I stand still, as the darkness grows close again, until the edge of his sunglasses dig into my skull, his lips brushing against my ear as he whispers. "Ah. Are we friends, Kotoba? Answer honestly."
I swallow, and he puts a hand on my other shoulder, pulling me close to him. I take a moment to consider the question. He is violent. Unhinged. Not human, not even slightly. But… he'd taught me some secrets the trust didn't like outsider mages knowing. He'd vouched for me, for reasons I didn't understand, to the other Mononoke in the depths. He'd taught me what little I knew of knife fighting, and given me the switchblade on my birthday. I'd never actually told him when my birthday was, which was what made it disturbing. And sometimes, when I wished I could sleep instead of living through every hour, I came down here, and we just talked and played mahjong.
"Yes. I think… you're one of my closest friends." Not that I have enough, really, to make it a matter of degree.
The mask is ripped away from my face in one motion, and I gag on the sudden smell of sulphur and rot.
"Then call me Faan-kun, Rensei-sensei." He turns me slightly, and pushes me forwards, and I stumble across the top of the water, until I feel my hands touch the lip of an archway.
"The Oni is down there. I like the mask. Call it a fair trade, heh?" And then his presence is gone, the sharpness and fragility vanishing into nothingness.
I was pretty sure the next time I'd see him, he'd be wearing my mask. Which… was probably worth a few hours of breathing sewer smell. It was really a disturbing smile.
---
The path is long and straight, longer than it ever could be. I keep on walking, checking the power on the torch every hundred heartbeats or so, until it finally bursts into electrical light after maybe twenty minutes. There are a few paths I could take, beneath the city, where I can walk in a straight line for twenty minutes, but none without interruption or intersection. But that'd been what I'd seen in the walls, brick or concrete, but never marred with another opening.
A path to the Oni. It is hiding itself, obviously, else Seo wouldn't have needed to do anything. Wait until it killed, and then follow the murder back to wherever it is. Easy sympathetic magic. Even I can pull that off, if I could store up enough power.
But an Oni is a monster, and monsters live off the edges of maps. And isn't that the depths? I was pretty sure they aren't real, not in the same way that sewer engineers might wander among them in the daylight. It's a liminal space, fixed between the unknowable underearth and the human city above. A human underground, known to exist, unknown what it contains.
Some time later, Muninn pecks at my hair again, and I hold up my free hand to let her peck at my fingers, while I keep walking onwards. Whatever Faan had used to breach the Oni's defences, it hasn't broken them entirely. The length of the path is probably what remains, a compromise between access - you can hardly say a straight line without intersections is a troublesome path - and the defences working, as the sheer length deterrs as best it can.
The torch starts to flicker again and I frown, slightly. It has been… an hour, maybe two, since I've turned it on. Is that merely the battery running dry, or a sign of my approach? I frown, reaching a hand up to clasp around my neck and slightly squeeze.
Odin, who hung for three days to gain wisdom. Ten seconds of mild constriction doesn't do much, but it chases away the tiredness clouding my thoughts for at least a little while. Idol Theory, or God Forms. It is probably what I am best at, after ritual. The lessons that Reproduction has available don't talk about it too much, preferring evocation or other, more mana hungry forms of magic. Magic that would need information they didn't provide to perfect.
But they talked about it a little, because witchsight was such an essential technique. There were doubtless other ways to perform it, but the simplest one was to block one eye. Odin, again. Giving up one eye, in exchange for knowledge. It was common enough that a few of the prissier greetings mages would give each other included it - or at least allusions to it - to establish that there was no deception.
Cowards.
It is quick, it is temporary, and it is cheap. The materials I'd gotten hadn't even mentioned it would cost mana, and that wasn't even a deliberate omission as far as I could tell. Most mages simply didn't notice that it cost any. It does, of course, it requires energy to burn through Lie and see the truth of things, but they aren't wrong. So convenient, so easy. Easy enough it even dominates here, eight thousand kilometers from home.
Cowards.
Munnin pecks at my fingers around my neck, and I release them. One of the instructors on the video tapes had a tight choker around her neck to do the same thing on a more constant basis, provide a little boost of wisdom. That was my inspiration. You can make it more perfect, express more of it, by more perfectly imitating the source. Human belief make the magic flow easier.
It is why I'd chosen Muninn.
And now I have one eye. The same sacrifice Odin made, all those years ago. And now I have the best witchsight in Tokyo. It has a cost, of course. I can never turn it off. No, I always see that little extra layer, that little extra detail, just waiting to unfold into a world of connections and allusions if I would just press in a bit more. I've gotten good at turning it out, these past few years.
I'd cheated, even then. I still had two eyes, just only one that was mine, the other my familiar's. It bound Muninn to me, the fact the link went both ways, and of course it gave me binocular vision. Better than that, actually, as eagles have excellent eyesight, and it wasn't much of a ritual at all to make my worse eye match the abilities of my new, better one.
Did mean I had to carve a rune of illusion into the zygomatic bone under my eagle eye, but that didn't hurt much. Not compared to ripping my eye out, anyway.
Why am….
I stare at my fingers, looking at the fine webbing that surrounds them and fades into darkness and twirls together into a cord that reached my throat. Oh, that is clever.
How long have I stood here, exulting in my own genius, instead of walking forwards. And what triggered it? … The first act of magic I've done in the corridor, my breath for insight.
I've not moved backwards, of that I am sure. I examine the threads as they meld into the darkness and the walls around me. Whatever Faan had done to make this the path had stopped whatever defences that could halt me, but this… this had to be done since I'd started walking, cleverly weaving around what remained of the previous defences. I'd chosen to stop, to exalt in my own superiority, and so it didn't count. It was made to trigger on the act of performing magic, because that would be easy to make a mage just start exalting themselves, because what mage
wasn't proud of their skill?
I pick up my torch, from where it had fallen on the ground, and start walking again.
That does mean I am getting close. I am facing a Yokai, not a mage, which likely meant that this was the only defence they'd been able to put up. Spirits are less flexible than mages, in general, more constrained in the kinds of things they could do. Even this is honestly reaching, and probably half enabled by the way Faan had made the path, providing enough energy from the destruction of the Oni's defences that the Oni had been able to repurpose it all into this.
I make sure my jacket is pulled tight around me, and gripp my switchblade with my other hand. I'd taken a hundred paces since I'd started walking again, and the dim light of my torch shows the walls of the tunnel curving away. A chamber. Eight paces away, probably, the resonance of the sacred number would have made it easier to hang a defence there.
I call up the mana within me, twisting and folding it up and down my limb. It is another use of idol theory, and rather weak compared to a geomantic grid, or even a standard ward. But it is cheaper on the mana, and so I mumble the rote Hebrew phrases. It'd likely be cheaper, and better, if I did this in a country with a greater abrahamic tradition.
The vows of a Nazarite are to abstain from wine. To remain pure from corpses and graves. And never to cut their hair.
I have been to a grave, and touched corpses. I have cut my hair. But I have never drank wine. Samson touched a corpse, and drank wine. But he never cut his hair, and so YHWH gave him strength. One vow upheld, the other two broken.
I finish the short recitation of Samson's vows in a language I didn't speak, and the vast majority of the mana I have leaves me, a gasping hollow forming inside me.
A trickle, the barest fraction of Samson's legendary strength, surges through my muscles in return. But the framework of mana established inside me that grants me that strength takes barely any mana to upkeep, enough that I can feel my mana return as I breathe in and out.
I take my hand out of my pocket, and wipe the sweat away on my leg, before grabbing the knife again, and walk forwards, dropping Muninn to the ground. She could be a distraction, perhaps a couple of times. But she was still a bird. Still fragile.
The chamber doesn't look like even the one Faam Shi San was in, or any other in the depths. They were the actual sewer rooms beneath Tokyo, or mirrors of the same. But here, it feels more like an animal's den. The walls curved, the bricks rounded.
The giant sakura tree the Oni is sitting under.
I take my knife out of my pocket, blade still retracted, as I train my torch's light on it. It. No, she. She is young, younger than me, if that meant anything to a yokai, with hair the same shade as the blossoms falling around her pierced by two horns, and dressed in a kimono, the edges stained in filth. And she feels stable, healthy. She is a yokai, true and proper, supported by the weight of a thousand years of belief, and lacked that raw edge the Mononoke here had.
She slowly got up, and I tensed.
"So, you've come, bringing your filth with you." She gestures at the sewer I still stood atop of. Yeah, I had to give her that. "So. Have you come to drag me back, Mage?" She's shorter than me, but she holds herself like a noble, imperious and unbending.
I adjust the grip on my knife, my hand sweaty again. She is three meters away from me. Straight lunge, use the knife's extension, straight for the throat. I could do it.
"No," I say instead.
She laughs, high and derisive. "The Seo may not be a major family, but… ah. I see. I am ruined, ah, by my standing amongst this pit of a city. To kill me then, assassin?"
I wonder what she could see, with the torch in her eyes. A silhouette, perhaps? Just a faint outline? Or is she using some form of sight to see even with the light and dark clashing over her?
"Not necessarily," I say.
"You make for a poor liar. I can see it in you. You came here with the intent to kill me. So go on, then. I know I am no match for one of Suppression's leashed killers." She spreads her arms. She cannot guard herself, not from any one of a dozen angles. She isn't human. It'll be easy.
"I don't work for Suppression," I say.
She purses lips as red as her skin, and makes a small noise. "No. Perhaps you do not. So what then, mage? You have burnt through my defences, and I will hold you to account. Name yourself, mage."
Name Yourself. I know the demand, it was common among spirits. Our response was, honestly, a superstition at this point. The great spirit courts had been laid low. The fae weren't even native to this continent. And what anyone else could do with your birth name - even fellow mages - wasn't that hard to deflect.
"Rensei Kotoba," I say, and it isn't a lie. That is the key. You couldn't just use any fake name for this. I mean, you probably could in the modern day. But by associating one name with your practice, and one name with your mundane life, you isolated the two. Provided just that little bit of extra protection when you weren't engaged in the arts. And I'd take any protection I could. "I have been promised six hundred and fifty thousand, repayments of debts owed, if I rid this place of you."
She scoffs, an act that almost looks beneath her. "I'm worth at least ten million."
"I'm not," I say. "And that's why I'm here."
"What, then, are you waiting for? I see the knife in your hand. Come, you cheaply bought soul, and see what I can do, ruined as I am."
"I don't… have to kill you. Not explicitly."
She brings her arms close together, hiding her hands in her sleeves, and stares up at me. "You've never killed, have you."
"Not… anything sentient." There had been a few bastard mononoke either too far gone or not yet grown. And some rats.
"Ah. Do you have some ideas, then? I may hate how diminished I have grown, but I do not hate myself more than I hate my life, Rensei-san."
I swallow, and wipe my hand against my trousers again. "These sewers can hide you. Unless. Do you need to kill people?"
"Yes," she says, and she sounds regretful. "I do. Do you know why the Seo clan had me? They know the weight that can be gained from belief. There is a power there. And their shrines, their towns, the little rituals they have set up in their quaint valley… it allowed us to exist. And they drew from that. Siphoning the mana of belief. It kept us weak and provided them with strength. And then, a few generations ago, they realised it would be more efficient to be more… direct. If they could draw the mana directly into themselves. And so, in those sun-lit gardens, they began their project, to mix their blood and ours. That is what I was born to enjoy. So I left, before I had no more chances too."
And outside whatever structure supports the Oni by the weight of belief… she'd need another source of power. And Oni are known for murder and cannibalism. The efficiency loss - especially if she was part human… No wonder she calls herself diminished.
"I could provide…" The words are like ash in my mouth, and I could see that it hadn't fooled her. I can't provide her with enough. Perhaps a geomancer could, if they could redirect part of a ley-line. Perhaps an astromancer could find the right signs to do so.
"No," she says, surprisingly gentle. "You couldn't."
I nod, and readjustmy grip again. The grip is sweaty.
"Well. Who… are you?"
She smiles. "Ume."
I nod.
I lunge forwards, knife flicking out, but she was already stepping back, her hands appearing with claws that were
definitely not there before. The lunge turns into a stumble, and Ume is there, going for my stomach with her claws.
I twist my shoulder, turning the stumble into a bodycheck, momentum in my favour, and we both slam against the tree. I stumble back. She's on the ground. Where's my knife? In my hand. Right.
I grip my knife harder and Ume's kick slams into my jaw. I bite my tongue, my mouth filling with iron. Samson girds me, though, and I don't fall over. I slash wildly, blindly, and it bites, digging into something. I take a few steps backwards, readjusting my grip on my knife as the dark spots disappear from my vision.
I'd ripped through her sleeve, and I could see blood dripping to the floor. My tongue was throbbing, and we looked at each other.
I hated this.
I throw my mana into my boots, the enchantment boosting itself. I move from a standing start into motion, but she is faster than me and used to it. I overextend and she rips through my jacket, cutting under my arm. I twist, and slam my elbow into her temple, but that stretches my new wound.
I gasp in pain, and she sweeps the leg, and I collapse onto the ground. I twist, but she's kicking me in the wound, and I roll to absorb the blow.
I roll into the sewer.
My boots cannot sink. The rest of me does, and I'm in the churning filth, eyes stinging and I'm flailing, hands splashing on the surface, trying to find anything to grab onto, to pull myself out, and I can't see anything, and I can taste it and smell it and it's everywhere, and I slowly start tilting down.
I have barely anything left. I have no breath to draw, to gain mana by, and I'm sinking into filth. I need to think. Knife. Still got my knife. What else? My head hits the base of the channel and I twist, twist until I can feel my hand against the concrete, my lungs burning, begging me for air. I have the echo of strength flooding through me, and I kick my legs to try to move my feet still hanging in the air. I have to move, move my body over my hand, so I can launch myself out. I can taste copper and offal in my mouth and my armpit is burning with four lines of scourging pain, and I am kicking and I'm moving so slowly and I can hear my heart in my ears and I kick and kick and kick until I can't kick anymore.
I push with everything I have left, and launch myself out of the effluent. I hit something hard, and fall to the floor, my arms aching, but I force my eyes open, dark blurs sharpening, and I still have the sight of a god and eagle both.
I'm on the other side of the sewage channel from her, and I push myself to my feet, panting, stripping bare fragments of mana from the air but my blood needs the oxygen. She's staying there. Of course. She has to leap over it, while… I've got footing there, I can treat it as ground.
I somehow still have my knife and I step forwards, still breathing heavily, spitting stuff I don't ever want to think about out of my mouth. I can do this. I've got to do this. I have height. I've got the weight advantage. I can retreat over here and she can't follow.
I can kill her. Right?
I stare at her. Ume is still as solid as ever under my mage-sight, but I can see how she's cradling her arm close, the one I cut, and her temple is already swelling slightly. Alright.
Round two.
I step forwards, onto the water, and throw a quick thrust. She dodges, dodges left, and I step sideways, turning it into a slash. I keep the attacks up, trying to drive her into one of the corners, but she's still so fast, and she throws a counter whenever I get too close to a wall. We go back and forth, two, three times. It gives me time, though, time to breathe. Time to plan.
I've been feeding mana to my eyes instinctually ever since I emerged from the sewer, my torch lost down there, which means I have two free hands. I slash, and she dodges to my left, and I strike.
I hit her in the throat and she gasps and she sounds so hurt that I hesitate, and she backs off, and we have space again.
No. I press my advantage, quick little slashes, backed by the force of my spell, my other hand high up in a guard but ready, hitting her limbs, her chest, her face, any target that she leaves open as I keep walking forwards. Until her back is against the Sakura tree. I slash high and sweep her legs, before diving on top of her. I've got the weight, I've got the strength, and we grapple for a second. I grab one hand, and then the other, and wrench them high and pin them there with one hand, my knee pressing into her guts.
Ume stares up at me with her one good eye, fluid slowly leaking from the other. From where I cut her.
"So? Go on then!"
I'm breathing heavily, filth still dripping off my clothes, copper and iron and rot in my mouth. I readjust my grip.
"Oh. Oh you coward. Come on, Kotoba. Finish me!
Do it!"
I do it.
---
I don't quite know how long I sat there.
But some time later, Muninn gave a few muttered cries, and a few seconds later, I hear a pair of leather-soled shoes walk in. There was a pause. And then they start walking those few last paces.
"Congratulations, Rensei-sensei," Faan says. "Victory is yours."
"Some victory."
"Ah yes, shame about the clothes. I don't think you're going to get those clean. But, fortunately, I believe there is a solution to that."
He bends down, such that his next word was breathed into my ear.
"
Fire."
I snap my fingers, and hold the fireball up to the side of my head for a second, before letting it go out. He chuckles, before blowing a stream of scented smoke over my shoulder, blocking my eyes for a second. Was that a kindness?
"And how are you, Rensei Kotoba?"
"I'm fine." I say.
His tone drops an octave. "You're
bleeding."
I breathe in, though my nose. I'd had long enough to think it over. Three deep cuts, one less so. The middle one managed to rip through some of my intercostals. Breathing hurt. And then I'd fell into a sewer, with four open wounds.
"I can fix it all."
"I have no doubt about… No. No. One, two, and up you come." Two hands reach under my armpits and drag me upright, until I'm standing on my feet again, legs groaning with the pain of sudden blood flow. He spins me around, and I see the needle toothed smile ripping into the filter of a cigarette, even as he dry washes his hands, the filth somehow not clinging to them.
His hands are already stained.
"That's better. Now we can talk face to face, Rensei-sensei. Like friends."
"Like friends," I echo.
He's bending down, I realise, so his eyes are level with mine. I look into the thick black plastic of the sunglasses, and he stares back. He wasn't wearing my mask.
"First time, isn't it?"
I nod, a little jerkily.
"Ahhhh. I cannot sympathise." He tilts his head, lips briefly covering his teeth as he pulls a long drag. "But… was it worth it?"
I swallow. "No. It was… cheap. It… She… deserved a better life."
"Don't be an idiot, Rensei-sensei. Deserve has nothing to do with it."
"It was still cheap. Sixty five."
He winces, a little, at the figure. "Not much, but you're forgetting another part of it. A life and change a day."
I move my gaze from his teeth to where his eyes should be. "You don't approve of altruism, Faan-kun."
"I am a thing of violence and gambling and extortion." He shrugs, a little, a surprisingly human gesture. "But you're not."
I don't say anything for a moment, and Faan exhales another cloud of smoke, before straightening up, and looking around at the chamber, and the tree. "It… is an interesting place, here. Not real. Not tethered to anything."
He looks past me, behind me, before turning back to the chamber. "Not anymore, at least. I wonder… There's enough of an investment here. I think… it might survive. A little nowhere place. Perhaps…"
Perhaps. It wouldn't survive intact. It'd diminish, now, perhaps collapse entirely. But Faan must have invested something to create that path, and… he might twist what that leads to. If he would bother.
"A short-cut place." I say. It'd be the easiest to transform it into, if it survived. A bulb, disconnected from the depths, tethered to nowhere in specific. Useful, given how much walking I usually did.
He chuckles, humourlessly. "Ah, but I like having you walk fruitlessly."
I sigh, and Muninn flies over, pecking at my hair a little, before alighting on my shoulder.
"Go home, Kotoba."
I turn to look at him, and he's just staring at the grate by which the sewer exited the room.
"Go home. Take off your clothes. Burn them. And then consider what you did here. Have a shower, perhaps. I've heard it's a good place for thinking."
"Do. Do. Do," I swallow, hard. "Do you know anything that makes it easier?"
He grins, revealing dozens more of his teeth. "In the long run, everyone dies." He pauses at that, a little, before striding over, grabbing one of my hands, and pushing something into it. "Don't want to leave that behind, do you?"
I open my hand to see the switchblade. When had I let go of it?
I flick it open, and the motion pushes out two pieces of paper, and I absently grab them. The blade is clean, but the little scratches of tonight are still there.
"Needs a little sharpening, but you used it well."
I give a little smile at the compliment, even though I don't want to. I look at my other hand, and see two ten-thousand yen notes. I look up at him again.
"For new clothes."
"I don't need… charity." I say, still letting them rest in my palm.
"It isn't
charity," He spits.
"Consider it… payment."
"For what?" I say, curious.
His cigarette has gone, leaving his grin unadorned. "The body."
I give a weak smile in return, and turn to the entrance.
It's a shorter walk back than in, and I arrive only two turns from the entrance I use. I push the cover out of the way, and Muninn launches herself up into the early morning sky, vanishing out of sight. Dawn was halfway here already. I follow, kicking the cover back into place with a slight grunt of effort, before letting the decaying frame of Samson's strength collapse.
I stumble, the pain in my side suddenly worse, and drag myself the dozen steps home. I leave my pristine boots in the genkan and try to avoid touching anything as I make my way to my tiny little bathroom.
I follow Faan's advice. I dump the clothes in the sink, take out my unused chalk and ball, and burn them until they're mostly ash and my mana is exhausted, and stand under the showerhead until the water runs light pink from my untreated cuts and the hot water is long exhausted.
I slowly stumble out, and finally stare at a clock. Quarter-to-six.
Slightly less than two hours to school. Just about enough time. And so, with exhausted arms, I set about trying to heal myself.
-----
Hello. I've had this written for probably a couple of years at this point, but I couldn't figure how to move on from here. So instead, I've now decided this is either going to be a stand-alone, or the start of an anthology featuring Kotoba/Kamiko and the other characters in this setting which drifts around the detritus of my subconscious. Inspired, by
@BiopunkOtrera 's little fantasy world, as well as a long running oMage character I play, as well as elements from half a dozen other things.