Shinrabansho: Myriad Souls

The fireworks above stuttered, one burst blooming strangely in slow motion as if it fought against his dark aura.

BOOM

The mirror in front of him shattered, its fragments falling toward the earth in sparkling motes.

Noh-Baku’s voice turned raw as he said, “Enough.”

The dream immediately answered him with a wave of shadow that rolled outward, rewriting his dream world. 

WHUM

The air thickened into a pressure that struck Natalia first, her tails spreading to counter it as she fought to hold her position in the air. Each tail flared with the effort, golden foxfire spitting in protest as Noh-Baku’s shadows tried to cling to it, to quench it.

SSSHK–SSST

Natalia’s corona flickered under the strain, then steadied by doing something quieter and far more telling. It refused to dim.

Her light did not surge outward. It remained fixed in the sky, like the sun holding its place against the curtain of night. His darkness tried to suppress it and found itself scorched, not burned away, but denied purchase. It slid off, unable to adhere to something so clean and beautiful. 

HISS

She brightened into a small sun against the night sky.

Kagami-no-Kami moved, her masks no longer drifting. They snapped into coordinated motions, each taking a precise path through the wave of shadows.

SHIK–SHIK–SHIK

One mask cut low, slicing through the darkness, opening a path. Another struck high, redirecting the pressure. Her mirror-mask angled at the last instant, forcing the wave to fold back on itself and spill upward instead of outward.

KRRSH

Natalia felt the difference immediately. Kagami-no-Kami did not merely block. She edited consciousness around her.

The sky above the festival split into multiple reflections for a blink, as if reality had been forced to reflect itself. Somewhere behind them, the cracked mirror from moments ago shed a few bright fragments that spun away like glass before dissolving into dreamstuff.

TINK

Noh-Baku roared and launched himself forward.

His movement was shocking in its speed. He crossed the distance between them like a thrown boulder, his trunk whipping, his arms trailing shadow, his Noh face hollow and merciless. The air screamed around him as his dark power dragged the dream’s substance into his wake.

SKREEE

Natalia met him head-on, choosing not to dodge, though she could have. She raised her foxfire against him, lifting her tails and allowing the light behind her to condense, her corona tightening into a disk, a small sun pressed into physical shape by her will alone. Foxfire flared along its edge like solar prominences, wild and bright. She gritted her teeth, feeling her blood rush and her heart hammer in her chest.

DOKI-DOKI… BADUMP… FWOOM

The fire snapped outward into a curved front, like a fan thrown open in his path.

Noh-Baku drove straight into it, and the collision detonated into a burst of light that made the fireworks below look pale.

KRAKOOM

For a heartbeat, the sky became white.

Then it shattered into color.

Noh-Baku’s dark attributes did not burn like her powers. It gobbled up her heat and drank brightness, turning it dull.

Natalia felt her sunfire resist the corrosion, feeling it hiss and struggle, understanding that it was being swallowed whole.

HISSSS

She grimaced as the “sun-disk” she’d formed discolored at its edges, like a bright coin tarnishing in fast-forward.

Her eyes narrowed.

“So this is what you have become,” she murmured. “A creature that consumes light and beauty. I truly pity you, Baku.”

Noh-Baku’s trunk snapped through her barrier like a spear, striking her shoulder with concussive force. Her body whipped sideways.

THOOM

Pain flared, sharp and sudden, and she tasted blood at the back of her throat. It leaked down the corner of her mouth.

She spun, her tails flaring out to stabilize her in midair, catching herself before she could be thrown down to the earth into the watching crowd.

…

FOOM

She stabilized herself by forcing the sky to obey the laws of mass that Baku had originally written into the dream world to simulate Earth.

Natalia’s breathing went still. Her nine tails fanned out like sister rays. The corona behind her tightened, compressing until the light stopped behaving like plasma and began to behave like a dense mass.

A small, white-gold point appeared at her back, no larger than a pearl, and the dream around it began to respond, nearby light and debris shifting into a shallow orbit.

The fireworks below curved by a fraction. Embers that should have drifted downward hesitated, then began to spiral. Dreamlight that had been scattering like dust found a center and started to orbit it in slow arcs.

WHIRR

The air bowed.

Natalia exhaled slowly. The pain did not weaken her. It sharpened her focus. Her expression settled into the same one she had worn on the Council, the look that had once made others hesitate before challenging her.

Behind her, the point of light deepened, its brightness unchanged as its density increased. The dream creaked like timbers under load. 

KRRRNN

Noh-Baku moved to press the advantage, his bulk surging forward through the warped air.

Natalia raised one hand, and the white-gold point behind her asserted itself. The pull did not push outward. It took hold locally, drawing space toward her instead of away.

KLIK

Noh-Baku’s charge broke mid-motion. His forward momentum bent sideways, his body dragged into a widening curve as the same force caught his shadow a moment later and pulled it after him. What should have been a straight advance became a forced arc around her position.

WHUM

Embers, soot, and torn fragments of dreamlight nearby shifted course at once, sliding into the same curvature, their paths tightening as their speed increased. The pull deepened, and the arc narrowed.

WHIRR-WHUM

Noh-Baku fought it, forcing darkness outward in a brute attempt to reclaim control, but his aura stretched instead of spreading, drawn into long bands as its movement was redirected. Portions tore free under the strain.

RIP

Natalia did not move.

“Stay,” she said quietly.

The curve locked. Noh-Baku’s body jolted as the constraint held, his motion trapped on a closed path around her. 

K-KLIK

He strained against it with raw force, but the path remained intact, indifferent to his will.

Kagami-no-Kami closed the distance without seeming to move. One moment she was beside Natalia. The next, she stood in front of Noh-Baku, her masks fanning outward in a tight formation.

SHIK

Noh-Baku swung. A massive arm of shadow cracked through the air.

KRAK

Kagami-no-Kami did not meet it with her flesh. A mirror-mask slid into place in front of her. The shadow struck its surface and the force was turned.

KRRSH

The force rebounded, snapping back into Noh-Baku with everything he had put into the blow. For a moment, even through the madness, surprise crossed his posture. He twisted, the strike grazing instead of landing cleanly, and his dark aura burst outward, torn loose by the impact.

That spill met Natalia’s pull at once. What should have spread instead bent inward, dragged off course and was drawn into the same curved path around her.

WHIRR

The shadow did not expand. It collapsed, pulled into rotation around the white-gold point behind her, forced into a tightening spiral that, for a brief and unsettling instant, made his corruption appear to circle her light like an accretion disk.

Natalia saw an opening and moved and swept her hand forward. This time her foxfire did not form a straight line. It bent under its own influence, drawn into a thin arc and sharpened as it traveled, light compressed into a crescent that cut forward in a single, deliberate sweep.

The crescent cracked across Noh-Baku’s chest like a luminous lash.

KRAK

But the strike carried more than heat. There was a force in it that drove through his aura, making the contact feel less like burning and more like being laid bare. Her light did not simply scorch. It exposed the target.

His aura flared, her foxfire striking and skidding, sparks scattering as it bit into his form and tore at his dark power. It seared, but it also held, the heat clinging where it struck as though his corruption could not fully shake it off.

Where the foxfire stuck, the darkness thinned, not from damage alone, but from exposure. 

SZZZT

Noh-Baku shrieked, the sound carrying all the way down to the festival like a siren.

SKREEE.

“Stop touching me!” he howled, raw and unrestrained. “Stop cutting at me! Stop—Stop judging me—!”

Natalia’s heart relented, almost giving way under her empathy.

That was not a battle cry… it was a cry for help.

She tried again to reach him, wishing she could risk embracing him, because she could not stop herself.

“Baku,” she called softly, her voice strained against the roar of his power. “This ends badly for you… not just for you. For the girls you claim to be protecting. You know that I’m right. Please return Sumire’s power to her. She can handle that darkness.”

His Noh face rippled. For a heartbeat, the blank surface shifted, almost forming a tormented expression…

…Then it smoothed again, more remorseless, harder than before.

Noh-Baku lifted both arms, and the sky around them darkened as if a massive curtain were being drawn.

SHHHH

Natalia felt the dream’s substance respond to his power like muscles answering a command from the brain. Consciousness saturated the space, and he held its architecture the way a body held bone and sinew. He pulled, and the dream obeyed him.

A huge swell of darkness rose beneath Kagami-no-Kami and Natalia, a dense mass heaving upward as its surface split open, rows of jagged teeth forcing their way through and snapping as it climbed.

RUMBLE

Kagami-no-Kami’s masks repositioned instantly. Two dropped low, slicing the shadow tide into channels.

SHIK

A mirror-mask angled, catching one channel and redirecting it into another so the darkness collided with itself.

KRRSH.

The tide buckled and tore, but it kept coming, reforming around her edits as the dream tried to close over the damage.

Natalia thrust her tails downward, her gold and white foxfire bursting beneath her in short, violent jets.

FWOOM

But she did not rely on lift alone. She forced the space beneath her to hold, her sunlight-like energy pressing down hard enough to keep the shadow from surging cleanly upward.

Behind her, the corona tightened. White-gold light drew inward into a dense point that did not flare but compacted, and the air reacted as if a real mass had been introduced into it. It bowed and thickened, the dreamlight that had been drifting without direction pulled inward and began to turn.

WHIRR

The shadow tide surged toward them and then slowed, as if it had struck a rising grade it could not climb.

For a heartbeat the darkness faltered, its teeth stretching as the front edge was forced sideways by the curvature she had imposed on the space around her. It tried to climb again, and it bit upward as it went.

Natalia answered by making the space refuse it.

The darkness did not rise cleanly. It curved, dragged into a shallow rotation around the point behind her, forced into a path that bent it away from its charge.

WHUM

She rose above the tide, drawing Kagami-no-Kami’s line of attack with her as she climbed. Her old Council instincts surfaced, her sense of timing and placement returning in full.

Noh-Baku followed.

He did not fly. He launched himself, thrown forward in a violent burst, his aura tearing the air into trailing strands that snapped behind him like torn banners.

SNAP

Natalia snapped her fingers.

SNAP

Nine gold-white foxfire orbs bloomed around her, each hovering beside its corresponding tail like a small linked sun.

FWOOM

Each orb carried a dense white-gold center, compact and steady, with foxfire flaring around it in tight tongues. When they appeared, the space between them bent inward.

Embers from the fireworks below, tiny points of orange and silver, caught in the distortion and began to circle the orbs in faint rings, the dream’s fabric twisting around her power as if it had instinctively started drawing systems around her.

WHIRR

Beneath her, the shadow tide continued to rise, rows of jagged teeth snapping upward through the mass, jaws opening and closing as it climbed.

The orbs spun outward in a wide ring, then shot toward Noh-Baku in staggered sequence, aimed not at his center but at the seams of his aura where the darkness thickened. They did not travel like fireballs. They traveled very much like celestial bodies, each following a slightly different arc, bending in flight with quiet inevitability, as though Natalia had set their courses ahead of time and space was now complying.

Noh-Baku swatted at them.

WHAP… WHAP…

Each strike tore pockets in the dream’s substance, the ruptures bleeding shadow as the toothed darkness surged higher beneath him. The orbs detonated against his aura, bursting into flares that clung like burning pollen. 

BOOM

Where the flares adhered, the darkness did not merely scorch. It tightened, drawn into thin spirals, threads of stain dragged into the paths the orbs had carved.

WHIRR

He roared and swung his trunk again, this time laced with a stripe of darkness so dense it looked wet, like blood. The blow struck one orb mid-flight and crushed it flat, snuffing it out in an instant.

KCH

Natalia’s breath caught. The struck orb did not scatter or fade. Its light darkened at the point of contact, sinking into his aura and spreading through it, leaving her radiance diminished where his corruption thickened.

Kagami-no-Kami’s eyes narrowed. She lifted her hand, her palm extended outward.

The masks around her snapped into an array, then fired, each one streaking forward like a thrown verdict. SHIK. SHIK. SHIK.

They did not strike Baku’s body. They struck his aura, carving through the dark attribute with clean, ordered cuts. KRRSH. Each impact burst into reflected light, like mirror shards flaring and scattering brightness in all directions. TINK TINK.

Noh-Baku staggered. For a moment, the dark attribute thinned, and Natalia saw the old shape beneath it, the weary gentleman he had been, the careful and conscientious host. Below him, the shadow tide hesitated, its exposed teeth snapping at nothing as the structure feeding it wavered.

She seized the opening.

Natalia surged forward, her tails flaring behind her. She closed the distance and drove her palm into his chest, the corona behind her collapsing inward as the space between them compressed and struck him all at once.

The moment her palm connected, the corona behind her compressed to a point, and the air around Noh-Baku buckled, the sky warping inward toward him as the space he occupied collapsed under the force.

For a blink, his shadow mass locked in place, the teeth below him freezing mid-rise.

The impact detonated outward. The air cracked. A visible ring tore through the sky, forcing embers and debris away in all directions as if the heavens had expelled breath.

BOOM… FOOM…

Noh-Baku was thrown back hard. He tumbled end over end, his aura sputtering, his shadow losing cohesion. For a heartbeat it looked as if he would fall.

Then the dream caught him. Darkness surged beneath him, lifting and bracing him, the tide re-forming even as its teeth ground against one another.

SHHHK

His laughter returned, higher now, completely unhinged. “Yes,” he breathed. “Yes. Hurt me more! Prove me correct! Prove you are what’s wrong in this world!”

Natalia’s stomach tightened. She knew that voice. It was the sound of someone who had already decided he was unforgivable and wanted the world to agree.

Kagami-no-Kami’s tone remained calm, but her eyes sharpened. “You are not invincible, Noh-Baku.”

“I am not afraid of you,” he spat. “I am not afraid of any of you anymore. No yōkai can match my power here.”

His aura surged again, and this time the darkness did not spread outward. It folded inward, compressing around him. The air around his body tightened, drawn toward his center as if cinched by an unseen hand. 

KRRRK

Natalia saw the shift in his posture too late. It turned inward, the darkness around him drawing tight as his chest lifted and his trunk pulled back.

Noh-Baku inhaled.

The motion was subtle. His chest lifted by a fraction. His trunk drew back slightly. Beneath his aura, the shadow split and opened, rows of jagged teeth forming and spreading as the darkness parted around his mask.

SSSSHHH

Dreamlight rushed toward him in a sudden surge. Loose embers from the fireworks, fragments of lantern glow, even the thin warmth lingering in the air were dragged forward toward the opening in the darkness, pulled straight toward his mouth.

Natalia felt the draw catch on her foxfire. Her tails flared in protest. The orbs around her wobbled and lurched toward him.

WHIP

Behind her, the faint corona she had built tightened at its edge as the pull intensified, holding its shape while the dream thinned around it.

The small white-gold core tightened further, compacting inward as the draw intensified.

Kagami-no-Kami’s masks shuddered as his power’s influence reached them.

RRRRT

Kagami-no-Kami moved first.

She angled a mirror-mask forward and set it directly in the path of his inhalation. For a blink, the dream’s fabric shifted. The draw bent, caught on her mirror’s surface, and diverted.

KRRSH

The redirected pull struck the reflection head-on. For an instant, her reflection smeared across the mirror’s surface, her masks dragged out of alignment by the force.

WARP

Natalia’s eyes widened. “Kagami—!”

Kagami-no-Kami gave no answer, her gaze staying fixed as Noh-Baku’s Noh face rippled and the teeth in the darkness spread wider while the draw intensified.

SSSSHHH

Natalia felt the dream strain. The fireworks below sputtered again, their bursts thinning and their color dimming at the edges.

Kagami-no-Kami’s mirror flared.

FLARE

A hard, cold light burst from it as the suction line fractured and the pull snapped loose.

KRAK

Baku’s inhalation broke into a strangled gasp, his aura flaring in irritation.

HKK

Kagami-no-Kami’s form stabilized. Natalia saw it clearly. She had baited him, opening a path into her reflection and letting his instincts seize it as her.

The implication settled with a chill. She was not only fighting him. She was directing him.

Noh-Baku shook, fury sharpening into feral rage. “Such tricks,” he snarled. “You think you can trick me forever?”

“Rather than tricks, I think you can be made to reveal yourself,” Kagami-no-Kami replied evenly.

Natalia hovered beside her, her shoulder aching from the earlier blow, her tails still flared. She caught Kagami-no-Kami’s gaze for an instant and saw calculation there, measured and deliberate, followed by a pause that lingered longer than tactics required. It was not sympathy for his crimes. It was for the gentleness he had once shown, and for the distance between that yōkai and what he had become.

Natalia inhaled slowly. She steadied her gold-white foxfire and let the pain settle. Behind her, the corona tightened again, held in reserve.

“We will not destroy you, my friend,” she said, her voice carrying clearly. “But we will stop you here and now.”

Noh-Baku laughed, the sound breaking apart as his breath hitched and his throat tightened. “Stop me,” he echoed. “Stop me. Yes. Please. Stop—”

He jerked upright as the insanity took hold again.

JOLT

“No,” he snarled, the word snapping like a whip.

KRAK

“No. I will not be stopped by anyone or anything! I will not return to your darkness, to a place of ignominy! I will keep them! I will keep them safe! I will keep everything—”

He lunged.

FOOM

Kagami-no-Kami’s masks surged to meet him.

SHIK

Natalia’s foxfire flared.

FWOOM

Behind it, the pressure held steady, refusing to dim, refusing to yield.

The sky above the festival turned into a field of light, reflection, and spreading dark stains. Below, humans stared up at three impossible figures tearing open the dream’s heaven with every clash.

BOOM

KRRSH

WHUM

The fight had only begun. The dream was already groaning like a house under strain.

KRRRNN