Shinrabansho: Myriad Souls

Dad folded his arms as the group hug loosened, his gaze lifting again when another distant shockwave rippled across the sky. Foxfire flared overhead, then fractured, scattering into falling embers.

“All this is so strange,” he said quietly. “If it weren’t for those kami fighting up there, I wouldn’t believe you at all.” He exhaled. “It feels like the world is so stretched past what it can hold that it’s coming apart.”

Mom nodded slowly, her brow furrowed in that way she got when she was piecing something together. “There was always something subtly strange about Sumire,” she said. “It started two months ago, didn’t it? You remember, dear—how uncomfortable she seemed. Like she didn’t remember her own life properly.” Her eyes softened as they returned to me. “That was probably the moment when…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t need to.

“…I’m sorry if it feels like I took your daughter’s place,” I said, bowing my head.

To her, a stranger had entered her daughter’s body.

My voice wavered, but I forced the words out. “This is all just a dream for me, for you too… but… even if it’s beautiful, even if it feels so real…”

Reiko rested her hand on my back. Rui and Ume stood off to the side, their fingers intertwined as they watched. Rui’s lips were tight. Ume wore a sad smile, one small fang peeking over her lip.

“…I’ll never forget it. And you’re a big part of what makes this dream so special. All of you are.”

Rui and Ume looked at each other and stepped forward together.

Rui drew in a breath, steadying herself as she said, “We used to be Riko and Yuna as well,” she said. “The four of us are dreaming in the real world… well it’s a little more complicated than that… but...” She glanced up at the sky, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “As scary as that sounds, this world was created for us by a Baku yōkai. I don’t understand everything that’s happening either, but they’re up there fighting for us right now.”

“Fighting for you?” Haru echoed, incredulous.

Mom tilted her head. “Don’t doubt what she’s saying. I saw something elephant-like in that shadowy figure up in the sky. That’s what they’re supposed to look like, right?”

“Yeah, Mom.” I nodded and tucked my hands behind my back.

“Ne, I don’t get it either,” Ume said softly, a gentle smile touching her lips, both small fangs showing. “He was very gentle and kind. He cared about everyone so much. I don’t know what changed him.”

Reiko stepped forward then, her expression sober. “It was mine and Sumire’s power,” she said. “That’s what corrupted him.”

“Our power?” I asked, blinking.

“Did you think our Noh Face power vanished after we regained our humanity when you reclaimed my face from Mitsuhiko’s scroll?” Reiko continued. “It isn’t that simple. Our souls were already entwined. We both carried Noh Face power. That is why we could defeat Mitsuhiko, drawing on force neither of us fully understood.”

Rui nodded slowly. “I knew that much. But once you gave Susumu your body… once she recovered your face… I was reasonably sure that beating her Cinderella Deadline would have changed her soul back to human… But the yōkai all seemed to see Sumire clearly… they sensed the yōkai inside her. It’s weird though. I can’t really wrap my head around it all.” Rui gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. “The conditions to restore her humanity fully were met. And we did… but…”

“...It was too late for me. That’s probably why,” Reiko said quietly. “When I said it was too late back then, I knew there was no way back for me. I played for time. I thought maybe… if we stayed together… maybe she’d somehow keep me sane. Or maybe I’d drag her down with me.” She smiled faintly, painfully. “But I was lonely. I needed her, however it worked out.”

I stepped forward and hugged Reiko tightly. “Even if things had gone that way,” I said softly, “it wouldn’t have been all bad.”

Rui shrugged. “You were both unstable. Maybe you’d have ended up fighting forever… at least until one of you took the other’s life. You know… this outcome… it was probably the only one that wouldn’t have ended with everything destroyed,” she said, her lips twisting with a playful glint in her eyes.

Reiko laughed quietly. “Hah… I had zero idea what I was doing. Once she beat me… and I never believed she ever would, for the record, back then, I just wanted her to have my face as a trophy.”

“Just as a trophy?” I muttered.

“Noh Face are pretty simple in their insanity.” Reiko shrugged. “I never imagined it would fuse with her on the spot and restore her humanity. It wasn’t actually my intention to give you my identity. But then… when I stepped back and thought about it with what little sanity I had left, I laughed. I was happy with that.”

“Yeah… I went and destroyed my own face,” I added, heat creeping into my cheeks. “It was the source of all my misfortune, no kidding. I gave up my chance to be normal so I could stop you.”

My parents stared at us, stunned.

“…That might have been a lot to hear,” I admitted sheepishly. “Just… please know that the world is much more complicated than it looks on the surface.”

“Yōkai are real,” Rui said simply, as though we couldn’t all hear and see them fighting in the sky above us and feel how space was warping. She slipped behind Ume and promptly stuck her fingers into her mouth.

Ume sputtered, blushing furiously. “Wh-what are you doing?” she mumbled around Rui’s fingers.

“Ume’s a vampire,” Rui said matter-of-factly. “She’s not exactly a yōkai, but all supernatural beings are born from consciousness power.”

My Mom and Dad recoiled. Haru leaned closer, fascinated.

“They’re really cute. You’re a real vampire?” Haru stared at her. “Which of you was the one that beat me so hard at Tekku?”

“Me.” Rui grinned. “I had a weird knack for it. I’m not sure I could pull that off again now, though. Riko had some kind of extra information in her head. She just understood combat on an instinctual level that I never had before all this.”

“You’re actually my age and not Onee-chan’s?” Haru asked, clasping his hands behind his head. “You both were!”

“Dream on!” Rui quipped. “If I had my Number card with me, your head would be spinning so hard you’d wish I was just playing Tekku with you again. Wahahahaha!” She cackled.

Ume giggled and clamped down playfully, sucking on Rui’s fingers in a very sexual way before Rui yelped and pulled them back, both of them blushing.

Haru grinned. “I guess you’re still into girls. Too bad.”

“Tch. This is just a dream, literally,” Rui muttered. “Even if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have stood a chance with me. I’m not into little boys.”

“Little boy?!” Haru flushed and glared at Rui. “Says the little girl!”

“I’m freaking TWENTY!” Rui yelled. “Damn, you’re so dense!”

“...eh?” Haru’s head drooped.

“I’m a few hundred years old.” Ume shrugged and giggled. “Lost track around fifty years ago. I don’t mind boys for myself… but… I don’t like them your age. Sorry.” She clapped her hands together.

Mom and Dad kept staring back and forth between everyone, bewildered.

“Don’t worry,” Ume said brightly, turning to my parents. “I’m not violent. I don’t feed on humans… except for Sumire… and when it comes to feeding, it’s really about how she smells when she gets flustered. Anyway, when we get home, I should probably stop by my shop. I’m actually kind of starving.”

“You can have some of mine,” Rui said softly, cheeks pink.

Ume pounced on her and kissed her instead.

Haru flushed and backpedaled, laughing.

I laughed weakly and looked back up at the sky. “Everyone… you should go home. I want you all to be safe as long as possible, Mom. Dad. Haru.”

“We’re staying,” Dad said firmly. “Whatever happens, I want to see it with my own eyes.”

“So do I,” Mom added, clasping her hands in front of her. She sniffled and lifted one of her hands to rub at her eyes.

“Are you okay, Mom?” Haru asked.

“I am… it’s just not easy saying goodbye.” She chewed her lip and managed a small, sad smile.

Haru’s face tightened. He turned to me. “Onee-chan… what will you do against something like that?” He looked up at Baku, large enough to be seen clearly when the light caught him. “I know for sure you don’t have any superpowers like them, baka…”

“Don’t worry. Natalia-sama and Kagami-no-Kami might be able to heal him. And if that fails… we’ll do what we can.”

“What are you waiting for, then, if you can really fight something like that?” Haru asked, his voice serious.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“We used to have powers, maybe a bit like them,” Reiko said. “Before Baku took them from us. That’s our power he’s using up there. If we still had that power…”

“There’s still got to be a way, even without your Noh Face powers,” Rui said suddenly, clenching a fist. “You don’t want to lose your humanity just to be able to fight him, right?”

We all turned to look at her.

“We do it the human way like Dad taught me. Using consciousness power in our own way,” she said. “This world is positively made of it. Even I can tell that much. That means there’s a lot here that we could somehow use.” She smiled sheepishly, blushing. “So… let’s dance!”

I stared. “...What are you talking about?”

Ume nodded enthusiastically, immediately understanding her meaning. They took the familiar pose together.

I gasped. Reiko giggled.

“Caramelldansen? Really?!” My jaw practically dropped and I blushed.

They started dancing, hips swaying, arms raised above their heads, opening and closing in rhythm, ridiculous and earnest at the same time.

I laughed through my tears and joined them on instinct. Reiko took my hand and squeezed it before I really got moving.

“Let’s do this for old times. The long sessions when I drilled you mercilessly until you had it down pat. Don’t disappoint me now, wife.” Reiko winked.

I grinned and nodded as I moved with them, throwing myself into the dance.

Soon the four of us were moving in synchronicity, silly and sincere.

Pon-chan joined in, balancing on my shoulder and keeping time with us.

I was too caught up in the movement to stumble over the sight of a ferret dancing alongside us. This was a dream, after all.

No. There was a simpler explanation.

Light gathered around the five of us as we danced together.

We lifted our faces toward the sky and sent everything upward, love, memory, hope.

The glow spread through us.

“Caramelldansen!”

Noh-Baku surged forward, his vast shape dragging the dream around him like a curtain of fragile moss. His presence dimmed the fireworks mid-bloom. Shadow streamed from the seams of his mask, thick and viscous, carrying stolen identities. Where it passed, the air bent inward and collapsed toward him in spirals.

SSSSHHH

Natalia-sama met the charge without retreating as gravity answered her will and the sky dropped by decision rather than descent. The space between her and Baku thickened as consciousness condensed into mass, slowing his charge until it stuttered and he was forced to drive himself through it.

WHUM

Fireworks curved around the distortion as their sparks orbited Natalia in wide halos before guttering out, unable to escape the pull she imposed.

WHIRR

“Hold,” she commanded, not to him but to the world.

Baku snarled, the sound tearing loose in overlapping echoes.

GRAAAH

“You weigh me down like guilt personified,” he roared. “But guilt will not hold me back anymore.”

He tore free by force alone, ripping dreammatter apart with a violent inhalation that dragged fragments of the sky into his lungs.

HKKK

FWOOM

The wound sealed behind him, blackened and empty.

KRRK

Kagami-no-Kami moved in the same instant. Her mirrors unfolded and locked into place, not hovering and not circling, each one snapping into a precise angle around Baku’s advance.

SHIK

SHIK

The masks reflected him a thousandfold, Noh face within Noh face, his identity refracted until he could no longer tell which version of him was original as light split and space folded and Kagami-no-Kami stepped through one mirror and emerged from another, her strike landing from an impossible vector as her palm met his mask and the impact detonated.

KRAKOOM

Mirrorlight exploded outward and shattered the clouds into shards of reflected sky, driving Noh-Baku back as his colossal form skidded through the air and tore a long furrow through his dream world’s sky above the festival grounds.

SKREEE

Natalia’s lips parted in surprise. “…They’re cheering us on.”

Below them the girls were dancing their hearts out.

Natalia felt it before she saw it.

A pulse of consciousness energy.

Small, focused and bright.

DOKI-DOKI

The four figures moved together on the ground, their hips swaying and their arms lifting in that absurd, joyful rhythm. Their light did not flare wildly but accumulated, stacking support for them, memory and love. It was not power in the way that yōkai defined it. It was very human, even though Ume and Akuchi were yōkai. It was their resolve incarnate.

I am so proud of them. I will protect them with all I have!

Kagami-no-Kami glanced down, her mirrors briefly reorienting to capture the sight and magnifying, and for the first time warmth softened her face and body language.

“They are very interesting humans,” she said. “Such a silly and heart moving dance. Their movements are feeding this exchange. How it turns remains to be seen.”

Then fight harder we shall.

Natalia descended like a falling star.

FOOM

And… her power spiked. 

WHUM

Noh-Baku was slammed downward, his massive form forced into a spiraling plunge as if the sky itself rejected him.

THOOM

Kagami-no-Kami followed, her mirrors striking in rapid succession, each blow delivered without relying on raw strength. Every impact nudged at his trajectory and sheared fragments of stolen identity away in flaring sheets of light.

SHIK. KRRSH. SHIK.

Noh-Baku howled. “No. NO. This is MY dream world! This is my architecture!”

He inhaled with all his might.

…

And the air swept inward in a torrent, an atmospheric river torn from the sky and ground alike as it rushed into his lungs.

SSSSHHH

Natalia felt it a heartbeat too late, the sudden inversion of her powers’ pull as a command buried deep in Noh-Baku’s nature surfaced with terrifying clarity.

Dream-eating was not something he did. It was what he was, a dream eater by nature rather than a conscious decision, an existence built to swallow minds whole and digest consciousness until nothing recognizable remained. When he inhaled, it was not wind but collapse, space caving inward as reality itself folded toward his lungs.

Gravity turned against itself.

Natalia felt the sky betray her first as the laws she had some slight grip over inverted, mass turning treacherous while the space around her ceased to behave like space should. Distance compressed as the air was swallowed ahead of her, stripping away the idea of outside while the space between her and him ceased to exist.

KRRRNN.

Kagami-no-Kami reacted instantly. A mirror snapped into place between them and Noh-Baku’s open mask, its surface blazing with shadow energy as it tried to interpose judgment itself between predator and prey. 

SHIK

For a heartbeat, it held.

THRUM

Then the mirror warped.

It did not shatter. It stretched, thinning like molten glass, its reflected world smeared and elongated as it was drawn inexorably toward his mouth. The reflection screamed soundlessly as the surface was pulled through, passing the threshold as if solidity had never mattered.

WARP

Natalia tried to anchor herself in the air.

She drew her power inward, forcing gravity to condense around her, packing mass into herself until she should have been immovable. It made no difference. There was nothing left for her power to cling to.

She reached the limits of her ability to manipulate her own mass as his inhalation continued to draw her closer. The air offered no resistance at all. Space itself had lost any sense of direction or opposition.

Noh-Baku rushed her with that impossible speed of his, no acceleration, no transition, simply ceasing to exist where he was and tearing through the dream’s fabric to reappear directly before her, as if he had punched a hole through the fabric of the dream itself.

KRRSH

His inhalation took her point-blank.

SSSSHHH

It was not crushing.

It was consumption in stages.

Her body did not collapse or break. It unraveled. Gravity peeled away first, her gathered mass stripped from her as it was taken. Sensation followed, balance and orientation removed in sequence, each cut cleanly. Her form stretched thin, drawn forward and inward, every part of her pulled toward the same singular absence.

HSSS

She came apart violently through removal rather than rupture, something immense tearing her open from within. Pain followed at once, sharp and total, flooding every point where her power had once held her together.

She was seized and driven inward, her consciousness bent and folded as material in his grasp. Her identity did not break. It was handled and stripped down into something that could be taken apart. Every attempt to assert herself gave him more to seize, more structure to tear loose.

KRRRK

Natalia felt herself held inside him, aware and suffering, her power reduced to fuel while her will battered uselessly against the confines of his consuming dream.

For a fraction of a moment she sensed Kagami-no-Kami fighting beside her, her mirrorlight flaring in defiance as it winked out.

KRRSH

That awareness was torn away.

The world went dark. Not black. Not a void. Everything was null.

Sound ceased, not muted but removed, as though it had never existed. Thought followed, breaking apart as she passed through strata of consumed nightmares and dreammatter within him, human fears left half-digested and rotted into stagnation, with two other identities reduced to residue.

SCRAPE

Her memories resisted digestion. They were pulled apart anyway, not destroyed outright but chewed down to sensation as she was dragged deeper into his core. She tried to scream. The act unraveled before it could exist.

Then integration began.

The sky screamed for her.

She felt her Sun-Heart collapse into a cold coin in his throat, still shining, still in the act of being swallowed.

KRRRNN

We were still dancing when it happened, our bodies moving on habit more than thought, following the familiar rhythm without really paying attention to it anymore.

The sky lurched with brutal force.

The dream lurched under a deeper shock, seized and wrenched sideways as though its entire structure had been caught and twisted at once.

I felt it before I understood it, a violent pull seizing my chest as Noh-Baku drew the dream into himself and collapsed everything within it. My breath tore out of me, my steps losing their rhythm beneath me.

Rui stumbled beside me, catching herself with a startled sound. Ume froze mid-motion, her hands still lifted in the cute pose we’d been holding only seconds earlier.

And then I knew that something had gone very wrong above us.

Natalia and Kagami-no-Kami were gone. Their glow no longer marked the sky. Only his darkness remained.

Noh-Baku’s shape in the sky convulsed, swelling outward in a way that made my stomach drop. His silhouette fractured, lines splitting and rejoining as though the dream’s fabric itself was struggling to keep him contained. He was growing too large now, too heavy for the world to bear. The clouds around him bent and sagged, dragged inward by an invisible force, spiraling slowly toward his body as if they were sinking underwater.

I stopped dancing without realizing that I had, and when I looked around, I saw that everyone else had stopped with me.

Mirrors began to surface across his body, jagged broken planes embedded beneath his skin that caught the fireworks and twisted them impossibly, bending light. Each reflection showed a different version of him, none stable, none whole. The sight made my skin crawl.

Then his mask split.

It wasn’t a clean tear. Black fluid seeped from his face like old blood.

The sound carried all the way down to us, wet and terrible. What stared out from behind it wasn’t hollow anymore.

It was too crowded.

There were too many eyes. Too much packed into one shape. I couldn’t look at it for long without feeling like vomiting.

He grew nine shadowy fox tails that thrashed madly behind him like maddened tentacles.

Reiko’s hand tightened around mine, and the truth hit me all at once with crushing clarity.

“We…” I stuttered. “O-our dance didn’t help.”

My heart skittered, my thoughts stumbling over each other. Was our dance too weak? Too late? Had we done nothing but hurl our childish hopes into the sky without understanding how things truly worked?

My knees went weak, and the light around us flickered out.

For a moment, a terrifying, suspended moment, I knew everything was about to go out.

Then I felt movement on my shoulder.

Pon-chan shifted, his tiny body rigid, his fur puffed out, still glowing radiantly.

I blinked at him through tears I hadn’t realized were falling.

His light hadn’t dimmed at all.

If anything, it looked sharper, more concentrated.

Above us, Noh-Baku laughed, and the sound rolled across the city with an intensity that made my body ache. Lanterns rattled on their strings. I felt the vibration throbbing in my body.

“I see it all now clearly,” he crooned, his voice carrying new depth, new mass, mixed with something that hadn’t been there before. “Judgment… inevitability… gravity… reflection… all of it fits so beautifully inside me.”

He turned his gaze downward, and my heart stuttered when I followed it, down to us, to the empty spaces where Riko and Yuna should have been.

They were gone.

Standing there instead were Ume and Rui in their normal bodies, no longer contained by the dream, returned fully to their identities.

“No,” Baku whispered, and for the first time the word sounded small, his voice betraying panic.

Even whispered, it carried across the world. The dream shifted in response, its structure warping around the crack in him.

The street beneath our feet warped, the grass stretching unnaturally as though it was all a single piece, shifting like softened wax. Lantern light bled shadow energy. The fireworks twisted overhead, their colors smearing into sickly spirals that hurt to look at.

Faces in the crowd blurred, everyone’s features sliding as if the dream couldn’t remember what anyone or anything in the world was supposed to be.

Their shapes screamed.

And yet…

The ground beneath us held.

The light around us sharpened instead of breaking, pressing back against the distortion. I felt it thrumming through my chest, through my hands, through the place where Reiko’s fingers were still laced with mine.

My parents were staring up at the sky, frozen in disbelief, but the world didn’t take them.

It didn’t take us, not yet.

They looked at us for a long moment, their eyes searching, their mouths half-formed around words they never got to say.

Then their faces buckled—pulled out of their recognizable shape by something unseen—

—and they were erased.

They were dragged away with the rest of this world’s people as if they’d never been there at all.

Baku snarled, fury tearing through the delight that had filled his voice seconds earlier. “This cannot be,” he hissed. “I will rebuild it all—I will fix it—!”

He reached again, and this time light pushed back.

It wasn’t grand or blinding.

It was small.

Defiant.

Unyielding.

For the first time since he changed, Noh-Baku hesitated.

And standing there, shaking, I understood that whatever was happening, whatever this light that Pon-chan was still emanating–

It hurt the monster above us.