Tokyo: Proving one's position from behind the scenes

The pipes stretched forward in the darkness.

Nobuko Yoshida walked through the pipes. The diameter of the abandoned combined drain pipe narrowed from two meters to one and a half meters, then widened again. The vertical erosion lines on the pipe walls flickered in the dark red light of the demon-slaying aura. Water seeped from the top of some sections of the pipe, and droplets fell onto the hood of her hoodie, making a soft pattering sound, before being dried by the fire elemental energy emanating from her body.

She recalled Su Nuo's words in that gray dream: everyone who touched her finger would see her in their dreams. Some of them made a deal; they would send their fingers to her. She didn't need to look for them; they would come to her.

After waking up, a feeling she couldn't quite describe lingered in her body—an extremely faint, penetrating pull from the surface of her skin inwards, as if someone had gently tugged at the hem of her clothes from a very, very far away place.

The direction is the sea.

She started from the pipes in Arakawa Ward and headed south along the main trunk of the underground waterway.

The pulling sensation was sometimes strong and sometimes weak. When it was strong, it felt like someone was grabbing her wrist and pulling her forward. When it was weak, she could hardly feel it, and only a faint directional indication remained deep in her consciousness.

She followed it and walked underground for a whole night.

Early the next morning, she smelled the sea breeze.

The pipe outlet is hidden beneath an abandoned concrete breakwater along the Tokyo Bay coast. The breakwater, likely built in the last century, has mostly collapsed of its once neatly arranged four-legged concrete blocks, leaving the remaining ones piled up crookedly. The pipe outlet is half-hidden between two collapsed blocks, largely obscured by a clump of plants growing from a crack in the breakwater.

She crouched down as she crawled out of the pipe, a salty, fishy wind hitting her face, blowing the hood of her sweatshirt backward, her black hair being torn apart by the wind and fluttering in the air behind her head.

The sea was grayish-white, the sky was grayish-white, and the boundary was indistinguishable.

The wind swept in unimpeded from the ocean, pushing waves one after another against the concrete foundation of the breakwater. Each crash created a burst of white foam, which was then swept up by the wind and dispersed into a fine mist in the air.

In the place where the mist is thickest, something is emerging from the sea.

First, the water surface bulged. A curved bulge appeared on the grayish-white sea surface, and seawater poured out from the top of the bulge, as if something of considerable size was rapidly rising from underwater. A grayish-blue head, somewhere between a human head and a fish head, emerged from the water.

Its eyes were two deep, dark pupils, with no discernible focus, fixed fixedly facing the direction where Nobuko Yoshida stood. Its mouth was wide, the corners stretched to a position impossible for a normal human to reach, revealing two rows of sharp, uneven teeth. Between its teeth was something held tightly: a scroll tightly wrapped in dark brown oilcloth, the surface of which was still dripping with seawater.

Its body continued to rise from the water, and when it stood up, it was over two meters tall, with an arched back and vertebrae protruding slightly from under its skin, like a row of serrated teeth covered by flesh. It had translucent webbing between its fingers, and its nails were thick, sharp, and dark gray.

The messenger of Lord Umibo.

Nobuko Yoshida stared at it, her pupils contracting slightly. The monster's appearance was almost identical to the description given by the Metropolitan Police Department about her brother's mutated form.

With the same gray-blue skin, the same hunched back, and the same webbed fingers, the older brother transformed into this monster in his quest for revenge against the Yakuza.

She gripped the Demon Slayer tightly.

The fish-man monster didn't approach any further. It stopped seven or eight steps away from Nobuko Yoshida, seawater cascading down its body and forming a slowly spreading puddle on the concrete embankment beneath its feet. Its mouth opened, and the oilcloth-wrapped scroll fell from between its teeth, landing in the puddle with a dull, water-soaked thud.

It pointed with one finger at the scroll, then at Nobuko Yoshida, before turning and walking into the sea. Its grey-blue back traced an arc on the surface before sinking beneath the greyish-white water and disappearing. Only ripples spreading outwards and white foam whipped up by the sea breeze remained on the surface.

Nobuko Yoshida walked forward, squatted down, and picked up the oilcloth roll from the water stains.

The oilcloth was covered with seawater and a few grains of sand, its surface rough and cold to the touch. A dark brown leather cord held the roll in place. The cord wasn't knotted, just coiled around and around. She untied the cord, coil by coil, and then unfolded the oilcloth.

Eight withered fingers were fixed to the inside of the oilcloth, their skin dark brown, their nails yellowish, and their bases jagged. Each one was exactly the same as the one she had snatched from the truck on the highway. The eight fingers were tied side by side to the oilcloth with thin hemp thread, which passed through the skin near the bases of the fingers and was tied into tight knots on the back of the oilcloth, securing them firmly, as if prepared for a long journey.

Nobuko Yoshida squatted on the edge of the breakwater, staring at the eight fingers for a long time. The wind blew her loose black hair, obscuring half of her face, but she didn't brush it aside.

She climbed to the top of the breakwater, walked back to the pipe opening below the four-legged block, and crawled back into the pipe.

The darkness in the pipes engulfed her again. The Demon Slayer was lit in her right hand, and she tucked the newly wrapped oilcloth roll under her left armpit. The rough texture of the oilcloth came through the fabric of her hoodie, and the outline of the eight fingers inside pressed against her ribs, digging into her side with each step.

The journey here took a whole night, and the journey back was just as long.

By the time she returned to the outpost at the abandoned combined sewer in Arakawa Ward, it must have been dark again. She could see through the gap in the manhole cover that it was completely dark outside; no light was filtering through.

"Knock knock"

A knocking sound came from afar.

Nobuko Yoshida climbed over the low concrete wall and placed the oilcloth roll next to the blanket, close to the crack in the stone where the finger had been. She unrolled the oilcloth again, revealing eight fingers lined up in a dark red light. Dark brown skin, dark yellow nails, the cross-sections of the eight fingers were jagged, the cracks in the bones were all different, but they all shone with the same dark luster, seeping from deep within the bone.

She stuffed the tarpaulin into the crack where the finger had been placed before, and then plugged the crack back with the concrete fragments.

The Demon Slayer lay across her lap, its dark red glow casting a small, flowing patch of light on the tube's surface. Her right hand gripped the hilt, while her left hand rested on the blade, her fingers unconsciously tracing the flame-like patterns on its surface. She closed her eyes, preparing to take a good rest.

"Knock knock"

wrong.

Yoshida Nobuko suddenly opened her eyes, gripping the demon-slaying sword in one hand and preparing to pull her fingers out of the crack in the stone with the other.

The manhole cover above the pipeline was being tapped rhythmically!