Yuna Morikawa

July 1, 2021

“Morikawa-senpai! Morikawa-senpai!”

Yoshiro rushed into a portal to find Yuna, the third member of the Fox Knights. The two had answered up to respond to a report of an open portal near the same elementary school that Yoshiro and Hana both attended at the time, and as he ran in and drew his sword, he saw his team mate battling a mighty beast.

Yuna, who wore an outfit more akin to a butler equipped with a utility belt and used an axe, was fighting a three-headed lizard-like magical beast by herself. She had already cut off one of the heads, but was clearly getting tired out trying to fight off the other two. Covered in both the blood of the magical beast and her own blood from wounds she had attained, she turned to Yoshiro and told him, “Get Hana-chan here now! We’ll need all three of us to take this one down! I already used one of my grenades on it, and it only killed one of the heads!”

Yoshiro pulled out his phone with his free hand and quickly spoke into it to make a call without using his hands. “Call Miyashita Hana!”

Much to his relief, Hana picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

In a panicked tone of voice, Yoshiro yelled over the phone, “Miyashita-senpai, you need to help us! Morikawa-senpai got hurt battling this beast! It’s gotta be at least a Class Three or Two! It’s got like three heads!”

“I’ll be right down,” Hana replied. “I’ll be there in seven minutes. Hold out until then.”

“Thank you,” Yoshiro replied. He then put his phone away and charged forward at the beast, telling Yuna, “Miyashita-senpai is seven minutes out!”

Yuna replied, coughing up blood from an earlier hit to her abdomen, “I don’t think we can hold out for seven minutes!”

“We have to try!” Yoshiro then began battling the lizard-like beast, deflecting a bite from one of its two remaining heads with his sword before slashing across its neck. To his dismay, however, the beast’s skin on its neck was too rough for him to easily cut through. “Damn it,” he yelled as he then blocked a swipe from one of the beast’s forelegs.

Yuna, who wiped blood off of her face and prepared to once again join the fight despite her wounds, then noticed something in the distance, pointing with her axe. “Arikawa-kun, we got company!”

“What do you mean?!”

“Look!”

As Yoshiro looked to his right, he saw a smaller antlerless deer-like magical beast run towards him at breakneck speeds. Then, when he blinked, the beast suddenly disappeared, and the lizard-like beast attacked him once again, throwing him down to the ground. As he opened his eyes again, the deer-like beast suddenly materialized in front of him and almost trampled him with its hooves, forcing Yoshiro to attack and cut one of its legs off. The deer-like beast screamed in pain before it tried to bite him, forcing him to cut off most of its mouth with his sword.

Yuna meanwhile charged at the lizard-like beast again with her axe, yelling at it, “You won’t get away from us!” By now, the lizard-like beast had begun to turn around and try to escape, perhaps realizing the second magical beast could be enough of a distraction for it to get away with two of its three heads still remaining. The beast heard her coming and turned back around to face her, screeching at her work both of its heads and causing her to wince in pain from how loud both were. Even so. Yuna pushed on, and struck the beast as hard as she could with her axe, cutting rather deep into its body. “Die already!”

However, just as Yoshiro beheaded the deer-like beast and killed it, he turned and saw that the head of Yuna’s axe had gotten ripped off of the handle after getting stuck inside the lizard-like beast. He screamed as he rushed over to help her, “Morikawa-senpai!”

Yuna froze in a state of panic as she thought to herself, “My axe! It’s stuck! I’m… Oh no… God, please help me!” Before she had a chance to snap out of it and get away from the beast, one of its heads then bent down and bit down on her right arm and shoulder, tearing it off from her body completely and causing her to scream in unimaginably severe pain.

Yoshiro yelled out, “NO!”

Yuna fell to her knees,a torrent of blood gushing out of the small stump where her right arm had once been attached to her body. She then reached for something on the belt of her blood-stained magical huntress outfit with her remaining left arm and hand and yelled to Yoshiro, “Stand back!”

“Wait, what are yo-?!”

Before Yoshiro had a chance to finish his sentence, Yuna pulled out a grenade from her belt and used her teeth to pull the pin. She thought to herself, “I’m sorry, Arikawa-kun… I’ll probably die from blood loss between my right arm and all the other wounds I got anyway. I’ll take this bastard out even if I die in the process with my second and last grenade!”

Yoshiro could only watch as the grenade then exploded, forcing him to look away as the deafening blast knocked him down onto the ground. The explosion ripped apart both Yuna’s body and the second head of the lizard-like beast, instantly killing her and severely crippling the beast. When he opened his eyes and looked, he saw the beast writhing and screaming in pain before him before he looked down and was met with a rather disturbing sight. “Oh… Oh my God!”

To his horror, Yuna’s severed head had rolled over to him, her eyes and mouth still wide open. He could barely hold it in, and as he got up, he began to feel sick and dry-heaved. It was as if Yuna’s head was both staring at everything and at nothing at the same time, her eyes lifeless and devoid of any activity despite being open.

“Morikawa-senpai… No…” Yoshiro dry-heaved once more, and this time, he began to feel his mouth water, indicating he was about to go further than just dry-heaving in a matter of seconds. He thought to himself as his head began to spin, “I’m all alone… It’s only me… I’m the only one left here aside from the beast… Am I going to die?! Is this really it for me?!

Then, he began to hear Hana’s voice call out to Yuna from the direction of the portal entrance, with his leader screaming as she rushed over, “Yuna-senpai! Yuna-senpai!”

As Yoshiro then began to actually vomit out the contents of his stomach, Hana charged at the beast, angry at the beast for Yuna’s obvious death. The beast, in too much pain to launch a successful counterattack, barely reacted as Hana jumped up and slashed through part of its body before then slicing through the neck of its final head, which had been severely injured by the explosion and thus less strong than before. Yoshiro looked up and said to himself as he shivered, “She… She’s dead…” He then vomited once more onto the ground.

As Hana killed the magical beast with a third and flash slash into its body, she yelled at it in anger, “Damn you! God damn you!” Finally, the beast fell to the ground and went still, its life slipping away at that moment. As Hana sheathed her sword and began to catch her breath from first running to the scene and then attacking the magical beast, she looked over and saw Yoshiro on his knees, still trying to process what had happened to Yuna. “You… I…”

“She’s dead,” Yoshiro said as he began to cry, wiping away both tears and vomit from his face. “Morikawa-senpai is dead…”

Hana looked down at the body parts of Yuna, which were strewn about around both of them due to the grenade blast since it went off in her left hand. She was horrified to see what had happened to her comrade, but knew she had to put on a brave face for Yoshiro and act professionally in that painful moment for the Fox Knights. “I can’t let my emotions get in the way,” she thought to herself as she heard Yoshiro sob nearby and then pulled out her phone to document the battle on the Protection and Research Agency’s app. “I need to remain calm and do what needs to be done.” As she began to take photos, she stifled her growing sadness and took a deep breath to clear her mind as best as she could. “I won’t let this happen again,” she vowed to herself. “I will do anything I can so that anyone else who joins us will live. No matter how hard it may be, I cannot let another member of the Fox Knights die in battle against a magical beast!”

…

Present

In Ruka’s apartment, Hana, who was taking several deep breaths to calm herself after arguing with Ruka, told her, “You have no idea what I’ve done and what I’m willing to do…”

Ruka, now more concerned than angry at her, replied. “Have you done this before?”

“No,” Hana said as she shook her head. “I never did anything like that before with anyone, which…” She then sighed, disgusted with what Hideo had done and said to her. “He… He said that was an asset. He told me that he was glad he was my first…”

Ruka was equally disgusted with what Hana was describing. “Are you… Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No,” Hana replied. “I’m not.”

Ruka then sighed, forming ideas in her head as to what to do with the information given to her. “I wanna fucking kill this piece of shit.”

“You can’t,” Hana told her. “Don’t do that.”

“But he raped you!”

“Look,” Hana explained to her. “We’d be in a world of shit if we did that! We’d have a whole gang going after us, and I don’t wanna do that!”

Ruka turned around, about ready to storm out of her apartment. “Fuck his gang, I’ll kill every single one of the-“

“No, you won’t!” Hana then grabbed Ruka by the shoulder and pulled her back. “Listen to me, Ruka-chan!”

Ruka yelled back at her in response to being touched, “Don’t fucking tou-“ However, she stopped herself when she saw that Hana was seemingly on the verge of tears, realizing that screaming at her further would only make her more upset. “I…”

“Listen to what I have to say,” Hana demanded from her. “I also blackmailed him into silence! If he does anything against us, I’ll expose him for who he is!”

“You…”

“It’s the truth… He won’t mess with us, and we won’t mess with him.”

Ruka sighed, trying to make sense of it all. As she did, she sniffed the air and realized she had to finish the oyakodon. “Wait, shit! Hang on!” She ran into the kitchen and looked at the pot on the stove before turning the heat down and adding an egg mixture to the pot. “We argued so much I almost burned the food,” Ruka explained. “We’ll save this conversation for when I finish, okay? The last thing I wanna do right now is mess this up.”

“Fine…” While Ruka went to finish the oyakodon, Hana sat down at the table, wiping her eyes and looking up at the clock, still thinking about what Hideo had done to her as she saw that it was around an hour after noon. She sighed and said to herself, “Today of all days…” She then felt her phone vibrate with a text and looked at it, seeing it was from her mother.

MOM: are u at your friends house? which one was she again?

HANA: Ruka

MOM: yeah, her house?

HANA: Yes, mom

MOM: ok just makin sure, ur father is at a meeting today so he wont be home until after u get home

HANA: That’s fine

MOM: what time r u coming home?

HANA: probably around 5 PM

MOM: alright that works

Then, Ruka told Hana from the kitchen, “Okay, the food’s ready.”

As she then brought it in, Hana said to Ruka, “Thank you again for this.”

“It’s whatever,” Ruka replied as she set two bowls of oyakodon down for the two of them. “Now, we’re gonna talk more about what you and that Yakuza boss did.” She thought to herself, “I’ve never told anyone else about what I’m going to say to her now…”

“I suppose we should,” Hana agreed.

“There’s something you should know about me that I cannot have you repeat to anyone else,” Ruka then said to her. “And I feel like I should tell you since I reacted in the way I did. What I say to you next has to be taken to your grave. No exceptions.”

Hana, curious, asked her, “And that would be?”

“I… I have a history with what happened to you,” Ruka explained, pulling herself together so she could tell Hana the truth about her past. “Although I didn’t do it because I wanted something. In fact, I didn’t want it at all.”

Hana’s eyes widened as she realized what Ruka was telling her. “You… You were…?”

“I was raped when I was ten years old. A man my grandfather knew held me down and…” Ruka sighed, finding it somewhat difficult to explain to Hana what had happened. “Well, he… He took me home after a gala I had attended since my alcoholic grandpa was going to a bar. I went upstairs to my room, and I didn’t know he followed me in. At that moment, he attacked me, pulled my dress down, and… Well, you know.”

Hana, taking it all in, nodded and replied, “I see. So that’s why you reacted the way you did…”

“Yeah. The last thing I want to see is someone I know go through that.” Ruka wiped her eyes, getting emotional as she recalled what Aki had done to her. “You’re the only person who knows about this that’s still alive. The only other girl who knew is dead. I’ve never told anyone else this until now. Hana, I can tell you right now that it messes with you a lot, and hearing that you did that with him… It hurts.”

“I can see why… I feel so bad for you, Ruka.” Hana then asked her, “So, um… What happened to him?”

“The day after I became a magical huntress,” Ruka replied. “I killed him. It was the very first thing I did as one. They never solved his murder obviously.”

“And that’s why you don’t want me telling anyone, I assume?”

“Exactly. I don’t feel like going to jail anytime soon.” After a brief pause in the conversation, Ruka told Hana, “Look, if you’re bothered by what you did with that Yakuza boss, you can talk to me. As someone who went through something similar, I can tell you that it ain’t a lot of fun going through it alone.”

“You know,” Hana commented. “You really can be a totally different person depending on the circumstances. I wouldn’t have guessed you were this caring based on our first meeting.”

“Well… That’s what happens when your father comes from a wealthy family that raised him to be a proper and polite man and your mother is born poor and has the mouth of a sailor.” She then looked at a family photo of her with her parents when she was younger on the wall. “I’m more like my father in formal situations or when I’m around most strangers. In battle or around my friends, I’m more like my mother.”

“I see…” Hana then looked at the same photo Ruka looked at, thinking to herself, “She looks so happy in that photo. She must have lost her parents when she was very young if she lived with her grandfather when she was ten.”

“Now,” Ruka then said. “Let’s eat before our food gets cold.”

“Oh, right.” Both Hana and Ruka then put their hands together before saying to each other, “Thanks for the food.” Before Hana began to eat, she said to Ruka, “Ruka-chan?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for talking to me,” she said with a smile. “I’ll deal with the Yakuza boss myself when the time comes. If anyone is going to eventually kill him, it’ll be me, but not right now.”

“That’s fair. You deserve to be the one who does it if it comes down to that. Also, um… I’m sorry for yelling at you like I did. I got a little carried away there.”

“It’s fine,” Hana assured her. “I understand why you were upset.”

…

October 23, 2023

“So,” Ruka said to Kumiko as the two of them walked around the latter’s neighborhood on patrol for magical beasts. “You haven’t really told me what the deal is with your family and your sister. Do they know about… Well, this?”

“My dad does,” Kumiko replied. “My mom doesn’t know shit about my identity now.”

“Wait a minute.”

Kumiko replied to her as they both stopped, “What’s up?”

“I remember back in the day how you would have to leave a bit early to talk to your parents,” Ruka asked her. “What was that about?”

“Well,” Kumiko admitted. “It wasn’t entirely true. You see, it was around that time four years ago that my parents began to fight really bad, and they’d fight over me quite a bit. They divorced about a year after you moved away, Kishio.”

“Shit, man, that sucks.”

Kumiko sighed, getting a bit emotional as she further explained to her what her living situation was. “My mom has my sister, and my dad has me. He accepts me, but my mom doesn’t want to see me and tells my sister I got a mental illness.”

Irked at how her mother reacted to her gender transition and her coming out, Ruka told Kumiko in disbelief, “What the Hell is wrong with her?”

“It fucking sucks,” Kumiko agreed. “It’s so messed up, but I can’t do shit about it.” She then kicked the ground in frustration. “God damn it…”

Ruka told her in a more comforting tone, “Hey, Murata-kun, listen to me. If you ever need help with anything, let me know, okay?”

“Thanks, man… You know, I’m glad we ran into each other again. It feels nice to see a familiar face after so long. I lost contact with all my other friends between the divorce and me coming out. It hasn’t really been a fun four years for me.”

“I can imagine.” The two paused their conversation as they crossed a street together. As they were about to reach the halfway point, however, a car nearly hit both of them, just barely stopping in time. Ruka, angry at the driver, slammed the hood of the car with her right hand and yelled at him, “Hey, asshole, watch where you’re fucking going!”

“Watch where you’re fucking walking,” replied the man behind the wheel in a loud voice.

“Up yours, you son of a bitch,” Ruka yelled as he drove away, flipping him off as he did. “If you hit us, it’d be your fucking fault! Get outta here!” She then sighed as the two of them made it to the other side of the road. “Sorry you had to see that,” she told Kumiko. “That piece of shit wasn’t watching where he was going.”

“I’m just glad you’re alright,” Kumiko replied to her.

“So, where was I…” Ruka then remembered the other question she wanted to ask her. “Oh yeah! That’s it! What inspired you to become a magical huntress? I wouldn’t have expected someone like you to do it.”

“Me? Well…”

“Come on. I’ve heard plenty of reasons. I’m sure it’s not one I haven’t heard before.”

“I wanted to become one after I heard about it because it would help affirm my gender,” Kumiko explained, clearly embarrassed by her reason for signing up. “Getting to fight in a dress you can automatically change into… It… It just felt really good. I don’t get to wear feminine clothing a lot of the time between school and being home, so any excuse to wear it will do.”

“Well,” Ruka replied, her previous statement proven wrong. “I’ve actually never heard that reason given before. That’s a first for me.”

“Really? Does it sound stupid? I’m sorry…”

“No, no, no,” Ruka assured her. “It’s not stupid. It’s definitely not stupid, Murata-kun. I get why you made the choice to become a magical huntress.”

“Oh, well… Thanks for that.” Kumiko chuckled and looked at the ground, telling her, “I’ve never told anyone that. I always feared I’d get laughed at if I did.”

“Screw those people anyway. They don’t matter at the end of the day.”

“I keep telling myself that. Trust me.”

“You know,” Ruka commented. “It’s funny in a way. Because of my body, I wanna dress as less feminine as possible in casual clothes, since, well…” She then outlined the shape of the front of her body, including her chest, with tight index finger. “You get the idea.”

“Yeah…”

“And then you want to dress as feminine as possible because of your’s.”

“You know,” Kumiko realized. “I never thought about it that way until now. That is kinda funny when you think about it.” As the two shared a laugh, Kumiko said to her, “I always wondered what it was like having big boobs, at least ones that were real.”

“It isn’t fun,” Ruka told her. “I told the others this at the girls' bath. You’ll get looks from not just boys and men, but even other girls. Sometimes, your back will hurt, especially if they’re growing faster than the rest of your body. It’s especially annoying when you have to buy clothes.” She then looked down at her outfit and continued with, “I had to get new bras recently because my old ones were too small. I had them for less than a few months, too. It sucked.”

“Your back hurts?”

“Not as much as it used to, but it did a lot a year ago. My doctor said it was because they weighed so much compared to the rest of my body. He says that if the rest of my body grows a bit more, it’ll hurt a lot less, and so far, that’s true, but still.”

Kumiko, eager to know more, asked her, “How much do they weigh?”

“You really wanna go in-depth, don’t you?”

“Come on. A trans girl has the right to be curious.”

“Well,” Ruka shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly putting them on a scale, you know. The doctor says they can weigh anywhere from 0.2 kilos to almost a whole kilo on average, although in Japan, they tend to be more on the smaller side… Unless you’re me, of course.”

“Yeah, I was gonna say. Is that another reason why you get looks?”

Ruka chuckled and nodded. “You bet your ass it is. In America, they’d be seen as above average, but here, they’re huge.”

Kumiko, embarrassed about asking so much, apologized to Ruka with, “I’m sorry for asking so many questions about your boobs, Kishio-san.”

“It’s fine. If it helps you make better decisions about what you wanna do when you’re older, I’ll help you.” Ruka admitted to her, “You know, I don’t really open up to most people like this. Come to think of it, the only people I’ve opened up in any form to really are you and Hana.”

“I guess that just means you trust me a lot,” Kumiko inferred. “Well,” she then said before turning away from her to head down a different street. “I gotta head home. I’ll see you later, Kishio-san.”

As Kumiko left, Ruka quietly spoke to herself while pondering what Kumiko had said to her. “Trust… Something I’ve lacked for a long time…”

…

October 25, 2023

Yoshiro and Kyosuke were walking together in school during a break in the middle of the day, talking about what had happened to his cousin Ai. “There’s still no leads or anything,” Kyosuke said to his friend. “My family’s really worried they won’t be able to solve who or what did it.”

“That’s awful,” Yoshiro replied, feeling terrible for his friend. He thought to himself as they continued to walk, “I know that a magical beast killed her, but as of now, nobody knows what led to her death. That other girl that Hana-senpai found said she killed a Class Five magical beast already when the Class Three attacked. If I had to guess, both beasts came through the same portal, and while that other girl was fighting the weaker of the two, the stronger of the two killed Furukawa-kun’s cousin. That leaves just one question… Why was his cousin there to begin with?”

As they went up a flight of stairs to the second floor of their school, Kyosuke asked him, “You got really quiet all of a sudden. What’s up, man?”

“Oh, uh…” Yoshiro realized that in his thoughts, he had ignored Kyosuke the whole time they had walked down the hallway. “Sorry about that. I was just thinking about what happened. I must have gotten lost in thought.” On a hunch, he then asked him, “By the way… Was your cousin… Seeing anyone?”

“Seeing anyone?”

“As in… Did she have a boyfriend?”

“Oh… Now that you mention it, she did say she was dating someone before she died, actually.” Kyosuke began to recall what Ai had told him and the rest of their family about this mysterious dating partner she had. “She didn’t say much about him, but they had been seeing each other for about three months before she died. I feel kinda bad for whoever it was, although I can’t recall any boys at her school saying anything about her dating any of them.”

“So he wasn’t from her school?”

“I doubt it. The way she said it made me think he was from a different area of the city. He must have been kinda rich, too, since she started buying clothes for herself and had more money to spend than before.”

That last sentence immediately set off alarms in Yoshiro’s mind. “Huh… And he never contacted you or anyone else in her family after she died?”

“Not at all.” Kyosuke shrugged, at a loss for an explanation. “I don’t know why. You’d think he would, but nope.”

“That’s weird…”

Then, they both noticed Goro Yamanaka talking to two girls in their grade nearby. They overheard him telling the two of them as they walked by, “Yeah, so you two can come over anytime. My dad won’t care. My house is really big and I got plenty of cool shit there.” It was clear based on his tone of voice and his confident facial expression that he was attempting to swoon them, and it was clear based on the reactions of both girls that it was working to some extent.

When they were far enough away, Kyosuke commented to Yoshiro, “Man, I swear, he’s hogging all the girls. He should leave some for the rest of us. Aren’t there enough girls in his own grade?”

“He goes through them like a printer goes through paper,” Yoshiro pointed out. “He definitely isn’t keeping either of those girls around for long. He probably moved onto girls in our grade because he’s done with the girls in his.”

“Is it true he’s already had sex?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised. God help us all when he gets to high school.” The two then laughed at Yoshiro’s remark.

“Indeed. God help us all.”

As the two reached Yoshiro’s classroom, the former told the latter, “Well, I gotta head back in. I’ll see you around, man, okay?”

“See you later,” Kyosuke replied as he walked to his own classroom down the hall.

When Yoshiro sat down at his seat, he immediately began to think about what Kyosuke had told him regarding Ai spending more money on clothes before her death. His thoughts, of course, immediately shifted to one suspect for her quote-unquote ‘boyfriend.’ He realized in his head, “Kawase Hideo… There’s a good chance it’s him. He’s got the money to spend, he’s got a reputation for it, and he’s local to us. If he is the mysterious boyfriend, he may have been the last person to see Furukawa-kun’s cousin alive.”