Land of the Dead
Its power was so immense, it was unthinkable that anything could compare to it. Its ability to kill everything would make it appear invincible at a glance.
In fact, killing it was impossible. No matter how fast the attack was, or if it was from a range the eye couldn’t track, or if it was so indiscriminate as to destroy the entire world, none of it would work. If one thought to kill it, they would definitely be struck down in retaliation, meeting certain death. There was no way to remove it from the world or to escape its power. It covered the entire realm, and everything was in its hands. There was no doubt that some would come to view such a being as a god.
But it was not a flawless being. It had an obvious weakness. No matter how extreme its power was, it was still just a human in the end. It wasn’t omniscient or omnipotent. And as a being with a human heart, its mind could be nothing but human. It could easily be shaken, confused, panicked, or terrified. The heart was the only weakness of that otherwise invincible being. With that knowledge, one could guide it and possibly even tame it. One could frighten it, confuse it, lead it astray.
When it was a young child absolutely dependent on its parents, the people it loved had died right in front of its eyes, and the child couldn’t take it. They had been destroyed so tragically, so cruelly, that one could tell at a glance they would never move again.
What had motivated someone to do such a thing in that village? Just seeing what was left behind, it was hard to say. But the end result was the worst possible outcome: it had lost its mind. Its small world had been thoroughly destroyed, throwing everything into chaos, leaving it wandering alone in the darkness.
Nothing would have happened if it had been left alone, but instead it had been transformed into a storm of indiscriminate death.
A man in the robes of a Buddhist priest walked through a suburban city. His name was Dougen. He had been called to help deal with the monster that had been released from a nearby village.
He was heading for the mountains in the north and was currently in the prefectural capital, so it was a lively setting. However, if one looked a little farther away, they would see only mountain wilderness. Somewhere within those mountains was that thing. Apparently, it was still a young child, so naturally its pace was slow, and it was still wandering through the wilds. Only one settlement had been wiped out so far. If they could resolve the incident with limited damage, things could be said to have gone well. But if it reached a populated area, the damage would escalate dramatically. They needed to stop it before that happened.
Dougen decided to head straight for where it was. The organization he belonged to took it upon themselves to safeguard the world. They exterminated supernatural beings that brought harm to humans, sealed them away, and maintained peace from behind the scenes. Given their guiding principle, they could hardly ignore what was happening.
“Not that we believe anything can really be done about that child...”
At some point, the bewitching woman in the loose kimono had appeared alongside him.
“Are you sure you’re okay being seen by other people?”
“With this outfit, everyone will think I’m just doing that ‘cosplay’ thing, right? If people talk to us, I’ll act like a fox, and they’ll believe it in a second.”
Her clothing was anachronistic, and she had fox ears growing out of her head. As she said, most who saw her would think she was in costume.
“Is there really nothing you people can do?” he asked her.
“Nothing at all. Well, even if there was, we’d be on the boy’s side anyway.”
“That one guy’s name was Shidou, right? Can he do anything?”
Masamichi Shidou. He had called himself the head of the Restricted Territory Disaster Management Task Force. As a member of a branch family of the one that controlled the village, he had leaped into action after the main family had been wiped out. He had said the family had passed down some ancient teachings regarding the monster, but he hadn’t divulged any specific information during the briefing.
“Where exactly am I supposed to put this?” The woman had a headset in her hands, one of the devices the Task Force had given out for wireless communications.
“How should I know?!” Dougen spat. He had one as well. He would receive orders on how to deal with that thing through it.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do. My first thought was to wait for him to exhaust himself and fall asleep. I wonder if Shidou had a similar idea.”
“But there wasn’t anything even resembling a plan.”
The Task Force had gathered a great number of people specialized in dealing with the supernatural. Dougen had thought they would work together as a unit, but they had all been told to deal with the situation on their own.
“They all seemed like awfully untrustworthy people to me. Trying to get them to work together was a lost cause from the start.”
“I suppose they weren’t well-suited to working as a group,” he admitted.
While they were all powerful individuals, everyone involved seemed to be strange, egotistical, eccentric people. It was unlikely they would be able to cooperate in such an impromptu fashion. Rather than trying to force them to work together, letting each one work in their own way was more likely to produce results.
“Well, whatever. The only thing we can do is head there ourselves,” Dougen continued.
Sitting around thinking about it wouldn’t solve anything. First they needed to head to the location and get a grasp on the situation. They might find a solution by doing that.
“Are you worried about your health or something?” Though he had sped up, the fox-eared woman kept up with him.
“What do you mean?”
“I was just wondering. The mountain is still pretty far away. Why not use a taxi or something?”
“I don’t have money to waste.”
“Is that so?” As she spoke, the woman waved down a taxi. “It doesn’t especially concern me if more humans die, but I feel like we should probably avoid wasting time, no?”
“I have no intention of working with you.”
“Come now, even bitter enemies sometimes must share the same boat, right? It’s my treat, so hurry up and get in.”
“Do you actually have money? You didn’t just transform some leaves or something, did you?”
“That’s just a fairy tale. Of course I have something real.”
She pulled a credit card from her sleeve.
There existed those who fought against creatures that defied understanding. Superhumans, youkai, demons, otherworlders, aliens—according to common sense, none of them should have existed. They were scientifically impossible. But even if they were impossible, even if one didn’t believe in them, there were things in this world that didn’t seem like they could be anything but unnatural.
While it wasn’t certain that those beings were what they claimed to be, the fact that they were inflicting real harm meant they needed to be dealt with. When fighting against creatures that were hard to understand, there were those who used similarly incomprehensible powers, but from among them, two brothers used particularly pragmatic means.
In short: firearms. The bullets, bearing blessings and incantations of exorcism, could shoot down the most otherworldly beings. The brothers themselves didn’t believe in God or Buddha, but they did understand that the bullets were effective. In exchange for money, they could acquire projectiles capable of taking down monsters. To them, that’s all it was. Whatever the monster, if you filled it with enough lead, it would eventually stop moving.
While getting themselves properly equipped within Japan was something of a problem, it could be solved with enough money. There were few who were capable of dealing with monsters. The market was somewhat of an oligopoly, so there were any number of high-paying jobs available.
Getting rid of the monster known as Lord Okakushi was one of those jobs.
Right now, the brothers were on a cliff overlooking the settlement. It was the commune of some cult, a self-sufficient village isolated from the rest of society.
“How does it look?” the older brother asked, crouching down on his knees. The younger one was on his stomach, looking through the scope of his sniper rifle.
“A number of people who look like believers are lying on the ground here and there. They’re probably dead.”
“And the kid?”
“He’s wandering aimlessly through the fields.”
The boy in white robes was walking slowly, the only one still moving in the settlement.
Their target.
“They had to be exaggerating, making such a big deal about killing one kid.”
They had asked the Task Force what sort of ability the boy possessed. Apparently, it was some kind of curse that let him kill people just by willing it. But aside from that power, he was an ordinary boy. No matter what kind of power he possessed, all they had to do was shoot him through the head before he knew they were there.
“Seriously. Exterminating the whole cult would have been a more interesting job.”
“They were definitely planning something here. That looks like a chemical plant. They must have been making something dangerous.”
Still, no matter how suspicious the village’s activities might have been, they were humans, and that put them outside the scope of the brothers’ work.
“Well, right now we need to worry about the kid. Any word from the Task Force?”
“They’re saying to get closer.” The older brother was wearing the wireless headset. They had confirmed they’d found the target, but those were the only instructions that had come back so far.
“What’s the point? We could just shoot him from here and end it.”
Climbing down and approaching would be a pain, and pointless. There were no problems with the weather, and the distance between them wasn’t that great. With the younger brother’s marksmanship skills, there was no chance he would miss.
“Then can I just shoot him?”
“Yeah. I’ll leave the timing to you.”
The younger brother put his finger on the trigger, then stopped. For a short time, the older brother waited. He thought his sibling was being more cautious than usual, but there were a number of factors that played into making the shot. He thought the other man was just waiting for the right moment.
But the shot never came, so he eventually called out, “Hey, what’s wrong?”
There was no reply.
“Hey, you didn’t fall asleep, did you?”
Touching a sniper while he was tracking a target was a bad idea, but his brother was still offering no response. The older man reached out to touch him. The lack of any resistance sent a chill through him, urging him to shake his brother harder.
He was dead. Without any warning, his brother had suddenly died.
At the time, no one had known much about the boy’s power. They had thought it was merely some supernatural curse to cause death and had optimistically assumed that if they weren’t noticed, they would have no problem. They only learned about his ability to detect killing intent, and the fact that distance meant nothing to him, after this event.
Asaka Takatou and Yogiri were walking their dog through the village. Although it was an underground cavern made to look like the outdoors, it was extremely spacious, so they weren’t lacking when it came to places to walk. Asaka had thought that wandering around aimlessly would be boring, but Yogiri seemed to be enjoying himself.
“What is this place anyway?” Asaka asked.
“Isn’t it a village?”
“No, I mean this space. Isn’t it a bit huge? I wouldn’t think they could dig out a place this big.” The enormous place they were in was underground. Asaka didn’t feel like current levels of technology would allow for something like it. “Maybe they did it with some crazy new tech.”
In this place, technologies that seemed like nothing more than dreams on the surface were commonplace. For example, the villagers working in the fields nearby were bipedal autonomous robots controlled by high-level AI, and they seemed very human in appearance and behavior. Even now she found it hard to believe they were robots. They were clearly on a different level from any robot on the surface.
She shrugged. “I guess there’s no point in worrying about it.”
The two of them walked through the tranquil village, eventually coming to a comparatively large structure.
“I wonder what that is. Do you know, Yogiri?”
“No idea.”
It wasn’t like Yogiri knew everything about the village. After all, until Asaka had arrived, he had basically never left the mansion.
Her interest piqued, Asaka approached the building. It was surrounded by a fence, and a signboard was up by the gate.
“An elementary branch school? They even set up something like this down here?”
In order to replicate the village on the surface, they had recreated the buildings, fields, and even the forest. So this building had likely been on the surface at one point as well.
Asaka and Yogiri stepped through the gate. Beyond the compact schoolyard was a two-story building. “It really does look like a branch school, doesn’t it?”
The wooden structure looked thoroughly aged and was large enough to handle about ten students.
“Hey, Asaka, can we play here?”
Asaka thought for a bit. It was almost evening, so she would need to start working on dinner soon. If she let him play, she’d need to leave him and go back alone.
“Okay. Make sure you’re home by dinner.”
But she hardly thought of that as a problem. This whole space was made for Yogiri. It wasn’t like they had to worry about perverts showing up, and although some suspicious people did find their way down from time to time, his power was more than enough to deal with them.
The schoolyard had metal horizontal bars and rubber tires embedded in the ground to play with. It wasn’t a whole lot, but for Yogiri, it was all new and interesting. He inspected them for a while but had no idea how to actually use them.
Stepping up to the bars, he tentatively touched them. They were firmly set into the ground and wouldn’t budge. First he tried holding on to one with both hands and hanging from it. Bending his knees so his feet didn’t reach the ground, he swung back and forth. He felt like he was doing something wrong, but it was still kind of fun.
“What are you doing? That’s so weird.”
Turning towards the voice, Yogiri saw a girl in red clothes.
“Who are you?”
“Kiyomi. And who are you? You don’t go to this school, do you?”
“I’m Yogiri. Sorry for using this without permission.”
“I think it’s fine.” Kiyomi stepped up beside him, grabbing the bar. Lifting herself up, she twirled forward around it. “This is how you’re supposed to do it. You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Really? Then what about this?” Kiyomi proudly showed off more techniques, like backflipping around the bar and spinning forward around her knees.
“That’s amazing!”
“Really? It’s pretty easy if you try.”
With her guidance, Yogiri was able to do the same backflip right away.
“Takashi can spin around over and over, though.”
“Really? Hey, how do you use those?” Yogiri pointed towards the tires.
“Like a vaulting horse.”
“What’s a vaulting horse?”
“Okay, I’ll just show you. Watch.” Kiyomi headed over to the tires, putting both hands on one. Then, with a small jump, she leapfrogged over it.
“I see.” Yogiri tried to imitate what she had done. The tires were pretty low to the ground, so it was easy to jump over them.
While they were doing that, the schoolyard filled with other children.
“Who’s that?” A larger boy stepped over to Yogiri.
“This is Takashi. And this is Yogiri,” Kiyomi introduced them.
“Yogiri, huh? What grade are you in?”
“I think Grade Three. That’s what Asaka said, at least.”
“What do you mean, ‘you think’? Well, it’s fine. Let’s play shadow tag!”
“What’s shadow tag?”
“You don’t even know that?”
“Yogiri doesn’t know anything,” Kiyomi explained. “He’s like a baby, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he is. And he’s got those fancy clothes.”
Perhaps because it was just a branch school, there was no distinction between grade levels while they were playing. Yogiri played with them, totally absorbed in their games, and before he knew it, the sun was setting.
Yogiri returned to the mansion around dinner time.
“I’m home.”
“Welcome back. You’ve gotten a bit dirty.”
His clothes were absolutely filthy.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. I guess you should have a bath before we eat.”
Yogiri headed to the bath while Asaka finished up dinner. She had thought he was far too dirty for a kid playing on his own, but maybe that’s just how kids were when they played outside.
She didn’t think much of it.
“And nothing of note has happened recently?” Shiraishi asked Asaka, who had come up for her regular report. They were in their usual meeting room, and as always it was just the two of them.
“It’s been totally peaceful. Well, I guess something could happen at any moment, so I can’t let my guard down.”
Even if they didn’t venture out, there were some things that might end up wandering into that bizarre underground space. She couldn’t be optimistic enough to assume it would never happen again.
“How about with you? None of those kings of the world have come to mess around, have they?” She wanted to add “for no reason” but didn’t. Yogiri had killed one of those “kings,” so it was to be expected that the others would take notice of him.
“We haven’t seen much in the way of movement from them. But if they took an interest, they’d probably head straight for you guys.”
“What would they even do?”
“Probably nothing, I would think. I can’t imagine them visiting a place where a king died, just out of curiosity.”
“By the way, what’s with that hallway filled with talismans and charms? Are you sure that won’t cause some dangerous incidents?” Asaka couldn’t help but think that their repeated ill fortune might have been caused by that hallway.
“No, that’s totally backwards. It exists to keep those dangerous people out.”
“Shiraishi...you’re a scientist, aren’t you?”
Shiraishi paused. “There are plenty of things in the world that science hasn’t uncovered yet, right?” His gaze had become distant. Apparently, he didn’t like the idea of believing in curses either.
“But even with that, dangerous things are still making it through, aren’t they?” There was the creature that had snuck in through Asaka’s shadow, and that guy claiming to be an angel had made it in with no problem. Its efficacy as a barrier seemed extremely questionable.
“Well, we don’t really know how things like curses and wards work, so we can’t press them for that much in the way of certainty...”
“So they’re completely useless, then.”
“Anyway, you ended up coming pretty late today. Will everything be okay for lunch with Yogiri?”
Shiraishi bluntly attempted to change the subject. Asaka had rushed up to the surface, having overslept.
“We’ve got Cup Noodles down there, so I’m sure he’ll be fine.” They had food that could be eaten without any preparation, so she wasn’t especially worried. “Oh, speaking of which... Not that anything happened, but there’s a branch school downstairs. I was thinking of having Yogiri study there. Do you think that would be a problem?”
Lately, Yogiri had been going off to play at the school by himself a lot. It wasn’t an especially interesting place, but he had taken quite a liking to it for some reason. Asaka thought that maybe he’d find studying there more interesting as well.
“A branch school?”
“No good? It’s not like it’s a big deal, but where we study doesn’t really change much, does it?”
“No, if it’s in the village, we don’t really care what you do.”
“Then it’s all right?”
“But what do you mean, ‘branch school’?”
“The elementary branch school. The one on the edge of the village.”
“Are you sure there’s a school down there?”
“Huh?” Asaka stared back at Shiraishi, a chill running down her back.
“Hold on a second... Here we go. This is a map from when the village was built. There may be some differences in the details, but there’s no way a building that large wouldn’t be on it.”
Shiraishi turned the laptop around to show Asaka the screen. In the spot where she had expected to see the elementary school, there was nothing at all.
When Nikori suddenly started barking, Yogiri stepped out into the front yard.
“What’s wrong?”
Nikori was staring at one part of the yard and barking.
“Yogiri! Let’s play!” A girl was standing just outside, calling for him.
“Oh, it’s Kiyomi. Okay. Do you want to play here? I have some video games.”
“No, let’s go to the school.”
“But I’m going to have to eat lunch soon.”
“Then let’s eat at school. We have school lunch. They even give us pudding!”
“School lunch?”
“We all eat lunch together in the classroom. It’s fun!”
Yogiri thought for a bit. Asaka had just left. If it was the same regular report as always, she wouldn’t be back for at least two hours. If he waited for her to get home, it would be well past lunchtime. In that case, he would only have what was in the house to eat, but there should be no problem if he went and ate with Kiyomi and the other students instead.
“Is there enough for me?”
“Don’t worry, we always have leftovers.”
“Okay, let’s go. Nikori, please watch the house for me.”
Nikori had been growling the whole time, but after Yogiri said that, she calmed down.
Yogiri followed Kiyomi to the school. It was his first time actually going inside the building. The interior seemed to be even more rundown than the exterior. When he made it to the classroom, that impression was only strengthened. It looked like it had been abandoned for decades.
There were about ten children inside, sitting at their desks. One student in a white coat was pushing a cart with a large pot on it. The children formed a line, so Yogiri joined them. Taking their food on trays, they went back to their seats. The menu was curry with rice, sauerkraut, milk, and pudding.
“Go ahead and eat!” Kiyomi said, stepping up beside him.
“What about you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Actually, where’s the teacher?” Yogiri knew enough to know there should have been a teacher in the school. He would have thought the teacher would eat with them.
“Just go ahead and eat. If you want, you can have my pudding too!” Ignoring his question, she continued to pester him.
Though he had his doubts, since it was his first chance at a school lunch, he went ahead and scooped some of the curry up to his mouth. It wasn’t particularly good or bad, just sort of ordinary.
“You ate it,” Kiyomi said, her voice going flat.
“Yes.”
“I saw.”
“He swallowed it all.”
A number of voices rang out, and suddenly everything outside the windows turned red. He couldn’t see the others’ faces anymore.
“Now Yogiri is one of us.”
“We can keep playing forever.”
“Everyone together.”
“You can’t go home anymore.”
“We’ll be together forever and ever.”
The students had completely changed. The calm, quiet atmosphere had vanished.
“I’m going home,” Yogiri said, getting up from his seat. Something felt very wrong. As he made to leave, laughter erupted all around him. It sounded like far more than ten people, coming from inside and outside the classroom. The other students started to turn blurry. They didn’t look like people anymore.
Yogiri opened the classroom door. As he walked through the hallway, the jeering laughter turned to confusion. Exiting the building, he made his way into the schoolyard. Though it was supposed to be noon, the sky was bloodred. Angry, wordless roars resounded around him. Roars filled with confusion, bewilderment, and resentment.
“How?! How did you get out?!”
Kiyomi stood in front of him, blocking his path. Yogiri wasn’t quite sure what she was asking. He hadn’t been locked inside, nor had he been restrained in any way. It would have been stranger if he hadn’t been able to leave.
“You definitely ate it! You ate the food of the dead!”
“It was good. Thanks for the meal.”
He had only eaten a single bite, but he thought he should be polite anyway. Maybe they had tried to prank him by putting something weird in his food. That would explain why they were so insistent that he eat it. But even if it had gone rotten or if they had put poison in it, that didn’t mean much to Yogiri. Anything that posed a danger to him would be killed and rendered powerless.
“What are you?!” Kiyomi shouted before going blurry and disappearing.
Yogiri felt sad. He hadn’t intended to do anything to her, but she had clearly intended to hurt him. So she had been erased. Maybe she had never had a physical body in the first place.
Exiting the schoolyard through the gate, he turned around. All that was behind him was an empty lot.
Asaka ran to the edge of the village. There was no branch school there after all. Just like they had seen on the map, it was just an empty lot. Yogiri was standing at the end of the path, staring at the open space.
“Yogiri! Are you okay?!”
“Oh, you’re back.” As Asaka called out to him, he turned to her. She didn’t know what had happened, but his expression seemed a little lonely.
“Uhh, there was a school here, right?”
“Yeah. There was, but it disappeared.”
So she had been right. “Was there someone here?”
“Yeah. I thought it would be nice to be friends.”
Yogiri had never mentioned that he’d met someone there. Asaka had no intention of getting angry at him over that. Kids had their own secrets to keep, she figured.
“There have been a lot of strange things happening here recently. We should be careful.”
Maybe something had changed when Asaka had arrived, but despite this place being designed to isolate Yogiri, weird things had been happening over and over. That couldn’t have been a good thing. If they stayed there, something might happen that they couldn’t undo.
Perhaps it would have been best for Asaka to run away while she had the chance. But...
“Yeah. I’ll keep you safe, though!” Yogiri smiled.
Asaka just couldn’t bring herself to abandon Yogiri like that.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login