Shinrabansho: Myriad Souls

It took me a moment to notice, but everything looked wrong.

I was still in a train car… but the world had a strange sharpness it never had before. Every color looked overexposed, every sound too crisp, like reality itself had been shoved into some kind of cruel high-definition mode.

My brain must have been rattled back on the train. That was the only explanation that made sense.

I rubbed my face… and froze.

My fingertips felt everything. Every pore. Every contour. Every unnatural smoothness. I dragged my palms over where my cheeks should have been, where my nose and eyes should have been, and my skin crawled.

There was nothing there. Just smoothness.

I jerked my hands away, my heart slamming against my ribs.

On instinct, I covered my face with both hands.

Whatever had happened to me, it didn’t block my vision in the slightest. I rubbed at where my eyes should have been, but there was no moisture, no lids, no lashes. My fingers pressed against soft skin stretched over empty eye sockets.

I could still see perfectly, even with my hands covering my ‘eyes’.

“What…?” I gasped.

That was when I noticed the passengers.

They had already recoiled, pressed into the corners of the car. Some shook. Some cried. A few just pointed at me like I was infectious.

An officer shoved through them and boarded the car, drawn by the commotion. I’d seen him around before during minor run-ins, and he’d never been that bad, but the moment he saw me his expression snapped straight to aggression mode.

More than usual.

I scrambled backward, my instincts screaming.

“W-wait…!” I blurted.

He didn’t wait, charging at me.

I turned and bolted down the aisle. Commuters shrieked as I passed. The car was only half full, but the way they pulled away from me, flattening themselves against the doors and windows, made it feel like I was running through a tunnel of open mouths and terrified eyes.

They cleared out of my path as though I was made of molten lava.

I sprinted toward the far doors with freedom in sight…

A high kick smashed between my shoulder blades.

The impact sent me flying. I slammed into the wall past the doorway, my briefcase skidding away. Light burst in my vision.

“Monster!” the officer barked. He settled into a practiced fighting stance, every line of his body hard and focused. “Hands on your head… if that’s even a head and not a hairy hard-boiled egg!”

Hairy egg?

I blinked stupidly. “W-what are you doing, officer?! I get that I’m ugly, but is that a crime now?!”

Someone snorted with laughter. Everyone else stared like I’d crawled straight out of a cursed horror DVD.

A cheerful jingle chimed over the speakers. The train lurched, then rolled forward out of the station.

Great. He hadn’t even stopped it.

“Yokai!” an old man shouted. “It’s a demon!”

The officer lunged again.

But this time…

I saw it coming.

Not because I read his stance or watched his shoulder turn. I saw his kick from the edge of my vision, as if my eyes had slid around the sides of my head. It felt like my field of view had stretched into a full circle around me, and my brain just… quietly accepted it.

A martial artist would sell their soul for vision like this.

I twisted aside, snatching my briefcase off the floor as I moved. The next flurry of blows hammered into it.

My arms shook. Each strike made the case vibrate like it was a steel shield instead of cheap office junk… and my laptop.

“W-whoaaa!” a kid squealed, delighted. “It’s like a sentai fight!”

The officer flushed, his lips twitching into a proud grin for just a second before he forced his face back into stern cop mode. Quickly, he renewed his assault, playing action hero for a live audience.

If it weren’t for this new vision, he’d have flattened me easily. His form was clean, efficient, even by Reiko’s standards.

Then a burly salaryman yelled, “I’ll help, officer!” and raised his own briefcase like it was Mjolnir.

Now I had two attackers.

The civilian’s briefcase swung at my head. I ducked. His briefcase whooshed past my ear so close I could feel the air move.

The officer slipped around that wild swing with frustrating ease.

I backpedaled, briefcase raised, angle shifting to keep both of them in my weird all-around sight. Behind me, the doors at the far end of the car…

…and saw the doors behind me sliding shut.

No time. No choice.

I swung my briefcase sideways, using the motion to torque my body. I dove through the narrowing gap.

ZOOM.

I fully expected the doors to clamp down on me and cut me in half in the attempt.

Even “closing” my eyes, I could still see everything. It felt like I remembered what blinking was supposed to feel like, and my brain was just obligingly playing along while ignoring the fact that I no longer had any eyelids.

My body twisted in a way like never before. Something tugged sharply at my left hand as I slipped out… like the door tried to catch me by the fingers…

…

But then I was through, rolling onto the platform in a clumsy sprawl.

The commuters waiting there recoiled at once, forming a wide ring around me, like some invisible barrier had shoved them back.

Behind the glass, the cop and the helpful salaryman hammered on the doors as the train pulled away, faces contorted in frustration.

I pushed myself upright, breathing hard. People on the platform gaped at me like I was a nightmare made flesh.

Screams rose like a tidal wave.

“Yokai!”

“It’s the noh-face that everyone’s been talking about!”

“Yeah… You saw how it moved! Looks human… but it’s not.”

“Call the police!”

“Someone just kill it!”

Another train screeched into the opposite platform, brakes shrilling. For a second I considered jumping aboard.

Then I imagined being sealed in another metal coffin with more heroic volunteers.

No thanks.

Two officers rushed down the stairs from the police box, pushing through the onlookers.

“Maybe it’s… just a really impressive costume?” a woman suggested weakly. Her face said she didn’t believe it for a moment.

“It isn’t!” another woman shrieked. “Did you see how he twisted his body?! Humans can’t move like that! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“Noh-face!” an otaku squeaked. “It’s a REAL YOKAI! This line really is haunted!”

The officers broke through the crowd and moved toward the empty bubble of space I occupied near the tracks. It truly felt like I was a weird floating island in a sea of people.

I held up my hands. “W-wait, please! The noh-face is real! My face was—augh—!”

A palm strike crashed into my chest.

SLAP.

It didn’t hurt as much as it should have, but it still knocked me back a step and knocked the end of my sentence out of my throat.

His second hand snapped toward my neck. This time I jerked aside. My feet slid on the platform, but I stayed upright. I realized, distantly, that hit might actually have hurt.

“HALT!” he barked.

Everything blurred as I bolted.

Panic took the wheel. Reason got shoved into the trunk.

I spun and ran, weaving between the bodies edging away from me.

My brain tried to keep up, checking escape routes mid-sprint.

Do I fight the cops? …Violent, stupid, guaranteed to end badly. How about jumping onto the tracks and losing them that way? … Hell… no. Noh-face is probably still lurking in the tunnels. Ab-so-lute-ly not. Board another train? Sure… and trap myself. Out from the frying pan directly into the fire. Well… how about surrendering? A cold, bone-deep instinct screamed death if I chose that one. They might even put me on a surgery table and perform a live autopsy to see what made me tick. Okay then… Marathon time! It was the only real choice left to me, but not through the tunnels. Maybe I could outlast them if I just kept running. The only relatively safe route out was up.

So I kept running like hell.

I darted around vending machines, benches, pillars, kiosks; my expanded vision let me slide past shoulders and bags by centimeters. Screams chased me, echoing off tile and metal.

“Stop!” officers yelled. “Halt!”

Then more officers appeared, blocking my path to the stairs and escalators leading up to the street. They weren’t blocking the tunnels at all. Only an idiot would choose that route willingly.

Lucky me. I was just desperate, not brain-dead.

I slowed for half a heartbeat, feet skidding, and took stock.

Two officers near the stairs. Two more on the far side of the platform, standing near the tracks beyond the last kiosk, cutting off that approach. Between us, the open space was narrowing as they converged on me.

They were setting up a pincer.

They were really going all-in on this. I gulped air, staring at the train that had just pulled in across the platform on the opposite side. If I could just get through those doors…

Even though I’d decided to not… I bolted toward them. Maybe it would buy me some time.

It was stupid and impulsive and basically my brand.

If I somehow made it on, I might get home faster than on foot, though it would take me back through the same tunnel I’d been attacked in. If not, then at least I’d tried.

The doors slid shut right before I could slip through. I slammed into them face first and bounced off, sprawling on the platform.

CRASH. BUMP.

The crowd peeked between and around the officers, their fear slowly morphing into excited anticipation. They wanted to see the monster get taken down.

The station roared with an assortment of shouts.

“Get it!”

“Kill it!”

“Catch it!”

Their jeers to ‘burn it with fire to death’ hurt more than the fall.

I lay there, legs half-curled, staring at the tracks, on the platform edge. For a moment… a long-feeling and terrible moment… I saw headlights in my mind.

I could end it.

Rot in a cell, dissected on a table, or become paste on the tracks. Everything that I’d already considered passed before my eyes. That was my bright future.

The officers’ shouts crashed over me.

“Stay down!”

“Don’t move!”

“Surrender!”

“Lie down with your hands behind your head!”

“Die!!!” some delightful stranger chimed in. Not especially original.

Through all the yelling, one voice slid in like a thread of cold wind. A whisper, quiet but somehow louder than everything else.

“Tomorrow…”

I shivered.

Tomorrow.

There wouldn’t be a tomorrow if I gave up here.

I wasn’t that kind of man. Not yet. Not while there was any fight in me.

I sprang to my feet.

I sprinted toward the two nearest officers at the side with the kiosks. The other pair moved almost at the same moment, angling toward me from the far side, sealing the space off. They were going to crush me between them right there.

Another clean pincer.

I lowered my center of gravity, arms out, keeping them in my weird peripheral all at once. At the last moment, instead of barreling into the closer officers, I pivoted and lunged toward the kiosk itself.

The vendor hiding inside shrieked and slammed the metal security gate down.

RATTLE—CRASH.

“Don’t let it take a hostage!” an officer shouted.

Not what I had in mind, but thanks for the terrible suggestion.

They closed in from both sides, ready to drag me away.

The gate, though, made an excellent ladder.

I jumped, grabbing hold and scrambling upward. Metal clanged under my boots. The officers rattled the gate beneath me, shaking it so hard my teeth would have chattered, if I still had any.

RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE. CLINK.

One officer climbed up under me and seized my ankle.

He tried to yank me down. My fingers slipped a little on the bars.

Fine.

I kicked him hard in the face.

He dropped. I kicked off the gate and flipped backward, legs spread awkwardly in the air. Somehow I landed behind him in a shaky crouch with a loud...

THUMP.

The shock of impact jolted up my legs into my spine. I didn’t stop to process it.

I bolted into the narrow corridor that ran along the tracks toward the stairs in the distance.

The platform erupted into chaos. People screamed and ran ahead of me in a full-on stampede, the whole crowd surging away like I was a tidal wave bearing down on them. To anyone watching, it would look like I was chasing them.

“Run!!!”

“Yokai!”

“Demon!”

“Die!!!”

The shouts echoed from every direction. Even people who had just arrived on the platform caught the fear like a disease and joined in.

My heart felt hollow. I pressed my briefcase over my face as I ran. It didn’t really help, but having something solid between my non-face and the world kept me from falling apart completely.

On the platform edge, I stumbled. For a moment… a long-feeling and terrible moment…

I saw headlights in my mind.

Up the stairs. Through the ticket gates. Onto the street.

I didn’t stop for traffic. Cars honked. Brakes squealed. People leapt back from me or stared as I tore past them, holding my briefcase in front of my head like a riot shield.

I ran until my lungs burned, until the city smeared into streaks around me. Sweat soaked my clothes and pooled under the helmet.

Kami-sama, why?

Is my face a cursed temple?

Crowds flee in terror.

What… what did that monster turn me into?

I ran until fear itself carried me home.