Note: Track I used to write this, and recommended for one's reading pleasure is "Björk - Storm (instrumental)", from Spec Ops: The Line

(convenient youtube link: watch?v=KihNpltEEjI)


Deep inside Youkai Mountain, a festival occurs.

Tengu, Kappa, and Oni eat, drink, dance, and play music in joyful merriment. The sake flows without end, the Big Four of the Mountain watch from a lookout above all others approvingly.

On their lookout, the Big Four engage in their own version of merriment: Shuten-dōji brags of the plunder she could fetch per raid, Hoshikuma-dōji retorts of the men she could knock out with a single strike.

Kane-dōji's pride of her constitution gets the best of her, daring Hoshikuma-dōji to partake in a test of resilience. And Ibaraki-dōji, content in the swiftness of her mind, keeps quiet, letting her compatriots run their mouths before she puts them in their place.

Yet as she runs through the schemes and plots she hatched, something gnaws on her. She thought it easy to ignore at first, but it kept boiling inside of her, gnawing through her, judging her, damning her.

She suppressed her nerves best she could, her compatriots noticed naught a thing. Yet the fraying of her nerves only intensified, a sense of nausea starting to creep into her.

She hasn't drunk too much, has she...? No... sake was nothing to her. Why...?

Time slowed around her, her heart pounded faster and stronger. A flash of a mutilated human victim barged through her gaze, only to leave as instantly as it came.

He's just some human! Why does she feel bad for what was done to-

Ibaraki-dōji.

Her heart skips. Her world screeched to a halt. Her compatriots' expressions remained frozen in brazen joy, their complexion greying out like everything else.

Cunning and Treacherous.

She found herself unable to speak, to move, to even move her eyes. Yet her heart felt like pounding out of her chest, her nerves so frayed and worn the buzz was unbearable.

A cunning great enough to even beguile herself, a treacherous urge so vile as to even forsake her own self.

The greyed-out scene in front of her started slowly melting away, warping and twisting her compatriots like melting candle wax, their expressions taking ever more ghastly forms.

Do they even know why you turned your back on them? Do you think they would take so kindly to your spit on their faces?

The warped expressions took a state filled with malice, mocking and jeering her for her weakness.

You deluded fool.

All of a sudden, the melting world around her is replaced by a bloodied battlefield, devoid of life. She falls on her knees, her left arm halting a complete fal- where is her right arm?

"Do you really think of yourself as a better person without me?"

Trying to keep herself from trembling any more, she slowly lifted her head to look at the voice speaking to her. It was akin to looking at a mirror. She wished she didn't look.

"Do you really think of yourself absolved of the acts of horror you committed without me?"

The smokey visage was a mockery of her, and her in actuality both at once. Her right hand, perfectly corporeal and eager to lash out, her ethereal face contorted in a mocking grin, her eyes overflowing with contempt.

"Do you really think your victims will accept you running away from your sins?"

Tears started welling up and rolling through her cheeks, the truth strangling her from the inside out. The tar-black visage in front of her only laughed at her pain.

"No amount of piety will make up for your weakness."

Suddenly, the visage swiped onto her throat, grabbing it, using it as leverage to pin her to the ground. Her own right arm held her left arm in place, the ghostly body kept her pinned down helplessly.

"Idiot Sage. Queen of delusion." The swirling smoke around her throat tightened ever further. "False hermit of wilted roses."

"S-stop- gk-k!" Her pleas were cut short by a now-unbearable grasp. She was at the mercy of her own shadow now, a plaything of infinite sadism.

"No. I won't stop. Not now, not ever." Skeletal arms slowly dug themselves out of the ground, followed by the rest of her victims. Yes, those were her victims, looking for retribution. She deserved this.

"I am the thing that torments you at night," her own malice mocked. "The evil that reminds you of every truth you deny." The skeletons grabbed more and more of her, pulling her to the blood-stained ground as her own evil let go to gloat to her. "I will never rest. And neither will you..."

The only thing she could do now is close her eyes, accepting her fate. She deserved this. She deserved thi-


-s, the thought kept repeating into her mind as she jolted awake, catching her breath, her heart racing faster than would be healthy for a human, her whole body trembling from the phantom pain.

Why did she have to keep being tormented like this? Didn't she give so many bodies the proper rites? Did she miss any?

A choked sob echoed through her Senkai pocket, and it seemed like it'd never end.