"Queen to H1. That's checkmate, Honoka."
The one speaking was Arima Fumihiko, father of the one to whom he was speaking - Arima Honoka. Fumihiko seemed to have a fascination with the occident, and as such was the one that brought the game of chess into their home in the first place. He simply played the game for fun, but he was fairly competent at it, although he was most definitely not a pro. Honoka, on the other hand...
"Argh, I'll never figure out how you do it, dad. By the time you put me in check, it was already too late."
She shook her head. She had never won against her father even once, despite the hundreds of games they had played together. To her, the game was just too complicated to wrap her head around. She could think tactically, but not strategically. Unfortunately, chess was a game of strategy, and so she always fell flat on her face. Despite this, she enjoyed the game, and was somehow sure that she would one day become good at it, even though she never seemed to make any progress toward that.
"Well, you'll get it sooner or later. Now, what would you like for dinner? I'll go make it," he said. He was the cook of the family, and if there was one thing he was good at, it was that. Outside of the kitchen, he was clumsy and his demeanor gave the impression that he would always be ultimately mediocre at everything, but once he was in the kitchen he would transform in an unbelievable way. In fact, he had a job as a cook.
"I want whatever you feel like making," she said as she smiled. After all, she would probably enjoy whatever he made, and she liked surprises. Even though she lost so horribly, she was in truth merely glad to spend time with her family.
"Alright, one whatever coming right up!" he said as he marched into the kitchen. However, just when he was about to begin cooking, the doorbell rang. His intuition told him there was something wrong, so he grabbed a small kitchen knife and concealed it in one of the pockets on his apron before he went to answer the door.
When he opened the door, there was a simple-looking woman there with fierce eyes. Her hair was wild, as though she had not done any maintenance on it in years. She was completely alone, her build was small and she didn't look very strong, and she had no obvious weapons. Despite this, she gave off an air that seemed to say that he was at an unsurmountable disadvantage and that she was probably going to kill him right then and there.
As soon as she moved, his instincts kicked in. He was still in kitchen mode, and he was invincible in kitchen mode. As she stuck her arm out, he stabbed the knife all the way through her arm. He was already planning to take advantage of the moment where she was temporarily blinded by pain, but the injury didn't seem to do anything to her and she just grabbed his head and twisted it hard enough to break his neck.
She didn't even remove the knife as she walked into the next room of the house, where Honoka was sitting down watching TV. Because of the noise from the TV, she hadn't heard anything that would alarm her. As Honoka was staring in confusion, her mother was already running into the room.
Arima Fuyuko, the mother, already knew what was going on. Unlike the other two members of the family, she had studied the occult extensively and she could feel exactly what kind of being had entered the house.
It was because of this that she desperately told Honoka to run away. Despite the training that she had done, Fuyuko would be lucky if she could even distract an oni for a moment.
The human appearance of the woman that had walked in was an illusion. It was an oni, simple as that.
For her part, Honoka intended to do exactly as she was told. She had never been in a life-or-death struggle, and she had never even considered that any member of her family would be killed, but she figured that all she needed to think about right now was doing exactly as her mother said. There clearly wasn't enough time for anything more, if her mother was reacting this way. She tried to run out of the room, and head for the back door, but she felt like she wouldn't be able to get away. Indeed, even as the oni was dealing with Fuyuko, one of it's arms simply stretched out and grabbed her. She struggled against it's grip, but it was obviously futile.
It seemed her mother had exerted some impressive spiritual influence, and then had her neck snapped right after that. It was no wonder that humans once feared the oni, in the days before they stopped believing in their existence.
Honoka looked as though she would simply cower before it, for what else could she do? In an adrenaline-fueled fit, however, she struggled until it used the hand that wasn't holding her to punch her, instantly rendering her unable to struggle. If it hadn't been holding her, she would have been flung off her feet and would have made a dent in the wall.
Needless to say, her body was broken. She was bleeding, but that paled in comparison to the internal damage. She felt that she was dying.
The oni expected to see hatred or despair in her eyes, or perhaps emptiness. Humans seldom reacted to it's murders with anything else, which was only natural, especially since it had seemingly come in and done all of this unprovoked and with no remorse.
Honoka betrayed it's expectations, though, because if she died like this then she would have regrets. "Please grant my last request," she said with a longing in her eyes, and the oni could not believe it's ears when it heard the request.
"Please don't let me die alone," she said. "I have always thought that if I die, I want to die in someone's arms. But you're the only other person here who can grant that wish, so please let me die in yours."
The oni could feel from the start that Honoka loved her parents and was devastated by what it had done to them, and that she very much did not want to die. It could feel these things because it was a spiritual being and thus was quite attuned to them. It was more like empathy than mind-reading, though. Despite everything, the girl's longing was clearly directed at the oni, and so it scratched it's head because it had lived for over a thousand years without ever seeing a prey that wanted it's affection while on the verge of being killed by it.
It was only to be expected that many people believed that oni did not have hearts, but in actuality, their hearts were very big. With a gentleness that didn't seem to suit it, the oni wrapped it's arms around her and stayed like that.
As she lost consciousness, Honoka felt that the oni was a very good hugger, and yet somehow, she suddenly felt very clearly that it's tenderness did not mean it would try to save her life.
Shortly afterward, Honoka found herself in a dream. She was with her parents and was so glad to see them again, while their expressions seemed to convey a mixture of that same gladness along with some kind of relief and helplessness that she didn't understand.
"I'm sorry, my daughter," the normally chipper and carefree Fuyuko began. "But from here on, we can only watch over you. I don't understand it myself, but you will not die here. What you do with the life you have left is your choice, and we will not fault you for it regardless of what you choose, but we will always be with you and will bring you what fortune we can, so please don't give up..."
What? How could she not die? She knew that the oni would not save her life. Maybe someone came who could somehow rescue her.
"If you only remember one thing, then please remember that we will always wish for your happiness," said Fumihiko.
The three hugged each other and cried.
As for the oni, it was now more confused than ever. It was true that it did not intend to save her life, and even though Honoka bathed in the oni's mighty spiritual energies, it seemed like she would die.
It seemed that way, but then a minute passed, followed by several more. An hour later, the girl was still just sleeping and not dead. Her bleeding had stopped, but her internal damages remained severe, and yet she hadn't died yet. That's why the oni was presently confused as to what it should do now. Finish her off? At this point, it didn't want to do that, and an oni won't do what it doesn't want to do, so that wasn't going to happen.
Anyway, the oni had decided to fulfill her last request, and so out of a sense of honour, it did not even begin to think of letting go of her, even though that would have killed her for sure by depriving her of it's spiritual energies which were barely keeping her from dying. Therefore, she continued to bathe in them.
Finally, the oni decided to just go to sleep. The house that it was in was far enough out of the way that nobody noticed the slightly ajar front door or Honoka's scream from earlier, and so at least as far as this place was concerned, the oni's hunt was done.
Even though Honoka was sure that she should not be able to wake up right now, she was doing exactly that, only to find a sleeping oni still hugging her. This gave her some very mixed feelings. She was far more confused than the oni, so much so that she was on the verge of crying out of sheer panic. For better or worse, the oni seemed to sense that she had woken up even though she hadn't moved at all, and so it woke up too and just stared at her.
The two stared at each other until Honoka started crying.
The oni spoke it's first words to her: "You still don't hate me even though you didn't give up on living. Why?"
It took her a moment to settle down enough to answer, and she sniffled. "Because I'm completely helpless and I just have to deal with that. My parents are already dead, and I can't change that so I've already accepted it. If you wanted to kill me then I couldn't stop that either. If I knew this was going to happen, then I would have listened to everything that mother had to say about the occult, and then I would have surpassed her and become something that could snap you like a twig, but I didn't do that and now they're..." Before saying the last word, Honoka started to choke up again. "Dead..." After that, she started crying again. She would say no more until after she had slept again.
By now, it was clear that Honoka would live, and so the oni let her go and stood up. It found a bed, and put her on it, and let her sleep. It then found that the house was a bit draftier than it should be for a wounded human, and closed the front door. It looked at what was in the fridge and started to make a hearty stew. It had some experience in cooking for humans because of all the times that it had kidnapped them in the days before the oni gave up on that.
Somewhere in it's heart stirred the hope that this human was different from the sly and cowardly ones that it had met in the past. Time would tell.
This time, Honoka dreamt of nothing at all, and it felt like no time had passed before she woke up feeling annoyingly rested. She was sleeping in her mother's bed, and that made her cry all over again. An obnoxiously appetizing scent had come into the room. She couldn't believe it. Was the oni cooking for her, of all things?
It was thirty minutes before she finally and sluggishly managed to get out of bed and make her way to the kitchen. "Why did you cook food?" she asked.
"Because you would be hungry when you woke up," it said simply. "Eat, and live, and become strong."
"You tried to kill me and now you're telling me to live? Where do you get off saying something like that?" she said, and yet still she walked over to the pot and served herself some stew and then ate another three helpings of it before going back to bed. It wasn't as nice as her father's cooking, but it was annoyingly good all the same, and she was starving for some reason.
Her parents visited her in her dreams again, and they simply spent some time together, which healed her heart a bit. The next time Honoka woke up ended up being in the morning, and she felt many times stronger than she ever had before. Also, she seemed to be able to perceive things about the land underneath her feet that she had never been able to before, such as how much soil and how much rock there was under the house, and how it was all arranged. That oni clearly put something in the stew. All of her physical wounds seemed to be healed up, too, and the morning had brought with it a feeling a freshness. If she wasn't so sad, she would have felt chipper, albeit rather scared of what her new capabilities might mean for her. She liked these kinds of mornings.
She laid there for a while before getting up out of bed again. This time she was going to confront the oni for real. Her mind had finally cleared up enough for her to register, as she moved about the house, that the corpses of her parents were gone.
She found the oni where it was sitting and reading a newspaper, and asked "What's your name?"
"Hirato-douji," the oni said.
"-douji? So you are an oni, then? Why are you still here, Hirato?" she asked.
"To give you the choice to come with me," Hirato said.
"And why would I want to do that?" she asked.
"Only you would know the answer to that question," Hirato said.
She groaned. Maybe the stew was screwing with her head, and that was why she was even considering it. She was feeling less inhibited in general, for some reason. Still, she had nowhere else to go anyway, and she'd be lying if she said that the thought of oni actually existing wasn't fascinating. "You're really not going to kill me?" she asked.
"I'm really not going to kill you," Hirato said. "Not intentionally, at least."
"And why not? Why did you attack us?" she asked.
"I'm really not going to kill you because I like you," Hirato said. "And I attacked the three of you because I wanted food."
"You held back a lot when you punched me, didn't you?" she asked. "Was that because you liked me?"
"I did, and that was because I didn't want to damage the food too much," said Hirato.
"What made me stop being food?" she asked.
"You wanted my affection," Hirato said. "So I gave it. Also, you turned out to have impressive inner strength, which I respect. There was a time when I would have just kidnapped you and not given you a choice, as I and the others of my kind used to do with the humans that we liked. But we gave up on kidnapping when the humans became too sly and cowardly, and then forgot about us. Now, we just hunt for food."
Honoka had a lot to think about, so she sat down with some more stew and ate it while thinking about all sorts of things.
"What happened to the humans you kidnapped?" she asked.
"All but one died," Hirato said. "I accidentally killed most of them. It took me a long time to learn to control my strength well enough to be able to not kill you while hugging you for as long as I did. Also, humans die of alcohol poisoning too easily. Most of the rest of them were accidentally killed by my friends. The one that lived became an oni."
"Do you think I'll die if I go with you?" she asked.
"Don't know," Hirato said. "Maybe if you eat enough of my food, you will live."
"And just what did you put in that stew?" she asked.
"My magic," Hirato said.
"What kind of magic?" she asked.
"Magic of the earth," Hirato said.
"What will happen to me if I keep eating your food?" she asked.
"You will become an oni," Hirato said. "If you survive long enough. I think you would be a great oni."
Honoka sighed, and she wasn't sure if she should take that as praise or not, but she would be lying if she said that she didn't like being praised. "I see. So part of the reason that you oni kidnapped humans was to create more of your kind. This is your way of reproducing."
"That's true," Hirato said. "Many oni are born in this way."
She continued to eat for a while longer, before something else nagged at her.
"One last question. Where did you come from?" she asked.
"Gensoukyou," said Hirato-douji. "Another world. We live underground there."
Author's notes:
So, for now all I've got is this chapter about some OCs. It is still a Touhou Project story, though. This uses my interpretation of Touhou's oni race. As you can see, the oni that showed up is from Gensoukyou.
This was rushed, because I am impatient and a sucky writer, but it is still a story that I wrote, and that feels nice.
I may or may not continue this story, but if I do continue it, then Touhou characters will probably start showing up. Probably a lot of them. Look forward to it if you want, but please don't be disappointed if I don't continue this story, because I already said I might not.
Either way, I hope I will write more stories in the future.