In simpler times, Darren had often fancied himself as a building architect, translating what beautiful designs he could dream up into tangible reality not just for himself, but for everybody else to admire. And then the war came to their doorstep, and his proclivity for design went to emergency bunkers and municipal fortifications, then the rebuilding of hospitals, camps, and entire districts turned to dust from orbit along with their inhabitants. The irony of him admiring Yuuyami-Saigo’s architecture, which he could properly see for the first time since he had arrived, was not lost on him. Under the full moon, the shapes of the roofs of each home, the pattern of wood and concrete supporting them, the warm yellow lights from the windows over the head-height stone walls…

He shook his head. Simpler times indeed, but ones he could never return to. He kept running, his shoes sinking ever so slightly into the muddy road, pistol in hand, and directly on the trail of a creature as fascinating as it was deadly.

At the crossroads Toshiie had driven him past, where he had glimpsed the tiered temple, he slowed, coming up behind a group of villagers with their rifles drawn and their backs pressed against a wall. Even in the dark, he could see their strained expressions underneath large, clunky orange visors. Darren put his arms up and whistled as he walked into view, waving with his free hand. “Something going on?”

The closer man responded in jumbled Xingram that even Darren couldn’t make out, before his colleague punched him on the shoulder and raised his visor. “You are the specialist?” asked the needly man with the thin moustache.

“In the flesh. What’s out there?” He lowered his hands.

“One of them and one of us. No clear shot.”

Darren nodded, and looked up over the wall, to the roof. “Boost me.”

“What?”

“Help me up.” He nodded at the wall. “I can get an angle from the roof.”

The two men looked at each other, and the one that understood him leaned back against the wall and crouched, clasping his hands before him.

“Sorry about this,” Darren said, and stepped onto the guy’s hands with one of his muddy shoes, launching himself upwards with help and clambering onto the top of the wall. He took a few moments to find his balance, and slowly rise to his feet. One look at the gap and he knew he could make it - it was just going to hurt. Darren muttered another quick apology under his breath, cocked his legs, and leapt.

Most of the impact was absorbed by his knees and elbows, and padded with the reinforced lining of his Division-issued suit, hurt much less than he had anticipated. He began moving and in that moment, the two tiles by his left leg, worn and now cracked from his jump, split in two and tumbled into the yard below.

Well shit.

He made a mental note about paying it back, and crawled up towards the apex of the roof, looking down onto the street with his goggles.

One of the things, white and flowy and tined orange in his view, was definitely down there, but from where he was, most of it seemed to be obscured by the lanky old man standing directly before it, his head bowed and swaying in a trance. He lined up the iron sights in his pistol. It was, in fact, a good enough shit. But in lieu of familiarity with the gun, and knowing how his hands would shake once he decided…Darren swept his gaze over to the building on the opposite side of the road, taking in a most peculiar sight he’d only subconsciously registered out of the corner of his vision: a balcony jutting out if the second floor, covered in thick translucent orange plastic, and a hole cut out to allow the barrel of a bolt-action hunting rifle through, also turned into the street. The middle-aged woman behind the weapon was lit well enough for Darren to see her looking at him, then back through the plastic at the situation at hand.

He pointed at himself, holding up his gun, then at her, then down towards the street. She nodded. He nodded back, and took aim again, this time a whole two metres left of where the sheet-ghost-thing was. Even with the metamaterials in the goggles meant to filter out the harmful aspect of observing it, and the fact that he wasn’t even looking directly at it, it was still hard. His eyes couldn’t help but water, and before his hands could start to shake, he squeezed two rounds into the mud.

The gun pulled a little to the left, and the old man in the street shuffled to the side, trying to shield his puppeteer from the perceived threat.

The crack of the rifle from across the street came in the next heartbeat, and the old man fell to the ground, suddenly lucid, crawling backwards away from his captor. The sheet-thing spasmed around the point of impact, before flitting away towards the temple-adjacent road, shedding bits of material as it flew like paper streamers into the night. It would go up into the mountains, as he knew from all the naps of the town he’d been given, and he would be right on its heels.

Darren thought of giving the clearly experienced sharpshooter a thumbs up, but when he went to look, she had already vanished inside the home. For a moment he remembered his own mother, the ever-stalwart duchess she was. There was light yet, he had to tell himself. He had insisted on this job.

With a little sliding and turning over on the roof, he managed to hop once onto the top of the wall and then back onto the mud. The rest of the neighborhood watch had poured in to help the elderly man, who seemed distraught from the experience of it all. Darren simply walked past them, picking up a scrap of the white cloth shorn from the sheet-thing, holding the muddy scrap in his hands. He looked up, and through the gap in the heavy studded doors of the temple building, a ray of moonlight illuminated a massive stone face, calm and serene.

If he believed in any of that stuff, perhaps he would have prayed then. He did try anyway, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, until the peace was cut short by the sound of a motorbike engine.

Toshiie came up on his ride, now wearing an orange visor. He didn’t say a word, just looked at Darren with determination in his eyes.

He climbed on and just like that, they were off, bouncing up the side of a mountain on a road that got progressively worse the higher they went. It wasn’t entire devoid of life - remains of small stone sculptures and lantern bases littered the path, degrading along with it, the vestiges of habitation up in these wilds. Considering it was a mountain like many other cases, he had a pretty good idea of what lived out here. A flash of white in between the trees made him tap on Toshiie’s shoulder, slowing them to a stop. Darren hopped off, and stepped over the small shrubs to where he’d seen that unnatural colour.

“What is it?” Toshiie asked.

He lifted the large, torn piece of dirty cloth up, peering through a bullet hole in it at Toshiie. “I think it died. If it was alive.”

“So we lost it.”

“Not yet.” He tossed the cloth aside, and knelt to examine the splash of red on the ground underneath it. A thin brown stem, topped with a cage of claw-like crimson stamens and a smaller dome of petals. Lycoris radiata. He spotted another a couple of metres away, growing next to a mossy pile of rocks. Under any other circumstances, spider lilies weren’t anything special; but this particular planet was in its monsoon season far off from the summer where they bloomed, and he knew for a fact that none grew on Yuuyami-Saigo, at least not naturally.

Standing up, he crossed two fingers from each hand, forming an X, before turning his hands down and spreading the fingers to form a triangular aperture. He turned in place, squinting through it, until he saw the path. When he lowered his hands, still prickly with pins and needles from the magic in his flesh, there was not a series of flat stones making a crude staircase up the slope, into a thicket of trees that seemed to block out the pale moonlight completely.

“What…the hell,” was the only thing Toshiie could manage, crunching through the brush behind him.

“You never mentioned the island had kami.”

“We don’t.”

“How long ago did this start? All of this.”

“A couple of years.”

“How many people have vanished?”

“They didn’t take anybody at first. Just came down and…” Toshiie’s eyes seemed glazed over.

Darren removed the tablet from his blazer, tabbed away from the analysis of the video feed and back to a briefing document. “Taiko submitted for help six months ago. Why only then?”

“The Daimyo wouldn’t have allo-”

“The Daimyo is dead.”

Toshiie froze, and Darren could see the gears turning in his head.

“He died in a skirmish last year,” Darren added. “With one of our fleets.”

“That’s not possible.”

“You said the younger people staff the warning bell in the temple. Shouldn’t the monks do that?”

Toshiie said nothing.

“Gun’s blessed, right?” He held up the pistol. “But I haven’t seen anyone who could do that. You’d think they’d be coordinating the defense and working with me. I know what’s going on here.” He swiped back to the readings in the tablet of that vague, wavy shape.

“What?”

“Something out here is eating people. Not just their bodies but the idea of them. I’m trained to resist this, but all of you…I’m going to need you to go back down and stay in the village.”

“You’re crazy if you go in alone.”

“And you’re insane if you think it won’t get worse. It’s already devoured so many people. I don’t think you even remember who you’ve lost.” 

The older man looked like he wanted to say something, but no words came. In some way, Darren surmised, he probably knew, felt in his soul, that it was true. In the end he just nodded begrudgingly. “Good luck.”

“If I don’t come back out by sunrise, call the same line Taiko used. Preferably before you forget I existed.”

Toshiie turned to walk back to his bike, but paused. “Are you ever going to tell me what it was you did?”

“Hm?”

“Why you are out here, throwing your life away?”

Darren smiled. “I really do hope I get the chance to.” And without another word, he hopped up the path into the dark.