My expedition continued. I fought my way through the Old Capital, going as quickly as I could so that I wouldn’t freeze to death. I could feel the drop in temperature as I approached Hot Springs Town and felt the thermodynamic effect of the vengeful spirits there.

“Are we going straight to them?” I asked. The crystal was pointing that way, despite the fact that we usually battled outside Yuugi’s bastion of power. I hadn’t been back since our daring escape.

“Yes,” came Patchouli’s voice. “You are less likely to be interrupted there.”

“Ahah.” Patchouli also suspected Marisa was on her way to cause trouble. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to show that to Human Town? There aren’t any children in the audience, right?”

“You are all children to me,” said Patchouli. “Keep in mind they can hear you, even if they cannot necessarily hear me.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said.

“It will be fine. You and Sasha were disgusted by what you saw there, were you not?”

“Yeah, but Sasha’s ace, and I’m a gentleman.”

Patchouli laughed over the psychic connection. “Is your best idea for protecting Human Town to conceal the truth from them?”

I thought of the loads of bullshit secrecy I had to wade through every day. Then I made haste toward Hot Springs Town. Within moments I was beset by oni. A surprising number of them were male.

“A man in a puffer jacket asks if you are bi,” came Nazrin’s voice over the communications crystal.

“Straight as an arrow,” I said. I preferred questions about danmaku and youkai, but shutting down the audience was a bad idea, especially after the argument between Marisa and Patchouli. “If I had to speculate on why the oni aren’t pretending to be female, it’s because they’re struggling to get a read on my preferences.” Other than gender, I struggled myself. I was disgusted but also fascinated by the oni. Athletic was attractive, but their slovenly and hedonistic ways also repulsed me.

“Hey!” said an oni with a wispy white beard. “I’m actually female.”

“Sorry,” I told her.

“It’s not a disability,” she said as she fired danmaku at me, her beard flailing wildly with her movements through the air.

“No–it’s–I meant for misgendering you!”

She didn’t seem to understand. Her body was masculine in every respect, but there was a breathiness to her voice that was the only hint she was pretending. It was the faintest sense of femininity I’d ever noticed. I blasted the oni with vectors and moved on.

Another human asked if the oni could change their appearance to look like anyone. I suspected not, or else they would have changed their skin from bright primary colors to ordinary human skin colors in their attempts to seduce me. After I explained that to the crystal I went ahead and asked an oni anyway.

“Pfft, no,” they said. “I can only look like myself.”

“That’s crap, though,” I said. “You can tune the breadth of your shoulders! And the depth of your cleavage!”

“Like this?” they asked. They grew more pronounced pecs. At some point they stopped being pecs.

“Kind of?” The oni’s chest just kept on growing for several seconds, which was distracting as hell.

“You can flex too,” said the oni. “It would probably be cute!” He was still shooting balls of danmaku at me. I returned fire, defeated him, and moved on as he deflated.

The oni had an imperfect transformation ability. They could control their height and even proportions, but not skin color or… it wasn’t quite bone structure, but it was something fundamental about their shapes. The only thing that was constant about the oni was their athleticism: none had gone overweight. That didn’t stop them from redistributing their fat in distracting ways.

Whatever their abilities, they weren’t just turning a knob labelled ‘gender.’ They expressed various aspects of physicality, all in their own way.

It had been a mistake to mention cleavage. The oni all attacked as females with exaggerated feminine features, hips and waists and all. I tried not to roll my eyes. I imagined that when I returned in a few days they’d try some variety again–but for now they had a very specific and wrong idea of how to trick me.

The oni weren’t very systematic in their approach. It would have made more sense for them to radiate outward to as many appearances as possible, to test my reaction to each. It was clear they’d never designed a search algorithm. The technicolor youkai weren’t cooperating with each other, so every single one of them had to try the same experiment before they believed the results–or so it seemed to me.

I flew through the fog of Hot Springs Town and over a wall with a shattered guardhouse. In moments I was above a series of stagnant and sulfurous pools, lambent vengeful spirits in lanterns, and naked oni. Hoshiguma Yuugi rose into the air to meet me, a wide grin on her face.

I shrugged out of my coat and started to pull off my snowpants mid-air. I did it quickly because the heat was sweltering, but I tried to be careful. If I dropped them I knew they’d fall into nasty water.

“Coming to me, this time?” asked Yuugi. “Have you decided you want to join us after all?”

“Against my better judgement, I have been convinced to survey this place once more,” I said. “As a guest.” I stuffed my outer layers into my backpack. Yuugi waited for me to take more clothes off. I didn’t.

“Tease.”

Down below, oni were fornicating in all kinds of combinations. It was oddly easy to ignore; maybe because my own dry spell had ended, or maybe because the hundreds of partially-nude oni attacks had desensitized me to any sexuality involving them. Who could say.

“I’m sure your audience appreciates the show,” continued Yuugi. “I hope they get an eyeful.”

“You know about that.”

“I heard it through the grapevine,” she said. She looked at the crystal. “Hello, Human Town!”

If they said hello back, it was not transmitted. Yuugi enjoyed being performative in any case. I expected the long-horned youkai to launch into a speech of some sort. She did, but the topic surprised me.

“We don’t want you among our number any longer, Jake Thorne. While you are welcome to visit Hot Springs Town… keep your hands off the goods.” She probably meant I shouldn’t eat the flesh of oni, not that I shouldn’t go in for a cuddle. I had no plans to do either.

“Odd. Your minions are still trying to seduce me.”

“Probably for good-ole-fashioned murder,” she said with a sharp-toothed grin. “Don’t worry. I told them they can’t kill you, either, so it’s just for practice.” She examined one of her short, unpainted nails at the tip of a finger that could break bones. “You may want to think about which limbs are your favorite just in case.”

A chill went down my spine. Perhaps the oni were less effective at seduction that day, not because I was inured to their overwhelming sexuality, but because some part of my intuition had detected their lack of sincerity. That both meant that my limbs were in danger and that before they had been sincere.

Yuugi was less desperate for recruits, now. It was a mystery worth following up on, I felt.

“Have you stopped cannibalizing each other, then?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said Yuugi.

“I don’t see any oni children,” I said as I looked down into the soupy, off-white water below. How were they replenishing their numbers?

“We prefer adoption,” said Suika as she pulled up beside Yuugi.

Her approach had been silent, and perhaps hard to see because of her size-changing powers. The smaller two-horned oni still looked as bedraggled as she had two days before, but her eyes were brighter and her eye sockets were less pronounced.

“Pregnancy makes it difficult to celebrate with abandon,” said Suika.

“So you can become pregnant?” I asked.

“What an odd way to propose,” said the short oni, covering her mouth.

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out how you’re offsetting your cannibalism.”

“Why would we have to?” asked Yuugi.

It was rhetorical; she began the battle right afterward. Red bullets with glowing penumbras burst from Yuugi. I wove back and forth, returning fire. Oni could count, right? They could notice their numbers dwindling through cannibalism? They had to have some sort of response, or else Yuugi was a terrible leader.

Yukari’s influence and control was diminishing every day. The oni could start making raids on Human Town, almost without consequence. And unlike the youkai of the rebellion, they had hundreds of potential soldiers–we couldn’t just repel them, even with four thousand humans.

“Hell’s Wheel of Pain!” said Yuugi. She sliced her hands, throwing out rings of blue fire that diminished as my bullets intersected them. The rings burned down from the far side as they were shot, until they were crescents, then lines.

“Wiki says they aren’t worth destroying, only shrinking,” said Nazrin.

“Good thinking,” I said to my crystal. I dodged around one of the ropes of blue fire. Yuugi shot out green bullets that made a cone around me, constraining my movement, but I could twist in the air to dodge each line of reduced blue.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

If the oni decided to invade we’d have a serious problem–and the Human Council was all about heading off serious problems. There was an official emergency plan that involved danmaku users protecting other humans at the periphery of town. The oni’s super strength meant that they could carry off people at their leisure, so the center of town wasn’t as safe as a place where danmaku could be used to compel them.

Oni were too strong for walls, towers, or probably even firearms (not that we had any). Magic was the only possible response to what amounted to an army of drunken supersoldiers. But for some reason the idea of the oni invading just didn’t feel right to me either. I felt like I was missing something.

Suika flew up, taking Yuugi’s place. She grew in size and threw out yellow danmaku. I shot her with vectors.

“All the humans want my gourd,” said the oni as we fought. Her voice was baritone from her size. “Do you even drink?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “We just want to try our hand at distilling nutrient paste and fuel from your rice wine.”

Suika looked at me like I was flossing with a bandsaw.

“It’s for getting drunk,” she said.

“Yeah, well, we’re hungry.”

“Then eat chicken or something!”

“We’re saving them for later.”

“Humans are always making things so complicated,” said the little oni as she shook her head.

“Starvation is simple,” I retorted. “And however little nutrients there are in sake, it’s more than zero!”

“True enough. Oni Crowd: Imp Swarm!”

“Conviction Mines!” I said.

As I had predicted, many of the oni went after my mines instead of me. That bought me some time to focus-fire Suika, under the theory that the oni would back down if I hit her hard enough. I hit her hard. Then I became distracted by a red oni in the crowd wearing glasses, one who looked a little deflated compared to the last time I’d seen him.

“Wait wait wait,” I said. “Red?” His muscles were smaller–merely absurdly large–but it was the same oni, without a doubt.

“My name’s actually Mez,” said the oni as he tried to punch me. I ducked. It was danmaku, but my hindbrain didn’t know that. “Glad to see you again!”

“I watched you get eaten!” Actually, I’d mostly heard it, because I’d been too afraid to look. It had sounded like tearing wet newspapers. “You’re dead!”

“Oh,” he said. “I got better.”

“Someone’s asking about a dragon’s testicles,” said Nazrin. I ignored her.

“How?” I asked. Suika’s spellcard ended, and the oni stopped leaping to attack me. Even Mez backed off with a smile on his ogre face. I realized he was naked. He must have been bathing before he’d been called up.

Actually, they’d all been naked. I briefly thought of the audience that was watching.

“He remanifested,” said Yuugi as she flew forward, her eyebrow quirked up. “You know? That thing that youkai can do?”

Like a beam of light shining in my brain, I understood. There was brief pause in our battle.

Oni were youkai. They could remanifest as long as belief in them was strong. Hot Springs Town practiced cannibalism, but for a supernatural being the consequences of being eaten alive were no more permanent than donating blood, or perhaps entering a medically-induced coma. You would survive as long as you were strong enough as a concept to wake again before you faded away forever.

Suika and Yuugi ensured that only the strongest would join them for dinner–that is, only the oni most likely to remanifest would ever be eaten. Those oni would compel the others with danmaku, and fighting with danmaku was feeding, so the strong were feeding the weak.

What’s more was that Yuugi had wanted Sasha and myself to become oni as soon as possible. That was not because it would put us on the menu (we were always there) but because it would prevent us from permanently dying should we be eaten.

She’d been trying to find a way to save us. And we’d insulted her and ran away.

“Holy fuck, I misjudged this entire situation,” I said. “And you.”

Yuugi laughed. She’d spent a few seconds waiting for me to overcome my confusion before we continued our battle. The color of danmaku returned to the air as soon as I spoke.

“We are used to it, lad. If you let every unjustly spiteful person get to you, you’ll get nowhere.”

“But you could have told me that he was going to manifest again!”

“Told you something you already knew?”

“Fair,” I said. I hadn’t known I’d known it. I continued to battle her. “Hot Springs Town still faces a problem, though?” Satori had alluded to it, and not told us what it was–only that Sasha and I couldn’t solve it on our own. And Yuugi had tried to prevent us from leaving.

“Not anymore!” said Yuugi, looking at the crystal. “Knockout in Three Steps!”

I jerked back to the edge of a spell circle as the airspace above Hot Springs Town became a soup of primary-colored danmaku in concentric rings. I was grazed several times, but I managed to find a place where I would not be struck as they appeared. Then I moved carefully as they flew outward.

Youkai could remanifest. Why hadn’t I believed it before? I’d even seen Moriya Suwako do it! And yes, she was a god, but I knew how youkai worked. The whole reason I’d gone seeking a quest in the first place was to revive a youkai!

More danmaku appeared and I kept dodging. If oni could come back, so could the fairy Maroon. Hope swelled in my heart. I would bring her back.

“Thank you, Mister Thorne,” said the fairy. I spun around in the maelstrom

“Maroon?” A bullet struck my back and compelled me to return to the surface. My will withstood it. I couldn’t see the fairy anywhere.

“Keep dodging!” said Patchouli over the telepathic link. I kept dodging. I escaped the third burst of danmaku and shot vectors out at an incredible rate. “Don’t forget about the gourd!”

My doubts were erased. The oni weren’t a real threat, my mission could succeed, and I was acting to save Human Town from starvation at that very moment. Yuugi showed teeth as I renewed my attack.

“Conviction Mines!” I said, with the will to save everyone. Maroon was nowhere to be seen–but I knew she was still there, somewhere. The air above Hot Springs Town exploded with fireworks of red danmaku.

Marisa had said I was dodging too early. Even as my attention was fully focused on defeating the oni, I thought of that and slowed my movements. Dozens of bullets grazed me. My will to fight swelled further.

“Adamant Helix!” shouted Yuugi. A spiral of yellow danmaku shot out from her and swung toward me.

“Run in circles!” shouted Wiki through the connection, his words conveyed at the speed of thought.

Instead of dodging I flew around Yuugi herself, ahead of her spin. The yellow cord of danmaku oscillated behind me like a sound wave, making it impossible to fly over. The only safe path was to circle Yuugi in the same direction. I drew near to her and the center of rotation.

“Akiba Summer!” I called. I whipped a tendril of my own flame against her. It was my go-to for close quarters.

“Yes, he only knows two,” said Nazrin, talking to some human observer.

Yuugi stuck her horn straight up and spun in place, releasing a gout of blue flames to counter my red. They hit me and compelled me to flee. The compulsion nearly took.

One more hit and I was through. I no longer had the luxury to cut it close, to experiment with dodging. Yuugi drank deeply from her sake dish as I pelted her with more vectors. I held my breath as she spoke.

“I’m glad you’ve come to your senses,” she said after she’d swallowed. “I can taste it in that danmaku. You act to protect your people. Your hatred is gone.”

“My hatred…” I said. “I guess so. I thought you were killing each other to survive.”

“So what?” she asked. “You wouldn’t?

“I–I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Well. My contempt for you has also diminished. We can be allies after all, as long as you promise to keep fighting with us whenever you come by.”

“Of course.”

Hoshiguma Yuugi stuck out a hand. We both stopped firing danmaku. That hand would be the perfect lead into a physical attack that I could do fuck-all about, since Yuugi was strong enough to tear steel.

“Is this wise?” asked Patchouli.

“I don’t know,” I said. I took her hand anyway. Yuugi only made most of my fingers pop before letting go. She released some danmaku, prompting me to fire upon her.

“I yield,” said Yuugi with a bow.

“Behind you,” said Patchouli with the barest hint of urgency.

“Hiya!” shouted Suika, whipping a chain toward me.

I hadn’t stopped moving as I pulled back; it barely missed, and the second chain whizzed over my head and threatened to pull my hat off.

“Great Oni Sign: Missing Purple Power!”

Suika grew to an immense size, twenty feet tall, and swung her chain-laden fists again. I jerked back then down. One chain splashed into a spring below and threw up a gout of water, obliterating a bathing oni.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Patchouli. “It was danmaku. He seems to be running for the exit, though.”

“Akiba Summer!” I said as I sprayed Suika with danmaku flames. She shrank under my fire. I thought about her gourd, and feeding the human village. Suika herself was slowing down. I noticed when the compulsion took; my vectors started bouncing off her a bit, like she was made of rubber. Suika had a small smile on her lips.

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll let your friends borrow the gourd.”

“Thank you,” I said as I descended to the floor below. My heart was pounding. I’d been flying a lot.

“Hold on a second,” said Patchouli.

“Hmm?” I flinched as the cheers and applause of the watching humans came in and deafened me.

“There. Good work, Jake.”

“Wow, they love you, don’t they?” asked Suika. “I guess you did just win them infinity drinks at the bar.”

“Just–just like that,” I said as Yuugi walked up to us. “You’re our allies, now?”

“It doesn’t need to be complicated,” grumbled Yuugi. I looked at the oni king. She actually cared about her subjects a great deal. I wondered if my own desire to protect Maroon alongside the human village had reached her.

“Has anyone seen a fairy, recently?” I asked.

“A blonde one came by the other day,” said Suika. “With a torch.” I shook my head; that couldn’t have been Maroon.

“Clownpiece,” said Nazrin.

“Pardon?”

“The fairy was Clownpiece, apparently. I find it off-putting that you know every fairy in Gensokyo.”

A moment passed.

“Ten fairies is still an off-putting number to know.” She must have been talking to Wiki. I knew like twenty fairies who worked at the mansion, but I didn’t say anything to defend my roommate. He could justify his knowledge of fairies on his own.

“You know, Patchouli, you could relay both sides of the conversation,” I said. After I said it I began to hear Wiki’s voice.

“--particularly interesting is how fairies are sustained by belief in their aspects. They're tied to natural elements and concepts, and can actually change–”

“Nevermind,” I said, and the voice cut out.

“It’s rude to talk on your crystal when you’re a guest,” said Yuugi. She hated apologies, so I didn’t give one.

“Didn’t I compel you to the surface?” I asked. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got work to do, and you’ve probably got a party ahead of you up there, if you want it.”

Yuugi laughed. “Good point, boy!” She ruffled my hair by grabbing my hat and jostling it.

“C’mon,” said Suika. “Let’s go ‘redistribute’ some of this booze!”

Yuugi gave her a feral grin as they took to the air. “It’s been too long since I partied with humans,” I heard her say as they receded.

“Can I come?” asked Mez from one of the pools.

“Stay here, scrub.”

“Rick reports that they have a small still ready,” came Nazrin’s voice. “They’ll be waiting. I’m told that this is the first step toward solving the hunger problem? Purifying sake, somehow?”

Someone spoke to her.

“Give it up for Jake Thorne, who is saving Human Town from hunger!” The cheering resumed, albeit with a bit less frantic enthusiasm. Battle was what excited the masses, not logistics like ‘find an infinite source of rice wine to find an infinite source of rice wine solids.’ One person was clapping louder than the others. I realized she was behind me.

“Yo,” said Marisa from atop her broom. “I missed most of that one. Mind if I catch the next?”