Common I – Raidou Kuzunoha XXI Vs. The Napoleon of Crime
Hunting Comrades
December 1st, 20XX.
The JSDF is called in to evacuate Shinjuku ward. But by the time they can get boots on the ground, it's already too late.
Harrowing, vicious creatures that vaguely resemble humans but have lost all sense and all reason stalk the streets, not as mindless husks but as unshackled spirits, basking in the light of the moon, tearing away everything holding them back, their howls almost delighted as they parade through the narrow intersections, feeding on all those still with impunity. The sick have given way to the most unsightly of monstrosities, and though immortal they certainly were not, the detachment deployed to the scene is horrendously unequipped to gun them down.
In a matter of hours, Shinjuku is transformed into a den of beasts, what little sanity the people had left having finally slipped away, and that night, only these elated chimeras, covered in all manner of scales, fur, or feathers like fungus growing on the skin, marked the streets. The government elects to close the entire ward off, detonating explosives to seal off the subway and end train service throughout the entire city until further notice, the JSDF poised to shoot anything that moves. Anyone who still vainly clung to the vestiges of their daily lives could do nothing but make for the subway and pray.
In the end, not a single man, woman or child escapes through Shinjuku Station. The beasts are innumerable, and any who attempt escape are merely food for their number.
In the hours that follow it's quickly determined that Shinjuku was the ground zero for what the acting Governor of Tokyo saw as a product of the spreading influenza that would inevitably impact other parts of Tokyo before inevitably taking to the rest of the country. While Shinjuku was closed off, there were simply too many people in Tokyo to be able to trace possible infection.
Sealing Shinjuku ward was merely an effort to contain the beasts for as long as they could before more inevitably appeared outside the perimeter. But in reality, Shinjuku being cut off from the outside served another purpose entirely, one that the puppets dancing about on their strings desperately trying to claw their way out of this crisis could never hope to understand.
It spreads quickly, like a legend just beginning to take shape, like smoke across the Sea of the Soul. Beckoned by their other selves, those with the potential learn of Shinjuku's great secret, hidden deep underground. The source of the beastly scourge – a vast, unspeakable power that would crown the King of Mementos, a king that could wrest control of the decaying world from the leadership that had led it to the point of desperation. Many are compelled to action, and many serve as merely food for the beasts, but all seek the Sword in the Stone, and the rite of kingship inscribed within.
December 1st, 20XX.
Saito Nijima tends to his beat, as a patrolman should. The night is his to watch over and protect. And the moment he steps out into the cold night, he fully understands. This night is a night of beasts – a night where those that had lost everything are well and truly free, a night where all those like him that had quietly crept off the deep end could run free.
He'd slept through much, and most of the humans were already dead, but that doesn't matter. The nature of these beasts does not interest him in the slightest, but the night is his as much as it's theirs. His soul may have long since departed – but what was left behind persists, stronger than ever before, stronger than he had ever dreamed. And while he dances about the evening air with the force of a hurricane, none can hope to match him.
And he knew.
He understood.
Speed unlike anything he'd ever felt.
Power unlike anything he'd ever even hoped he could achieve.
He might not be in control anymore, but he's free. And that's what was important.
The Shinjuku Police Department is first on his list, as always. After all, he needs to check in.
Tearing down the front doors with his bare hands, he takes great, painstaking care to scatter it all to the wind, every filing cabinet, every desk, every locker. He pries open the lockboxes with standard issues inside with his bare hands, emptying the magazines, igniting the gunpowder with a box of matches. Before long the precinct lies in a smoldering ruin. That testament to a fragile peace, the stability of a world that never should've persisted for as long as it had – gone, in a burning wreck, each and every room turned inside out, its carefully secured premises reduced to nothing.
It is, by far, his greatest duty as a police officer. To protect and serve – to fight and struggle on and on for the sake of justice. And there was no greater justice than to set fire to that hellhole.
The blaze attracts other beasts. Many of them are drawn into the fire, others are frightened and attack him. But they're no match. Armed with nothing, he can break bone even more easily than he can bend steel.
Out into the dead of night, in a dreadful stampede, he takes to the long winding road of his beat. Tearing down lampposts, crashing through the window panes of stores, he glides about like a man pushed far past his limits. It feels like a late December evening, despite it being mid November. It must be the moon. After all this time and all this insanity, the moon is fighting back against the earth, and he is the instrument of its will.
He takes to the rooftops, every leap greater and farther than the last.
He understands now.
This was the way – the only way to live. Without care, without worry.
That initial high takes him all the way across the ward, to the highest peak. He marvels at the sight of the night sky – from here he can just barely make out Tokyo Tower in the distance. Surely he could climb to the very top of it, the way he is now.
And so he begins his mad dash across the rooftops – but as he does so, his destination far in the distance seems to only grow further and further away. His eyes peeled to the skyline, he watches the tower come closer and closer before whisking itself away once more. And again, and again.
The reality dawns on him, in a moment of clarity. He could not leave Shinjuku. It was physically impossible. Trying to escape the ward to the north merely spit him out at the south. Shinjuku was looping in on itself, repeating in its entirety, infinitely in any direction.
Interrupting that barely lucid train of thought, at last they come for him. The pangs of hunger.
He must feed.
There's no escaping it – not the cage of Shinjuku, and not the urge for nourishment. Even such tremendous power can't come without some cost. And so he goes off. Off in search of proper meat.
Proper meat?
Ah.
Of course.
He knows exactly what meat he needs.
He wanders towards a residence and makes short work on the front door. Inside there are signs of life – dinner left uneaten, cabinets and drawers that were cleared out. He frowns. The next house he breaks into is much the same. Turning them inside out, he finds no whisper of life – just the echoes of its remains.
It followed that there must've been an evacuation to the outside, but then the sick who couldn't get away should at least still be out on the streets – Of course. The alleyways. That's where they'll be hiding. He rounds the corner, his endless sprint carrying him across his beat in a fifth of the time.
His legs carry him into a vacant lot. A deep fog permeates the enclosed space – a dense cloud with a repulsive smell. His face itches first, then the rest of his body. He scratches at his forearms hard enough to draw blood. Eventually he recognizes the smell. It's incense. But he doesn't remember incense smelling quite so foul.
Further in he can just barely make them out in the darkness – first he can hear weak grunting, and then catches sight of them, squirming about in the dark. It's a woman with long black hair, sprawled out on the ground, desperately clawing at her neck as though she can't breath. He looms over her struggling form – but he frowns, before gritting his teeth in growing irritation over his stinging skin. Dragging her by a leg he pulls her out of the vacant lot and out onto the street.
The moment he releases her she flips over onto her stomach, arcing her neck back to look up at him. Her clothes are in tatters, and her arms and legs are covered in what look to be pink bird feathers. Most of the feathers on her legs appear scorched by some flame, as is some of the charred skin beneath. Her eyes exude a manic instability, and her chattering teeth form something of a snarl.
She flails about as he mounts her from behind, biting into her shoulder. She can't move her legs whatsoever, and her resistance is ultimately futile. But as soon as he takes a bit out of her tarnished flesh he throws it all right up. He supposes it was worth a try. After all, these creatures aren't his kin – but it's as he assumed, and as the night grows longer and the pangs of hunger grow stronger, it's something he was slowly learning to fear.
He looks down at the gaping hole in her shoulder, her blood slipping down the side of his face and rolling right off his chin. She still squirms about like she doesn't even feel it. He understands – she's just like him. His eyes shift towards the alley leading to the vacant lot where he'd found her. A trap? It must have been.
Eventually she settles down despite herself. For a moment he thinks she's died, but no. She's merely lost the will to fight, in some primal form of submission. She lies there, her ragged breath kicking back in as she watches him, as though waiting for his next move. He fully intends to leave her there – stepping away from her he heads further down the road, closing in on Shinjuku Station.
The station itself lies in ruin. A derailed train has destroyed many of the support beams, and the far side of the station has completely caved in. All across the tracks are dead bodies – some look fairly human, others look like he does. Right in the entrance way one creature feasts on what looks like a fresh corpse. Saito eyes him curiously – but a few moments later, the beast gags and pukes just like he had. He sighs.
The creature hears him, and turns to face him. Mindlessly it charges forward, its aim to feast on him just the same. Without an ounce of effort he evades the beast's initial charge, then firmly reaching underneath its shoulders, rips both of its arms from their sockets with his bare hands.
It howls in agony as its blood sprays everywhere before it keels over. Kneeling down and rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt, he turns its body facing upward before digging his hands into its stomach and prying it open. He searches around inside for any meat – any good meat, from a proper human, but to no avail.
The altercation draws the attention of three more just like the last, who are just as fixated on each other as they are on him – the signs of starvation, where beast endeavors to eat beast. His hands dart about like the sharpest blades imaginable – the head of the one closest to him is severed clean from its shoulders, and it stumbles forward for a few seconds before helplessly crumpling to the ground. The second he pierces straight through the chest and rips its still beating heart out, which he then proceeds to force down the throat of the third until it suffocates.
With that he's left with no choice. He takes to the tracks, searching the dead bodies for any that might have been purely human, looking first and foremost for anyone with body parts missing that don't appear to have been regurgitated nearby. But without any further prospects to be found on the surface, he wanders into Shinjuku Station.
Inside things smell different straight away. After descending the first flight of stairs, he can see it – scores of dead beasts, limbs severed, their heads blown away. The tunnel leading into the subway from the first platform is open, but painted in beast blood above the archway is some bizarre warning.
'The King Descends.' There's something downright eerie about it. And surely not a message meant for any beast.
Suddenly, a loud, violent coughing. He's not alone at the mouth of this tunnel.
He turns sharply – and he sees them lying there, stomach cut open, legs broken, blood beginning to pool. It's a human. A woman with short brown hair. A police officer, a young one at that, fully dressed in uniform too, but not a police officer he recognizes.
"Nijima? Is that… There's no way, right?" But evidently, she knows him. He stands over her, looking down. Her wounds are fresh, and feral. She must have killed most of these beasts herself. "You have to get out of here, it's not..." Her hazy eyes finally meet his, and she sees right away the lack of recognition, and the intense longing about to become feral.
She sheds a tear. "I knew it. I knew it the whole time. Couldn't stop thinking about how to make it right, and it just ended up like this…!" She coughs hard, blood splattering her mouth. "You're gonna eat me now, right? It's okay. My time's up anyway. I won't be mad at you." She tries as hard as she can to lift her arm and reach out to him, but she's too weak. "I'm sorry I was such a shitty partner."
He kneels down on one leg. He takes her arm into his hands.
And then her parting words. "Kiana's safe. I know she is."
That word.
That disgusting word.
That word that word that word that word that word what is it about that word why does it burn disgusting word ugly word
He rips her arm out of her socket as hard as he can. "Don't you dare! Don't you dare don't you dare say that word againnnnnn!" The Veneer of a Beast takes him. He doesn't even know what he's saying. And yet. And yet. And yet.
He rips the limbs from the fallen officer, one after the other. He stuffs her thighs into his mouth, hungrily kneading and slurping the fat through an opening he creates in the skin before gnawing into the meat. With his mother's arm it was a little difficult – but the legs are a different story. Not only do the legs taste better, but the thighs especially are much easier to chew through. Even on a fit woman like this, the least amount of muscle builds up in the thighs relative to the rest. They're perfect to start with, almost like the breast of a chicken.
The breasts themselves, meanwhile, are a different story. Mostly fat, but some of the chewy bits he tosses out onto the station platform. He knew of mercenaries in the Southeast that cooked the breasts of the women they killed. The form was different, but the spirit, or lack thereof, was the same. He can feel the effects of this ravenous feast almost immediately. That excruciating hunger slips away. There was no greater sense of fulfillment.
He looks up at her. Her face is stained with tears now, but the frozen look in her eyes proves that she's passed on. He howls in both satisfaction and pain. Stripping the rest of the body clean of the dead officer's uniform, he can hear the clamoring of other beasts. He hoists the body up and moves away from the station, heading back the way he came. He needs to find a place that not many would wander near – and he can think of no better than near the vacant lot laced with incense. The rest would smell that from a mile away and not come close.
He makes his way back to the mouth of the alley, the torso and the severed limbs all in tow. The girl is still there, as crippled as she'd been when he'd left. She watches him closely, her breath still ragged, as he eats into one of the arms of the corpse he'd brought back.
Eventually, her staring starts to bother him. He looks at her for a few moments before snapping the arm he was holding in half. He tosses the forearm her way. Like a hungry dog she immediately piles on top of it, eating away at it, nearly choking on a small bone. Once she's eaten her fill, her breath finally starts to slow down. Her staring doesn't get any less intense, but at least if he closed his eyes he could pretend that she wasn't there.
The two of them eventually get through everything the body has to offer. He tries to do something with the skull, but the brain doesn't taste as good as the rest of the body does, and rather unfortunately because this office had been so physically fit, there wasn't much mileage to get out of the cheeks either. He isn't that fond of the tongue's texture, so he lets the girl figure out what to do with that. And of course she just eats through it like it's nothing.
His stomach finally full, he finds himself sapped of what until then had seemed like boundless energy – the price of such physical prowess. While the little waif besides him eats at what little remnants of the human corpse were left, he looks down at his own hands, still drenched in blood.
There's something he should be feeling. He knows there is.
But he just can't remember what that's supposed to be.
Some time passes like that, in that eternal stillness. The moon hangs right where it is and does not move even a millimeter out of place. And so the night drones on. In perpetuity. He feels himself drifting off.
"Oh my, how lovely!"
He looks up at the sudden sound – It's an old woman. An old woman, at least in her seventies, dressed in a bulky cloak with her hair tied up in a bun, carrying what looks like a basket in her arms. She looks down at the two of them, a gentle smile on her wrinkled face. It's a human, a human elderly woman. And she'd simply called out to them, like they were a couple of homeless people on the side of the road. He almost can't believe it.
"Are you two taking care of each other? That's just the most adorable thing -"
His arm shoots out towards her, aiming straight for her throat. But before he can even blink, the old woman's shifted just out of his range.
"Come now, I'm not here to fight." Her eyes open ever so slightly. "You seem like you've got a good head on your shoulders, dear. I'm sure you can behave in front of your lady friend here."
Her asinine words aren't what pushes him to comply. It's simply instinct.
"She looks like she's still hungry. It's not good if you go too long without eating." She reaches into her basket and produces a chunk of meat. "Here – this should help." She simply puts the prime cut out in front of him. He stares at it for a few moments, before taking it and tossing it on the ground by the birdwoman's head. She starts chewing into it on the spot.
He looks back towards the old woman – only to find that she's vanished as suddenly has she had appeared.
After that – he's simply too tired to put up with anything else. But even so, the waif beside him breaks out into pained groans every once in awhile. She was spoiling his carefully curated resting spot. Maybe he should just kill her. It's a wonder that she hasn't tried to bite his head off like all the others yet.
He looks over at her – he's not sure what part of him does the reacting, but he finds himself rising to his feet and breaking into the pharmacy just across from where the two of them were resting. Inside he pillages the shelves until he finds bandages. He attempts to grab some burn ointment from the shelves, but the bottle shatters in his hand.
Making his way back to where the waif is squirming about, he crouches just beside her, removing the bandages from their wrapping.
He grabs hold of one of her scorched legs – at his touch she starts to spasm, but before too long he manages to tightly wrap most of her charred skin in the bandages. With great difficulty he does the same to the other leg – after doing so, she seems to finally calm down. Apparently the bandages alone are enough to stop much of the pain that she was feeling. From then her groans are a lot less exacerbated, and for a moment she seems to be drifting off to sleep.
With her eyes closed, she almost looks human. Her sleeping face is like that of any other girl. He watches her for awhile before his own eyes at last close.
Before too long, the hunt must begin anew. The pangs of hunger are unavoidable. A beast must eat. That is the law.
The birdwoman sleeps soundly. But he goes off in search of more meat.
This time he heads north, towards an old shrine torii gate that once was a common meeting ground for all kinds of people. The offertory boxes were barren of every last yen and there's some evidence that much of what had been in there was stolen, and the surrounding grounds, as well kept as they were had not a trace of man or beast.
He hadn't noticed at first – but the beasts were avoiding this area. And despite that, there wasn't a hint of incense in the air or so much as a corpse in sight.
Some part of him mulls over that fact. But before he can make anything of it – he can feel it.
A change in the wind. Like life had just been blown into his surroundings like hot breath. It's like the moment that old woman appeared, but more intense.
He senses it at his back first – by the time he reacts to it, even at his augmented speed, he's too late to avoid the dagger that pierces his back. He lets out a loud grunt that becomes a snarl – the dagger burns. He tries to wrap his hands around the hilt, but all he does is cause the skin on his hands to burn away at an alarming rate when he takes hold of it.
"Silver..." He snarls.
"Oh? This one can speak? Tonight's just full of surprises."
The moon at his back, a long blade in his hands. Dressed from head to toe in a black Imperial officer's uniform ripped straight out of the early twenties, a man that couldn't be any older than twenty stands before him, his face hidden beneath his officer's hat.
The burning only grows more intense. Saito can't waste any time. He shoots forth, attempting to break the wrist of the young man's sword arm – but he's not fast enough. The man dodges his advance and the last moment and without the slightest delay in his movements curves his katana in a deadly arc.
Saito manages to escape, but not without a massive gash on his arm. He grits his teeth – but as he does, the wound on his arm rapidly starts to heal. The imperial officer advances on him without giving him any time to recover, this time aiming right for Saito's head.
Saito attempts to catch the blade with his open palm – he does so, but the strength of the man's swing cuts deep – he has to let go, otherwise he'll lose his hand. He pulls away, the dagger in his back sinking a little deeper between his shoulder blades. He cries out, jumping backwards several feet, blood leaking from the gash in his hand as it too starts to rapidly heal.
"Ah, I see." The young man nods in understanding, placing a hand to his chin. "Self-healing, and quite potent at that. I doubt one dagger to the back will be enough to dispatch you, even if it hurts like hell."
Suddenly – another, sharper change in the air. The space around the officer begins to shift – and then, at his back, a massive man, at least eight eight feet tall, floating slightly in the air and wrapped in a large brown trench coat that hangs so low that his legs weren't visible, his face further concealed in the shadows of a deerstalker cap.
The young man faces him. "What do you think, Shirley?"
Careful, Raidou. The shadow speaks in what sounds like a heavy English accent, the sound of his voice warped as though being filtered, but no less pronounced and commanding. This one lacks the gibbering insanity of the rest of these creatures. His posture, expressions, even the way he recoils from pain suggest a cognizant reaction to stimulus for a man not much older than you are.
"I thought the ones that could think straight would've all slinked back into Mementos by now."
In all likelihood it only just awakened. I suggest we dispense with the pleasantries and wrap this up as soon as we can.
"You're the one that's talking up a storm here." The man called Raidou once again advances at blinding speed, the trench coat shadow following close by. He sheathes his katana as he approaches, while Saito charges forward right at him before ducking to the right at the last second as the young man draws his katana swiftly in a perfect Iai. The blade misses him by millimeters, and before the young man can turn around Saito kicks off the ground, sending himself spiraling backwards through the air, his engorged palm poised to smash through the man's head.
Only then the trench coat giant moves. He grabs hold of Saito midair by the arms, his translucent form no mere illusion. Saito squirms there helplessly, unable to break free of the giants grasp as it draws him close.
He can then see beneath the deerstalker cap – and the face of a drowned man beneath it, the skin around the base of his neck wrinkled and strained, his lips a dark blue, his eyes half open. The drown man's mouth alone moves, to form a rather smug grin.
"Kougaon." Raidou's command is a jumbled mess of sounds that he can't even begin to understand, but in that moment a beam of light shoots out from the dark recesses of the trench coat, piercing Saito's stomach straight through to the other side.
The giant releases him, and he falls onto his back, the silver dagger sinking all the way to the base of the hilt. He cries out in agony, writhing there on the ground as the gaping hole in his torso much more slowly begins to seal shut, while the dagger in his back seems to sap the life away from him, one limb at a time until he finds himself too weak to even move his legs.
Just like that. Everything he was, everything he'd gained. All reduced to nothing.
Powerlessness finds him again. He's back in that bedroom, sprawled out on the floor.
He understands, at last.
Nothing had changed.
All he'd done was unearth what was there all along.
He didn't have the strength to ascend from this place, to that world of mortals that left him behind.
He was still part of that plan, the plan that shaped the world he hated so very much. He was prey in one life, and he has become prey in the next.
And he was going to die. Just like this.
Raidou readies his blade, hoisting it in the air just over his head, the tip of the blade hovering just between Saito's eyes. He only hesitates for that one second, long enough for Saito to notice. But he doesn't have the time to process it – when that second ends, the blade begins its descent.
At the last moment Saito manages to lurch his neck with enough strength to avoid the blade's drop. His left arm finding the strength it needs to move latches onto it in desperation, the blade digging into his skin hard as Raidou attempts to yank it from his grasp.
Just then, something flies straight at the two of them – crashing into Raidou at high speed, sending him toppling over onto the ground. The specter at his back dissipates, having not seen the incoming assault whatsoever.
Thrashing around on top of him is the waif, screaming at the top of her lungs with her hands clawing away at his face, pummeling away until the man underneath him throws her off.
She lands on her back at Saito's side. He watches her, completely stunned as she stands on her now shredded bandages, her hands caked in blood with a frenzied look on her face that betrays some manic sense of determination.
Raidou pulls himself up, his face scratched up badly and bleeding all over. He glares at the pair of them, his cape thrashing in a sudden burst of wind as the trench coat figure reappears, flying straight towards them. The figure snaps its fingers – in its open hand, a long harpoon made of pure light takes shape. Taking aim, it hurls the harpoon straight towards Saito, its intent to end the fight with one decisive blow that would doubtlessly kill him.
The waif moves to shield him. The harpoon pierces her through the stomach, and straight out the other side. The shadow retrieves the harpoon from her gut as she falls to the side.
In the chaos of the waif's frenzy, Saito is able to at last bend his arms enough to grab hold of the hilt of the silver blade. His hands burn, unlike anything he'd ever felt before, but he manages to at last free the blade from his back. That's all it takes – he's extremely weak, but he can move his arms and legs freely again.
And he runs.
He flees from the hulking darkness of that great detective, across the road and into an alley before scampering up the side of a building.
He travels ten blocks from the shrine before he descends onto the streets. The hole in his stomach still needs to heal. It's sealing up, but much more slowly than any of his other injuries. Even the hole from the silver dagger is closing up faster. But he can't afford to stop, or to be seen. Before too long, he's returned to the vacant lot. He can see the waif's bloodied footsteps leading away from the alley, which he tries his hardest not to think about.
Guilt. Guilt from running away. Relief. Relief from running away. That shadow of death was no longer upon him. Relief wins out over the guilt.
Concealing himself in the shadows of the alleyway, he plops himself down on the hard concrete. His level of exhaustion is intense – his still-human body can't keep up with the feral power that dwells within it.
There's still a bit of the policewoman he'd killed earlier – the heels. Not exactly appetizing, but he didn't have any other options. He chews through them as best as he can. He's in no shape to go out looking for more dead humans – and certainly in no shape to risk coming across that detective again.
Sleep.
The only thing he wants now is sleep.
Sleep to beat out the hunger.
When he closes his eyes he can see her. He can see her throwing herself in the path of that harpoon.
Sleep.
Forget everything.
Tomorrow will be different.
Tomorrow the Grendel will emerge victorious.
Tomorrow the night shall be his again.
Then it comes for him. A voice.
"Now's not the time for rest. I'm not done with you yet."
Raidou Kuzunoha steps out of the shadows, and with the silver blade severs Saito's left arm from his shoulder.
Blood sprays.