Yu Yu Hakusho: The After Years

Episode 1: Special Delivery

The streets hummed with afternoon traffic. Lights blinked red and green as cicadas sang from high-up branches in the June heat. A young boy juggled a soccer ball with his feet, weaving in between the legs of passerby. It was the slow, awkward sort of kick of a young child, with very little control. The ball soon veered too close to the street. He lunged after it to save it, only to find someone had stopped it with their foot. A few more centimeters and it would have rolled into traffic.

The boy looked up into the face of a girl in a middle school uniform. Behind her stood a boy of about the same age. The boy had his arms behind his head and was looking up at the sky. He avoided eye contact, as if to say, "here we go again." The girl had large, friendly-looking brown eyes. Yet, at the moment, there was something stern in them that made the boy's stomach churn. The same feeling he got when being scolded by a teacher. 

"Hey, it's not safe to play here," she said in a firm tone, "there's cars coming. Where are your parents?"

The boy looked around for his mother, but she was nowhere in sight. He had gotten ahead of her somehow.

The girl sighed and hoisted the ball above her head, "Oi! Someone missing a little boy with a soccer ball?"

The mother caught up to them, muttering apologies. The girl handed her the ball and said she might want to hold onto it until they reached home.

The boy behind her laughed quietly.

"What?"

"Nothing, it's just funny how you're always sticking your nose in other people's business, Rieka."

"You can't tease me about that, Hiro, he could have been hit by a car."

"Still, shouting for the mother like that..."

"If I just gave him the ball back and sent him on his way, he would have just started doing the same thing again. You know how little kids are."

Hiro shrugged, and ran a hand through his shaggy mint-green hair, "As long as your dad doesn't get pissed at us for being late."

Rieka checked the time on her phone, "We'll still make it back before the afternoon rush as long as we don't get side-tracked again."

They had moved away from the busiest of the streets and were winding their way up the quieter, residential roads. Rieka's father ran a diner attached to the bottom of their house, so she was used to seeing people milling about. However, a circle of people crowded around something, their bodies packed to densely to catch a glimpse of what it was. Seeing them made the hair on the back of her neck tickle. She looked over to Hiro, who was a few inches taller than her. She saw his brow furrowed in the shadows of his face.

"You sense that too, huh?" said Rieka.

Hiro nodded, "Yokai."

"Guess we're going to be late, then."

Hiro was tall enough to stand towards the back of the crowd and peer over, but Rieka had to nudge through a group of people.

Rieka's eyes scanned the two in the center of the circle. One was a hulking bear of a man, muscles and veins were popping in his neck as he glared at the man at the other side of the circle. The second man was small and dressed in a black robe. He had a white headband wrapped around his forehead and spiky black hair. While there was something much more demonic about the large man, Rieka could tell that the smaller of the two was the yokai.

"I told you I have no desire to fight someone as weak as you," said the smaller man coolly, "That doesn't mean I won't defend myself."

"You little shit, you think you can badmouth me and just walk away?" the large man growled.