Yukari yawned as Wiki and I stared at her, open-mouthed. Nazrin tilted her head. I knew Wiki was thinking the same thing as myself.

I’d only played a few Touhou games. Even so, I knew that Touhou games all had five levels and an extra stage, with six bosses total. It was perhaps the most reliable aspect of the series. That Yukari thought I’d face six opponents while resolving her ‘incident’–the canon name for the events that spurred each game!–could only mean one thing.

I was the main character after all!

Wiki didn’t seem as enthused about it as I was. In fact, I could smell cooking meat.

“You’re going to die,” said Wiki.

“Main characters don’t die,” I countered.

“Actually, in Touhou, you die hundreds or thousands of times before completing a game. And you’re going for the extra stage!” If I were playing easy mode, it would have only been five steps. “What are the chances a scrub like you gets it right on the first try?”

“I’m not a scrub!”

“Essentially zero,” said Yukari with a smile. She yawned again. “But failure won’t mean death… not as long as everyone follows the rules, and you don’t fail too many times.”

“How many?” asked Wiki.

“Eh, a hundred and fifty or so.” Yukari waved her gloved hand. “I don’t have a calendar handy.”

“One,” said Wiki, “That’s terrible for planning. Two, can’t you use your power to look literally anywhere? There’s got to be a calendar somewhere in Gensokyo!”

“Not one with my schedule on it,” said Yukari. She smiled at us a little dreamily. “Ran’s been busy recently. I’m going to sleep on this and tell you more tomorrow.” Without another word she disappeared into a gap.

Wiki turned to me. “You’re dead but slowly.”

“Maybe we can form a club?” I suggested.

His fear smell worsened. It was the middle of the night, and Yukari was out of commission. It was a time of great danger, irrespective of how hard it would be to complete her challenge. I looked at the sky.

“It’s early for Yukari to sleep, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah…” said Wiki. “It’s still several hours until midnight. Hmm.”

I saw a distant light move, and my hair stood on end, but before I could point it out it was gone. There were no planes or satellites in Gensokyo, so I thought perhaps it had been a fairy. I wondered if it had been a meteor.

“Well, I think I’ll go home now,” said Nazrin. We followed her toward the gate. “If you ever need anything else found, send for me. And arrange payment ahead of time.”

“I lost my hat,” I said.

“Try again with more money,” she responded as she walked away and ahead of us.

“Darn,” called Wiki. “I was hoping the next one would be ‘on the mouse!’” She didn’t respond. Instead she lifted into the air and flew, presumably so she could cover ground faster. The pun helped Wiki calm down, at least, and the smell of his fear receded with Nazrin. I wondered if ‘social anxiety’ was close enough to fear for me to taste it.

As soon as Nazrin was out of mind-reading range (old habits die hard) I spoke to Wiki.

“What were you thinking?” I demanded. “Those puns were awful!”

“I…” he said. “I don’t know. Sometimes things become humorous through repetition alone, don’t they?”

“No.”

“I figured I’d already fucked things up, so I couldn’t possibly make it worse.” He made a face. “I’ll try not to make that mistake again. At least Reika likes puns.”

“Thank goodness,” I said. I wondered if she was just humoring him.

We walked through the gate. Ichirin had been dozing, but Unzan flicked her cheek and told her to get up. The temple guard closed the gate behind us. Remilia was leaning on the wall and examining her nails. The ground nearby was full of suspicious holes, as though someone had been playing with an oversized lawn dart.

Raghav was on the ground at the vampire’s feet.

“What happened?” asked Wiki. He bent down to examine the Indian man.

“Watch your tongue!”

“What happened, Lady Scarlet?”

“I drained him of his blood,” said Remilia with an evil grin. For a moment the smell of freshly cooked meat worsened, but then Raghav shooed Wiki away as he sat up. “Not all of it, of course. Just enough to pay for a month or so of my protection.”

Raghav wobbled as he stood, but he straightened up and resumed his holier-than-thou good posture. He had two dark spots on his neck.

“Will he turn into a vampire?” asked Wiki. “Lady Scarlet?”

“No. That’s against the rules. Now let’s get you home before a monster attacks you.”

“Lady Remilia,” I said as we set off toward the human village. “I learned some things about manifesting Maroon again… but it’s complicated.”

“Save it for tomorrow,” said the vampire. I nodded. All the powerful youkai were procrastinators, I thought.

“Lady Scarlet,” said Wiki, “Would you make the same deal with me as with Raghav? Blood for temporary protection?”

Remilia smiled, frowned, then growled. Wiki stepped back.

“I don’t appreciate being manipulated,” she responded. “I will never make a deal with you like that!”

“My deepest apologies, my Lady,” he said with his hands up.

“I would drain your blood for free,” she added. “Just keep plotting and see what happens.”

“It won’t happen again! Not if I can help it!”

“What exactly happened?” I asked. I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d been thinking about how hungry I was.

“Well, if she said ‘yes’, it meant that my fate wouldn’t catch up to me within a month,” explained Wiki. “So I wouldn’t actually have to take the deal, because I’d know I was safe.”

“Is that what you think?” asked Remilia. “It’s worse than that. If I said ‘yes’ he would do something dangerous and get himself killed within a month, so simultaneously I sensed he wouldn’t take the deal and it wouldn’t be worth it. For me.” She shook her head. “Whatever you are thinking of doing on the way back? I have a suggestion: don’t.”

I gave Wiki a concerned stare.

“I was thinking of committing to various courses of action, and seeing Lady Scarlet’s reaction to guess whether they would get me killed. Just thinking of it!”

“I find it difficult to commit to things that will result in my demise,” said Raghav. “Not impossible, but extraordinarily difficult. Odd that it should be so easy to do by accident.”

“Yeah, admittedly it would be hard to have a positive test. I’d probably have kept escalating my plans until–”

“You are so headache-inducing,” said the vampire. “Stop thinking, or I will leave you to die!”

“I–I–I can’t!” sputtered Wiki. “And you promised you’d take me ba–”

The vampire jutted forward and scooped him up in her arms to carry him to the village at speed. Wiki’s yelp receded into the distance.

Raghav and I were alone. He stumbled and I caught him.

“Are you alright, buddy?” I lied. He wasn’t my buddy, pal, or guy.

“I think so,” he said. “She sucked me way harder than expected.”

I tried to ignore the turn of phrase. “She’s a vampire. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Yes, but I didn’t think she was that thirsty.” He rubbed his neck. “I am quite sure that she didn’t actually pierce my carotid artery. It was strangely… intimate.”

I considered telling him that I’d learned that Remilia didn’t experience lust, and decided against it, not because it was inappropriate for the conversation, but because it was inappropriate in every other sense.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to afford this every month,” I said instead.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I suspect the same,” he replied. “But at least this will keep me safe during the investigation.”

“Are you worried about retaliation?”

“Yes,” he said. “Miss Hakurei and Miss Kamishirasawa both told me to use caution. Independently. Apparently there’s a history of youkai seeking revenge preemptively.” He took a deep breath. “What’s more, is that Remilia wouldn’t allow me to work for her in an absolute sense… and given Wiki’s line of thinking, that is a very bad sign indeed.”

“You don’t say,” said a light that descended from the sky. Its form twisted until it became a black-clad trident wielding youkai. I struggled to identify her, but the circumstances triggered a memory of a group of monsters attacking humans at midnight.

A new smell filled the air, like spicy curry. I realized that my subconscious might be racist, and the smell shifted a bit but didn’t change all that much. Some part of me wondered if Raghav was afraid, or if I was the one with fear that smelled like chicken tikka masala.

I reminded myself that I distrusted Raghav for being snooty, well-dressed, arrogant, and perfect in almost every way, and also because he’d volunteered to be a police officer or detective or something, but not for being Indian.

“You are the attacker,” said Raghav. “Don’t try to kill us. We both know danmaku.”

“Sure, sure, but can you unbreak a promise?” asked the youkai. She looked at the three points on her spear. “I broke a promise, recently. Do you think it can get more broken?”

“You can’t unbreak a promise, but you can work toward forgiveness,” he replied. She laughed at him.

“My work is cut out for me already. I promise that I just came to talk. Nothing more!”

“Are you going to turn yourself in?” asked Raghav.

“No.”

“Miss Yakumo’s policy is forgiveness,” said Raghav with an unhappy expression. “Even for murderers, so long as they come to their senses before there are too many unnecessary deaths.”

“She’d have an empty land if it weren’t,” said the monster. She stabbed the ground and looked at me as she leaned on the trident. “No, I’m not here to negotiate a surrender. Instead I’m going to tell you some things, and in a way that hopefully doesn’t cause too much damage. To start with, Yukari hasn’t been forthcoming with you.”

I gasped. “No.” I couldn’t help myself.

The youkai laughed again. “Sarcasm is my favorite human activity! That, and watching them flee in terror.”

“Don’t youkai have sarcasm?” I asked. I tried to recall Sekibanki, Satori, or Patchouli being sarcastic, and I realized the librarian drank the stuff like kombucha. It definitely wasn’t a human-exclusive.

“No, we are all deadly serious,” said the mysterious youkai. “Stop distracting me. Yukari’s masterplan is straightforward, and when you hear it you’ll be shocked at its simplicity!”

“Let’s hear it, then,” said Raghav.

“Yukari is the most powerful youkai in Gensokyo. She has been for hundreds of years. But that kind of power takes work, like maintaining a forest. Sometimes you’ve got to clear some brush, or cut a tree down. And I’ll give you a hint: Yukari doesn’t consider herself a fucking tree.”

“She is very tall though,” I said. I was trying to distract her. We’d have a much better chance of subjugating her if she hung around until Remilia came back.

“True! Anyway, the land of fantasy has never had its brush cleared, if you take my meaning.”

The youkai wiggled her trident under her hands as she leaned on it. She wasn’t acting like a murderer, she was acting like a gossiping teenager. She looked young, but I suspected she really wasn’t, like most of them weren’t.

“Yukari’s been slowly reducing the flow of human emotion, so we’ve all been getting colder and hungrier. When we’re finally too weak to fight back, that’s when she’ll kill most of us and start over.”

“Why?” I asked. For all of her callous disregard, Yukari hadn’t expressed even an ounce of anger or contempt. I couldn’t imagine why she’d go to all the trouble of making a place like Gensokyo and filling it up only to kill its inhabitants. (Unless they were humans, that is.)

“Youkai are like, oh,” the youkai made a pinching motion with her fingers. “What are the crustaceans you humans ate to extinction?”

“Crabs?” Technically autonomous fishing drones had done the dirty work. It had been too profitable to be stopped, when crab meat increased in value to a thousand dollars a plate.

“Yes!” she said with a snap. “And Gensokyo is like a bucket. Normally we fight each other and nobody gets ahead. But Yukari is a coward, and the other youkai have been nice to each other recently. She’s afraid that we’ll get together and do something to oppose her.”

“So that’s why you are getting together to oppose her!” She was forcing their hand. It made a frightening amount of sense.

“Exactly! And that’s why she’s trying to starve us. To keep us down. But the bucket is going to overflow, or actually it’s a shrinking bucket…” the youkai shrugged. “Metaphors only get you so far. The point is, we’re gonna jump out and pinch the fuck out of her the first chance we get!”

“Where does the mass migration fit into all this?” I asked.

“You’ve got to feed the jailers,” said the youkai, her expression turning dark. “Yukari’s lackeys eat well, because there will always be rewards for the enforcers.” She looked at Raghav and spat. “That bitch brought a load of humans who weren’t even afraid of youkai at all and pretended like it was a favor! As if we wouldn’t notice the taste of poison!”

Sekibanki had claimed that our fear was poisonous for a different reason, but maybe she had been confused. Or maybe she’d lied to me… but I didn’t think so. I trusted Sekibanki, at least a little bit.

“Not a favor…” said Raghav. “Either way, your plight doesn’t excuse murder.”

“Oh, but it does,” she said. “We need your fear to remain strong. That’s the second thing I wanted to tell you about.” She pulled her trident from the ground and leapt backward and up into the air. “We’re going to come into the village to kill someone, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

“When?” he asked.

“Sooner than you think,” she said with a grin. I wondered if she meant that very night. I remembered that Sasha and Arnold were still in the village without us, and my stomach writhed with worry. The mysterious youkai turned to me, her grin widening.

“We’ll oppose you,” Raghav said.

“Good! See that you do, and maybe we’ll have a reason to kill a few extra! Hah!” She was lifting into the air. “Tell all your friends. Especially Yukari. Until next time, toodle-loo–”

“Perfect Golden Bullet!” shouted Raghav.

“Conviction Mines!” I shouted at the same time.

“Sons of bitches!” She flew off at high speed, a golden sphere of danmaku trailing after her. “We’ll wait one month and a day, asshat, just so you are on the menu!”

“Damnit,” I said.

“She didn’t fall into our trap,” said Raghav.

“Eh?”

“There is no way we could beat her without Remilia’s intervention, of course. I was hoping she would stab one of us right away… I’m not sure that she’d come back, otherwise.” He looked at me. “I am the more skilled user, so perhaps it would be better if she stabbed you… but Lady Scarlet makes both of us irrelevant, I suppose.”

“Oh.” I’d forgotten about that, and also that Raghav was a jerk. “Yeah. By the way, will that thing follow her all the way back to her lair?” The yellow sphere disappeared into the trees.

“Sadly not,” he said. “It only lasts for a minute, and it is quite slow.”

“Why did you want a spell card like that, anyway?” I asked.

“I expected to be facing opponents who would keep their eye on the ball.”

—

The next day was Saturday and the four of us met up at the hut for lunch for nearly the last time. Soon we’d be moving into our new dorm. Miko had all but confirmed it with an announcement, to much fanfare. Part of me would miss the simple accommodations, but part of me wanted to be able to shower without getting naked in front of a bunch of other men.

Even if the new dorms only had closet showers, everyone was excited for flowing water. Arnold and Wiki had been ordered to spend the afternoon contributing to the effort to stand up a water tower on the mountain, one that was comically oversized according to Wiki. Sasha was also working that Saturday, by official edict. I had special dispensation to travel to the Scarlet Devil Mansion instead, although I’d spent the morning moving material waste to a large pit for burning and burial.

Even if we were working overtime, lunch could never be canceled. I explained what the trident youkai had said to me. Yukari might be listening, but that was probably fine given that the mysterious attacker had said to tell Yukari anyway.

“An interesting explanation,” said Wiki. “I wonder how much of it is true.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “It makes perfect sense. Yukari slows the flow of emotion from the Outside World. Then she brings in supplies–humans, that is–for the youkai who will bend the knee. She makes the humans take care of themselves for logistical reasons, and she protects them, but not too much. She wants to keep us officially “on the menu” because she wants as many youkai as possible to eventually surrender to her will.” As Sun Tzu said, leave a line of retreat for your enemies, and a fear-eating youkai’s line of retreat was ‘you can eat the humans after all.’

He nodded. “And Touhou fanatics will already know everything they are supposed to believe, so they’ll provide the right emotions faster than anyone else. That mostly tracks, and it suggests that Yukari doesn’t eat fear. But, if we are just food, why would Yukari make sure we had the option to learn danmaku?”

“Danmaku is practically the unit of energy in this ecosystem,” I said. “We are more like food if we produce it.”

“Except that then we don’t get eaten. I guess we’re chickens who lay eggs?” He was holding Emeff. “Or maybe we’re like dairy cows after all?” Sekibanki had made the exact same metaphor.

“Heh,” said Arnold. “Yukari is milking us.”

“That’s a fun mental image, thanks,” said Sasha.

“We are mitochondria!” Arnold flexed his bicep. “Humans are the powerhouse of Gensokyo!”

“But that just makes learning danmaku even more important,” added Sasha. She stared at Wiki. “You want to survive as you are fed upon.”

“Heifers rather than steers,” said Arnold.

“No no, let’s go back to the metaphor where we’re bacteria.”

“Subcellular structures,” said Wiki to correct her. “That is a hole in the theory, though. If danmaku is so efficient, why allow anyone who can’t use it into Gensokyo?”

“Not everyone has the aptitude,” I said, which was easy for me to say after the fact. “Maybe we can only be tested here?”

“‘I’ll kill you if you fail this test,’ is wildly unfair, but very motivating. You’d think Yukari would tell us!”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Also,” he went on. “Why not just keep drip-feeding them with criminals? Heck, if Yukari wanted to kill a disobedient youkai she could just kick ‘em out of Gensokyo. One portal and bam: nonexistence.”

“I’m glad someone here respects my power,” said Yukari from Arnold’s bunk. The purple youkai sat in a portal there, fanning herself without a care in the world. She got to her feet and fully exited the portal. For a moment it looked like Arnold’s bed had a sheet that was woven with eyeballs, or blotched with a purple stain.

“Care to deny the allegations?” asked Wiki with a quaver in his voice.

“As a rule I neither confirm nor deny any conspiracy theories about my own person,” said Yukari as she fluttered her fan. “Unless I feel like breaking that rule. Unrelatedly, I want to commend all four of you for learning danmaku and allowing my evil minions to milk you to the fullest.”

“Ew,” said Sasha as Arnold said ‘you’re welcome.’

“So it’s true…” said Wiki.

“I didn’t say that at all,” said Yukari.

“Wait, how do you know I can do danmaku?” asked Wiki. “Were you watching the attack after all?”

“I just got done not explaining this, Mister Sloan,” said Yukari. “Anyway, I’m not here to deal with or in disinformation, as fun as it might be. I’m here for Mister Thorne.”

I nodded. “We are going–”

I fell through the air and into a room full of books, demons, and fairies. It also had a witch.