Shinrabansho: Myriad Souls

“Do you mind going somewhere else?” I asked, taking another sip of ocha and looking from one of them to the other.

Neither moved.

Iwabe, on my left, smiled first. He was still trying to play it light, still pretending this was casual and harmless, the same annoying persistence from the train with a little more boldness.

“Come on,” he said. “Why are you acting like that? We only wanted to talk with you.”

“You already tried that,” I said. “I clearly told you that I’m not interested.”

Koji lifted the canned coffee he had just bought and leaned back against the wall beside me, too close for comfort, too relaxed.

“We thought maybe you were in a better mood by now. You definitely looked more relaxed.” he said. “Akiba can be fun if you know where to go and we do.”

“I do not want company and I have no intention of wasting time playing around.”

“You haven’t even heard what we were going to offer.”

I looked out toward the tracks instead of at them. People were spread along the platform in little clusters. Office workers, students, a mother with a sleepy child holding her hand, a couple in matching shoes near us, pretending not to notice that I was being bothered. The display board overhead still said I had a few minutes until my train arrived.

Plenty of time for them to leave me alone.

“Then offer it to somebody else,” I said.

Koji laughed under his breath. “So cold.”

“I don’t intend to lie to make you feel better about yourself. I want to be left alone.”

“Harsh too. What an ice princess.”

I screwed the cap back onto my bottle of ocha and lowered it to my side. “You’ll get by. Go.” I gestured, flipping a hand upwards.

That made Iwabe and Koji trade another look.

It was subtle. Quick. The kind of look men gave each other when they thought a woman had become a challenge instead of respecting a person’s wishes and space.

Iwabe took half a step closer. “You really suck at being friendly.”

“And you suck at listening.”

His smile thinned a little. “We’re just trying to be nice to you.”

“No. You’re just trying to wear me down.”

Koji shook his head. “Why are you making it sound so bad? We’re not the creeps you’re thinking of.”

You are without a doubt some of the worst scumbags I’ve ever met.

I turned my head then and met his eyes directly. “Then act like decent men who can know how to take no for an answer.”

That landed, although it wasn’t enough to make them stop. Just enough to sting.

Iwabe clicked his tongue. “You don’t have to talk to us like that.”

“I do when people get pushy like you. Why bother with me when there have to be much easier girls to pick up. I’m not interested.”

A few more heads turned. Not many bothered to look. I noticed a shift in the edge of the platform’s attention. A businessman near the pillar stopped pretending to read his phone. Two girls farther down lowered their voices. The mother with the child pulled her daughter a little farther away from us without looking over. Their actions definitely had been noticed.

The train announcement rolled across the station, naming the next arrival and the line. The sound washed over us and it was gone.

Koji still had not taken the hint.

“Listen,” he said, softening his tone in a way that was supposed to sound reasonable. “You’re really pretty. We noticed you the moment we saw you. That’s all there is to this. Don’t turn this into a whole thing.”

I felt my mouth flatten.

“You stalked me off a train.”

He scoffed. “Akihabara is a public place. We have a right to be right where we are.”

“So is this platform. That doesn’t mean you stay in my space, annoying me.”

“You act like we did something terrible. Is saying hello suddenly an unforgivable sin?”

“Do you need a list or something?”

That got a tiny snort out of one of the girls down the platform.

Iwabe heard it. His face changed.

Only a little.

Just enough.

“I think you’re having fun embarrassing us,” he said.

I pushed off the wall and straightened, my bottle still in hand. “I don’t care. If your behavior is embarrassing yourself, that’s your fault.”

He took another half step toward me.

I bent, setting my ocha on the floor beside the wall, and stood again.

The movement made both of them notice that I had freed my hands, but for what?

Good.

“Last chance,” I said quietly. “Go somewhere else.”

Koji smiled again, but there was nothing pleasant in it now.

“And if we don’t?”

I kept my eyes on him. “You already heard me on the train, didn’t you?”

Iwabe laughed once through his nose. “You’ll show us a world of hurt, right? Is that what you’re planning? What’s a weak girl like you going to do? You really think you can pull that off by yourself?”

“I do,” I said.

Iwabe smiled wider and reached for me.

His grapple wasn’t especially skilled. He just seized my wrist.

For one split second my body locked despite all my training.

My pulse kicked in my throat.

The storage room flashed across my mind with ugly clarity. It had been filled with dust. The smell of sweat filled it, mostly mine over my inability to fight back. The memory of a wrist seized hard enough to hurt. The instant of helplessness before panic had gotten its hands around my lungs.

Then another memory rose over it, Aoi’s voice telling me exactly how to break a grip in our first lesson. The exact place where a hand became weak if you turned it the right way. The first trick she drilled into me until my arms ached.

And them.

They were boys then… or rather, I was convinced that this was them, even though they should have just been dream figments, men who looked so much like older versions of Tadashi Iwabe and Nakamura Koji that my stomach had twisted the moment I laid eyes on them. The resemblance had been too uncannily close from the start, though I had no way to know yet if it was really them.

I inhaled and let the air out slowly.

I had frozen, but not for long.

I turned my hand at once, slipping my wrist toward the gap in his grip as I stepped in instead of back. My other hand closed over his. I bent his wrist hard the wrong way, pinned his elbow with my forearm, and dropped my weight. 

KRK

The sound was small.

His scream was not.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

Iwabe’s knees buckled. Koji’s coffee hit the floor and burst on it, dark liquid skidding over the tile. I let go before the motion could carry into anything worse and shoved both palms into Iwabe’s chest.

He stumbled backward into the open space by the vending machine, clutching his wrist to himself, his face draining white around the mouth.

“I warned you,” I said.

The crowd recoiled all at once. Shoes scraped on the tile and someone gasped, the ring around us widening in a hurry now that the scene had turned violent.

Koji stared for half a heartbeat, stunned less by Iwabe’s injury than by the fact that I had done it.

Then his expression turned ugly.

“You bitch!”

He lunged.

His hand came for my shoulder, then higher, fingers spread for my throat or collar, sloppy with his anger. I knocked his arm away with my forearm, stepping outside his stance, and drove the heel of my palm into the soft center under his breastbone.

The breath flew out of him in a startled bark.

Before Koji could recover I hooked my foot behind his ankle and shoved at his chest.

He crashed down onto one knee and one hand, coughing hard, his eyes wide with shock.

I stepped back instead of following him.

That mattered now. There were too many people watching us. Too many phones were already halfway raised to capture the fight. Too many ways to turn self defense into the wrong kind of rumors if I lost my temper and kept hitting after the point was made.

“Stay down,” I said firmly.

Iwabe did not.

He came at me with his good hand, his face twisted with rage, the broken wrist tucked tight to his body. Pain had made him stupid. So had humiliation. He swung wide at me like he would have if I was still a man.

I slipped to the side, caught his forearm, and dragged him past me. His own momentum carried him farther than he expected to go. I planted a short kick into the outside of his thigh just above the knee.

His leg folded.

Iwabe dropped hard and slid on the spilled coffee, cursing.

Koji had gotten enough air in his lungs to stand. He did not come carefully this time either. He charged with both hands out, trying to grab, bully and overwhelm me with sheer size. Admittedly the two were fairly tall. They were both shoulders and heads taller than me.

My wife had hated this kind of clumsy attack. It left him too much open.

I let Koji get close enough to commit, turned my hips, smashed my forearm into the inside of his elbow, and struck him once in the side of the jaw with a short, tight backfist. I didn’t have to use my full power. Technique was enough.

His head snapped sideways. I caught his arm, stepped behind his leg, and sent him sprawling across the tile onto his side.

He cried out more in surprise than pain.

Iwabe pushed up again, stubborn, furious, stupid enough that for one ugly instant I wondered whether I should just put him down properly and make sure he stayed there. This could be tiresome if I kept restraining myself.

My wife always had struggled with fighting like this. She never held back with idiots.

I decided to leave, so I bent and picked up my bottle of ocha from the floor, took two quick steps back to clear the slick patch of spilled coffee, lifting my chin.

“Do not touch or come near me again,” I said. “Either of you.”

Koji spat a curse at me and started to rise.

Iwabe was still cradling his wrist, breathing in sharp ragged pulls. Around us, the crowd had stopped pretending not to watch. A man in a station uniform was shouting into a radio somewhere up the platform. One of the girls farther down had both hands over her mouth. Another person was filming us openly now. The sleepy child was gone. Good.

Iwabe looked past me suddenly.

His eyes changed when he saw the police.

I heard them a second later. Their voices were sharp and their footfalls were fast. One whistle cut through all the noise.

Both men saw the officers at once and made the same choice… to run.

Iwabe bolted first with the damaged wrist, trying to shoulder through the gap in the crowd. Koji followed, still half hunched from the hit to his stomach and the knock to his jaw.

They made it only three steps.

The first officer caught Koji by the back of his jacket and yanked him short, hard enough to spin him around. Another officer moved to block the route toward the stairs. Iwabe tried to veer away, slipping on the coffee slick, and nearly went down on his face before an officer seized his arm and forced him to a stop.

It would have helped them to have yōkai powers like I did when I escaped a platform myself on Halloween.

As he went down, Iwabe howled.

I almost felt bad for them, almost.

Iwabe and Koji started talking over each other at once.

“She attacked us!”

“She’s crazy!”

“She broke my wrist!”

I stood where I was, bottle in hand, breathing just hard enough to show that I’d been active. My heart was still hammering. My hands were a little sweaty. I’d usually only had trouble with the police in the past. They always judged me when I hadn’t done a single thing. It was always my face that made them suspicious of me. Now I’d actually done something legally punishable, although I’d acted in self-defense.

My palms weren’t sweating from fear so much as having had to fend Iwabe and Koji off.

Then there were the memories of having been grabbed. Back then I was so weak compared with the boys that they could have literally done anything they wanted to me, cornered in a deserted wing of the school. Maybe it came from the part of me that had gone very still, the second fingers closing around my wrist in that storage room. Even though it was just a dream world, it was a real experience that had left me with lingering scars.

One of the officers approached me carefully.

“Miss, are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Did they touch you first?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know them?”

I shook my head. “They started bothering me on the train and stalked me ever since. I told them to leave me alone more than once and they refused.”

The officer looked past me toward the crowd. “Did anybody see that?”

Half the platform answered at once.

“Yes.”

“They were bothering her.”

“He grabbed her.”

“She warned them to stop!”

The officer exhaled through his nose like a man who already knew how the report was going to read.

“Identification, please.”

For one awful beat my stomach tightened before I remembered.

Right.

I had one now.

I set the bottle down again and crouched to open my bag, pulling out my wallet. My fingers brushed Natalia-sama’s card, the realty folder, the new phone. Then my My Number card slid free, official and weirdly surreal enough that even now it gave me a strange little jolt to see.

The officer took it, glanced from the card to my face, then back again.

“Shinohara Sumire-san.”

“Yes.”

He handed it back and nodded. “Please wait here while we sort this out.”

Wait here.

As if I had any intention of going anywhere.

The two men were still shouting at the officers. One of them finally blurted the other’s name in his panic.

“Nakamura, say something!”

The name landed in me like cold water.

Then the other officer snapped back, “Quiet, Tadashi.”

I closed my eyes for one second.

Of course.

Of course it would be them. I recognized their faces. Clearly, Baku’s dream world wasn’t so much of a construction as a copy of the real world, and at least some of the figments had been built off human memories and dreams. I wondered if the dream world touched everyone on some consciousness level.

When I opened them again, I saw a familiar figure coming down the platform from the direction of the stairs, coat neat, posture easy, black hair untouched by the station wind, dark eyes taking in the scene in one sweep and missing nothing.

I sighed inwardly.

Oh no…. Not him…

Amagi Ren noticed me at once.

There was no point hoping he would not.

He adjusted the brim of his hat with two fingers as he came nearer, his pace unhurried in a way that somehow made the officers straighten more.

“Shinohara Sumire-san,” he said. “I see your day has not been uneventful.”

“It rarely is lately,” I said.

He looked at the officers. They recognized him immediately, though none of them said the relevant part out loud. One stepped over and gave him the kind of clipped explanation people used when they were speaking to someone whose credentials they did not need to inspect twice and wordlessly handed me my ID card.

“Two men were harassing her on the platform,” the officer said. “Witnesses say they followed her from earlier. One grabbed her. She defended herself. They tried to run when we arrived.”

Ren’s gaze moved briefly to Tadashi, who was hunched over and furious, then to Nakamura, whose face was still tight around the jaw where I had hit him.

“I see,” he said. Then he looked at me again. “What happened?”

I tucked my card back into my wallet before answering. “They bothered me on the train. Followed me through Akihabara. Cornered me here when I came back to the platform to take a train. I told them to go somewhere else. One grabbed my wrist. I broke his. The other tried his luck right after.”

Ren’s lips twisted faintly.

“How very concise,” he said. “And, from the look of things, accurate.”

Tadashi tried to lunge verbally from where the officers held him. “She’s lying! She’s a violent freak!”

I faintly blushed, taking that as a compliment. Aoi had been referred to the same way after she’d beaten them and crushed Koji’s phone with her bare hand.

To be regarded the same way as my wife and sensei was a badge of honor.

Ren did not even turn his head all the way.

“She warned you first, I assume.”

Neither man answered.

That was answer enough.

He gave the officers a small nod. “If the witnesses are consistent, I do not think Shinohara-san is the party you need to worry about.”

One of the officers relaxed by a visible degree. “That was our read too.”

Ren shifted his attention back to me. “You are not injured?”

“No.”

“Good.”

His eyes dropped briefly to my bag then rose again. “And these two will be processed for harassment at the very least, likely more once witness statements are gathered and the station cameras are reviewed. If either of them has a prior history of this sort of behavior, which I would not find surprising, their evening will become even less pleasant.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said before I could stop myself.

That made one corner of his mouth lift.

He took one more look at the men and then returned his full attention to me, which was not much better for my nerves.

He noticed the pack on my shoulder properly this time.

“Are you travelling somewhere?”

“Not really. I’m just looking for a few things.”

“I hope you’re not acting as an unlicensed Spiritual Detective.” His tone stayed smooth enough that I almost missed the warning tucked inside it. “Although if I caught you doing that, rest assured that I wouldn’t report you... unless you crossed a line.”

“I’ll try not to make your paperwork worse.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

The platform announcement sounded again above us, this time naming an incoming train on the opposite side in two minutes. Lights had begun to gather faintly in the tunnel beyond, just enough to show through the dark if you knew to look.

Ren heard it too but did not turn yet.

He studied me for another moment, and the look was not the same one he had worn in Rui’s office. That earlier interest was still there somewhere, I could tell. So was the gentleness that made me uneasy in a different way than the two idiots on the platform ever could. But this time there was appraisal in it too.

“You look different, Shinohara Sumire,” he said. “I’m surprised that a person could change so much in such a short span of time since we last encountered each other.”

“A lot can happen in just a few days.”

That was such an understatement that I almost laughed. A few days in this world. Two months in another life. A body learned twice over. A grief lived twice. A wife folded into my heart and mind until I no longer knew where I ended and she began in certain quiet places.

“One of those yōkai matters, I suppose,” he said.

“You could say that.”

“Interesting.” His eyes narrowed ever so slightly with thought instead of suspicion. “Now I’m even more interested to see how you perform during the exam. I’ll be there to evaluate you.”

“Mind telling me something about the exam?” I asked. “The kinds of things that they’ll test that I might want to train myself to do?”

He folded one gloved hand over the other at his waist.

“The only thing they want to determine is whether you are likely to get yourself killed or worse in the line of work you aspire to,” he said. “As long as you can fight at a certain level, your license is effectively guaranteed. Those who cannot use spiritual abilities but can fight are not likely to be licensed. There will be others taking the exam at the same time, including the peculiar girl that seemed not to care much for you, Shinohara Aika… bad blood between siblings or cousins, I suppose. Even though she does not possess what would be considered normal spiritual abilities, her ability is strong enough that there is a real chance she may pass.”

“I see...” I said. “Thank you. That means I can focus on other things.”

He tilted his head. “You’re that confident? I understand that the Yōkai Council have concerns regarding your ability to pass the exam. How much training could you have gotten in a mere two days?”

“You’ll see.” I smiled despite myself. “I don’t know what level I actually fight at, but I’m a competent fighter.”

That was the safest way to put it.

Aoi had held a few dan ranks in karate and jujutsu. I had trained at least five days with her every week, and sometimes on the weekends for two months, sparred with her, learned from her, learned from becoming her in the most intimate and impossible way a person could. And in the end, when she had been a noh face yōkai slipping farther from herself, I had defeated her once. It hadn’t been clean or clear in a way I wanted to brag about. Spiritual power had mattered in that fight. I did not know what any of that translated to in the real world. So I had no idea what Ren meant when he said competent.

I only knew I was not bluffing.

Ren held my gaze a second longer, then nodded once.

“I see... that’s good to hear. I wish you good luck.”

He took my hand gently between his fingers and leaned to kiss the back the same way he did in Rui’s office. This time, my reaction time was enough to save myself from being embarrassed again. I quickly extracted my hand instead of freezing.

He looked at me and instead of being offended, he grinned at me with a good nature.

The train lights had grown larger by then. The inbound cars slid into view with a rush of wind and a metallic cry, decelerating along the opposite side of the platform until the doors lined up and the chime sounded.

Ren glanced toward it and tipped his hat.

“That is mine.”

Of course it was. Men like him always seemed to have impeccable timing.

He gave the officers a final brief nod, then looked back at me. “Try to avoid breaking any more bones of civilians before the exam, Shinohara-san. I would prefer the paperwork to remain light.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I believe you.”

Then he turned, crossed toward the newly opened doors, and stepped onto the train with that same maddening composure.

I watched until the doors shut. The cars pulled away a few seconds later, carrying him out into the tunnel and taking a strange pocket of order with him.

Come to think of it… that was my train too… 

There was no way I was going to ride in the same car with him after that.

The platform felt ordinary again too quickly.

The officers still had Tadashi and Nakamura in hand. One of them was still swearing. The other had gone pale and quiet now that his wrist truly had time to hurt. A station employee was already mopping at the coffee spill with the weary expression of someone who had not been paid enough to deal with any of this. My own train had not come yet.

Then a hand touched my shoulder.

I turned sharply.

A woman around my age stood there, maybe twenty, maybe a little older, her grip light but confident enough that she did not ask permission to touch me. She had a compact athletic build, the kind that looked balanced rather than delicate, with dark brown hair cut around her jaw and deep brown eyes that stayed steady on me with unsettling recognition. Her face was attractive in a tomboyish sort of way, calm and readable even with the tension in it. She looked right at me and said, “Come with me, Reiko.” 

My blood chilled.

I hadn’t gotten a long enough look at her face to scan through Reiko’s memories to try to identify whoever this was.

She did not wait for an answer.

She simply turned and started walking, her hand falling away only because she seemed certain I would follow her.

For one stupid second, I did.

Then I caught myself and stared after her, my pulse jumping again for a completely different reason than before, my bag still over my shoulder, my ocha in my hand, the police and the station and the whole afternoon tilting sideways around a name I had not expected to hear from a stranger’s mouth.

I went after her, crosschecking what I remembered of her face with Reiko’s memories.

Akuchi stayed where she was for two seconds after Sumire followed the woman out of the station.

Two seconds was all she could stand.

She had watched the whole thing from above and behind in the form of a rat between the blind spots people never looked at properly. She had seen the men circle in on Sumire. She’d seen the first grab, his wrist snapping and the way the whole platform recoiled from the girl the two had mistaken for easy prey. If Iwabe and Koji had any memories of Aoi or the beating that Sumire had given them last time, they wouldn’t have approached her.

She should have felt proud. Maybe part of her did. Sumire had handled herself well. Even better than well.

That was not what sat in Akuchi’s stomach.

What sat there was guilt.

If Sumire had frozen a little longer, if one of those men had pulled harder, if there had been three of them instead of two, what then? Her fighting skills hadn’t been tested against more than two opponents so far. Akuchi had lingered in the shadows and told herself she was respecting Sumire’s wish to do things on her own. That excuse felt thinner now. Protective instincts were easy to claim when nothing was happening. They mattered when something ugly actually started.

She did not feel much like a protector at the moment.

Then the stranger had touched Sumire’s shoulder and called her Reiko.

Akuchi’s ears flattened.

That name was trouble.

Not because it was wrong… part of Sumire was Reiko. That was what made it worse. Wrong names were easy. Wrong names could be ignored. A name that was correctly used brushed too close to the truth in the middle of a crowded station, from the mouth of someone Akuchi had never seen before, made the fur along her spine rise.

With a poof, she returned to a human form and jumped down, startling a few people around where she landed as she followed them both.

The woman moved with confidence through the afternoon crowd, not fast enough to look like she was fleeing any trouble, not slow enough to invite interruption. Sumire followed a few steps behind her with the tense look of someone who had already had enough surprises for one day and knew another was waiting just ahead.

Akuchi kept to the side, her hood kept low, her eyes sharply on them.

Whatever this was, it had taken on a special meaning when the stranger used Reiko’s name.

Special thanks to PrincessArylin, ShinjiHinako, Assurbanipal II (Achan) for beta reading book three!