Tokyo at night is a city of brilliant lights, but there are always places where an indelible darkness lurks.
A golden figure with two horns on her head dashed through the shadows between eaves and street corners; she was the Oni girl known as Ibaraki Doji.
Of course, inside this body was Hibiki, who had just obtained a Golden Finger and was too excited to sleep.
Instead of tossing and turning in bed, he decided it was better to sneak out for a night stroll.
“The power of a Heroic Spirit is truly convenient…”
Leaping down from the window of a sixth-floor apartment, he landed unharmed, with the sound of his landing so faint it was negligible.
Recalling his method of sneaking out, Tachibana…
no, Ibaraki Doji at this moment, grinned, revealing a mouth full of sharp fangs.
Although Aunt Kyoko wasn’t as strict as his biological parents, she would never allow him to go out late at night.
Going through the front door was out of the question; the only path was the bedroom window.
With the extraordinary agility and strength granted by the Heroic Spirit Card, Ibaraki Doji scaled walls and leaped across buildings as if walking on flat ground.
Tokyo is a bustling city that never sleeps.
However, Hibiki’s apartment building was in a residential area of Bunkyo Ward; late at night, most households had already turned off their lights and gone to sleep.
Passing by a few windows that were still lit, Ibaraki Doji curiously widened her golden vertical pupils and peered inside.
She saw an ethereal-looking internet-addicted youth at a computer desk, a model couple contributing to solving the declining birthrate, and even a miserable corporate drone working overtime online late at night, cursing their boss at the screen.
All walks of life, each different in their own way.
“Pardon me, pardon me.”
Hibiki considered himself a moral model student; once his initial curiosity dissipated, he stopped prying into others’ privacy.
The night in Bunkyo Ward was still too quiet…
as expected, he should go check out places like Shibuya or Shinjuku.
To cause a major scene, he had to find a suitable location.
The sensual Kabukicho?
A seedy bar or nightclub?
Or perhaps directly raiding the hideout of some Yakuza organization?
Hibiki thought to himself.
How should he expose this Ibaraki Doji persona to the world in a “reasonable” way?
He certainly couldn’t actually go around eating people like an evil spirit; he had to find a proper pretext.
This concerned the subsequent character building and the efficiency of harvesting human order foundation.
Like a monster in Ultraman, causing widespread destruction upon appearance?
No, that’s too crude.
A pure image of an evil spirit would only attract fear.
While fear is a powerful emotion, it is far less enduring and pure than awe, worship, or faith.
There must be a “stage,” a stage where the character of Ibaraki Doji can be perfectly performed.
A stage where she can demonstrate the brutality and power of the Oni race while subtly revealing a certain sense of “order” and “rules.”
Just as Ibaraki Doji was about to leave this quiet residential area, a sweet and metallic scent suddenly wafted into her nose.
The Oni loli’s figure flickered for a moment as her cute nose twitched, sniffing playfully.
“This scent?”
She recognized it; it was the smell of human blood.
It was very fresh, and…
quite a lot of it.
The Oni loli’s eyes instantly became sharp.
“…It seems there’s no need to go through the trouble of heading to other wards.”
Her pink tongue licked her lips as the evil spirit’s instincts made the demonic blood within Ibaraki Doji surge.
Following the scent of human blood, Ibaraki Doji made a few leaps and landed silently outside the second-floor window of a detached house.
She pressed a golden Oni eye to the crack in the window.
Her powerful Oni vision easily penetrated the barrier of the curtains, revealing a bizarre scene inside the room.
The room was almost devoid of furniture; on the bare floor, lit white candles outlined an ambiguous hexagram magic circle pattern.
In the center of the pattern, a girl in a school uniform was bound to a wooden cross with coarse hemp rope.
There were obvious cuts on her wrists and ankles, and blood was dripping from the wounds, flowing into grooves already carved into the floor, making the eerie pattern even more crimson.
In front of the cross stood three men wearing white robes and hoods.
The leader held high a thick book with metal-bound corners, chanting ambiguous phrases in a tone that was both frenzied and devout.
“…With the blood of a pure virgin as the catalyst, and an unsullied soul as the sacrifice, we welcome the supreme and most benevolent One True Lord, the Great God of Beautiful Wishes. Please descend upon this world!”
“Please listen to our devout prayers!”
“Please redeem our sunken souls!”
The other two black-robed men knelt on the ground, bowing repeatedly and chanting fanatical prayers.
This was…
the scene of a cult’s human sacrifice.