—Shibuya at night gleamed like glass after rain. Cheers and footsteps spilled from every direction at the crossing, neon repainting the wet road.
Shibukanu paused atop a pedestrian bridge and listened. From the crowd-noise, a single thin filament of "emergency call" frequencies rose up.
—"There's some freaky monster in the alley by Hikarie!"
—"Huge frog… it's shooting something from its mouth!"
Strings of numbers. A location. Chaos at the site.
"…Going."
The alley was dark, sticky with oil and the sourness of trash. And it was there.
As big as a compact car. Skin a dull green like mossed-over iron. A swollen, pulsing belly. Spines on its back. Strings of tacky breath drooling from the corners of its mouth. Clouded yellow eyes.
A frog yōkai—its tongue-tip snapped, and poison darts came down like rain.
Shibukanu didn't move. She lifted her right arm before her chest.
Pat, pat, pat—
The darts hit her skin and shattered, bouncing dully off the ground. Not even a whiff of blood.
"Move."
She stepped in.
A fist. That should have been plenty—normally.
She punched the belly.
Thud, a dull sound.
What came back was the impact itself.
The frog's belly absorbed the force and sent the same volume back. As if pushed by an invisible wall, Shibukanu's shoulder hopped back half a step.
"…Hm."
She cracked her neck left and right. The sound flattened the darkness of the alley.
Again—the belly.
This time, a flurry.
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud—
Belly that takes and returns; skin that receives and returns. But the next hit landed before the rebound. And the next. And the next.
Streetlight caught the ridges of her fists; the shock rippled out and rebounded. Her punches, faster than the returns, broke the overlap of those ripples.
Five blows, ten, twenty.
The elasticity in its gut screamed; pressure under the skin ran out of places to go.
"—Finish."
Her last strike dropped silence, and the frog burst open from within like a flower. Slime rain painted the alley walls; spines clattered to the ground and went still.
"A—amazing…"
A woman who looked like a reporter peeked from a service door, white-knuckling a mic. A camera jostled behind her.
"W-what was that just now? That thing—?"
Shibukanu flicked off some slime and glanced over.
"A frog."
"Wh—what kind of frog?"
"A scary frog."
It sounded like no further explanation was required.
Her pocket buzzed.
〈Yukika〉
She picked up; the girl's voice dropped short. "Listening."
What followed was distant murmur—wind being cut, held breath, scraps of whisper: "There's a lot of them." "No footprints."
"…Understood. —On my way."
Before the reporter could take another step, Shibukanu bent her knees and jumped for the sky.
Out from the alley. Rooftop to rooftop. Shibuya's lights pulled away under her soles. Her leap wasn't a straight line—rather, the terrain seemed to warp to meet wherever she was.
She split the wind, stitched the night, and dropped into the scene.
◇
The theater lobby was dead quiet, but the meaning of the quiet was different.
Yukika and Sekou stood shoulder to shoulder just inside the entrance, scissors and trident-staff half drawn.
On the floor, folded people. Little sign of struggle, and yet the angles of the bones were terribly wrong. Small holes in throats. Breastbones split from the inside. Not many surface tears, but nothing human moved in those directions.
With one sweep, Shibukanu took it all in, then crouched and touched a single body with her fingertips.
"…I've seen this way of dying before."
Sekou sucked a breath. "When—and where?"
"Not saying."
Short refusal—yet her voice was clouded with the hue of a faint memory.
"Not a common yōkai. Fast. Quiet. And obscene in its technique. Extremely dangerous. We stop it."
Her words made the floor's cold a touch warmer.
Trying to lighten the air, Yukika rolled a shoulder and tossed a joke. "So what's the next move? Patrol the whole country? 'Mr. Culprit, come ooout'?"
"We will."
She answered without a breath between.
"We protect the public. The task is simple: search wide, fast, and continuously."
She adjusted her sunglasses with a fingertip and assigned, clean and short:
"I'm Kyūshū and Shikoku. Ikue—Hokkaidō. Aki and Yukika—Honshū. —That's all."
"Eh."
At some point Aki had joined them; her brows took on a distinctly nope angle.
"Me and Yukika. Alone?"
"I'm delighted," Yukika beamed and waved.
"Denied. Different pairing."
"Denied," Shibukanu replied, flat. "Mobility, reconnaissance, anti-swarm balance. You two are the fastest team. Complaints go in a bundle after mission complete."
Aki pressed her lips thin and turned her face a fraction aside. "…Understood."
"And Sekou?"
"I'm on Honshū too. We'll start in central Tokyo."
"Good. —Break."
By the time she finished saying it, her shadow was already moving toward the doors.
◇
Night in Tokyo; the Marunouchi wind was a little cold.
Aki, Yukika, and Sekou threaded the streets from the Imperial Palace Outer Garden toward Yūrakuchō.
"Be serious," Aki said, eyes forward.
"Yeees," Yukika sang, waving at a neon cat while tightrope-walking the curb on one foot.
"Don't mess around."
"I'm not. You've got 'can-only-do-serious disease,' so I'm just balancing the other side."
"I don't need an 'other side.'"
"You would say that. Hey, Aki, you don't have many friends, do you?"
"Cut the pointless chatter on patrol."
"Bullseye—"
The air twanged. Sekou gave a wry smile and let his gaze swim between them.
"…Ah."
Up the walk, a girl with a shopping bag waited at a crosswalk. Long bangs swept to one side. Light makeup, a smile tinted faintly.
"Sairen."
Sekou raised a hand.
She blinked, then waved back at once.
"On patrol?"
"Yeah. From today we're 'good kids making the rounds.' If a bad yōkai pops up, we respond on the spot."
"Heh. Doesn't suit you."
She gave a short laugh; the light turned green; she trotted past him.
"See you, Kagetsu-kun."
"See you."
As she went, Yukika nudged him with an impish elbow. "Who's that?"
"My friend."
"Just?"
"Just."
Aki slid Sairen a sidelong glance and said nothing, but her stride ticked one notch faster.
What followed was a loop of picking up tiny anomalies and tossing them aside. Direction of a cry. The temperature of an alley. How the wind ran. The two women bickered in quick bursts and sometimes snapped to face the same direction in the same instant. Sekou pushed his pace to keep up, while inside his chest the feel of last night's "shadow" replayed again and again.
◇
At the same time—
Kyūshū, in one of the ranges.
The mountain's night skin was warm with the smell of sleeping animals. Treetops whispered with the wind; mineral chill rose between rocks.
Shibukanu stepped off the game trail and put a hand to a black, jutting ridgeline.
She had the feeling of being "called."
No reason. But the instincts honed by years of battle are sometimes truer than a map.
A faint light at her feet.
In a crack in the rock, a slim blade was stuck.
It wasn't fire, yet it wavered like flame; it was cold, yet the light seemed like it could scorch a fingertip. Not gold or silver—some "limpid metal" she had never seen.
"…What are you."
She pushed her sunglasses up to her forehead and peered with her own eyes.
The blade wouldn't budge. When she touched it, the whole mountain quivered, like it was breathing.
"Are you telling me to stay here… or to come?"
No answer. Only the wind, bringing a far ocean's salt.
She took one step back.
Not the smell of an enemy—but the smell of an incident was strong.
"Record, report… I'll return later."
She looked back over the mountain and up at a single cold star.
Far away in Tokyo, kids were bickering, laughing, running.
To protect those laughs, they would circle the country starting tonight.
The shadows were broad; the night was deep.
But their feet wouldn't waver.
From here, the Kibu clan's patrol truly began.
—-