I don’t think I’m stupid. You have to be a little smart to earn your own way in Manhattan. Got to have at least a bit of moxie, a bit of hustle and creativity. Or a lot of it. Usually a lot of it. So I don’t think I’m stupid. I will, however, admit that I don’t always think things through completely. That sometimes, rarely, I miss things.
In my defense, this was something of a black swan event. Not to mention that I had extremely limited experience in working with the Ghost Touch potion, and even less experience in fighting ghosts. And the mechanics behind the special abilities used by my Awakened are understood at an empirical level at best. While I can accept that the results are my fault as I was the one who gave the order, I really don’t think I can be blamed.
I mean, what do you think would happen if you shot ghosts with an arrow who’s special effect runs on the life force of monsters? Nothing, right? Two negatives makes a positive in math, but two hungry people don’t make a full person outside of a few select mid-western households. It just doesn’t work that way in real life.
Except… however real this world is… both physics and common sense were told to eat a fat one a long, long time ago.
Ever obedient, Miyuki lined up her shot. Her yard-long arrow was knocked, the string pulled back to her cheek, the glowing light doing wonders to make her look as bold as she was beautiful. With a soft release of her fingers, the long bow snapped forward, launching the glowing arrow through one, two, three densely packed Hungry Ghosts. Threading them on a skewer like dango. The Ghost Touch potion worked perfectly.
I might have expected an eerie whistling, something that directly jabbed its finger on the back of the brain stem on the pressure point labeled “Primal Terror.” What I got was chanting. Angry chanting.
Golden light burst from the arrow, as consecrated syllables thundered out. Choppy, primal sounds, each enunciated with care and filled with dense meaning. This was the sound of life, and life lived with discipline and contentment. Whoever was chanting had known desire, but overcome it. Had known hunger, but found something greater to fill themselves with. Something holy.
Whatever it was, the Hungry Ghosts treated the voice like it was their salvation. The three skewered ones knelt, not bothering about the arrow and raised their arms in worship. The rest of the ghosts mobbed around, dropping their ghostly spears and trying to touch the brilliant golden light pouring from the pinned monsters. The chanting got louder, more furious. Then, one of the surrounding Hungry Ghosts exploded.
I don’t have any other word for it. What do you call it when a ghost suddenly, violently, sheds all the pain and darkness it was carrying and becomes an enlightened spirit instead?
The Ghost were awful looking things. Human-ish, with too long arms and the bloated bellies that you see on children drowning in famine. Their hair was long, thin and stringy, hanging down to their shoulders. They stood naked, except for tattered loincloths made of leather. Their crude hunting spears hung loose in their hands as they watched, drooling, as one of their own shook off his desires, and ascended.
The glowing spirit had shaved its head and donned a clean golden robe. It sat in a lotus position, tapping a wooden fish as it added its voice to the chant. I could see another two ghosts struggling. Fighting to reach that warmth and fulfillment. It should have been a brutal, terrifying battle. A desperate fight in the fog against demons summoned from some of the most primal human fears. Instead, it was a moment of salvation. Healing. I don’t believe in miracles outside of Magical Girl Anime, but damn me if I didn’t feel like I was watching one at the moment.
It was at this point that Mrs. Hungry ate the converted ghost.
We were all standing there, frozen, watching the undead religious revival and Mrs. Hungry just… hopped right in there with her long hooks, lashed out and fished the chanting spirit up out of the mix. She held the insubstantial being above her head. As she tilted her head back, I finally saw her face.
Human cheeks and teeth and ears and a human nose and even her eyes were a human shape. It was all human shaped but there was nothing human in her. An empty person. The dip in the uncanny valley. Her eyes were wells of horror. Hunger. Insane hunger. Hunger beyond words. No wonder she bit on my lure so easily. Anything that could saite her even for a moment was to be eaten. Even if it wasn’t anything material.
She held the chanting ghost in the air for a long moment. Two more of the hungry ghosts converted, lightening the fog. I could feel something stirring on the mountain. The air was clearing, and that was making something furious. Then Mrs. Hungry dragged the chanting spirit down towards her mouth and ate it. She ripped pieces off with her hook, then bit the ghostly flesh away. She shoved her whole head into the immaterial body and simply consumed.
It was like watching a grizzly eat a deer, or a hornet eating a spider. Pure savagery. Not fury. Just a powerful need to eat, and a willingness to use the most brutal and direct means to get the food inside of them.
Something changed in Mrs. Hungry. Like an ounce of sulfur dropped in water. Something caught fire and there was no putting it out, and whatever was burning, whatever that change was, it made the mountain shake and a dreadful hissing noise rose, pressing down on us, on the chanting ghosts.
Miyuki fired another arrow and strung another three ghosts together. I nearly fell over. We had all been so paralyzed watching the show, I had forgotten to give my Awakened any orders. Miyuki had received her instructions, and was dutifully carrying them out. It was the rest of us who were standing around like idiots.
“Everyone not named Miyuki, form up in a circle! Something is changing around us, and I don’t want us getting ambushed. Miyuki, keep stringing them together. Move if something threatens you.”
I stood in the middle of the circle with Versai. I’m the obvious target, and it’s game over for everyone if I die. And naturally I made sure there was plenty of space for Versai to act if the need arose.
Mrs. Hungry was changing. There was a sense of boiling under her skin. She was filling out, but skin was sloughing off in rough sheets, Her lanky hair fell away in clumps as she ate more and more of the blessed spirit. The shaking of the mountain grew stronger, the sense of oppression building like a thunderstorm over dry prairie.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The second string of chanting ghosts sped up the conversion rate. More and more of the thirty Hungry Ghosts were converting, shedding their old forms and becoming monks. They sat in tidy rows, beating their wooden fish and chanting. Each syllable hammered on the oppressive force of the mountain, beating it back. The dull thock of the fish formed a steady line against the menacing hissing. Life against death. Courage against fear. Order against chaos.
The universe tends towards chaos.
I felt the earth shake under me, and through the writhing fog, I could see the grass field fracture. Cracks in the soil spread like shattering ice. Something impossibly cold shone up through them. Light the color of dry winter on concrete. Something terrible was being reborn into the world, or simply… revealed. An implicit truth made explicit.
Mrs. Hungry was melting like a candle under a blowtorch. Flesh ran down her bones, the blood and lymph steamed, boiled and spurted out of the collapsing meat, even the bones melted and ran into the awful slurry. She should have dissolved into nothing, but in the midst of the diabolical disintegration, new bones were growing. New flesh budded from bone marrow and flowered into muscle and organs. New skin stretched out, sliding under the skin that was sloughing away, trying to protect those newly stretched strands of muscle and sinew.
The cycle of creation and destruction repeated even as more and more ghosts converted and picked up the chant. Suppressing the chaos of the world with their steady chanting. Awakening those trapped in the grand illusion with the sound of their wooden fish. It was working. More and more ghosts were converting, the speed picking up, snowballing. This corner of the field was filing rapidly with a warm, golden light.
The earth pulled back from whatever had been below. I could see it now. Metal. Some sort of metal, scarred and corroded by time. A vast piece of something, something that radiated a terribly cold light. The last of the hungry ghosts converted, leaving only the skewered. Then even they converted, merging into beings with three heads and six arms. Each head chanted their holy mantra, while each hand proffered a different talisman or ritual weapon. Offering blessings, suppressing calamities.
The golden radiance was blinding. Overwhelming. And then Mrs. Hungry completed her transformation and the golden light overwhelmed me. I couldn’t see her form clearly. What I saw was the golden light strike the metal under the earth. The reflected light bounced off, reflected up into the sky.
Under the brilliant golden light of repentant cannibal spirits, the hidden moon was revealed.
Hanging in the sky was a piece of bone. As my mind slowly accepted what my eyes insisted was there, I saw more and more of the “moon.” It was the top of a skull. Battered, scarred, cracked, but unmistakably the bone dome that protected a mind. The reflected light grew on the moon, picking out details. The bone was spinning, twisting through the void. The fragment of the skull turned over, and
and
and it was a face. A bone face the size of the moon.
Not of any human species. Long, sloping. Holes on either side of the lower jaw where something once protruded. Broken teeth, some for grinding, others for ripping. In the middle of the face was a single vast hole- a cyclops skull? But there were two more holes above and behind it. Too far apart for human eyes. Vast. So vast. And it hungered.
“That’s not the moon.” I heard Rikka whisper from the shadows. “That’s not our moon. I exchanged cups of wine with the Young Lord in the autumn moonlight. He promised he loved me.”
“I was the little serving girl guarding him from the shadows. They were beautiful together, the moonlight erasing all bounds of class and propriety.” Miyuki whispered. “I failed them both.”
“I should have said no.” Rikka couldn’t take her eyes from the moon. “I should have said no. But I was drunk with love as we caught the moon in our winecups and I hungered to feel his silks wrap around me and feel his strong muscles and the warmth of his lips.”
“I was scared. I had killed for him, and watched him day and night, and guarded him against every shadow. But seeing the hunger in him, seeing how he lost his cares in the moonlight, shedding all propriety, how could I dare tell him no? How could I beg him to let the cooked duck fly away?” Miyuki asked.
“But that night, it wasn’t your Young Lord.” Yoko murmured from the side. “I know this story. It wasn’t your Young Lord. It was a monster sent down by the moon.”
From out of the glowing, golden light came a bitter laugh. “Oh child, that was a lie I told to make the story easier to swallow. It’s always so much simpler when it’s a monster. It was a man. Just a man, who revealed his monstrous nature in the moonlight. And for the fleeting pleasure of a prince’s perfect night, four women paid the price.”
The skull could see us. I don’t know how to explain that. It could see us. It was furious at us. This was its grazing land. It was a piece of something so vast, it wasn’t even physical. It was an extrusion, a principal bound into the readiest matter that was at hand. I could feel my mind fracturing under the weight of it. Hunger. Famine. And the derivatives of hunger- cruelty and desperation.
Something stretched down from the moon- some fragment of that principal. My mind was going faster now. I was standing on mountains of bones, the highest point in a charnel house and ossuary. I was in a mine, surrounded by moon-metal. I was a ghost doll, waving my little stick and directing the other little dolls to war against an ant colony. I was a furious grub, roaring my defiance at a wasps nest.
Something stretched down from the bone moon and I saw a man- elegant, his hair shiny and black, pulled back into a bun and hidden under a little cloth crown. His robes were moon white, his long bow made of yellow-gray bone. He smiled, heroic in the moonlight, hand reaching for the quiver hanging from his waist.
“The hunter’s daughter, the girl who served the wine, the cook who made the meal and her daughter who always said the wrong things. No one of consequence. No one who would even missed. But his Lordship wasn’t heartless. While the brave warriors of the clan struggled against the endless wave of monsters, we could find ourselves a refuge. A safe exile, where no honorable warrior would ever come. Hidden Moon Mountain.” Mrs. Hungry finished her story.
“WHY ARE YOU TALKING!” Someone screamed. It was a man’s voice. It kind of sounded like me, but all wrong. My voice didn’t sound like that. I wheezed when I tried to talk too loudly. I don’t like to shout except on Discord. I was too fat to get worked up like that. I don’t like this anime. I don’t like it. I want to watch something else. That bishonen with the bow was a bad guy, and not in a fun way.
“Kill him. RUSH THE BUM, PUT HIM ON THE GROUND AND KILL HIM! NOW NOW NOW!”
He fired his first arrow. I thought it would be at me. He aimed for Rikka. Still cleaning up his mistakes? But this wasn’t the real Young Lord, it was a drop of corrupted moonlight. The long arrow twisted through the air like a promise. Rikka saw it coming, bringing her dagger up and around. With a shout-
“REBUKE!”
The golden light from the figurine pushed out, strong enough to help her knock aside the arrow. Then Versai was on him. It was a ghost formed by the bone moon and the mountain. But we were well equipped for ghosts. And the monk ghosts hadn’t stopped chanting.
I could see the golden radiance settling down on the handsome man. The pale luster of his jade skin was revealed to be paint. His teeth were inky black. The white silk transformed from a court robe to a shroud. I wonder if he saw his emaciated face reflected in Versai’s shield as she charged in.
There were shapes twisting in the air. Other things struggled to manifest, but their way was blocked. The golden light of the ghost monks held them in place. Then Mrs. Hungry hauled them down.
I couldn’t see how she did it. Something reached out of the golden bonfire surrounding her and pulled, drawing the distortions in space towards her. And then they vanished. Eaten, exorcized, I don’t know.
Miyuki had raised her bow, but not drawn it back. Afraid of shooting a comrade. Everyone else had joined Versai and were dog piling the moon-monster. Rikka was behind it, her kunai flashing bright in the darkness. Versai was moving faster and faster, her sword hacking down with naked loathing. Rakim had set up on the side and was steadily putting rounds into the… thing.
Into the melee rumbled Othai. Last to get to the fight, but there was an awful lot of her when she got there. The halberd thrust forward, spear point ripping open a hole. The monster raised its bow to stop the follow up blow. It might as well have tried to stop a meteor with a moonbeam. The ax head swung down on the long pole. Smashed through the bow. And chopped deep between shoulder and neck.
Versai took the head off with a sharp blow from the other direction, and the flying head sprouted a yard long arrow.
There was a terrible shattering in the sky. I… lost track of time for a while. When I returned to sanity, a full moon shone brightly in the sky. The word VICTORY! Hung in the sky, as fireworks burst over the mountain.
I sat on the ground, trying to piece everything together. The ground was unreasonably hard. Metal. I rapped it with my knuckles. It made the most incredible ringing sound. Pure and beautiful, despite my ass being planted on it.
“Purified Moon-Forged Mithril. Rarity- Unique.” I read the tool tip out loud.
We had won. We lived. And we were sitting on a mountain of Mithril.
When my brain started working again, I was going to laugh and laugh and laugh.