Yorimitsu moved toward the central house, his footsteps heavy against the packed earth. The building loomed larger than the others, its weathered wood blackened as if by a fire that refused to burn out. Using his spirit-sight, the structure looked shrouded in a dense, roiling dark aura that moved like a thousand spiderwebs, pulsing and reaching out toward the village square.
He stood before the entrance for a heartbeat, his pulse a steady drum against the silence. This is the darkest aura I have ever felt.
Reaching into his pouch, he pulled out a handful of ritual salt and a strip of consecrated paper. He threw them; then began the Kekkai Rite. With a sharp, rhythmic stomp of his foot, a Hangon step, he slammed his palm against the earth.
"By the four gates and the five elements, stay bound!"
A shimmering wall of translucent blue light erupted from the soil, racing upward to form a hemispherical dome that encased the house. The barrier hummed with a low, vibrating frequency, sealing the spiritual rot inside.
With a fluid motion, he drew his ironwood blade. He channelled his spirit, the black lines on his arm glowed with a dull, subterranean light stretching to the sword. He traced a finger along the length of the blade, igniting it with Onmyōdō energy. Pale, ghostly flames licked at the edge, casting a cold, flickering light against the dark porch.
"Obaasan..." he whispered, a cold dread pooling in his stomach.
He slid the shoji screen open.
Though the sun was high and bright outside the barrier, the interior of the house was a void. It was unnatural, absolute darkness that seemed to swallow the light from his eyes, leaving him momentarily blind. Yorimitsu raised his left hand, snapping his fingers.
"Fire spirits, hear the command. Light the path!"
Three small globes of foxfire ignited around his head, bobbing like lanterns. As the blue light expanded. The stench hit him first with a cloying, sweet rot of old meat.
The walls were not decorated with scrolls, but with the dead. Bodies, desiccated and drained of blood, were piled in the corners like discarded firewood. Most horrifying were the infants; they were suspended from the rafters by thin, translucent cords that looked like umbilical webs, their tiny faces frozen in silent screams.
Yorimitsu felt a surge of bile rise in his throat. He clutched his stomach, his knees nearly buckling. "Yama-uba!" he roared, his voice cracking with desperation. "Old hag! Where are you?"
From the deepest shadows of the back room, a rattling sound emerged—the dry, scraping noise of bone against wood. It wasn't the sound of someone walking; it was the sound of something dragging itself along the walls.
"I... left..."
The voice was a low, agonising rasp, dragged out so long it felt like it would never end. It carried a weight of danger that made the hair on Yorimitsu's neck stand like needles.
"You... shouldn't... have followed me... brat."
Yorimitsu turned, his foxfire illuminating a shape huddled in the corner. It was hunched, the indigo robes tattered and soaked in black ichor.
"You shouldn't have come," the voice deepened, vibrating with a power that shook the foundation of the house. "Now... you have fallen... into his snare."
Yorimistu's eyes darted about, trying to see clearly then.
BOOM!
The house shuddered. Outside, the shimmering blue barrier Yorimitsu had erected began to creak and groan. The villagers were slamming their bodies against the dome, their fingernails scratching at the light, their eyes glowing with red, mindless hunger.
"What the—"
The barrier began to crack.
His gaze saw it, the shadow in the corner began to rise, the ivory horns on its head growing longer in the dim blue light.
The blue glow of the foxfire flickered violently, its steady light fracturing into jagged sparks as Yorimitsu's composure finally shattered.
The predatory stillness he had cultivated for years vanished, replaced by the raw, trembling panic of the boy who had once hidden in the dung-heaps of the Minakaze.
"Obaasan!" he cried out, his voice cracking, the sound echoing off the macabre walls. "What is this? Why did you come to this rot-choked place? Look at these... these bodies... the children..." He gestured wildly with his free hand at the desiccated infants hanging from the rafters. "Come out! Come into the light so I can see you! I can heal you; I know how to do it now."
"I... can't... come out," the voice groaned, sounding as if it were being squeezed through a throat filled with glass. "You have to... run. Run, Yorimitsu!"
"I'm not leaving you!" he roared. With a flick of his wrist, he commanded the three globes of foxfire to levitate toward the corner, pushing back the unnatural darkness.
The light revealed a nightmare.
Yama-uba was no longer the frail crone of the mountain. She was pinned against the back wall, her body mid-convulsion. Her left side remained human, the skin wrinkled and pale, a single milky eye weeping a lone, clear tear. But her right side was a landscape of horror.
Black, obsidian-like skin had erupted from her shoulder, and a massive, ivory horn curved jaggedly from her temple. Her right eye was a burning pit of molten gold, the pupil a vertical slit of pure malice.
"Go, brat... run!" she sobbed from the human side of her mouth, the sound hitching in her chest. "It is too late for me... this village... it was a trap for my failing spirit. But you... You need to... SUR—VIVE!"
Her body suddenly arched with a sickening crack of bone. The sobbing stopped. The clear tear on her left cheek was burned away by a sudden, surging heat radiating from her skin.
"Mmmmmm..."
The voice that came out of her now was not hers. It was deep, resonating with a tectonic power that seemed to vibrate the very marrow in Yorimitsu's bones. The human eye rolled back, turning into a second pit of molten gold.
"What is this I see?" the thing that used to be his master hissed, her neck twisting at an impossible angle to stare at him. "Ibaraki-sama, why are you not with the master? What are you doing here?"
"Get out of her!" Yorimitsu screamed. He dropped his ironwood blade to his side and reached into his pouch, pulling out a handful of salt and a heavy paper talisman. He threw them with all his might, shouting the Cleansing Chara. "Pure light of the sun, wash away the filth! HARAEDO-NO-OKAMI! PURGE!"
The salt hit her chest and erupted into a brilliant, blinding white flash. For a second, Yorimitsu hoped. But as the light faded, the demon-grandmother stood unaffected. She threw her head back and laughed—a sound of clashing metal and mountain tremors.
"Purge the sea with a cup of water?" she mocked, her voice a chorus of a thousand demons.
CRACK!
The blue barrier outside finally shattered under the relentless assault of the possessed villagers. The kind old man, the giggling girls, and the farmers poured through the broken screens of the house, their limbs elongated, their jaws unhinging. They moved like a tide of meat and teeth, rushing toward him.
"Run..."
A final, tiny whisper escaped the monster's lips, a sliver of the real Yama-uba using her last breath of human soul to plead for his life.
"Run, my ungrateful sprout... run!"
Then, with a terrifying roar, the horn on her head doubled in size, and she lunged forward, her talons raking the air where his throat had been a second before.