Despair swallowed Kenji Sakata whole.
It came like black water from the bottom of the sea, rising past his throat, filling his lungs, drowning whatever remained of his reason.
He stared at the oni girl before him.
Her petite body was stained with the blood of his subordinates.
Her golden kimono fluttered lightly amid the ruined house, and her bright eyes still held that innocent, amused curve, as if the massacre around her had been nothing more than a game she had briefly enjoyed.
Sakata’s mind went blank.
Run?
Where?
Resist?
With what?
The shadow of death had never felt so close.
It was no longer an abstract fear, no longer something that happened to criminals, victims, or fools unlucky enough to be caught in reports and statistics.
It was standing in front of him.
Smiling.
“No…
please…
don’t kill me…”
Survival instinct crushed every shred of dignity he had left.
Kenji Sakata, Police Inspector of the Metropolitan Police Department, dropped to his knees on the filthy floor.
He no longer cared about the gravel cutting into his skin or the blood soaking into his trousers.
He prostrated himself before Ibaraki-Douji, pressing his forehead to the ground again and again until his skin split and blood smeared the dust.
“I beg you!
Lady Ibaraki-Douji!
I’ll do anything!”
His voice broke into a sob.
“Please spare me!
Money, power, sacrifices, anything!
Just give the order, and I’ll get it for you!”
He threw out every bargaining chip he could imagine.
Money.
Influence.
Human lives.
Promises.
Loyalty.
The desperate offerings of a man who had spent his whole life believing everything could be bought, sold, buried, or negotiated.
Ibaraki-Douji merely tilted her head.
She watched him with open interest, her smile unchanged, like an audience member enjoying a particularly pathetic farce.
Sakata’s heart sank deeper.
She was unmoved.
Of course she was.
Money and influence meant nothing to a true Oni God.
What else?
What else could he offer?
His brain, driven to its limit by terror, began clawing desperately through every fragment of rumor and legend he knew about the oni of Mount Ooe.
In old stories, many oni had once been humans.
Humans who had fallen.
Humans who had sinned.
Humans who had been twisted by hatred, desire, and karma until they were no longer fit to stand among mankind.
Sakata’s eyes widened.
He had committed more sins than he could count.
Bribery.
Cover-ups.
Shielding criminals.
Framing colleagues.
Destroying evidence.
Selling justice piece by piece until the badge on his chest became nothing but decoration.
Even some of his subordinates, the ones who hated him, had privately called him Sakata the Oni.
If that was the case…
If that was the case!
A mad thought flashed through his mind like lightning.
“Yes…
yes, that’s it!”
His eyes lit up as if he had found the last rope dangling over a cliff.
“I’m willing!
I’m willing to become an oni!”
He raised his head, face twisted between terror and fanatic hope.
“I want to follow Mount Ooe!
Please allow me to serve by your side forever, Lady Ibaraki-Douji!”
Rather than clinging to the fleeting power and luxury of the human world, why not follow the leader of Mount Ooe before him?
Why not abandon humanity and become one of the oni who would bring chaos upon the world?
That was true power.
Eternal power.
“What?”
For a moment, even Tachibana Hibiki, who was playing Ibaraki-Douji, was stunned.
This guy…
His survival instincts were flexible to a terrifying degree.
If you cannot beat them, join them?
Defecting on the spot?
What kind of wild move was this?
Inside Ibaraki’s Saint Graph, Hibiki almost gave him a mental thumbs-up.
As far as sheer will to live went, Kenji Sakata had broken through human limits in the worst possible direction.
“Hahaha…”
Ibaraki-Douji began to laugh.
Then louder.
“Hahahahahaha!”
Her clear laughter rang through the ruins.
She clutched her stomach, shoulders shaking, laughing so hard that tears almost gathered in the corners of her eyes.
“I see!
So that is what you were thinking!”
She wiped at her eye with one finger, still grinning.
“Honestly, humans are such interesting creatures.
Truly, truly interesting!”
Was she mocking human weakness?
Their shamelessness?
Their boundless capacity to crawl toward any path that might keep them alive?
Perhaps all of it.
Seeing her laugh, Sakata was overjoyed.
He had guessed correctly.
He had found a way to live.
“Thank you for your mercy, Lady Ibaraki-Douji!”
His voice turned sickeningly sweet.
“In truth, I’ve admired the power of evil oni since I was a child!
If my wish can finally be granted today, then even death would be worth it!”
While spewing flattery, he crawled forward on all fours like a dog.
Then, in a gesture so disgusting it made even the air feel dirtier, he stuck out his tongue and tried to lick Ibaraki-Douji’s bare foot as proof of loyalty.
“You pervert!
What do you think you’re doing?!”
The smile vanished from Ibaraki-Douji’s face.
Pure disgust replaced it.
Her slender bare foot rose.
Not to be worshipped.
To strike.
The kick landed cleanly against Sakata’s chest.
Thud.
A large section of his chest caved inward.
“Gwah!”
Sakata flew backward like he had been hit by a speeding truck.
He crashed heavily onto the broken floor, eyes bulging, mouth hanging open as a strangled noise escaped his throat.
For several seconds, he could only twitch.
Ibaraki-Douji rolled her eyes.
“You want to become an oni?”
She walked toward him with light, unhurried steps.
“It is not impossible.
After all, I too was once human.”
She stopped beside Sakata and looked down at him.
“But such a thing requires a trial.”
Ibaraki-Douji raised one slender finger.
At its tip, a needle-sized wisp of crimson flame ignited from nothing.
It was small.
Almost delicate.
Yet the moment it appeared, the ruined house seemed to grow darker.
The air tightened.
The corpses on the floor looked colder, and even the sunlight pouring through the broken ceiling seemed unable to touch that flickering red-black fire.
“Within my karmic fire dwell the grudges of the hundred oni of Mount Ooe.”
Ibaraki-Douji gazed at the blood-colored flame with a casual smile.
“Since you wish to become an evil oni, give it a try.”
Her golden eyes shifted back to him.
“If you can endure the gnawing of this Purgatory Karmic Fire, you may molt from human into oni.”
The flame trembled at her fingertip.
“If you survive, you are my kin.”
Her smile deepened.
“If you fail, your soul will become nourishment for the fire.”
Inside her, Tachibana Hibiki treated it as an experiment.
A cruel one, perhaps.
But the subject was Kenji Sakata.
A man like this dying in pain could hardly be called a tragedy.
At most, it was waste disposal with dramatic lighting.
Ibaraki-Douji bent down and lightly touched that insignificant wisp of Sougenbi to Sakata’s body.
The instant the black flame made contact, it exploded.
Like a drop of water thrown into boiling oil, the fire erupted across him in a frenzy.
Sakata, who had been lying half-conscious from the kick, arched off the floor and released a scream more piercing than all the victims before him combined.
“AAAAAAAGH!”
The blood-colored karmic fire spread over his skin like something alive.
It poured from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, wrapping him from head to toe within a single second.
Yet it did not burn his flesh.
Not directly.
It was worse than that.
It burned something deeper.
His soul.
Within the black-red Sougenbi, faces appeared and disappeared.
Grinning oni.
Weeping monks.
Twisted mouths.
Empty eyes.
Silent curses.
Silent laughter.
The grudges of Mount Ooe churned inside the flame, mocking him, devouring him, testing whether the rotten thing called Kenji Sakata had the strength to become something even worse.
The pain shattered him immediately.
It felt as if thousands of red-hot blades were slicing through him again and again.
As if fire and ice had both been poured into his organs.
As if countless demons had crawled beneath his skin and begun gnawing at his bones, nerves, memories, and sins.
Sakata rolled across the floor, screaming, convulsing, clawing at his own body.
He smashed his head against the ground until blood sprayed.
His throat produced sounds that no longer resembled human language, raw and wet and broken, like an animal dragged from the water and left to cook beneath the sun.
“Hehe.
You still have plenty of energy.”
Ibaraki-Douji watched his performance with great interest, even offering commentary like a gourmet appraising a dish.
Tachibana Hibiki felt no sympathy.
Not for him.
Letting this scum burn was already a form of recycling.
Then a woman’s voice sounded from behind her.
It was trembling.
Barely.
But it was being forced to stay calm.
“What…
have you done?”
Ibaraki-Douji’s bright smile froze for the smallest instant.
Inside her, Tachibana Hibiki’s heart dropped.
No.
Why her?
But he adjusted almost immediately.
He was not Tachibana Hibiki right now.
He was Ibaraki-Douji.
The oni of Mount Ooe.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Ibaraki-Douji turned with careless grace and glanced over her shoulder.
“I am giving him a trial.”
Her golden eyes gleamed.
“A trial to molt into an evil oni.”
At the entrance to the ruins stood a woman in a sharp business suit and square-framed glasses.
Her long purple hair had been tied into a neat ponytail, and a portable video camera was clutched tightly in her right hand.
Kyoko Tachibana.
Hibiki’s aunt.
Her face was bloodless.
The hand holding the camera trembled violently.
Yet her feet seemed nailed to the ground.
She did not take even one step back.
Her gaze moved past Ibaraki-Douji and swept across the ruined house.
The corpses.
The blood.
The broken bodies of the officers.
And Kenji Sakata, still writhing in black flame, screaming with a voice that no longer sounded human.
9