The street fell into an unnatural silence.
The officers who had arrived as reinforcements stood behind their shields and gun barrels, eyes wide, breathing shallowly.
Sweat slicked their palms beneath their gloves.
Some of them recognized the thing kneeling in the ruins.
Kenji Sakata.
Police Inspector Sakata.
A man with an ugly reputation, yes.
A rotten superior, yes.
A piece of trash wearing a badge, without question.
But still human.
At least, he had been.
Now, in only a few minutes, that man had become something else entirely.
“Is that…
Police Inspector Sakata?”
The officer holding a submachine gun could barely keep his voice steady.
The creature in front of him wore the torn remains of a police uniform.
Beneath the shredded fabric bulged slabs of blue-black muscle.
A single horn jutted from his forehead, slick with blood, while his crimson eyes rolled with mindless violence.
The officer felt his understanding of the world cracking apart.
“He turned into an oni…”
“How is that possible?”
“Do we shoot?
Sir, do we open fire?”
Conflicting orders crackled through their communicators from the rear command center.
The officials sitting safely behind screens had clearly seen the drone footage, and just as clearly, they had no idea what they were looking at.
A monster.
An oni.
A former police inspector transformed before their eyes.
“All units, stand by!” the sergeant leading the team shouted, forcing his voice above the panic.
“Do not fire unless the target attacks first!”
He sounded firm.
His knees were not.
Ibaraki-Douji hovered above the ruined house, arms folded, watching the newly born oni with bright, interested eyes.
“Well then, you newborn piece of trash.”
Her smile was sweet enough to belong on a festival poster.
That made it infinitely more terrifying.
“You have already abandoned your human skin.
Let me see what you can actually do.”
Kenji Sakata’s head snapped up.
The voices around him, the pointing, the fear, the disgust, all of it poured into the newborn oni’s heart like oil onto flame.
Rage and violence surged through his warped body.
But the moment his blood-red eyes met Ibaraki-Douji’s smile, that rage shrank.
A deeper instinct seized him.
Fear.
Not the fear of bullets or death.
Something rooted deeper than thought, carved into the soul now twisting inside his new body.
Before the oni of Mount Ooe, he could not raise his head.
“Ibaraki…
my lord…”
Sakata lowered himself quickly, his voice hoarse and dry, like rusted iron scraping against stone.
“Do not face me.”
Ibaraki-Douji’s golden eyes narrowed.
“I have no interest in the weak.”
She raised one small hand and pointed toward the armed police line.
“Those people tried to kill you just now, did they not?
Go on.
Unleash your anger.”
Her lips curved.
“If you survive, I may consider letting you become a little gatekeeper oni.”
That sentence was enough.
Kenji Sakata’s blood-red eyes turned toward the police.
Killing intent flooded the street.
In that instant, he remembered everything.
The suspicion when he had called for help.
The contempt.
The way his former colleagues had hesitated over whether he was still worth saving.
And deeper than all of that, he remembered his lifelong hunger for power.
Now, he had power.
Then anyone who stood in his way could die.
“Roaaar!”
The oni that had once been Kenji Sakata released an inhuman roar and kicked off the ground.
Rubble shattered beneath his feet.
His huge body shot toward the police defensive line like a blue-black cannonball.
“He’s charging!”
The sergeant’s face changed.
“Fire!
Open fire!”
Gunfire erupted.
Submachine guns and automatic rifles spat flame at the same time.
Bullets poured across the street in a dense storm, hammering into Sakata’s body.
An ordinary person would have been torn apart instantly.
But Sakata was no longer ordinary.
The bullets struck his blue-black skin with dull, heavy thuds.
Some buried themselves into his flesh, but they failed to punch clean through.
His muscles tightened like powerful springs, trapping the rounds inside.
The impact forced him to stagger back several steps.
He did not fall.
The pain only made him angrier.
“Roar!”
Sakata charged through the hail of bullets, grabbed an abandoned car at the side of the street with both hands, and hoisted it over his head.
A policeman screamed and emptied his magazine in panic.
“Monster!
Die!”
Sakata roared back and hurled the car.
Boom!
The vehicle smashed into the riot shield formation with crushing force.
The front line broke apart.
Several officers were thrown backward, their shields spinning from their hands as a massive gap opened in the defensive line.
Sakata rushed through it.
One huge hand closed around an officer’s head.
Snap.
With a slight twist, the man’s neck bent at an impossible angle.
The slaughter began.
In the distance, Kyoko Tachibana stood half-hidden behind a utility pole, her camera still recording.
Her stomach churned.
This was not a film.
Not a staged disaster.
Not a nightmare she could wake from.
This was real.
Those well-trained officers, men who had arrived with armor, weapons, discipline, and orders, were as fragile as paper dolls before the oni.
“Help!
Headquarters, requesting support!”
“We need heavy weapons!”
“Ah!
My leg!”
Gunfire, screams, shouted commands, and the crash of metal tangled into chaos.
Kenji Sakata rampaged through the police line.
His movements were crude, but his strength was terrifying.
Every swing scattered men.
Every step cracked asphalt.
Every broken scream seemed to pull him deeper into the pleasure of his new body.
For the first time in his life, power was not something he borrowed from rank, bribery, or connections.
It was in his hands.
In his bones.
In the fear of others.
The joy of tearing through flesh and deciding who lived or died swallowed him whole.
For one mad moment, he even thought that becoming an oni was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him.
But in the end, he was only a low-ranking oni freshly born from corruption and fear.
Once the initial chaos passed, the police began retreating with purpose.
Then came the snipers.
Bang!
A dull, heavy shot cut through the noise.
A large-caliber round struck Sakata’s knee with brutal precision.
“Aargh!”
His leg half-buckled beneath him.
Bone fragments flashed white through the torn flesh, and his enormous body crashed down onto one knee.
Another shot followed.
Then another.
Shoulder.
Chest.
Side.
The power of a sniper rifle was nothing like a handgun or submachine gun.
Each hit tore open great wounds in Sakata’s blue-black body, splashing dark blood across the broken street.
“Stop shooting!
Stop!”
Sakata’s voice cracked with panic.
“I’m your superior officer!
I’m Kenji Sakata!”
The large-caliber rounds had taught him something important.
His new body was strong.
It was not invincible.
And once Kenji Sakata realized that, his agile, shameless mind began working again.
His shouting had an effect.
For a brief moment, the rear command center hesitated.
A living oni sample would be far more valuable than a dead Sakata.
Scientists, politicians, and every secretive power behind the scenes would want him alive if possible.
Sakata seized that hesitation.
“Ibaraki, my lord!”
He twisted his broken body toward the sky and screamed.
“Save me!
Please save me!”
He no longer cared about rampaging.
He no longer cared about dignity, revenge, or the thrill of power.
The cowardice buried in his bones had resurfaced the moment death drew near.
“I am already an oni of Mount Ooe!” he shouted, trying to crawl toward her.
“I am your subordinate!
Please help me!”
Ibaraki-Douji only looked at him.
Her gaze was cold.
It was the way one looked at garbage.
“An oni of Mount Ooe?”
She laughed softly.
Her voice was not loud, yet it seemed to drown out the gunfire, the shouting, the sirens, and the drone rotors above.
“You?
A coward who fears death, grovels before humans, and has not even learned the first shred of pride?”
Her golden eyes narrowed.
“What makes you think you deserve to call yourself my kin?”
She slowly raised one finger.
A tiny black spark danced above her fingertip.
“I told you before.
This was only a trial.”
The spark flickered.
“Surviving it would have given you the qualifications.
But now, it seems you have not only failed to survive.
You have failed to understand the dignity of an oni.”
Sakata froze.
Looking at Ibaraki-Douji’s cold face, the last thread of hope in his heart snapped.
“No…
you can’t…”
He wanted to say more.
The police did not let him.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
The command center had made its decision.
The moment they saw Sakata begging Ibaraki-Douji for help, they understood one thing clearly: the situation was no longer under human control.
A living sample was valuable.
A monster that might be taken away by a higher-level Oni God was a disaster.
A dead Sakata was better than an escaped oni.
The kill order came down.
Snipers fired first.
Then the armed officers tightened their formation and surrounded him.
Automatic rifles roared, pouring round after round into Sakata’s head and chest.
Without Ibaraki-Douji’s favor, without karmic fire protecting him, without time to adapt to his new body, the low-ranking oni could only twitch beneath the storm of bullets.
Part of his head was torn away.
His chest became a ragged, blood-soaked cavity.
A few seconds later, Kenji Sakata, once a Police Inspector who had swaggered through the Metropolitan Police Department, now a failed oni born from greed and fear, collapsed into the spreading pool of dark blue-black blood.
He did not move again.
“Tch.”
Ibaraki-Douji did not spare the corpse another glance.
“Boring.”
She lifted her gaze and swept it across the armed officers staring at her with pale, terrified faces.
“It feels rather satisfying to slay an oni, does it not, mortals?”
Her smile carried a strange, meaningful curve.
Sharp canines peeked from beneath her lips.
She seemed completely unmoved by the death of the creature that had begged to be her kin.
“Today’s entertainment ends here.”
The black-red fire around her stirred.
“As expected, humans and oni killing each other is far more amusing than anything else.”
Her golden eyes gleamed.
“I look forward to seeing whether you can bring me something more interesting next time we meet.”
With that, Ibaraki-Douji’s body dissolved into golden flame.
The fire shot upward, blazing through the air beneath everyone’s gaze.
It shrank rapidly in the sky, becoming a brilliant spark before finally vanishing beyond the clouds.
Silence returned.
All that remained were the devastated ruins, corpses scattered across the street, broken vehicles, spent shell casings, and the foul pool of blue-black blood where Kenji Sakata had died.
The armed officers of the Metropolitan Police Department looked at one another.
No one spoke.
Everything they had seen today had twisted their understanding of the world beyond recognition.
Before such a vicious, transcendent Oni God, simply surviving felt like something worth thanking Buddha for.
Behind the utility pole, Kyoko Tachibana finally lowered her camera.
The strength went out of her legs, and she slid down to the ground, back pressed against the concrete.
Her chest rose and fell violently.
Sweat blurred the lenses of her glasses.
For a long while, she could only breathe.
Then, in a hoarse voice, she whispered the thought that had settled in everyone’s heart.
“This world…
has really changed.”
A pause.
“It feels so strange.”
…..