Shinrabansho: Myriad Souls

The girl standing inside the crooked elevator was small… maybe ten or twelve years old, give or take a year. Her style hit me first… she had on a loose black T-shirt tucked into a short skirt, casual makeup highlighting warm brown eyes, and hair cascading around her shoulders in dark, glossy waves.

Wait a minute… why is a kid wearing makeup, especially competently…

Then I noticed something else strange about her: her shirt.

A bold white calligraphy design sprawled across the chest in elegant swirls:

I’m not weird. I’m just yuri.

Seriously?

My brain registered the words. My brain recognized the joke.

My brain absolutely knew the correct socially acceptable response.

But when I’d collided with her a second earlier, what I felt had been more like…

A wall.

An unyielding, perfectly flat brick wall.

And instead of commenting on her shirt, like a normal polite human being, my overloaded, traumatized, barely-functional mind shut down completely and crashed into a chaotic BSOD kind of a disaster.

“F-FLAT!!!” I blurted.

It echoed up the elevator shaft like a cursed chant meant to summon demons.

Her expression froze.

I saw her emotions flash on her face. Blushed. Annoyed. Offended.

In moments that evolved to an annihilation-tier rage. And it all happened in three seconds flat. 

Flat… Flat… Flat…

If emotions had levels, she just unlocked Super Saiyan Murder Mode.

Flames practically erupted behind her. I swear the temperature rose.

“You…” she hissed.

One heartbeat later, she became a blur.

I had survived a noh-face attack.

I had outrun trained officers.

I had performed parkour over a kiosk gate.

But I was nowhere near ready for an angry tiny girl with righteous fury blazing in her eyes.

Her foot shot upward.

“Baka!!”

Her kick connected with a part of me that Kami himself had designed to be emotionally and physically vulnerable.

SNAP. CRACK.

The world inverted. My vision burst into starry fireworks.

I flew backward like a bargain-bin sentai stuntman someone launched with a catapult.

Fireworks should have been exploding. They certainly were going off in my brain.

The wall caught me. Hard.

Everything else faded.

I don’t know how long I lay there, curled up on my side on the grimy hallway floor in full red sentai armor, contemplating the fragility of masculinity and life itself.

A soft whimper escaped me.

Not only was I a noh-face yokai monster…

Now I was a noh-balls too.

Small mercies… at least no one else had witnessed this crime against my dignity.

Eventually, after the kind of miserable eternity only men can understand, I managed to uncurl slightly and climb to my feet. My legs trembled beneath me, low-powered jackhammers struggling to support my weight.

My voice croaked out a broken prayer to every kami in existence.

Once I could stand without immediately collapsing again, I staggered back toward the elevator. The hallway was mercifully empty now.

She was long gone.

I pressed the elevator button… probably too hard.

CRACK.

The plastic casing split clean down the middle and fell in two sad halves onto the floor.

“Oh no. Oh no no no…”

I bent down, scooping up the pieces like that would magically fix anything. The button still lit, flickering faintly, which was something.

Then I looked left. Then right.

No witnesses.

Good.

I hummed nervously as the ancient mechanism groaned and clanked its way back down. When the elevator finally arrived, the wrought-iron gate rattled aside with the subtle grace of a dying cicada.

The crooked floor looked even more lopsided now.

Or maybe I was tilted.

My entire body hesitated.

But something in me… was it pride? Spite? Competitive spirit?... Whatever it was ignited.

If that terrifying girl had ridden on this thing without fear…

I couldn’t lose to a violent loli dragon.

Not today. Not again.

Not when my humanity… and my remaining dignity… were already hanging by threads.

I stepped inside.

And the elevator doors clattered shut behind me.