棒や石はその骨を壊すことができる
She woke from oblivion to the worst headache she had ever had, brought to violent attention when she twitched in unconsciousness that was ripped from her by the pain that lanced through her brain at the movement. It pounded at the base of her skull like a heavy, spiked mace the size of a mountain. The only sound she could hear was of her blood pumping through her veins and roaring in her ears.
Her whole body ached, even with as still as she laid. It felt like she had been dunked in a river of ice, her bones were shivering. Her eyes felt glued together; no matter how she tried once she set her aching mind to it, she couldn't open her eyes.
Pai knew she was lying down, she could feel the hard surface beneath her, all along her body. It was – wet. There was water under her bare arms and soaking through her clothes.
She took a deep breath, trying to calm the rising tide of panic in her chest. She needed – she had to stay calm. She knew that panicking wouldn't help her. She didn't know how she knew or if there was something wrong with her that this layer of shaky calm told her to remain in control, but it was firm, the knowledge that if she let herself go, nothing good would happen. She had to be calm if she was going to figure out what was going on.
She focused on trying to open her eyes. She took deep breathes, calming her racing heart, catching a whiff of salt in the cramped air around her. She tried wriggling her fingers and toes, wincing at the stiffness in her joints. As she rotated her ankles, something cold and hard, metallic, moved against her skin. Dimly, as if there were heavy earmuffs over her ears, she heard metal clinking.
Chains, she thought hazily. That sounded – that felt like chains. Why were there chains around her ankles?
She remained absolutely still as she fought to open her eyes. It was hard; she was so unbelievably tired, as if she had just run three dozen Olympic marathons instead of just waking up. The darkness behind her eyelids was so complete, so whole, that she wasn't even sure she would know that they were open. She was completely disoriented, confused, her mind and body disconnected from each other.
At last, she pried open the seam of her eyelids. She blinked several times, to adjust to the darkness, but no light seeped in. She turned her head side to side, trying to see anything of where she was, but...nothing. She could only rely on her sense of touch, and anything else she could discern. She knew that there was something right next to her nose, she could feel it when she turned her head, in the way she felt her breath bounce back at her, off of something. It was like a wall. The same happened when she turned to the other side.
Where am I? she thought, a growing discomfort and fear warring in her stomach.
She stretched her arms on either side of her, as far as she could, tensing her fingers. A second later, she came up against solid cement. She wriggled and shimmied her body down until her bare feet touched yet another wall. The chains jingled as she shuffled around.
She was in some sort of narrow enclosure. She raised her hands slowly, until her forearms hit another slab of stone; this time it was right above her.
Her heart swelled, kicking into overdrive. Fear closed her throat, stifling her, as if an iron hand was strangling the breath out of her. Her hands shook in violent tremors running up and down over her arms, from her shoulders to the tips of her fingers. It was so much that she couldn't tell if it was only her hands shaking, or if her whole body was trembling.
No, she thought, blind panic blanketing her mind. No, please, not this, not – please, what the hell is this, please.
In this small enclosed space that was just enough to keep her imprisoned, something strong and powerful hit her in full force, choking her.
Fear.
She slapped the stone above her with her hands, hitting it. "Hello?" her voice shook as much as her whole body was. There wasn't a sound to be heard except her own voice thrown back at her. "He – hello?"
She hit the stone again, and for every hit, she got louder, until she was screaming. Her own voice was deafening her, but she didn't stop. Desperation gave her renewed strength even as she hit and kicked at the walls around her, scratching her palms, arms, legs, bruising her knees and elbows.
She didn't know how long she went on. She hit at the walls around her because it was all she could do, trying in vain to find a way out. Her mind was engulfed in panic as she shouted out in the hopes that someone, anyone, would hear her, would come to help her.
"Help! Somebody help, please!" her voice was hoarse, scratching at the walls of her throat as it worked its way up to her mouth. She was tired. It hurt. Everything hurt.
She froze, heart hammering in her chest, when she heard the stone slab above her moving, felt the slabs around her grating against each other. She kept her hands on the slab above her for a second, trying to make sure she wasn't imagining it when she felt it move against her palms.
Pai pulled her hands away, clasping them to her chest as she stared wide-eyed up above her, heart in her throat. She was terrified – scared that, even though it looked like she was being freed from this stone prison, there was still the person who put her in it, chained her and left her in it. She tried to control her harsh breathing, that it wouldn't be so loud, but she was still shaking so much from the fear of being trapped in this small, confined space with no escape no matter if she beat at the walls around her until her hands were bloody.
Inch by inch, the block of concrete above her moved, revealing a barely lit space above her that she couldn't even see the ceiling of. The second there was enough space, she shot out. She scrambled up over the edge, and in her desperation to get out, she didn't notice that the enclosure she was in sat atop a sturdy metal table.
She fell over the sharp edge and landed jarringly on her back on the floor, breath knocked out of her. Black stars bloomed before her eyes as she struggled to catch her breath. She felt jittery, out of odds, completely unsure in her own body, feeling as though her bloody was vibrating in her veins, unsettling her.
When her vision finally focused, she found herself staring up at steel and metal beams with low-hanging lamps and a corrugated iron roof high, high above her. The lights were on, bright spots of illumination in what would otherwise by the complete darkness of night pressing in from the outside. She pushed herself up slowly, staring all around her, at the large coloured crates that surrounded her.
Crates.
Crates?
Am...am I in a warehouse?
By the sharp tang of the sea breeze drifting in from somewhere behind her, the warehouse must have been right by the ocean. Pai didn't know where she was, or where the warehouse was. She lived nowhere near the sea.
How the hell did she get here?
She felt so small, in this large building. There was no one around her, no hint of whoever had pushed the stone top off of her. She looked up at the high ceiling and winced as a shot of electric pain tickled the back of her neck. Her muscles locked for a brief, tortuous second, before relaxing slightly.
She twisted her head to the side and brought her hands up, gingerly touching her nape. When she brought her hands down, they were slick with traces of blood, still wet from the water she was lying in.
She stared at her pale hands, at the bright wash of red made runny by the water, painting her palms bloody. This...this was hers. This was her blood, so much of it that her gut twisted painfully at the sight.
Her breath caught in her chest when she lifted her eyes to look at what she had been in not a minute ago. It was a confinement structure made entirely of stone, four concrete slabs built together. The one that had been over her, shutting her in, lay on the floor opposite her, where it had landed after being pushed off.
It looked like a stone coffin.
When she looked down, she saw that the chains around her ankles weren't padlocked. She took them off and pushed herself to standing, clothes dripping wet and hanging heavy on her. She couldn't look away from the coffin, as if she was waiting for that darkness to return, the incredible, suffocating breathless of feeling the stone all around her, pushing in, closing her in, cutting her off from air, light, sight –
She jumped, startled, when there was the sudden sound of something sharp striking the ground. Her heart skittered to a stop as she spun around, trying to find the source of the sound – but she saw nothing.
There was only the crates, an endless number of them.
Pai stepped forward hesitantly, even when everything in her was screaming to run (but run where?), toward the narrow path between two piles of crates that stretched high up to the ceiling.
"He – hello?"
She hated how her voice shook. She hated it, she hated it. She wanted to be able to respond to all of this calmly, rationally, to not panic and make some stupid mistake. But she couldn't help it; the sheer fear that coursed through her veins was so prominent in her, she couldn't even imagine not living with it, couldn't remember what it was not to be scared out of her mind, it was so whole.
She looked around herself when nothing answer, trying to find an exit, but it was like the massive room had been built with no door leading in and out of it. There had to be one, but it could only be behind one of the crates, hidden from sight.
She didn't want to go anywhere near them. She felt like whatever was in the room with her, hiding from sight, was probably hiding near or behind one of the crates.
She froze when another loud click resounded through the large warehouse. Her eyes were wide as she tried to peer in to the dark, shadowy spaces between the crates, to see what was there. Her feet, as quietly as she tried to walk, still tapped in far too loud echoes as she moved slowly around.
She felt so cold. Now she wasn't shivering from fear alone, but from the blistering cold coating her body like a second skin. Her toes and fingers hurt from it the way they only did in the middle of winter, when she didn't have warm enough gloves on.
She looked around, trying to spy the tell-tale colour of the auras of the Yori Chiisai, but she couldn't see anything like it. She didn't even know if the freezing temperature was because of the presence of any Yori Chiisai, or if it was from having soaked in cold water for who knew how long, in that stone coffin that she was desperately trying not to look at.
There were seemingly no Ayakashi around her, but knowing that didn't take way the cold, or the feeling that something was watching her.
A blast of the frigid ocean breeze hit Pai in the back, blowing a few tangled, wet strands of her hair over her face. She turned and saw almost an entire wall of glass-plated windows behind her, a dozen or so open to let the breeze in. It was pitch black outside.
Without thinking, she turned and ran. She ran straight for one of the open windows, her bare feet slapping on the wet ground, loud in the chilling silence of the warehouse. She wrapped her scratched-up hands on the frame of one of the small windows, looking down through the glass.
She was at least two floors above the street-lamp lit road, snaking by the side of the warehouse and off into the distance (and just – why? Who would cart all these crates up two floors? Were they empty?). It shouldn't be, but the ground looked much further away than just two floors. She could see the lapping waves of the black ocean hitting the wharf ahead, and if she focused she could hear the soft murmur of it.
She turned back to face the large expanse of the warehouse behind her, stumbling almost drunkenly as she peered into the gloom, trying to make out anything through the blurriness her vision had become. Black stars danced alarmingly across her vision, and her headache pounded fiercely. She had just woken from unconsciousness, but she was scared that she would slip back into oblivion any second now.
She didn't – she couldn't let that happen. She needed to stay awake, remain conscious, alert enough to find a way out of this place. She didn't know where she was, or how she got here, but she knew there was something fundamentally wrong here, and she needed to get out before something happened.
There was something in the warehouse with her, something she had never encountered before, and she knew it couldn't be human.
There was something in here, it wasn't human, and she was trapped in here with it.
Pai turned around and caught sight of the swinging light of a lamp in a small room off to her right, with a plain brown wooden door opened just enough for her to see it. She walked toward it, keeping an eye out around her all the whole. Stretching out her hands once she reached it, she gently pushed the door open fully, staring at the light as it swayed like a pendulum. She stepped into the room slowly, angling her body to the door, ready to sprint out at the slightest hint of danger.
There was no one in the room. Pai looked behind the door, but nothing jumped out at her, nothing was hiding there. She looked at the room, closing the door behind her – but not completely, not willing to risk the telling click that would let anyone – anything – know exactly where she was.
She was in a kitchen, of all things. There was a square wooden table in the middle of the room with four rickety old chairs, one of which was missing a leg, a refrigerator in a space between the counter table, and a dull orange gas balloon.
Next to the refrigerator was an old, rusting cooler. The sink was streaked with moss and dirt, and the tap was closed but leaking drops of water, following each other out of the tap and falling into the metal sink with surprisingly loud plops. The lamp overhead swung from the force of the wind blowing into the small kitchen from the open window over the sink. The window was too small for her to even bother thinking of crawling through it.
Besides, she was high up, on whatever floor that was so far from the ground. She would break a bone if she tried to jump.
If it came to it, though, if there was no other way out of here – she would risk the broken bones.
Pai walked to the sink, but there was nothing in it. She pulled out the drawers beneath the sink and looked in the cabinets over it, but there was none of the usual kitchen utensils one would expect to find. She went to the fridge and pulled it open, but there was only a couple of beer bottles, one of which had a broken top.
She took the broken bottle out, inspecting the jagged ends, touching it experimentally. It was blunt. It was the only thing she had, though, so she shut the fridge and kept a hold of the broken bottle and continued looking through the rest of the room.
Then she opened the lid of the cooler and looked inside, and she knew she wouldn't need the broken bottle.
Most of the space in the cooler was taken up by large, clear plastic wraps, but there was a single dark shape nestled at the bottom of it all. She pulled the wraps aside, hating all the noise they made as she did. When she saw what the dark shape at the bottom was, her mouth popped open in a gape of surprise.
It was a gun.
Why the hell is there a gun in here? She thought. Even as she did, she – she knew what type of gun this was, just by looking at it.
She reached in and pulled the gun out of the cooler. It was heavy. She fit her hand around the pistol grip and ran her hands over the expanse of the cold metal. Her skin was stark white against the dark metal. Flipping a catch she found, the magazine of the gun dropped out onto her open palm. It was fully loaded with thirty rounds, each stocked with a gleaming brass-burnished bullet with a sharp nose.
She wasn't sure how, but knowledge of every detail of the gun slipped into her mind as if she had always known it, as if it was just carefully stored away in her mind for future reference, as if this wasn't the first time she had ever held a gun in her life, much less one as complicated-looking as this one.
In a surprised, unbelieving tone, she voiced the gun's components aloud, as if that would make any of this make more sense. She felt like she had spoken these words before, but she didn't know when, or why, or where. As she spoke, in her mind she thought she could hear the echo of someone's voice, male but unrecognisable, asking her questions that she dutifully answered aloud, despite being – maybe – alone.
"What is it?"
"M4A1 Carbine." What does that even look like? I don't know, I don't know, I really don't know.
"Is it an assault weapon?"
"There...there is no such thing as an assault weapon. So-called assault weapons are semi-automatic firearms." What does that mean?
"And this is?"
"A fully automatic assault rifle." What's the difference?
"How many rounds does it fire?"
"Up to nine hundred and fifty per minute. Pull the trigger once for ten rounds of shots." That's just – that's just numbers to me. I don't – what is this?
"What are it's ranges?"
"Maximum range, three thousand six hundred meters. Maximum effective range for a point target, five hundred meters. Maximum effective range for an area target is six hundred meters. It has a fourteen point five-inch barrel, compact size as compared to the full-length M16-series rifle, and it fires the .223 calibre NATO round."
"Right on, girlie. Does it have a fully-loaded clip?"
"It is not a clip, but a magazine." What?
"That's right. What are its special accompanying accessories? Every gun needs its fancy gadget, eh?"
"It is capable of supporting night vision devices, suppressor, laser pointer, telescopic sight, and both M203 or M230 grenade launchers." Pai ran her hand over the length of the gun, over the smooth metal and the ridges and bumps. "All of which are missing from this one." She pulled her hand away from the gun, staring at it like it was a live, slimy creature.
How...how did she know all that? And that voice, the one asking all those questions – who was it? Did it have something to do with her disappearance? How could she have delivered those answers with such cold precision, as if the words were drilled into her so much, for so long, so that she could no longer put any feeling in them?
And why was there even a gun here in the first place, placed so conveniently in what was looking more and more like an abandoned warehouse by the sea?
What was going on here?
Click.
Pai jerked, quickly fitting the magazine back in place and hoisting the gun in her arms, right forefinger hooked over the trigger as she flicked the safety off with her left hand. Her heart felt stone cold, muscles tired but sure in their movements as she held the gun close to her, secure in her arms. Despite her confusion, there was a certain odd confidence in her heart that she could and would use the gun if she needed to.
She turned. Directly opposite the open window was a board, with dozens of papers of varying degrees of yellowing stuck on it with little colourful pins. Pai walked to the board and looked at them. The majority seemed to be construction plans of some type, timetables, receipts, photos. The receipts were dated from six months ago.
Pai reached up and pulled the thumbtack keeping one of the pictures stuck to the board. She picked it up when the photograph fell after being released from the tack. It was of a small motorboat, rowed manually by two blurry figures towards a large ship decked by the wharf.
She paid no mind to the image of the small boat, but to the ship itself. Painted in large, striking white on the hull of the ship was the image of a fox. Not just any fox, but one in Hengen Ayakashi form, with all nine of its tails splayed out proudly behind it, its white chest pushed out and up proudly with its sharp nose pointed high.
Kyubi no Kitsune.
Pai knew then, with barely a doubt, that the owner of that ship and all the others like it was likely Hengen, part of the Kitsune Clan. Even the name of the ship, printed just below the proud ninetail, was tell-tale enough.
運祖の狐
"Fox shipping," she murmured. They don't even try to hide because they know no human could imagine a Kitsune owning the business, she thought drily.
"That's what makes them so dangerous," Pai frowned when the derisive voice of a young woman echoed in her mind, almost as if someone was saying it right now, right beside her. "They hide in plain sight, just like snakes lying in wait, stirring and biting if you disturb them."
She startled when another one of the sharp clicks struck the floor. This one was close – too close. It was right outside the door. She dropped the photo on the table and tiptoed back to hide behind the door. Her heart was lodged in her throat as she tried to control her breathing, to quieten it down so that it wasn't so loud, holding the gun close to her chest.
Her lips trembled and tears – from fear, from anxiety, from the overload of tumultuous emotions filling her to breaking point – streaked down her dirt speckled cheeks. Her hair lay in lank, pale rattails around her wet forehead and down her shaking, blood-stained shoulders.
Click.
Her gaze snapped up at the sound a second before something pushed on the door. She silently moved to the side, not wanting to but knowing she had to. The door swung open, and she sucked in all her breath to make her body as flat as possible. The cold metal of the gun pressed sharply against the side of her neck.
There was a series of clicks that follow the first as something with a heavy, black, malicious presence walked into the room on otherwise silent, padded feet. The door blocked her from seeing the creature that made such strange sounds and was clearly looking for something, for her, but she could tell – it was big.
The thing's head – a massive shadow she could see, thrown against the floor and swinging as the light above it moved – suddenly jerked to the right. She saw something long lift up beside the head, and she yanked her head up when four long talons wrapped around the edge of the door. They were filthy, yellow, with dirt and something that looked like old meat stuck underneath them. She felt like she was going to vomit.
Claws. Those are fucking claws.
Sniffing, the sound of huge lungful puffed of air being drawn in. She held her breath even as her own lungs burned with the effort, with the need to breathe. The thing behind the door did that several times before the talons lifted from the wood of the door and retreated, just as the creature stepped back.
It was gone between one blink and the next.
She stayed where she was, staring at the deep, scissoring indents in the wood from the talons that had just been digging into it. She heard the clicking of what she now knew to be the creature's claws on the ground as it stalked away, searching. She was just blowing out a slow, quiet breath of shaky relief when she heard it.
"Pai-chan, it's going to be all right. Wait here for me."
Her lips parted in stunned surprise. Sh – Shiori. That was Shiori's.
Pai didn't think as she pushed off the wall and ran out the room, straight for where she heard Shiori's voice come from. All she could think is, Don't tell me she's here. Tell me she's safe, at home, not here, not here.
She was halfway back to the stone coffin, entirely exposed under the harsh lighting of the lamps overhead, when she heard clicking behind her. She froze, muscles tensing as she skidded to an abrupt stop, almost slipping over the wet floor and the water spraying from her feet. Her hands clutched at the assault rifle in a grip of fear.
Click. Click. Click.
It stopped.
Slowly, like a puppet being turned by her master puppeteer, she turned and faced the – the monster that was right behind her. Her hand loosened around the gun as absolute shock coursed through her, mind going blank as she tried to process what she was seeing.
It was not an Ayakashi, not any she had ever head seen. It was not from how it looked that she knew this, but from the aura of it. Ayakashi made her feel cold, and with Hengen it was both a hot and cold that blended together in a sometimes oddly soothing manner, usually depending on who it was.
Despite the chilly wind enveloping her, the freezing temperature of the water slicking her body, she was hot. A burning furnace made flesh. The heat was unlike anything she knew, like she was standing beneath the scorching blaze of an unforgiving sun – and it was all coming from the monster.
It stood twenty feet from her, but its presence was so heavy that it felt like it was right in front of her. She recognized it in the next few seconds, the shock slipping into recognition as the pictures she had seen in children's books when she was younger superimposed in front of what was right in front of her in this moment.
This was an Onihitokuchi, a demon that poisoned for paralysis, kidnaps to inspire fear, and eventually devoured its prey whole.
Its head was massive. The Onihitokuchi itself rose to nine, ten feet tall, but its head took up almost seven of those feet. One large, baleful eye of sickly yellow with a black hole of a pupil stared down at Pai from its height. Its body was short and stocky, with abnormally long arms that ended in curved talons that dragged on the ground, as if they were too heavy to lift up. It was clad in ragged burlap sacks that looked like several had been hazardously tied together to form some semblance of clothing to cover at least parts of its pale, yellowing, bulging rolls of fat.
The creature's maw, a mouth with a manic grin stretched from ear-to-ear, was filled with humanoid teeth, blunt except for minuscule sharpened canines. A long, scaly tail lashed behind its back. Pai could just spy the steel-tipped barbed end of the tail, dripping with some strange, oozing clear yellow liquid. The sight of it turned her stomach inside out, nausea crawling up the back of her throat.
Her hand went to the back of her head where, through the blood, she could feel the gaping seams of a long cut. It wasn't very deep, but enough that it still continued to bleed despite how much time she spent unconscious, and she didn't know how long that was, the water she had soaked in not helping matters in the least.
The Onihitokuchi opened its large mouth, fat lips flapping as it perfectly enunciated Shiori's voice again, as if taunting Pai with it. "Wait for me. Pai."
Hearing Shiori's bright, cheerful voice coming from the depths of this massive creature twisted Pai's stomach to knots, bile coating the back of her throat. It was wrong, it was so wrong to hear Shiori's voice and see the Oni moving its mouth to match those words and to know that the voice was coming from it and that it was not actually Shiori speaking. It threw Pai for a loop, brain floundering as she tried to comprehend the impossibility of it.
The voice changed. It was no longer speaking in Shiori's voice, but in its own, gruff undertones. It was a horrible, grating sound against her ears, and she wanted to lift her hands and cover her ears to stop hearing it, but she was frozen in place, unable to move a muscle.
And she was not letting go of this gun.
"Pai, Pai, mine, mine, sweet name, sweet girl, sweet blood."
Dimly, stupidly, she realized that she wasn't breathing properly. Her breath shot out of her lungs in harsh, short gasps as she quickly backtracked, wanting to run but afraid to turn her back on the Onihitokuchi.
"Pai, it's going to be all right."
Shut up, shut up, shut up!
The Oni remained where it heavily stood, eye twitching as it tracked her rapid movements. It took a single step forward, almost swallowing half of the distance between them before coming to a full stop. Pai whimpered, and hated herself for it.
Somehow, even with the size of its head, the Onihitokuchi tilted it to the side as it regarded her with an expression that could only be described as confused. "Pai, Pai, running away. Pai, Pai, running away. Pai, Pai, why?"
Her throat seized up as she gave up on the fight with her fear. Without even realizing what she was doing, she raised the muzzle of the gun, fingers squeezing on the trigger – she was almost blown back by the force of the bullets erupting out of the gun. The shots rang loud and clear in the warehouse, like bombs going off.
The Onihitokuchi screamed in pain when the bullets dug into its skin, spraying blood and meat everywhere, unable to dodge because of how quickly she had moved.
As she lowered the gun slightly to see, she saw rivers of glistening dark blood running down from the high forehead of the Oni, into its eye and dripping down in its mouth. Its fat lips opened, and the Onihitokuchi screamed again in pain, a horrible sound that had goosebumps crawling up her spine.
I...hit it? She wondered, stupefied. She tried to ignore the twinge of guilt that wormed through her stomach at the thought. It wants to eat me. I don't care.
She couldn't care.
She spun around and ran as fast as she could, making a beeline for the shadowy crevices of the massive shipping crates. Her primal reasoning was, if the Oni was that large, it couldn't possibly fit through the narrow spaces between the crates that were just big enough for her to squeeze through, right?
Right.
She didn't hear the Oni following her as she pressed herself back to the metal of a large green crate. It was still moaning in pain, that much she could hear. Her chest heaved as she struggled to breathe properly, cursing her weak body. She was still jarred and feeling bruised from the sharp report of the gun.
Pai risked peering around the edge of the crate when it went abruptly quiet. The Oni was gone. It was no longer there. There was only a dark puddle of sluggish-looking liquid where it was. For such a large creature, she didn't even hear it move. She jerked back and stared wide-eyed all around her for any sign of it.
She was in a tight little space, barely able to fit through it herself. Unless the Onihitokuchi could shapeshift – and, if she remembered right, it was rare for Shimo Oni to possess such a powerful ability – she was safe, for now.
But she was stupid, so stupid. How could she run out like that? She stood a chance of finding a way out of here before, wherever 'here' was, but now she was screwed.
She tipped her head back against the crate and closed her eyes as burning tears ran down the sides of her face. She should have realized that it was a trick. Even without knowing what exactly she was supposed to be running from, she should have realized it wasn't Shiori. She woke up here, alone, with no sign of anyone else around. Shiori wouldn't be here.
She just – she was just scared, so scared, that Shiori might be here, that all rational thought fled her mind and she bolted.
She opened her eyes and looked at the gun cradled in her arms. She was overcome with an almost irresistible urge to laugh.
She was dead. She had basically just killed herself. She had just shot herself in the foot, and now she was probably going to die, and this time she was not being a melodramatic teenager wary of entering high school; this time she was stuck in this building that didn't seem to have an easy exist she could find, with a man-eating demon that was hunting her.
After disappearing for three years, going through something traumatic enough that her once black hair turned white (because she knew such a drastic change was not normal), losing her memory and her whole family, this was it. Pai was going to die without ever filling in the blanks in her memories and finding out what happened to her after she disappeared, what happened to her family, why they all suddenly vanished in the first place.
She wanted to kick herself in frustration at how utterly stupid and useless she was, if only the tiny space she was hiding in would allow it.
"Pai, Pai, hurting. Pai, Pai, why? It's going to be all right."
The Oni was close. Somewhere to her right, perhaps even just around the corner.
She slid out from her hiding place as quietly as she could and ran to hide in yet another space, deeper in the maze of crates on the other side of the room, between two that had at least three other crates piled on top of them, just beside the large windows. As she crossed the empty, naked space from one spot to the other, she wanted to be quiet, silent, to not give herself away, but she didn't know how to do that without slowing to a snail's pace.
There was a sudden hissing sound that came out from out of nowhere. It was like a cat rising itself up to provoke a threat. Her heart leaped to her throat and she stopped running, spinning around and keeping her finger clenched tight around the trigger as she swung the gun madly around, firing at anything that moved. She only saw a brief shadow darting on top of one of the crates, a whipping tail, and then the Onihitokuchi backed away into the shadows.
"Leave me alone!" she screamed. She heard the metal casings of the bullets hit the ground, and she stopped before turning and running between the crates. She gasped as she struggled to breathe normally, heart pounding in her chest. Her legs shook so bad she felt like she was going to collapse any second.
She frowned fiercely as her mind sped up, trying to piece the impossibility of this happening at all. Why hadn't her aura kept the Onihitokuchi away? Kouta told her that Yori Chiisai wouldn't be much of a bother to her because there was a distinct repelling factor to her aura. At least, the weaker ones shouldn't have been able to get to her, and so far, that had proven to be true.
But why wasn't it keeping the Onihitokuchi away from her? Why was it hunting her? Why did it so fixedly want her?
Had...did it manage to get past her aura because it was Shimo Oni? Because it wasn't truly Ayakashi, but another kind of supernatural creature altogether? Was it that her aura only served as a shield against Ayakashi alone?
If that was the case...except for this gun, she had absolutely no other defence.
She slid the magazine out of the gun (how did she know how to do that? How?) and let out a shaky breath of relief. It was still comfortingly full despite her mad shooting seconds before. But she had to be careful – she didn't have any more bullets. She didn't even know why there was a gun in this place to begin with.
Pai stopped breathing when there came a sound somewhere off to her right. Slowly, she turned her head and looked off into the gloomy distance. It was too dark for her to tell what was making the sound. It was different, though, from any sound that she had heard the Onihitokuchi make so far. It sounded like a cat scratching on a wall.
Her heart thudded in her chest. She held her breath and slowly peeked out, looking around.
The warehouse, if not for knowing already, seemed empty. A massive, empty space, full of crate and entirely devoid of life besides for Pai and the Oni hunting her. The stone coffin she was trapped in remained where it was, the lid resting heavily on the ground where it fell. Her eyes bounced past the coffin, trying to quell the sliver of fear that weaselled its way in at the memory of being trapped inside. The light in the little kitchen was still swinging around as the force of the wind from the windows blasted it from side to side.
She paused.
The windows.
She cautiously tiptoed out from her hiding spot and approached the edge of the window, closest to where she hid. It was closed. Pai held the gun under her arm as she twisted the handle and tried to push it open, but it wouldn't budge. She moved to the window next to her, but got the same result. She glanced back behind her, but she saw no sign of the Onihitokuchi. She continued down the line of windows, trying to open each one and failing to.
They were all shut tight, impossible to pry open. The only windows that were already open were halfway up to the top, almost double her height. Unless she had superhuman strength and could drag one of the crates closer to climb it, or jump that height, there was no way she could get to them.
Her lips tightened as she retreated a few steps, looking behind to make sure the Oni wasn't waiting for her to back right into its talon-tipped arms. She raised the gun and took aim for the windows.
If she couldn't open the windows to get out, she would shoot the glass to break them. She would make her way out. She was not going to die here.
Just as she pulled the trigger to blast her way out of the warehouse, something thick, slimy, and scaly whipped around her ankle, lifting her high into the air right above the open, gaping mouth of the Onihitokuchi.