Chapter 319: Slaying Demons (Patreon)

"Sorry, but this is a matter of life and death."

Amamiya Rin's calm words carried a trace of apology and sincerity.

"A matter of life and death? You're always saying such boring things."

Fortune-Teller Tomie shrugged, her face full of disdain.

"Because life really is precious."

Amamiya Rin answered earnestly.

"I've died once, so I know what death feels like. That's why I respect the value of life. Whether it's Fujino Terumi, or Mamiya Yuka, or those ordinary strangers I've never even met—"

"Fine, fine, enough of this headache-inducing talk. You're just that kind of person. I've known that all along."

Hearing Amamiya Rin's utterly earnest speech, the Tomies felt a throbbing in their skulls. It was like Jugglus Juggler hearing Gai Kurenai's harmonica, and they hurriedly cut Amamiya Rin off.

"You want me to divine Fujino Terumi, right? I'll start now. But don't expect it for free."

Fortune-Teller Tomie's thoughts came with a lazy, trailing lilt, like a cat's claw lightly raking across silk.

Amamiya Rin didn't hesitate.

"Once this incident is over, you pick the time, you choose the place, you name what we do."

"…Hmph. That's more like it."

The corners of Fortune-Teller Tomie's mouth curled up. Her tongue stayed sharp, but her hands grew brisk.

She gathered the tarot cards into a stack and brushed her fingertips lightly over the backs of the cards, her breathing gradually slowing.

At the same time, another Tomie had already opened a computer and entered the police filing system, the Resident Registry network, and the missing persons database.

Three windows opened at once, data streaming across the screens. Fujino Terumi's resident record was pulled up: date of birth, registered domicile, current address, emergency contact, all lined up in neat rows.

With the records synced to her view, Fortune-Teller Tomie shuffled, cut, and drew.

Her fingertips slid over the faces of the cards and paused for an instant, then she drew three from the fan.

The first card: the Moon, upright.

The second: the World, reversed.

The third: the Hanged Man, upright.

"The Moon, upright, means illusion, dreams, the abyss of the subconscious. It also stands for unknown fear and deception. The World, reversed, means a person has left their original, complete state and been cut off from the real world. The Hanged Man, upright, means giving up resistance, suspension, passive waiting. It also means a person turned upside down from their normal position, entering a different perspective."

Fortune-Teller Tomie's voice rang out in the [Tomie Network], unusually serious.

"Put simply, she has gone to another world, and entered an unknown world of terror from a different perspective."

"Is she dead?"

"Not certain."

Amamiya Rin pondered for a moment.

That answer was too vague. It couldn't confirm what had actually happened to Fujino Terumi.

"Divine some of the other missing people."

"All the missing people?"

Fortune-Teller Tomie raised an eyebrow.

"That's no small number."

"Pick a few at random from those recently reported missing."

"OK."

Fortune-Teller Tomie shrugged, gathered the cards, and shuffled them again.

Three cards were turned over.

The Moon, the World reversed, the Hanged Man—exactly the same combination as Fujino Terumi's.

She redrew several times, but the result never changed.

"Disappearance."

Amamiya Rin let out a helpless sigh, tinged with a sense of powerlessness.

It was obvious that Fujino Terumi's disappearance had nothing to do with the Head Balloons. Like the other missing persons, she had vanished from the living world because of a curse born from a social problem.

Step outside and you meet the Head Balloons; stay home and you vanish. In a situation like that, it didn't matter how calm and clever Fujino Terumi was.

He was about to withdraw his thoughts when Fortune-Teller Tomie spoke again, this time with a trace of hesitation in her tone.

"Rin, there's something I think I should tell you."

"What is it?"

"I've picked up some rumors lately through the witches' social circles. I didn't plan to get involved, but since you're dealing with these things, I figured I should mention it."

Fortune-Teller Tomie sat up straight, her fingertip tracing circles on the tabletop without her noticing.

"Recently, I saw demons."

Amamiya Rin's thoughts paused for a moment.

"The Apology Demon?"

"Not that. Ordinary demons."

Fortune-Teller Tomie rejected Amamiya Rin's guess and recalled the demons she had seen at night a few days earlier.

Winged demons had swept across the sky. They resembled the Apology Demon in shape, but fit the stereotypical image of a demon much more closely.

"Through the witches' circles, I heard that a great magician from four hundred years ago has been reborn. According to the divination, his rebirth triggered the astrological configuration for a demon god's descent. Jupiter and Saturn conjunct in Scorpio, Mercury retrograde in the eighth house, Pluto and Uranus in a harsh aspect. The whole sky is pointing to one outcome."

"An ancient demon god is about to descend upon this world again, borrowing that great magician's power."

Fortune-Teller Tomie paused.

"I don't know the details, but the witches are nervous. They say the magician's rebirth is to complete a ritual left unfinished back then. And the core of that ritual is mass blood sacrifice."

"The Village of Sirens?"

Amamiya Rin's gaze sharpened. From the clues Fortune-Teller Tomie had given, he immediately worked out where the demons came from.

In Junji Ito's "The Village of Sirens," a great magician from several hundred years ago is reincarnated in the modern day. To resurrect a demon god, he brainwashes people with sound and turns the village's women into demons, who are sent all over the country to steal large numbers of infants as sacrifices. At night, those demonized women travel to the cities, slip into homes, and snatch the babies.

"Babies."

Amamiya Rin's thought rang out heavily in the [Tomie Network].

"Have a large number of infants gone missing recently?"

Mara Tomie's reply arrived almost in the same instant. Her fingers flew across the keyboard; she typed keywords into the police system's search bar, set filters, and hit Enter. Data popped up on the screen. Her eyes swept over row after row of records, and her expression darkened slightly.

"Yes. In the past week, fifty-seven infants under one year old have been reported missing nationwide. Most of the cases are classified as 'disappearance' incidents."

"Classified as disappearance?"

Amamiya Rin's thoughts carried a note of anger.

"The police system's classification standards are crude. Infants can't act on their own. After the family files a report, if no body or sign of a crime is found, local stations usually process it as 'missing, cause unknown,' and in the end it gets folded into the statistics for the 'disappearance' phenomenon."

Mara Tomie answered.

"I overestimated the police after all."

For once, Amamiya Rin could barely control his emotions. He almost revealed his square-jawed Wrathful Wisdom King aspect.

"Ha!"

Fortune-Teller Tomie let out a cold laugh.

"You're only realizing that now?"

"An infant going missing and an adult running away from home are completely different things. Even with no sign of a crime, how could a baby possibly vanish on its own? They can't even make that most basic judgment. What on earth are those people doing?"

"What else? Sitting in their offices waiting for reports."

"All the more reason we should rule this country ourselves."

The other Tomies joined the discussion, their tones openly contemptuous.

The remarks were casual, but in fact what they described was exactly what was happening.

During the three days Amamiya Rin was unconscious, Mara Tomie had sunk the roots of her domination into more than ninety percent of the country's nodes of power.

The Cabinet, the ministries and agencies, the National Police Agency, the Ministry of Defense, the boards of the great conglomerates—in every position that could decide the country's course, the people seated there acted according to her will.

But the problem was that controlling power and running a country were two entirely different things.

Mara Tomie could make people submit, make politicians obey, make officials sign documents, mobilize resources, and approve budgets as she wished.

But she couldn't change the structure of the state machinery itself. The inefficiency of the Japanese police system wasn't caused by a few incompetent commanders. It was the product of decades of institutions, history, and culture poured into the same mold.

At the institutional level, police investigative powers are tightly restricted by law. Unlike in Britain or the United States, Japanese police have no authority for warrantless arrest on reasonable suspicion, and no plea bargaining or immunity system, so their investigative means against organized and covert crime are extremely limited.

This framework was a product of postwar democratic reform, originally meant to prevent the revival of the prewar police state. But while it limited abuse of public power, it also greatly constrained the police's ability to deal with new types of crime.

At the cultural level, Japanese police organizations have a deep-rooted insularity and a tendency toward "internal harmony." A reform proposal from the National Public Safety Commission pointed out explicitly that the "collusive coziness" within the organization had rendered oversight functions nominal, and that the Public Safety Commission had not fully exercised its supervisory role as a democratic governing body.

A culture of "anonymity" had formed inside the police: individual responsibility was diluted under the organization's name, and frontline officers lacked tension and initiative.

At the resource level, Japan's ratio of population to police personnel is low among Western industrialized nations. Yet the scope of police duties is unusually broad, from security patrols to traffic management, from family disputes to youth counseling, and all of it falls on the few officers at the grassroots koban.

The National Public Safety Commission's report also admitted that the surge in 110 emergency calls and traffic accidents had left koban officers overwhelmed, patrol and home-visit functions severely degraded, and many "empty koban" had appeared.

Under this system, the handling of missing persons was flawed from the start. How police classify and prioritize missing persons depends largely on whether there is "obvious suspicion of a crime."

A disappearance with no body, no ransom demand, and no witnesses is naturally pushed to the back of the queue. That infant disappearances were filed in the same folder as adults leaving of their own accord was not the negligence of any one officer. It was the inertia of an institution running.

Mara Tomie could make every senior official of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department kneel on the floor and bark like dogs in a single day, but she couldn't rebuild a bureaucratic system that had been running for seventy years in a single week. Reform required time, manpower, and institutional design, and those were precisely what domination couldn't replace.

Amamiya Rin understood the situation too.

But understanding didn't mean forgiving.

By now, he had come to understand everything.

The so-called curses came entirely from human society.

Humanity's fear of the unknown, carried by humanity's works, gave birth to the unnamable.

Humanity's social problems, born from all manner of malice, gave rise to conceptual curses.

The only way to eliminate these curses and unnamable things was not to defeat them. Even if they were killed again and again, they would resurrect again and again. Only by resolving the corresponding social problems could they truly be erased.

In that case… it was time to become more radical.

A cold, piercing light flashed in Amamiya Rin's eyes.

"Government reform. Regardless of consequences, regardless of cost, use every card in your hand and push as fast as you can. The police system, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, local governments—every process related to missing persons. Within three days, I want to see a brand-new framework."

Before, there had always been things he had to take into consideration. But with the situation having deteriorated this far, breaking through by force was necessary.

"As you command, dear. I'll turn the entire bureaucracy into a machine that never sleeps within three days."

A deep crimson flush spread across Mara Tomie's face, as though she had reached a climax.

Yes, this was the Amamiya Rin she wanted to see: no longer restrained, a human letting all his light blaze forth. That was a true human, the one she loved. How dazzling he was.

"Fortune-Teller."

Amamiya Rin could feel Mara Tomie's twisted love, yet he accepted it without any resistance, and made a request of Fortune-Teller Tomie.

"That magician's village. Can you pin it down?"

Before going to rescue Mamiya Yuka, he had to kill that magician first and bring back the infants who were still alive.

"Wait, wait, wait, give me two minutes! Somebody open the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's digital land database."

"Coming!"

One Tomie's thoughts cut in. She sat before a computer, and a vector map of the whole country popped up on the screen, with terrain, waterways, roads, and administrative boundaries layered on top of each other.

Fortune-Teller Tomie synced with that Tomie's view, her fingers already resting on the tarot cards, and turned over three cards one by one.

The Tower, upright.

The Emperor, reversed.

The Devil, upright.

"Direction: southeast. Distance: between three and five hundred kilometers. Terrain: mountains, near a river system, with minerals that have been heavily excavated."

"The range has narrowed. Look at the map."

The map on the screen zoomed rapidly, expanding outward from Tokyo and shifting southeast. Nagano, Yamanashi, and Shizuoka swept past, and it finally stopped on an area where mountains and a river met.

"Here… southern Nagano Prefecture, the upper Tenryū River. Marked with hot springs and an old mining district."

"And the village?"

"Let me filter."

The data layers switched, and a row of administrative place names popped up on the screen. Around the old mining district in the Tenryū River basin, there were three settlements organized as villages. Fortune-Teller Tomie's gaze swept over them, and she tapped the card once more with her fingertip.

"Shirobe Village, below the old mining district, surrounded by abandoned mine tunnels. Population three hundred forty-seven. Main industries are forestry and mining. Since the mines closed the population has kept draining away, and the number of people actually living there now is unknown."

"That's it!"

Fortune-Teller Tomie's spiritual sense flared in an instant. The moment she heard "Shirobe Village," she saw, somewhere in the dim unknown, a huge, dark gray tower.

"I'm transforming into Seven and heading to Shirobe Village. Whoever has time, go to Tensei Academy and deal with the Holy Mother."

Having confirmed the coordinates, Amamiya Rin spoke at once.

It wasn't only the magician in Shirobe Village; there was also the Holy Mother at Tensei Academy. He had originally planned to sleep first and then let the resurrected Swordmaster Tomie handle the Holy Mother herself.

But things had come to this, and Amamiya Rin could no longer indulge Swordmaster Tomie's feelings. He only wanted to resolve every uncontrollable factor as soon as possible.

"Transforming into Seven to travel? That's a heavy drain, you know."

"Time is tight. I can't worry about that."

Amamiya Rin's thought cut off the warning.

[Disappearance], [Head Balloons], [The Village of Sirens], and the many curses and urban legends not yet discovered were all brewing a big move. Dealing with them one at a time, in due order, was no longer enough to save this world on the brink of destruction. He had to speed up.

"Then leave it to me. When that impostor is resurrected, I'll mock her properly."

Flesh-Mod Tomie's thoughts surfaced from deep within the [Tomie Network], crisp and decisive, without a trace of hesitation.

Amamiya Rin took a deep breath, and his gaze sharpened.

"Seven!"

Light shot skyward and coalesced in the city sky into a giant silver-and-red figure, which then turned into a streak of light and tore through the air toward the southeast.

Below, pedestrians on the streets looked up and cried out, scrambling to pull out their phones and aim their cameras at the trail of light crossing the sky.

But Amamiya Rin's speed had already exceeded the speed of sound from the start. By the time people who spotted an Ultraman raised their phones, the light had vanished from their view.

The earth below receded at dizzying speed in Amamiya Rin's eyes. The city's outline shrank to a patch of gray-white within minutes, the coastline stretched across his view and was left behind by his speed. The light patterns of the Wings of Wind unfolded at his back, shedding air resistance layer by layer. His speed climbed to its limit, and the sonic cloud from Mach 3 flight trailed behind him in a long white wake.

A moment later, the upper Tenryū River, southern Nagano Prefecture.

A streak of silver-and-red light dived down out of the clouds, slowed, and finally hovered above Shirobe Village.

Amamiya Rin looked down.

Shirobe Village lay on a long, narrow strip of flat land between the river valley and the ridge. Dozens of gray-tiled wooden houses were scattered along both banks, and a broken asphalt road ran through the village entrance and on to the old mine entrance across the river.

At the edge of the village stood a factory, covering considerable ground, its chimneys and conveyor pipes rusted through. It looked like it had been abandoned for a long time.

But inside the factory, one area had clearly been refurbished. At the very center of the factory, an iron tower stood.

Nearly a hundred meters tall, its body was built from a mix of metal framework and concrete. At its top was mounted a huge array of horns, each more than two meters in diameter, all pointed toward the village.

In front of The Tower was an enormous pit.

About ten meters in radius and bottomless, its walls were soaked in a dark red liquid that had hardened into a thick crust of grime. The liquid at the bottom was dark red too, its surface glistening with oil, and broken bones and clotted blood could faintly be seen settled at the bottom.

Amamiya Rin's gaze sank.

The scene in his memory matched the sight before him exactly. The tower that emitted sirens, the hypnosis and demonization, the demon god summoned from the pit with infant sacrifices.

Down below, the villagers had been startled by the giant overhead.

"It's an Ultraman?! There really is an Ultraman! The news was true!"

"Why would one show up in a little mountain village like ours?!"

"No, no! Ultraman only shows up where there are monsters or disasters… Could it be, could it be that there's a monster hidden in our village?!"

Gazing at the Ultraman who had appeared in their village, the villagers wore all kinds of expressions. They gathered in twos and threes under the eaves along the road and on the ridges between the fields, heads tilted back, most of their faces blank with confusion.

As the guess about a monster spread, the atmosphere of mere curiosity and surprise turned to fear in an instant.

Everyone believed an Ultraman could defeat a monster, but no one could be sure that nobody would die in the aftermath of the battle.

Several old people turned pale. A man riding a bicycle on the village road turned around and pedaled back the way he came. A housewife dragged her child and ran for the edge of the village. Those who had been peering out ducked back inside one after another.

Deep inside the factory, halfway up the iron tower, there was a sealed control room. Its concrete walls were thick enough to withstand a landslide, and its iron door had been reinforced and bolted from the inside.

Haiyama stood before the control console, watching the silver-and-red figure outside through the narrow observation window.

"An Ultraman…"

The great magician, over four hundred years old, glared at Amamiya Rin in the sky, gritting his teeth.

"Why must you come to interfere with me!"

He had been stopped once four hundred years ago. Now, four hundred years later, just as he was about to summon the great demon god Cruffith, some so-called Giant of Light had come to stop him again!

Haiyama didn't hesitate. He reached out and threw the main switch on the console.

"Wooooo—"

The siren blasted out.

It was no ordinary siren. Sound waves with precisely tuned frequencies surged out of the giant horns, carrying fluctuations of magic, and covered all of Shirobe Village.

The man running along the village road stopped abruptly, his eyes unfocused and his pupils dilated, not even noticing the bicycle fall from his hands. The housewife cowering under the eaves slowly stood up straight, the fear draining from her face, replaced by a hollow calm.

The old people in the alleys, the young men in the fields, the mothers holding their children—everyone's movements froze at the same moment.

Then they turned around and walked toward the factory.

And all across the village, the adult women began to change.

Their bodies shook violently in the siren's sound, dark red veins surging to the surface of their skin like blood vessels floating up. Their eyes rolled back, their nails grew long and sharp, their backs arched, their shoulder blades pushed outward, and the sound of tearing cloth rose all around.

In just a few breaths, dozens of women had completely lost their human form, becoming a horde of demons with blood-red skin, bat wings on their backs, and sulfurous breath spewing from their mouths.

Haiyama's commands traveled down on the siren's carrier wave, orders encoded in magic poured directly into the demons' minds.

"Attack that giant! Kill him!"

Dozens of demons raised their heads in unison, flapped their bat wings, and shot skyward from every corner of the village, lunging at the silver-and-red giant hovering in midair.

Amamiya Rin looked down at the figures rising from the ground.

His senses covered the entire village. Every frequency fluctuation of the siren and every hypnotized mind was clearly laid out in his perception.

Had he not studied hypnosis, today would have been a hellishly difficult fight.

But there were no ifs.

"Oṃ—"

Only a single syllable was needed.

The Brahma-Sound.

In Buddhism, the most direct passage of scripture for quelling outer demonic interference and steadying the mind is the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra: gate gate, pāragate, pārasaṃgate, bodhi svāhā.

The core function of this mantra is to break through all obstacles and subdue every Demonic Obstacle, returning body and mind to purity.

But what Amamiya Rin uttered now was not the complete scripture. It was a single syllable flowing naturally out of his practice of the Ear-Faculty Perfect Penetration method.

That was the root sound from the Avalokiteśvara chapter on Ear-Faculty Perfect Penetration. In the sutras, this one sound encompasses all dharanis and can break every outer demon.

When a practitioner realizes that the nature of hearing is neither born nor destroyed, this sound is no longer a sound-object but the direct manifestation of the light of self-nature.

For Amamiya Rin, this syllable carried the will to relieve suffering within his Nature-Light, just as when he had cast the Brahma-Sound Illusion Art for Shimizu Hinako, but now on a scale far beyond that time.

That thread of luminous intent was magnified without limit and poured from the mouth of the Giant of Light, becoming a nearly tangible golden ripple that spread in all directions.

The ripple swept past the first demon. Its bat wings abruptly stiffened, the dark red veins receded from its skin, its rolled-back white eyes regained the outline of pupils, its extended claws shrank back into its fingers, and its arched back slowly flattened as its body fell from midair.

The same change happened to every demon at once.

Wings contracted, red faded, claws retracted, pupils reset. Dozens of figures fell from the sky together like paper kites with their strings cut, crashing onto the village road, the ridges between the fields, and the open ground of the factory, gradually turning back into human form.

The hypnotized villagers stopped in their tracks at the same moment. Their unfocused eyes sharpened again, and the hollow calm gave way to confusion and fright.

To them, it had only been a moment of absent-mindedness. When they came to, they found themselves gathered with the others, walking toward the factory.

"Wh… why am I here?"

"What just happened?"

"I remember I was at home…"

"Why is everyone heading to the factory?"

"That woman… that red thing! I saw someone turn into a monster!"

"Me too! I saw it too!"

"A monster! Is that the monster the Ultraman came to the village to destroy?"

The people murmured among themselves, panicked, yet they also realized what had happened.

There really did seem to be some kind of monster in their village.

In the control room, Haiyama began to panic.

The siren was still sounding, but it had lost all meaning. The women who had been turned into demons had returned to human form, the hypnotized had woken up, and his sonic hypnosis system had failed completely under a single strike from the Giant of Light.

"Impossible…"

Haiyama's fist slammed into the wall, leaving a vivid smear of blood, and he roared in shock and rage.

Four hundred years of scheming, five years of preparation, the blood of over a hundred infants poured out, all for this moment.

But an Ultraman had appeared. Now the women had turned back into humans and the hypnotized had woken up. His chain of sacrifices was broken, the rhythm of the ritual thrown off, and the conditions for the demon god's descent were no longer complete.

"Sacrifice! Sacrifice now!"

Haiyama bellowed and rushed to the console, pressing both hands on the runes that activated the altar. Magic surged wildly out of his body and poured through his palms into the rune array.

The dark red liquid in the pit began to boil, fine bubbles rising on its surface, and a pungent stench of sulfur rose from the bottom.

He couldn't wait any longer!

Even if the ritual was incomplete, it had to be forced to start; even if the conditions for the demon god's descent weren't met, the summoning had to be forced. As long as Cruffith appeared, with its power a mere Ultraman was nothing to fear.

"Descend! Cruffith! Demon god of hell! Answer my summons!"

At the bottom of the pit, the hardened crust of dark red grime burst apart. Liquid crimson erupted from the cracks and gathered into a thick pillar of blood that shot skyward.

The pillar of blood twisted in midair, and a pair of enormous horny wings spread out of the red light, every wing membrane covered in dark red veins, like some giant hybrid of bat and dragon.

A massive body rose from the pit and stood upright, nearly matching the silver-and-red Giant of Light in height.

Its skin was a deep gray with the texture of rock, covered in dense scales. Its limbs were thick as stone pillars, and the tips of its claws glowed with a dark red heat.

Its head was a twisted, humanoid face, the jaw split in two to reveal interlocking fangs inside. Its tail dragged out behind it, and the bone spikes at its tip plowed a deep furrow into the ground.