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Chapter Text

The Oni’s Bride sat in the center of the futon as she had been taught: with ankles tucked beneath her buttocks, hands folded demurely on her lap, back straight and eyes low. She sensed the heaviness that heralded return, that thickened the air until it moved between her teeth like mist, and thus she knew kneeling was required of her.

Soon heavy boots struck the floorboards outside. Even before the paper door slid open, she had already bowed her head to the mattress, hands pressed together tight upon the futon to cushion her deferent forehead. The heavy footfalls paused at the doorway, their master watching. Waiting. Silent.

“My lord,” she murmured into the oppressive quiet.

Her lord did not address her. Heavy steps crossed the room. Waiting until she heard the telltale tap of his hand against his thigh, the Bride rose and followed, eyes downcast as she joined him at the yoroi kaku awaiting against the wall. She kept her eyes lowered when he extended his arms. Methodically, quickly, expertly, guided by the light of a single paper lantern, she doffed his armor. Straps and ropes and buckles unwound from his blood-stained muscled, but though the armor weighed heavy in her hands, she did not let the pieces dirty the fragrant tatami mats below. She caught each piece and transferred them with reverent care to the yoroi kaku. The tekko on his arms; the sode on his shoulders; the kusazuri at his hips; the uwa-obi made of rope as thick as her arm, heavy and rough. She had handled each a hundred times by then. She knew them as intimately as her own body, and his. Each and every piece required respect, and through her careful handling, the pieces of armor were shed and reassembled to rebuild the figure of the warrior before her atop the wooden posts of the yoroi kaku.

To rebuild the figure of her husband, the Oni, returned home from the field of war.

She removed his mask, last, and placed it atop the center post of the yoroi kaku. The armor stand wore a crown of snarling red, livid in the gloomy room. Hands stained with blood and dirt fell to her side as her husband stood before her in nothing but his hakama. A broad chest, blue and grey and covered in scars, filled her demure vision as his hands descended to the tie of his trousers. They fell to the floor at his feet, and she gathered them up, folding them and setting them aside to be washed whenever he bade her do so.

But he wasn’t bidding her now. Now her husband stood before her naked, watchful and silent in the shadows.

He lifted a hand so massive he could grip her skull in his palm, crush it like a ripe peach, reduce her to bloody ruin in an instant. But the Oni did not crush his Bride inside his fist. A soft caress, light as air, brushed over her carefully bound hair. A finger tracked the curve of her cheek, and her jaw, and her throat. Breath hitched in the Bride’s chest. The Oni’s shadow flickered against the wall. It loomed even taller than her massive husband, inching upward in the paper lantern’s fitful light. Her eyes fell shut as the touch traveled once more upward. It passed over her parted lips, the bridge of her nose, and back against her hair. A sigh whispered from her lips, warmth expanding from every place he favored her with his touch.

The hand pressed flat against the crown of her skull. It grew heavy, commanding. Obedient, the Bride sank to her knees. The Oni was hard for her already. Hard and thick and curved just so, the skin here had flushed dark blue, white beading pearly at the slit in the tip of his penis, bubbling until it fell to front of her thin linen yukata. The Bride opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue, eyes cast aside, holding perfectly still as the Oni’s hips jutted forward in time with a deep grunt. The head of him struck her tongue hard enough to call forth a gag, but she pressed forward in time with the pressure his hand exerted on her hair. Breath coming heavy now, the Bride took him into her mouth and sucked, cheeks hollowing, tongue slicking over his flesh in hot, heavy strokes. Again her husband grunted, shunting forward until she gagged once more. The Bride’s eyes closed. Tears beaded along her lashes. She breathed through her nose as the press of his hips and the cage of his hand cut off her escape. The massive cock in her mouth soon inched down her throat. The Oni rocked into her neck until she could not help but place her trembling hands upon his thighs.

They were huge, the Oni’s thigh. Laddered with veins. Corded in muscle.

And slick with blood that did not belong to him.

The Bride did not balk at the task before her. She choked on her husband’s ardor until he pulled her off of his twitching penis, hand firm in the rapidly unraveling strands of her hair. Holding her up, head tipped back and throat exposed to him, he fisted himself in his other hand, grunting and huffing until come spurted from his tip to paint her face, her breasts, and hair with stripes of thick white ichor. Above his kneeling Bride, the Oni’s chest rose and fell with locomotive intensity.

The Bride panted, too. Her tongue wet her lips, slick and spit mixing on her thrumming skin.

The Oni growled. He dropped to his knees. She turned for him, knowing what he desired and hiking up the hem of her yukata until she was exposed to a pair of eyes gleaming like fire in the gloom. She was wet for him already. As wet and as slick as the blood on his thighs, taking his cock inside her easily when he pressed it against her weeping center. He pressed in deep, hands catching on her hips with bruising force. She complained not even a little at the stretch of him, nothing on her lips but a gasp and a whimper of thanks.

“Thank you, my lord. Thank you,” said the Oni’s Bride. “Thank you — !”

Face lowering to the tatami mats, reeds scratching against her cheek, she thanked him for every slapping thrust against her, his broad hips striking her ass with the crack of flesh on flesh, his growls of pleasure loud in the night and a low accompaniment to the keening yelp of her gratitude. Her hand slipped between her legs, furiously working at the source of her pleasure until she dragged an orgasm from her throbbing body. An ugly thing, that orgasm. Brutal and hard, inner muscles spasming in furious release, milking the Oni as pleasure blotted out her mind and left her weak and trembling and limp. Her body jounced in his grip, cheek rubbing back and forth, back and forth over the tatami, a trail of spit leaking from her numb lips. More slick dribbled down her thighs, little rivulets of fluid that soon pooled beneath her bruising knees. Through the fabric of her yukata, hard nipples dragged against the textured tatami.

The Oni paused. He pulled himself free. He stared down at the gape of her cunt as it pulsed and clenched around his absence. Huffing, he hauled her up by the waist and dragged her to the futon. There he sat like a lotus to guide her legs around him, entering her body in a swift, brutal, upward thrust. Hands under the globes of her ass, the Oni moved her up and down atop his cock, guiding her to place her arms around his neck as his enormous tongue swiped up his Bride’s throat. She moaned, yukata at last coming untied, breasts spilling before he eyes as he took her in the light of the flickering paper lantern. She was so tiny in his grip. So helpless and small, too weak to resist the pull and push of his enormous hands — and when sharp tusks grazed her shoulder as the Oni bit down, she came around him with a wail, violently spasming around the monster beneath her and thanking him again, and again, and again.

Her second orgasm had hardly finished ripping through her when she began to beg for a third, and for the privilege of feeling her lord find his release inside of her. Crescent moon nails scored his shoulders, adding thin new scratches atop gnarled scars in a desperate constellation.

“Use me, my lord!” she cried. “Use me, use me, fill me, please!”

She panted and huffed and hummed her desires, gratified when the pleas falling from her lips pulled a groan from the demon beneath her. The Bride howled with satisfaction when the Oni surged upward and slammed her onto her back atop the futon. He picked a brutal pace inside her, bestial in his ferocity, squatting and bending her nearly in half beneath his great weight as he climbed to his feet to drive down into the clutch of her sopping core. His cock slammed inside her willing body with crude wet sounds — and when he unloaded into her waiting center, he threw back his head and bellowed his release, a challenge to anyone who heard it to claim what he had marked so clearly as his.

“Th-Thank you, my lord. Thank you.” The Bride sobbed into his chest when he pulled free and gathered her to him, cock still hard and dripping between them. It slapped against her stinging clitoris with a splatter of his spend, but she did not flinch. “Thank you, thank you, thank you — ”

The Oni flipped her prone on the futon. He draped her with his weight and buried himself inside her once more, seed squelching from her bruised depths around the plunging invasion of his cock. Hand on the back of her neck to keep her still, he straddled her thighs and pushed in deep, fucking his Bride as she begged him anew to use her, fill her, and find his rough release.

But the Oni’s Bride had not always begged her husband for his ardor. She had not always been so pliant, pliable, and eager.

She had not always been the Oni’s bride.

No.

Before she became the Oni’s Bride, she had been a Survivor.

Chapter Text

The Trial started like any other.

It didn’t end that way.

The Survivor and her allies were up against the Oni, this time. She’d never faced this killer before, but she’d heard stories about him whispered across the campfire in the lull between Trials. Whispers rose to alarmed chatter when survivors returned from a Trial bleeding and shaking, even more roughed up than usual. These shaking survivors told tales about the Oni’s demonic face and the power of his arms, the swing of his blade, and his roar. That roar! The mere mention of that roar made other survivors shudder, fear like firelight flickering in their eyes. He was one of the most vicious killers, they claimed, and particularly brutal when he struck.

But hearing tales and witnessing reality are entirely different things.

She heard his roar, first, from somewhere across the site of their Trial, a deafening sound of rage and violence rattling the windows of the dilapidated warehouse even from a distance. Hair stood up on the back of her neck; sweat beaded on her palms; her knees knocked together like fallen kindling. Matt, beside her, swore under his breath and ducked into the shadows, clinging to them and keeping out of sight.

“The Oni. Shit.” White showed all around his irises before he disappeared into the gloom with the other survivors. “Find the gates. I’ll go around here, try and find a genny.”

He went his own way, and she went hers. Didn’t really want to. Would’ve preferred a friend just then, truth be told, and Matt was as good as any. But they’d never get away from the killer if they didn’t get the damn gate open, and they could cover more ground if they split up. A tried and true tactic. She’d been in enough Trials to know by now that moving as a group attracted too much attention to be worth the helping hands.

But getting caught alone by a killer, no matter how wise the tactic, was never a pleasant consequence thereof.

The Survivor kept to the outskirts of the realm, head low and feet quick, eyes peeled for signs of her friends and the killer alike. The air smelled of blood and decay, broken concrete and ash, spilled oil and fear. Broken windows and fallen palettes made her route circuitous, winding, indirect, but that suited her just fine. Made her harder to track, harder to spot, harder to chase. She nabbed a generator before she spotted anyone else, and then she saw another survivor. They exchanged a nod before darting into the dark. Soon she heard another generator kick on in the distance, and then one more. For a minute she thought they were doing well. That this Trial wouldn’t be so bad, and they’d be back at the campfire in time for whatever meager meal the others had managed to scrounge up, no worse for wear.

Her optimism was short lived.

She heard the Oni before she saw him. Another of those roars, even closer than before, shook the rafters, thrummed in her teeth, rattled down her spine like rocks down a hill. She whirled, turning — and there he was.

The Oni.

He stood in the doorway across the warehouse, watching her. Red mask, hulking body, that huge weapon with the spikes slung over his shoulder — blood sang in her wrists and neck, screaming at her to run. Even at a glance, shrouded in shadow, he was just as intimidating and ferocious and huge as the other survivors promised. No, worse. Because blood dripped off that gigantic spiked club of his she didn’t have a proper name for, landing on the ground in little puddles that gleamed crimson in the light of the EXIT sign still flickering above him. It cascaded off the demon-faced armor on his shoulders, his grey skin even darker in the neon-thick shadows.

Somehow no one had ever thought to mention the third eye in the middle of his mask. No one had thought to mention that it was real, moving and rolling around the socket — until it landed right on her.

She froze.

The eye stared.

The Oni didn’t move.

Or at least, he didn’t move right away. Maybe it was only for a second, and fear made it seem longer. Maybe he really did just stare at her for one moment, then two, then three. But it felt like they held there for a long time, just watching one another. Just staring from across the warehouse, predator and prey, hunter and quarry, killer and victim —

He took a step forward.

She turned and ran.

It was like a switch flipped. As soon as her back turned, she heard him charge, felt the pressure of him swell in time with the crescendo of his footfalls. He went from stillness to lighting speed in an instant, steps thudding, pounding, slamming the ground hard enough to feel in her calves, and even before she could bolt through the open doorway behind her, there was a roar, a rush of air, and —

Somehow he didn’t lop her head clean off. He just sent her falling onto her damn face as thudding fire bloomed across her back. She fell with a cry, more stunned than pained. The pain hadn’t caught up with her yet. Only a matter of time, though. Numbed, she knelt on the cold concrete and watched sullen blood trickle down her arms, terror like a rabbit in her throat as she waited for his heavy weapon to come crashing down and end it all.

But it didn’t. A grip like iron grasped her arm and threw her onto her back, tossing her down as the Oni dropped to a knee, caging her in beneath his bulk in the shadow of a stack of palettes. The point of his enormous club thudded beside her head. He leaned his weight on it, looking down at her, the third eye roving across her face. Now she could see him close up. The mask was carved of wood, and it was red, but the paint was uneven — no, wait, that wasn’t paint, that was splattered blood, gore just a slightly different color from the rest of the mask. Huge boar tusks jutted from his mouth, inhuman. And those eyes were pits of fire in his face, literally burning, undulating in his skin. An unholy light spilled from them to paint the tops of her heaving breasts glowing orange and gold. And she could smell him, too. Sweat and blood and rust and iron, the dirt of graves and the bite of cold rain, oh god he was on top of her, he was right there, he was going to kill her —

Something moved behind the Oni; a human grunt split the quiet like a gunshot; there was a crash and a screech and then wood rained down as the stack of palettes fell onto the Oni’s back. He buckled, bending forward, the eye in his forehead spinning and roving all the faster. But his body blocked the wood, holding it up and at bay. Dimly she expected him to bat it aside, or shrug it off, or duck and let it fall and crush her right where she lay.

But he didn’t. He tensed. He held it up. Stared at her. Unmoving except for that roving eye. Every muscle taut and shuddering as he bore its weight. All so it wouldn’t —

So it wouldn’t crush her?

But that couldn’t be. The Oni had no reason to protect her. The Oni had no reason to —

Hands snatched her shoulders. Warm ones, smaller than the Oni’s by far. She scrambled up, running out from under the Oni and through the door and into Matt’s arms as he pulled her off the floor. Half dragging, half carrying, hands winding in her clothes for purchase, he hauled her up and out of the warehouse and into the night beyond.

“C’mon! This way!” he said.

Her reply was a sob, choked and broken. “Oh my god, thank you, thank you — ”

“Fucking run, dammit!”

She obeyed. She couldn’t help it. Obedience came easier than using her own brain when terror clouded her mind so thickly. Her legs were wooden but she did as she was told, pelting away into the dark. But drugged with fear, she chanced a look over her shoulder.

Red eyes glowed in her wake — and the Oni roared again. She heard heavy feet strike the earth. They were going to come after her. She knew it in her brittle, prey-fragile bones. The Oni would come after her, next, head straight in her direction, and —

She spotted a locker and dashed inside. She clamped her hands over her mouth to stifle her panting.

The Oni’s steps faded away.

In the distance, Matt began to scream.

She only barely escaped that Trial. After everything was said and done, the generators lay cold. Her comrades, hooked and dead. The drumbeat thrumming of her heart kept time to the Oni’s furious, roaring song. It was only by miraculous accident she even stumbled upon the elusive hatch standing open inside a random shed, the darkness inside a welcome friend after a night of frantic bloodshed. Hands shaking, feet bloody, she hauled it open with a sob and prepared to throw herself inside —

Something stopped her.

She looked up.

There, in the doorway, stood the Oni. Eyes like fire lit the crags of his masked face and hooked teeth. From his right fist dangled his club, spikes matte with blood.

From his left hung Matt’s severed head, mouth agape in a silent scream.

She threw herself into the hatch.

The Oni’s gaze tracked her all the while — and although the Oni could not follow his prey through the hatch, even the warmth of the campfire’s safe light could not keep the memory of that dreadful gaze from following the Survivor into her dreams.

Chapter Text

The Oni chased a woman through the dark. The trail of her blood gleamed like scattered rubies in the moonlight. Frayed cords spit lightning sparks, but they cascaded harmlessly off his mask, so he paid them no mind. He only watched the woman, waiting for her feet to falter before charging forward. A wolf upon a rabbit, he shoved her to the ground and rolled her over.

A terrified face stared up at him.

It was not a face he recognized.

Rage filled his hollow chest. The Oni brought down his kanabō, and the terrified face turned to pulp.

But there were other women in this Trial. He had spotted three at the start before they scattered. He hunted and chased the next one he found, ignoring a man who scuttled across his path. He had no time for any of the men, this trial. He chased the next woman until she, too, fell. He flipped her over as she screamed.

He did not recognize her face, either.

Rage filled him once again.

Her face, too, turned to pulp beneath his club.

The Oni flicked blood from his weapon. He turned to go. There was one more woman in this Trial. One more chance to find her. The one with the familiar face that stayed his hand and filled his hollow chest with —

He had forgotten the word for it. He had not felt that emotion in untold years.

But he would learn what it was when he found her again. He was sure of this. He was sure that finding her would give him the answers he seeks. After all, he had met her before. This he believed in the depths of his rotting bones. But her face had been as terrified as these other women’s. Would she, too, run from him again? Would she flee into the night the next time they saw one another?

About this the Oni was not worried. He used to know her. He had broken her once before. He knew how to break her again.

“You’re letting them get away.”

A simpering voice, low and whispering in the dark — it came from the place where the shadows gathered thickest, soaking like ink spilled by a clumsy calligrapher into tatami. He knew this voice. This familiarity was not marked by the unnameable feeling that accompanied the woman’s face, however. This was marked by wariness, caution. Not fear, though. Never fear. The Oni had never feared anyone. Not even death. Not even the Entity, either, cruel as she was.

The shadows thickened, swirling around his feet. The voice rose stronger than before. It curled into his ears like the fog grasping his ankles, cold as the Void and just as hungry.

“I said, you’re letting them get away,” the Entity whispered. Tendrils of ice gathered around his shoulders. “They’re almost finished with the generators. Soon they’ll disappear through the gates and out of reach.”

The Oni said nothing. He turned to stalk off into the dark, but the fog pressed in tight around the door, blocking his way out of the dilapidated house with its strange architecture — nothing at all like the soaring eaves and paper doors of his long-ago, and nearly forgotten, home.

 “Are you going to find them? Stop them? Or will you just look for another girl to murder?” The Entity’s voice dropped low, rumbling, dangerous. “Or do you not even care anymore?”

The Oni said nothing. The Entity sighed.

“You were such a promising recruit when I first plucked you from the grip of death. A record-breaking killer, in fact. I feasted when you first entered my trial.” The Entity sounded almost regretful. “But lately, feast has turned to famine.”

The Oni growled low in his chest. The Entity laughed.

“Oooh, scary!” The humor faded into sneering disdain. “Or you would be, if you hadn’t let so many of them go free.”

The Oni said nothing. The Entity wasn’t wrong. He had let people escape him recently — men, mostly, because they did not interest him. They weren’t her. He had sought her ever since he caught sight of her face in that fated Trial. No other would do in her stead. No other face filled his thoughts so completely. He thought of her face whilst in the Void, and during the Trials, and during moments of respite between rapid rivers of potent rage.

Rage…First he had raged at those who fled from him. Now he raged because she was not here. He loosed another growl and turned, but the mist was already there, crowding in close.

“This… preoccupation of yours,” the Entity said. “It’s costing me more than you realize. More than you can afford, in fact.”

The Oni cocked his head. The Entity swirled, mist on the wind. In the distance a generator kicked on, a low rumble in the night.

“That’s why I’ve been keeping her from your Trials, Oni,” she continued with a giggle. “I had hoped her absence would — ”

She didn’t get to finish. The Oni was roaring and swinging his kanabō, slicing at the mist to rend it in twain. Hot rage bubbled and built in his chest at the thought of being denied, of the Entity prolonging the separation from the one, single thing the Oni had desired after so many years of blind, devoted, unending rage. He struck again, and again, and again, brutal and ferocious…but the mist floated back into place with a long-suffering sigh, unharmed.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” the Entity said. “You know that won’t work.”

The Oni did not care. He struck again with his kanabō, knocking down a wall with a furious crash. The mist scattered and reformed, the bank of fog pulling away from the Oni and moving toward the hole.

“Fine. I’ll leave. I know where I’m not wanted.” The Entity sounded almost offended…but then a small, sly smile seeped into its oily voice. “It seems you don’t want to hear my offer, after all.”

The Oni’s attacks slowed. The rage abated, a coal dimmed but still burning in his chest. He was not so far gone as to neglect reason. Chest heavy, fists tight, he stared at the Entity’s eddying form in enraged question. Again the Entity laughed, mist coalescing around the Oni’s shoulders once more.

“That’s what I thought,” the Entity purred. “Now, where was I? Ah. Right. The girl.”

The Oni did not move, but his hand tightened around the kanabō.

“I kept her from you because I thought without that distraction, you might give up the chase. But you never did.” The Entity sounded puzzled, almost, if she was capable of such an emotion. “You persisted even after she vanished from your sight. And that made me realize I’d gone about this all wrong.” She chuckled darkly. “You’re still human, under that mask. It’s easy to forget sometimes.”

The Oni’s glowing eyes blazed even brighter. He took a step toward the place the Entity’s fog pooled the thickest, hand tight on his club. The mist did not retreat, but it did undulate (just a little) at the fire in his eyes.

“No, no, no. Keeping her away from you was not the answer, and you’re too valuable for me to simply retire.” Leering, simpering, as if showing its teeth, the Entity said, “Casting you into the Void would be such an awful waste, you see. No. I have something else in mind for you, Oni.”

The Oni’s grip on his weapon relaxed. The Entity hummed. She was pleased, it seemed. The Oni did not know why.

“It’s highly unusual, my dear, but…I’d like to offer you a deal.”

Here the Entity paused. Waiting. Gauging the Oni and his endless temper. When the Oni did not balk, or bellow, or blitz the Entity’s misty form again, she continued on again.

“Its terms are very simple,” she said. “I will graciously place the girl into your next Trial. If you are able to kill every other survivor in the Trial, I will allow you to keep her.” She sounded proud of herself and her endless generosity, preening like a parrot. “How does that sound? We’ll call her a reward for all your good work so far.”

The Oni’s head slowly inclined. Keep her? Take her and keep her? A rush of something filled his chest, foreign and electric. To keep the girl… This was —

“But.” The mist undulated in warning. “I don’t normally allow my killers to keep pets, Oni.” She laughed like coins falling into a deep, dark well. “No, no, no. If you wish to keep her for yourself beyond the Trial where you claim her, there is something you must do for me in exchange.”

The Oni stiffened. His kanabō bobbed when his fist around it clenched and unclenched in turns. The rush of unnameable emotion in his chest had turned to ice.

“That’s right. This is a deal, not a gift freely given. But I don’t think the terms of our bargain will offend you.” Her voice dipped again in tone and tenor, the hollow thrum of the Void yawning in every word — and in that yawn a contract awaited, demanding a signature in blood. “In exchange for the woman you seek, you must vow to return to the beast you once were. To the demon I recruited all those years ago. While in my wonderful Trials, you must hunt, and maim, and kill like never before. You must wreak a path of carnage in every Trial you enter and deliver unto me more blood and agony and delicious, delicious terror than you ever have before.”

The mist swirled thick. Another generator kicked on in the night. Cold hands grasped the Oni beneath his armor, tantalizing and icy and full of creeping promise.

“Can you do that for me, Oni?” the Entity asked in that same, dark tone. “Can you kill as never before in my hallowed Trials, all for want of that  human woman?” The hands clenched tight, claws of cold cutting into undead skin. “Or will I have to cast both you and that little survivor into the Void?”

The Oni stood in silent vigil.

Then he roared — a roar of possession and a promise. Vengeance and a vow. Aggression and a guarantee. As he stalked into the night, rage and blood thirst singing in him as never before, the Entity threw back her unseen head and laughed.

And thus, a deal was struck.

A realm away, sitting beside a campfire, a chill crept down a certain Survivor’s back.

Chapter Text

The next time the Survivor met the Oni, it was in his domain.

The Survivor didn’t realize it at first glance. Houses with gently curved gables and soaring eves, once beautiful but now in ruins, bathed the gathered survivors in deep shadow. Statues of smiling monks turned their faces when no one was looking. Stone lanterns with fitful fires in their hearts cast pitiful light along unkempt gravel paths. The paths wound between dilapidated shacks and broken tori gates, huge boulders slick with moss and tall copses of bamboo blocking lines of sight across the realm. None of the structures looked sound enough to hide within, much to her dismay. But while she scanned the unfamiliar realm as soon as the fog cleared around the survivors, the others — many of them veterans who had outlasted vicious Killers dozens of times — tensed at the sight of the architecture.

“Shit,” one muttered.

“Not here,” said another.

“Where’s here?” she asked.

Hoarse with dread, a survivor said, “The Yamaoka Estate.”

“But did we get the — ?”

Somewhere in the distance the Oni bellowed, and the Survivors scattered.

Dashing between the shadow of a skeletal arbor and a shrine whose roof had long caved in, she kept out of sight amid tall grass, trying to find a generator in the fog. She’d never been to this realm before. Warehouses, graveyards, desolate cities and strange facilities, but never a Japanese garden long left to ruin. She felt exposed out in the open like this. Most of the realm had no roof to speak of. Trees someone could climb and use to watch you from afar stretched bony fingers toward the sky. Crows cawed and squawked, scaring up in a cloud when she passed — and maybe giving away her location, fuck. She sank low into a drift of fallen orange maple leaves before spotting a generator and running for it. It kicked on and she scurried away to find another, lest the sound attract the killer lurking in the shadows. Not that her thundering heartbeat wasn’t already a dead giveaway.

But she wasn’t in danger at that precise moment. This Killer didn’t exactly lurk. Even at a distance she could hear him lumbering, roaring, footsteps pounding over the terrain as he chased the other survivors and meticulously shut down any generators they managed to activate. Nowhere near her for the time being, thank whatever gods had abandoned her in this desolate place. She hadn’t seen the Oni since their first meeting. A lucky break; she didn’t want to see him again, tonight or ever again. She kept her head down and her movements quick, running along the edges of the realm marked by a tall fence.

Didn’t make sense, that fence of iron and stone. There wasn’t anything beyond the edge of the realms, as far as she knew. Why even pretend to fence them in when the survivors had nowhere to go? This place was a mindfuck of the highest order, and —

There, in the shadow of a house’s bare skeleton, the Oni swung his giant club into the middle of a man’s back.

She ducked, hiding in the shadows, heart in her mouth. Her fellow survivor screamed, but the Oni didn’t grab the man and haul him to the hooks like she expected. No, he raised his spiked club and swung again, and again, and again until the man stopped screaming and lay there in a heap. Dead. Truly, truly dead.

“Brutal, even for that sonofabitch.”

She almost yelped, but the man at her elbow covered her mouth just in time. It was another survivor, Jared, a tough-guy with neck tattoos and a big grin. But he wasn’t grinning now. In grim silence they they watched the Oni lumber off, bulky body vanishing through the center of a large house with a precariously caved-in roof.

“He’s not playing. Better make this fast.” Jared jerked his head west. “We cut through that gap and then split up. Meet on the other side of that arbor. He cut down the center. Whoever he spots will lead ‘im on a chase around the perimeter, over there.” He jerked his head east. “The other goes for gennys.”

“Right.”

It felt good to work with someone else amidst the chaos. They could outsmart that big, dumb brute if they worked together. One would lead him away, distract him while the other got down to business. The tactic had worked for them before. She’d gotten smarter, sharper since the last time she saw the Oni. She wouldn’t get caught again; she wouldn’t need saving again. She and Jared crouched beside each other and stalked forward through the shadows, heading for the gap he’d noted —

They didn’t make it far. The Oni charged through a crumbling wall, showering them with dust and debris and sending her skittering to the ground. Heavy feet hit the earth with vengeful thuds. Jared grabbed her elbow and yanked.

“C’mon, c’mon, run!”

She tried. Stumbled. Fell. Reached for Jared as the Oni’s shadow passed over her terrified face. She curled her hands into his shirttail, trying to crawl forward on legs that shook with fear.

Jared’s eyes hardened.

He kicked her in the jaw and bolted.

Her head snapped back. Her ears rang. The shadow of the Oni bore down, his gigantic club lifted high, spikes glinting in the light and spelling her doom as she realized Jared left her, Jared had left her, he had kicked her down and left her to distract the Oni so he could get away and now she was going to die, die, she was going to die, and —

But the Oni did not bring the weapon down.

She thought she must have a concussion, because the Oni did not kill her, and that made no goddamn sense at all. Hand slick with another survivor’s blood, he cupped her chin, jerking her face to one side and then the other. White hair swirled around his massive head like a funeral shroud. A low growl filled his chest, burrowing into her ears like the bore of a drill. The world tilted, lurched, spun when he grabbed her wrist and yanked her up, throwing her body over the sharp spines of his armored shoulder, not caring even a little when she screamed at the biting pain.

This is it, she thought. This is it. He’ll hook me, and leave me there, and kill my friends, and then —

But he did not take her to the hook and set her flesh upon it. He walked right past one hook, in fact, and then another, heading toward — well, she had no way of knowing where, but she struggled and kicked and screamed all the while, crying out for the other survivors (and even that traitor, Jared) with every thundering step the Oni took.

None of it made any difference. He held her thighs in a bone-crushing grip until shadows passed over her terrified face and his feet struck hollow boards. None too gently he tossed her down, her ass colliding with the floor so hard her teeth clattered together. Above her the Oni’s eyes burned scarlet, fire flowing from them in a trail of rage. Surely now he would kill her. Surely now he would —

The Oni walked away.

A door slid shut behind him, and she was trapped.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust. She was in…a building? Yes, a building with rotting mats of woven reeds on the floor and paper doors, fibers somehow unbroken despite the rest of the realm’s dilapidation. It wasn’t a very big building; just a dark cube with a high ceiling, alone and enclosed, light so dim she could barely see. But the walls were made of paper. This was Japanese architecture, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t some light shine through? Yes, the doors had to be paper, and that meant —

She slammed her hands against the door.

It was as solid and as heavy as iron.

She spun, frantic, trying to find a door or a window or a gap, but there were none. The Survivor shoved her shoulder against the wall again, but what should have been pliable paper would not budge. She yanked and slammed in the dark, throwing her entire body at the paper again and again and again, but it wouldn’t so much as bend beneath her entire weight. It wouldn’t break. The paper would not break or tear. Why wouldn’t this flimsy,  mildewed, water-stained paper not fucking break!?

She curled her fingers and raked her nails down the paper, but even that didn’t work. But she did it again, and again, and again regardless, desperate, nails tearing and pulling in their beds because in the distance she heard someone scream and gibber in fear, and then the buzz of a generator went out. No, no, they couldn’t lose, they needed that genny, they needed —

The paper gave way, just a tad. A tiny fissure opened up. A ray of fitful light speared the gloom. With a cry she dug her finger into the gap, yanking and tugging and opening it wider as another survivor screamed, and then another generator went quiet, and —

Ice suffused her finger. Pure cold, pure dark. She snatched back her hand with a cry, stumbling away from the tiny ray of light, of hope, she had opened in the door.

But instead of light, all she saw was dark. Dark like mist pulsed beyond the tiny fissure. It hurt her eyes to look at it, like it was made of something mortals should never see. To her horror, it snuffed out the light and poured into the room, chasing away dim shadow with pure black, with utter dark, complete Void —

The Survivor tried to scream.

Pure nothing flooded her lungs.

The Survivor knew no more.

Chapter Text

Waking came slowly.

Understanding came later still.

The Survivor came-to with a pounding headache and a mouth dry from thirst. She was indoors somewhere, air smelling of stale air and old wood, and it was dark. Not so dark she didn’t recognize Japanese architecture when she saw it, though. Although she did not recognize the room itself, she suspected it wasn’t part of the realm the other survivors had called the Yamaoka Estate. She’d run around enough of that realm to see its caved-in roofs, broken walls, and rotten eaves. Nothing in that realm had remained intact. Here, though, the room was in one piece. Yes, there were spiderwebs in the corners and the reed mats on the floor were threadbare, but…

Clean. It felt cleaner here, somehow, than it had in the realm she remembered being taken from.

And that meant she had no fucking clue where ‘here’ even was.

There wasn’t much to her prison. She’d been locked in a single room (long, rectangular, plain) with paper walls and reed mats on the floor. The paper on the walls resisted all of her attempts to push, claw, or tear through it. Just like in the little shack where the Oni had imprisoned her during the Trial, she thought. Here, too, the paper was as tough as stone. Her scratching nails and prying fingertips gave way long before the paper did.

Were there any other means of escape? A little ambient light filtered through the paper on what seemed to be an exterior wall, but there were no windows and only two doors to speak of. The first door resisted every attempt she made to pry it open. It didn’t even rattle in the frame. The other slid open easily enough, but it didn’t hold means of escape. The tiny room beyond was made of stone, and it held an empty half-barrel that might be some kind of bath tub, plus a hole in the floor. Must’ve been a toilet, because there was a little t-shaped metal post beside it to assist in squatting. The bathroom did have a window set high in the ceiling with what might be bamboo bars across it, but it was too high to reach and too tiny to squeeze through.

At least there was thin, grey light in the bathroom thanks to that window. Better than nothing. And she’d had nothing for a long time.

Maybe there was something she could use as a pry-bar or a hammer. Back in the main room she found a heavy wooden chest with iron fittings, but it just had some linen robes and other odds-and-ends inside it. Tucked away behind a tall folding screen sat a complicated wooden stand she couldn’t discern the use of. It was too flimsy to make for a good tool, much to her chagrin. Nothing to use as a weapon, at least. The only other item in the big room was a huge, threadbare futon with a comforter that had once been pale green. Now it was a shade of indeterminate brown, faded and dull after many years and many washings.

She looked at the futon with trepidation. This wasn’t where the Oni slept, was it? Somehow she couldn’t imagine that demon doing something as mundane as lying down and resting. Or wearing the robes in the chest. Or shitting in that old-fashioned Japanese squat toilet.

A real, honest-to-goodness laugh (the kind she hadn’t found cause for since she got trapped in the waking nightmare of endless Trials) bubbled in her chest. The image was as preposterous as the fact she’d made it out of the Trial alive and held in strange room with unbreakable paper doors —

Distantly, somewhere beyond the paper walls, heavy footsteps thudded against the floor.

The Survivor’s laughter died as quickly as it had begun.

The Oni easily opened the paper door she hadn’t been able to budge. She would’ve been insulted if she wasn’t scared out of her mind. The Survivor had already backed up against the far wall by the time he slid the door aside and stepped within. Somehow he looked even larger indoors than he had in the Trial. Heart in her mouth, palms sweating and knees knocking, the Survivor waited with a whimper on her tongue for the moment he’d stride across the room and kill her where she stood.

But he didn’t kill her. He just stood there. Watching. Staring with those flaming eyes, white hair undulating around his head like he was underwater.

Frantically pressing herself against the wall, she scanned her killer up and down. To her surprise (and with some distant sense of fleeting relief) he wasn’t carrying that huge spiked club he loved to bludgeon people to death with. The Oni still wore his armor, though for some reason he’d ditched his shoes. Vaguely she recalled that you were supposed to take off your shoes in Japanese homes, but the idea of the Oni possessing manners was utterly laughable, and she wasn’t in the mood for jokes anymore. Fear overrode every other instinct in her trembling body. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, discomfort — it all faded away under the rush of adrenaline making her heart beat like a rabbit’s fleeing feet against her ribs.

She skittered down the wall when the Oni took a step in her direction, but he didn’t come lunging at her as expected. He just walked forward and bent at the waist, one enormous hand swiping along the floor. Then he backed up and planted himself once more in the open doorway, still watching her.

She wasn’t watching him in return anymore, though.

Her eyes were fixed on the ceramic bowl of food he’d placed on the floor.

The food looked normal enough: a mound of steamed rice and a skewer of what was probably chicken, dry as a bone but seemingly fresh. An earthenware cup of clear water sat next to it. Clean water, fresh food — she hadn’t seen fresh food in ages. Packaged goods scrounged during Trials were the freshest she’d had in a long while. Sometimes stale bread or half-rotten fruit appeared at the campfire. The time a box of half-eaten, day-old pizza had appeared, half the survivors cried in happiness. Most water (brackish, never fully clear) came from tepid puddles of unknown origin. Finding a sealed water bottle was cause for celebration. Rice, chicken, fresh water…these were luxuries, and at the sight of them, her stomach growled loudly enough to rival the Oni’s roar.

Still: She debated eating it for a while. As her heartbeat slowed from a sprint to a jog, her eyes shifted from the food to the Oni and back again. Slowly, bit by bit, she peeled herself off the wall.

“If you wanted me dead, you could’ve just killed me by now.” Her voice was hoarse with disuse, scratchy from thirst. “So… probably not poisoned, then.”

The Oni’s head tilted to the side. His undulating hair swayed. The fire in his eyes shifted, the tail of the flame drawn toward the ceiling like smoke. He said nothing.

The Survivor took a deep breath, and she ate.

It tasted...stale, maybe. Not quite right. Decidedly under-seasoned. Also cold. But it was the best food she’d had in a long time, and so she choked down every grain of rice and scrap of greasy chicken with big gulps of clear, tasteless water. She avoided making eye contact with the Oni. She avoided looking at him at all if she could help it. Intent on survival, the Survivor kept her face lowered. Eyes averted. And when she ate the final bite and her headache finally abated, she set the bowl in front of herself and curled back up against the wall.

The Oni watched her for a time.

Then, slowly, he dropped to his haunches and held out his hand.

It took her longer than she’d like to admit to realize what he wanted: the bowl. He wanted it back, and he didn’t intend to pick it up himself. She stared at his hand in reluctant silence. It was large, his skin a strange grey-blue in the dim light, like the skin of a drowned corpse. She didn’t want to touch him. She didn’t want to get anywhere near him. And she most certainly didn’t want to clean up a damn bowl when he was perfectly capable of picking it up himself…but the longer he sat across from her, as patient and unmoving as a stone, the more she suspected he would outlast her in a battle of wills.

Pissing him off was also probably a bad idea, come to think of it.

Slowly, gingerly, she uncurled her legs. Half crawling, half crouching, she scooted across the floor and grabbed the bowl. On her knees she leaned forward, trying to hand him the bowl while remaining as far away as she possibly could —

In a flash the Oni’s fingers closed around her jaw, pulling her face toward him with a hard yank. She saw a flash of red eyes, white hair, a gaping maw, hooked teeth and —

She wrenched away somehow. Or maybe the Oni let her go. Either way, with a cry she skittered back against the wall, knees to her chest, face hidden in her dirty jeans.

Something rattled. There came a thud. She didn’t dare look when the paper door slid shut. Only when his footsteps faded down the hall did she dare lift her eyes.

The Oni was already gone, and the Survivor was alone.

Chapter Text

The food indicated the Oni did not intend to hurt her. At least, not yet.

She hadn’t been expecting the Oni to keep her alive, but the food said he had some reason to keep her intact…for the time being, anyway. It was impossible to say what he wanted for her in the longterm. Maybe he would keep her intact long enough to use her as bait and trap her friends (though she doubted such a tactic would work on assholes like Jared, anyway). Maybe she was just an amusement to break up the pattern of the Trials. Maybe if the Oni didn’t get pulled into a Trial fast enough, he’d torment and torture her as a fun after-hours alternative. Break her body for his amusement. A nice little side-dish to the main course.

Or maybe he wanted something else.

She looked at the futon, as of yet untouched, and shuddered.

But he didn’t do any of those things. He didn’t even make her sleep on the futon, though she understood by now it was clearly meant for her. She worried he’d become enraged and kill her if her filthy clothes got it dirty, so she stayed away out of an abundance of caution. Not that he appeared to care about her unwashed state. He came and he went, and he fed her, and he watched while she ate. She never found the courage to look at him in return — at least not straight on, nor in the eye. He moved slowly, like someone trying not to spook an animal, and never spoke. Eventually she stopped scrambling away every time he entered the room, though her heart never stopped hammering like it wanted to break free of her chest.

It helped he always brought food and water for her.

But if he didn’t mean to kill her, why was she here? How long did he intend to keep her locked up in this room? And what waited for her outside it when the Oni inevitably tired of feeding her (or if by some miracle she managed to escape)?

She didn’t like thinking about the longterm any more than she enjoyed contemplating the short.

Still. After what she suspected was a few days in isolation, she smelled absolutely ripe, and at some point you can’t pretend not to notice the situation at hand. Much though she dreaded the thought of speaking to the Oni directly, she had to try something — for her own sake. For her sanity. So the next time he appeared, she mustered up the courage to ask him for something to bathe with.

He met her plea with silence. It occurred to the Survivor that her captor might not speak English. The architecture of this place and his name were a clue he came from Japan (specific era unknown), but she didn’t know enough Japanese to make a difference. She tried gesturing once she had his attention, feeling utterly ridiculous while she pointed toward the wooden tub in the bathroom and mimed washing herself.

“I’d like to bathe,” she said, over-enunciating each syllable and feeling stupid about it. “To bathe. Bay-thuh. Wa-ash with wa-ter. Do you get it?”

 His head cocked to one side, and a number of syllables tumbled from his gaping, toothy mouth.

Japanese, as predicted. It was the first time she’d head him speak. He had a deep voice to match his roar, also as she expected. The words rumbled like thunder and vibrated the air them before worming past her teeth and stealing her breath away. The mask only muffled his voice a little.

“I’m sorry?” she said.

His head cocked like a dog’s again. More syllables she couldn’t catch bloomed in the space between them. Vaguely she wondered if the tangle of tusks and fangs in his mouth were part of his mask or his face. The teeth posed no barrier to his pronunciation. No lisps or anything, at least. When she didn’t reply, he spoke again, words too complicated for her to replicate. Something-something-'ay-go-dess.'

“Gesundheit,” she replied, because she had no idea what else to say.

“Omoshiroi desu ne,” he said.

His chest expanded and rapidly deflated, air huffing from his mouth. Although she hadn’t understood a single word of his Japanese, there was something about his tone that she recognized. Contemplation, maybe. Perhaps a touch of surprise. Clearly they didn’t understand each other. She rubbed at her temples, fear fading in the wake of frustration. How the hell was she supposed to survive here without being able to ask for things as simple as bathwater?

But perhaps her pantomiming hadn’t been entirely useless. He left the room, and when he returned, a full bucket of cool water hung from his massive hand. Rags, a hand towel and a cake of soap sat in the other. Gingerly she took it from him, eyes wide. Disbelieving.

“Thank you,” the Survivor whimpered. “Oh my god, thank you.”

If the Oni understood, he gave no sign. The Oni went to the wooden chest against the wall. From it he pulled one of those linen robes she’d found on her first night in the room. This she took, too, with wooden hands.

“I…thank you.”

He didn’t say anything. He just pointed at the washroom door.

The Survivor couldn’t find it in herself to speak, either. She was too stunned, too shocked that she’d asked for something and actually received it. After so long with nothing — with not a single basic human need being met — without a single moment of levity or kindness or comfort —

Crouched over the bucket of water, rag in hand, covered in flimsy suds, the Survivor’s eyes filled with tears.

She didn’t let herself indulge in a nice cry, though. A Killer stood on the other side of the door. He could probably smell weakness, and she didn’t intend to give the Oni any indication of her vulnerabilities. She scrubbed her face to obliterate any puffiness and put on the linen robe, grudgingly grateful to be clean for the first time in what felt like months. Survivors tried to bathe where they could, but without consistent access to running water, the act was never terribly thorough. Her regular clothes were too filthy to put back on. No, she’d wear the robe, even if it meant accepting another gift from the Oni. When the Oni left, she’d wash her clothes in the leftover water, or perhaps he’d even bring her more. For now she left her dirty jeans and shirt hanging over the lip of the giant barrel-tub for safekeeping.

The Oni had disappeared by the time she returned to the main room, but he’d left behind bowls of food and water — on a tray, this time. The lacquer was chipped in places, but the tray had little enamel flowers set into the handles. Camellias, the Survivor thought. She stared at the yellow and white flowers as she ate. They were the brightest things in the room. The closest to sunshine she’d seen in ages. Once she ate every scrap of food, she put the tray by the door and sat on the futon.

Boredom followed.

She counted the reed mats on the floor for a bit. There were 24 total. She already knew the number; it wasn’t her first time counting the mats since the Oni locked her up, and she suspected it wouldn’t be the last. There wasn’t much else to do besides try and remember what those damn mats were called. She’d heard the Japanese name of them a long time prior, but no matter how hard she racked her brain, she couldn’t quite recall the word. Ta-something. Ta-ma-mi? Ma-ta-mi? No, that wasn’t right…

The diversion only last so long before it grew as stale as the food. Because she was at last clean, she decided to sit on the futon — and oh, now that was nice. She hadn’t slept on anything softer than the dirt beside the campfire in ages. Now she knew exactly what she could do to pass the time: nap and not get a crick in her neck. Score. Eagerly she pulled back the comforter and climbed inside, burrowing down with a sigh. Naps were way better than boredom, even if the weird little pillow on the futon was lumpy inside and rattled when she moved.

But, she thought as she shut her eyes, she supposed boredom wasn’t so bad as far as personal problems went. She’d recently faced the much bigger issue of surviving this strange, deadly world of Trials and Killers. Being bored was far better than being scared out of her mind 24/7. Come to think of it, when was the last time she’d actually had the necessary free time to experience boredom? Weeks? Months? Time flowed so oddly in this place, it was hard to tell.

Discerning the flow of time had only gotten harder in her prison, but she still supposed it wasn’t all bad. She was safer here than she would be in the Trials (provided the Oni didn’t decide to kill her, or whatever it was he intended to do with her once the novelty of taking care of her wore off). After everything she’d been through, boredom felt almost novel. A kind of luxury she didn’t know how to appreciate before running for her life day after day in endless, excruciating survival.

In painful retrospect, there was a lot about her old life she hadn’t appreciated enough. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” and all that annoying jazz. She saw now why that clichéd line had caught on. What she wouldn’t give now to get even the dullest, most tedious, insufferably boring parts of her old life back. An arm for sure. Maybe even a kidney.

She swallowed the lump in her throat before it could dissolved into tears. Her old life was gone. She wouldn’t get it back. And there was no sense crying over the impossible, these days. She had much bigger things to cry about.

Like fire-eyed Killers coming back and killing her while she slept, for instance.

Ugh, shut up, brain. She should focus on the positives instead. Meager though they may be to someone not accustomed to Trials, the positives at hand were pretty major for the Survivor. Consistent food, potable water, a bath, and even a soft bed...it wasn’t all bad here. Some parts were downright pleasant.

She pressed her face against the strange, lumpy pillow resting by her head and scowled. The filling inside rattled like fate decided by the roll of the dice. Could the Oni’s careful treatment be considered a form of kindness, or was she interpreting him all wrong? Maybe he’d felt sorry for her and brought her here? Maybe there was still something human behind that horrible mask?

Or maybe she was merely bait for other survivors.

Maybe this ‘kindness’ of the Oni’s would come at a cost she couldn’t yet comprehend.

The Survivor did not know.

But the futon was comfortable, and she fell asleep wondering.

Chapter Text

The Survivor woke to the sound of heavy footfalls. Footsteps made by someone many times her size would have sent her scrambling for a hideaway before, but now she was warm, and comfortable, and thus she swam from sleep slowly. She opened her eyes and blinked blearily in the dim room just as the door opened —

Twin points of flame in a dark silhouette swam into view.

She scrambled up until her back hit the wall, shaking hands clutching her robe tight atop her chest. She couldn’t help but cry out in fear, though she managed to stifle the sound behind her fist. The Oni watched her in silence from the open doorway. He stood just far enough inside to reveal his red mask and the golden, bloodstained armor on his chest. The rest of him remained suffused in deepest shadow. Tusks gleamed in the low light, sharp and curved. Somehow he seemed bigger with parts of him obscured. The Survivor’s dream-addled mind filled in the missing pieces to render him even larger still.

Soon he moved. Luckily he didn’t head in her direction. Shoes dangling from his hand, he strode across the room to the folding screen along the far wall. Shoving it aside revealed the funny wooden contraption the Survivor did not recognize. It looked like a box with wooden posts jutting up from the top, spindly and inscrutable. The Oni set the shoes in front of the box. Then he turned to her and beckoned. His nails were long and sharp, pointed at the tips like a tiger’s claws.

The Survivor swallowed, hands clammy against the floor mats. “Wh-what do you want?”

He beckoned again. This time he paired the curl of his fingers with two syllables: “Kite.”

“Kee-tay?” she repeated, pointing at her chest. “You want… me?”

He pointed at the floor before him. “Koko ni kite.”

She hesitated. His fiery eyes blazed brighter; the third eye on his forehead fixed upon her in a hard, unblinking stare. Something in its glistening depths sent a chill down her back. She got the feeling the Oni didn’t enjoy asking for things more than once. She didn’t want to find out what would happen if he had to ask a third time. Survivor intent on surviving, she pushed herself up against the wall until she found her feet and crossed the room step after skittish step.

She’d always known he was big, the Oni. Taller than most Killers, and certainly more muscular. Jared had once remarked the Oni was built like a brick shithouse (not that the coward would ever dream of saying that to the Oni’s demonic face), but while glimpsing him from afar had been intimidating, seeing this beast up close and personal was another thing entirely. The tips of his white hair, still undulating on a wind she could not feel, nearly brushed the room’s low ceiling. Barrel-chested with arms to match, his tree-trunk thighs looked capable of lifting a fucking truck. Her mouth dried with every inch closer she moved, because the closer she got, the more he seemed to loom. The brighter his eyes blazed under his hooded crimson brow. And the more certain she became that he could squash her like a bug with minimal effort if she so much as annoyed him. Better obey him, fast.

In spite of her commitment to not getting squashed, the Survivor stopped cold when his scent washed over her. Wind and ruin, metal and blood…the blood of her friends? She bit back bile, heart hammering as her previous meal of cold chicken and rice threatened to make a reappearance.

The Oni reached one massive hand toward his opposite shoulder. One grey-blue fingertip tapped the strap holding his metal shoulder-armor in place. It was the same armor with the demon faces and jutting horns that had gouged her stomach when he carried her off during the Trial. Then he pointed to the opposite shoulder, looking at her in expectant silence.

Soon it clicked: “You want me to help you take that off?” the Survivor asked.

He kept pointing. No English. Dammit. With all the reluctance of a doe entering the lion’s den, she stepped into his orbit. Knees shaking, hands unsteady, she reached for the Oni and touched the strap on his shoulder with a fingertip.

His hand fell to his side.

Breathing through her mouth so she wouldn’t taste the blood on the air, she found the metal clasp and twisted it open. The huge plate on his shoulder drooped as the leather went slack. For one horrible, tilting second she thought it might drop to the floor, scatter blood across the reed mats. But he was fast, far faster than the Survivor, and he caught it before it could fall. He pulled the plate free and turned to the wooden stand. With a few loops of his fist, he draped it over the left side of the wooden contraption behind the screen.

The same side of his body he’d worn the armor on, in fact.

The Survivor was smart. She had to be smart to face the Trials and live to tell the tale. Without prompting, she unclasped his other piece of shoulder armor and mirrored its placement on the wooden contraption — the armor stand, she now knew. Relief flooded her chest when the Oni nodded once, approving. Then he pointed at the shoulder pieces one by one.

“Sode,” he called them.

“So-day,” she repeated back.

He nodded again. He guided her to another strap crossing his broad chest. This one held up the leather panels on either side of his thick neck. He taught her the name of those pieces, too, before unbuckling the medallion over his chest. The medallion resembled the shoulder plates, all of them bearing three-dimensional carvings of demon heads with ruby eyes baring their teeth in silent snarls. The overlapping plates of leather armor on his stomach were connected to the chest medallion, apparently, and held in place with more straps. When he stripped this part away and placed the dou (as he called it) upon the stand, he turned to her only half clothed.

Nude from the waist up, he wore another big medallion over his groin and stomach, flat metal held in place by buckles and lengths of rope thicker than her wrists. Panels of overlapping armor guarded his thighs. His chest was right at her eye level; with a hollow jolt she realized it was the first time she’d seen him without the complex rigging of straps and ropes obscuring his upper body. The idea of an undressed Killer left her gaping and dumbstruck. Huge and broad and grey, flesh tinged an unearthly blue, he bore a constellation of pockmarks and slashes upon his skin, scars mapping a night sky of war across a body honed to warrior perfection. Muscles bunched in his heavy pectorals, stone-carved abs, and the yoke of power along his trim waist. When he held out one thick arm to offer her the gauntlet upon it, prominent veins and muscles rippled under his skin there, too.

The vein in his wrist pulsed. Apparently he was alive, somehow. She wasn’t sure why that surprised her, but it did. He was too big to be a human man. Too imposing, too supernatural. Larger-than-life, like a demon from a storybook rather than a living being. The incongruity of his pulse and the deathly pallor of his skin were totally at odds. Would his skin be warm to the touch? Cold? Burning as hot as his eyes?

She fumbled with the straps along his wrist and forearm. She couldn’t seem to get the buckles moving. Anxiety spiked in her chest. She tried harder, but the leather was stiff, and she didn’t want to touch his skin. She didn’t want to feel the pulse in his veins. She didn’t want to know if he was alive or undead, warm or cold or burning hot —

Her trembling fingers slipped off the gauntlet again.

The Oni caught her by the wrist.

She froze deer-in-headlights solid. The Oni’s grip was cold and hard. An iron vise clad in skin roughened from years handling weapons and the scrape of his enemies’ bones. But he didn't hit her, or hurt her, or even growl at her clumsy failure like she thought he might. He just pushed her fingers away. Slowly, carefully, his hands — those massive hands with their long, sharp nails and deathly blue skin — unbuckled the gauntlet. It took a deft little flick of the metal buckle the Survivor would never had known to perform, and one the Oni’s bulky fingers looked to big to accomplish so neatly. Peculiar task complete, he pulled the gauntlet off and placed it on the stand. Then he offered her his other arm.

This time, copying him, she removed it without issue. She placed it on the stand opposite its mate.

His hands dropped to the massive rope at his hips.

She turned from him. She couldn’t help it. It was the last bit of armor he still wore, the armored medallion blocking his groin the only thing keeping his body apart from hers, armor protecting her from him instead of the other way around, and the thought of owing him for the food, the water, the soft bed rattled in her head, and oh god was he about to collect the debt she owed — ?

He caught her arm.

She choked on a sob as he took her wrists in his hand and guided them to the rope. Slowly, his cold touch guiding her wooden fingers, she unknotted it.

The medallion over his groin and the armor over his thighs fell to the floor with a thud.

He wasn’t naked underneath, thank god. He still wore a pair of threadbare Japanese-style pants made of rough cloth. She stared without seeing at the floor as he picked up the fallen armor and placed it on the stand, turning back to her and standing just within reach. He didn’t have shoes on. He had muscular feet, too. Kind of weird seeing a Killer’s bare feet. It felt… silly, somehow. Unreal. Killers weren’t supposed to have grey-blue toes and nails in need of clipping. They weren’t supposed to have little houses where they could take off their armor at the end of a long day. They weren’t supposed to teach you Japanese words or bring you water and food and soap —

One enormous blue hand swept through the air. The Oni pointed at the futon.

“Nemu,” he said.

The Survivor had no idea what that meant. But somehow, she knew exactly what the Oni wanted her to do. She also knew better than to argue. Crawling into bed and going to sleep was the only escape left to her, and into its waiting embrace — and the distressingly comfortable futon — she eagerly threw herself.

Chapter Text

The Survivor was awake the next time the Oni returned. That night (or day; she really couldn’t tell the difference) she helped him with his armor as he’d shown her, silently placing each discrete piece upon the wooden stand he called a yoroi kaku. She didn’t enjoy touching the armor. Blood all-too-often slicked the metal with deep crimson, but at least helping the Oni gave her something to do besides make and-remake the futon, or count the reed mats on the floor.

24 mats in all. The number hadn’t changed. Neither had her desire to find something to occupy her endless, night-dark days.

The following time the Oni returned to the Survivor’s prison, she had grown bored enough to crave work to busy her idle hands. Blood or no blood, at least putting away the Oni’s armor broke up the monotony of her imprisonment. She rose from the futon when she heard him coming down the hall outside and waited with scant patience for him to slide open the paper door. As soon as he did, she started forward with hands outstretched and eager.

But the Oni held up a hand of his own to stop her. Slowly he shook his head, white hair waving, tips snapping like silent whips in the quiet air. Beneath his hooked brow, the flames where his eyes should be burned brighter than before.

The Survivor’s heart leapt into her throat. “What’s wrong?”

He pointed beside the futon. She’d learned by now that pointing usually meant he wanted her to move to whatever spot he’d indicated. She hadn’t had the heart to resist his direction more than a few times. On the rare occasions she showed resistance, he’d reached for her like he intended to move her himself with his own two hands. But she didn’t want him touching her, not fresh from a Trial with blood under his fingers, so she inevitably obeyed before the Oni could get that far.

Now, too, she resisted the idea of being touched by him. She moved of her own accord, standing beside the futon just as he’d wordlessly instructed.

Once there, he pointed at her feet. She looked at them, and then at him, with one brow hitched.

A frustrated growl rumbled between his teeth. She flinched, backing up a pace. The Oni walked to the yoroi kaku and set down his shoes, rounding on her and stalking back over with heavy footfalls. Her heart beat loud in her ears; her face dropped to the floor, shoulders tensing, braced for impact. What was wrong? What had she done wrong? Why was he angry — ?

He did not hit her. He’d never once hit her in spite of her many expectations of violence or bodily hard. Instead he walked over and bent, dropping briefly to one knee and placing his palm flat on the floor.

Then he stood. He pointed at the ground again.

Slowly, carefully, the Survivor sat down on the mats.

The Oni watched her for a moment. He sat down, too. Leather and metal creaked as he knelt in front of her, feet held parallel with calves tucked beneath his thighs and ankles under his buttocks. He placed his hands flat atop his thighs. The muscles in his legs flared out with the pressure of his posture, fabric straining over their bulging heft, power rippling just out of sight.

Suddenly the Survivor remembered a movie she’d seen, once, set in some historical period of ancient Japan. This pose was familiar to her. Some kind of ceremonial pose, she thought, though she couldn’t remember what it was called. With new understanding she copied the motion. She knelt with hands on her thighs and peeked up at the Oni with breath held. Even kneeling beside each other, he towered over the Survivor, shadow on her face as thick as ink. Their knees nearly brushed, her legs delicate in comparison to his obvious strength.

Again her heart kicked into gear, thudding against her breast. Blood sang in her wrists and cheeks. She was perfectly within reach, and the room felt small all of a sudden, and she could smell the Oni’s iron-spiked scent and oh god the bed was right beside them —

He made no move to touch her, as she expected him to. The Oni only nodded at her, once. His legs spread a bit, space opening between his knees. The Survivor gulped. She started to copy him, but then she stopped. The motion looked…masculine, somehow. So did the way his hands became fists and moved to rest near his groin (a groin she refused to look at, lest she find what she dreaded waiting there for her). Holding her knees together helped keep her robe from gaping open, too, and she very much craved modesty as her pulse spiked and skittered in her chest. She got the sense she was sitting in a feminine pose, and him the men’s version of the same.

One of his huge hands lifted. He gestured first at his legs, and then at hers.

“Seiza,” he said

“Say-za,” she repeated.

“Hai.”

She’d learned by now that hai meant ‘yes.’ He held his palm up toward her, motioning for her to stay seated while he stood. She watched with bated breath as the Oni returned to the doorway and lingered there, staring down at her with eyes like coals. For a moment, silence followed. Her ankles had already begun to ache, but she held herself in seiza as best she could regardless. If it meant she could stay away from him a moment longer, she’d sit until her feet fell off.

The Oni moved to the yoroi kaku. When he reached it, he looked her way and patted his thigh twice.

The Survivor’s back stiffened. She didn’t obey right away, but not because she didn’t understand what he wanted. No, his meaning had clicked for her immediately, a bucket of icewater down her suddenly rage-hot spine, and she hated what it implied: He wanted her to wait there until he called. He wanted her to obediently sit and stay until he gave her the command to come to him — like a dog? Like a servant? Was this why he’d brought her here? To be his personal house maid when he came home from murdering her friends?

The Survivor’s fists clenched. So did her teeth. She stared at the Oni with daggers in her eyes, opening her mouth to bite out a refusal and perhaps an insult in the bargain —

The Oni’s eyes blazed. His own fists clenched. His hair snapped on an unseen wind, muscles and veins in his arms tensing so hard she swore she heard them creak with fury only barely held in check.

The urge to obey was a tsunami that doused the fire of her rebellion in a crushing wave.

The Survivor lurched to her feet, stumbling for the Oni with hands outstretched and eager.

Chapter Text

It did not take the Survivor and the Oni long to fall into a routine.

The survivor sat seiza when she heard his footsteps down the hall, and she waited to be called before approaching the Oni by the yoroi kaku. Playing sit-stay-come had stung a little at first. She didn’t like thinking of herself as some kind of dog or maid. But the Oni didn’t taunt or mock her for her obedience, and every time she helped him, he brought her food to eat and water to drink and bathe with afterward.

It was a trade-off, she thought. She helped him, and he helped her. Quid pro quo. An even exchange. Payment for services rendered.

She tried not to think about how she had no other choice but to play long.

She had few choices at all these days. Her original clothes had gone missing, the Oni unwilling or unable to return them when she asked. At least the robes he provided were comfortable. She had little else to do but wash them when she grew bored. It wasn’t like planning an escape was an option. She’d tried to get out of her prison a hundred times, but no doors would open, and the paper wouldn’t break. Escape would be impossible unless the Oni left the door open and the Survivor unattended, but he never did. She wasn’t even sure if he slept. He never seemed to. The burning fires where his eye should be never went out even when he sat against the wall, unmoving, for hours at a time.

And where would she even escape to if she found a way out? Back to the Trials, where the Oni might kill her for her defiance?

Or, worse yet, capture her again?

The Oni often left her alone to think about it when he went out to hunt survivors in the Trials. When he came back, he’d doff his armor and silently sit with her — sometimes for hours on end. Other times he’d vanish beyond the paper door to places unknown. When it came time to hunt again, he put on his armor piece by piece before disappearing, and the Survivor helped him do it.

The practice, soon habitual, put a horrible pit in her stomach every time. He was going out clad in armor to kill people like her. To kill her friends. Shouldn’t that give her, like, a moral dilemma or something?

It should have, certainly. But the Survivor’s belly was full, so she tried to ignore the queasy feeling in her gut whenever the Oni came back covered in blood.

Time in the Survivor’s prison meant little. It was marked by the Oni’s comings and goings, the fitful light  in the washroom window changing merely from barely lit to pitch black as hours passed. She’d long since grown accustomed to the eternal night by now. There was no day/night cycle back at the campfire, either. Just endless, monotonous dark interspersed by the feverdream nightmares of the Trials. Only rarely did the sky ever brighten, the tease of daylight instilling false hope before fading with the light itself. Here it was endless night interspersed only by her own hunger, thirst and fatigue to mark the hours. Better than the Trials, she thought, though maybe not by much.

But sometimes the Oni stayed with her for longer periods. Hours at a time. Even what might’ve been a whole day, once. That’s when he taught her how to clean his armor. They sat together and scrubbed off the blood in tepid water before conditioning the leather and metal with oil from a jar in the wooden chest. The blood and oil collected under her nails; she cleaned it out with a splinter and rinsed it down the washroom drain.

She knew the blood must belong to her friends. But at least cleaning it gave her something to do, and she tried not to think about to whom it could belong.

The Oni brought a paper lantern to the room. It glowed like a peach lit from within, warm and inviting, the brightest light she’d seen in months dazzling her eyes and heart alike. Presumably the Oni lit the lantern with oil, but she didn’t see where he kept it. She didn’t dare ask. She just enjoyed its glow as they worked on his armor.

When the armor was clean, they put it on the yoroi kaku. The arrangement of the armor was almost comical. It reconstructed the general shape of a man upon the stand, shoulders and hips and legs and chest suggested by the placement of pauldrons, gauntlets, cuirass and boots. The tallest wooden bit in the center always remained empty, though, the reconstructed warrior as headless as a Sleepy Hollow phantom. The Oni didn’t wear a helmet to place at the top of the yoroi kaku, so the facsimile of a samurai remained headless for now.

He doused the lantern whenever he left her alone. She wished he’d leave it lit. Perhaps he thought she might try to burn her way out of her prison if left unsupervised. With nothing else to do without the Oni present, she spent her time alone napping, drifting in and out of twilight in a revolving door of dreams. Being awake was a torment, the Survivor driving herself crazy pacing and waiting for the Oni’s return. Sometimes when boredom grew too much, she pressed her ear to the door and held her breath, just listening. Trying to see if there was anything out there that might amuse her.

Or, as she learned eventually, something that might save her.

Sometimes, far in the distance, she heard shouts. Another time she swore she heard the rumble of a generator so far away she almost mistook it for the sound for her own blood running in her ears. In both instances, she screamed herself hoarse, trying to gain the attention of other survivors. But no one heard her. Or if they did, they did not come for her. Perhaps she just didn’t scream loud enough.

Or perhaps it didn’t matter how loudly she screamed.

Perhaps any captive of a Killer they considered dead to them already.

She tried not to think about that, either, though in her heart of hearts she didn’t blame them. She wasn’t sure this existence of hers could be considered living. Not in the true sense.

But she was a Survivor, and thus, she would survive.

The Survivor was not always awake when the Oni returned. Often she had already retired to the futon when the paper door slid open and the Oni entered on heavy feet. Sometime she tried waiting up for him when sleep just wouldn’t come, able to greet him upon his return and fall into their routine as usual. But sometimes sleep tugged at her eyes and limbs too seductively, or boredom grew too great to endure, and she crawled into the futon and went to bed while the Oni was still away.

The first time he came back while she was sleeping, she jolted awake at the sound of a heavy foot on the floorboards outside the room. She lay quietly in the dark as steps trekked toward her down the hall, mind racing in time with the Oni’s stride. Should she get up? Tend to him like usual? Sit seiza as she’d become accustomed to doing since he showed her his expectations? She was awake now, but what would happen if she hadn’t heard him coming and had remained asleep? Would he rouse her from her bed and make her play maid, anyway?

She panicked that night. She kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, burrowed under the comforter and pretending to sleep when the Oni entered the room. To her surprise, he didn’t demand she rise to help him. Perhaps he truly thought she was asleep. Whatever his unspoken reasoning, he undressed himself and settled down somewhere in the room as she held perfectly still upon the futon. She didn’t dare roll over to check where he lay, nor did she dare test the paper door when she heard it rattle.

Presumably he’d gone somewhere else. Not for the first time, she wondered if there were other rooms in this house (if they were even in a house at all). Was there a kitchen where he prepared food? A separate bedroom just for the Oni? Another room to house his weapons, which he never brought into the room where she slept? Was there…?

She fell asleep asking questions, and she awoke to no answers at all.

Some nights, she didn’t wake when the paper door slid open or his feet thudded in the hall. Some nights she only woke when she heard a grunt and the clatter of armor in the corner. The first time this happened, she  swam from sleep in slow strokes, opening her drowsy eyes to see him standing there, taking off his armor, his back turned to her as she watched him in the dark.

Broad shoulders, she thought through the haze of sleep. Impressive arms. Bigger around than her own  head. His back bulged when he lifted an arm, muscles rippling up into his thick neck. And his waist nipped in toward his hips, shoulders even broader in comparison. He was enormous. Bet he was huge everywhere. Huge and thick and strong, powerful in every inch.

If he hadn’t killed so many of her friends, she’d say he cut an impressive figure.

If he wasn’t keeping her hostage, she’d say those muscles on someone else would’ve been attractive.

But he had killed her friends, and he was keeping her hostage. The reality of her life came back to her in a snap of cold dread. The Survivor rolled over and buried her face in the covers, hoping the Oni hadn’t heard the telltale sound of her racing heart.

Sometime she didn’t wake at all when he came back. One night she rolled over with a sigh, roused from sleep by heat of the room and her own legs kicking off the stifling covers. She curled around her balled-up comforter, leg jutting outside her robe to get some air on her heated skin. Her eyes fluttered open as she groaned.

The Oni leaned against the wall, dark and dreadful with legs splayed out before him. Hands hung limp between his huge thighs. He sat with his face toward the floor, hair not flying about in defiance of gravity but hanging limp around his heavy head. Long white strands tailed over his shoulders and chest like cobwebs. Was he asleep, for once? But why here? Was he guarding her?

…guarding her from others, or guarding her escape?

She started to sit up in bed. Maybe to check the door. Maybe just to get a better look at her captor.

As soon as she moved, fire flared to life. Eyes burned like flames from behind the Oni's curtain of white hair.

Not sleeping, then. Watching her.

The Survivor’s eyes slammed shut. Face pressed to the blanket, she tried to calm the beating of her heart and sleep, cursing now that her bare leg had broken out in gooseflesh for all to see.

Something shuffled in the dark. Feet thudded along the floor. Their fall vibrated in her cheek as the Oni took one step, then another, and then one more…

He headed her way. She thought this might be it. That he might touch her at last. Give in to the temptation of her exposed thigh and take her there on that futon, split her open on the parts of his anatomy she hadn't seen but knew had to be as big as the rest of his hulking frame. She'd been expecting it since the day she arrived in this strange, lonely place. More gooseflesh erupted along her body, shuddering and cold.

But the Oni did not touch her. Not yet, anyway. Instead his feet turned to the door, and he walked away.

She wasn’t sure when she managed to fall asleep again. But when she woke, his armor was gone.

A tray of food sat beside her, the only sign the Oni had ever broken routine and troubled her rest.

Chapter Text

The Oni stood in silent vigil over his sleeping Bride, dutifully keeping watch.

Her sleep had improved since she arrived in the Sanctum. At first she jolted awake at every sound, terror in her eyes and a cry on her lips. Now she slept deeply once she slipped under sleep’s dark blanket. Sometimes she only pretended to doze, but he saw the way her body lay too rigid to be at rest and she breathed like a frightened animal in the dark. Clever thing, though. She was good at playing pretend. A less practiced hunter might be fooled.

The night he had captured her and the Entity transported them both to the scrap of realm where the Oni was permitted to keep his Bride, he’d cradled her sleeping form for hours, afraid she might dissolve in arms like a ghost in the light of day. His claws traced the line of her jaw and the pout of her lips, gentle in a way the Oni had not been compelled to touch anyone in eons. Reverent, almost. His caress upon her skin a sacred promise to possess her utterly, as a lord should possess his wife.

“Mine,” he had snarled into her hair. He did not hold the same tenderness for anyone who might take her from him. “Mine, mine, mine!”

No matter how loudly he spoke, she did not stir. She slept too deeply to be roused, her mind shut tight against the darkness the Entity had dragged them through. The Oni was accustomed to the cold of the Void; his Bride was not. Unconsciousness an act of preservation, she remained unaware of the way he huffed against her chest, smelling her, tasting her sweat and feeling his blood stir in a way it hadn’t in years. He only released her and set her upon the futon when the Entity summoned him away for another Trial, and he fought more viciously than ever to earn the right to return to her side.

She had remained asleep upon his return, mind still hiding itself away in the protective grip of dreams. So deeply the Bride slept that she had not even awoken when he crouched over her body and gripped his cock until he spilled his pleasure against the softness of her belly, roaring his claim into the dark.

He had wiped away the evidence before she awoke, his Bride none the wiser to his lusts.

Tonight, though, she slept true. She had largely stopped waking when he returned from a hunt. At last accustomed to him, it seemed. No longer quite so on edge as she once was. Eventually the rabbit tires too much to struggle. So, too, had his Bride accepted her fate. Perhaps some small part of her remembered the time he had submitted to him before, in another life and a world away.

It was familiar to him, this game: the game of winning the trust of the reluctant, until fear gave way to toleration, and eventually to affection outright. The Oni, when the world knew him as Kazan Yamaoka, had battled against his reluctant Bride and won. She had been so scared upon their wedding night. A tightly-shut bud that had bloomed for him over time, after he…

After he…

The Oni could not quite recall how he had won her favor. But he knew that to wait, for now, was right. He knew that if he was careful, he would not need to wait much longer for his bride to warm to him.

Her sweet repose was proof enough of that. She lay upon the futon with the cover askew, her yukata fallen open over one supple thigh and the fat of her breasts. Blissfully unaware of his gaze crawling across her nude form. Blissfully unaware of the way his cock pressed against the inside of his hakama, skin catching on rough fabric that swiftly grew damp and sticky. It had been an age since he felt arousal, but he felt it now, hunger rising as he looked at the thatch of hair at the juncture of her legs. At the soft spill of her naked breasts. At the length of her thigh, so small compared to his.

Would she keen beneath him as she had on their wedding night, in the long-passed life they could no longer call their own? Would she take him as eagerly into her slick center, when the time came? Would she bear him another son to take the place of long-dead Akito? Would her belly swell just so, her cunt all the sweeter for the fruit it bore him?

He would find out soon, he was sure. He would make her his Bride once more, and the ache in his cock would ease.

The Oni would ease it himself for now, thinking of her. His hand was no substitute for her wet cunt, but it would serve in her place so as not to disturb her rest. He crouched beside his Bride in the dark, silently pumping his fist along his fat length above her sleeping face. Up and down, up and down, beads of prespend gleaming all the while. Pressure built in the base of his spine, pleasure slowly mounting. He looked at her breasts, her legs, her cunt in hunger, dreaming of the way she’d soon spread her legs for him. Eagerly. Crying his name in the dark, calling him her lord and submitting as a good Bride should. Her nails would score his skin, adding more scars to the record of war that decorated him, and he would take pleasure from that fleeting pain.

A drop of moisture dripped from his cock. It landed on his soon-to-be Bride’s cheek. She frowned in her sleep as it rolled along her skin, bead slipping to the corner of her mouth.

Her sleeping tongue across her lips.

The drop disappeared.

The Oni came with a grunt. Rocking back on his heels, he caught his spend in a rag, rope after rope of cum spitting from his swollen cock until the bursting pressure of orgasm faded. He breathed deeply in the dark, watching his Bride carefully. But she did not wake.

The Oni left the room. Beyond his Bride’s chambers lay a long porch tucked beneath the eaves of this small house. Beside it, a high wall topped with sharp spikes cupped an overgrown garden in its hard embrace. Stone lanterns glowed in the dark; the sky burned sullen red, oily clouds creeping on a tepid wind. The Sanctum was calm. No Trials for a while yet, the Oni thought.

But then a cold chill sluiced down the Oni’s back. The Entity’s voice rent the quiet.

“You still haven’t fucked her, I see.”

Mist poured over the wall, tangling with the branches of a dying maple tree before pooling on the garden’s barren ground. More mist poured from the shadows, filling the garden with death and ice and the Entity’s unmistakable chill. Tendrils curled around the Oni’s shoulders with something akin to a caress.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m enjoying watching her squirm,” she whispered in his ear. “She’s deliciously on edge, and that’s without knowing what you get up to when she’s asleep.” A low giggle, mischievous and secretive. “But I thought by now you’d have her split apart on that club of yours, and I don’t mean the one you use in my Trials.”

The Oni said nothing. He brushed the mist aside and stalked off, back toward the manor — the small slice of landscape the Entity had afforded him. A secure and secret home for his Bride, who waited for him so sweetly on the futon.

“You are gonna fuck her, right?” the Entity called after him. “Or did I miss something? That’s what I thought you took her for!”

The Oni did not say a word. Why should he? He had done as the Entity asked with a warrior’s passion and precision ever since they struck their deal. He had slaughtered and maimed and killed an entire Trial’s worth of Survivors that very night, dragging out their deaths to afford the Entity the feast of shattered hope and screaming anguish he knew she desired above all else. His half of the contract fulfilled, the Bride would remain his. He had done as asked, and thus the Oni owed the Entity nothing more — certainly not an explanation of what he planned to do with his Bride in the privacy of their marital bed.

Nevertheless, the misty Entity trailed after him and said: “She’s waiting for you to do it, you know. Practically drooling for it.”

The Oni chuffed, his laugh devoid of any humor. That was a lie. His Bride was still wary of him, even if her terror had relaxed into simpler fear out of sheer exhaustion.

“No, I’m serious,” argued the Entity. “She likes those muscles of yours. I saw her watching when your back was turned. She pretended to be asleep, but her thoughts wandered.” Her voice sharpened to smiling daggers. “Oh, she didn’t like catching herself thinking about how big your cock must be, but she thought about it anyway. She just couldn’t help herself.”

Halfway down the porch, the Oni paused. Seductive as her words most certainly were, he not sure if he believed her. The Entity was manipulative, and the Oni knew better than to listen without scrutiny.

 “Her shame tasted like wine, Oni. Like blood on a moonlit night.” Low and throbbing with desire, the Entity’s voice dropped in pitch, resonating with a hunger that mirrored the Oni’s own. “Rich and red and hot when I drank it down. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I want more. So I want to make another deal.”

The Oni spun, teeth bared around a snarl. Mist swirled against his face and shoulders, tangling with his horns, caressing his arms with pleading strokes of icy cold.

“Yes, you heard me. Another deal,” the Entity cooed. “Or maybe I just want to add a new condition to the first.”

The Oni’s fist the mist until it scattered, but it rippled and reformed, stroking him again as the Entity laughed.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” she simpered. “Yes, you’ve done well in the Trials. But this game you’re playing with the girl is…how should I put it? Ah, I know.” Whispers thrummed against his ear: “It’s slow.”

The Oni bristled. Yes, he had approached his Bride with a hunter’s steady patience, but he had done so on purpose. He had a plan to seduce her, but it was measured, precise. The impatient Entity would not ruin his plans. He would not allow it.

“I won’t go back on our first deal,” the Entity continued. “You can keep her in whatever way you like so long as you sate my needs in the Trials. But I want my needs sated with her, too.”

The Oni knew the Entity well by now, or at least he understood her hunger. Her words sounded very much like a suggestion to kill or rape his Bride, torment providing the sustenance that sustained the Entity. But to torment her now will drive her from him forever, not see her sweetly bloom into the submissive flower of a proper Bride. Sating the Entity’s profane needs did not align with the Oni’s plans for his Bride in the slightest.

The Entity seems to understand his reluctance and confusion. Fronds of mist waved like hands, patting the Oni’s shoulders as if in comfort. But the Oni wasn’t fooled. The Entity had no interest in providing such things to the beings it considered pawns.

“No, no, Oni. You don’t have to hurt her,” the Entity told him. “Just… speed it up. Or shake things up. Or at least find a way for her to feed me, too.” Mist like claws on his skin, the Entity pulled close, voice a hiss in the red-tinged night. “I’ve had a taste, but I want the main course. And I’ve grown tired of waiting for more.”

For a time the Oni said nothing. He stared into the reddened sky, fiery eyes fixed on a point in the unseen distance. He was a warrior capable of many stratagems and feats, but could he find a way to claim his Bride as he intended and please the Entity, both? No matter what kind of deal they struck, the Entity held the power here. She could break any deal she chose and leave the Oni no means of recourse. The Oni would have to play this very carefully if he intended to claim his Bride.

“You’re thinking about it, I see. Good!” The Entity patted his shoulders again, mist eddying happily about his feet. “Find a way for her to feed me, keep doing well in the Trials, and you can keep your pretty bird locked in her lovely little cage for as long as you’d like. You have my word on that, Oni, dear.”

The Oni considered the Entity’s demands for time.

Then, having weighed the options before him, he nodded — deliberate and slow.

The Entity giggled. “Good. Very good. I look forward to seeing you get creative with your little pet.” Mist pooled in his ear, thick and insistent. “And remember, Oni: You know what I like. Just be sure you deliver.”

The Oni did indeed know what the Entity craved.

Thoughts of hope and shame and anguish rushing darkly through his head, the Oni returned indoors, where he once more stood in silent vigil over his sleeping Bride.

Chapter Text

Sure feet on creaking wood; the rattle of chains; the slide of a paper door. The Survivor woke as the Oni returned, but he did not rouse her from the futon. Unexpected. She was not certain she did a good job at playing pretend that night, flinching violently awake at the scrape of his soles over smooth tatami. Even at her least convincing, he let her pretend to fool him. Even after all this time, the Survivor was not sure why.

Still: Eyes squeezed carefully shut, she kept her breathing slow and even, not daring even to peek as the Oni divested himself of his armor. By sound alone she cataloged each piece as it left his body: first the gauntlets called tekko with their creaking buckles; then the sode on his shoulders with their heavy metal plates; and then the kusazuri at his hips, leather slats sliding against each other like the legs of a steely cricket. She knew the pieces well by now, though she couldn’t quite recall the word for the wrist-thick ropes that bound them all together. They draped atop the yoroi kaku with a creak, wood protesting under the cumbersome weight that no longer threatened to drop from the Survivor’s practiced hands when she helped the Oni undress at night.

But then she heard a different sound — one she was not used to. A light tap like a hollow bowl striking a wooden spoon. It rang through the stillness, a gong of difference that piqued her interest like a wick catching flame. Not a part of their nightly routine as far as she could tell. Curiosity burning, she held her breath and listened as the Oni crossed the room, passed by her futon, and entered the washroom. Splashing followed. He was cleaning himself, she thought, of the blood from the latest Trial. He didn’t always bother to bathe when he returned, but tonight…

The Survivor’s eyes opened.

From atop the yoroi kaku, the Oni’s mask stared back at her.

Knife-sharp fangs. Red skin. Pointed ears. An eye in the middle of a scowling forehead, pupil beady and black. It took her mind a minute to catch up with what she was seeing. The stand had always sat empty at the top. A little T of wood, unadorned, waiting for a helmet to complete the figure made of the Oni’s armor every time he undressed. She had never seen anything occupy that spot. It was occupied now, though. Even though the eye sockets were as empty and as black as the night beyond her prison, the Survivor would recognize that dreadful visage anywhere.

Only one clear question swam through the fog of her disbelief:

The Oni could take off his mask?

She had never considered that a possibility. Never, not once. The eye in the middle of the mask could move, goddammit. She’d seen it roll around in its socket and track her movements through the dark. Now it sat still, carved from plain wood, decorative and impotent — and that made no sense at all. She’d seen the Oni gnash his teeth, red skin around his mouth moving in tandem with his rage. The mask had seemed like it was fused to his face, part of his anatomy, a part of him. Not that she had allowed herself to look at his face for long. She made a habit of averting her eyes and keeping her face downcast, lest she risk angering him with a direct stare like some kind of territorial animal. But now…

What did he look like under the mask?

She didn’t dare find out.

When the splashing in the bathroom stopped, she squeezed her eyes shut again. She tracked the Oni’s footfalls as they thudded into the room. He seemed to pause in the doorway before striding toward her futon, steps carrying him to the end of it, where he stood for a time in silence at her feet.

The Survivor tried so hard to keep her breathing steady. To resist the urge to open her eyes and see him. To ignore the pressure of his presence in the dark, oppressive as a funerary shroud and a million times as weighty.

It was a miracle she didn’t flinch when his voice, low and thrumming in her very marrow, rumbled: “Anata wa nemutte imasen.”

She had no idea what the words meant, even if she had learned to recognize Japanese syllables when she heard them. That deep, dark voice of his curled into her skin like a physical touch, tracing rough fingers down her spine in a long, slow, intentional caress. She almost gasped, almost arched, almost shivered. But she didn’t. The Survivor meant to survive, and so she held still, breathing slow and calm and even.

But her breathing could not hold steady when the Oni stepped onto the futon. It could not help but stutter when he dropped to the mattress at her side. She sucked down a lungful of air and tensed around the pressure of that vapor, curling nearly into a ball at the wall of force now looming at her back. The wall lowered as the Oni stretched out along the futon at her side, and then he lay still.

For a moment she thought he was done. That he had finished moving. That he had gotten comfortable beside her, but at a distance she found comforting.

But then one massive arm looped around her waist, the Oni pulled her back against him.

She stiffened. She forgot to play possum and struggled as an animal protests a snare. But the arm was like lead, heavy and thick and inescapable, banding about her diaphragm and pushing the breath she held out between her panicked teeth. She panted in his grip, writhing and bucking back against his broad, cold, impossibly hard chest. Another arm slipped beneath her head until she lay upon his bicep, cheek pressing against grey skin that smelled of wind and metal and tallow soap. Her breath came in harsh pants, hands clutched to her chest. Knees kicked up into a ball. Toes curled, skin clammy, mouth as dry as bone.

Against the back of her head, the Oni said, “Ochitsuke.”

She didn’t know what the word meant. All she knew was that the Oni had a deep, sonorous voice that seemed to crawl under her skin and cascade down her spine, sending shivers along with it. A rich voice in other circumstances. A rumble of volcanic promise in the dark, threatening eruption, smoke, heat. Hair rose on her arms and nape, a chill wracking her as if in fever.

“Ochitsuke,” the Oni repeated. Then: “Neru.”

The Survivor had no idea what he meant.

But the Survivor meant to survive, and thus, she calmed. She quieted. The fight went out of her, body stilling helplessly, going completely limp, exhaustion replacing adrenaline in a flood of hard fatigue. With willpower she did not know she had, the Survivor forced herself to fall into sleep — the only escape she had.

He was gone when she awoke in the realm’s pitiful excuse for morning. A bowl of food sat on a tray nearby. Camellias, white and yellow, gleamed on the tray’s polished handle. The Survivor eyed them while she ate, thoughts awhirl.

That night, the Oni returned once more after she had retired to bed. Just as he had the night before, he removed his armor while she pretended to sleep. He placed his mask upon the yoroi kaku. He bathed. And then he lay beside her, hauling her back against his chest without a word.

The Survivor’s heart didn’t beat entirely out of her ribs that time. He hadn’t hurt her the previous night. She’d slept well, dreamless and deep in the cage of his embrace. The breath on her neck, the weight of his arm — these soft touches held no intention to hurt. None that she could see, at least.

Soon, and in spite of every instinct screaming for her to run, she relaxed and fell asleep.

But she wasn’t asleep when he returned the night thereafter. She was awake when the paper door slid open, sitting seiza beside the futon as she had been taught. She helped the Oni with his armor according to his instructions, and together they cleaned and oiled it. Then she washed up, night falling beyond the paper doors into pure black. She slipped beneath the blanket on the futon while the Oni bathed, scent of simple tallow soap drifting on the twilit air.

She was not able to fall asleep by the time he returned. He stood in the washroom doorway in silence, looking at her. She looked at him in return. He still wore his mask. From behind its carved brows, his eyes blazed with crimson fire, sparks trailing upward toward the ceiling. Those eyes crawled from her face to the futon and back again. A question hung between them on the air, unspoken but heard clearly still.

Heart a stone in her chest, the Survivor squeezed her eyes shut. Her hands fisted in the comforter. She nodded.

The Oni turned out the paper lantern. Under the cover of night, he removed his mask. He joined the Survivor on the futon.

This time when he pulled her to him, she did not stiffen quite so much. She stared at the mask on the yoroi kaku as the Oni’s breath fanned across her hair. Her muscles melted like wax beside a flame, sinking slow and syrupy into the warm futon.

When was the last time anyone had simply held her like this?

She couldn’t say.

But in the dark she felt the mask’s third eye upon her, watching silently from its place upon the stand — and in its unblinking stare she beheld the answer.

Chapter Text

“What do you look like under the mask?”

The Oni knelt before her in stony silence. He had just placed food in front of the Survivor. Another bowl of rice, this one paired with a skewered fish that had apparently been grilled. Steam rose from it in sullen streams, scales gleaming with fatty oil. The food had been getting better lately, though the rhyme or reason for this had not been revealed by the Survivor’s quiet captor. Still, even though her stomach rumbled beneath her thin yukata at how good this latest offering smelled, she didn’t reach for the food. The Survivor — feeling bolder now that she had a mission to complete — raised her eyes to the Oni’s. Even kneeling, he dwarfed her. His red gaze stared down with silent fire.

She dropped her eyes and swallowed.

She wasn’t sure if he’d understood her question. They still couldn’t communicate more than a few words at a time. The Oni spoke so rarely, it limited her ability to pick up anything more than the most basic, hyper-specific Japanese words relevant to their odd dynamic. But as much as her limited vocabulary handicapped their communication, she couldn’t help but inquire about the mask. Now that they’d been co-sleeping (she refused to even think the words ‘sleeping together’) it seemed like she should have question-asking privileges. Co-sleeping felt like some kind of progress, even if she couldn’t quite pinpoint in what direction. Maybe they’d progressed far enough along in…well, in whatever this relationship was to allow for a few questions.

Provided he could understand any of them, of course.

She just couldn’t help herself. Ever since she’d learned the Oni could take off the mask, she had filled her boring days with speculation about the mechanics of the Oni’s face. The topic was certainly more interesting than counting the tatami mats over and over again. (There were still 24. Nothing on that front had changed.) Questions, new and thrilling, plagued her. She’d never seen him eat; could he eat with the mask on? And when he leaned against the wall to rest between Trials, he didn’t take it off then, either. Did he usually sleep with it on? He had never removed it before. So why had he taken it off when he joined her on the futon? She had always thought of his face as a mask, but with the paradoxical twist that he could never take it off. The Oni was his mask; the mask was the Oni. But was that assumption true?

Truth be told, before her imprisonment provided the Survivor an assessment of the Oni as intimate as it was unfortunate, she’d never been quite sure if the Oni was a human being. Some of the Killers were clearly inhuman. She’d seen the Demogorgon up close and personal once; the memory of its gaping maw still haunted her. Memories of the Alien, witnessed only and blessedly from afar, did too. But some of the others, like Ghostface or the Trickster, were clearly men in body but monster in spirit. The Oni’s description, whispered around the campfire in tones hushed with dread, had led her to believe the Oni was a monster in both physical function and internal form. 

But that had been before she saw him in the Trials. Long before she glimpsed a vein pulsing in his branch-thick wrists. And even longer still before he’d taken his mask off as he lay beside her in the dark, night after night after night.

It had been simpler, before she saw evidence of his lingering humanity, to assume the Oni was merely a demon from a folktale as his name implied. Easier to rationalize his actions, certainly, storybook-simple and sadistic. But once she saw signs of a heart beating below the beast’s scarred chest, she began to suspect the Oni might be something close to human — or, at the very least, that he had been in the distant past. If he had started life as human before becoming a Killer, she suspected this insane place had warped his features into something supernatural, twitching third eye and gnashing teeth and glowing gaze and wicked horns a sign of his transformation into a Killer. He wasn’t the only Killer who looked like a human twisted by a nightmare. Maybe the darkness in a Killer’s soul manifested itself outwardly, or something poetic like that.

But then the mask had come off, and all her half-baked theories (ones she only now had the luxury of time and boredom to consider properly) had gone up in smoke. Now the Survivor wasn’t certain at all what the Oni looked like underneath his monstrous mask. What if he looked human?

And what would it mean for her if he did?

The desire for answers gleamed like a coin at the bottom of a well, tempting and shining in the sunlit rays of her obsession. She had thought about trying to see his unmasked face while he slept, but something stopped her. An old myth she’d heard once about a woman married to a god who only came to her in the dark. Looking at his face against his wishes had…

Had…?

She didn’t remember the consequence. But a good Survivor knew better than to ignore the advice of history. Thus, she’d have to ask the creature in question for answers, even if it meant looking the dreadful Oni in his burning eyes.

“Sorry if that was weird,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. It wasn’t like he could understand her, anyway. “I was just curious. You take it off at night but never in front of me. So I wondered…”

He said nothing. He didn’t budge from where he had knelt in front of her to deliver the food. Only his strange, gravity-defying hair still moved, undulating around his head in white wisps. In contrast to his iron body, the eye in his forehead twitched in its red socket. It occurred to the Survivor that she, too, did not tend to speak much. The Oni was probably as shocked to hear her talk as she was whenever he spoke more than a few words at a time in her presence.

Perhaps she’d gone about this all wrong, in that case. Maybe it had been silly to try and verbalize her question. He’d responded well to pantomime in the past, so…

“Your mask.” She covered her face with her hands and mimed taking a mask away before gesturing at him. “It comes off?”

The Oni didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He just stared. She sighed and reached for her food.

“Never mind,” she muttered. “Thanks for the foo — ”

The words died on her tongue when the Oni moved. One dinner-plate hand covered the bottom half of his face, obscuring his tusks and teeth. His fingers clenched, curling around the edges of his jaw, cheeks, and temple.

He pulled the mask away from his skin, but only barely, and stopped.

The mask came away from his face just as any mask would. The second it parted from his skin, his hair stopped flying around his head. It fell in pin-straight strands down his broad shoulders, brushing his brutish collarbones like corded cobweb glowing ghostly white in the dim light. Unlike other masks, this mask snapped into rigid contours of wood once it was removed, third eye freezing in place as if it had never moved. The fire in its eye sockets dimmed, face behind it cast into deep shadow.

Although he’d pulled the mask free, the Oni held it over his face for a moment in silence. From behind the shadow of the mask he watched the Survivor carefully. A hunter gauging its prey, waiting to see if it might run, or fight, or fall at his feet.

The Survivor did not run.

The Oni lowered the mask one inch, then two, until she could finally see his unadorned eyes.

The skin of the Oni’s face was as mottled grey-blue as his hands, and his eyes were still red. As red as blood, as poison berries, as dart frogs with venom in their glands — but they didn’t glow once he doffed the mask. They were harrowing and bloodshot, yes, but the eyes of a human man stared back at her over the mask’s crimson forehead. He paused there for a moment, the pair of them trading a long, lean look in silence.

He lowered the mask completely.

His eyes were human.

His mouth was not.

His mouth was a ghastly wound, teeth like a boar’s jutting from his lower jaw, fangs curling from beneath the curve of his upper lip in a permanent snarl. She had thought the teeth belonged to the mask alone, but — but they didn’t. The mask added more teeth to his already bristling maw, exaggerated their shape, sharpening and elongating them, but the teeth were still his, daggers of ivory irrevocably bound to flesh and bone. And the horns were his now, too. She hadn’t seen it before in the dark, but there were holes in the mask to accommodate the horns jutting from just above his temples, those curved blades of black bone grafted as inexorably into his skull as fear had made its home in the Survivor’s heart.

He had been handsome, once. The ghost of it haunted his features. A phantom of beauty clung to the planes of his hollow cheeks and sculpted jaw. But he wasn’t handsome anymore. Darkness has turned him into something else. A monster, not a man, eyes and skin and hair and horns and those wretched, terrifying teeth far beyond what anyone could ever consider handsome. Not in a traditional sense. Not in a rational one, either. Nothing in this place was rational. It was all insanity, all horror, all terror and a complete abandonment of logic, sense and reason.

But the Survivor did not shy away from the sight of that terrifying face.

She only nodded, once, and ate her food.

She had seen many horrifying things in recent months.

The Oni’s face ranked low upon the list.

Chapter Text

Perhaps it was the sharing of their bed that changed things between them. Perhaps it was the revelation of the Oni’s true face that altered the current on the air. But something shifted soon after, even if the Survivor could not place her finger on the moment the shift took place.

They had both bathed for the night, and the Oni’s armor had been cleaned. The Survivor sat upon the futon tending to her hair with her fingers. The Oni, unmasked, kept silent vigil nearby. He had taken to removing his mask more often while biding time between Trials. She wasn’t sure what he was doing or if staring into nothing was just some kind of samurai hobby, but it mattered little to her. At some point she had stopped flinching at the sight of his fangs. She ignored his curved teeth and horns and tried to comb her damn hair.

Even basic maintenance was difficult without proper care products. During the Trials, the other survivors had managed to find some random items to make life at the camp somewhat more livable. A bag of scavenged clothing here, a comb with missing tines there, the occasional pair of shoes or flashlight taken off a still-warm corpse… She’d had ways to keep her hair tidy back at camp, but here in the Oni’s lair, she had no such items. Washing her hair wasn’t easy, either, but even if she couldn’t style it, she did her best to keep it clean. It had grown longer since she came to this shadowed land of Trials and Killers. Not easy to get a trim when you’re trapped like a rat. Something told her the Ghostface wouldn’t lend her his signature knife so easily…

But while she was determined to prevent her hair from matting, her fingers did not measure up to her ambitions, snarling into budding knots and missing tiny tangles that would only grow fatter with time. Still, she tried her best, tugging and pulling and detangling as best she could.

She wasn’t sure when she noticed the Oni watching, but at some point she felt the pressure of his eyes on her. They didn’t burn quite so much without the mask to ignite their fire. They were still reflective, nearly glowing in the dim room, but the actual flame abated when it wasn’t framed in red. The Oni’s tusks gleamed in the lantern light instead, drawing focus when he stood and walked to the wooden chest in the corner. The Survivor stilled when he rolled to his feet, watching him open a drawer and pull something out with breath held tightly in her chest. She kept holding it when the Oni strode back to her and stood over the futon.

She released the breath when he extended his hand, palm up, and she saw what lay upon it.

A comb. Absurdly tiny in his huge hands, the comb had been carved from pale wood with a tiny orange nasturtium flower inlaid upon the curve. She’d seen a woman wear something similar in her hair in an old black and white photo, classic and beautiful and somehow timeless. And beside it sat a tiny vial, the contents of which she didn’t know.

The Oni’s fist closed around the comb. Three long, purposeful steps brought him behind the Survivor on the futon. She held perfectly still, heart frantic in her chest as he settled down at her back. Thick, bare ankles with skin the color of asphyxiation extended on either side of her, bent at the knee, caging her in and cutting off escape.

The moment she thought of escape, fingers brushed her neck. She flinched at the cold touch, but the Oni only gathered her hair behind her head. Starting at the ends, and with almost shocking gentleness, he oiled her hair with liquid from the vial and started working at the tangles, picking at them one by one with the wooden comb.

The oil smelled of flowers and something woodsy. Sweet. The sweetest thing she’d smelled in months.

Shocked into inaction, the Survivor didn’t speak, nor could she move a muscle. She could only sit in slack-jawed wonderment as the Oni — the Killer who had murdered so many people and taken her prisoner — tended to her hair. So caught up in stupor and the delicious scent of the oil was she that the Survivor could not guard herself, nerves flayed open and laid bare when the comb brush her neck, and fingers touched her nape, and the tines gently scraped her scalp…

The sound she made was tiny. So, so, small. But the room was as quiet as the grave, and the Oni sat so near to her, she knew he heard it. She knew he heard that barely voiced whimper of helpless pleasure that whined in her throat at being touched so tenderly. It had been ages since anyone had touched her softly. Being dragged along in a Trial, shoved, hooked, stabbed, kicked in the jaw by a friend turned traitor…she couldn’t recall the last time someone brushed her hair, or held her in the night, or provided any touch that didn’t end in pain.

She could admit to herself, now, that when the Oni held her in the dark, she no longer resisted.

But the Oni didn’t need to know any of that. She stifled the traitorous sound when it again bubbled in her throat. Grabbed it and killed it, not letting herself relax into the gentle touches sending frissons of pleasure down her back. But the Oni didn’t pause his ministrations, and it became harder and harder to keep them in as he touched her so very, very gently.

It became all but impossible when he spoke.

He’d moved her hair to the side, working on it in painstakingly precise sections, exposing her nape. He leaned in close. Breath huffed over her skin, hairs rising at the intimate puff of cool air on warm flesh. He said something in Japanese she didn’t understand, too many syllables to remember or replicate. But the tone of them — the low, rough, throbbing tone of them dug beneath her skin and sank deep into her muscles, as tangible as a massage in her tense flesh. A shiver cascaded down her back. Relaxation followed. She sank, slackened, melted into the sound of his voice, a sigh whispering between her lips at the relief of soft words and soft touch working together in harmony.

He leaned into her nape and inhaled. Long, slow, deliberate. Smelling her, close enough for the bump of blunt tusks to bracket her neck on either side.  God, he was so huge, caging her in with nothing more than his teeth…

He spoke again. Lips and something wet brushed her nape. This time, the Survivor could not keep the sound at bay. She whimpered, pitching forward and away from the Oni, hands around her shoulders as she tried to keep from breaking into so many desperate parts. Even her nipples pebbled, rubbing against the material of her robe with sweet friction. To her horror, a bolt of fire raced through her, pooling in her belly with a sweetness that smelled of the oil in her hair.

The Oni chuckled. He chuckled. Even with a voice as deep as night, she could tell he was laughing at her, low and throbbing in his chest like rocks slides in an earthquake. Even as the laugh wormed into her blood, her pride stung. The Survivor gathered herself and stood, walking away from the Oni and combing her hands over her hair.

It wasn’t tangled anymore. The Oni, somehow, had done a good job.

She clutched her robe a little tighter around herself to keep his voice from burrowing once more beneath her skin, for what little good the effort did her. Turning to face him, she ducked her head in thanks. To her surprise, he returned the nod, rising too to stand beside the futon.

“You’re in a giving mood,” she muttered. “Think you could do something else for me?”

His head cocked to one side. Dammit. She needed to learn Japanese.

“Don’t suppose I can pantomime my way into you giving me something to do. Or a place to stretch my legs, at least. Even people in jail get time in the yard.”

But the Oni didn’t seem to understand. He remained silent. Unmoving and unmoved.

And yet, perhaps it wasn’t words she needed. Samurai seemed men of action, and actions spoke loudest of all.

The next day while they cleaned his armor in the big wooden tub in the washroom, she glanced wistfully at the tiny window and sighed. It was daytime, or the closest thing they had to it, fitful grey light casting the thinnest rectangle on the far wall. She turned her face to it and closed her eyes with a sigh. She dreamed of the outdoors. Even the bloodied sky of the Trials would be a reprieve after so long under a low ceiling.

When she opened her eyes again, she found the Oni watching her. He stood and gestured for her to follow. She did, curiosity her guide as he padded to one of the small room’s exterior walls. Faint light shone through the paper. He reached out and…

And he opened it.

It was not a wall.

It was a door.

She’d never noticed a door there, and she’d looked over every inch of this room a hundred times or more. It was utterly incomprehensible to think she could have missed it, but this place was hardly logical, and the door was definitely real. Her pulse leapt. Was the Oni letting her out? Letting her go? She scrambled after when he strode through, heart in her mouth and elation in her blood.

Beyond the door lay a low stretch of porch tucked beneath a curving eave — the edge of a building with traditional Japanese architecture, as expected. But just off the porch lay…

“Is that…is that a garden?”

The yard wasn’t huge. Maybe fifteen by thirty feet at most, stretching along the length of the building with a high wall running opposite and parallel to the porch. Brambles lay along the base of the wall, thick and full of thorns. Statues whose shape she could not discern lurked within their sharp tangle. A few stone lanterns flickered fitfully to light the barren earth. The trunk of a tree with rusty orange leaves, bark nearly black in the shadows, jutted above the wall, branches hanging down like grasping fingers. But through them she could see sky above, dark red and brooding, and the cold wind tasting of iron and salt was nevertheless fresh.

She was outside.

She was outside!

Mouth agape, the Survivor stood beside the Oni upon the porch in abject wonder. The building turned corners off to their left and to their right, both directions blocked by brambles so high she could not see past their heft. The rest of the yard was empty save for drifts of fallen leaves and scattered dirt. The faintest suggestion of a gravel path wound through it.

Still. Bare and destitute as it was, this was undoubtedly a garden. Unkempt and overrun and forgotten, but a garden nonetheless. She stared at in in wonder before looking at the Oni.

He stared down at her in return, eyes flickering faintly in the night.

“Thank you,” the Survivor said.

The Oni said nothing.

But between them, unspoken and unnameable, another something shifted.

Chapter Text

The next time the Oni left for a Trial, the Survivor investigated the garden in earnest.

Its overgrowth was even worse than it appeared at first glance. She couldn’t get past the left corner of the house where bramble grew higher than she stood tall. Thorny vines wound up into the support beams under the corner of the roof’s curved eaves, covering the porch there in an impassible wall of spikes. Past the huge bank of bramble she thought she smelled water and the fainest whiff of sulfur. The source was impossible to discern. She would need clippers (or maybe a flamethrower) to get through the bramble and investigate. Even standing on the edge of the upraised porch and going on tiptoe didn’t let her see over the thicket. The Survivor edged as close as she could, but thorns snagged her robe and scraped her shin, leaving behind a thin pink line of stinging blood.

The Survivor, no longer accustomed to pain after her hiatus from the Trials, yanked away from the hedge with a curse.

She had suffered worse injuries, though, and continued her investigation. The thorns on the rightmost corner of the yard weren’t as thick as the rest; she managed to pull aside just enough to uncover the edge of a man-made koi pond ringed in stone, pool covered in algae with barely any water in it. Maybe there was another koi pond on the other side of the yard. The Survivor wasn’t sure if she’d be able to restore either to their former glory. Maybe if she cleaned them and it rained…

She snorted. Rain. Had she ever once seen it rain in the realm of Trials and Killers?

Because going left and right alike was impossible, she turned her attention to the wall opposite the house. The top of the wall was covered in spikes, bamboo sharpened to points set into hard stone. It was too tall to climb over, not that she gave escape much thought. A tree hung over the top of the wall, branches casting rippling shade when there was enough fitful light to do so. She couldn’t reach the branches and there was nothing to stack to climb up, anyway. Plus, she had no idea where she even was, let alone the way back to the campfire and the other survivors. If somehow she made it over the wall, she’d be lost. And who knew what else was out there waiting of her? She didn’t even have shoes; she didn’t relish the thought of running from an unknown Killer in bare feet.

No. Better to stay here. At least here she ate proper meals and could bathe regularly. No more Trials. No more running. No more pain. Just sleep, and food, and clean clothes. More than she’d dreamed of after finding herself pulled into literal hell.

And she had a garden now, too. No flowers to speak of, but grass grew in clumps from the hard earth. If she cleared the bramble and the leaves fallen from the tree, it could grow back better, if anything could grow here at all. She might be able to walk around and stretch her legs on soft turf. Hopefully the Oni would use that strength of his to…chuck the vines over the wall once she uprooted them, maybe? Or should she even ask his help? If she wanted to clean up this garden as thanks for all he’d done for her, asking him for help defeated the purpose of the gesture.

Wait. Was she cleaning up the garden as a gesture of thanks, or as something to do to occupy her time?

The Oni had kidnapped her. Kept her prisoner. Restricted what pitiful freedom she’d had left. Why should she thank him for anything?

The Survivor looked at the garden. She remembered the food, the clothes, the soft place to sleep in peace. She remembered how the Oni let her sleep when he came back from the Trials, undisturbed. She remembered that he had never forced her to do anything she didn’t want to do. How he had never made her fight for her life or sleep on the hard dirt. How he’d combed her hair. Given her clean clothes. Held her in the night with no hint of ulterior motive.

And then she remembered the trials that came before, and she shuddered.

She started with the koi pond, trying to pull back brambles as best as she could with her bare hands. To her delighted surprise, she unearthed an old trowel with a cracked handle from some loose dirt below the porch. She used it to hack at the vines, scratching her limbs up in the process, but she didn’t mind the spiderweb of injury crisscrossing her skin. She’d suffered worse. Even had a hook through her chest a few times, grievous wound miraculously healed before each new Trial. Some piddling scratches on her legs and arms were nothing in comparison.

She wasn’t sure how long she spent in the garden before the telltale thud of the Oni’s footsteps cut the quiet. Duller due to distance and closed doors, he got closer than usual before she recognized his approach. The Survivor had barely managed to stand and brush off her yukata by the time she heard the door to her room slide open.

Aw, shit. Dirt on her knees, under her nails, all over her feet and arms, with scratches laddering her skin beneath — she was a mess. She had wanted to bathe before the Oni returned. No such luck. She climbed back up onto the porch and headed for the open paper door.

The Oni stood in the other doorway on the opposite side of the room. His shoulders relaxed when she appeared. He still had his boots in hand, armor as bloody as usual after a Trial. Still, the Survivor smiled at him. She’d had a great day. Not boring at all; what a gift!

“You’re back,” she said, one bare foot lifting from the porch. “I — ”

The Survivor stopped. She knew enough about Japanese culture to know she shouldn’t place her dirty, bloody feet onto the tatami. Hands braced on the edges of the paper door, she caught herself just short of disaster and smiled at the Oni, an awkward laugh building in her throat.

The Oni wasn’t laughing. He still wore his mask, eyes blazing bright as he looked her over. He stood completely motionless, fist clenching around his boots.

“Sorry,” the Survivor said. “I’d help you with your armor, but… the tatami.”

She lifted her hands, covered in dirt. She lifted a foot into the air, limb covered in even more dirt. A bright red bead of blood welled through the mess and rolled down her calf. She winced when it carved  a track through the muck, dragging dirt into her still-weeping wounds along the way. The third eye in the Oni’s mask rolled, tracing the path of the blood down her leg as a droplet beaded and fell —

Right onto the tatami.

Red stained woven reeds with scarlet. The Survivor gulped. “I’ll clean that up,” she said with instant haste. “I was just in the garden, and — hey, wait a second!”

He’d started toward her, foot hitting the tatami with a horrendous thud. Stalking across the room, eyes on her, thunderous, the pressure of his advance hit her like a physical strike. She stumbled back, tripping, scrambling across the porch because although the Oni didn’t hold a weapon, she didn’t see him as the not-quite-human man who’d combed her hair so softly mere days before. She saw him the way she’d seen him in the Trials: a ferocious monster bearing down, steps sure and swift and purposeful as he stalked his next victim through the night. A cry bubbled in her throat as his boots fell to the ground forgotten, scattering dirt and blood of their own across the floor. Soon he was upon her, yanking her to her feet and tossing her over his still-armored shoulder. Metal horns dug into her gut and threatened to tear her innards to shreds.

“Please, please, no, I’m sorry,” the Survivor sobbed, fear a heady intoxicant in her thrumming veins. “What I did do, I‘m sorry, I — ”

He didn’t listen to her promises to make things right. He jumped off the porch, impact sending his armor spiking into her gut just as it had during the Trial that had brought her to this place, and then the Trials before. Impaled on hooks, carried by Killers, she heard their laughter at her pain in her ears as the Oni’s armor knocked the air and any cries from her mouth. She held on for dear life as he loosed a roar, something snapping and biting around her legs as he jerked this way and that,  performing some kind of strange action with his free hand that she couldn’t see. Something sharp scraped at her legs, and then she saw brambles under his feet, and —

The Oni tossed her off his shoulder, and everything was hot.

Hot and wet, actually. The Survivor landed with a splash in hot water, of all things, deep enough to close over her head. She surfaced with a sputter and a cough once her feet found solid stone below. Hot water? What the actual — ?

It was a hot spring. A natural hot spring ringed by irregular rock and boulders, one side of it pressed up against the edge of the building where the Oni had kept her caged for so long. Roughly circular, the tall wall surrounded the sides of the spring not encased in bramble or edged by the building itself. No wonder she’d smelled water. A thin trickle of it sluiced over a gap in the boulders, running through a metal grate at the base of the wall and out of sight. Dirt and rusty blood bloomed in the water around her body as it flaked from her skin, but as the water rushed toward that drain, the cloudy dregs cleared. A hot, natural pool that cleaned itself? This was amazing! This was —

Annoying, actually. It was super annoying.

Why had the Oni not show this to her this sooner!?

He must’ve bulldozed his way through the thorns to reach this place, slicing easily through the tangle with his body alone. She turned toward the edge of the pool with a scowl, ready to berate the Oni for making her bathe in buckets of cold water all this time when he could’ve accessed the spring at any time, but the words died in her throat.

The Oni stood at the edge of the spring, watching her. Blue skin wept bright red blood from a hundred tiny slashes left by razor-edged thorns and brambles. Unperturbed, the Oni reached up and undid the buckle on his shoulder. Then the other shoulder. Pieces of armor fell to the dirt one by one, piling at his feet until he stood in nothing but his hakama and mask before her.

Then he took the mask off, too, and strode forward into the spring where the Survivor waited.

Chapter Text

No matter the context or amount of slowly growing trust in play, the sight of a seven-foot-tall warrior with monster teeth and crimson eyes and the skin of a corpse should be enough to send most people screaming for the hills. So it was for the Survivor when the Oni waded toward her, huge thighs flexing as he sliced effortlessly through the weight of the steaming water. She tried to pedal backward to gain some distance from the charging Killer, but the pool’s irregular stone bottom caught her feet, and the Survivor could only stand in place as a wave of displaced water slapped her torso. The water came as high as her heart beating a rapid tattoo against heaving ribs, but it only reached the Oni’s hips, soaking his hakama trousers completely.

Without a word he reached for her. Somehow the Survivor resisted the urge to scream, letting the Oni grab her wrist and lift her hand from the water.

For a second her skin gleamed wet under the deep orange sky.

Then blood beaded from the cuts left by the thorns, sunset sullen and just as pink.

The Oni sucked in a breath through his nose. His mouth parted around his fangs. He jerked her closer with a sharp tug, her feet bumping over stone until she almost fell against him. Her free hand slapped atop his grey-blue chest for purchase. Trails of blood that did not belong to the Oni alone smeared under her touch and the brush of the steam rising from the pool, deep red dying his skin bruise-purple.

She half expected him to make her wash him. To clean him as she’d cleaned his armor so many times. Or perhaps he’d compel the Survivor to take her first proper bath in ages.

Instead, he lifted her arm higher and trailed his tusks along the sensitive skin of her inner wrist, inhaling along the way. His almost-handsome red eyes fell shut, hair limp and white atop deep blue skin.

“What are you doing?” the Survivor whispered

The Oni did not reply. Not in words, anyway.

His mouth opened wide, and from it spilled a long, red tongue. It connected with her skin in a cold slide, trailing from her wrist to her elbow as a growl rumbled in the Oni’s barrel chest.

The Survivor didn’t move. She didn’t dare. She only watched with eyes wide and heart hammering so hard she was sure the Oni could taste her fear in the point of her pulse, feel her heart racing through the skin under his tongue. She shivered at the steady, cool lap of that enormous tongue, mouth agape and brow furrowed, squirming as he dragged her closer and turned her arm, tasting the back of it with another of his sonorous groans. His work was methodical, meticulous, measured. The rough scrape of his taste buds brought her out of her stupor, and with a jolt she realized what he was doing.

He was licking up her blood.

The Oni growled when she eventually stopped bleeding, eyes opening with a flash of fire. He took her other arm in his grip and licked it, too, rumbling and gleaming-eyed as he lapped her blood like wine, hands forceful but not violent against her trembling skin. When her other arm stopped bleeding, too, he unleashed a frustrated snarl.

“I’m OK,” she was quick to assure him. “The cuts weren’t deep.”

But maybe he wasn’t worried for her wellbeing at all, because he grabbed her waist and pulled her through the hot water with hard-handed urgency, lifting her as though she weighed nothing and placing her on the edge of the stone pool. One gigantic knee knocked her thighs apart; she protested, but he didn’t pay her any mind when she tried to hold her sodden yukata shut. He was more interested in her leg, anyway. Reaching beneath the pool, he grabbed her ankle and yanked it from the water. She pitched backward on the stones. He grabbed her calf in his other hand and kneaded her flesh with firm, massaging strokes until blood welled from the many small cuts laddering up her leg.

The moment cherry-red beaded against her skin, he dragged his tongue in a slow, solid path from her inner ankle to her knee. She watched, sprawled as she was on her back, as he pawed at her again and again, pushing blood to the surface and lapping at it. Eyes at half mast all the while, heavy lidded, growl thrumming like a purr in his chest. He was enjoying this. Enjoying her taste, her closeness, her blood.

And heaven help her, she was enjoying this, too. His hands were firm and cool in contrast to the hot spring and its cloying steam, and his tongue was rough, wet, and slippery. She fisted the hem of her robe tight, keeping it closed around her hips as he laved her ankle, calf, knee, thigh, crowding close all the while, her legs forced to spread around him, breath huffing and heat that had nothing to do with the spring pooling low in her belly, flowing down between her legs until she ached, ached in a way she hadn’t since she woke up in the Trials and survival superseded things as petty as sex —

But there she was, biting her lip and trying to stifle a groan when his tongue pressed against another shallow cut on the inside of her knee. Her breasts ached, heavy and full, and the throb of arousal pulsed between her legs like the beat of a hungry heart. Every lick of the Oni’s tongue pulled a helpless little gasp from her mouth, a mewling sound she barely recognized as hers but one she knew full well sounded needy, wanting, wanton. Was that really her, making those sounds? She could scarcely believe it, shocked as much by her own reaction as the reality of the situation itself. Shocked at how good it felt to be touched, shocked by her keening cries of need, shocked at the very fact she liked it. Too confused to even protest, to even ask him to slow down so she could calm her chaotic thoughts. She just clenched her fists in her robe and held them tightly over her aching pussy, her death-grip on her clothes the last and final barrier to her modesty’s preservation.

The Oni gave her no time to reconcile the moment with her mood. He swapped one leg for the other when her blood dried up, repeating his avaricious actions, tongue starting at her ankle but traveling higher, higher, and higher still with every taste. Her other leg dropped into the pool and curled around his thick thigh, pulling him  closer. She was aching, arching, legs spread wide by her own volition and not just the press of his hands by the time he reached the top of her inner thigh and stopped, face pressed into her skin, teeth prodding at her flesh. He gripped a thigh in each hand, curled around them to hold her still and open, spread like a feast below his gnashing teeth. She sagged against the stone when he lifted his face from her thigh, Survivor’s body going limp with — disappointment? Relief? She wasn’t entirely sure.

The Oni paused. He leaned in close, teeth brushing her hands as he drew in a long, deep breath. Nostrils flared, crimson eyes burning in his face as they trained on her clenched fists—no, not her fists. At her cunt behind them, hidden by handfuls of yukata and her own shaking fingers. Again he drew in a breath through his nose. Sniffing at her like a wolf scenting prey, another growl throbbing low in his chest. She knew she was wet. She felt herself grow wetter still when he trailed his tongue once more over her thigh, as high as he could get, nearly at the seam of her thigh and her groin. His eyes remained locked on her hands as if willing them to fall away. Willing her to bare herself to him, the final test of her consent to the insane potential rising rapidly between them.

Breath shuddered in the Survivor’s chest. “I…”

She wasn’t even sure what she wanted to say, but the unspoken words died when he bent close again. She knew she should protest, tell him to get away, snap her legs shut and run the opposite direction — but she didn’t, because she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to run from this. Not from the Oni, not from the house that had protected her these past few weeks, not from the food he delivered by hand each day — nothing. Not anymore. The internal admission brought a sob to her throat as she lay there waiting, holding her breath, resting on tines of delicious anticipation for him to tug her hand aside, brush her yukata away, and take the burden of decision from her hands into his own.

The Trials took the choice away from them both.

Black smoke erupted across the Oni’s face. Between one second in the next it suffused his gleaming eyes, and when it cleared a fraction of a heartbeat later, the fiery gaze of the Oni’s masked face stared back at her from between the Survivor’s spread thighs. His hair fanned around his head on an unseen wind. The Survivor gasped and struggled, but the Oni didn’t hold her in place. His hold on her legs dropped, and as she scrambled away, he waded out of the pool.

The Oni was aroused. His soaked hakama clung to every last scrap of his anatomy, outlining the shape of a monstrously large cock jutting between his massive thighs. Although the Oni paid it no mind, she stared at it through wide eyes, mouth dry, half in the pool and body on fire as the Oni donned his armor piece by piece. He wasn’t looking at her anymore...not until the last piece of armor rested atop his still-damp skin, at least, and he turned to stare at her. The twin flames of his eyes cast flickering shadows over the dimly lit spring, furious when they trained on her. His cock jutted, straining against his pants. He palmed himself through the fabric and squeezed, groaning as he gave his cock and gave a long, measured stroke.

The Survivor’s arousal spiked in tandem. Before she could do the unthinkable and call him back to the pool, black smoke eddied from the ground at the Oni’s feet. Gathering far too quickly to be natural, it surrounded him until only twin red flames burn in its heart. But the Oni’s eyes, too, faded after a time, and when the smoke cleared, the Oni was gone — summoned back to another trial, the Survivor assumed. She’d never seen him go to one, but there was no doubt in her mind she had just witnessed a summoning.

Trembling, unable to stop herself, unable to get the feeling of the Oni’s enormous hands and tongue on her skin out of her head, the Survivor thrust her hand between her legs and brought herself to a quick, hard climax. Fingers of one hand dove into her soaked cunt, other hand rubbing furiously at her clit until she bowed on the rocks and cried out into the quiet air. Black spots dotted her vision. She sagged in the steam afterward, fingers and the insides of her thighs slick and slippery. Listless on her back, she stared at the drain siphoning dirty water from the pool. Iron bars in the base of the wall — teeth in a gaping maw, hungry and black, drinking down the water and dregs of her fading arousal in great, greedy gulps.

After, she slid into the spring like a limp rag. Her breath choked on a sob as she washes evidence of her transgression away.

In the cold clarity of orgasm, a pall crept across her heart, a tainted shadow on bright pleasure that left her reeling. She’d masturbated at the thought of his long tongue and heavy hands, but then the Oni had left to go kill people — people she may have once liked. She had been wondering what the Oni’s intended to do with her, and now it was clear he meant to have her sexually. She should be repulsed by that. She should be repulsed to have found pleasure in the touch of a Killer. She should be planning her escape to prevent the inevitable from occurring, because if she did not leave now, the Oni would have his way with her.

The Survivor gathered herself from the pool. She limped through the gap the Oni had cleared in the thorns. She turned her stinging feet toward the house, but upon the porch, she paused.

The garden. The spring. The food. Dark pleasure under a bloody sky. This was more than she’d had in ages. What would be the harm if she let the Oni have his way with her, so long as he kept her in comfort afterward?

No. There was no guarantee the Oni would continue to provide if she gave in and let him touch her. Perhaps he’s throw her away if she gave him what he wanted. Maybe he liked the game, and the prize was immaterial.

…but what if it wasn’t immaterial at all?

What if the Oni truly did intend to give her a better life, so long as she gave him what he desired in return? What would be the harm in giving in, if that were the case?

No. No. She couldn’t think that way; she wouldn’t!

And yet when she crawled into bed that night, she found herself wondering when the Oni would return.

Was that fear in her heart, or anticipation?

The Survivor was not sure it made a difference.

Chapter Text

An eggshell-fragile skull spilled scarlet yolk onto the pavement beneath the persuasion of the Oni’s kanabō. Heedless of the mess, he smashed the humming generator nearby to bits of gleaming metal, rendering the dead survivor’s accomplishment as null as his expired pulse. The Oni fed the next survivor he found into churning machinery that shredded them to pieces starting from the feet. A useful tool, though he did not know what it was called. The survivor, screaming as he died, did not care to name the method of his demise for the Oni’s benefit. It mattered little, however. The Oni did not understand many of the things the Entity had brought to her realm. Sparking machines and glowing relics hailed from worlds and times quite unlike the one he had left behind, but the Oni had seen enough by now to learn how the strange devices could be leveraged toward destruction.

He craved destruction now. He craved violence, a physical outlet for his rage, senses honed and weapons sharp, eager for blood. He had to do something with the energy pent up inside him lest the energy aim inward, where it did not belong. He’d rather spend it on his Bride, but she was not there.

With no outlet for lust, he would make do with wrath.

Wrath ruled the field of war that night, striking down the enemy’s attempts to win with strategy, subterfuge and stealth until a pile of bodies lay broken at the Oni’s feet. Most of the corpses were not in one piece. The generators (the name of which he had learned after many Trials wherein survivors screamed their need to find one) all lay quiet. The Oni had destroyed the survivors and their salvation alike. Now the realm lay quiet save for the sound of the Oni’s breathing. Deep and measured, baying for blood, eager for battle even after he had bathed in the aftermath of a successful hunt.

A severed arm hung from his fingertips. He had abandoned his kanabō and fished an arm out of the pile to beat the last survivor to death with his comrade’s broken body. Faces once twisted in horror and fear now stared sightlessly into the sky. In other Trials, the Oni would have placed the survivors on hooks for the Entity to devour, but this night he had not. Too much rage. Too much blood thirst. Too much vengeance demanded he savor the kills for himself.

The Entity had ruined everything. He had no doubt that damnable wraith had interrupted the Oni’s tryst with his Bride on purpose. To taunt. To torment. The Oni’s Bride had ripened, and just as he intended to sup of her sweet submission, his hunger had been denied. The Entity did not deserve to eat, either. So he murdered the survivors before the Entity could devour them, even if he’d provided that glutton a feast of pain before he struck the killing blow.

A small revenge in the grander scheme of things. The Entity could strike the Oni down at any moment if she so chose. But even in small vengeance, the Oni felt a measure of peace. Of honor restored. Of the scales tipping back in his favor, if only for a moment of stolen time.

Perhaps the Oni’s work was not yet finished. One of the corpses shuddered in the pile. Its head lolled atop its neck; the Oni raised his makeshift weapon, ready to bring the human to the true death it had somehow escaped.

But then a voice that did not belong to the dead man spilled from its open mouth, sibilant and strange — and familiar, too.

“Excellent job in this Trial, Oni,” said the Entity through this puppet. “You’ve played your part, and you’ve played it well.” The body’s lips twisted into a pout. “Though you could’ve left me one survivor to snack on, at the very least…”

The Oni snatched up his kanabō and smashed the corpse’s head to pulp with brutal efficiency. Another corpse in the pile twitched. Eyes rolled in their sockets, blood staining the whites deep crimson.

“Oh. Poor thing,” the Entity said through its new plaything’s dead mouth. “I think I know why you’re so upset.” Blue lips pulled back from cracked teeth. “Did I interrupt you and your little toy right when you were getting to the good part?”

The Oni smashed that corpse, too. A third mouth opened up soon after.

“A little delayed gratification never hurt anyone.” The Entity giggled with the sound of bones cracking and wind whistling through empty ribs. “Well. Unless you’re me, that is. I don’t like waiting. It’s something about myself I only learned just recently. I’ve been a patient creature up until now. But I fear I’m losing my temper.” Something black writhed behind the corpse’s lips, cheeks bulging and throat buckling. “Perhaps you need a demonstration?”

The Oni pulverizes that corpse as well. The Oni was not deterred. The pile of bodies shivered and shook, and two of the survivors the Oni had all but beheaded lurched to their feet. Black tendrils lined with spikes, octopus limbs covered in thorns, speared the bodies’ stomachs and crawled out of the holes in their necks, worming from between shattered teeth and broken jaws. The corpses careened the corpses into each other, dead hands pawing at their clothes and ruined heads butting together — pantomiming kisses, caresses, twisted care. The Entity made them rut at each other in a heinous approximation of copulation, playing with the corpses like dolls. One of the corpses keened and moaned, its voice a perfect, Entity-forged replica of his Bride’s needy cries. The Oni growled at the display, fist tight and shaking with rage around his kanabō. He recognized this for what it was: a taunt at his expense, at his failure to claim his Bride at last. This was an insult to the Oni’s honor that could not go unpunished.

“What’s wrong?” the Entity simpered from within another twitching corpse. “I’m only illustrating what you should do next. Though I confess I find the reproductive habits of lesser creatures rather tedious.” She tittered softly. “But the emotions that come with them…oh, now they are delicious given the proper circumstances.”

The lurching corpses continued to writhe together, ruined heads a bloody tangle of pulverized bone and gristle. The Oni started toward the husks with weapon raised, but the Entity’s black tentacles jerked the bodies high into the air, limbs spread-eagle, spines breaking and contorting with the crunch of bone on bone. More thorny tentacles spilled from every orifice and cut, writhing outward in sick undulations, tenting flesh before erupting like a scarlet flower blooming under fitful moonlight.

“The clock is ticking, Oni,” said the Entity, but this time she spoke from every corpse in the realm, a discordant mess of discrete voices blending into one terrible whole. “I had fun interrupting your little moment, earlier. Your bride’s shame was such a treat. Do see that you bring more of that out in her, and soon.”

The Oni gripped his weapon tight. There was no shame in a bride submitting to her groom. He had scented her arousal when he licked her. His blood had ignited him from the inside out, cock throbbing at the taste of what rightfully belonged to him. To see his Bride writhe, to smell her arousal, and to know she hungered for him as much as he hungered for her was an intoxicating testament to his skills in taming her. She had responded to the soft calculation of his touch and his gifts exactly as intended — exactly as she had in the past, in fact, when he tamed her the first time with sweet words and careful considerations, meting out privileges as her behavior slowly met his exacting expectations. And oh, how she had responded to theses rewards with such demure compliance... He had thought her eagerness in the spring a boon, but the Entity claimed she felt shame? He would have to correct this dishonor, should it prove true. To show submission to one’s master was not shameful, but the proper place of a Bride.

 And yet, if the Oni wanted to keep his Bride, he would have to play the Entity’s dark game. But how could he balance the scales between himself and the Entity without sacrificing that which he desired most?

She was his. His to hold, to possess, to instruct. And the Oni refused to give her up.

The Entity sighed. “Tell you what, Oni. I’ll grant you a boon. A little gift, of sorts.”

The Oni tensed. Blood pooled on the ground as the bodies continued to shred. Thorns curled out of a skull, pushing an eyeball to the ground with a wet plop. It rolled in the dirt until it came to rest, fixated on the Oni.

“What you and your pet need is enrichment,” the Oni declared, every corpse in view grinning in sick tandem. “When I deem it necessary, I’ll introduce a new animal or two into your enclosure just to spice things up a little. A Trial in your realm, staged personally for you and your toy. It’ll be good for you.”

Red, heat, rushing rage. The Oni bellowed in hot fury. He did not want to share. He did not want anyone near his Bride. He would not allow it! She belonged to him in this life just as she had in the last, and he would not be denied her again!

But the Entity only giggled at his bared teeth and meteoric eyes: “Oooh, scary! I love it. You’ll want to keep up that energy when the time comes, Oni. Because if you haven’t finished what you’ve started before then, who knows?” Her giggle darkened, a sharp blade ringing against cold stone. “Someone else might just steal your prize away.”

The bodies hanging high above in the rust-red sky broke apart from the inside in twin showers of blood and viscera, ropes of sinuous innards spilling to the dirt. The Entity’s massive tentacles with their spiked skin lashing in the sullen air as the Entity howled with laughter. Black mist surrounded the Oni, climbing up his ankles to wind around his hands, holding him in place as he struggled and bellowed his fury.

But the Entity was stronger than any Killer, and even the fearsome Oni was soon subdued.

“Ah, such anger. You are just a treat,” the Entity condescended. “You and your bride will be delicious once you’ve ripened.” A tentacle speared an eyeball and bobbed it by the Oni’s face, peering into his fiery gaze in unblinking mockery. “Now be a good little Killer for me, hmm? You have one more Trial to attend to before I send you back to her.” A flap of broken skin wagged across the eye, a deranged and disembodied wink. “Make it a good one, yeah?”

The Oni roared as darkness closes over his head — but even as he raged, he calculated. Plotted. Strategized his next move in the one-sided war he waged with the powerful Entity.

To some, the Oni appeared a vengeful beast, a maddened creature driven by naught but an unthinking storm wrath. But the Oni was not so easily bested. The Oni had been a warrior in life, proud and strong and honorable. That had not changed since his rebirth in the Entity’s realm. No matter what the Entity might be planning, the Oni would beat her at her own game. He would turn the Survivor into his proper Bride before the Entity could make good on her threat, and he would find a way to meet the Entity’s demands in the bargain.

And should his Bride be made to suffer along the way?

That was of no consequence to the Oni. Her suffering contributed to the pursuit of a noble goal. She would accept her role in time and forgive her husband, as a good Bride should. A small battle to lose, so long as the Oni won the war — and he would wage that war tonight, as soon as he returned to her.

Chapter Text

The air felt thicker that night. Charged, somehow, with a tension she felt in her marrow. It filled the Survivor’s prison like the steam pouring off the hot spring, humid and sultry. She and the Oni had been interrupted just as the heat between them reached a boiling point, and the smolder lingered long after, a mirage on a hot day, perception rippling and undulating in time with the desire pooling in her blood.

If the Oni hadn’t been summoned away for a Trial, they would have done something they could never take back.

Her head didn’t necessarily want to cross that line. Her body was another story. She’d been on edge since he left, caught up in the heat-mirage of unfulfilled need. Shame had followed close behind the orgasm she chased with her fingers to the thought of his tongue on her skin, but then she’d done it again when she caught his scent on the sheets of the futon. And again after making sure to wash her blood from the tatami. Once her body recalled the tension and release of orgasm after so long without, she just couldn’t stop herself. She had washed herself again in the spring after the third time, cheeks hot not from the spring, but from embarrassment. The barred grate in the corner watched her like a dark eye, accusing.

But this shameful descent into debauchery wasn’t all bad. Masturbation at least helped pass the time while the Oni was away. It certainly beat counting the tatami (24 total to this day) to stave off boredom.

Still, her heart leapt into her throat when footsteps echoed down the hall. She wondered if the Oni would be as on edge as she is, but when he stalked in like a pacing tiger, mood a knife with a sharpened blade unsheathed, he ignored her and lit the paper lantern with sharp flicks of his wrist. His armor looked bloodier than usual, somehow. Gore caked his hands and his chest with ichor so red it was almost black.

She waited by the futon in obedient seiza, eyes downcast until he called her over to help with his armor. The Survivor didn’t dare raise her eyes to his. She just undressed him: pauldrons, cuirass, gauntlets. She repeated the Japanese names for each in her head: sode, do, tekko. But even that soothing repetition did not calm her. Her hands shook by the time she untied the medallion over his groin, wondering if he’d be hard again behind it —

He removed the demon-faced medallion himself and placed it on the armor stand with his own hands. The Oni snatched up the lantern and stalked into the washroom, light blocking her view and denying her an answer. The Survivor wasn’t sure if she felt relieved or disappointed. She had already bathed, skin soft from the spring water, ready for whatever lay ahead that night. The Oni apparently disinterested in continuing, she lay inertly under the covers while he cleaned himself. Fidgety, unsure. Staring at the ceiling in nervous silence all the while.

Soon the splashing in the washroom stopped. The Oni appeared in the doorway, but he did not approach the Survivor. He left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Disappointment flared in her gut.

Wait. Disappointment?

The feeling reverted to nervousness when he reappeared with a bowl of food in hand. It looked like a teacup in his fingers. She tried not to think about that — tried not to focus on his height, his muscles, the way he towered over her even when he sat on the tatami mats to watch her eat. She ate her dinner quietly, grateful for each bite. This meal even included some pickled vegetables in addition to rice and meat. A treat, unexpected but welcome.

Did the Oni grow tired after Trials? If so, he had put aside his fatigue to make sure she ate. A kindness; the Oni was kind to think of her needs like that. He didn’t have to if didn’t want to, but he did anyway. He didn’t have to do any of this for her: food, shelter, protection, clothes, baths. But he did, all without asking for anything in return.

Suddenly cleaning up the garden didn’t seem a grand enough gesture of gratitude in light of the Oni’s efforts.

After she ate, careful to devour every last scrap he gifted her, the Oni took the bowl away. She climbed back into bed and waited quietly until he returned and stood over the futon in the dim lantern light. It reminded her of the first time he stood over her like this. She had held her breath that night, pretending with all her might to sleep. Would he sleep in the futon with her again tonight?

He provided an answer, just like he provided everything else the Survivor needed. Extinguishing the lantern, he placed his mask atop the yoroi kaku and lay at her side, hauling her backward against his chest as he had the night before. One arm under thrust her head for a pillow; the other palm pressed flat to the Survivor’s sternum. His face pressed into her nape. He inhaled and growled and she shuddered her response, nerves lighting up in bursts of nervous stimulation.

For a moment they held there, still. Unmoving. Frozen in time and anticipation, curled around one another in the dark.

But then the Oni licked a slow stripe up the back of her neck and the tranquil moment shattered. Tusks bracketed the column of her spine, his nose buried in her nape, breath bringing tingles and gooseflesh to her arms and back. Her nipples pulled tight against the fabric of her robe. He was so much bigger than her. Huge, all-encompassing. Eclipsing her body like the moon blotting out the sun. The hand on her chest slid up, a slow drag of possession. He collared her throat, gently squeezing as he took another long, slow lick up her neck with a scrape of hungry tongue.

Just as she released a low, trembling breath and craned her head, exposing herself to his grip in a show of surrender, he let go, but only so he could reach for her knee and hoist it high. A cry of surprise fell from her mouth as he pulled her legs apart, tugging her thigh up and back and draping it over his muscular elbow. Splayed open, her ass pressed against his stomach and her yukata swiftly came undone. She cried out and started to grab it, to shut it, but the Oni snatched up her hands and pinned them above her head. She lay in a cradle of his body, bicep under her head and the connected hand gripping both her wrists like iron manacles. His other hand crept lower, lower, then lower still.

He brushed her yukata aside, exposing her nude body to the air.

The survivor tried to lift her free leg and hide herself, but the Oni didn’t touch her exposed cunt as she expected he would. Instead — keeping her leg hooked over his elbow all the while — he reached down lower, between and below her spread thighs, to unknot the ties of his hakama. With a growl and a twist his cock sprang free, slapping against his stomach with an audible thud. She watched in numb fascination as he took himself in hand and pumped, foreskin pulling back until the Survivor saw the blunt head emerging between his fingers. He was huge, though by peering down her own body she couldn’t see him fully, the angle not quite revealing his length. But she could tell he was thick because the girth of him filled even his enormous fist, skin of his engorged cock head flushed even darker blue-grey than his fingers. Pearls of cum beaded at the tip, bright against deep blue. For a moment she wondered if he’d thrust himself inside her, not care for her pleasure or preparation and sink home with a burn and a tear, take the payment for the debt she had accrued after he took her in —

He didn't. He grunted into her hair, gripped her crossed wrists tighter, and masturbated himself between her splayed legs. The Oni craned his head and traced his mouth along her arms, lapping at the scratches still marring her skin along the way, pulling her flesh into his mouth until her wounds reopened and he suckled at her blood. It stung, but she barely felt it, transfixed by the sight of his fist around his cock as he stroked it again and again and again below her. It was all she could do to hold on and watch in stunned fascination as he jerked himself off, huffing her scent and growling, pelvis bucking underneath her. The leg still hooked over his elbow jounced with every stroke of his fist. Every groan sent a spark down her spine until she gasped in time with the Oni’s pumping fist, her hips rolling with unfulfilled need. Her cunt felt so empty — so achingly, awfully empty, throbbing and clenching, a dull ache inside her screaming to be filled. She could tell she was wet. She felt it running down the cleft of her ass and smearing against the Oni’s belly, her backside sliding against him in a slick glide. Her hips rolled, twitching desperately, seeking friction he did not provided. Even though she knew that lethal cock would hurt her, she couldn’t help but angle her hips down, trying to impale herself on the shaft held just barely out of reach.

“Oh my god. Oh my god.” She barely even recognized the wanton whimper as her own. “Oh my god! Please, please — ”

The Oni grunted when he came. She felt it wash over him, from the way his breath huffed to the bunching of his muscles against her ass to the way his strokes became harder, faster, sloppier. And when he stiffened around her and growled into her hair, he angled his dick upward so ropes of scalding cum spattered against her naked pussy.

The Survivor froze. His hands were cold but his cum was like fire as rope after rope spat from his dick and onto her pussy, stomach, breasts, even a fleck against her cheek. He came for what felt like an age, breath finally slowing in time with his trickling spend, tension leaving his thick muscles as he relaxed behind her.

For a time they lay there together, still. Arousal pooled like coals in her belly as she listened to his heavy breathing in the dark. She breathed hard, too, legs still spread, not caring that she lay there nude atop him covered in his cum. She stifled a frustrated groan when he released her wrists. She was just writhing on him like a cat in heat and he hadn’t even touched her. Did the Oni not want her, after all? Or even worse, had she disgusted him? He was from another time, with different standards for behavior. Had he just wanted to take, not give, and — ?

Without warning the Oni pushed her onto her stomach, apparently not caring that his cum would stain the futon. She gasped, face in the covers as he put a hand on the back of her neck and held her down, pinning her in place. With his other hand he grabbed her hip, hauling her ass high until she arched painfully into the futon. A muscular thigh shoved between her legs, parting them with a burning stretch. The Oni’s hakama pushed against her soaked pussy, crushing against her clit with unrelenting pressure. She gasped again, eyes wide and staring into the covers as he rocked her hips back against his thigh, making her ride him. Her back arched even further, trying to find the perfect angle, and —

“There, there, right there!” she cried as the pleasure bloomed, a firework in the night, a spark igniting an inferno between her legs. “Oh my god, oh my god — ”

He rolled his thigh into her cunt harder, faster, the angle perfect, stars bursting behind her eyes as pleasure mounted with shocking swiftness, her body already primed to orgasm and approaching the precipice fast. An arm curled under her head, locking around her neck, and the choke of air and the pressure of his thigh burned the fuse of her desire until she detonated, writhing in his hold and throwing herself back at his leg until she came with a wail. This orgasm was nothing like the ones she’d coaxed from her flesh on  her own. This was brutal and hard and left her trembling, the cloth on the Oni’s thigh completely soaked with the gush of her arousal.

When he pulled away, his hakama peeled from her with a wet smear, audible in the silent room. The Survivor was too boneless, too sated to resist when the Oni flipped her onto her back, maneuvering her body without any effort at all. He knelt between her splayed thighs and stared down at her for a moment. She stared back, eyes half lidded, body languid and glowing. Not even caring that she lay naked before him, cum streaking skin still heated from her orgasm. His eyes crawled over her body up and down, drinking her in. She stretched like the cat that got the cream, hands brushing down her body, nippled pebbling again under the light touch. Thinking she’d be playful, entice him to touch her more directly, she cupped her breasts, fingertips playing over them and pinching —

He snatched her hands. Pinned them to the bed. Fear chased away her lingering arousal like hounds after a rabbit.  

“I’m sorry,” the Survivor pleased. “I’m sorry, Oni.”

His hands tightened around her wrists. Anger flared in his eyes, fire sparking within them even without his mask. The Survivor gasped, small and helpless and naked and afraid under the form of the monster who held her at his mercy.

“I-I’m sorry,” she repeated, desperate, begging for charity with her watering eyes and broken words alike. “I’m so sorry, Oni — ”

“Yamaoka Kazan.”

The Survivor said nothing, though the timbre of his deep voice made her shiver. The Oni took one of her hands, so tiny in his own, and placed it upon his chest.

“Yamaoka Kazan,” he repeated.

She pressed her hand back against his chest, understanding. This was his name. His real one. The one he held as a human before whatever happened to turn him into the Oni. Somehow she knew deep within her breast that she was one of very few to know it belonged to him. This was a great honor bestowed only upon a select few. Perhaps she was the only Survivor who had ever heard it. And with the utterance of his name — strong and proud, as regal as the monster who once called it his own — a memory surfaced about Japanese culture. Surnames came first. Which meant the Oni’s given name was…

On a sigh the Survivor whispered, “Kazan.”

The Oni stilled. A statue of a monster who had once been a man, stony and severe. The hand around her wrist tightened further. Sharp nails pricked her skin, but the Survivor refused to flinch.

“Kazan.” She reached for his face. “Kazan…”

The Oni growled, eyes fever bright and twice as deadly. For a split second she wondered if she’d done something wrong to spike his ire so. The dread intensified when he collared her throat again, fingers huge and tight against the sides of her neck. But he didn’t bear down. He didn’t choke the air from her lungs or the life from her body. Instead his thigh slid up again, pressing at her naked center…and his cock slid over her belly, hard again and huge.

She could see him fully now. Enormously thick, longer than any cock she’d ever seen, throbbing and dark grey-blue, the length of him rested heavy on her belly and reached well past her navel, cum dripping in a steady stream, smearing hot against her. Fear struck a heat-lightning path through her desire, intimidation rising in tandem with her need.

But the Oni didn’t notice her reluctance, or perhaps he didn’t care. He just pressed his thigh against her cunt and took his cock in his hand, masturbating the both of them at once. His cum and her slick had her gliding against his drenched hakama, the pair of them soon moving together in a slow, undulating dance of hard presses and grasping hands. The hand around her throat tightened, suppressing the thump thump thump of blood in her veins, head light and airy and full of dizzy desperation to come again against the Oni’s thigh.

The Oni seemed to know what she needed before she even grasped his wrist. The second he eased up on the pressure and oxygen flooded her lungs, the Survivor wailed and sobbed at the impact of another brutal orgasm, desperately humping against him again and again and again while pleasure exploded behind her eyes, through her skin, through every vein and valley of her body writhing on the futon. The Oni found his peak, too, more thick spend pooling on her stomach and ribs as the Oni roared his pleasure in the dark.

Her energy flagged as he eased his leg out from between thighs, the liquid there squelching and reeking of sex. The Oni lay beside her, cradling her from behind as he always did. The Survivor was tired. So tired. Deliciously lax and supple, pliant in his hands, warm and full and sated from her meal and her orgasm alike. So sated was she that she could only murmur wordless encouragement when he lifted her thigh and draped it over his arm once more — and when she felt him take his cock in hand again, it was all she could do to murmur his name and drift into dreamless sleep.

What he did while she slept was no concern of the Survivor’s.

Her body, her mind, her pleasure — he held it all in his hands, and into his arms the Survivor gave herself that night.

Chapter Text

Most mornings (so to speak in this desolate place of indeterminate day and night) the Survivor woke to watery grey light and overcast skies. Monotony blended time into an indiscernible slog marked by the Oni’s comings and goings and little else. Things rarely changed in this realm.

Today she woke to the sight of the Oni kneeling between her thighs, hand wrapped around his cock. That kind of coming (if she were to be crass) was certainly new.

While the Oni huffed and grunted above her, she swam blearily back to consciousness, still-warm liquid on her skin mixing with cooler fluid. He’d practically covered her in cum, testament to his activities while she slept. Apparently the Oni had the stamina of a warhorse. She watched in drowsy fascination as he pumped his cock, slit in the head peeking out every time he pulled back his hand. Veins pulsed in his groin and along his stomach, in the back of his arm and in his neck. So much cum beaded at the tip of his cock, bubbling there, white against deep blue. It streaked his naked thighs and hers alike, but she was truly filthy with it. Cum streaked her breasts and pooled in her navel, matting in her pubic hair and dripping from the lips of her pussy. She must look horrific. Debauched. Depraved.

But with the Oni staring at her like that, teeth wet with saliva and eyes aflame, somehow she’d never felt so desired in her life.

His spend wasn’t the only reason she was wet. The Survivor’s poor cunt ached, empty and hollow and needy, thighs spread wide in unconscious invitation her waking mind soon echoed. But he didn’t surge forward and fuck her even as she spread her legs around him, hips rocking with need unfulfilled. He seemed to like looking at her spread body, grabbing her knee and pushing it up and back until she lay beneath him like a pinned butterfly, keeping her there with the press of his leaning frame. He grasped her breast once he had her positioned. First the Oni squeezed, hard and deep until she yelped. Then he tweaked her nipple and dragged his pointed nails down her ribs in a trail of fiery sweet pain. He pressed the tip of his dick against her clit when he reached orgasm, coming against her in a splattering mess as she moaned in half-pain, half pleasure.

Dazed, she let the Oni carry her to the spring, his touch far gentler than when he’d carried her to the hook in the Trials. He washed her just as tenderly, touch turning ardent in short order. Soap glided over her breasts beneath rough hands. He sat behind her and spent so much time on them that they were sore afterwards: flicking her nipples, tracing them with his claws; pinching; massaging and kneading them until they ached. She arched back, gratified at the press of his cock against her ass, rubbing herself against him and hoping to entice. His teeth ran along her throat and her ears, huffing, sending chills through the Survivor despite the hot spring water. She shuddered when his tongue laved her ear, Survivor’s fingernails pressing into the meat of the Oni’s thick thighs bracketing her hips until she was sure she drew blood.

“Kazan,” the Survivor moaned, his name a plea on her uncertain tongue. “Kazan, please.”

He collared her throat with one hand. His fingers wrapped nearly all the way around it.

“Kazan-sama,” he rumbled in her ear.

“Sama?”

“Kazan-sama.”

She repeated it for him, softly at first but with growing confidence when the cock against her ass somehow swelled even further, the thud of blood in engorged veins pulsing against her skin. The Oni growled and lifted her out of the water, putting her on the rocks ringing the pool. Eyes glimmering like garnet in the dim morning, he threw her legs over her shoulders and curled his hands around her thighs, holding her tight in place. An expectant stare met hers. Patient. But glimmering with urgency all the same.

“Kazan-sama,” the Survivor breathed.

The Oni growled, perhaps at his name, perhaps at the way her hips bucked when his long tongue — swollen and red, thick as any cock she’d ever taken — spilled from between his tusks, lolling out and gleaming in the low light. The Oni didn’t hesitate. He surged forward, tusks bracketing her swollen cunt and pushing her legs wider still, and licked a long stripe up her center. He smeared over her clit in a wave that left her keening before the tip caught on her entrance, bullying inside without preamble. Curling hot and thick, as thick as any dick she’d taken or glimpsed in her past life, it burrowed in deep before pulling back, a vicious stretch that left her keening and gasping in its wake. The Survivor’s hands scrambled for purchase before grabbing the Oni’s horns, any worry she had about his teeth (or angering him with her rough hold) evaporating as he burrowed in tighter, closer, nails pricking her thighs as his tongue found a spot inside her that made her clench up tight with pleasure and surprise. And his teeth, oh, his teeth — the blunt top row butted against her clit, hard and vibrating with his growls, a vicious accompaniment to the way his tongue battered that spot inside her in a pinpoint assault on every delicious nerve ending she had.

The sensation of being filled, bucking against his face as the Oni fucked her with his tongue, brought her to orgasm with alarming swiftness. Her cunt fluttered and pulsed around him as she cried out into the night, entire pelvis seizing as paroxysms of pleasure blotted out her view of the blood-red sky.

After, she lay on her back beside the spring. The Oni pulled his tongue free with a lewd wet sound, but he didn’t release her thighs. The Oni stood. Hands under her knees, he once more pushed her thighs to her chest until she splayed open beneath him. His cock slapped against her nude center when he rose to his full height. She moaned when he rubbed himself through her wetness until he was coated, gliding and slipping and sliding together, overstimulation making her squirm when he pressed against her clit. Growling low in his chest, the Oni pulled back his hips, angling his dick down and swiping it through her folds until it caught on her entrance.

But he was far too big to penetrate her, a fact that became utterly undeniable when he tried to press inside.

The Survivor gasped at the impossible stretch, eyes locked on where their bodies tried in vain to join. He pushed against her with a slow thrust, the tip of his cock head pushing in only the barest bit — and her body clenched, clamping down tight, the intrusion far too large to take without tearing. Wet and pliant and prepped as she was, the Oni was about to rip her in half. She knew it in her bones, the pain and stretch an alarm bell ringing through the haze of even her pleasure-addled head.

Hands slapped against the Oni’s abdomen. “Oh — oh, stop, it hurts, it hurts!”

And perhaps he understood, because he eased back. Claws pet her hair, combing through it in soft, sure strokes. The Survivor relaxed, relief flooding coolly in her veins. Much as she wanted to be fucked, and much as the Oni clearly wanted to fuck her, it was clear he was just too big. She needed more prep, something to stretch her and train her body before he could fuck her...if that was even possible. Looking at him now in the light of not-quite-day, she had her doubts. He had a cock out of a bad romance novel, too big for realistic sex. The length of her forearm, thick with veins and desire, impossible to comprehend. The kind of thing that brutalizes a person, not pleasures them. If she took it, it would irreparably maim something inside her, she was sure.

The Survivor whispered, “I’m sorry.”

The Oni didn’t tell her he didn’t mind, nor that it was OK. He had been a samurai, a man of action in life (or so the Survivor assumed). As silent as ever, he held himself still in contemplation. Just looking at her smaller body, eyes crawling up and down her nude form before settling on her thighs. The Oni gathered her legs and squeezed them together, their combined length pressed to his chest and held tightly in place when he wrapped both arms around them.

And then she felt it — his cock nudging between her thighs, finding the juncture of them and sawing between the softness of her flesh. Head tipping back with a groan, the Oni fucked into them, cock sawing between her thighs, through her pussy lips, and out onto her belly, so long he reached there without trouble, the pressure of her thighs constricting his dick along the way.

And he held her legs together so tightly his cock shuttled along her clit, too, her own wetness leaking out and making his way slippery, warm, erotic. She threw back her head and moaned, hands scrambling against the stones for purchase as he jounced her body in place, his hips battering her ass with crude wet slaps

“Oh!” she said when his cock ground tighter against her clot. “Oh, yes, yes, just like that — please, please, Kazan…”

He stopped cold. She whined, hips bucking, trying to get him to move, confused until he gripped her face in his hand. He squeezed her cheeks tight, her lower lip jutting in a helpless pout.

“Kazan-sama,” the Oni growled.

She repeated back the name. As soon as she did, he moved again. And every time she said he name with the honorific attached, he rewarded her with an even harder thrust. The Oni soon came all over her belly and breasts, but only after she reached her peak beneath him with a wail.

Handprint bruises and the pricks of claws stained her thighs when he finally let go. He swiped his fingers through the mess they’d made and pressed them to her mouth. The Survivor licked the Oni’s clean, watching with glassy-eyed satisfaction as his eyes began to blaze.

To her delight, he dove back into her pussy, devouring her, a reward for good behavior. And she grasped his horns and cried his name, as he liked it, the entire time.

Afterward, the Oni dragged his tongue slowly through her wet cunt, lapping at the mess he found there until she was clean. He fed her by hand in the shelter of the temple and combed her hair, conditioning it with sweetly scented oil he then used to massage her sore limbs. She moaned her gratitude into the futon and reclined sleepily in his arms once he finished, the pair resting together on the porch under the cloudy sky.

Somehow, the Survivor felt…safe. Safer than she’d felt in such a long time. Sheltered from reality, not a thought in her head but the growling beast at her back and the cool moonlight on her face. When he massaged her breasts with the oil, she sighed and sank bonelessly against the Oni. Every limb thrummed with exhaustion. She’d sleep for a week if she could.

But tired as she was, when the beast’s cock stiffened and he reached once more between her thighs, she could not find the will to resist.

She only rose from their bed once after the Oni placed her in it for the night. It was late, and she was moments away from sleep when the Oni rose from her side. In the dark he put on his armor, piece by heavy piece until he wore the dreadful accoutrement of a Killer. Then, footsteps like the beat of a taiko drum, he strode from the room.

He did not shut the door behind him.

The Survivor stared at the doorway for a long time. Deep and dark and black, the space beyond it yawned like the mouth of some great void. Cold and empty. The vacuum of space, waiting to suck her into a realm of nothing.

Hardly daring to breathe, the Survivor rose from her futon. She stood on the threshold. She waited for the Oni’s footsteps to signal his return.

She heard nothing.

The Survivor leaned forward and peered into the dark.

A long hallway waited beyond the door. Bare and empty, it stretched featureless to her right. But down to her left, she saw a door. A paper one, plain and austere. The palest grey light filtered from beneath, a stripe of illumination amid deep shadow.

The Survivor had been waiting for something like this. A chance to escape. A chance to slip unseen into the night, and out of the Oni’s grasp.

She stared at the door for what felt like an age.

She pulled back from the threshold.

She shut the door.

The Survivor crawled once more into the futon to wait for the Oni to return.

Chapter Text

They were in the midst of bathing when the crimson demon mask appeared on the Oni’s face. The Survivor knew by now that its appearance heralded a black-smoke summons to a Trial. She followed the Oni from the bath and helped him dress: sode, dō, tekko,  kusazuri, uwa-obi, one piece after another in their prescribed order. The Oni stood upon the porch once they were done and stared across the yard with eyes of flame. Watching. Waiting. Hands clenching at his sides as if longing for a weapon to grasp.

But no smoke summoned him away. The Oni remained within the shrine, long hair undulating on an unseen breeze. The Survivor stood beside him in uncertain silence. The sky burned the color of blood overhead, sullen yet intense.

“What’s wrong?” she asked when the silence grew too thick. “Is there not another Trial?”

To this day, the Oni hadn’t uttered a single word in English. To this day, she assumed he could not understand her language, just as she could not understand the nuances of his. But perhaps her tone conveyed her meaning, because he pointed over the wall as though in answer.

The Survivor’s scalp prickled. “Is someone out there?”

His head cocked. The Oni put a finger to her mouth, shushing her. A confirmation and a warning in one.

“I see.” She whispered every word now. “I’ll be waiting here for you here.”

Fingers the hue of corpses played across her hair. The Oni pet her gently, but his eyes remained affixed on the compound’s high wall. There had been Trials in this realm before, or so the Survivor suspected, though never close enough to merit auditory caution. This Trial must be closer than the others, then. Perhaps right on the other side of the wall.

But why? Why was it different from the Trials that had come before, and what did that mean for her? Or for the Oni himself?

Worry ignited in the pit of her stomach, coals buried just below the ash of her composure. She had never been nervous for a Trial before. Now, after the intimacy they’d shared, she dreaded the moment the black mist would spirit the Oni away. Survivors never killed Killers (how could they?), but what if something nevertheless happened to the Oni during one of his hunts? What if the Oni did not return?

What would happen to her if something happened to him?

Again her stomach twisted. The Survivor reached for the armor on the Oni’s waist. He grabbed her wrist, head cocking in silent question.

“Please.” She didn’t really care if he could understand her words. Let her, too, be a person of action. “Let me remind you of what’s waiting for you, once you win.”

His head cocked to one side, a dog listening to a far-off sound. He released her wrist after a time. She twisted the armor on his groin to the side and dropped to her knees. The Survivor unlaced his hakama and found him quickly hardening. She stroked him with one hand and shrugged out of her yukata, freeing her breasts so his fiery gaze could drink them in. Let him see her; let him remember her; let him long for her body when he was away. Holding these wishes in her head, she licked her lips and lapped at the head of his penis. Big and grey-blue, skin darker here than on the rest of him, he was soon engorged to the point of pain, veins thumping under her fingers and slick palms. His cock wept precum onto her tongue, smearing, messy, thick, tasting of salt and iron, strangely hot compared to his cold skin.

She couldn’t fit much of him in her mouth. Too big, filling her completely with the head alone. She sucked him as best she could before laving him with her tongue, fingers only overlapping around the shaft when she used both hands. Too big. Unwieldy. Intimidating. But she did her best despite his size, thinking of how he’d touched himself and trying to replicate the motions he preferred.

He seemed to appreciate her efforts, however clumsy. Low groans spilled from behind his tusks, one hand resting on the back of her head in a heavy pet. Hips jutted toward her when she teased the slit at the tip of his cock, the Oni wanting her touch, craving it, chasing it. She might’ve been on her knees, but the power of the act thrilled her. The Oni wanted her — her! An answering throb between her legs pulsed star-bright and singing. Moaning into his cock, nuzzling against it, she dropped one hand and pressed her fingers into her folds, dragging slick through them and pressing at her clit. The hand on her hair grew heavier, his breathing faster, deeper, armor rattling as his lungs expanded. Fingers slicking frantic over flesh, she rocked onto her hand, saliva spilling from her lips and rolling down his cock, mixing with his precum, everything wet and hot and slippery and spiraling higher, faster, more desperate by the second —

Without warning he pulled her off of him, squeezing her face in his hand and grasping his cock in the other. He came on her face and breasts while she played with herself, Survivor coming simultaneously to a shuddering orgasm at his feet.

It was in the midst of this, with his spend on her chest and her knees aching against the porch, that the Survivor wondered if she had given him enough.

They sat on the porch like that for a time. She leaned heavily against his leg, spent, glowing. But all good things must come to an end, and the Oni soon grasped her arm and dragged her to her feet. Flaming eyes flared bright. Grasping her wrist, he licked her fingers clean, growl like an earthquake in his chest all the while. She burned with new desire by the time he finished, hoping he’d ignore the call to the Trial and instead take her right there on the porch.

The Oni didn’t. Grasping her shoulders, he turned her around and pushed her toward the spring. Clearly he wanted her clean by the time he returned, perfumed and pretty and ready for him. She felt almost giddy at the idea. Surely he’d come home again if she did as he said. Pleased him. Obeyed. Submitted.

She paused midway across the yard, cum drying sticky and slick on her skin, and looked over her shoulder.

When her eyes met the Oni’s, he gave a nod, slow and grave and silent.

The Survivor did not see him leave, though in the quiet that followed, she could only assume he had been summoned away. She tried not to think about it as she sank into the spring and cleaned herself, the Oni’s cum floating in foamy rivulets atop the water and out the grate at the base of the shrine’s tall wall. Despite how many times she looked at it, the drain still watched her like an eye, no less creepy for all its earned familiarity. She had tried peering out of it once, but she hadn’t seen much. Just a ditch with water trickling along the bottom to parts unknown. She turned her back on it, laying her cheek along the rocks at the edge of the pool.

Once clean, she lounged in the water, sinking up to her chin in the deep pool. Would the Oni be rougher after a good hunt? Gentler, with aggression worked out before he returned home?

Home.

When had she begun to think of this place as home?

Before the Oni took her, she would’ve balked at the idea of finding any kind of home within the realm of Survivors, Killers and Trials. Now, though, she couldn’t find the energy to be troubled over this revelation. It was impossible to feel concerned when she was so warm and full and sated, afterglow still thrumming in her veins. Her eyes were heavy, limbs leaden, a languid calm possessing every muscle until she might drown in relaxation and the spring alike.

But then — a sound in the distance.

The Survivor sat up, cold despite the hot water lapping at her skin. Somewhere in the distance a voice rang out, too far to make out words but close enough to hear the fear coloring each hazy syllable. Another shout followed. Then a low hum, sullen and unmistakable.

A generator.

There really was a Trial nearby.

The Survivor sank low in the water, arms around herself to keep away a chill. Still, she shivered. More shouts cut the night, a crash and another hum cutting the steamy air. Much closer than the other Trials, judging by the sound. Close enough that she might overhear words if they drew any nearer. Other survivors ran from the Oni nearby, perhaps behind the very wall that guarded her from the outside world —

A new voice cut the quiet.

Someone called her name.

She thought she had imagined it. It came and went so fleetingly, almost hissed, whispered, a gasp on the breeze one might mistake for wind whistling through orange leaves. But then she heard it again. Louder, this time. More confident, if not still low. She whirled, grabbing her robe and scrambling out of the pool, but turning in place revealed not a soul. The Survivor was alone. So where was the voice — ?

“Hey! Hey! Down here!”

The drain. The voice was coming from beyond the drain. She waded through the spring and grabbed the bars, throwing herself at them and desperately peering through the gaps. Her eyes took a second to adjust, but soon a pale shape swam from the darkness.

There, in the shadows, was a face. Wide-eyed and wild, familiar, so familiar it snagged the air from her lungs and left her trembling. And he seemed to feel the same because the color had drained from his clammy skin, moon-wide eyes staring like he’d seen a ghost rising from the grave. And perhaps he had, at least from his point of view.

The last time he’d see her, after all, she’d been gripped in the arms of the Oni.

But she wasn’t in the Killer’s arms now. No, she was clean and fed and sated now, clad in a robe and fresh from a bath, staring back at her old friend with horror and confusion waging war in her chest. A similar war waged behind his eyes, but that didn’t stop him from stretching his fingers through the grate in her direction — grasping for her as if to pull her through, away from there, the place she had only just begun to consider home.

“Oh my god,” said Jared with another disbelieving whisper of her name. “You’re alive?”

The Survivor stared at him in silence, numb.

In the distance, the Oni bellowed his rage into the night.

Chapter Text

Jared looked more haggard than she recalled, if such a thing was even possible. Bruise-blue bags she didn’t remember stained his under eyes, cheeks more sunken, wrists thinner as he gripped the bars and stared at her in shock. And he was dirty — so very, very dirty, gritty grime and soot streaked along his cheeks and clothes in thick lines of filth. A cut had opened along his cheek, stubble on his jaw slick with red. Had she looked so disheveled before the Oni took her? And what did she look like in Jared’s eyes now? Unlike the survivors she’d once called friends, she’d been eating well. Bathing. Sleeping —

“I thought — we thought you were dead.” Jared choked the words out like they hurt him, each one a battle all their own. “After you disappeared, we all thought the Oni — ”

“Disappeared? Don’t you mean abandoned?”

Jared had the decency to look ashamed of himself. Rage burned in her throat like acid, her grip on the bars a poor substitute for how badly she wanted to wring the man’s skinny neck.

“What did you even tell the others, anyway? That I fell behind?” she said, voice shaking from anger held only barely in check. “Did you leave out the part where you kicked me in the fucking face and left me for the Oni to murder?”

His face spasmed. “Hey — ”

“Shut the fuck up.” The Survivor had no interest in excuses, lies, justifications for an action Jared never, ever should have taken, because survivors were meant to stick together, dammit, and he had broken that code as easily as a Killer breaks a neck just to save his own sorry skin. Face pressed to the bars, trying to wound him with her eyes alone, the Survivor hissed: “I’m here because of you, Jared. You hurt me. You left me for dead. You don’t get to act all concerned for me now. Not after what you did!”

“I know.” The words came soft. Pleading. Apologetic, even. “So let me make it right.”

She laughed in his face. “How the hell could you possibly do that?”

“I can get you out of here.”

“Out of…?”

The notion left her dumbstruck, though sincerity colored Jared’s dark eyes like blood on a crisp white tablecloth. What made him think he stood even the smallest chance of getting her out? There was nothing he could do against the Oni in his own domain! But Jared apparently didn’t realize this. He looked around with a shrewed expression on his starving face, crouching there in the ditch beyond the wall as if he believed every foolish word he spoke.

And he threw a lot of them at her in short order: “Can you get to the exit?”

“I don’t know where it is,” the Survivor said, neck prickling in the steamy air. “I’ve never even seen this building from the outside.”

“Shit. The doors—?”

“You don’t think I’ve tried to use them? They won’t open or break!”

He cursed under his breath, thinking hard. “Can you climb the wall?”

“No.”

 “Nothing to stack up, or throw over — ?”

“No.” Did he really think she was stupid enough to have never considered these things!? “There’s a chest, but I can’t move it, and it’s not tall enough, anyway.”

“OK. Shit.” He bounced on the balls of his feet, crouching in place but getting read to run. “Wait there.”

The Survivor threw herself at the grate with a slosh of hot spring water. “Where are you going?!”

“Shhh! Don’t let the Oni hear you!”

And then Jared vanished, bolting out of sight with the splash of frantic feet in dirty puddles. The only sign he had ever been there were the footprints he left behind in the damp earth, imprints of his soles cracked and bare of tread.

In his absence, the Survivor floundered. Sounds rose up in the distance. A roar, a scream, the hum and then the silence of a generator kicking on for a survivor and going dark under a Killer’s hand. She should tell the Oni what was happening, warn him about Jared and what he might be planning —

Did she want to warn the Oni?

The question left her frozen in place, chills stuttering along her spine in spite of the hot spring. This was her chance to escape, wasn’t it? Not that long ago, she would’ve leapt at this chance…but it wasn’t the first time she’d turned down an opportunity to reclaim her freedom. She’d lied to Jared when she said she’d never seen the exit to her prison-turned-home. The Survivor had glimpsed a door one night, but she had not walked through it. And now here she was, poised on another threshold to freedom and coming up short of taking the leap.

She thought of Jared’s dirty face. His tired eyes. His gaunt cheeks, clothes hanging from his underfed frame in tatters.

Should she tell Jared to just leave her behind again?

The Survivor wasn’t sure how long she sat there in the water, yukata sodden, shivering despite the heat. It could have been a minute or an hour before Jared reappeared at the grate. He carried a rope in his hand this time, scrounged from who knew where within the realm. But he’d always been the resourceful type, she recalled. He was the one who’d found the hairbrush back at camp.

Jared pointed off to the side before flicking his finger up, up, up. “I’m gonna tie this to the tree and throw it over the wall. You can climb up it to get over the wall, then down the tree on the other side. Think you can do that?”

She didn’t say anything, but Jared wasn’t listening to her anyway. He disappeared again before she could utter a word. From beyond the wall, feet moved over gravel; grunts of effort followed. Numbly the Survivor waded out of the spring and stood in the garden, dripping water and indecision on the hard dirt. A coil of rope sailed over the wall and fell to the ground at her feet. The rope snaked up and over the wall toward the tree, twitching and pulling taut as Jared fastened it somewhere in place. If she just climbed it, she could reach the branches of the tree overhead. Use them to pull herself over the bamboo spikes. Climb down and run, run, run away from here as fast and as far as she could —

“Hey!” Jared called, voice rising in volume and risk alike. “Can you hear me? C’mon, the coast is clear!”

The Survivor didn’t move. She stared at the rope. It was right there. Right in reach. Jared had even tied knots along it that she could use for footholds. It would be easy, she thought. She’d climbed less reliable ropes and rickety ladders in the Trials. As easy as breathing to just shimmy up and over that wall. Just a few moments of effort and she could slip away into —

Into darkness, and Trials, and endless night, and killing. So much killing.

“Hey! Hey!” Jared bellowed, frantic now, feet dancing over gravel in a feared flurry. “What’s taking you so long!?”

She should want to escape. The Oni was a killer. He’d brought her there against her will and held her captive, slave to his permissions, bound to his every whim. She wouldn’t need anyone’s permission if she was free. If she was free, she could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She could —

She could hide from Killers in the Trials. She could start generators and sleep on the cold, hard ground. She could be pierced with hooks and slashed with knives, and she could wake up in the morning and do it all again.

“What are you waiting for!?” Jared bellowed. “Just fucking climb, goddammit!”

Before Jared showed up, the Survivor had been waiting for the Oni to return. She’d bathed  herself in preparation for his touch. For a warm meal. For a soft bed and arms to hold her in the night, so long as she discarded the notion of freedom altogether. She had been waiting for the Oni — her jailer, her lover, her only pitch-dark respite against even deeper shadows — to return and give meaning to her otherwise monotonous existence.

The Survivor could live freely amidst the darkness, if only she took the rope in hand.

Or she could stay. She could stay, and she could be safe, and she could survive in the shadows with the Oni. Free from pain. Free from hunger. Free from cold. Free from choice. Free to accept whatever pleasures the Oni deemed her worthy of.

The Survivor stood in silence, on the precipice of decision.

But then the Oni roared, and the spell upon her shattered.

Jared screamed, a sound of abject terror and fury mixed as one. “Shit, he’s coming! He’s coming! Just — just take the rope and run, dammit, run — ”

Jared’s footsteps fled into the night.

Giving chase, the Oni bellowed like the demon he had become.

On the other side of the wall, the Bride reached for the rope.

Chapter Text

The man who dared encroach upon the Oni’s territory did not get far. A swift strike to the knees brought him to the ground at the Oni’s feet. He lay there in a gibbering puddle, reeking of sweat and fear and the stink of the generators’ acrid fuel. Behind the mask, the Oni’s lip curled.

“Please, please—I didn’t mean anything by it!” the survivor screamed, hands up in futile surrender. “I didn’t know she was yours! Please—”

So this pathetic coward had knowingly tried to steal what belonged to the Oni, did he? His show of apology was too belated to matter. The Oni raised his club, gratified when the man screamed in terror…but the Oni didn’t kill him. He merely clubbed him over the head until he passed out, slinging him over his shoulder and making his way back to the house with swift steps.

He stopped short outside the compound wall. Someone had tied a rope to the tree beside the wall, fibers knotted around a lower branch. The other end had been thrown over the wall and into the garden beyond. He eyed it silently, even the patient hunter. His Bride waited on the wall’s on the other side. Would she climb the rope and try to run? She had passed his test when he left the door open after he lay claim to her on the futon, but now, with an old friend to encourage her disobedience…

The rope tensed — pulled by the weight of a climber, perhaps? The Oni held perfectly still, preparing to drop the man on his shoulder and pursue his true quarry should she attempt to flee. But soon he relaxed again, because the branch stretched back, and back, and back, and he heard a feminine grunt of effort from beyond the wall…

The branch broke. The rope disappeared.

The Oni dragged the man through the dirt and around to the shrine’s main entrance, passing beneath a desecrated torii arch without stopping to pay any profane respects. The Oni did not bother to remove his shoes. Uncaring of the mess he left behind, and with the male survivor in tow, the Oni stalked down the hall to where his Bride awaited. It was improper, but in that moment, the Oni did not care about his shoes or the state of the tatami. He strode across them without pause, dragging the man behind him in a trail of filth as he crossed the room and entered the inner courtyard.

His bride stood in its center. She coiled the rope around her arm, movements methodical, measured, precise. The broken tree branch sat to the side, tidily tucked away against the wall. She put the coil of rope down and dusted her hands. When she saw the Oni, she smiled.

“Welcome home,” she said.

There was a stillness to her. A serenity. Tranquility like that of a deep forest, the cool embrace of acceptance shadowing her eyes. The Oni dropped Jared and went to her. He petted her hair, pride a purr of pleasure in his chest when his Bride nuzzled into his touch, eyes drooped in catlike affection.

“Is it over?” she murmured into his palm. “The Trial?”

He understood her words perfectly. He pretended not to, though this charade of ignorance would not last much longer. He had been in the realm of the Entity far too long to not have picked up her language; in battle, one must use every advantage of wit one could, distasteful though learning another tongue had been. But for now, his Bride did not need to know the true depths of his understanding. That was acceptable to him…for now, at least.

But he would need her full understanding, and soon, to cope with what lay ahead.

The Oni pointed over the wall. A generator kicked on in the distance. The Bride nodded, able to put the pieces together from these clues. The Trial was not over yet. The Oni had more work to do.

“I’ll be here. Waiting.” She glanced at Jared. “What do we do with him? Will you kill him?”

What a wonderful suggestion from his Bride. The Oni certainly wanted to kill Jared for daring to try to steal her away, but now was not the time for indulgence in the heady rush of wrath. The Oni had another plan. His Bride knew his tastes, but she was not very clever, and she did not know what he knew about the Entity and its hunger. No, he had a better plan than merely killing Jared. A smarter one. The Entity sent this Trial to them as a test, and the Oni would use Jared as the tool to make good on the Entity’s unsavory conditions.

In this way, Jared’s life would serve the Oni even before he died beneath the Oni’s kanabō.

The Oni used the rope Jared has tossed down to his Bride to bind him, lashing together his hands and feet so he could not escape. Leaving him on the porch, the Oni pointed to the dirty tatami. The bride nodded.

“It will be clean by the time you return,” she said.

The Oni rewarded her with a stroke to her hair again. So agreeable for him. So obedient. His Bride has been remade as he saw fit, sweetly submissive and perfect, a vessel for his every wish. Perhaps some long-buried part of her recalled the feeling of submitting to his hand, habits dogging her from one life to the next. Perhaps she had simply learned the way of things anew. Either way, he would kiss her if his mouth were capable of such a feat. She had earned the right to a kiss at last. But since his teeth prevented such tenderness, he would instead reward her when he returned.

But the reward would not take the form of a kiss. No — he had something more permanent in mind. Something that would make good on his end of the bargain, wrought in promises and blood, so the Entity could never take his Bride away. His Bride might hate him for it, but she would not remain cross for long. He had broken her in all the proper ways a husband breaks his wife. Only one more remained, and then she would be his forevermore. And she would thank him for it.

He would accept nothing less than her deepest, most humble gratitude.

But she had no idea what awaited her upon his return. Oblivious and stupid, she smiled so sweetly at him, the tender hand on his arm full of warm affection. She wouldn’t smile like that if she knew what he was planning. And she most certainly would sound so darling when she murmured, “Good luck. Don’t take too long.”

He huffed against her hair. He had no need for luck; he would have to teach her not to disrespect him thus, and to choose her words more carefully. For now, she only meant well, and he would take her words in the spirit she intended.

But he would correct this slight another time.

The Oni would not tolerate disrespect. Not even from his chosen Bride.

After one final stroke of her hair, the Oni hefted his kanabō high. Eager to return to her and make good on his intentions, he stalked from the room, noting the kick of a generator in the distance as the survivors took advantage of his momentary distraction.

First, the Oni would hunt.

And then he would provide for his wife — and in the process, break her.

He was halfway across the realm when fog began to eddy about his feet. He ignored it, chasing a trail of ruby blood left by an injured survivor as the Entity’s lilting voice echoed through the darkness.

“What’s this? You kept one alive?” she asked.

She meant the male survivor tied up in the shrine, no doubt. Oni did not pay the Entity any mind. He tracked footsteps and spilled blood, senses keenly fixed on the task at hand.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” the Entity continued, undeterred by his silence. “But if you torture him, I won’t protest. It’ll taste better than what you’ve been providing me of late.”

The Oni growled low in his throat. He knew what the Entity would say. He had been expecting it, memory of the Entity’s demands and his wife’s pleasured cries clashing discordantly in his breast. As soon as she had lost herself to ecstasy at his hands, he knew the Entity’s malcontent would follow swiftly after.

“She likes it when you touch her.” An air of complaint crept into her words, petulant and sullen. “She got over the shame far too quickly. A pity.” She tittered, a laugh bubbling like blood in a severed throat. “The woman lost her flavor. Perhaps it’s time I sent her packing…”

Even the Oni’s surgical grip on his rage could not prevent him from striking out at the swirling fog with his kanabō. The mist danced and churned, shapes like grasping hands and grinning skulls roiling in its depths.

“Oh. The cogs are turning behind that mask of yours.” Utterly delighted at the prospect of seeing the Oni in action, she giggled with the sound of rattling bones and broken teeth. “What are you planning, Oni?”

The Oni did not tell her. She would see soon enough, as would his waiting Bride. The Oni strode ever forward, uttering but a single word before he continued his violent search for one survivor, then another, and then another until none remained. The single word he spoke was stark. Commanding. Cryptic. Sure to bait the hungry Entity into keeping a close eye upon the Oni in the hours to come. And he was counting on it work, for his plan would not come to fruition unless the Entity played audience to the Oni’s grand design.

The single word the Oni said was: “Watch.”

With all that he planned to offer her, the Oni was sure the Entity would do exactly that.