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A/N: Every time I look at Amae Koromo, I can only think 'she's a spawn of the Flesh God, serving her lord with offerings to satiate the primordial hunger within.' But I've been wrong on more than occasion, so what would I know.
Demon
"Accursed be he who plays with the devil."
- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
There's no such thing as demons.
They don't exist. They're figments of the imagination, shades of a color that do not correlate with the spectrum of moral comprehension. There have never been demons, no records or documents of creatures with menacing horns, glittering fangs, membranous wings, such things which are the stuff nightmares are made. Demons appear only in the construct of an individual mind, taking shape to what he or she fears and despises in the realm of the awake.
They aren't real.
Demons don't exist, yet there's one sitting amongst them. She's a child of sixteen, with virgin white skin and a head of fair gold. She bears no horns or fangs or wings, but she wears a pair of floppy red rabbit ears that compliment the blue of her eyes. A blue so dark, so deep, they drag those three girls to the very bottom of the sea. There's even a hint of fear on the stoic face of Tsuruga's captain, a helplessness that ceases its flailing and submits to the jaws of the shark tasting for blood.
The lights kick back on. The first half of the hanchan ends like a cliffhanger to a heart-stopping drama. Ryuumonbuchi cinches the top spot, standing in a niche of a volcano overflowing at the rim and engulfing all in its blazing path.
The thrill of victory feels glorious.
She leaves behind a sickly sweet smile oozing with serpentine poison and walks away, shedding her skin as she goes. The girls don't lift their heads, don't shake themselves free the chains binding them to their underwater prisons.
There is such a thing as demons. They do exist, and they are real.
This demon's name is Amae Koromo, and she's going to destroy those girls. No matter how keen their concentration is, no matter how many mahjong tiles they discard or how many tricks they pull, they will not topple her from her throne.
For those who play with a demon become nothing more than sacrifices to their own folly….
