Hanabi

Chapter 45: Unplanned

Hawk-like eyes stared into the distance, seeing the mass of darkness in the sky ahead. A curious sight to have, it was. The red and orange sunset sky continued for a long way before turning into night over where Kyoto was placed. It almost looked like something artificially painted, not natural, like a canvas where human hands poured black and midnight-blue paint over one previously carefully painted sunset scenery.

The owner of the eyes sighed in contempt. The unnatural darkness started over Mount Kurama, as far as he could see, far away. In that moment he felt like one of those mothers who would leave the house for just about an hour and come back to find mayhem caused by the hands of their children. It was just a matter of him deciding to leave for a couple of days and things would go out of hand. Maybe he should stop checking on the other tengu and just mind his own business, stay in his territory like the old hermit he was supposed to be.

Sojobou kept walking, now extremely annoyed, hitting trees with his shakujo as he passed. There was only one possible explanation for that unnatural sky, and all of it traced back to those girls. Maybe he should’ve killed Mami instead of helping her. He struggled to understand why humans would insist in doing such reckless things. Now there were Oni in his mountain, something disgusting to him in the deepest levels. Those girls called Oni to his home.

In moments like this he got to the conclusion that he really hated mankind.

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Mami followed her brother’s fast steps, though she couldn’t see where the door he mentioned might be. That wasn’t what she was supposed to be worrying about either. The fact that her brother mentioned “peace” and yet peace was all she wasn’t getting didn’t make her feel much better.

The thing was, after walking through that silent and eerie wasteland, now following her brother around instead of going along his side, Mami started to think about more things instead of letting her mind have peace.

Not that it was essentially a bad thing. She didn’t have a good sense of time in that place, so she didn’t know if it had been a minute or ten since Ryuuichi last spoke to her, but since silence fell over them, her brain started working on frenzy mode.

She felt angry with her realizations at first, but controlled the feeling. She knew better.

Now without the screams, the crazy fighting, without all the mess inside of her head that was worsened by all those Oni, without pain and other people’s horrible feelings and experiences disturbing her, she could finally think clearly. That whole appearance of the last Oni and the way it effectively rendered all their efforts useless started to make some sense.

This one was different from the others, in the fact that it was actually rational. The others they fought acted like mindless monsters with two very clear goals: to kill Tomomi in order to stop the music; and to get to Mami as always. Those were the same mindless monsters Mami was used to seeing her entire life. The eighth one however, could act rationally and even communicate with them in a way they understood.

It was clearly old, too, by the way it spoke to Rina. It was an Oni that started small and evolved, accumulating knowledge and experience from who knows how many battles, how many murders, how many deceits. This one knew how to act in a battle much better than the others. This one had been around for long enough to know exactly what to do to tickle the nerves of potential enemies. And it had done exactly that.