Smoke and Shadow

When the age of humanity was still young, when the world was newly created, the God of Destruction, Susanoo no Mikoto, nearly caused the total annihilation of the human world in his gleeful rampage. The ocean flooded the land, and storms of thunder and lightning raged amidst human settlements. Many innocent lives were lost.

His sister, the Goddess of Sun, Amaterasu Omikami, couldn’t stand and watch as her creations suffered. In all of her golden radiance, she challenged Susanoo no Mikoto, her fiery sword drawn toward the God of Destruction.

But Susanoo, desperate and wicked, opened the Gate of Yomi and dragged Amaterasu into the Yomi with him, where she then fought centuries of battles against its denizens. This chaos in the Yomi caused millions of yokai to flood the human world, unleashing more death and devastation upon humans.

Inspired by Amaterasu’s struggles, humanities of old banded together and vowed to fight a never-ending battle against the yokai.

They called themselves the yokai hunters.

—

Night had fallen hours ago, and the moon had refused to show its face from the shrouding clouds.

On this night, a feminine figure trudged through the woods surrounding a dilapidated shrine. The shrine had fallen out of use years ago, when the shrine maidens were revealed to be yokai in disguise — a pair of fox spirits, if she remembered correctly.

The local authorities hadn’t had the chance to demolish it just yet, but the lights had been cut off, causing the woods surrounding the shrine to be in perpetual state of darkness, even in daylight. No one was maintaining it anymore, not even the locals dared to step into the threshold of the shrine.

With such unfortunate history, it truly was a perfect spot for malicious yokai to hide and set up a lair.

The figure was Kazahana Sumire, a yokai hunter from the famed Kazahana Clan. She was a young girl with a youthful face, sixteen years of age, and a student of Ajisai High School. She was still wearing her uniform when she began the hunt — ivory-colored dress shirt and dusky-purple skirt, with a band of purple ribbon around herneck. Her ink-black hair was tied in a simple ponytail for practicality. Her dark, gleaming eyes were sharp as she swept her gaze in search of the yokai.

There!

She drew her cherry tree wooden bow and released a yokai-sealing arrow toward a dark and smoky shadow lurking behind a chestnut tree. The arrow cut through the air like a bullet, but its target dispersed into a puff of smoke before the arrow hit it. The yokai was taunting her to follow it, cackling as it led her straight into the traps it laid for unaware humans and yokai hunters.

Very well, then.

Sumire took a deep breath, before following the yokai into the woods. She had been on its trail since two nights ago, and she wasn’t going to stop here just because she was feeling a bit afraid of the dark. She could do this. She had to do this.

Dark shadow moved at the corner of her eyes, and she shot another yokai-sealing arrow toward it — only for it to land on the bark of a chestnut tree. She let it disperse to reserve her own power, before continuing her slow trudging across the woods.

This particular yokai, an enenra, had been haunting the neighborhood for a couple days, devouring souls of the men it lured into its lair. All of its victims had families of their own, who grieved for them and wanted a semblance of justice for them. Though she couldn’t return their souls back into their lifeless bodies, she could at least put them to rest by sealing the yokai that caused their demise back into the Yomi. She hoped it would bring some peace to their families too.

But it wasn’t an easy task, that she could admit. After all, how could she entrap a being made of smoke and shadow?

Ah, if only her grandfather allowed her access to her father’s trove of relics…

The enenra didn’t seem to be interested in her, instead taking its time to lure her slowly into the center of the woods. It didn’t seem to want to devour her soul, most importantly — all it did was to make her exhausted. A preference in victims usually was a sign of intellect — only higher-level yokai had them. They were the most dangerous ones.

Her musings were cut short, when darkness shrouded her completely. It seemed that her deduction was incorrect. The enenra was all around her, its ghostly cackling sent shivers down her spine. The hunter had now become the hunted.

Dark tendrils of smoke swirled before her, before entering her mouth, into her lungs and seeping into every part of her body. It was suffocating her, blinding her, and terror filled her as she helplessly lost all of her senses, the movements of her limbs. She felt as if she was floating, despite her body growing heavier, and heavier, until—

Rough, chapped skin she briefly recognized as lips pressed onto her own. It sucked the smoke out of her lungs, emptying her body of the enenra’s miasma. She gasped and coughed as her breath was returned to her, her knees hitting the forest floor beneath as she was feeling lightheaded. It took everything in her not to pass out from the sensory onslaught.

As her vision returned to her, she saw a boy her age standing with his back facing her. In his hand was ball of eerie blue ball of light, lighting up this particular part of the woods and driving the enenra away. The cackling stopped, only the rustling of leaves remained. The air was fresh, if a bit chilly from the winter frost, but there was no sign of miasma in the air.

The boy turned, smirking at her confidently. His long, black hair waved in the wind, and his silver eyes glimmered like the moonlight, which finally showed its face as it shone through the thickest of the trees.

And all Sumire could think in that moment was how this beautiful boy had stolen her first kiss.