Tokyo at night was a city of light.
Neon signs bled color onto wet pavement.
Office towers glittered like glass altars.
Convenience stores glowed on quiet corners, their doors opening and closing with polite electronic chimes.
Even after midnight, trains still groaned along distant tracks, taxis slid through intersections, and somewhere in the city, people laughed, drank, worked, lied, loved, and cursed tomorrow.
But no matter how brightly Tokyo shone, there were always places where darkness remained.
Between rooftops.
Beneath eaves.
In narrow residential alleys where the streetlamps flickered and old shadows gathered against concrete walls.
A golden figure darted through that darkness.
Two crimson horns curved from her head.
Her small body moved with inhuman lightness, crossing the gaps between buildings as easily as stepping over puddles.
Blonde hair fluttered behind her, and ruby-like eyes shone with the sharp gleam of a predator loose beneath the moon.
She was the oni of Mount Ooe.
Ibaraki-Douji.
Or at least, that was what she looked like.
Inside that body was Tachibana Hibiki, who had received his Golden Finger only a few hours ago and was currently far too excited to even consider sleeping.
Rather than rolling around in bed until morning, he had made the very mature and responsible decision to sneak out for a late-night stroll.
“The power of a Heroic Spirit really is convenient…”
Ibaraki-Douji dropped from the sixth-floor window of an apartment building.
Her bare feet touched the ground without so much as a stumble.
The landing produced only the softest tap, barely louder than a cat hopping down from a wall.
Remembering how he had escaped, Hibiki could not help grinning through Ibaraki’s mouth, revealing a neat row of sharp little fangs.
Aunt Kyoko was much more lenient than his biological parents, but even she would never allow him to go out wandering Tokyo in the middle of the night.
Leaving through the front door was impossible.
So naturally, he had chosen the bedroom window.
With the agility and raw physical ability granted by the Heroic Spirit Card, walls and rooftops were no different from flat ground.
Drainpipes, balconies, exterior ledges, air-conditioning units—all of them became convenient footholds.
If his old body had tried this, he would have become breaking news before reaching the second floor.
Now, he felt as if gravity had become a polite suggestion.
Tokyo was a city that never truly slept.
Still, Hibiki’s apartment was in a residential part of Bunkyo Ward.
At this hour, most households had already gone dark.
The streets were quiet, the windows dim, and the whole neighborhood seemed wrapped in that drowsy stillness unique to places where ordinary people had normal lives.
As Ibaraki-Douji passed a few windows where lights were still on, her golden vertical pupils widened with curiosity.
She peeked inside.
One room held a pale, hollow-eyed youth hunched over a glowing monitor like a ghost who had forgotten to die.
Another contained a loving couple doing their part to fight Japan’s declining birthrate.
A third revealed a miserable corporate drone in a wrinkled shirt, working overtime from home while whispering curses at his boss through clenched teeth.
All walks of life, each suffering in their own way.
“Pardon me, pardon me.”
Hibiki considered himself a morally upright student.
Once his initial curiosity faded, he immediately stopped prying into other people’s privacy.
Besides, Bunkyo Ward was too quiet.
If he wanted to create a proper supernatural incident, he needed a more suitable stage.
Shibuya, perhaps.
Or Shinjuku.
Kabukicho, with its bright signs and darker corners, sounded promising.
A shady bar.
A nightclub.
Maybe even the hideout of some yakuza group.
As Ibaraki-Douji leaped across a low rooftop, Hibiki’s thoughts moved quickly.
How should he reveal the persona of Ibaraki-Douji to the world in a reasonable way?
He could not actually go around eating people like a proper evil spirit.
There had to be a pretext, a structure, a story.
This concerned the future image of the character and the efficiency of harvesting Human Order Foundation.
Should he make a debut like a kaiju in an old tokusatsu show, appearing suddenly and causing mass destruction?
No.
Too crude.
A monster that only destroyed would inspire fear, but fear alone was shallow.
Powerful, yes.
Immediate, yes.
But not enduring.
Awe, worship, faith, reverence—those emotions lasted longer.
They sank deeper.
They could become stories, rumors, legends.
What he needed was a stage.
A proper stage where Ibaraki-Douji could display the brutality and power of an oni while also revealing a strange sense of order.
A monster with rules.
A calamity with standards.
That was far more memorable than a beast that simply smashed whatever stood in front of it.
Just as Ibaraki-Douji was about to leave the quiet residential district, a scent drifted into her nose.
Sweet.
Metallic.
Fresh.
Her small figure stopped on the edge of a roof.
The oni girl’s nose twitched.
“This smell…?”
Hibiki recognized it at once.
Blood.
Human blood.
Very fresh.
And there was far too much of it.
Ibaraki-Douji’s eyes sharpened.
“Looks like I don’t need to go all the way to another ward after all.”
Her pink tongue slid across her lips.
It was not Hibiki’s habit.
It was the instinct of the evil spirit, the blood of the oni stirring inside Ibaraki-Douji’s body.
Excitement pulsed beneath her skin, hot and savage, as if something ancient had opened its eyes.
Following the scent, Ibaraki-Douji crossed the rooftops in a few silent leaps.
She landed outside the second-floor window of a detached house.
No lights were visible from the street.
The curtains were drawn.
To an ordinary passerby, it would have looked like any other sleeping home in the neighborhood.
But the smell of blood leaked through the cracks.
Ibaraki-Douji pressed one golden eye close to the window.
Her oni vision pierced the thin barrier of the curtains with ease.
Inside, a grotesque scene unfolded.
The room had almost no furniture.
The floor had been stripped bare, and white candles had been arranged in a crooked pattern around an ambiguous hexagram-like circle.
At the center of that pattern stood a wooden cross.
A girl in a school uniform was bound to it with coarse hemp rope.
Her wrists and ankles had been cut.
Blood dripped steadily from the wounds, trailing down into grooves carved into the floor.
The channels guided the blood through the ritual pattern, staining the strange lines a deeper and deeper red beneath the candlelight.
In front of the cross stood three hooded men in robes.
The leader held a thick book with metal-bound corners high in both hands.
His voice trembled between frenzy and devotion as he chanted words that sounded half-invented and half-remembered from some forbidden corner of the internet.
“With the blood of a pure maiden 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!”
His voice rose.
“Please descend upon this world!”
The other two men knelt on the floor, bowing again and again.
“Please hear our devoted prayers!”
“Please redeem our sunken souls!”
Their voices were feverish.
Their bodies trembled with worship.
Their faces, hidden beneath their hoods, were turned toward the bleeding girl as if they were not looking at a person at all, but an offering.