“I see it. Lantern on the water, right?” Falano said, prone on the ground on his front, his masked head tucked into some bushes. “Ritchie’s not even here yet. Do we go on without him?”

“Are you okay?” Kofuku asked from where she was sitting against the trunk of a tree, one top of the hills on either side of the dam. She fidgeted with one of the hundreds of sakura petals that had fallen, but which would be quickly replaced by new growths regardless of the season. Such was the ingenuity of Coalition bioengineering, from an age before hers. Her father’s age, one could say, when the United Coalition Front spanned three hundred worlds under the Shogunate, before Takeshi Kofuku’s death had fractured any meaningful trust in the last Shogun and snowballed into multiversal schism, bursting with rogue warlords who scattered to every edge of humanity’s hold over the stars. Now the trees, like the silver ones in the town and the palace grounds, were just a reminder of their stint of neofeudalism and its constant desire to reinforce its supremacy over its internal hierarchy, over the people simply trying to live their lives, and above all, over the entropy nature wrought. Try as she may, she failed to imagine what it would have been like had she been born into an earlier period; perhaps a stern shogunate official, a soldier, married off to a samurai to secure an alliance, or worse, a geisha to be ogled at by lords and commoners alike. Given her current proclivity, she was confident that if she was at least a concubine, she would have made it quite far…but any further thought of it made bile rise in her throat. Perhaps, in a way, the death of the UCF was a blessing in disguise.

Falano put his hand in front of her face, snapping her back to the present. “Hey. Hello? Are you astral projecting to find Richard or something?”

“I can’t astral project. I was just thinking of my father.”

“Why am I not surprised? Look, I said I’m fine. They didn’t get a single hit on me.”

Kofuku looked at him. “Honestly I expected you to be…”

“What?”

“More resistant? Non-compliant?”

“...so you can have a reason to activate the microbomb you put in the base of my skull?”

“I didn’t mean…” She sighed. “Okay, I haven’t forgotten about that part. But you could have just shot that guy in the basement without getting me out of the way, and you didn’t need to cover me from those arrows on the lift.”

The lens of his mask-eye adjusted. “What are you trying to say?”

“I just thought you’d hate this a lot more.”

“Oh. Oh, that’s what you mean.” He slapped his metal knee, giving off a loud noise. “No, once I get this bomb out you’re still good as dead.”

“Do you actually mean that?”

Falano froze for a moment, before leaning back. “Look, just because you treat us nice and take us to a night market doesn’t mean you didn’t threaten my life to get me to come along.”

“Yeah, right.” The sound of bushes being moved interrupted them, and Kofuku drew her revolver in anticipation.

Richard emerged from between the trees, now dressed in dark, baggy clothes and holding a trash bag. “Hi!”

“So stealthy, my guy,” Falano said, inching away from him a little. “You got all that murder out of your system yet?”

“Those ninja dudes didn’t stand a chance.” He dropped the bag, allowing two more sets of clothes just like he was wearing to spill out. “The butler guy said this was for you guys. Also aren’t we killing demons or something?”

Kofuku picked up the smaller set that was clearly for her, pulling it over her clothes and propping up the hood. “If, and I mean if the yokai attack first, then you’re free to fight back. Before that happens, sparks for show only. We don’t need to make this situation any worse than it already is.”

“Killjoy.” He sat down with them.

“How close was the boat?” Kofuku asked.

“Real close. Should be almost up to us by now,” Falano said.

“Then let’s go.” She didn’t bother sitting back down, instead pushing through the brush, ignoring Richard’s protests about walking up the mountain and making her way by moonlight to the edge of the canal built to contain the water behind the hydroelectric dam. Against the reflection of two of their three moons, she spotted the small wooden boat, and the unusually tall man in the straw hat standing on its end, paddling close to the concrete shore. She gave him a quick nod, which he returned, and took her position right by his feet. The other two sat in front, Falano in front of Richard due to his ability to scan their surroundings, and as they set off, the tall man flicked their electric lantern off.

Under the light of Zenya and Kouun they sailed, up into the mountains and into the land of spirits. Kofuku kept quiet the entire time but her hand wandered, grabbing at the black buttons of her cloak, her eyes peering into the darkness between the trees, transitioning from sakuras to the more common conifers once they passed the walls that demarcated the last of what classified as human territory. Even Falano and Richard were silent, their breathing subdued and quiet, for probably the only time she didn’t want them to be. Her eyes were trying to adjust to the nothingness, the absence of threats, and slowly, shapes began to take form in the brush, if only to satisfy her brain’s desire to find some kind of pattern, some kind of thing to latch onto.

She turned up to the sky. Outside of the city, there were no lights to obfuscate most of the stars, and so she began pushing them into constellations in her head, recalling the contents of an old book in the palace library she used to read over and over as she waited for her father to return from his visits abroad. The five stars in a row, barely obscured by the larger moon Zenya, made up the Lotus Chain, a boon for the mercantile Rattana Mandala of the former Coalition, their fleets scattered and lost after the schism. Below it, she spotted the ring of stars - the Azure Cog - that turned like the wheels of progress, at least according to the Tianlu’s tech guilds, now consolidated onto a handful of worlds. Then if she turned her head, she could see the winding tail of Ngalyod, the rainbow serpent of Terra Australis infamy. But her favourite, one that she used to be able to project every night as if she was a spaceship’s computer, was one that every faction under the Coalition had some version of: the Bridge. A simple arc of stars, number six or seven depending on your background, and from Daizo-Shikigami she knew for a fact the second from the left was Orcichalcos, and that orbiting it was Theremis, the magical capital of the First Unified Human Empire. She recalled the time she had first heard of it, and how she had always wanted to enroll at one of its various prestigious academies, but had never expected those eight years to widen her horizons as they did when she finally arrived.

Any chance of recounting her professors and her studies was interrupted by an inky veil that fell upon the sky, sapping it of its faint blue hue and deflecting the light from most of the stars, leaving only the brightest few. Kofuku turned to the shoreline and to absolutely no surprise, spotted the first spider lily, red against the greyscale landscape. She only need to look the other way or further afield, and more would become visible, glowing an ethereal crimson.

They had entered a yokai realm.

Suddenly, Kofuku was no longer sure if the shapes in the darkness were a product of her rampant pareidolia, or if they were being watched by a hunting party. Free of the madness as they were, there was no predicting what those that kept to the depths of the realm, that hadn’t seen a human since the purification, were capable of. 

Falano must have picked up on the vibe too, because he was in a crouch, giving himself full range of motion to draw his weapon.

This far upriver was an uncomfortable distance from the mountain, and from the god entombed within. All reports indicated it had nothing to do with the grudge or magic - even the mining crews after the purification just felt a certain wrongness in the presence of an old, dead thing, like something humans were never supposed to encounter and therefore were never wired correctly for. Even looking at the shape of the thing, the way the mountain formed around it made Kofuku uneasy, but for a different reason entirely. At first they had worshipped it as Susano-o, felled by the Stateship four hundred years ago along with the many other gods that re-manifested, but as operations continued, and more and more of the skeleton was exposed, a more likely truth came to light.

Yamata-no-orochi. Undeniably serpentine in nature, with multiple heads. Her father had sworn the workers all to silence, but with the inevitable discovery of the fact, his public addresses changed to reflect it. Gone were mentions of the “Great Purifying Deity” or the “Ox-Headed Heavenly King”, replaced by generic terms like “storm god” and “the dead god”. She vividly remembered the look on the faces of the mage-historians in the palace as he doled out massive cheques to ensure their compliance, and the very next day any mention of Susano-o was struck from their databases. Despite protests from the likes of the predecessors of the Tidekeepers, by the time Kofuku left Daizo-Shikigami for the first time after her initial arrival, the storm god no longer had a name.

“I see it.” Falano leaned over the side of the boat. “It’s that cabin right, Ritchie?”

“Bro, I can’t see shit,” Richard said.

“Oh. Forgot. It’s in a clearing. Only structure for miles around, too.”

“Do you have magical sensing?”

“I can roughly map some types of magical radiation and oh fucking hell.” He tapped the side of his helmet a couple times. “This whole place is magically charged. The air coming out of me is charged right now.”

“That’s the yokai realm for you. Can you even see anything?”

“Trying…” He stared in the direction he had seen the cabin here. “There’s…a lot of fluctuation in the trees? None in the clearing.”

“So we’re walking into a trap.”

“Second time today. Tempting fate, aren’t we?”

She looked up at the boatman, whole horns were visible from the angle she was at. “Bring us in.”

He was silent as he moved the boat closer to the shore in parallel, and stepped out with one foot to anchor it to the shore.

Kofuku quietly thanked him as the three of them got out of the boat, starting up the slope towards the clearing. Falano took up the front, as the only person who could see clearly. He kept turning to look into the forest, pausing their advance, and then shaking his head and trudging on.

“What?” Richard asked, turning around, looking directly at Kofuku.

“What?” she repeated back at him.

“Did you say something, boss?”

“Not a word.”

He just turned back around, frowning, and followed Falano up to the clearing. Despite the choking dark of the yokai realm, the cabin was easy to make out. “Yeah, that’s it. Can’t believe you saw it from all that way bro.”

Falano pointed at the crooked, crumbling chimney. “It’s that shape. What do you think? Safe to approach?”

“They’re watching,” Kofuku said. “Let’s not disappoint them just yet.” She took the lead, headed right towards the front door. As she got closer, she could make out more and more of the details of its abandonment: the door slightly ajar with grass growing into the gap, the dusty windows too caked to see through. She spotted the strange marks on the inner doorknob before she even reached out to open it.

The interior of the cabin was overgrown, as expected, but between the plants, there were gigantic, sweeping scorch marks on the walls and floor and the sole metal table, partially collapsed into the burnt floorboards, looked like it had been melted into that shape. Looking back at the door, the handle was melted in almost the same fashion, and wood scorched with the same tree-branch pattern.

Falano stuck his head in. “What the hell is that?” He pointed at the collapsed table, and in the dark, Kofuku finally saw it.

A dark dodecahedron, sitting in the hole in the metal it had melted through, itself made of some kind of ceramic compound. Each face was inset and packed with something compressed and off-white. Bone, she realised, kneeling to get close to it. She reached out a finger to it, and despite her caution, she saw a flash as a bolt of electricity jumped from its surface and into her skin. The stinging made her pull back, falling over on her butt, but something was different. “Take…skin…desire,” she repeated. A voice she had heard only once before.

“If you’re possessed I’m shooting you,” Falano said.

“Richard!” she called out. “Get in here!”

The Venator bumbled in, leaning against the door. “Wassup boss?” His eyes caught sight of the object embedded in the table, and he cocked his head. “Hey, that’s the…so that’s where the voice was coming from.”

Falano shook his head. “Not getting anything, just more magic.”

Kofuku got to her feet. “I think I know why my father hired him.” She walked around Richard, who seemed transfixed on the relic. “Whatever it is, it's got a lot of the dead- of Orochi’s bones in it. And if Richard can talk to it...”

“Should we let him touch that?” Falano took a step back. “Look what it did last time.”

“Yeah, but not with us inside.”

“Good call.” He strode out, waited for her, and shut the door to keep Richard inside. “What now?”

Kofuku didn’t get a chance to reply when a shrill whistle cut through the air. Strange, flowing shapes exfiltrated from the trees, shimmering in the air before settling in the shape of men - or rather, simply humanoid. Some were hunched, some stood tall, but all of them had large, jagged beaks over their lower faces. The majority of them had swords, just like hers, and one had a long staff with ornaments hanging from a ring at its end; the rest held old bolt-action rifles, pointed straight at them. The tengu closed in on them, step by step.

Kofuku reached for her backpack, which spat a talisman into her hand. “Honestly,” she said, “I didn’t think we’d get this far.”