Chapter 1: Sora
"Sora, dinner is ready. Come out and eat."
A gentle voice drifted in with the soft sound of knocking at the door.
It was warm, tender, almost motherly enough to make anyone picture a kind woman standing outside with a helpless smile, trying to coax a stubborn child out of her room. And yet, beneath that softness, something felt wrong. It was hard to explain, harder still to ignore. The warmth was too careful. Too practiced. Like a smile painted over something rotten.
The room was completely dark.
Only a thin strip of moonlight slipped in through the curtains, cold and pale, barely touching the floor. Red cords hung all over the room in messy lines, forming crude barriers against evil. Charms were pasted at the corners of the walls, some new, some already curling with age.
Buried beneath the blankets, Kasugano Sora trembled.
Her body was small and frail, drawn into itself like something trying to disappear. Her face, delicate enough to seem unreal, had long since lost all color. Her lips were dry. Her eyes were bloodshot from too many sleepless nights. One hand clutched a black rabbit plushie to her chest. The other gripped an amulet engraved with the Seimei Seal, something she had begged for from a shrine not long ago.
Only by holding both could she barely breathe in this house.
This house had once been warm.
Now it felt like a grave that had learned how to imitate home.
Then the knocking changed.
Bang!!!
The door shook violently.
The gentle rhythm from before vanished in an instant, replaced by raw force that made the wood rattle in its frame. The sound hit like a hammer, so sudden and brutal that Sora jerked under the covers.
Bang. Bang. Bang!!!
Each blow was harder than the last.
Because there was no response from inside, the voice outside lost even the last trace of false tenderness. The soft concern disappeared, as though some thin human mask had finally been ripped away. In its place came ragged breathing, wet and heavy, carrying a foul inhuman hunger. It sounded as if something filthy was crouched outside the door, pressing itself close, sniffing at the crack.
The pounding grew louder.
The panting grew closer.
Sora bit hard on her lip and pressed both hands over her ears, her fingers shaking so badly they could not even hold steady. It was a useless act of self deception. She knew that. Still, she could not stop herself. If she could not hear it, maybe it would not come in. Maybe if she stayed quiet enough, small enough, frightened enough, it would leave.
Minutes crawled by.
At last, the pounding stopped.
The panting faded with it, little by little, until all that remained was the retreating sound of footsteps dragging themselves farther and farther away.
Sora did not move.
Not at first.
She stayed curled beneath the blanket, eyes wide open in the dark, waiting for the next knock, the next whisper, the next lie.
Only when the silence held did some of the terror drain from her face.
Is it over?
Tonight, at least, it seemed to be.
But that thought brought no comfort.
Tomorrow would come. Then the day after that. And the day after that.
The fear that gripped her chest had no end to it.
The sudden deaths in her family, the things that began after, the unnatural shadows in the hallways, the voices that wore familiar tones but no longer belonged to the dead or the living, all of it had pushed her to the edge. Sora had never been strong. Now she was surviving one night at a time.
She forced back the sob rising in her throat. She did not dare make a sound.
After a long moment, she carefully pulled her phone from beneath the pillow.
The screen lit up the darkness with a harsh white glow, washing her already pale face in an even deader color. Her fingers were cold and unsteady as she unlocked it and opened a website.
The Non Scientific Supernatural Forum.
Ever since supernatural incidents had begun surfacing across the country, strange forums like this had appeared everywhere. Most were full of fake stories, recycled rumors, or lunatics trying to farm attention with cheap horror posts and fabricated eyewitness accounts.
This one was different.
The Non Scientific Supernatural Forum had a reputation.
People said the incident reports posted there were real. The survival guides were written by people who had actually seen things they should never have seen. More importantly, if someone had money or enough desperation, they could post a bounty and request an actual exorcist.
Some even claimed the forum had ties to official spiritual investigation networks, perhaps even people from the Onmyo Agency itself.
Whether that was true or not, it was the only hope Sora had left.
She opened the page for bounty requests.
Her trembling fingers hovered over the keyboard for a long time before finally moving.
She typed out everything.
The deaths. The voices. The knocking at night. The thing that wore her family's faces. The signs that something in this house was no longer human. Every detail she could remember, she forced herself to record. The cause, the symptoms, the progression. The forum required that much at minimum before reviewing whether a case was truly supernatural.
To Sora, it did not feel like writing a request for help.
It felt like writing her final statement.
An hour passed.
Nothing.
The review page remained unchanged. No reply. No notification. No sign that anyone had even seen it.
Sora stared at the screen until her vision blurred.
"Nothing again…"
Her voice came out dry and hoarse.
This was the third day in a row.
Three bounty posts. Three unanswered cries for help. Each one had sunk without a trace, like a stone dropped into black water. And with each passing day, the small fragile hope she had clung to was stripped away piece by piece.
She lowered her eyes.
That was when her phone vibrated.
Sora froze.
Then, almost frantically, she looked down at the screen.
A private message had arrived.
Official notification.
[Congratulations.
The bounty you posted has been accepted by the White Fox Office. The White Fox Office will head to your address to carry out an exorcism mission in the near future. During this period, please ensure your own safety.
From the Non Scientific Supernatural Forum.]
The White Fox Office.
For a second, Sora simply stared.
Then the tightness crushing her chest loosened all at once.
Someone had accepted it.
Someone was coming.
In that moment, it felt as if a thread of light had appeared at the bottom of a pit so deep she had stopped believing there was a sky above it.
She let out a breath she did not realize she had been holding and slowly put the phone down.
All she had to do now was endure.
Just a little longer.
With that thought, Sora cautiously lowered the blanket and poked her head out, desperate for even one mouthful of air that did not smell like fear.
Then she stopped.
Her whole body went rigid.
The breath in her throat locked in place.
The thin moonlight still fell across the room.
And beside her bed, standing in the darkness without a sound, were three figures.
Familiar.
Impossible.
Her father.
Her mother.
And another figure she knew so well that the sight of it hollowed out her soul.
They stood there smiling.
Their faces were wrong.
Their expressions were too wide, too fixed, too empty, like badly stretched skin pulled over something that had only studied humans from a distance. Their eyes watched her without blinking.
Then one of them spoke in a voice she knew better than her own.
"Sora, disobedient children get eaten."
The world seemed to stop.
A heartbeat later, the darkness in the room moved.
Countless black vines burst upward like living shadows, twisting and writhing in silence as they swallowed the moonlight whole.
In the pitch black room, the only thing left glowing was the white screen of her phone, flickering weakly on the bed like a final distress signal sent into the night.