Nishifune Nozomi is a cursed witch in a Tokyo not quite like our own, trying to survive love, politics, crime and the minions of the outer dark.
The Troubled Schooldays of Nishifune Nozomi
The Troubled School Days of Nishifune Nozomi
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Chapter 1-1: Schools and Libraries
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've almost broken into the library when the girl with the goggles drops on me.
She's shorter than me, but then I chose to be tall for a girl. Her gear looks like it's high-tech rather than mystic; a form-fitting suit in dark, migraine pattern digital camouflage, equipment webbing; and the goggles. I'm into those goggles. A whole array of lenses, eight of them, a pattern of fourth-generation night vision, and another optic I don't recognize, possibly thermal. You can't buy goggles like that, I've tried.
It's a stylish and practical outfit, and I admire it a little as we come together in a rapid exchange of blows. Even so, I prefer my white hoodie, black skirt, shorts and thigh highs with red stitching, a long coat, and red-accented black fox mask. She's got a somewhat easier time sneaking about but I can disappear into a crowd. At least mostly.
She's quick, impossible quick. She's not as strong as I am but the initial drop strike knocks me down and forces me into a frantic spin kick up, which drives her back just long enough for me to regain her feet. She's poised to come right back in after, short jabs transitioning suddenly into longer punches and kicks as she measures me.
I'm assuming she's here for the same reason I am. Thieves don't like to share.
"You're pretty good." She drives me back with a jab, then jumps back as I snap up a kick, just avoiding its arc.
"I know." I look at her, head on one side. "You too. Am I telegraphing? You're reading my moves or something."
"Just a talent I have."
She comes in again, a rapid series of elbow and knee strikes, a sudden transition to punches and longer kicks as I try to step back out of it. I'm glad of the armour spell I put on myself, and the more mundane concealed layer in the jacket as I ride several punches.
She's seeing the future.
I don't have time to check, as it would require I cover my eye in a symbolic sacrifice for wisdom, but I'm almost certain she's not a mage.
Looks like I'm fighting my first Esper.
The building isn't really where you'd think you'd find a library of dark and eldritch power. I got a tip that this was stored up here from one of my contacts, and decided to check it out. It's the top story of one of those white mid-rises in Shibuya, above a real estate agent and three levels of paper records for an antiquarian book company which, given they also own the top floor, needs serious investigation. After I'm done ripping them off I'll probably inform the proper authorities.
I'd just got into the main library, and found the floor covered with record binders and strewn papers and one safe open. That's when Goggle Girl dropped on me. The infiltration was pretty easy up to this point, but now I'm in the fight of my life.
I speak a word of power and emit an omni-directional wave of force. She was already dodging back, but her sight didn't give her enough time to get away, and she gets knocked sprawling, then flips head over heels and lands on her feet across from me.
"A mage, huh?" She smiles. "Not security I'll bet. You're here to steal the book."
She's not supposed to know about that. Someone has been talking out of school. "I don't know who you are, but the black books can only bring you sorrow."
"Well I mean, I'm not going to keep it." She waves a package, then seems to blink. "Wait, books?" She dodges behind the shelves as I launch a shadow bolt at her. I go over the top, throwing out a pair of sparrow knives, only for her to catch them in a heavy volume of records, and then kick the bookshelf over. I drop backward away from the fall, only for her to erupt through it, one of my own sparrow blades seeking for my throat. A quick yank on its runes spins the blade away and try I a kick, but she ducks past it, carrying me over into a hold she abords halfway through to flip away before I can set her on fire.
"You're persistent. Don't you think you've got bigger things to worry about?"
My phone, connected to the building security system on the way in begins to buzz. A silent alarm has been triggered.
"Bye-bye." She runs and jumps through a window, taking advantage of my momentary distraction. I launch another bolt of force at her but it misses her fleeing form and blows a divot out of the wall next to me. I get there just in time to see her swinging away on a line, impossibly graceful. I turn back to my work. Things have now officially gone wrong.
The alarm brings no immediate response. No shadows coalescing into fearful eyeless hounds or hidden coffins opening to release undying things. I have at least some time to work.
I wonder where goggle girl got her information from. She obviously knew exactly which safe she wanted, but apparently not about the other black book. I'd say an insider, but people who have libraries like this tend to have ways to ensure the loyalty of their troops.
An inspection of the safe shows warding symbols which implies the previous presence of a black book. My information says there are two volumes here, so one is up for grabs, plus whatever is in the other safes. I pull the safecrackers out of my webbing and set them down on the shelf. They're spidery electromechanicals, eight legs with various tools. Each one clicks through a functions check, then begins to move to one of the safes.
The remaining books should make coming here more than worth it.
My phone buzzes again and I check it, bring up video from my drone. A security response is arriving, and not the one I expected.
When you break into the library of a group linked to eldritch horrors like those found in the pages of the black books, you kind of assume they'll come at you a certain way. Vaguely octopoid horrors, shadowy creatures, long-range death curses. I've got a full suite of stuff meant to deal with just that, but this is a surprise. The men pouring out of the pair of mismatched utility vans below belong to some other place, some other city.
There are twenty of them, all big and bulky, clad in a variety of civilian clothes that almost but not quite makes them look like civilians. Kevlar helmets, balaclavas, night vision, plate carriers and body armour with military webbing over it. Moving tactically forward behind those ubiquitous American rifles. All the same gun. Same gear too.
Japan has, on average, about six gun deaths a year, and hasn't been much of a target for foreign terrorists, so Tokyo doesn't have a system like London, where the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorist Unit can appear a score of grey-clad men with brand new Swiss carbines on some poor false alarm. I lived in London for a while. It's a funny place.
And these aren't police. I know what the Tokyo Metropolitan Police emergency response team and the national level special assault team look like, and even if they were to go around in civilian clothes, their gear isn't this new, and they carry submachine guns, not rifles. They're not the TMP's shiny new anti-Esper unit either, who carry a lot more ordinance, gas grenade launchers and .50 cal rifles with fancy high tech scopes.
This is interesting.
No way to run. The building has a fire escape but they've got it locked down, and the countermeasures in here prevent teleporting out of the building even if I was willing to leave my prize behind.
I'll fight.
The men clear rapidly, two floors at a time, four men per room, with the spares covering up and down. By the time I've got organized, they've reached the third floor, coming off, pointman aiming his gun up into the gloom above.
He sees a dark shape coming down on him.
"Contact!"
The gunfire is loud and brassy in the confined space. Rounds rip into my coat as it drops on them. The man covering the left door glances up at the noise. In the confined space, even a suppressed round is loud. Others see me burst through the door on the right, and turn that way, shooting. Another illusion, a mirror image. In fact, I'm through the right, the light bent around me to reduce me to near invisibility as I slam a knee into a man's face. He gasps, knocked backwards into the stair rail, and I ride him over it, down onto the steps below. Gunfire erupts to my side and I felt at least one bullet slam into my armour but not pierce the layer of magical reinforcement.
We land badly, but with me on top, and him still moving. Above I can hear shouting. Men on the stairs swing around to aim at me.
I speak a word of activation. The runes I left on the walls of the third-floor offices blow out. The overpressure brings down dust and shatters the windows. The man aiming at me vanishes in a spray of dust and fire.
I roll off the one I'm on top of. I wanted one for interrogation. The guys up there probably aren't all dead, but they're not going to be talking. That ambush was maybe a little risky just to get a prisoner but as I said I'm curious.
My captive moves weakly; he's wearing jeans, a dress shirt, and suit jacket. Something about the subtle mismatch puts me on edge. Tactical gear over civilian clothes is common enough but why that outfit? I pull the rifle away from him and cut his webbing away, pulling his weapons away as I step back. Just in time, as the mask tears and writhes. A mass of white tentacles explodes out at me. I fall over and then turn it into a side roll, coming back to my feet as the body jerks up on invisible strings, an impossible mass of worming white pouring free of his dislocated mouth.
I punch them as hard as I can. My movement, long-practiced, is just so, completing the circuit which will flow magical force from air and down my arm. The horror goes flying, smashes into the wall, and sets fire.
I breathe hard under my mask, and almost snatch it off before thinking better of it. I've seen creatures like this before, and I'm suddenly far more afraid. Not of them but of what they work for.
I pull out my phone, a little shakily, and turn off the building's sprinklers, then begin to chant up fire. Flame erupts above me, catching on carpets and internal fittings. Air is pulled up, sucking at my skirt. My coat reforms on my arm, none the worse for wear. There's the popcorn sound of bullets cooking off as the weapons on the floor above heat up. I wince as a round spans off the stairs near me.
On my phone, the safecrackers report the safes are open. Fire is between me and them, but the anti-teleport mesh is only in the outer walls of the building, not the middle.
I still have to get what I came for and neutralize the ones on the outside of the building, but it's long past time I was gone from here.
Do well in school. Do cram school too. Go to a top university. Enjoy the springtime of your youth. Get a job, work all day in a career you hate. Marry a good man, or one who's just okay, or one you hate. Drink yourself to death. Get a part-time job, don't raise a family. Get a full-time career and kill yourself from overwork. Have ungrateful children. Rush in every morning. Fight off the advances of your boss. Get bullied by your coworkers. Come home late every night. Work away your best years for honour, for your family, for the company, for the shareholders, for nothing at all.
That's not for me.
My name's Nishifune Nozomi and I'm a thief and a witch. I stole someone's place in a top school by cheating on the tests, and I'll do the same thing for one of the nation's finest universities. Not because I want an education, or a job, or a tall, rich husband who understands me. No. I want power. The University of Tokyo is home to one of the greatest collections of mystic esoterica surviving in Japan, and I want access to it. That achieve no less a stepping stone to my desire than the evil arcana I stole last night.
I never had any desire to go here, to a school. I was just going to mark time here. To do the minimum I needed to make my passing hours. To deceive people into thinking I was brilliant while missing all the tiresome stepped on minutiae of academia. To just walk along through my school life without anyone noticing me.
How did I end up liking it here? How did I end up enjoying this as much as I enjoy winning? Is it really normal life that calls to me?
As if this is normal life either.
Fujisaka Jogakuin is an all-girls private high school on the western outskirts of Tokyo, where the city starts to merge with the mountains. It's actually quite high up, with a really nice view. Its buildings are deliberately old-looking and somewhat careworn, but lovingly restored by various grants. It's a school that seems like it should be boarding, but is just faking the aesthetic to pull in the daughters of the upper-middle-class professionals and lower rich who are its main clients. It has a good academic record and good relations with Tokyo University.
It's an artificial place. A postmodern Maria-sama ga Miteru reference without the religion for the credulous new rich. Elements stolen from British education, stuff that owes more to Kyoto or Osaka than the Kanto region.
So why do I kind of enjoy coming here?
Well, it has uniforms I like. A deliberately retro black Serafuku with a white collar and a blue scarf. If I'm honest with myself, that's why I'm here. There's an option to add black thigh highs, and I use it. There are plenty of girls' schools with good grades and good locations, but I have a look and I want to maintain it even at school.
Also it's haunted, but I'm not really involved with that.
To be honest there are things here I could do without. Like having to attend while aching where my armour took bullets last night, or my tiresome position in school politics. But I can deal. It's not so bad.
There are two hundred and ten days left of my sakura-coloured school life.
Given I'm dying, maybe I shouldn't wish them away.
Time to go home. The lunch period was mostly filled with signup for non-sports clubs. I'm too hurt to feel sociable today, and I have another engagement this evening which I'm kind of dreading. I can at least, go home and--
"Gokigenyou Nozomin-chan!"
There is a certain type of girl at this school who gives me a lot of attention. Not the most popular people at school, but I have a kind of crossover appeal to both the nerds and the athletes. Stuck up on top of a mountain without even any male teachers, of course I get a lot of attention. They're a clowder of starving cats. I'm tall and athletic with test scores regularly in the top ten percent, mysterious, standoffish, beautiful, with white hair that is unusual in a sea of black. I'm an albino, did I mention?
I think the lack of male teachers is because of the haunting.
The first speaker, able to get in first because she sits closest to me is Manako. She's one of the weirdest girls in the school. Knows all the legends of the local area, urban or otherwise. I think she's the one most into my witchy self. She's shorter than me, and kind of plain in a way that I really go for, wears big thick glasses that make her seem less capable. She's actually pretty athletic, went to the nationals in second-year track, but you can't see it past the glasses.
"Manako-chan, how was your spring break, you were going to Hawaii weren't you?"
She beams at me, pleased I remembered. "Yes. It was nice, but hot. We went shooting. How about you?"
"I went to London." I rise, getting my bag. "I'll show you some pictures later, though I'm afraid I can't stay too long tonight."
Manako is basically my best friend. I've known her since middle school. She told me her family put her up to it, after they heard I was a rich orphan with no friends.
"Did you see Buckingham Palace?"
"Yes. Also lots of protests." I head for the door with Manako trailing. A bunch of the other girls are studiously ignoring this spectacle or giving Manako looks about how loud she's being.
"I'm jealous. I'd like to see London. I hear there's all kinds of--"
"Gokigenyou Nozomin-san." At the door, I'm ambushed by several members of the visual arts appreciation society, of which I am a distant pseudo member in that I'm their friend and main financier. We do cosplay together and I sometimes go to meetings when I don't have sports.
"Ah, Fumi-chan." Their spokeswoman is a slim, short-haired girl named Nakata Fumi who has ambitions to be a voice actress. "Did you get your interview?" I gently fend off Manako, who's started simmering, as I turn my best smile on this new block.
"Ah." She blushes. "Ah. Yes. It was only a very minor role though." She brushes her hair back self consciously, aware that such a gig is not so minor a thing for a wannabe voice actress. "Will you be attending our evening sessions this year?"
"I'm afraid with exam prep and volleyball I probably can't, but I'm sure I can drop in some lunchtimes or if I'm ever have an evening free. Figure out what blu-rays you want this year, I can still finance them. Also, we should meet and discuss our outfits for the summer."
"Yes! Thank you!"
We get through the door, Manako talking about gun safety and the limits of Hawaiian shooting ranges. Almost free.
"Hey! Nozomi-chan."
Akagi Akari is the only girl at Fujisaka Gakuin as tall as I am, a fit, slim, muscular girl who seems to be all legs. Akari is the captain of the volleyball team, to which she forcibly recruited me. Last year we went to the final, this year she hopes for more. "Hey Akari, what's up?"
"Hey, come to signup in your kit tomorrow. I want to have something impressive happen during signup, so we're going to play two vs. two."
"You don't think the pair of us might scare of the small fry?"
"If they're scared I don't want them."
"Sure sure." I wave to her in passing. "I'll see you at practice."
"Alright. How about tonight? An extra game?"
"Sorry, I have a prior engagement."
"Alright." She sighs. "Hey, help me study as well right? If I'm going to do university volleyball I need to actually get into university."
"Sure."
There are three secrets to my academic success. The first is that I only need to sleep more than one night in five. The second is potions that allow me to boost my memory and recall of information. The third is rampant magic-enabled cheating, I'm a thief, I told you. I don't actually go to cram school, I'm just blackmailing a gambling addict teacher to tick me as having attended. Occasionally I show up, but it's not a thing I really do, just an appearance. I have other things to do in the evening.
I head up to the third floor. I'll cut back down the stairs at the other end of the building and leave by the other door, that should avoid most everyone. The top floor is mostly club rooms, so it's not used that much when things aren't setting up till tomorrow.
The only person up here should be-- "Hoshi-san, are you hiding?"
Hoshi Rei, president of the student council is a very serious, very squared away girl with stylish glasses. She's a mass of perfect test scores, and a secret. Right now she's covertly glancing out through the blinds in a way that seems kind of comical from the inside. "Ah, Nozomi-san." She steps back from the window, radiating a burning aura of awkwardness that almost sets the room on fire. "Gokigenyou."
"What's up?" I step inside, walk to the window and look out. From this height you can see the outer waiting area. Among the shiny new cars and parent people carriers I note a figure at the back, a girl on a motorcycle. "Friend of yours?" I give her a suggestive look.
"Ah, yes. She's not supposed to come here and now my parents messaged me to say that they're picking me up. I need to find a way to get her to leave and pick me up later! She doesn't know my parents car well so she might wave at me or something and then I'll have to answer questions. I've texted her three times but she's not picking up her cell!"
I pat her shoulder. "No problem. I'll take care of it."
She slumps into her chair, melting with relief.
I head down the back stairs, change my shoes and out, walking towards my car on a trajectory that takes me past her. On the way I wave to the cute Underclassman who has to handle the ghosts. Smooth as could be. It looks perfectly natural as I walk past motorcycle girl. As if I am there purely by accident.
"Her parents are here. Get her later." I whisper. The girl, who has short, dyed blonde hair and with a cigarette in her mouth nods.
"Thanks. Fancy a lift?"
I consider it. If anyone asks, I can tell them it's my cousin, and it'd provide a tradecraft way to get her out of here.
"Sure." I hope Rei-san isn't too jealous. I hop on the back and put the spare helmet on.
I do kind of like it here.
Every month, the collected Wizards of Tokyo hold a party, for that I'll need a dress.
After my activities last night, I also have another reason to visit my tailor.
J-to-Me is a small but fashionable shop in Ginza. It mostly caters to men. Male suits and so on, but the owner is an old, well, let's say friend of mine, who will tailor me jackets and dresses.
Honestly I think it's mostly because he hopes to redefine my aesthetic for me.
He smiles at me coolly when I step in through the back door, and see Junya in the workshop, pinning a suit together on a dummy. "Nozomi-chan."
Junya is five years older than me long-haired with glasses and a ponytail. He wears a suit, coal-black. Usually, a suit is a coffin for the male physique, meant to disguise the imperfections of a man. Not so Junya. His is so sharp you could cut yourself, rigorously tight across his frame, showing off a body at the peak of fitness, and the cold expression of a sadist.
Junya is another of the strays the house Aratani took in like my own family. Their fate was happier than mine, death only, not betrayal. Junya was away at the time, learning tailoring and magic in Italy to keep him away from the other side of his family, a powerful and extremely corrupt house of exorcists and priests.
He is both handsome and beautiful. And oh he's cruel.
"Junya-kun. I'm here for my dress for the party tonight."
"Of course. If you'll follow me? I believe I have something that will fit."
He leads me into the back, and waves me into a changing room. "Let me measure you, see that you haven't grown any larger." I allow this, the tape snapping around with quick, whip-like motions, snapping across me.
I bite my lip a little.
"You really went to the trouble of compensating for the curse's impact on your health, and then overcompensating." The tape snaps across, lifting me up slightly on my toes, then away. "What a showoff you've grown to be." The tapes movements start to remind me of the demonic wire he uses as his primary weapon.
I run a finger down the front of his suit. The cloth is a little rough under my fingers, and I can feel his breath and hard muscles under it "You would know all about that."
His smile shows teeth and he snaps his fingers. My outfit begins to unravel, the dress spinning up around me as it goes, replacing the other. With a lazy motion, he covers his eyes.
The dress he's made for me an elaborate floor length affair the colour of fresh blood. All silk. It covers most of me, but still lets me move enough to fight. Most of is a simple waterfall of silk, but elaborate stitching and embroidery decorates the collar and shoulders makes it hug my figure.
"Main colour red?" I raise an eyebrow. He's pushing the boundaries of my aesthetics here.
"A young lady must learn and grow." He smirks. "Though perhaps you shouldn't grow anymore."
"I had an interesting encounter last night."
"Oh? That little affair in Shibuya?"
"It's that big a news?"
"Guns, books and cosmic horrors. If those three things come together it's a fair bet you're involved." His fingers move up my spine, testing stitching and dress integrity. "Don't worry, our secrets are still mutually kept."
Most people don't know that besides being a tailor, Junya is a cleaner, a man who works for both the police and organized crime dealing with problems, usually supernatural, that are too much for them to handle. I've helped him out on some cases before. Supplied him information on others.
We know we can rely on one another.
"I met someone interesting there. An Esper. Female, about my age, perhaps younger. Wore quite excessive goggles and could see the future."
It all started about five years ago. Young people gaining strange powers, seemingly superhuman gifts that redefined everything we knew about physics. The powers we imagined psychics might have, teleportation, pyrokinesis, telekinesis, stranger powers.
The sudden existence of physics-defying superpowers was a surprise to everyone. Especially those of us who were members of much longer term physics-defying conspiracies of superhuman power like exorcists, vampires, mages and other monsters.
We were doubly surprised when they figured out how to induce them, even if it only works for some people. Of course, the induced ones aren't the problem. It's the ones who appear from massive stress. Especially in war zones or prison facilities. These five years have not been kind for the Middle East, China or America. Of course, places like Japan and South Korea gets a fair few stress Espers, but if you develop superpowers due to cram school you're less likely to want to overthrow the government than due to being randomly detained by police.
"I'm surprised your own information sources do not have something on such a person. Is the famous fox mask falling down on the job?"
I sniff. "She gets her information like anyone else. By asking people who might know."
"Well, in this case you're in luck. I do know of the Esper you're talking about, though not her name. She's been responsible for a string of robberies, corporate espionage. She put a couple of police officers in hospital a few weeks ago."
"But no known organizational allegiance?"
"Probably simply to money."
He makes final adjustments to the dress and pulls up the mirror, showing me the elaborate red of it, a black ribbon at my collar. A perfect witch. I imagine black lipstick and like the thought very much. "What exactly did you get from that facility? Rare arcana, but what?"
Here's a secret I'm not ready to share. "Ah, nothing of any great interest in turned out. My new friend got away with the real prize."
He chuckles, leans forward. "I almost believe that. You should practice before you have to tell it to Aratani."
I turn and bat my eyes at him. "Perhaps you could come to the party with me. Watch and see if I mess up or not."
"I'm not one for parties." His fingers touch my lip. "If you wish to stay here though..."
"Ah haha! No." I say quickly. "Thank you, but no. I must attend."
And avoid something that'll only hurt you when I die.
She's shorter than me, but then I chose to be tall for a girl. Her gear looks like it's high-tech rather than mystic; a form-fitting suit in dark, migraine pattern digital camouflage, equipment webbing; and the goggles. I'm into those goggles. A whole array of lenses, eight of them, a pattern of fourth-generation night vision, and another optic I don't recognize, possibly thermal. You can't buy goggles like that, I've tried.
It's a stylish and practical outfit, and I admire it a little as we come together in a rapid exchange of blows. Even so, I prefer my white hoodie, black skirt, shorts and thigh highs with red stitching, a long coat, and red-accented black fox mask. She's got a somewhat easier time sneaking about but I can disappear into a crowd. At least mostly.
She's quick, impossible quick. She's not as strong as I am but the initial drop strike knocks me down and forces me into a frantic spin kick up, which drives her back just long enough for me to regain her feet. She's poised to come right back in after, short jabs transitioning suddenly into longer punches and kicks as she measures me.
I'm assuming she's here for the same reason I am. Thieves don't like to share.
"You're pretty good." She drives me back with a jab, then jumps back as I snap up a kick, just avoiding its arc.
"I know." I look at her, head on one side. "You too. Am I telegraphing? You're reading my moves or something."
"Just a talent I have."
She comes in again, a rapid series of elbow and knee strikes, a sudden transition to punches and longer kicks as I try to step back out of it. I'm glad of the armour spell I put on myself, and the more mundane concealed layer in the jacket as I ride several punches.
She's seeing the future.
I don't have time to check, as it would require I cover my eye in a symbolic sacrifice for wisdom, but I'm almost certain she's not a mage.
Looks like I'm fighting my first Esper.
The building isn't really where you'd think you'd find a library of dark and eldritch power. I got a tip that this was stored up here from one of my contacts, and decided to check it out. It's the top story of one of those white mid-rises in Shibuya, above a real estate agent and three levels of paper records for an antiquarian book company which, given they also own the top floor, needs serious investigation. After I'm done ripping them off I'll probably inform the proper authorities.
I'd just got into the main library, and found the floor covered with record binders and strewn papers and one safe open. That's when Goggle Girl dropped on me. The infiltration was pretty easy up to this point, but now I'm in the fight of my life.
I speak a word of power and emit an omni-directional wave of force. She was already dodging back, but her sight didn't give her enough time to get away, and she gets knocked sprawling, then flips head over heels and lands on her feet across from me.
"A mage, huh?" She smiles. "Not security I'll bet. You're here to steal the book."
She's not supposed to know about that. Someone has been talking out of school. "I don't know who you are, but the black books can only bring you sorrow."
"Well I mean, I'm not going to keep it." She waves a package, then seems to blink. "Wait, books?" She dodges behind the shelves as I launch a shadow bolt at her. I go over the top, throwing out a pair of sparrow knives, only for her to catch them in a heavy volume of records, and then kick the bookshelf over. I drop backward away from the fall, only for her to erupt through it, one of my own sparrow blades seeking for my throat. A quick yank on its runes spins the blade away and try I a kick, but she ducks past it, carrying me over into a hold she abords halfway through to flip away before I can set her on fire.
"You're persistent. Don't you think you've got bigger things to worry about?"
My phone, connected to the building security system on the way in begins to buzz. A silent alarm has been triggered.
"Bye-bye." She runs and jumps through a window, taking advantage of my momentary distraction. I launch another bolt of force at her but it misses her fleeing form and blows a divot out of the wall next to me. I get there just in time to see her swinging away on a line, impossibly graceful. I turn back to my work. Things have now officially gone wrong.
The alarm brings no immediate response. No shadows coalescing into fearful eyeless hounds or hidden coffins opening to release undying things. I have at least some time to work.
I wonder where goggle girl got her information from. She obviously knew exactly which safe she wanted, but apparently not about the other black book. I'd say an insider, but people who have libraries like this tend to have ways to ensure the loyalty of their troops.
An inspection of the safe shows warding symbols which implies the previous presence of a black book. My information says there are two volumes here, so one is up for grabs, plus whatever is in the other safes. I pull the safecrackers out of my webbing and set them down on the shelf. They're spidery electromechanicals, eight legs with various tools. Each one clicks through a functions check, then begins to move to one of the safes.
The remaining books should make coming here more than worth it.
My phone buzzes again and I check it, bring up video from my drone. A security response is arriving, and not the one I expected.
When you break into the library of a group linked to eldritch horrors like those found in the pages of the black books, you kind of assume they'll come at you a certain way. Vaguely octopoid horrors, shadowy creatures, long-range death curses. I've got a full suite of stuff meant to deal with just that, but this is a surprise. The men pouring out of the pair of mismatched utility vans below belong to some other place, some other city.
There are twenty of them, all big and bulky, clad in a variety of civilian clothes that almost but not quite makes them look like civilians. Kevlar helmets, balaclavas, night vision, plate carriers and body armour with military webbing over it. Moving tactically forward behind those ubiquitous American rifles. All the same gun. Same gear too.
Japan has, on average, about six gun deaths a year, and hasn't been much of a target for foreign terrorists, so Tokyo doesn't have a system like London, where the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorist Unit can appear a score of grey-clad men with brand new Swiss carbines on some poor false alarm. I lived in London for a while. It's a funny place.
And these aren't police. I know what the Tokyo Metropolitan Police emergency response team and the national level special assault team look like, and even if they were to go around in civilian clothes, their gear isn't this new, and they carry submachine guns, not rifles. They're not the TMP's shiny new anti-Esper unit either, who carry a lot more ordinance, gas grenade launchers and .50 cal rifles with fancy high tech scopes.
This is interesting.
No way to run. The building has a fire escape but they've got it locked down, and the countermeasures in here prevent teleporting out of the building even if I was willing to leave my prize behind.
I'll fight.
The men clear rapidly, two floors at a time, four men per room, with the spares covering up and down. By the time I've got organized, they've reached the third floor, coming off, pointman aiming his gun up into the gloom above.
He sees a dark shape coming down on him.
"Contact!"
The gunfire is loud and brassy in the confined space. Rounds rip into my coat as it drops on them. The man covering the left door glances up at the noise. In the confined space, even a suppressed round is loud. Others see me burst through the door on the right, and turn that way, shooting. Another illusion, a mirror image. In fact, I'm through the right, the light bent around me to reduce me to near invisibility as I slam a knee into a man's face. He gasps, knocked backwards into the stair rail, and I ride him over it, down onto the steps below. Gunfire erupts to my side and I felt at least one bullet slam into my armour but not pierce the layer of magical reinforcement.
We land badly, but with me on top, and him still moving. Above I can hear shouting. Men on the stairs swing around to aim at me.
I speak a word of activation. The runes I left on the walls of the third-floor offices blow out. The overpressure brings down dust and shatters the windows. The man aiming at me vanishes in a spray of dust and fire.
I roll off the one I'm on top of. I wanted one for interrogation. The guys up there probably aren't all dead, but they're not going to be talking. That ambush was maybe a little risky just to get a prisoner but as I said I'm curious.
My captive moves weakly; he's wearing jeans, a dress shirt, and suit jacket. Something about the subtle mismatch puts me on edge. Tactical gear over civilian clothes is common enough but why that outfit? I pull the rifle away from him and cut his webbing away, pulling his weapons away as I step back. Just in time, as the mask tears and writhes. A mass of white tentacles explodes out at me. I fall over and then turn it into a side roll, coming back to my feet as the body jerks up on invisible strings, an impossible mass of worming white pouring free of his dislocated mouth.
I punch them as hard as I can. My movement, long-practiced, is just so, completing the circuit which will flow magical force from air and down my arm. The horror goes flying, smashes into the wall, and sets fire.
I breathe hard under my mask, and almost snatch it off before thinking better of it. I've seen creatures like this before, and I'm suddenly far more afraid. Not of them but of what they work for.
I pull out my phone, a little shakily, and turn off the building's sprinklers, then begin to chant up fire. Flame erupts above me, catching on carpets and internal fittings. Air is pulled up, sucking at my skirt. My coat reforms on my arm, none the worse for wear. There's the popcorn sound of bullets cooking off as the weapons on the floor above heat up. I wince as a round spans off the stairs near me.
On my phone, the safecrackers report the safes are open. Fire is between me and them, but the anti-teleport mesh is only in the outer walls of the building, not the middle.
I still have to get what I came for and neutralize the ones on the outside of the building, but it's long past time I was gone from here.
*****
Do well in school. Do cram school too. Go to a top university. Enjoy the springtime of your youth. Get a job, work all day in a career you hate. Marry a good man, or one who's just okay, or one you hate. Drink yourself to death. Get a part-time job, don't raise a family. Get a full-time career and kill yourself from overwork. Have ungrateful children. Rush in every morning. Fight off the advances of your boss. Get bullied by your coworkers. Come home late every night. Work away your best years for honour, for your family, for the company, for the shareholders, for nothing at all.
That's not for me.
My name's Nishifune Nozomi and I'm a thief and a witch. I stole someone's place in a top school by cheating on the tests, and I'll do the same thing for one of the nation's finest universities. Not because I want an education, or a job, or a tall, rich husband who understands me. No. I want power. The University of Tokyo is home to one of the greatest collections of mystic esoterica surviving in Japan, and I want access to it. That achieve no less a stepping stone to my desire than the evil arcana I stole last night.
I never had any desire to go here, to a school. I was just going to mark time here. To do the minimum I needed to make my passing hours. To deceive people into thinking I was brilliant while missing all the tiresome stepped on minutiae of academia. To just walk along through my school life without anyone noticing me.
How did I end up liking it here? How did I end up enjoying this as much as I enjoy winning? Is it really normal life that calls to me?
As if this is normal life either.
Fujisaka Jogakuin is an all-girls private high school on the western outskirts of Tokyo, where the city starts to merge with the mountains. It's actually quite high up, with a really nice view. Its buildings are deliberately old-looking and somewhat careworn, but lovingly restored by various grants. It's a school that seems like it should be boarding, but is just faking the aesthetic to pull in the daughters of the upper-middle-class professionals and lower rich who are its main clients. It has a good academic record and good relations with Tokyo University.
It's an artificial place. A postmodern Maria-sama ga Miteru reference without the religion for the credulous new rich. Elements stolen from British education, stuff that owes more to Kyoto or Osaka than the Kanto region.
So why do I kind of enjoy coming here?
Well, it has uniforms I like. A deliberately retro black Serafuku with a white collar and a blue scarf. If I'm honest with myself, that's why I'm here. There's an option to add black thigh highs, and I use it. There are plenty of girls' schools with good grades and good locations, but I have a look and I want to maintain it even at school.
Also it's haunted, but I'm not really involved with that.
To be honest there are things here I could do without. Like having to attend while aching where my armour took bullets last night, or my tiresome position in school politics. But I can deal. It's not so bad.
There are two hundred and ten days left of my sakura-coloured school life.
Given I'm dying, maybe I shouldn't wish them away.
Time to go home. The lunch period was mostly filled with signup for non-sports clubs. I'm too hurt to feel sociable today, and I have another engagement this evening which I'm kind of dreading. I can at least, go home and--
"Gokigenyou Nozomin-chan!"
There is a certain type of girl at this school who gives me a lot of attention. Not the most popular people at school, but I have a kind of crossover appeal to both the nerds and the athletes. Stuck up on top of a mountain without even any male teachers, of course I get a lot of attention. They're a clowder of starving cats. I'm tall and athletic with test scores regularly in the top ten percent, mysterious, standoffish, beautiful, with white hair that is unusual in a sea of black. I'm an albino, did I mention?
I think the lack of male teachers is because of the haunting.
The first speaker, able to get in first because she sits closest to me is Manako. She's one of the weirdest girls in the school. Knows all the legends of the local area, urban or otherwise. I think she's the one most into my witchy self. She's shorter than me, and kind of plain in a way that I really go for, wears big thick glasses that make her seem less capable. She's actually pretty athletic, went to the nationals in second-year track, but you can't see it past the glasses.
"Manako-chan, how was your spring break, you were going to Hawaii weren't you?"
She beams at me, pleased I remembered. "Yes. It was nice, but hot. We went shooting. How about you?"
"I went to London." I rise, getting my bag. "I'll show you some pictures later, though I'm afraid I can't stay too long tonight."
Manako is basically my best friend. I've known her since middle school. She told me her family put her up to it, after they heard I was a rich orphan with no friends.
"Did you see Buckingham Palace?"
"Yes. Also lots of protests." I head for the door with Manako trailing. A bunch of the other girls are studiously ignoring this spectacle or giving Manako looks about how loud she's being.
"I'm jealous. I'd like to see London. I hear there's all kinds of--"
"Gokigenyou Nozomin-san." At the door, I'm ambushed by several members of the visual arts appreciation society, of which I am a distant pseudo member in that I'm their friend and main financier. We do cosplay together and I sometimes go to meetings when I don't have sports.
"Ah, Fumi-chan." Their spokeswoman is a slim, short-haired girl named Nakata Fumi who has ambitions to be a voice actress. "Did you get your interview?" I gently fend off Manako, who's started simmering, as I turn my best smile on this new block.
"Ah." She blushes. "Ah. Yes. It was only a very minor role though." She brushes her hair back self consciously, aware that such a gig is not so minor a thing for a wannabe voice actress. "Will you be attending our evening sessions this year?"
"I'm afraid with exam prep and volleyball I probably can't, but I'm sure I can drop in some lunchtimes or if I'm ever have an evening free. Figure out what blu-rays you want this year, I can still finance them. Also, we should meet and discuss our outfits for the summer."
"Yes! Thank you!"
We get through the door, Manako talking about gun safety and the limits of Hawaiian shooting ranges. Almost free.
"Hey! Nozomi-chan."
Akagi Akari is the only girl at Fujisaka Gakuin as tall as I am, a fit, slim, muscular girl who seems to be all legs. Akari is the captain of the volleyball team, to which she forcibly recruited me. Last year we went to the final, this year she hopes for more. "Hey Akari, what's up?"
"Hey, come to signup in your kit tomorrow. I want to have something impressive happen during signup, so we're going to play two vs. two."
"You don't think the pair of us might scare of the small fry?"
"If they're scared I don't want them."
"Sure sure." I wave to her in passing. "I'll see you at practice."
"Alright. How about tonight? An extra game?"
"Sorry, I have a prior engagement."
"Alright." She sighs. "Hey, help me study as well right? If I'm going to do university volleyball I need to actually get into university."
"Sure."
There are three secrets to my academic success. The first is that I only need to sleep more than one night in five. The second is potions that allow me to boost my memory and recall of information. The third is rampant magic-enabled cheating, I'm a thief, I told you. I don't actually go to cram school, I'm just blackmailing a gambling addict teacher to tick me as having attended. Occasionally I show up, but it's not a thing I really do, just an appearance. I have other things to do in the evening.
I head up to the third floor. I'll cut back down the stairs at the other end of the building and leave by the other door, that should avoid most everyone. The top floor is mostly club rooms, so it's not used that much when things aren't setting up till tomorrow.
The only person up here should be-- "Hoshi-san, are you hiding?"
Hoshi Rei, president of the student council is a very serious, very squared away girl with stylish glasses. She's a mass of perfect test scores, and a secret. Right now she's covertly glancing out through the blinds in a way that seems kind of comical from the inside. "Ah, Nozomi-san." She steps back from the window, radiating a burning aura of awkwardness that almost sets the room on fire. "Gokigenyou."
"What's up?" I step inside, walk to the window and look out. From this height you can see the outer waiting area. Among the shiny new cars and parent people carriers I note a figure at the back, a girl on a motorcycle. "Friend of yours?" I give her a suggestive look.
"Ah, yes. She's not supposed to come here and now my parents messaged me to say that they're picking me up. I need to find a way to get her to leave and pick me up later! She doesn't know my parents car well so she might wave at me or something and then I'll have to answer questions. I've texted her three times but she's not picking up her cell!"
I pat her shoulder. "No problem. I'll take care of it."
She slumps into her chair, melting with relief.
I head down the back stairs, change my shoes and out, walking towards my car on a trajectory that takes me past her. On the way I wave to the cute Underclassman who has to handle the ghosts. Smooth as could be. It looks perfectly natural as I walk past motorcycle girl. As if I am there purely by accident.
"Her parents are here. Get her later." I whisper. The girl, who has short, dyed blonde hair and with a cigarette in her mouth nods.
"Thanks. Fancy a lift?"
I consider it. If anyone asks, I can tell them it's my cousin, and it'd provide a tradecraft way to get her out of here.
"Sure." I hope Rei-san isn't too jealous. I hop on the back and put the spare helmet on.
I do kind of like it here.
*****
Every month, the collected Wizards of Tokyo hold a party, for that I'll need a dress.
After my activities last night, I also have another reason to visit my tailor.
J-to-Me is a small but fashionable shop in Ginza. It mostly caters to men. Male suits and so on, but the owner is an old, well, let's say friend of mine, who will tailor me jackets and dresses.
Honestly I think it's mostly because he hopes to redefine my aesthetic for me.
He smiles at me coolly when I step in through the back door, and see Junya in the workshop, pinning a suit together on a dummy. "Nozomi-chan."
Junya is five years older than me long-haired with glasses and a ponytail. He wears a suit, coal-black. Usually, a suit is a coffin for the male physique, meant to disguise the imperfections of a man. Not so Junya. His is so sharp you could cut yourself, rigorously tight across his frame, showing off a body at the peak of fitness, and the cold expression of a sadist.
Junya is another of the strays the house Aratani took in like my own family. Their fate was happier than mine, death only, not betrayal. Junya was away at the time, learning tailoring and magic in Italy to keep him away from the other side of his family, a powerful and extremely corrupt house of exorcists and priests.
He is both handsome and beautiful. And oh he's cruel.
"Junya-kun. I'm here for my dress for the party tonight."
"Of course. If you'll follow me? I believe I have something that will fit."
He leads me into the back, and waves me into a changing room. "Let me measure you, see that you haven't grown any larger." I allow this, the tape snapping around with quick, whip-like motions, snapping across me.
I bite my lip a little.
"You really went to the trouble of compensating for the curse's impact on your health, and then overcompensating." The tape snaps across, lifting me up slightly on my toes, then away. "What a showoff you've grown to be." The tapes movements start to remind me of the demonic wire he uses as his primary weapon.
I run a finger down the front of his suit. The cloth is a little rough under my fingers, and I can feel his breath and hard muscles under it "You would know all about that."
His smile shows teeth and he snaps his fingers. My outfit begins to unravel, the dress spinning up around me as it goes, replacing the other. With a lazy motion, he covers his eyes.
The dress he's made for me an elaborate floor length affair the colour of fresh blood. All silk. It covers most of me, but still lets me move enough to fight. Most of is a simple waterfall of silk, but elaborate stitching and embroidery decorates the collar and shoulders makes it hug my figure.
"Main colour red?" I raise an eyebrow. He's pushing the boundaries of my aesthetics here.
"A young lady must learn and grow." He smirks. "Though perhaps you shouldn't grow anymore."
"I had an interesting encounter last night."
"Oh? That little affair in Shibuya?"
"It's that big a news?"
"Guns, books and cosmic horrors. If those three things come together it's a fair bet you're involved." His fingers move up my spine, testing stitching and dress integrity. "Don't worry, our secrets are still mutually kept."
Most people don't know that besides being a tailor, Junya is a cleaner, a man who works for both the police and organized crime dealing with problems, usually supernatural, that are too much for them to handle. I've helped him out on some cases before. Supplied him information on others.
We know we can rely on one another.
"I met someone interesting there. An Esper. Female, about my age, perhaps younger. Wore quite excessive goggles and could see the future."
It all started about five years ago. Young people gaining strange powers, seemingly superhuman gifts that redefined everything we knew about physics. The powers we imagined psychics might have, teleportation, pyrokinesis, telekinesis, stranger powers.
The sudden existence of physics-defying superpowers was a surprise to everyone. Especially those of us who were members of much longer term physics-defying conspiracies of superhuman power like exorcists, vampires, mages and other monsters.
We were doubly surprised when they figured out how to induce them, even if it only works for some people. Of course, the induced ones aren't the problem. It's the ones who appear from massive stress. Especially in war zones or prison facilities. These five years have not been kind for the Middle East, China or America. Of course, places like Japan and South Korea gets a fair few stress Espers, but if you develop superpowers due to cram school you're less likely to want to overthrow the government than due to being randomly detained by police.
"I'm surprised your own information sources do not have something on such a person. Is the famous fox mask falling down on the job?"
I sniff. "She gets her information like anyone else. By asking people who might know."
"Well, in this case you're in luck. I do know of the Esper you're talking about, though not her name. She's been responsible for a string of robberies, corporate espionage. She put a couple of police officers in hospital a few weeks ago."
"But no known organizational allegiance?"
"Probably simply to money."
He makes final adjustments to the dress and pulls up the mirror, showing me the elaborate red of it, a black ribbon at my collar. A perfect witch. I imagine black lipstick and like the thought very much. "What exactly did you get from that facility? Rare arcana, but what?"
Here's a secret I'm not ready to share. "Ah, nothing of any great interest in turned out. My new friend got away with the real prize."
He chuckles, leans forward. "I almost believe that. You should practice before you have to tell it to Aratani."
I turn and bat my eyes at him. "Perhaps you could come to the party with me. Watch and see if I mess up or not."
"I'm not one for parties." His fingers touch my lip. "If you wish to stay here though..."
"Ah haha! No." I say quickly. "Thank you, but no. I must attend."
And avoid something that'll only hurt you when I die.
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Apotheosis
Lucifer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hmm, interesting. The relatively recent appearance of Espers compared to the other groups reminds me a lot of A Certain Magical Index.
It seems like Junya and Nozomi might have a bit of a love/hate thing going on, and whatever her curse is makes her reluctant to get closer to him. I could've misreading that though.
The way Nozomi said she was interested in things for power, in the context of her being a cursed orphan and the comment about the black books bringing sorrow, makes me think that something related to the black books killed her parents, maybe some sort of Eldritch cult and that she's trying to get revenge or try and stop them in some way. She mentioned betrayal as well, so maybe her family was involved with the Eldritch but ended up killed or sacrificed.
Overall it's pretty good, looking forward to more.
It seems like Junya and Nozomi might have a bit of a love/hate thing going on, and whatever her curse is makes her reluctant to get closer to him. I could've misreading that though.
The way Nozomi said she was interested in things for power, in the context of her being a cursed orphan and the comment about the black books bringing sorrow, makes me think that something related to the black books killed her parents, maybe some sort of Eldritch cult and that she's trying to get revenge or try and stop them in some way. She mentioned betrayal as well, so maybe her family was involved with the Eldritch but ended up killed or sacrificed.
Overall it's pretty good, looking forward to more.
Tayta Malikai
200% Space Whale
- Location
- Australia
I'm a pretty bad reviewer in general, but I'll do my best.
I really liked the action opening you decided to do. It immediately established a lot of useful details about the setting (modern with magic, criminal underworld, casual employment of eldritch abominations, Japan), and was also a fairly decent fight overall. It didn't drag or go into excess detail on what anyone was doing. Great stuff, definitely worked to hook my interest.
I wasn't quite as enthusiastic throughout the second half of the chapter, and I'm not sure why that is, given it's only 5k words. I got the gist of the scenes though, which is fine since it's more introductions of various character and setting things.
Overall, seems like a solid work, and I look forward to seeing more.
I really liked the action opening you decided to do. It immediately established a lot of useful details about the setting (modern with magic, criminal underworld, casual employment of eldritch abominations, Japan), and was also a fairly decent fight overall. It didn't drag or go into excess detail on what anyone was doing. Great stuff, definitely worked to hook my interest.
I wasn't quite as enthusiastic throughout the second half of the chapter, and I'm not sure why that is, given it's only 5k words. I got the gist of the scenes though, which is fine since it's more introductions of various character and setting things.
Overall, seems like a solid work, and I look forward to seeing more.
Exhack
We Won't Build The Plane!
- Location
- Montreal, Canada
- Location
- SMS Odette II
Action has definitely been one of FBH's strengths, which is hardly surprising since they've been refining that particular skill a lot. I think it shows particularly in how the characters use environmentals in the fight without any hitch in the prose.
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
Wait what? So there are others at the school that knows about the supernatural. Intriguing.
Is that you Marisa?
InterstellarHobo
Cosmic Vagrant
- Location
- No Fixed Planetary System
I dig the aesthetic, and the in media res opening is solid. Does a great job of showing us what kind of weird shit is in universe by running straight in to it.
Also, our protagonist just stole from someone with negative qualms about using eldritch monstrosities. This is 100% going to cause future problems, and I am excited for it.
I'm not super sold on the school parts? There's a bunch of new characters, but not enough time with any of them for me to care. The actual school stuff is clearly irrelevant, just like real life. It's basically Nozomi trying to ditch school while introducing new characters?
I mean, I've got a guess what's eventually going to happen with that thread, but.. it just feels kinda pointless right now.
Also, our protagonist just stole from someone with negative qualms about using eldritch monstrosities. This is 100% going to cause future problems, and I am excited for it.
I'm not super sold on the school parts? There's a bunch of new characters, but not enough time with any of them for me to care. The actual school stuff is clearly irrelevant, just like real life. It's basically Nozomi trying to ditch school while introducing new characters?
I mean, I've got a guess what's eventually going to happen with that thread, but.. it just feels kinda pointless right now.
Chapter 1-2: The Party and the Corpse
- Pronouns
- She/Her
To strike while the iron's hot, here's chapter 2, thanks for everyone who's liked and commented so far.
Operational Procedure for a Tokyo Mage Trust Monthly Party, 2019 number four (April)
Alleged purpose of party: Find someone to marry.
Actual purpose of party: Show up the haters by dressing better than any of them. Meet your few sort of friends. Don't die of heartbreak.
Methodology: Put on super cute custom J-2M dress, augment with black silk thigh highs, black lipstick, platinum and silver jewelry, black opera gloves white Bottega Veneta bag and black designer shoes to remind everyone you may be an evil witch but you're certainly richer than they are. Leave hair white to offset how dark the outfit is.
Go to party via car, admire the intricate nature of the underground tunnels under Tokyo it takes place in. Enjoy the giant stairway and the slight wheezing complaints of some of your peers as they are forced to walk up and down all these steps. Admire the vault itself, an old underground train siding constructed in the war to protect locomotives, grabbed for cheap by the Mage Trust and converted for events like this. Especially admire the ceiling painted which is painted with a beautiful image of a dragon and a tiger chasing one another across a starry sky.
Arrive, be announced, to dead silence as if a ghost entered the room followed by slow resumption of festivities. Listen to mutters about how it's awful that they're letting taint souled witches who are almost certainly simply fingers of eldritch powers and or the dolls of corrupt immortal magi into parties like this.
Go to bar.
Parties like this are a big thing for mages, and they suck,but at least they let me drink and be bi. Not that there's much point because absolutely nobody here will do anything with me. Except mutter as I go past, watch me, stop in the middle of conversations.
Once every few months, the mage houses of the Kanto region meet up to socialize, to gossip, to politic, and to investigate one another as prospects of marriage.
I would do almost anything to get out of this. They're not even usual places for me to network because nobody wants to be seen here in case a rumour starts that they're going to marry me. There's a bubble around me when I go to the bar. People clear back two or three chairs like I have an infectious disease.
I decide I'll get a drink, or several. I order red wine. In Japan drinking age is twenty, which is another law mages don't care about. It'll make it hard for my life to be adapted into an anime of course.
A mage's house is not just a family, it doesn't even need to be related by blood. It's more like a tradition, a way of mage craft, a set of institutional knowledge. Usually it's a family also, but it doesn't have to. Once I was in house Aratani, then the greatest of Japan's houses. Now I'm in house Kondou, which is two people: myself and my teacher. As he's one of the most powerful mages in Japan, that still makes us important. Of course, since I'm cursed, and he's also one of the most hated mages in Japan, I'm not exactly a great marriage prospect. The ritual here involves every potentially eligible scion of a mage house dancing with every other potentially eligible scion of a mage house so they can perhaps pair off.
This creates a log jam of people who are trying to avoid dancing with me until they have no other choice. I've tried to force it before and it doesn't work.
The food is good though. After I have a drink I wander over to the buffet and start filling my plate with unusual canopies. I don't have to queue, but can get straight on to loading and emptying my plate.
An arm snakes around me and a blue-gloved hand plucks an hors d'œuvre off my plate. "I came to dance, but you seem to have another partner."
I look around gracefully into the beautiful face of Kurusu Nanase. The only mage in Tokyo outside of Junya (who only half counts) that I would really call a friend. Even if she's cultivating me as a resource I don't care. She's learned that the best way to get me to do things for her is to be my friend and that's fine for now. Nanase is a year older than me and first daughter of her house, possibly the grandest in Tokyo, and the most eligible person here. Same-sex marriage legislation is still pending in the Diet, but that doesn't stop us mages, who've been marrying sons to sons and daughters to daughters for a couple of millennia and conceiving kids in magical jars.
Even if her reasons are selfish, I need all the allies I can get.
Nanase is tall, about my height but willowy, waist-length black hair cascading down in a long mane only barely contained by several white ribbons and gold jewelry. Her dress is silver, the same silver of her strange eyes. I'm a bit distracted by them. Those blue gloves really set them off.
"Please do me the honour of accepting the first dance." She bows over my hand. I let my plate go, telekinetically sending it back to the side board.
"It would be my pleasure." We move onto the floor together, then begin to go through the formal steps. People are watching, but there's no muttering. If Nanase wants, then Nanase gets. The Kurusu are the most powerful mage clan of Japan, and she is their miracle child.
"I have one of the arcana you wanted." I whisper to her as we come together.
She smiles. "There's quite a flap going on about that. They say there was gunfire."
"Things got interesting."
She tips me back, eyes looking into mine, her smile is still there but her eyes are cooler. "Don't let them get too interesting where I'm concerned."
"Nothing will tie back to you. I did it for my own reasons."
"Very well."
The dance comes to an end and I step back, feeling a flashbulb sense that I've somehow messed up. Great. So now we've reached the isolation and intrusive thoughts phase of the party.
No one else wants to dance with me.
I'm going to go fix my makeup.
Was black lipstick the right choice?
I like high-contrast makeup. Makeup in general is tricky for me because I'm so pale. If you're not careful you can end up looking orange. I order in a bunch of custom stuff. I have good skin but I still use foundation and concealer (and you know, magic) so that my skin looks uniform. I think the effect is good but it only accentuates how pale I am, especially when I combined it with black lipstick, and how tall and powerful I am.
Nanase seemed to like it but I got a lot of attention, maybe more attention than I wanted. Maybe I should have gone the other way, tried to look like a normal person rather than rub the fact I'm a colourless witch in everyone's faces.
I worry that I stick out too much. I definitely have my own style, but is that the right strategy? Shouldn't I just try to fit in, dye my hair black and stop being so obviously tainted? Dress down rather than always try to be the most stylish and the most eye catching?
Should I have made myself another short waif? Someone who can be pitied?
They'd still hate me, but less. They might help me because of that.
Fuck that. Let them mutter. I'll show them all.
I check myself in the mirror, and then force myself to close my makeup kit and put it back into my bag. It's perfect. I need to go back in.
I step out of the door to the restroom in time to see another party leaving. There's one guy in front, a tall, hefty young man with a very square head in a conservative dark suit. Behind him, two men and two women, in party clothes that say hanger-on more than centre of attention are dragging a man along. Small fairy fire whips move around them.
Is he drunk? He doesn't look in good shape. Sick friend?
Abduction attempt?
Hell. It'll mean I don't have to go back into the party.
I wait till they're around the corner then slip my shoes off and follow them. The tunnel floor is cold but dry under my stockings. I make a sign of protection against damage and pick my way forward being quiet, listening to the sound of high-heeled boots and stilettos ahead of me. I make a sign next to my ear, amplifying the sound going into it.
It's pretty easy to follow them, as the light they're using throws around the corner, giving me a pocket of twilight to follow.
"Think we went far enough?"
"Sure. Unless you want to be able to dump the body in the river when we're done."
The sound of boots coming to a stop. "Look, he just gossiped about something he shouldn't have. We're not going to be dumping his body."
"Whatever you say, Boss."
"Okay, wake him up."
The sound of a fist impacting skin and a man yelps. He doesn't sound like he's used to being hit. "Well now." It's the leader's voice. "I'm disappointed in you Keiichi-san. Telling tales about my sister's love life."
A new voice, terrified. "Please! I'm sorry Nanke-sama! I didn't mean to speak out of turn! Please let me go!"
"I'm sorry too Keiichi-san. I take matters of family honour very seriously. You have to learn what you can talk about in our society." A pause. "Don't worry, I'll make sure it doesn't show."
Nanke huh. That has to be Nanke Daikai, first son of the Nanke family. It sounds like he's really mad at this guy.
I should ignore this. I never thought mage society was nice. It's like Daikai said, stuff like this happens in mage society. I shouldn't borrow trouble.
Keiichi gives a pitiful cry that turns into a cough as Daikai hits him.
I stop in the corridor, take a deep breath.
Having a young mage under my thumb wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
No, even if I save him, he'll probably be ungrateful.
It will be a chance to let off some steam.
And get myself into even more trouble.
There's really nothing quite as good as beating some proud guy, especially when you get to save another in the process and take it out of both of them. One will know I beat him, the other will know I saved him.
Why don't I just be honest with myself?
I take another breath and turn around.
"Hey, Keiichi-chan," I step around the corner, "Where did you go off too, I thought we had a-- oh." The space beyond is a room concrete walled, graffitied, obviously some lost sub-basement of the transit system.
The group's two women are holding Keiichi up while the guys watch. Daikai is standing in front of him, fist cocked for a blow. He's removed his suit jacket and the guy on the other side is holding it.
The other man is blocking my way.
"Get lost." He says. "Your boyfriend is--"
He's about my height, so I grab him by the lapels and headbutt him. He stumbles back but I still have a hold of him, and bring my knee up into his gut. His eyes go wide and he collapses.
The other four clear for action fast. They're probably not as good as me, but I can't be lazy here. I kick the guy I knocked down to keep him down then hop back a bit.
Nanke looks at me, head on one side. He's at the group's back, next to the guy but now stepping back, clearing for action. "A corrupted mage who's thinks she's a hero of justice?"
"Witches need to work hard to make friends."
The other guy has stepped into blocking position between us, hands raised in a stance I recognize as one to channel mana from a major constellation. He, like mel will be using martial arts to summon his power, though I think he'll be using a different source than me. I know how to draw on constellations, but it's not my specialty. It's honestly they're too much work.
In general, there are three sources mages use to summon mana. The energy of the sky, which is ruled by constellations, the energy of the earth, which is ruled by leylines, and the energy of the air which is weak but near universal. There are two other more advanced techniques, summoning power from other dimensions or from the basic universal force, but both are much more difficult and generally used only for rituals.
This guy is definitely using a constellation. The girl behind him, who has begun a fire chant, is doing the same. Meantime the other girl has pulled a potion from her bag and injected it, and is now field mixing another.
Nanke, meantime stands aloof at the back, waiting to see if his minions can take me out.
I don't particularly want the women to get a chance to really prep so I go straight in at star guy. He snaps out a punch, faster than I thought he'd be able to. The guy must be a mathematical genius to be able to construct an aligned star move so fast. I'm forced to block, taking the blow across my arms and a surge of spoken power. This would be much easier if I was wearing my armour.
The blow knocks me back on my heels. I jump to the side, expecting a quick followup, but there isn't one. Instead he stands where he is, falling back into his stance.
Ah. I see it. "That's disappointing, but clever."
He snarls. "What did you say?"
"Your technique. I thought you were doing on the spot calculations to determine stance, but you're not are you? You worked out the symbol and move that would give you the most power in this day. You probably have a chart on your phone saying so and so sign for so and so hour."
Bullseye. He's glaring. I can't take too much time to gloat though, Fire Girl is taking a bit of time with her chant, probably to burn me rather than her friend, but I don't have much time. "Anyhow, it's clever but it makes your move set too limited." I step forward, judging distance.
"Damn you!" He takes a step forward, trying to move in the same stance, but I take a step back with him and then pivot on one foot to kick him in the head. He drops like a puppet with cut strings.
The two women back up. Both have almost completed their rituals and look back at Nanke to give them more time, but he doesn't seem to want to bother. It might not matter though, because they're just finished. Potion girl raises her arm to throw, and while her companion's chant raises to a climax.
I'm inspired to grab their friend I just kicked and yank him up in front of me as a shield. Potion Girl's aborts her throw but fumbles the veil—the hissing stuff hits the floor in front of her and starts to throw up dust. I throw my human shield at the fire mage, knocking her down in a tangle and disrupting her chant, which dissipates in a spray of smoke and sends her coughing.
Confident she's out for now, I go in on Potion Girl, running around the edge of the hole her transmutation potion is making and hitting her with a rapid combination of blows. She's able to stay with me for a few moments thanks to the strength potion she injected, but she's not nearly as practiced at fighting as I am. I put her down with a punch to the face, then zap fire mage with a shadowbolt as she gets out from under star guy, slamming her into the tunnel wall.
Keiichi has run for it down the tunnel, so it's just Nanke and me facing one another next to the dusty hole.
"He's a worm you know? A gossip and a scoundrel." Nanke circles left, stance casual. "I suppose that would be useful to someone like you."
"Truth is, I'm just mad you're all so reluctant to dance with someone as beautiful as me."
He laughs and drops into a stance. "Then, perhaps I can be your dance partner?"
Honestly, Nanke isn't so bad looking. He's just not really my type. I don't really go for hefty heavyweight guys. He begins to chant and I feel geomantic power building, sucked him from all angles this far down, and a network of runes glow around him.
He comes at me in a blur, driven to great speed by the power now flowing through him. Geomancy's great for that, and I should know, it's mostly what I use. You always expect big guys to be slow, but Nanke isn't. His combinations are simple, boxing blows, but he delivers them in rapid succession, fast enough I can hardly counter them.
I have a dilemma here. I can fight him at this level and maybe get hurt. I can reveal one of my tricks, or--
I kick up a wave of dust from the transmuted hole and then send it on a word into my opponents face. His chant stops abruptly as he starts to cough, and then I plant a blow in his stomach. He doubles over then goes back down with a knee to the face.
He looks up at me, wheezing, and I realize he's laughing. "T-that was cheap."
I shrug. I'm an evil witch after all. He closes his eyes and lies back.
"Still frightened of getting hurt, Nozomi?"
I look around and see Horie Yuuki step out of the shadows.
"Oh, you're here. So Aratani has finally arrived?" I raise an eyebrow. "He's putting on some airs arriving this late in the evening."
"We had a case."
"Of course you did." Horie Yuuki, is one of the deadliest hand-to-hand fighters in Tokyo and another old friend of mine. She's shorter than me, actually kind of short by any standards, with boyish hair. A real cutie. She's wearing a short, particularly daring white party dress, which I am endeavouring not to pay too much attention to.
"Come on. He wants to see you."
"Alright." I resummon my shoes and slip them on.
"What was that even about?"
"I'm a hero of justice now. Haven't you heard?"
She gives me a look.
Aratani Kaito is waiting for us in front of the entrance. The man who was my betrothed is a beauty. About two years my senior, carefully styled golden hair his major concession to the unusual. He's tall, but only slightly taller than me, well muscled, and filling out a white suit that clings to his form almost as well as the one Junya wore earlier. He wears small, serious glasses and carries a jewel top cane.
I shouldn't compare them so. I suppose it's just that I'm attracted to a lot of women, and very few men, these two among them. I've known them both since I was a child, and had my part in destroying their lives. It's hard not to.
"Nozomi." He looks at me, a slight smile as his eyes take in, no doubt, a dozen subtle signs I've just been in a fight. "Did we interupt you?"
I don't blush or anything, I have enough control for that, and run a cleaning and fixing enchantment on my dress. What does my makeup look like? Fuck. "Not particularly. You know how these things are for me. What about you though? You seem to have almost skipped the party entirely."
"I had to deal with an affair with a corpse."
"That seems common with you." I fall in beside him. "People will start to take you for a necromancer Kaito."
"At least that'd make it less gossip worthy for us to be seen together."
"So what's so interesting about this corpse?"
We step in through the doors, and the herald announces Aratani with fanfare.
"Later." He offers an arm. "For now, would you do me the honour? I believe it must be the fifth dance."
The body is splayed out, opened up, in a full state of post autopsy revelation. Beside it, dozens of objects are laid in a medical tray in neat lines. Aratani is still in his slim suit, but I took time to change. I'm not messing up my dress at the morgue. Now I'm wearing white. White Italian boots, a white Italian jacket, white silk shirt, white silk gloves that just happen to have pentagrams stitched into them. The only reason I don't look like a snow bank is black thigh-highs, and a blue silk cravat. I picked the outfit just for the morgue. White suit on white walls makes the colour and black stand out all the more.
The dumpy old police detective and police doctor are both giving me funny looks. I can't tell if it's because my heels make me taller than either of them, or because my heels cost more than they make in a month. They also keep glancing at Horie, is (rather stubbornly) still wearing her party dress and slowly freezing.
"You better take her back to the party when we're done here," I whisper to Aratani as we go, "or I might have to assassinate you for real."
He smiles. "You're so unobservant sometimes."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Let's concentrate on the dead body shall we?"
I frown at that, still not getting it, then shrug and approach the corpse, pulling up a surgical mask. "So, what's the context for this?"
The detective looks at Aratani questioningly, then coughs and speaks. "This is Tanaka Reo, unemployed, well, employed as a gang member. He was one of a number of men hired by," a look at Aratani, "a criminal enterprise in Roppongi. He and his accomplices engaged Aratani-san and his party, along with police special forces. He proved to be extremely fast and strong. It took Horie-san to take him down." He wipes his glasses, which are steaming up. "A second man with similar implants was encountered earlier this week, and was able to fight off dozens of police officers before we called in Esper Down."
"What kind of abilities did he have?"
"Officers said that he was incredibly fast and strong, and he could project blades of shadow that cut through a stab vest."
"Huh." I look at the corpse. "He wasn't an Esper?"
Aratani speaks. "He was twenty-nine." The oldest known Esper is twenty-five. You only manifest younger than twenty. "The autopsy found numerous foreign objects which had been implanted across his body. They initially thought they might be some kind of cybernetic implants, but there's no electronics present. You are an expert on--" Dark powers, the implantation of magic into the body, and thus the spirit, "magic like this, so…"
"You brought me in." I peer over at the tray and then at the wounds. "There are 108 of these?"
"108, exactly." The doctor says.
"You have some gloves I can use?"
After I get the gloves on, I move to examine the objects, first without picking them up.
Each is a small disk of dull copper, with a symbol embossed into its back. When I pick one up, it sticks to the tray slightly. A magnet? Thick enough that it might be hollow. I shake it. It rattles. The workmanship is crude, the edges cracked and uneven, with spots of discoloration from uneven temperature, and some evidence that the worst of it has been ground down. Terribly shoddy. Kondou-san would scold me for turning in something like this.
Aratani looks at me expectantly, he already told me that both the cop and the doctor are more or less in the know. Given how cold Horie is looking I decide I won't draw things out. "This man has been wired with a geomantic grid." I lift the disk. "There's a lodestone in here, a magnet. It realigns the man's body energies in line with the local geomancy, lets him draw on it for power."
Horie shivers, and not just from the cold this time. "But his energies would constantly bleed into the greater energy of the local dragon lines. He might gain great strength for a while, but each time he used it he'd become less and less himself."
"There are ways around that. None of them are fitted here though. With a grid of this type, he'd rapidly lose contact with normal human emotions. He'd become prey to whatever flowed down the leylines and into him." I put the implant down. "I suspect that he may not have known what he was getting into. These aren't very well fabricated. Maybe some street gang found an old book--" No, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Aratani is, of course, quick to jump on my lapse in logic. "It seems like you'd need considerable skill to come up with something like this, even if the surgery and manufacturing are a little crude, Nozomi. I don't believe either Yuuki-san or I would have known how to build this. Could you have?"
Always testing me. Just how much do you really know? It's always traps within traps with our Sherlock Holmes. "I could have, but if I was going to, I'd have done it better. There's no need for all this copper, indeed it just makes the process even more toxic and dangerous. Who wants super soldiers that go mad after a short time? No. Even if the person who made this has some skill, this is crude."
Aratani frowns. "So you are saying that whoever we're looking for is good at geomancy and black surgery, but not as good as you."
"Correct." I consider. "Or they're made in a way that's meant to debilitate the person using them over the long term."
"Is there a way we could detect or disrupt it?" Horei asks.
"I'm sure your boy has already guessed." I look at Aratani, who smiles and looks smug. "With an arrangement like this it's easy. All you need is a magnet."
I should, I suppose, as we go further into this, say a few words about the nature of what mages variously refer to as dark power, forbidden arts, unclean techniques. This also requires a little history of the Black Books, which are so much a part of this story. Magic, in general, works by the channeling of various arcane forces through symbolism. That symbolism can be a literal symbol, from a rune to a word, or it can be a symbolic action. To conduct a scan for local magic, shut one eye, sacrifice half your sight for wisdom as Odin did. Less sacrifice, less wisdom.
That's magic. Exorcists, priests, and infernalists may also call power by making deals with spirits, demons, ghosts and gods, but most mages don't, at least openly. Summoning, making pacts with, employing spirits is the least forbidden of the forbidden arts. It's not even really frowned on, it's just not something that one admits to.
What manner of arcane forces you employ varies. It can be the energy of the earth, magic of the stars, of the elements, of human sacrifices, of other dimensions. Here we get into the real meat and drink of forbidden arts. Channeling the wrong power in the wrong way can be dangerous, and can get you known as a black magician.
In general, mages don't like craft by which arcane power is introduced into the body in anything like a permanent way. They don't like anything that can change how symbolism works. Magic is about reason, they don't like anything that can pollute it, or that disobeys what reason would suggest.
But this isn't universal.
Some thousands of years ago, all the forbidden, twisted powers of the day were recorded, techniques written down in ciphered tomes, mighty spells used to symbolically, and thus actually, trap the knowledge that mages disliked in a series of grimoires, the black books.
Of course, there are two flaws in this plan. First, that such secrets can still be rediscovered, and second that the black books might be read.
I get home late. What with the party and the morgue, it's annoying. I have a treasure by I haven't been able to look at yet waiting for me. Maybe I should leave it another night, wait until I'm fresh. It's late. School will be far too soon in the morning. I planned to try to get some sleep tonight.
Fat chance. I can't resist any longer. I'll have to look through the book.
The Witch's House. My house is set back from the road in its own walled garden. There's a gate, gravel, then a four-story mansion built around a central courtyard. The gate opens, the garage door opens, and the card slides quickly inside, even as both portals rapidly shut.
I'm safe.
"Hello House."
"Hello Nozomi." The house's voice is warm and feminine, with an aristocratic British accent.
"Any intrusions or messages?"
"A parcel was delivered earlier, I believe it was your blu-rays."
"Great." I take off my shoes and hand my jacket into the hands of an unseen servant. It's nice and warm in here. The chill of the morgue didn't leave me even outside it. It's annoyingly cold this April. There might be snow. I shut the door and let the tension flow out of me.
I pull my cravat off and dump it. "Is a bath ready?"
"Yes Nozomi." The house says.
"Great." I walk upstairs, heading for the main bathroom on the third floor. I'll relax in the bath and run my first probes by remote. I put the book straight into the vaults. By habit, I glance at the central garden and then out of the long windows towards the street. Something stands under the lamp, watching the house. I stare at it, my heart suddenly hammering. It's so indistinct, a dark idea of a person in the pool of the street light.
It raises its head and looks at me.
Operational Procedure for a Tokyo Mage Trust Monthly Party, 2019 number four (April)
Alleged purpose of party: Find someone to marry.
Actual purpose of party: Show up the haters by dressing better than any of them. Meet your few sort of friends. Don't die of heartbreak.
Methodology: Put on super cute custom J-2M dress, augment with black silk thigh highs, black lipstick, platinum and silver jewelry, black opera gloves white Bottega Veneta bag and black designer shoes to remind everyone you may be an evil witch but you're certainly richer than they are. Leave hair white to offset how dark the outfit is.
Go to party via car, admire the intricate nature of the underground tunnels under Tokyo it takes place in. Enjoy the giant stairway and the slight wheezing complaints of some of your peers as they are forced to walk up and down all these steps. Admire the vault itself, an old underground train siding constructed in the war to protect locomotives, grabbed for cheap by the Mage Trust and converted for events like this. Especially admire the ceiling painted which is painted with a beautiful image of a dragon and a tiger chasing one another across a starry sky.
Arrive, be announced, to dead silence as if a ghost entered the room followed by slow resumption of festivities. Listen to mutters about how it's awful that they're letting taint souled witches who are almost certainly simply fingers of eldritch powers and or the dolls of corrupt immortal magi into parties like this.
Go to bar.
*****
Parties like this are a big thing for mages, and they suck,but at least they let me drink and be bi. Not that there's much point because absolutely nobody here will do anything with me. Except mutter as I go past, watch me, stop in the middle of conversations.
Once every few months, the mage houses of the Kanto region meet up to socialize, to gossip, to politic, and to investigate one another as prospects of marriage.
I would do almost anything to get out of this. They're not even usual places for me to network because nobody wants to be seen here in case a rumour starts that they're going to marry me. There's a bubble around me when I go to the bar. People clear back two or three chairs like I have an infectious disease.
I decide I'll get a drink, or several. I order red wine. In Japan drinking age is twenty, which is another law mages don't care about. It'll make it hard for my life to be adapted into an anime of course.
A mage's house is not just a family, it doesn't even need to be related by blood. It's more like a tradition, a way of mage craft, a set of institutional knowledge. Usually it's a family also, but it doesn't have to. Once I was in house Aratani, then the greatest of Japan's houses. Now I'm in house Kondou, which is two people: myself and my teacher. As he's one of the most powerful mages in Japan, that still makes us important. Of course, since I'm cursed, and he's also one of the most hated mages in Japan, I'm not exactly a great marriage prospect. The ritual here involves every potentially eligible scion of a mage house dancing with every other potentially eligible scion of a mage house so they can perhaps pair off.
This creates a log jam of people who are trying to avoid dancing with me until they have no other choice. I've tried to force it before and it doesn't work.
The food is good though. After I have a drink I wander over to the buffet and start filling my plate with unusual canopies. I don't have to queue, but can get straight on to loading and emptying my plate.
An arm snakes around me and a blue-gloved hand plucks an hors d'œuvre off my plate. "I came to dance, but you seem to have another partner."
I look around gracefully into the beautiful face of Kurusu Nanase. The only mage in Tokyo outside of Junya (who only half counts) that I would really call a friend. Even if she's cultivating me as a resource I don't care. She's learned that the best way to get me to do things for her is to be my friend and that's fine for now. Nanase is a year older than me and first daughter of her house, possibly the grandest in Tokyo, and the most eligible person here. Same-sex marriage legislation is still pending in the Diet, but that doesn't stop us mages, who've been marrying sons to sons and daughters to daughters for a couple of millennia and conceiving kids in magical jars.
Even if her reasons are selfish, I need all the allies I can get.
Nanase is tall, about my height but willowy, waist-length black hair cascading down in a long mane only barely contained by several white ribbons and gold jewelry. Her dress is silver, the same silver of her strange eyes. I'm a bit distracted by them. Those blue gloves really set them off.
"Please do me the honour of accepting the first dance." She bows over my hand. I let my plate go, telekinetically sending it back to the side board.
"It would be my pleasure." We move onto the floor together, then begin to go through the formal steps. People are watching, but there's no muttering. If Nanase wants, then Nanase gets. The Kurusu are the most powerful mage clan of Japan, and she is their miracle child.
"I have one of the arcana you wanted." I whisper to her as we come together.
She smiles. "There's quite a flap going on about that. They say there was gunfire."
"Things got interesting."
She tips me back, eyes looking into mine, her smile is still there but her eyes are cooler. "Don't let them get too interesting where I'm concerned."
"Nothing will tie back to you. I did it for my own reasons."
"Very well."
The dance comes to an end and I step back, feeling a flashbulb sense that I've somehow messed up. Great. So now we've reached the isolation and intrusive thoughts phase of the party.
No one else wants to dance with me.
I'm going to go fix my makeup.
*****
Was black lipstick the right choice?
I like high-contrast makeup. Makeup in general is tricky for me because I'm so pale. If you're not careful you can end up looking orange. I order in a bunch of custom stuff. I have good skin but I still use foundation and concealer (and you know, magic) so that my skin looks uniform. I think the effect is good but it only accentuates how pale I am, especially when I combined it with black lipstick, and how tall and powerful I am.
Nanase seemed to like it but I got a lot of attention, maybe more attention than I wanted. Maybe I should have gone the other way, tried to look like a normal person rather than rub the fact I'm a colourless witch in everyone's faces.
I worry that I stick out too much. I definitely have my own style, but is that the right strategy? Shouldn't I just try to fit in, dye my hair black and stop being so obviously tainted? Dress down rather than always try to be the most stylish and the most eye catching?
Should I have made myself another short waif? Someone who can be pitied?
They'd still hate me, but less. They might help me because of that.
Fuck that. Let them mutter. I'll show them all.
I check myself in the mirror, and then force myself to close my makeup kit and put it back into my bag. It's perfect. I need to go back in.
I step out of the door to the restroom in time to see another party leaving. There's one guy in front, a tall, hefty young man with a very square head in a conservative dark suit. Behind him, two men and two women, in party clothes that say hanger-on more than centre of attention are dragging a man along. Small fairy fire whips move around them.
Is he drunk? He doesn't look in good shape. Sick friend?
Abduction attempt?
Hell. It'll mean I don't have to go back into the party.
I wait till they're around the corner then slip my shoes off and follow them. The tunnel floor is cold but dry under my stockings. I make a sign of protection against damage and pick my way forward being quiet, listening to the sound of high-heeled boots and stilettos ahead of me. I make a sign next to my ear, amplifying the sound going into it.
It's pretty easy to follow them, as the light they're using throws around the corner, giving me a pocket of twilight to follow.
"Think we went far enough?"
"Sure. Unless you want to be able to dump the body in the river when we're done."
The sound of boots coming to a stop. "Look, he just gossiped about something he shouldn't have. We're not going to be dumping his body."
"Whatever you say, Boss."
"Okay, wake him up."
The sound of a fist impacting skin and a man yelps. He doesn't sound like he's used to being hit. "Well now." It's the leader's voice. "I'm disappointed in you Keiichi-san. Telling tales about my sister's love life."
A new voice, terrified. "Please! I'm sorry Nanke-sama! I didn't mean to speak out of turn! Please let me go!"
"I'm sorry too Keiichi-san. I take matters of family honour very seriously. You have to learn what you can talk about in our society." A pause. "Don't worry, I'll make sure it doesn't show."
Nanke huh. That has to be Nanke Daikai, first son of the Nanke family. It sounds like he's really mad at this guy.
I should ignore this. I never thought mage society was nice. It's like Daikai said, stuff like this happens in mage society. I shouldn't borrow trouble.
Keiichi gives a pitiful cry that turns into a cough as Daikai hits him.
I stop in the corridor, take a deep breath.
Having a young mage under my thumb wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
No, even if I save him, he'll probably be ungrateful.
It will be a chance to let off some steam.
And get myself into even more trouble.
There's really nothing quite as good as beating some proud guy, especially when you get to save another in the process and take it out of both of them. One will know I beat him, the other will know I saved him.
Why don't I just be honest with myself?
I take another breath and turn around.
"Hey, Keiichi-chan," I step around the corner, "Where did you go off too, I thought we had a-- oh." The space beyond is a room concrete walled, graffitied, obviously some lost sub-basement of the transit system.
The group's two women are holding Keiichi up while the guys watch. Daikai is standing in front of him, fist cocked for a blow. He's removed his suit jacket and the guy on the other side is holding it.
The other man is blocking my way.
"Get lost." He says. "Your boyfriend is--"
He's about my height, so I grab him by the lapels and headbutt him. He stumbles back but I still have a hold of him, and bring my knee up into his gut. His eyes go wide and he collapses.
The other four clear for action fast. They're probably not as good as me, but I can't be lazy here. I kick the guy I knocked down to keep him down then hop back a bit.
Nanke looks at me, head on one side. He's at the group's back, next to the guy but now stepping back, clearing for action. "A corrupted mage who's thinks she's a hero of justice?"
"Witches need to work hard to make friends."
The other guy has stepped into blocking position between us, hands raised in a stance I recognize as one to channel mana from a major constellation. He, like mel will be using martial arts to summon his power, though I think he'll be using a different source than me. I know how to draw on constellations, but it's not my specialty. It's honestly they're too much work.
In general, there are three sources mages use to summon mana. The energy of the sky, which is ruled by constellations, the energy of the earth, which is ruled by leylines, and the energy of the air which is weak but near universal. There are two other more advanced techniques, summoning power from other dimensions or from the basic universal force, but both are much more difficult and generally used only for rituals.
This guy is definitely using a constellation. The girl behind him, who has begun a fire chant, is doing the same. Meantime the other girl has pulled a potion from her bag and injected it, and is now field mixing another.
Nanke, meantime stands aloof at the back, waiting to see if his minions can take me out.
I don't particularly want the women to get a chance to really prep so I go straight in at star guy. He snaps out a punch, faster than I thought he'd be able to. The guy must be a mathematical genius to be able to construct an aligned star move so fast. I'm forced to block, taking the blow across my arms and a surge of spoken power. This would be much easier if I was wearing my armour.
The blow knocks me back on my heels. I jump to the side, expecting a quick followup, but there isn't one. Instead he stands where he is, falling back into his stance.
Ah. I see it. "That's disappointing, but clever."
He snarls. "What did you say?"
"Your technique. I thought you were doing on the spot calculations to determine stance, but you're not are you? You worked out the symbol and move that would give you the most power in this day. You probably have a chart on your phone saying so and so sign for so and so hour."
Bullseye. He's glaring. I can't take too much time to gloat though, Fire Girl is taking a bit of time with her chant, probably to burn me rather than her friend, but I don't have much time. "Anyhow, it's clever but it makes your move set too limited." I step forward, judging distance.
"Damn you!" He takes a step forward, trying to move in the same stance, but I take a step back with him and then pivot on one foot to kick him in the head. He drops like a puppet with cut strings.
The two women back up. Both have almost completed their rituals and look back at Nanke to give them more time, but he doesn't seem to want to bother. It might not matter though, because they're just finished. Potion girl raises her arm to throw, and while her companion's chant raises to a climax.
I'm inspired to grab their friend I just kicked and yank him up in front of me as a shield. Potion Girl's aborts her throw but fumbles the veil—the hissing stuff hits the floor in front of her and starts to throw up dust. I throw my human shield at the fire mage, knocking her down in a tangle and disrupting her chant, which dissipates in a spray of smoke and sends her coughing.
Confident she's out for now, I go in on Potion Girl, running around the edge of the hole her transmutation potion is making and hitting her with a rapid combination of blows. She's able to stay with me for a few moments thanks to the strength potion she injected, but she's not nearly as practiced at fighting as I am. I put her down with a punch to the face, then zap fire mage with a shadowbolt as she gets out from under star guy, slamming her into the tunnel wall.
Keiichi has run for it down the tunnel, so it's just Nanke and me facing one another next to the dusty hole.
"He's a worm you know? A gossip and a scoundrel." Nanke circles left, stance casual. "I suppose that would be useful to someone like you."
"Truth is, I'm just mad you're all so reluctant to dance with someone as beautiful as me."
He laughs and drops into a stance. "Then, perhaps I can be your dance partner?"
Honestly, Nanke isn't so bad looking. He's just not really my type. I don't really go for hefty heavyweight guys. He begins to chant and I feel geomantic power building, sucked him from all angles this far down, and a network of runes glow around him.
He comes at me in a blur, driven to great speed by the power now flowing through him. Geomancy's great for that, and I should know, it's mostly what I use. You always expect big guys to be slow, but Nanke isn't. His combinations are simple, boxing blows, but he delivers them in rapid succession, fast enough I can hardly counter them.
I have a dilemma here. I can fight him at this level and maybe get hurt. I can reveal one of my tricks, or--
I kick up a wave of dust from the transmuted hole and then send it on a word into my opponents face. His chant stops abruptly as he starts to cough, and then I plant a blow in his stomach. He doubles over then goes back down with a knee to the face.
He looks up at me, wheezing, and I realize he's laughing. "T-that was cheap."
I shrug. I'm an evil witch after all. He closes his eyes and lies back.
"Still frightened of getting hurt, Nozomi?"
I look around and see Horie Yuuki step out of the shadows.
"Oh, you're here. So Aratani has finally arrived?" I raise an eyebrow. "He's putting on some airs arriving this late in the evening."
"We had a case."
"Of course you did." Horie Yuuki, is one of the deadliest hand-to-hand fighters in Tokyo and another old friend of mine. She's shorter than me, actually kind of short by any standards, with boyish hair. A real cutie. She's wearing a short, particularly daring white party dress, which I am endeavouring not to pay too much attention to.
"Come on. He wants to see you."
"Alright." I resummon my shoes and slip them on.
"What was that even about?"
"I'm a hero of justice now. Haven't you heard?"
She gives me a look.
Aratani Kaito is waiting for us in front of the entrance. The man who was my betrothed is a beauty. About two years my senior, carefully styled golden hair his major concession to the unusual. He's tall, but only slightly taller than me, well muscled, and filling out a white suit that clings to his form almost as well as the one Junya wore earlier. He wears small, serious glasses and carries a jewel top cane.
I shouldn't compare them so. I suppose it's just that I'm attracted to a lot of women, and very few men, these two among them. I've known them both since I was a child, and had my part in destroying their lives. It's hard not to.
"Nozomi." He looks at me, a slight smile as his eyes take in, no doubt, a dozen subtle signs I've just been in a fight. "Did we interupt you?"
I don't blush or anything, I have enough control for that, and run a cleaning and fixing enchantment on my dress. What does my makeup look like? Fuck. "Not particularly. You know how these things are for me. What about you though? You seem to have almost skipped the party entirely."
"I had to deal with an affair with a corpse."
"That seems common with you." I fall in beside him. "People will start to take you for a necromancer Kaito."
"At least that'd make it less gossip worthy for us to be seen together."
"So what's so interesting about this corpse?"
We step in through the doors, and the herald announces Aratani with fanfare.
"Later." He offers an arm. "For now, would you do me the honour? I believe it must be the fifth dance."
*****
The body is splayed out, opened up, in a full state of post autopsy revelation. Beside it, dozens of objects are laid in a medical tray in neat lines. Aratani is still in his slim suit, but I took time to change. I'm not messing up my dress at the morgue. Now I'm wearing white. White Italian boots, a white Italian jacket, white silk shirt, white silk gloves that just happen to have pentagrams stitched into them. The only reason I don't look like a snow bank is black thigh-highs, and a blue silk cravat. I picked the outfit just for the morgue. White suit on white walls makes the colour and black stand out all the more.
The dumpy old police detective and police doctor are both giving me funny looks. I can't tell if it's because my heels make me taller than either of them, or because my heels cost more than they make in a month. They also keep glancing at Horie, is (rather stubbornly) still wearing her party dress and slowly freezing.
"You better take her back to the party when we're done here," I whisper to Aratani as we go, "or I might have to assassinate you for real."
He smiles. "You're so unobservant sometimes."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Let's concentrate on the dead body shall we?"
I frown at that, still not getting it, then shrug and approach the corpse, pulling up a surgical mask. "So, what's the context for this?"
The detective looks at Aratani questioningly, then coughs and speaks. "This is Tanaka Reo, unemployed, well, employed as a gang member. He was one of a number of men hired by," a look at Aratani, "a criminal enterprise in Roppongi. He and his accomplices engaged Aratani-san and his party, along with police special forces. He proved to be extremely fast and strong. It took Horie-san to take him down." He wipes his glasses, which are steaming up. "A second man with similar implants was encountered earlier this week, and was able to fight off dozens of police officers before we called in Esper Down."
"What kind of abilities did he have?"
"Officers said that he was incredibly fast and strong, and he could project blades of shadow that cut through a stab vest."
"Huh." I look at the corpse. "He wasn't an Esper?"
Aratani speaks. "He was twenty-nine." The oldest known Esper is twenty-five. You only manifest younger than twenty. "The autopsy found numerous foreign objects which had been implanted across his body. They initially thought they might be some kind of cybernetic implants, but there's no electronics present. You are an expert on--" Dark powers, the implantation of magic into the body, and thus the spirit, "magic like this, so…"
"You brought me in." I peer over at the tray and then at the wounds. "There are 108 of these?"
"108, exactly." The doctor says.
"You have some gloves I can use?"
After I get the gloves on, I move to examine the objects, first without picking them up.
Each is a small disk of dull copper, with a symbol embossed into its back. When I pick one up, it sticks to the tray slightly. A magnet? Thick enough that it might be hollow. I shake it. It rattles. The workmanship is crude, the edges cracked and uneven, with spots of discoloration from uneven temperature, and some evidence that the worst of it has been ground down. Terribly shoddy. Kondou-san would scold me for turning in something like this.
Aratani looks at me expectantly, he already told me that both the cop and the doctor are more or less in the know. Given how cold Horie is looking I decide I won't draw things out. "This man has been wired with a geomantic grid." I lift the disk. "There's a lodestone in here, a magnet. It realigns the man's body energies in line with the local geomancy, lets him draw on it for power."
Horie shivers, and not just from the cold this time. "But his energies would constantly bleed into the greater energy of the local dragon lines. He might gain great strength for a while, but each time he used it he'd become less and less himself."
"There are ways around that. None of them are fitted here though. With a grid of this type, he'd rapidly lose contact with normal human emotions. He'd become prey to whatever flowed down the leylines and into him." I put the implant down. "I suspect that he may not have known what he was getting into. These aren't very well fabricated. Maybe some street gang found an old book--" No, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Aratani is, of course, quick to jump on my lapse in logic. "It seems like you'd need considerable skill to come up with something like this, even if the surgery and manufacturing are a little crude, Nozomi. I don't believe either Yuuki-san or I would have known how to build this. Could you have?"
Always testing me. Just how much do you really know? It's always traps within traps with our Sherlock Holmes. "I could have, but if I was going to, I'd have done it better. There's no need for all this copper, indeed it just makes the process even more toxic and dangerous. Who wants super soldiers that go mad after a short time? No. Even if the person who made this has some skill, this is crude."
Aratani frowns. "So you are saying that whoever we're looking for is good at geomancy and black surgery, but not as good as you."
"Correct." I consider. "Or they're made in a way that's meant to debilitate the person using them over the long term."
"Is there a way we could detect or disrupt it?" Horei asks.
"I'm sure your boy has already guessed." I look at Aratani, who smiles and looks smug. "With an arrangement like this it's easy. All you need is a magnet."
*****
I should, I suppose, as we go further into this, say a few words about the nature of what mages variously refer to as dark power, forbidden arts, unclean techniques. This also requires a little history of the Black Books, which are so much a part of this story. Magic, in general, works by the channeling of various arcane forces through symbolism. That symbolism can be a literal symbol, from a rune to a word, or it can be a symbolic action. To conduct a scan for local magic, shut one eye, sacrifice half your sight for wisdom as Odin did. Less sacrifice, less wisdom.
That's magic. Exorcists, priests, and infernalists may also call power by making deals with spirits, demons, ghosts and gods, but most mages don't, at least openly. Summoning, making pacts with, employing spirits is the least forbidden of the forbidden arts. It's not even really frowned on, it's just not something that one admits to.
What manner of arcane forces you employ varies. It can be the energy of the earth, magic of the stars, of the elements, of human sacrifices, of other dimensions. Here we get into the real meat and drink of forbidden arts. Channeling the wrong power in the wrong way can be dangerous, and can get you known as a black magician.
In general, mages don't like craft by which arcane power is introduced into the body in anything like a permanent way. They don't like anything that can change how symbolism works. Magic is about reason, they don't like anything that can pollute it, or that disobeys what reason would suggest.
But this isn't universal.
Some thousands of years ago, all the forbidden, twisted powers of the day were recorded, techniques written down in ciphered tomes, mighty spells used to symbolically, and thus actually, trap the knowledge that mages disliked in a series of grimoires, the black books.
Of course, there are two flaws in this plan. First, that such secrets can still be rediscovered, and second that the black books might be read.
*****
I get home late. What with the party and the morgue, it's annoying. I have a treasure by I haven't been able to look at yet waiting for me. Maybe I should leave it another night, wait until I'm fresh. It's late. School will be far too soon in the morning. I planned to try to get some sleep tonight.
Fat chance. I can't resist any longer. I'll have to look through the book.
The Witch's House. My house is set back from the road in its own walled garden. There's a gate, gravel, then a four-story mansion built around a central courtyard. The gate opens, the garage door opens, and the card slides quickly inside, even as both portals rapidly shut.
I'm safe.
"Hello House."
"Hello Nozomi." The house's voice is warm and feminine, with an aristocratic British accent.
"Any intrusions or messages?"
"A parcel was delivered earlier, I believe it was your blu-rays."
"Great." I take off my shoes and hand my jacket into the hands of an unseen servant. It's nice and warm in here. The chill of the morgue didn't leave me even outside it. It's annoyingly cold this April. There might be snow. I shut the door and let the tension flow out of me.
I pull my cravat off and dump it. "Is a bath ready?"
"Yes Nozomi." The house says.
"Great." I walk upstairs, heading for the main bathroom on the third floor. I'll relax in the bath and run my first probes by remote. I put the book straight into the vaults. By habit, I glance at the central garden and then out of the long windows towards the street. Something stands under the lamp, watching the house. I stare at it, my heart suddenly hammering. It's so indistinct, a dark idea of a person in the pool of the street light.
It raises its head and looks at me.
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- Location
- a place
Loving the story so far, amazing work FBH.
InterstellarHobo
Cosmic Vagrant
- Location
- No Fixed Planetary System
Mmm, it's a little clunky how you describe Nozomi's outfits in full detail so often. The one at the start of this chapter was pretty decently done, but describing Nozomi's morgue-going garb really doesn't deserve that much detail, and the mid-fight description of her complete outfit at the start of last chapter felt really out of place.
Unrelatedly,
Unrelatedly,
I smell shipping ahead.
I dunno, I think the narration's insistent focus on what she and others are wearing even when it's clunky and awkward is revealing of the narrator's character.
Chapter 1-3: Monsters and Criminals
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I scramble into my workroom fast. "House, lock internal doors, set defensive wards to maximum sensitivity."
I yank open the back refrigerator and pull one of the high purity component bottles out of the top. Four balls of reagent go into my alabaster and ebony casting bowl. They're a mix of sulfur, beeswax, butter and gold dust. Four should be enough, at this level of purity each one would have the killing power somewhere between a tank main gun round and an anti ship missile. Unless this thing is tougher than any of the previous things that hunted me, it'll die to that.
"Mirror. Show me across the street." I call out, raising my hand and making the ritual gesture. My mirror flickers for a moment, then shows a photorealistic image of area under the street lamp, tracking what I wanted to see.
Empty.
"Show me the park."
Empty. "Thermal overlay." The view flickers to bright black and white. Still nothing. "Etheric." Glowing magical lines, pools of green mist and rising tides of magic, but no figure.
Shit shit shit! Where is it? "House. Launch the drones!" I have a sudden, horrid, thought, pull up the security system on the room's terminal, listed alongside the integrity on every door and window, internal and external cameras. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Pure technology, wired in to the computer in this room, unhackable without some serious magic I should be able to detect.
I snap around, looking behind me, guard up, checking the room.
Empty. Just me.
I bring up the feed from the drones. Nothing. A few passers-by, coming back from the last train, but no one with the same aura as that figure. I'd know if I saw them again, I'm sure of that. Could it have cut into a building? I use the mirror again, scan through the neighboring houses. Just people going about their business. No sign of it.
It's gone.
I have a condition: the symptoms are migraine headaches, seizures, and being hunted by monsters from the outer dark. I'm eighteen years old. If I don't find a cure, I'll be dead by twenty-one.
When I was thirteen, my father killed my family. He didn't mean to. The Nishifunes have always been a family connected to magecraft, involved with bringing the learnings of Western magic to Japan, and the learnings of Eastern magic to the West. It was only in later generations that we fell on hard times. My great grandfather sunk most of the family fortune, much of our mystic lore, and himself in an ill-advised venture during the Second World War. It wasn't a particularly monstrous enterprise, not like some, but it killed him and broke the family.
My grandfather was dead before I knew him, killed by the pressure to scramble his way up from nothing. My father tried to rebuild, sought safety in service to another of the great Mage families, the Aratani. He married, and had me, his daughter, who he betrothed to the Aratani's younger son, Kaito, who you have already met.
Only, he made a mistake. He didn't consider the character of Kaito's elder brother Eitaro, and how unsuitable he was to be heir.
I remember the night when Aratani Nonoka, the family matriarch, called him in. I was playing outside the door, my mother, a non-mystic exiled upstairs. It was in the drawing-room of the Aratani clan's giant old house. I don't really remember what she said but I remember how she looked at him, the pity in her eyes. The calm way she explained what had to happened. How the match was now impossible, as Kaito had become heir.
I remember the way his face froze. How no one seemed to realize how angry he was except me.
That awful expression. That black rage only his family saw.
I ran out and went to the summer house. It was dark, but I couldn't stay inside. I was afraid. I couldn't stay in there. The summer house, a woody space of spiders and chill in the dark was still the refuge I took in the day.
I think it was the distance that saved me. No one in the house survived.
I was curled up on the sofa inside with my knees up to my face, crying, when I had my first attack.
It started as a sharp pain behind my eyes, a swirl of colour across my vision. I felt hot and sick and the light hurt.
And then through it, I saw.
My father walked down the steps to the basement. Each step took him lower, towards something else. Towards the place I dreaded.
The Aratani family are keepers of the forbidden. They kept the black books, they kept other things. The worst thing they kept was in the basement, something they kept locked up.
There was blood on him, and on the sledgehammer across his shoulder. Not his. As he approached, I could hear him chanting, unsealing the magic around the door At the door to the basement he stopped, pushed a bloody hand onto the code pad. The door hissed open.
Behind it, the basement, a long glass window. Behind it, the spider stood. My father hit the close button on the door and shut it to seal.
It spoke to my father as if they were old friends.
For long the Aratani have imprisoned me, and see how their fortune has grown.
"You have had nothing to do with that."
Then why am I in a glass cell, why not sealed in a warded box a thousand meters below the earth? Why can you speak to me?
"They betrayed me. I was to become a member of their household. My poor daughter, she was to be married to a scion! We were to have a fortune."
A sad tale, but why waste time on such explanations? You are committed are you not? You killed to come down here.
"The legends say that a deal with a spider can grant great fortunes, not just for one generation but for all that follow."
I have heard such things.
"Will you grant my family fortune? If I free you?"
If you free me, then your family shall have all the fortune that is mine to grant.
"You swear to it?" My father looked back behind him, there was the sound of banging, someone at the door. I arched in agony, hoping desperately they'd break it down. Hoping for the bang of an explosive charge, the flare of fire or the crack of a gunshot to kill my father where he stood, anything to end the terrible pain in my head.
I so swear.
My father lifted the hammer and swung it into the engraved glass of the cage. "Then go free!"
The convulsions almost broke my back.
When I came back to myself there was screaming. The air was screaming. People were screaming.
Something was hunting me. I knew it as certainly as I had ever known anything. I got up and ran out of the summerhouse, out into rain suddenly pouring down from what had been a clear sky. I looked at the house once, saw energies flickering around it, impossible colours, and the thing coming after me.
I remember every step of getting to the road, the entire run a single long flashbulb, I remember hearing the thing getting closer and closer behind me. The alien sound that its breathing. So close. So close!
I got to the road and saw the lights of a car coming out on me. I thought it was going to hit me, and fell over and screamed but instead, it stopped and a man stepped free. He was a tall, long-haired and dark-eyed, so handsome, seeming both younger than my father and far, far older.
I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if not for the complete coincidence of him passing. Or did he sense something amiss and come to see?
I said something like "Monster!" and pointed. I saw it for the first time then. It was a thin horror, taller than a man, faceless and emaciated. I knew it was not the spider, but could feel it held a part of its power. He looked down the slope, saw the thing and raised a hand. I turned in time to see him yank the lightning down, the blast catching the hunter in a flash so bright it washed out the colours flickering around the house. I was awestruck. He walked forward to me, dropping to one knee before me, bringing him to a little above my eye level.
"So, young lady, what--"
I wanted to say, say something. Say that I was sure my father had done something terrible. Thank him for saving me or maybe just burst into tears. I wanted to warn him about the estate and the madness that was happening again.
I wanted never to feel so helpless again.
"Teach me! Teach me to do that!"
He laughed, looked me in the eye. "Alright."
And that's how I met Kondou Yuu, my teacher.
I don't get any sleep that night. There are ways around it. Instead I check out the black book, and take initial probes. Actually penetrating it is a long process which takes most of the time till morning. Then I crack it open for real and find that the whole thing is written in a cipher that I can't read.
This is obviously quite unacceptable, so I start the process of getting information. For starters, I call up the people who gave me the information to acquire this black book in the first place. I have school today, and I don't want to miss volleyball practice, so it is agreed they will come here, as soon as the call has ended.
The Kaneda brothers are a pair of shady import-export guys who run supplies for several foreign convenience store chains for expats, antiquarian items, and, as a sideline, a business buying and selling artifacts of the occult. They also sell information.They sold me on a certain antiquarian book chain having a secret archive and what it might contain. This is a good time to give them their reward in person, to see what information they have about the people using the artifacts, and to scare them.
I spy on them magically in the car. The younger one doesn't want to be up so early, is complaining he hasn't had any breakfast and that if he'd wanted to keep hours like this he'd have become a salaryman.
"You're not smart enough to be a salaryman," the older one, Tanaka, grunts, looking up at my house.
His brother gives him a look, then glances up at my house. "Shit. She really lives alone in a place like this?"
"Don't say any of that shit when we're inside." Tanaka looks back at him. "She's our ticket to real money if we play our cards right. You better not give away the show."
So. I get up from in front of the mirror and head down. The door opens and the two guys come in, leaving their shoes at the door politely. "Uh, Nishifune-San?" Tanaka asks.
"Come straight in." My voice comes out of the wall, what they might think is hidden speakers. The security door swings open. The two shrug and walk in on me in the living room. I'm wearing my school uniform, sitting at a table and eating breakfast. "Gentlemen. I figured you might be hungry."
"Kind of you Miss," Tanaka says, sitting opposite. "Your agents got the goods for you then?"
"My agents, yeah." I smile a little, and wave a hand food begins to serve onto their plates. Both men goggle. "I have a full continental spread here, so do tuck in."
"Ah-ah." The younger one looks at the toast like he's seeing things. "How the fuck--"
"I was spying on you in the car you know." I lean forward, let a smug smirk come over my face. "I can spy on people wherever they go."
"Ma'am. Please forgive--" Tanaka starts, then gasps, fingers going to his throat, wrestling for invisible fingers. His brother tries to get up, then finds himself straining against nothing. Then he also feels a grip on his throat.
"Don't interrupt me." I give them a cold look, release a bit of the pressure. "We've done good business together. So I'm disappointed. I'm really disappointed. First you sell me books that are ciphered, and now you're plotting to take me for everything I've got. I'm actually upset." my invisible grip tightens.
Both men are watching me eyes very wide. I tap a finger on the table "So, do you have the cipher that these are written in to sell me?"
"Ah-ah." Tanaka goes pale. "Well uh, uh, I know where they are, I had them but--"
The hand tightens on his throat briefly then releases. He pants.
"Tell me what happened."
Tanaka doesn't look like he wants to speak so his younger brother takes over. "Well you see," he takes a deep breath, "there's this gang... "
There's a gambling house, Kanezawa Palace, a fairly low-rolling underground place, that specializes in items of minor occult interest. There must be a hundred places like that, a thousand, in every city and in every continent. If people aren't auctioning mystic knowledge or stealing it, they'll be gambling it.
This particular gambling house has got a hold of the cipher key for these books, a glass reading device which on its own is just a magnifying glass that won't break and won't get dirty. The brothers here were planning to see how much money they could get out of me for it, and hoping to grab me into the bargain. They didn't have the device yet, but they had a contact inside the casino, who was going to make sure they won it.
Then someone gave a particularly vicious but ultimately forgettable gang called Boxcutter access to superpowers, and they grabbed every underground operation not protected by one of the more powerful syndicates.
Worse, after what happened in the last few days, they're liable to get raided by the police soon, which will put my cipher key in the much harder to reach Tokyo police evidence room. So all I need to do is raid the club before the police get there and while being hunted by a supernatural horror.
Easy.
The younger Kaneda completes this story and then looks at me imploringly.
"Well, thank you. You've been very helpful. If there's no further unpleasantness, I'll pay you your usual rate. I hope we can do more business in the future."
Both men bow, and withdraw.
They never do end up having breakfast.
I start the ball rolling on intelligence collection that day. Human intelligence (HUMINT), consists of sending an encrypted message to a certain Yakuza acquaintance of mine looking for any information on the Paradise or the gang who run it. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is provided by one of my drones, this one with alchemically doped batteries and the antenna. The antenna is the front end of a police Stingray mobile phone intercept system to hover over the club and pull in any mobile phone signals used in proximity. Another drone provides imagery (IMINT) from a camera, checking the place out. Both are painted blue and white and should hopefully avoid detection.
Finally, I set up my magic mirror to show me the clubs inside. This takes a complicated ritual and an even more fiddly set up of my digital camera so it can record what the mirror is showing while I am out.
With all that done, I head to school.
It's kind of dumb to worry about showing up for volleyball recruitment when I have a hunter on me. I should just stay inside my security, work through the intelligence as it comes in, be practical.
Maybe, but I can't help feeling like if I start down that path I'll go out less and less, do less and less of the things I like, until there's nothing left of me but work.
What's even the point of living beyond twenty-one if I don't have a life?
As far as I can tell, the hunter isn't on me now anyway. I'm running periodic checks, the car driving in counter tailing patterns, several drones as outriders, cameras checking surrounding streets for anything following. Nothing.
The thing has vanished.
There's frequently a stage of the hunt like this, where the hunter shows itself and then vanishes, sometimes for weeks, before the active phase begins.
That day I eat lunch with Manako in the shade of the trees where the school grounds start to fall away. She always has a fantastic bento, which she prepares herself, way better even than the expensive prepared ones I get.
"I made extra today." She offers me a wrapped box. "Do you want it?"
"Yes! I definitely want it." I unwrap it. "I hope I can eat all this and mine."
"Urgh. I wish I could eat like you.How is your figure so nice?"
"Relentless exercise mostly." I lean back. "I exercise a lot, it helps with my condition."
"How is that anyway?" she asks.
"No attacks lately." That's interesting, actually. Usually, I seize when a hunter comes. This one is different. I'll need to be careful.
"Do you think you'll go to the nationals this year?"
"I think we will." I stretch. "I want to close my last year out with a bang."
"What are you going to do after university?"
"I don't know yet." I'm going to be dead after university most likely. Actually a lot worse than dead. "Travel maybe. I've got enough money I'm never going to need to work. I might put a lot more time into my Instagram cosplay."
"Must be nice. My parents are already talking about a career and a husband."
"Both at once huh?" I smirk. "How modern of them." She blushes a little.
"Do you ever think there might be more to the world than this?" She looks out over the valley, the fringe of her hair blowing a little in the breeze in a way that makes me want to comb it. She has a pixie cut, but somehow always manages to make it look untidy.
"What do you mean?" I look at her.
"I mean, everything is so grey. I want to see something more." She sighs. "I mean even Espers are getting drawn into the grey. Turning into just another way to take exams. I just wish there was something more. "
For a moment, seeing the expression on her face, I almost lose it and tell her everything.
But I can't. I can't just pull someone over the threshold. Not with what's coming after me.
"Don't be too down." I give in and start to comb her hair back. She lets me. "There's still a whole year of school, and there's college."
"Urgh. Even school's not so good. I hate cram school." I'm so glad I don't have to actually do that. I really do not have time.
Manako relaxes under my hands, eyes closing. "Sometimes I feel like my whole life was already determined when I was born," she mutters.
"There's always decisions in life." I lift the comb away. "You just have to grab them when they come by."
In retrospect, this is not the wisest advice I've ever given.
After school, and helping recruit a new generation to the volleyball team, I have a doctor's appointment. Akigawa Alice, my doctor, is kind of a sketchy weirdo, but then all mages are. She operates a small clinic in the back streets near Sangenjaya Station. I take the train there to vary my routine from a random station and realize halfway that it's on me.
It's hard to check for followers in the crowded conditions of a Tokyo subway at this hour, but equally hard to follow. The best time to spot people is as the car clears out, look for people who pause near the doors, in position to watch who leaves.
And there she is.
I decide that I'll call her Office Lady. I always make a name for my hunters. In her human guise, she looks like a woman in her forties, dressed for work in a frumpy suit. Just another pink-collar worker on her way home from work.
Look closer and the discrepancies multiply. She's wearing sunglasses on the subway. Her tie is on backwards. Her shirt is light blue, not white, and her shoes, seen through a gap in the crowd, are on the wrong feet.
She looks at me, head tilted slightly as the car cleans out, and for a moment I think we're going to go at it right there in the subway car. Then people flood into the car between us, and the moment passes.
I cover one eye, a simple bit of symbolic magic, sacrificing for wisdom. She's still there, a void of life-force among the brightness of the other passengers, watching me. Waiting. We stand like that watching each other as the next station rolls up, and people pour out of the car.
At the last second, as people are coming in, I push my way out against the tide. A guard yells at me for my rudeness, but I'm off and running, whispering words that'll obscure my identity to facial recognition cameras.
Is she on me? I dare not look back. Instead, I bolt up out of the station, hitting my IC card on the ticket machine while barely slowing and bolt around the corner, down a series of alleys, just random turns until my breath runs out and I make a sudden turn, coming up with my hands raised to cast.
Nothing. No running steps, not even the shouting of angry station staff about people running in their station.
I do a slow circle, one eye covered, looking, looking. No sign of it to the limits of the vision this spell will give.
With shaking hands I open my bag and stuff my school uniform's top layer and tie into it, then, reaching into the folded space of another fold pull out a white jacket with a rather fetching red rose on it, zip it on and pull out my mobile phone. How did it find me? I should have detected magic to locate me. It was just there. Close enough it could have walked over and touched me.
I'm going to double back and change lines. It's not that hard to get to Sangenjaya.
I text Alice that I might be late.
"You look terrible," Alice says cheerfully as I come in. "What happened, did you run here?"
"Ran into a complication. Had to do some E&E."
"You know, even compared to me, Nozomi, you're a fucking nerd."
Alice's is a medium height, languid, gothy young woman with glasses, very dark hair and very white skin, which I think maybe an experimental side effect. She has a habit of wearing really high heels and a really short skirt under a white lab coat. The office is mostly normal, except for the Dreamcast 3 and Playstation 4 set up semi-covertly under the desk next to a rack of trauma centre disks and a handful of other games.
Alice is in her early twenties, still in the middle of a PhD in biology. I don't know what she did to get her medical license so early, but she's the best magical doctor I have access to, and genuinely one of the best in Tokyo.
"Were you being chased?" she asks raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah, there's a hunter on me." I rub my eyes. "I think I lost it though. I've checked a dozen times on the way in."
She walks over to her computer and checks the external cameras. "Well, if it does break in here, then I'll finally have a live one to study." She gets up, grabs me by the shoulders and steers me into the back. The second room of the clinic is much stranger, a mass of heavily customized medical machinery, an eclectic mix of older machines thrown out by hospitals and cutting edge computer equipment brought off the shelf.
"So, if you're being hunted, you had another attack?"
"That's the odd thing. No. I've felt fine for like a month. My last attack was in London, and I killed that one."
"Alright, well, dump your clothes and get on the scanner."
I remove my clothes and step into the scan pod. It's a sinister-looking reclining bed thing that I think started out as an MRI but now has half a dozen different high-tech components bolted onto it. "You didn't get any additional metal implanted into you since we saw one another last, right?"
"No."
"Cool." Alice does something and the machine begins to shift and ripple around me, caressing me with various scan types. "Hmm."
"Hmm?"
"Your life energy is still being drained, but I'm not seeing any new holes." She walks over as the machine completes its cycle. "The drain doesn't appear to have speeded up either."
"So this isn't a fresh phase of my symptoms?" I'm still doomed, but hearing that makes me feel better. I was worried, not just about the monster, but about what it might mean.
"No." She walks over and frowns down at me. "You're sure this is a hunter?"
"It looks like one." I rub my eyes and pull myself out of the machine, starting to reassemble my outfit. "It acts like one." I rub my eyes. "I know you know? When I see one. I know that it's one of them."
"Hmm." She sits at the desk and taps her lips with a carbon stylus. "We've known for a while that your vital force is being consumed, but everything we've tried hasn't stopped it. Sometimes you just have a new hole." She puts the stylus down and looks at me. "I want to introduce internal sensors." She rummages around and pulls out a pack of sterile fluid. "I want to be able to record what happens at the exact moment of you having an attack."
"Alright." I take the sensor and look at it carefully. There's something in the fluid, like iron filings "So what? I swallow it?"
"No, it's injected. Here." She pulls out a gas injector, then loads the fluid and puts it on my chest under my breast. There's a thump and a chill of the injection. Alice checks the monitor then nods. "Okay, it's giving me good telemetry. Memory looks good too."
I put my shirt back on. "You know, we could probably induce something like an attack by triggering my curse. It's not exactly hard to do."
"No." Alice shakes her head. "The acute symptoms you get from that are too dangerous. In my medical opinion, you shouldn't risk it."
"But--"
"Who's the doctor here?" Alice gives me a cool look over her glasses. "Oh yeah, it's me. So stop asking."
I'm cursed to have money. If I ever drop below having a billion yen, then I have a severe physical reaction, (like the kind of reaction you get when you're hit by a car) and I suddenly have more than a billion yen again.
My Dad wanted our family to be wealthy and prosperous, well, now we are. Forever. Or at least until I die at twenty one. Unfortunately, there also seems to be an upper point. At more than two billion, I suddenly can't make any more money. Investments flatline, the market moves against me. Without action, a downtrend starts and within a few months, the curse triggers again. I pay an expensive broker to keep my fortune up, and make sure to spend more than a little of the proceeds.
"I also have some new post-seizure medication." She pulls out an inhaler. "One puff as soon after the seizure as possible to restore normal functioning. If you're in an emergency situation, two puffs will put you back on your feet from almost any wound that's not immediately fatal. It'll just really fuck you up if you don't get proper medical attention afterwards."
"Thanks Alice."
"You stay safe out there." She musses my hair. "Want a lollipop?"
I'm still moving the sweet around my mouth and trying to decide if it was worth it when I check my messages.
Phones are very insecure and you should never use one for any kind of criminal enterprise. That's why my phone actually isn't a phone. While it looks as if it's the latest Samsung Galaxy, the only things it actually shares with that design are the screen and the case. The inside is all custom micro-electronics built for me by a group of American specialists. The phone is linked through a zero-latency-magical link to The Exchange, which is the big server that links all my electronics together through an array of encryption and ZLM links.
Backing all this up, I have a series of runes hung on my devices which state that they cannot be tracked. This is all most mages bother with. This isn't actually that hard a technique to pull off for a mage, and is very effective against non-magical opposition if what you're doing is non-obvious. Of course, against another mage, and the Japanese government also has mages, even a little pressure will cause the normal rules to reassert themselves.
So I have the exchange, and I have a bunch of encrypted systems.
This is great because it means I always have five bars of signal, even on the oldest areas of the subway.
I took the subway half out of bravado, half out of a part-formed plan to ambush the Hunter if it showed its face again. It does not, and now I'm glad. Riding the subway makes it much faster to get to a late-night meeting in Kabukichō. I need to go meet the Yakuza who wishes he were my dad.
I change clothes again before I get to Kabukicho, and do my makeup. The heyday of the crackdown on Yakuza and the like has well passed, but it would be bad to go around there in even a barely recognizable Fujisaka Jogakuin uniform. I change in a public toilet, and dump my school stuff into the bag of holding in my handbag, then head down to the non-descript offices of Hagino-Gumi.
Kabukicho is busy enough tonight to present a challenging environment for counter-surveillance, so I alert them I'm being followed, get an escort in. The Yakuza leaves me near the door, saying he's got stuff to do, so I go in alone.
There's a couple of the younger guys in the outer office, who do a bit of a double-take when they see me, but I'm known here, and the guy running the lobby gives me a "Yo, Nozomi-chan!" as I enter.
"Eiji-san." I wave, then snap my fingers. "How's the new wife?"
"She's great! First kid is on the way." He nods. "Boss is expecting you, go straight up."
"Thanks." I head up the stairs, hearing the three of them talking in voices they think I can't hear.
"Is that the Boss's woman?"
"No you dickhead! She's his business partner, and don't let him hear you imply otherwise."
"A girl like that is in business with the Boss?"
"I don't understand it either."
I smile a little as I step into the second-floor office. Nagoshi Ryuta, Captain and second ranked man in Hagino-Gumi is sat behind the desk smoking when I come in. In his fifties, now, he's still a big man, muscular like an aging wrestler with skin weathered by cigarettes and fistfights.
"Nozomi-san." He waves me to a seat. "Are you well?"
"So formal Ryuta-kun." I stretch out a little on the chair and look at him. Ryuta really wants to be my father. I think he had kids and then messed up their upbringing, but even after I got him out of a tight spot with a murder charge a few years ago, he treats me like I'm a kid. In return, I suppose I mock him a little. "Your men already suspect what we're doing up here."
He blanches, then sighs. "I have the information you wanted." He pulls out an envelope. "What are you getting into something with a gang like the Boxcutters for?"
"Let's say that we have a difference of agreement."
"They cut up one of your school friends?"
I frown a bit, he's spoiling my timing, but finish anyway. "They think they should keep the mystic artifacts in their possession. I think otherwise."
"Ah. I heard they'd got involved in other side of the city stuff." He puffs, "You know there's gangs recruiting Espers now? Or colour gangs led by Espers. The countries going to hell. It'll be like America soon."
"Hey, at least the police don't have the resources to worry about organized crime anymore."
"That's the truth." He brightens a bit before glaring at me. "Be fucking careful of these guys though, they were vicious psychos even before they started getting fucking magic. You know why they call themselves the Boxcutters?"
"They all use them?"
"Their initiation right is to slit some poor fuck up with one."
"How have the cops not come down on that?"
"Run up to a guy, slash him with your cutter and run. A lot of them get caught, but if you talk, you become the next target for initiations." He sighs. "In the old days, the Yakuza would have made sure shit like that stayed off the streets."
The idea that there was an old time when the Yakuza were a bunch of goodhearted outlaws who kept the streets clean with their own moral code is, as far as I can tell, something every generation of Yakuza has believed in.
His look turns speculative. "You sure you don't want us to go get whatever this thing is for you?"
I relent. "I know you'd do that for me Ryuta-san, but I don't want to get any of your men killed because of something I did."
"You know, you could have a good life on that inheritance of yours, without risking it involved in shit like this."
I pull the box I bought with me, anti-snooping charms for their phones. "No, I honestly couldn't. Thanks for your help Ryuta-san."
"Stay safe."
Reading Ryuta's folder, Boxcutter come off as even less pleasant than previously reported. Most criminals are just poor, desperate, they join gangs for control, or because it seems badass, or because they really don't have any better prospects
Boxcutter go way beyond the stuff you'd expect from colour gangs, or even the more security conscious, less 'acceptable' criminals like triads or drug gangs. Apart from the violent initiation they practice various ritual scarring and end their ceremonies by drinking blood mix with sake. I wonder how much of this is a product of their implants, if they all had them, or whoever gave them the gear picked a gang who's culture would already support it.
The most interesting thing though is their corporate ties. They've apparently done dirty work, (like kidnapping homeless people for medical trials) for a company called Kamitouge Group, but recently broke from it in violent fashion. I suspect that link is the only reason they haven't faced a massive police crackdown, and it's only waiting now on Kamitouge to finish its own internal cleanup.
Bloodthirsty psychos with a lot of loyalty and fear of one another. It's a hard place to crack, but there are some weak points. Guys like this don't like to clean their own floors. The next night I pay a visit to a certain woman, and a large amount of money changes hands between us. I get floor plans, intelligence on the gang, ideas.
I'm set. I'll do it on Friday Night.
I yank open the back refrigerator and pull one of the high purity component bottles out of the top. Four balls of reagent go into my alabaster and ebony casting bowl. They're a mix of sulfur, beeswax, butter and gold dust. Four should be enough, at this level of purity each one would have the killing power somewhere between a tank main gun round and an anti ship missile. Unless this thing is tougher than any of the previous things that hunted me, it'll die to that.
"Mirror. Show me across the street." I call out, raising my hand and making the ritual gesture. My mirror flickers for a moment, then shows a photorealistic image of area under the street lamp, tracking what I wanted to see.
Empty.
"Show me the park."
Empty. "Thermal overlay." The view flickers to bright black and white. Still nothing. "Etheric." Glowing magical lines, pools of green mist and rising tides of magic, but no figure.
Shit shit shit! Where is it? "House. Launch the drones!" I have a sudden, horrid, thought, pull up the security system on the room's terminal, listed alongside the integrity on every door and window, internal and external cameras. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Pure technology, wired in to the computer in this room, unhackable without some serious magic I should be able to detect.
I snap around, looking behind me, guard up, checking the room.
Empty. Just me.
I bring up the feed from the drones. Nothing. A few passers-by, coming back from the last train, but no one with the same aura as that figure. I'd know if I saw them again, I'm sure of that. Could it have cut into a building? I use the mirror again, scan through the neighboring houses. Just people going about their business. No sign of it.
It's gone.
*****
I have a condition: the symptoms are migraine headaches, seizures, and being hunted by monsters from the outer dark. I'm eighteen years old. If I don't find a cure, I'll be dead by twenty-one.
When I was thirteen, my father killed my family. He didn't mean to. The Nishifunes have always been a family connected to magecraft, involved with bringing the learnings of Western magic to Japan, and the learnings of Eastern magic to the West. It was only in later generations that we fell on hard times. My great grandfather sunk most of the family fortune, much of our mystic lore, and himself in an ill-advised venture during the Second World War. It wasn't a particularly monstrous enterprise, not like some, but it killed him and broke the family.
My grandfather was dead before I knew him, killed by the pressure to scramble his way up from nothing. My father tried to rebuild, sought safety in service to another of the great Mage families, the Aratani. He married, and had me, his daughter, who he betrothed to the Aratani's younger son, Kaito, who you have already met.
Only, he made a mistake. He didn't consider the character of Kaito's elder brother Eitaro, and how unsuitable he was to be heir.
I remember the night when Aratani Nonoka, the family matriarch, called him in. I was playing outside the door, my mother, a non-mystic exiled upstairs. It was in the drawing-room of the Aratani clan's giant old house. I don't really remember what she said but I remember how she looked at him, the pity in her eyes. The calm way she explained what had to happened. How the match was now impossible, as Kaito had become heir.
I remember the way his face froze. How no one seemed to realize how angry he was except me.
That awful expression. That black rage only his family saw.
I ran out and went to the summer house. It was dark, but I couldn't stay inside. I was afraid. I couldn't stay in there. The summer house, a woody space of spiders and chill in the dark was still the refuge I took in the day.
I think it was the distance that saved me. No one in the house survived.
I was curled up on the sofa inside with my knees up to my face, crying, when I had my first attack.
It started as a sharp pain behind my eyes, a swirl of colour across my vision. I felt hot and sick and the light hurt.
And then through it, I saw.
My father walked down the steps to the basement. Each step took him lower, towards something else. Towards the place I dreaded.
The Aratani family are keepers of the forbidden. They kept the black books, they kept other things. The worst thing they kept was in the basement, something they kept locked up.
There was blood on him, and on the sledgehammer across his shoulder. Not his. As he approached, I could hear him chanting, unsealing the magic around the door At the door to the basement he stopped, pushed a bloody hand onto the code pad. The door hissed open.
Behind it, the basement, a long glass window. Behind it, the spider stood. My father hit the close button on the door and shut it to seal.
It spoke to my father as if they were old friends.
For long the Aratani have imprisoned me, and see how their fortune has grown.
"You have had nothing to do with that."
Then why am I in a glass cell, why not sealed in a warded box a thousand meters below the earth? Why can you speak to me?
"They betrayed me. I was to become a member of their household. My poor daughter, she was to be married to a scion! We were to have a fortune."
A sad tale, but why waste time on such explanations? You are committed are you not? You killed to come down here.
"The legends say that a deal with a spider can grant great fortunes, not just for one generation but for all that follow."
I have heard such things.
"Will you grant my family fortune? If I free you?"
If you free me, then your family shall have all the fortune that is mine to grant.
"You swear to it?" My father looked back behind him, there was the sound of banging, someone at the door. I arched in agony, hoping desperately they'd break it down. Hoping for the bang of an explosive charge, the flare of fire or the crack of a gunshot to kill my father where he stood, anything to end the terrible pain in my head.
I so swear.
My father lifted the hammer and swung it into the engraved glass of the cage. "Then go free!"
The convulsions almost broke my back.
When I came back to myself there was screaming. The air was screaming. People were screaming.
Something was hunting me. I knew it as certainly as I had ever known anything. I got up and ran out of the summerhouse, out into rain suddenly pouring down from what had been a clear sky. I looked at the house once, saw energies flickering around it, impossible colours, and the thing coming after me.
I remember every step of getting to the road, the entire run a single long flashbulb, I remember hearing the thing getting closer and closer behind me. The alien sound that its breathing. So close. So close!
I got to the road and saw the lights of a car coming out on me. I thought it was going to hit me, and fell over and screamed but instead, it stopped and a man stepped free. He was a tall, long-haired and dark-eyed, so handsome, seeming both younger than my father and far, far older.
I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if not for the complete coincidence of him passing. Or did he sense something amiss and come to see?
I said something like "Monster!" and pointed. I saw it for the first time then. It was a thin horror, taller than a man, faceless and emaciated. I knew it was not the spider, but could feel it held a part of its power. He looked down the slope, saw the thing and raised a hand. I turned in time to see him yank the lightning down, the blast catching the hunter in a flash so bright it washed out the colours flickering around the house. I was awestruck. He walked forward to me, dropping to one knee before me, bringing him to a little above my eye level.
"So, young lady, what--"
I wanted to say, say something. Say that I was sure my father had done something terrible. Thank him for saving me or maybe just burst into tears. I wanted to warn him about the estate and the madness that was happening again.
I wanted never to feel so helpless again.
"Teach me! Teach me to do that!"
He laughed, looked me in the eye. "Alright."
And that's how I met Kondou Yuu, my teacher.
*****
I don't get any sleep that night. There are ways around it. Instead I check out the black book, and take initial probes. Actually penetrating it is a long process which takes most of the time till morning. Then I crack it open for real and find that the whole thing is written in a cipher that I can't read.
This is obviously quite unacceptable, so I start the process of getting information. For starters, I call up the people who gave me the information to acquire this black book in the first place. I have school today, and I don't want to miss volleyball practice, so it is agreed they will come here, as soon as the call has ended.
The Kaneda brothers are a pair of shady import-export guys who run supplies for several foreign convenience store chains for expats, antiquarian items, and, as a sideline, a business buying and selling artifacts of the occult. They also sell information.They sold me on a certain antiquarian book chain having a secret archive and what it might contain. This is a good time to give them their reward in person, to see what information they have about the people using the artifacts, and to scare them.
I spy on them magically in the car. The younger one doesn't want to be up so early, is complaining he hasn't had any breakfast and that if he'd wanted to keep hours like this he'd have become a salaryman.
"You're not smart enough to be a salaryman," the older one, Tanaka, grunts, looking up at my house.
His brother gives him a look, then glances up at my house. "Shit. She really lives alone in a place like this?"
"Don't say any of that shit when we're inside." Tanaka looks back at him. "She's our ticket to real money if we play our cards right. You better not give away the show."
So. I get up from in front of the mirror and head down. The door opens and the two guys come in, leaving their shoes at the door politely. "Uh, Nishifune-San?" Tanaka asks.
"Come straight in." My voice comes out of the wall, what they might think is hidden speakers. The security door swings open. The two shrug and walk in on me in the living room. I'm wearing my school uniform, sitting at a table and eating breakfast. "Gentlemen. I figured you might be hungry."
"Kind of you Miss," Tanaka says, sitting opposite. "Your agents got the goods for you then?"
"My agents, yeah." I smile a little, and wave a hand food begins to serve onto their plates. Both men goggle. "I have a full continental spread here, so do tuck in."
"Ah-ah." The younger one looks at the toast like he's seeing things. "How the fuck--"
"I was spying on you in the car you know." I lean forward, let a smug smirk come over my face. "I can spy on people wherever they go."
"Ma'am. Please forgive--" Tanaka starts, then gasps, fingers going to his throat, wrestling for invisible fingers. His brother tries to get up, then finds himself straining against nothing. Then he also feels a grip on his throat.
"Don't interrupt me." I give them a cold look, release a bit of the pressure. "We've done good business together. So I'm disappointed. I'm really disappointed. First you sell me books that are ciphered, and now you're plotting to take me for everything I've got. I'm actually upset." my invisible grip tightens.
Both men are watching me eyes very wide. I tap a finger on the table "So, do you have the cipher that these are written in to sell me?"
"Ah-ah." Tanaka goes pale. "Well uh, uh, I know where they are, I had them but--"
The hand tightens on his throat briefly then releases. He pants.
"Tell me what happened."
Tanaka doesn't look like he wants to speak so his younger brother takes over. "Well you see," he takes a deep breath, "there's this gang... "
*****
There's a gambling house, Kanezawa Palace, a fairly low-rolling underground place, that specializes in items of minor occult interest. There must be a hundred places like that, a thousand, in every city and in every continent. If people aren't auctioning mystic knowledge or stealing it, they'll be gambling it.
This particular gambling house has got a hold of the cipher key for these books, a glass reading device which on its own is just a magnifying glass that won't break and won't get dirty. The brothers here were planning to see how much money they could get out of me for it, and hoping to grab me into the bargain. They didn't have the device yet, but they had a contact inside the casino, who was going to make sure they won it.
Then someone gave a particularly vicious but ultimately forgettable gang called Boxcutter access to superpowers, and they grabbed every underground operation not protected by one of the more powerful syndicates.
Worse, after what happened in the last few days, they're liable to get raided by the police soon, which will put my cipher key in the much harder to reach Tokyo police evidence room. So all I need to do is raid the club before the police get there and while being hunted by a supernatural horror.
Easy.
The younger Kaneda completes this story and then looks at me imploringly.
"Well, thank you. You've been very helpful. If there's no further unpleasantness, I'll pay you your usual rate. I hope we can do more business in the future."
Both men bow, and withdraw.
They never do end up having breakfast.
*****
I start the ball rolling on intelligence collection that day. Human intelligence (HUMINT), consists of sending an encrypted message to a certain Yakuza acquaintance of mine looking for any information on the Paradise or the gang who run it. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is provided by one of my drones, this one with alchemically doped batteries and the antenna. The antenna is the front end of a police Stingray mobile phone intercept system to hover over the club and pull in any mobile phone signals used in proximity. Another drone provides imagery (IMINT) from a camera, checking the place out. Both are painted blue and white and should hopefully avoid detection.
Finally, I set up my magic mirror to show me the clubs inside. This takes a complicated ritual and an even more fiddly set up of my digital camera so it can record what the mirror is showing while I am out.
With all that done, I head to school.
It's kind of dumb to worry about showing up for volleyball recruitment when I have a hunter on me. I should just stay inside my security, work through the intelligence as it comes in, be practical.
Maybe, but I can't help feeling like if I start down that path I'll go out less and less, do less and less of the things I like, until there's nothing left of me but work.
What's even the point of living beyond twenty-one if I don't have a life?
As far as I can tell, the hunter isn't on me now anyway. I'm running periodic checks, the car driving in counter tailing patterns, several drones as outriders, cameras checking surrounding streets for anything following. Nothing.
The thing has vanished.
There's frequently a stage of the hunt like this, where the hunter shows itself and then vanishes, sometimes for weeks, before the active phase begins.
That day I eat lunch with Manako in the shade of the trees where the school grounds start to fall away. She always has a fantastic bento, which she prepares herself, way better even than the expensive prepared ones I get.
"I made extra today." She offers me a wrapped box. "Do you want it?"
"Yes! I definitely want it." I unwrap it. "I hope I can eat all this and mine."
"Urgh. I wish I could eat like you.How is your figure so nice?"
"Relentless exercise mostly." I lean back. "I exercise a lot, it helps with my condition."
"How is that anyway?" she asks.
"No attacks lately." That's interesting, actually. Usually, I seize when a hunter comes. This one is different. I'll need to be careful.
"Do you think you'll go to the nationals this year?"
"I think we will." I stretch. "I want to close my last year out with a bang."
"What are you going to do after university?"
"I don't know yet." I'm going to be dead after university most likely. Actually a lot worse than dead. "Travel maybe. I've got enough money I'm never going to need to work. I might put a lot more time into my Instagram cosplay."
"Must be nice. My parents are already talking about a career and a husband."
"Both at once huh?" I smirk. "How modern of them." She blushes a little.
"Do you ever think there might be more to the world than this?" She looks out over the valley, the fringe of her hair blowing a little in the breeze in a way that makes me want to comb it. She has a pixie cut, but somehow always manages to make it look untidy.
"What do you mean?" I look at her.
"I mean, everything is so grey. I want to see something more." She sighs. "I mean even Espers are getting drawn into the grey. Turning into just another way to take exams. I just wish there was something more. "
For a moment, seeing the expression on her face, I almost lose it and tell her everything.
But I can't. I can't just pull someone over the threshold. Not with what's coming after me.
"Don't be too down." I give in and start to comb her hair back. She lets me. "There's still a whole year of school, and there's college."
"Urgh. Even school's not so good. I hate cram school." I'm so glad I don't have to actually do that. I really do not have time.
Manako relaxes under my hands, eyes closing. "Sometimes I feel like my whole life was already determined when I was born," she mutters.
"There's always decisions in life." I lift the comb away. "You just have to grab them when they come by."
In retrospect, this is not the wisest advice I've ever given.
*****
After school, and helping recruit a new generation to the volleyball team, I have a doctor's appointment. Akigawa Alice, my doctor, is kind of a sketchy weirdo, but then all mages are. She operates a small clinic in the back streets near Sangenjaya Station. I take the train there to vary my routine from a random station and realize halfway that it's on me.
It's hard to check for followers in the crowded conditions of a Tokyo subway at this hour, but equally hard to follow. The best time to spot people is as the car clears out, look for people who pause near the doors, in position to watch who leaves.
And there she is.
I decide that I'll call her Office Lady. I always make a name for my hunters. In her human guise, she looks like a woman in her forties, dressed for work in a frumpy suit. Just another pink-collar worker on her way home from work.
Look closer and the discrepancies multiply. She's wearing sunglasses on the subway. Her tie is on backwards. Her shirt is light blue, not white, and her shoes, seen through a gap in the crowd, are on the wrong feet.
She looks at me, head tilted slightly as the car cleans out, and for a moment I think we're going to go at it right there in the subway car. Then people flood into the car between us, and the moment passes.
I cover one eye, a simple bit of symbolic magic, sacrificing for wisdom. She's still there, a void of life-force among the brightness of the other passengers, watching me. Waiting. We stand like that watching each other as the next station rolls up, and people pour out of the car.
At the last second, as people are coming in, I push my way out against the tide. A guard yells at me for my rudeness, but I'm off and running, whispering words that'll obscure my identity to facial recognition cameras.
Is she on me? I dare not look back. Instead, I bolt up out of the station, hitting my IC card on the ticket machine while barely slowing and bolt around the corner, down a series of alleys, just random turns until my breath runs out and I make a sudden turn, coming up with my hands raised to cast.
Nothing. No running steps, not even the shouting of angry station staff about people running in their station.
I do a slow circle, one eye covered, looking, looking. No sign of it to the limits of the vision this spell will give.
With shaking hands I open my bag and stuff my school uniform's top layer and tie into it, then, reaching into the folded space of another fold pull out a white jacket with a rather fetching red rose on it, zip it on and pull out my mobile phone. How did it find me? I should have detected magic to locate me. It was just there. Close enough it could have walked over and touched me.
I'm going to double back and change lines. It's not that hard to get to Sangenjaya.
I text Alice that I might be late.
*****
"You look terrible," Alice says cheerfully as I come in. "What happened, did you run here?"
"Ran into a complication. Had to do some E&E."
"You know, even compared to me, Nozomi, you're a fucking nerd."
Alice's is a medium height, languid, gothy young woman with glasses, very dark hair and very white skin, which I think maybe an experimental side effect. She has a habit of wearing really high heels and a really short skirt under a white lab coat. The office is mostly normal, except for the Dreamcast 3 and Playstation 4 set up semi-covertly under the desk next to a rack of trauma centre disks and a handful of other games.
Alice is in her early twenties, still in the middle of a PhD in biology. I don't know what she did to get her medical license so early, but she's the best magical doctor I have access to, and genuinely one of the best in Tokyo.
"Were you being chased?" she asks raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah, there's a hunter on me." I rub my eyes. "I think I lost it though. I've checked a dozen times on the way in."
She walks over to her computer and checks the external cameras. "Well, if it does break in here, then I'll finally have a live one to study." She gets up, grabs me by the shoulders and steers me into the back. The second room of the clinic is much stranger, a mass of heavily customized medical machinery, an eclectic mix of older machines thrown out by hospitals and cutting edge computer equipment brought off the shelf.
"So, if you're being hunted, you had another attack?"
"That's the odd thing. No. I've felt fine for like a month. My last attack was in London, and I killed that one."
"Alright, well, dump your clothes and get on the scanner."
I remove my clothes and step into the scan pod. It's a sinister-looking reclining bed thing that I think started out as an MRI but now has half a dozen different high-tech components bolted onto it. "You didn't get any additional metal implanted into you since we saw one another last, right?"
"No."
"Cool." Alice does something and the machine begins to shift and ripple around me, caressing me with various scan types. "Hmm."
"Hmm?"
"Your life energy is still being drained, but I'm not seeing any new holes." She walks over as the machine completes its cycle. "The drain doesn't appear to have speeded up either."
"So this isn't a fresh phase of my symptoms?" I'm still doomed, but hearing that makes me feel better. I was worried, not just about the monster, but about what it might mean.
"No." She walks over and frowns down at me. "You're sure this is a hunter?"
"It looks like one." I rub my eyes and pull myself out of the machine, starting to reassemble my outfit. "It acts like one." I rub my eyes. "I know you know? When I see one. I know that it's one of them."
"Hmm." She sits at the desk and taps her lips with a carbon stylus. "We've known for a while that your vital force is being consumed, but everything we've tried hasn't stopped it. Sometimes you just have a new hole." She puts the stylus down and looks at me. "I want to introduce internal sensors." She rummages around and pulls out a pack of sterile fluid. "I want to be able to record what happens at the exact moment of you having an attack."
"Alright." I take the sensor and look at it carefully. There's something in the fluid, like iron filings "So what? I swallow it?"
"No, it's injected. Here." She pulls out a gas injector, then loads the fluid and puts it on my chest under my breast. There's a thump and a chill of the injection. Alice checks the monitor then nods. "Okay, it's giving me good telemetry. Memory looks good too."
I put my shirt back on. "You know, we could probably induce something like an attack by triggering my curse. It's not exactly hard to do."
"No." Alice shakes her head. "The acute symptoms you get from that are too dangerous. In my medical opinion, you shouldn't risk it."
"But--"
"Who's the doctor here?" Alice gives me a cool look over her glasses. "Oh yeah, it's me. So stop asking."
I'm cursed to have money. If I ever drop below having a billion yen, then I have a severe physical reaction, (like the kind of reaction you get when you're hit by a car) and I suddenly have more than a billion yen again.
My Dad wanted our family to be wealthy and prosperous, well, now we are. Forever. Or at least until I die at twenty one. Unfortunately, there also seems to be an upper point. At more than two billion, I suddenly can't make any more money. Investments flatline, the market moves against me. Without action, a downtrend starts and within a few months, the curse triggers again. I pay an expensive broker to keep my fortune up, and make sure to spend more than a little of the proceeds.
"I also have some new post-seizure medication." She pulls out an inhaler. "One puff as soon after the seizure as possible to restore normal functioning. If you're in an emergency situation, two puffs will put you back on your feet from almost any wound that's not immediately fatal. It'll just really fuck you up if you don't get proper medical attention afterwards."
"Thanks Alice."
"You stay safe out there." She musses my hair. "Want a lollipop?"
*****
I'm still moving the sweet around my mouth and trying to decide if it was worth it when I check my messages.
Phones are very insecure and you should never use one for any kind of criminal enterprise. That's why my phone actually isn't a phone. While it looks as if it's the latest Samsung Galaxy, the only things it actually shares with that design are the screen and the case. The inside is all custom micro-electronics built for me by a group of American specialists. The phone is linked through a zero-latency-magical link to The Exchange, which is the big server that links all my electronics together through an array of encryption and ZLM links.
Backing all this up, I have a series of runes hung on my devices which state that they cannot be tracked. This is all most mages bother with. This isn't actually that hard a technique to pull off for a mage, and is very effective against non-magical opposition if what you're doing is non-obvious. Of course, against another mage, and the Japanese government also has mages, even a little pressure will cause the normal rules to reassert themselves.
So I have the exchange, and I have a bunch of encrypted systems.
This is great because it means I always have five bars of signal, even on the oldest areas of the subway.
I took the subway half out of bravado, half out of a part-formed plan to ambush the Hunter if it showed its face again. It does not, and now I'm glad. Riding the subway makes it much faster to get to a late-night meeting in Kabukichō. I need to go meet the Yakuza who wishes he were my dad.
I change clothes again before I get to Kabukicho, and do my makeup. The heyday of the crackdown on Yakuza and the like has well passed, but it would be bad to go around there in even a barely recognizable Fujisaka Jogakuin uniform. I change in a public toilet, and dump my school stuff into the bag of holding in my handbag, then head down to the non-descript offices of Hagino-Gumi.
Kabukicho is busy enough tonight to present a challenging environment for counter-surveillance, so I alert them I'm being followed, get an escort in. The Yakuza leaves me near the door, saying he's got stuff to do, so I go in alone.
There's a couple of the younger guys in the outer office, who do a bit of a double-take when they see me, but I'm known here, and the guy running the lobby gives me a "Yo, Nozomi-chan!" as I enter.
"Eiji-san." I wave, then snap my fingers. "How's the new wife?"
"She's great! First kid is on the way." He nods. "Boss is expecting you, go straight up."
"Thanks." I head up the stairs, hearing the three of them talking in voices they think I can't hear.
"Is that the Boss's woman?"
"No you dickhead! She's his business partner, and don't let him hear you imply otherwise."
"A girl like that is in business with the Boss?"
"I don't understand it either."
I smile a little as I step into the second-floor office. Nagoshi Ryuta, Captain and second ranked man in Hagino-Gumi is sat behind the desk smoking when I come in. In his fifties, now, he's still a big man, muscular like an aging wrestler with skin weathered by cigarettes and fistfights.
"Nozomi-san." He waves me to a seat. "Are you well?"
"So formal Ryuta-kun." I stretch out a little on the chair and look at him. Ryuta really wants to be my father. I think he had kids and then messed up their upbringing, but even after I got him out of a tight spot with a murder charge a few years ago, he treats me like I'm a kid. In return, I suppose I mock him a little. "Your men already suspect what we're doing up here."
He blanches, then sighs. "I have the information you wanted." He pulls out an envelope. "What are you getting into something with a gang like the Boxcutters for?"
"Let's say that we have a difference of agreement."
"They cut up one of your school friends?"
I frown a bit, he's spoiling my timing, but finish anyway. "They think they should keep the mystic artifacts in their possession. I think otherwise."
"Ah. I heard they'd got involved in other side of the city stuff." He puffs, "You know there's gangs recruiting Espers now? Or colour gangs led by Espers. The countries going to hell. It'll be like America soon."
"Hey, at least the police don't have the resources to worry about organized crime anymore."
"That's the truth." He brightens a bit before glaring at me. "Be fucking careful of these guys though, they were vicious psychos even before they started getting fucking magic. You know why they call themselves the Boxcutters?"
"They all use them?"
"Their initiation right is to slit some poor fuck up with one."
"How have the cops not come down on that?"
"Run up to a guy, slash him with your cutter and run. A lot of them get caught, but if you talk, you become the next target for initiations." He sighs. "In the old days, the Yakuza would have made sure shit like that stayed off the streets."
The idea that there was an old time when the Yakuza were a bunch of goodhearted outlaws who kept the streets clean with their own moral code is, as far as I can tell, something every generation of Yakuza has believed in.
His look turns speculative. "You sure you don't want us to go get whatever this thing is for you?"
I relent. "I know you'd do that for me Ryuta-san, but I don't want to get any of your men killed because of something I did."
"You know, you could have a good life on that inheritance of yours, without risking it involved in shit like this."
I pull the box I bought with me, anti-snooping charms for their phones. "No, I honestly couldn't. Thanks for your help Ryuta-san."
"Stay safe."
*****
Reading Ryuta's folder, Boxcutter come off as even less pleasant than previously reported. Most criminals are just poor, desperate, they join gangs for control, or because it seems badass, or because they really don't have any better prospects
Boxcutter go way beyond the stuff you'd expect from colour gangs, or even the more security conscious, less 'acceptable' criminals like triads or drug gangs. Apart from the violent initiation they practice various ritual scarring and end their ceremonies by drinking blood mix with sake. I wonder how much of this is a product of their implants, if they all had them, or whoever gave them the gear picked a gang who's culture would already support it.
The most interesting thing though is their corporate ties. They've apparently done dirty work, (like kidnapping homeless people for medical trials) for a company called Kamitouge Group, but recently broke from it in violent fashion. I suspect that link is the only reason they haven't faced a massive police crackdown, and it's only waiting now on Kamitouge to finish its own internal cleanup.
Bloodthirsty psychos with a lot of loyalty and fear of one another. It's a hard place to crack, but there are some weak points. Guys like this don't like to clean their own floors. The next night I pay a visit to a certain woman, and a large amount of money changes hands between us. I get floor plans, intelligence on the gang, ideas.
I'm set. I'll do it on Friday Night.
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Crimson Flight
华裔机甲迷
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Loving the tone and aesthetic.
- Location
- SMS Odette II
Pure nitpicking, but since she's already announced what she's doing, it probably doesn't need repeating in prose.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Good point. spot edit time!
- Location
- a place
Manako is so freaking cute.
- Location
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
Wow, this is a really nice aesthetic to this magic system. Watched with interest.
lol ok
keios
very normal
- Location
- US
excited for this! loving it so far.
lool i love her sense of drama
I love that use of "So."
xD clever nozomi
---
super fun, spunky narrator with an interesting and compelling backstory. lots of threads of the story spinning up. i'm really enjoying it xD
lool i love her sense of drama
lol, nozomi u dork.
genuinely creepy and i love the chapter break!
I love that use of "So."
hehehe this is great!
xD clever nozomi
---
super fun, spunky narrator with an interesting and compelling backstory. lots of threads of the story spinning up. i'm really enjoying it xD
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
nozomi stole the precious thing
I've only read the first chapter so far and will catch up in time, but I did enjoy it. There are some places which I think are a bit rough, like the order in which the scene was introduced in the opening was perhaps sub-optimal. The school element also doesn't land so well for me. But I like the depiction of the supernatural elements and I think Nozomi has a lot of personality, so it's all quite enjoyable.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The first chapter is perhaps a little rough in general. I'm thinking I'm going to do a major edit to it at some point when I figure out what that edit should be. Reading it again makes me realize that it serves perhaps too much as an introduction to Nozomi's status quo, with the school part basically just serving to introduce Nozomi's friends.
I'd be interesting to here what people think might be an optimal order for the opening to be set.
I'd be interesting to here what people think might be an optimal order for the opening to be set.