Was I seriously supposed to believe that this bloodsoaked tiger-skin sash was what she implied it to be? Or the hand of the rhesus macaque?

Of course, my mother freaked out at the sight of this bloodstained petrified detritus, which summoned my father back to us to make sure we were safe. I showed my father the sash and hand, then told him about the dream and the geass given to me, but I kept both a secret from my mother. Neither of us wanted to cause her worry.

I told my father that I suspected this stalker was not in the house or anywhere I had seen her previously. However, I didn’t know what powers she might have. Spatiokinesis might explain the displacement of her image and the conjuration of these two items, but it could not explain the nightmare that held me hostage. It couldn’t have been illusion casting either, as the material evidence of this event occurring was in our presence.

I did not sleep that day. I stayed up, weapon in hand, with my father to guard the home, but nothing strange happened. That was what I was hoping for. I didn’t exactly have a plan of action if anything happened.

Throughout the night, we watched the news. It mostly spoke about the ongoing disaster to the north, along with some investigative journalism into that foreign magical girl. The section regarding our mystery woman consisted mostly of interviews with people who claimed to have been saved by her. Included in this was an analysis of footage from the City of New Providence in America.

Considering her obscurity, this coverage resulted in almost nothing. Most of the news was speculation about kaijū, metahumans, the GSSDO, and worries about unknown future consequences of the recent disaster, as well as the ongoing searches for missing persons.

In the morning, my father trusted me enough to excuse himself to make breakfast before my mother woke up. She awoke just as father was finishing with the preparations to partition the food. We all ate together in the living room with the TV on, tuned to the NHK, which broadcast more of the same throughout the day.

We each had our own bowls of steamed white rice and miso soup, as well as a plate with small, grilled, salted salmon and tamagoyaki. We all shared a plate with tsukemono, nori, a bowl of natto.

Because of my biological nature, I had a sped-up metabolism and hypercarnivorous proclivities. So, my parents always tried to cook some red meat and even use the blood to create some homemade snacks for me. Today, my loving father provided me shabu-shabu.

I ate out of a bowl, which I accidentally shattered back in elementary school, which my father restored in the style of kintsugi. Overlaying the fragmentation lines with gold to beautify, rather than conceal, the newly mended cracks.

I thanked my father for the meal, but there wasn’t much to do afterwards other than watch the news. We had nowhere to be since all the schools shut down, along with most businesses, due to the obliteration of the veil separating the mundane from the supermundane.

In one day, we had our first encounter with kaijū, superheroes, and secret militaries. Furthur complicating matters, we now knew that, unbeknownst to the mundane world, devil practitioners were in our future.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that hanyō girl towards whom my thoughts turned when talking to the troll.

So instead of ruminating on it all day, I reminded my father, “Remember what I told you… about yesterday and earlier today? About the troll I met and his warning about powerful devils crossing the veil… About the Lich…”

My father asked me, “Do you trust him?”

I confessed, “Yes. He’s an earnest one who seems to harbor a tremendous love for the human species. He even seems to collect human books relevant for religious education.”

My father found this strange and simply said, “Is that so?”

I did not think to confess this next part when we last talked.

I explained, “I believe him to be Catholic, and the little girl he protects to be his adoptive daughter.”

My father chuckled, “A Catholic troll? Like from a medieval fairy tale?”

Invoking recent events, I asked him, “I know, right… but is it any stranger than a magical girl with manga superpowers, or a kaijū from tokusatsu film, or secret paramilitary organizations out of a spy-fi thriller?”

I reminded him, “His claim about a operating necromancer seems to be bolstered by the mystical modifications I found on the gashadokuro I slew.”

My father pondered my observations and asked me, “What are you driving at?”

I came clean. “I’d like to check up on Mari and make sure she’s okay.”

My father asked me, “You’re disturbed at the prospect that you might have to defend human beings from something that takes part, even if only partly, in the human nature?”

I confirmed his suspicion. “Precisely, but other than that, I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

She was one of the sweetest girls I’d ever met, but only I knew about the extremely disturbing and predatory undercurrent within her subconscious, stemming from her yōkai heritage. An original sin which I understood all too well myself.

He advised me, “If you’re worried about Mari, then you have my permission to check on her in person. I’ll hold the fort here, but be careful. If the world really is becoming something like a manga, then we still don’t know the parameters of the hitherto untold recently manifested. And no matter how powerful you are, you’re still our daughter, so while we trust your judgment, we still worry about you. Go there and come back. If you need to make any detours, and it is safe to do so, keep us in the loop.”

I accepted these terms, suited up in my armor, and glamoured myself to appear in my civilian guise, then tried to leave, remembering to take my Ryūseiseki with me.

Before I could go, my father pointed out, “Remember, Momo… Mari may be half-human, but she’s also half-yōkai. She takes part in the same nature that you do. It would do you well to consider what that means for you as a yōkai, a hunter of monsters, and as the daughter of men.”

I promised him, “I’ll think upon it, father.”

Then I left. I ran, as I thought that might help to clear my mind from the horrific events of the last two days. I made my way through the city, and while passing through, I heard the distant sounds of chaos: screaming, crying, the sound of metal crumpling, glass shattering, and what almost sounded like a bomb.

It took me a moment, but I changed course towards the sounds of terror. As much as I couldn’t bear to worry my beloved mother and father, I couldn’t stand by and let people die. So, while I ran there, I texted them that I had an emergency to help with and needed to make a slight detour.

It took me five minutes to arrive, and I approached the scene through the backroads and alleyways, where I dropped my guise to protect my identity.

Upon arriving, I saw that there was a sharply dressed college student with the physique of a bodybuilder and pleasing physiognomy. He whispered to a woman and her son to stay calm and stay out of sight in the alleyway.

Turning away from them, almost as if about to enter battle, he placed his right hand on the ground and the pavement beneath him ripped itself from the ground to encase him in what appeared to be powered armor. An armor composed of concrete held together and animated through telekinetic power.

A barrage of unseen projectiles seemed to crumple cars like paper, smash windows, and cause a part of the wall near him to collapse. The man, clad in powered armor, understood that the debris threatened the woman and child. Instinctively, he leaped into action and covered them, saving them from being crushed. However, this cost him time to respond to the active threat as he struggled to return to his feet, despite being unharmed.

That terrorist ranted to the crowd, “Traditional humanity has oppressed metahumans since time immemorial! We are the proletariat forgotten by the Marxists, Feminists, Postcolonialists, and Queer Theorists! Don’t you see!

“The seal was never real! It was a structure of oppression interlocking with capitalism, the patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and language itself! We must take hold of this nation! Move the hands of the clock forward with our siddhis, through which we can control the flow of time!

“Through the creation of the perfect state and the purging of dissidents, we can become the agents of History that move humanity forward into the utopia which is the end of History! We simply must do the work!”

I parkoured up the walls of the buildings I was between, trying to cause as minimal damage as possible. The unbearable screaming and crying amidst the occasional crashing sounds was overwhelming, but I had to move carefully. This was unlike any devil attack I’ve ever experienced before. There were more hostages, wounded, and dead, all concentrated together than I was used to.

So, I tried to sneak a peek over the roof to get a look at the situation from above. While attempting this, the wall over which I stood exploded beneath me, which forced a quick retreat. I hopped across rooftops on the opposite sides of the buildings and made my way towards the assailant.

The lunatic ravings continued, “The problem with the revolutions of the past is that under human power, it was doomed to be perpetual. But with siddhis, the finite can grab the infinite through actualized supertasks! We can achieve what no human powers ever could!

“Don’t you see? The first contradiction is identical to the last. But we can only find the resolution once all the contradictions in between, which are naught but fragments of that first and last contradiction, are themselves resolved! Until we truly understand that ‘As above, so below!’”

That bloodthirsty utopianism never died. How could you engage in a conversation with someone to relinquish their delusional aspirations when they believe a Logos beyond this world has enlightened them?

You can’t use the logic of this world, for they believe that their gnosis, bodhi, or critical consciousness transcends empirical science and constitutes the “True Science”. Which would make the science of the empiricists a false science unworthy of participation.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

That quick glance taught me something: he has some sensory augmentation, but I couldn’t guess its nature. There was no time to wait. I could smell enough blood from enough people to know that this was a mass casualty event, and that there were people who needed immediate help. But so long as this terrorist was active, emergency medical services could not reach them. Luckily, that momentary glance told me enough to know that he was closer to my side of the street. So, I used my superhuman senses of hearing and smell to leap to guess his location, then I bounded to the building, which was immediately behind him.

I thought that if I could get Ryūseiseki to punch through the ground next to him, then the atmospheric shock and disturbance of the ground should disorient him long enough for me to restrain him.

I refused to kill a human being under any circumstances. This was because I lived in extreme fear that my ancestral bloodlust from my biological heritage might manifest in a manner outside my control.

Deep within me was something evil, horrid, and draconic that is not me, yet speaks demonic temptations directly into my subconscious. I was deeply aware of this not-me-within-me through its effects on my consciousness and behavior. It is analogous to Leviathan or Tiamat, the primordial dragons of formless chaos, exploiting the weaknesses of my beliefs, guilt complexes, anxieties, defense mechanisms, and hypercarnivorous biology.

A worm that seeded intrusive thoughts of unspeakable hematophagic, hematolagnic, anthropophagolagnic, and somnophilic depravity into my mind.

But there was something else, which I assumed I inherited from my human parents, that spoke against this brainwyrm. Another serpent, which was not me, compelled me, through my conscience, to act according to the will of Heaven to the best of my knowledge. It told me that the cultivation of benevolence (慈) and love (愛) was an imperative.

Was this interpenetrating serpent the result of karmic impressions aggregated from past lives, the circumstances of my birth, and the blessings of my loving adoption? Was this deathless serpent a manifestation of buddhadhātu (仏性) in my subconscious responding to the light of wisdom-compassion radiating from the pure lands (淨土) and seeding information teleologically oriented to one day actualizing soteriological potential and casting off not only this ātman but that of others too?

I knew a young half-Sotonarukami named Mari, who was a raised as a devout Protestant. She too had unholy temptations derived from her hanyō blood, but she likened this benevolent other inside her to the bronze serpent of the Exodus: the agent of that God who allegedly became human and commanded his angels to defend that creation he unfathomably loves from every evil by placing some new law into the hearts of men to repel infernal vipers spewing spiritual cardiotoxins.

Or was this Cādūceus, explained by Sakurai’s Tenrikyō faith, of which I knew nothing?

I had no answers, but I knew I had to lean into its instinctual moralizations, lest I become one of the very monsters I spent my time defending my beloved humanity from.

Peeking over the edge, I saw he was facing away from me, and I took my chance. I leaped into action from atop a building, hoping to get the drop on him. However, he seemed to notice me, and right before I could throw Ryūseiseki mid-swing, a devastating force unlike anything I’ve ever felt before hit me in the shoulder. Whatever it was, I didn’t see it coming, and it ripped my weapon out of my hand. His attack knocked me off course and spun me like a top, but I landed on my feet, albeit on some poor sod’s car. I felt dizzy and wobbled, which presented an opening that the villain took advantage of.

This villain seemed to produce overpressure shockwaves, which could crush cars. Initially, he seemed to assume that I died, which would have happened had I been human. I was momentarily stunned, but when I recovered, I made the mistake of running towards him. He noticed me and instinctual assumed that I had some durability augmentation, which convinced him to target me specifically. Each new hit did more than stun me, as he repeatedly knocked me off my feet, torqued my spine, smashed me into pavement, cars, and even a telephone pole. Superhuman strength or running speed means little without a foundation. His wrath was a barrage of devastating aerokinetic bolts that crushed my steel armor and left me no time to anticipate or defend against this merciless maelstrom.

Coughing up blood, barely able to see, deafened by the repeated concussions, and with bones ringing like a bell throughout my body in pain, I was in a horrifying position. The slight light bending properties of his ammunition made it theoretically possible, but utterly unfeasible, to spot the bolts before it was too late to do anything about them. Because of this, the villain ragdolled me from a distance while he continued his speech.

Initially, these attacks came from his direction, then they came from above me, almost as if to pin me to the ground. My face, chest, shoulders, hands, arms, feet, legs were all slammed into the ground as if they were being struck with sledgehammers fitted with explosive charges.

In desperation, I decomposed into superheated smoke. That proved to be a disastrous choice. My smoke form was easily dissipated beyond my control by his unrelenting barrage of atmospheric attacks. It was so relentless that he prevented me from pulling myself together and controlling my movement. This mistake carried potentially lethal consequences, because the temperature of my superheated smoke could easily cause injuries such as electrical and thermal burns to human skin.

I knew I could repair the damage to my body by reconstructing myself from the smoke, which was one reason I tried this. However, like a muscle, this power was subject to exhaustion when overexerted. So, even if I succeeded, I’d quickly have to transform back into smoke to escape the brutal and savage beating I transformed to escape. Unfortunately, I had no proper plan on how I was going to escape my assailant’s unyielding assault. I was used to being able to anticipate what my enemies were capable of through bestiaries and demonological lore, but how could you predict the powers of a metahuman?

I panicked when suddenly I heard and felt a loud BANG, like cannon fire. Suddenly, the barrage stopped, and I reassembled myself in an utter frenzy. When I was in my smoke form, the heat of my smoke made the metal of my warped armor malleable enough that I could guide it back into wearability as I pulled myself together. It cooled off while I finished my solidification, as I drew the heat from the metals back into my body.

Looking around, I realized what had happened. The man in the improvised power armor had repositioned himself into a building. He constructed an arm cannon from his concrete exoskeleton and ended the fight with a single move. His shot punched through the window, tore through the villain’s chest, and then bounced off the wall behind the terrorist with enough force to dent the hood of a parked car.

This caught me so totally off guard that I didn’t know what to do. After reconstructing my body, I instinctively ran towards the terrorist. However, long before I got to him, it was clear that he died within seconds, if not instantly.

As I made my way to the corpse, I saw the dead bodies and critically injured patients. People who were hitherto hidden from my view by cars, debris, and my disorientation from getting utterly mollywopped by someone who almost certainly had no combat experience.

I heard a language I recognized, though only for words I had heard uttered by a friend. Someone was speaking in Latin. It was an African American Catholic priest who had been crippled by an attack from that terrorist. He called upon the intercession of his God and his army of angels for the sake of the criminal and his victims alike. Despite having lost his right arm and both legs, he directed medical personnel to help everyone else before even considering himself. He himself was only alive because of the quick thinking of someone in the crowd who made a series of makeshift tourniquets for him.

This terrorist’s violence was horrifying. His power shredded many of his now deceased victims’ internal organs, leaving them a sanguine mess with blood pouring out of their mouth, eyes, and ears.

Many of the living victims suffered shattered bones and internal hemorrhaging. Depending on whether he smashed them against a strongly resisting surface or not, he eviscerated some victims so horribly that it was impossible to tell where their body ended and another’s began.

The police and emergency medical services swarmed the scene to attend to the wounded and ensure that the villain was, in fact, dead. I moved to assist in any way I could, and while my monstrous appearance disturbed the people I sought to aid, most people quickly figured out that I meant no harm and only wished to help. Mammals were strangely adept at figuring this kind of thing out, and humans were the pinnacle of mammalian intelligence, after all.

The commanding officer approached me and asked for a word.

I obliged, and after we moved out of the way, he slapped me across the face and scolded me, “What did you think you were doing? Did you have a plan?”

He seemed unperturbed by my alien appearance.

He pressed me, “Why did you think we didn’t go in yet? You almost got yourself killed because you couldn’t use some goddamn common sense to consider that there might have been a reason the police were keeping a low profile! We already lost a sniper! You got lucky that your arrogance distracted him long enough for someone to put him down!”

I apologized for my arrogance.

I noticed that the second in command seemed distracted, and I turned to see that the man who shot this murderous youth had exited the building, still in his armor, with his hands up as if to signal surrender. The police interviewed him while I was subjected to a verbal dressing down. From what I could see and hear, the police did not deign to arrest him, and he gave them a business card with which they could contact him in the future. Of course, he stayed to help with what he could. Afterward, he returned to where he obtained the materials used to construct the armor and returned the material comprising it to its original configuration.

After cleaning up was done, I found the man who ended this rampage, and I meekly asked him, “Are you the man who took the shot?”

He answered truthfully, “Unfortunately, I am.”

I asked him, “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you kill him?”

He returned my question with, “Didn’t you try to kill him?”

He seemed genuinely confused at my line of inquiry.

I confessed, “No. I meant to use my kanabō to punch a hole in the ground next to him… to stun him so I could restrain him.”

He asked, almost amused, “You don’t have the heart to kill?”

I lied, “No. Or, at least, I hope I don’t.”

He softly challenged me on that, “Well, to be frank. I hope you’re mistaken… I didn’t catch your name?”

I lied to protect my identity, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what false identity I used. It was honestly probably ripped from an old manga I didn’t expect him to have read.

His face expressed amusement as he said, “Alright. Keep your secrets. My name is Takachiho (高千穂), and it’s a pleasure to meet you. Although, I wish I’d have met such a lovely girl under better circumstances.”

His sudden playfully flirtatious demeanor did not have time to sink in as he deigned to take his leave and go home. His strange introduction lead me to believe that he concealed his full name in response to me concealing my identity. Which meant that he knew I was lying.

I was lucky that there was some subset of metahumans whose powers permanently disfigured them into inhuman forms from within the womb, and that some of those could change their shape. This allowed me to pretend that I was such a heteromorphic human being with transforming abilities. As luck would have it, the traditional humans simply assumed that if kaijū and metahumans were both real, then such heteromorphic kaijin (怪人) might also exist as a type of metahuman. So, most traditional humans just assumed I was a metahuman kaijin.

I gave my statement to the police, and they let me go. After which I found and recovered my kanabō and left the scene. People in the streets and in the buildings recorded everything on their phones. This, combined with the fact that the news had already arrived and that the criminal was careful to not damage any security cameras, meant that almost every facet of this incident was caught on video and photo. The cat was out of the bag now. Certainly, reporters would show my face in their videos, articles, and podcasts, and that this would spread across the nation. So, I counted myself lucky that I had the wherewithal to drop my secret identity before entering the fray. I also considered the possibility that the police did not probe into my identity to protect me from the potential risk of assassination from the superstitious.

The thought of there being a formerly closeted metahuman within the police force who might have explained the dangers of exposing metahumans to the public crossed my mind as I made my way towards Mari’s home. Now under the cover of my alter ego guise, and after taking some time to ensure no one followed me. Any thought of confronting my harasser from yesterday evaporated. I was much too unprepared to deal with lowly metahumans, despite my two years of experience in killing devils.

Eventually, I arrived at my destination. Little miss Mari had been praying for me after seeing the fiasco on the news. While there, a brass-monkey sculpture, made in a manner evocative of the Jōmon dogū, caught my eye as an odd decoration.

Thus began several lives of ever-increasing, often man-made horrors beyond my comprehension. Where night terrors and subtly parasitic dreams manifest to test the very soul of being itself. Stories wherein we must confront Gnostic wizards, whose demiurgic “Scientia” sought to subvert all realities. To transform themselves into Gods, for whom all thoughts become real and who could therefore speak into being any hellish utopian fantasy they so desired. Wizards who desired to recreate mankind in their own vainglorious image.

The greatest of which was the Author, the invincible anti-God whose only challenger was that Supergod she beloved so much despite their impassible opposition to each other.