Revenge Is Best Served

That’s enough reminiscing. I hauled myself out of the memory spiral. Nothing of note happened after Zoe slaughtered the gangsters anyway. We both ignored each other’s existence, until one day, our connection was severed, and she was no longer my host. As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. “You know your geography and what my last host was called. So what?”

Pestilence shrugged. “You act tough. But you ignored me for a whole minute after I mentioned a single name.”

“You-” My reply was cut short by a bang.

Darkness all around me. Not because my surroundings lacked light, but because my eyelids were closed, eyelids that belonged to a physical body. Raven’s body. I was back at her house. Because she had woken up.

“We have to go back to Pestilence,” I yelled. Pestilence didn’t only program the server to attack intruders, but also to attack her through information transmitted as radio waves. She was acting as a guinea pig to train the server. This could result in something as deadly as the Nohato Disaster.

“Let me go back to sleep,” Raven yawned and covered her ears with her pillow, as if that could dampen my voice. “Why do you have to wake me up?”

“You woke up on your own.”

“No, you totes woke me up.”

Wait, I do remember hearing a bang. I scanned the house with quasi-omniscience. Wait, why is the front door missing? It seemed to have just vanished; in its place was an empty doorframe. More of the objects in the house, the sofa and cabinets, faded from my quasi-omniscience one by one.

It’s a blind spot.

“Someone broke into the house,” I said, forcing Raven to sit up. She gripped her bedsheets, digging her fingers into the fabric.

“Hilarious joke.” Which part of what I said sounded like a joke?

“I’m dead serious, and dead is what you will be if you don’t let me deal with this.”

“Don’t bother.” Raven tightened her wrist.

“Do you really mean that? Are you really ready to die? Do you know how that feels? I’ve experienced it multiple times, and I’ve heard spirits describing it too. You don’t want to experience it.”

Raven let go of the sheets. I could have seized this chance to leap off the bed, but I didn’t. I waited for her answer. “Don’t you think it is selfish? To kill another person so I can live.”

“How do you think your ancestors survived? How do you think every single animal survives? Is it selfish? Of course, it is. You can’t live without some selfishness.”

Raven closed her eyes and then opened them again. She released her body from her mind, falling into a limp state. “I still want to go back to sleep, but…”

Her sentence drifted off. I didn’t know whether she had forgotten what she wanted to say, or simply couldn’t say it out loud. She found her words again. “Thank you for keeping me alive.”

I could feel a smile on Raven’s face, or perhaps I was the one smiling. This moment of warmth didn’t last long, because movement at the door demanded my attention. My eyes flitted to its source, a figure crawling on the ceiling.

It was Junk-o.

Her skin was pale, as if it had been bleached; even her eyes were dyed white. She had her magical jacket and belt on. And before I could try to make sense of the situation, she aimed her hand at me.

I picked up a pillow and used it to block the grass needles flying at me. Junk-o didn’t stop her stream of projectiles. I leaped off the bed and charged at her, keeping the pillow as my shield. But it wasn’t large enough to block all the grass blades; a few slipped past, burrowing into my legs.

Raven shrieked. The sting infringed upon my muscles, almost causing me to drop to the floor, but I endured. “Don’t-”

“Go on! Don’t mind me!” Raven interrupted my warning. Hearing her exclamation, my heart grew lighter. I slid under Junk-o, while blood started to leak out where the needles hit. Even slight movements of my legs were pure agony, as if some ants were biting from the inside.

I rushed through the corridor as I heard Junk-o drop behind me. “I thought she was dead,” Raven said.

“She is.”

“Then what am I looking at?”

“It could be an illusion,” I said as I let myself roll down the stairs to the first floor. “But I think that this is…”

I stopped speaking, muted by what I saw. Another figure awaited in the foyer, standing next to the broken-down front door. It was a pallid kid with an eyepatch.

Haga Taisuke.

“Who’s that?” Raven asked. Taisuke’s eye glowed purple. I jumped to the side of the living room as a laser blasted out. My injuries sent pangs throughout my legs, and I almost lost my balance.

I avoided the beam with a limp and dove behind the corner. My face landed on the cold wood planks, but finally, I was exactly where I wanted to be.

The secret compartment in the wall was within reach. I opened it and fumbled for the magical headband from the box inside; ice started crystallizing over my wounds. The chill also numbed the pain a little. While that was happening, I snatched the Hama Yumi and pulled back the string. The bow didn’t create an arrow for me.

Is my conviction not strong enough? I knew I wasn’t the strongest-willed person, but not even a slight trace of an arrow appeared. Faint shadows poked out from behind the corner; my dead victims were getting close to me.

I released the bowstring, hoping the Hama Yumi’s folklore ability would work. Two non-human screams followed, and the shadows stopped advancing; instead, they morphed like a pile of clay. It seemed that the mere sound of Hama Yumi’s bowstring really could ward off evil. More specifically, yōkai. Although I knew of magical artifacts that could summon them, I had a particular suspect in mind.

Famine.

I flicked the bowstring again to stun the yōkai, while grabbing the magical belt from the compartment. The belt and jacket on the fake Junk-o were replicas; the real ones were still inside the secret chamber. I clumsily hurried to put on the belt.

Fiddling with the bowstring bought me time, but unless I cut off the problem from its source, the two creatures would continue to pursue me. I turned the corner while tugging the string again.

The impostors writhed on the floor, barely maintaining their forms. The fake Junk-o had four white tails leaking out behind her; her skin grew fur in the same color. Obviously a Kitsune in disguise. The fake Taisuke had brown fur and two round objects growing from his crotch. Those were… the signature feature of a Bake-danuki.

“They are yōkai,” I said.

“I can tell…” Raven answered.

“I have to kill them.”

A sigh. “Go ahead.”

I directed my fingers at the Kitsune and buried a barrage of grass needles into its skull. When I turned to the Bake-danuki, my trembling hand couldn’t shoot anything. The yōkai still had Taisuke’s face.

The effect of the Hama Yumi subsided. The creature looked at me; its eyes turned purple. “Death, what are you doing?” Raven yelled. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t do anything.

A thud. The Bake-danuki dropped to the floor with newly punctured holes in its head. I didn’t command the belt to fire projectiles. Raven did.

“What? I didn’t know I could do that,” she said. “Takafumi-san said that I couldn’t control the magic.”

“He also said that all rich people should die.”

“Touche.” Silence followed this word, as she stared at the dead Bake-danuki.

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

“Because… I don’t know. It was about to attack with the laser thing again, and I just…”

“You don’t have to regret it. Let’s go.” I scrambled to pick up the entire box of magical items. The corpses of the two yōkai began to disintegrate, but Famine could resummon them by offering food; I suspected they would reappear soon. I wobbled to the front door, slipping my feet into Raven’s sneakers without socks. Right before I exited to apparent freedom, I noticed something.

There was a fly on the doorframe. It looked innocuous enough, but my mind was screaming danger. Why? My quasi-omniscience didn’t detect anything outside. Then again, I also couldn’t sense the two shapeshifters.

“Why aren’t we leaving?” Raven asked.

“I need to test something.” I went to grab a pillow from the nearby couch and tossed it out the front door.

A rattling tore through the air as a milky blur plunged from the heavens and chomped on the fluffy object. The motion incited waves of air that hit my face; I felt slight rumbles under my feet. But this was no earthquake; it was a giant skeleton head.

The skull persisted for a second before disappearing with a flicker, leaving no trace of the pillow.

“What? WHAT?” Raven exclaimed. I knew exactly what it was. Famine got a Gashadokuro under his control.