The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village:Volume1 Chapter 4

Status: Incomplete

Chapter 4: Regarding the Slaughter

Part 1 (Jinnai Shinobu)

It was all over.

It was utterly and fundamentally over. There was not even the slightest hope. After all, there had never before been the slightest hint that someone like her would die!!

“U-uhh…”

The urge to vomit rose up within me. The extreme red coloration made me feel dizzy.

Even so, I could not tear my eyes away from what lay before me. They were rooted to the spot. I pointlessly tried to not make the connection between the thick smell of rusted iron and the fact that I was in the same area as a corpse.

It was in front of me.

A neck that was twisted like an old rag. A female body missing a head. I recognized that person who even now had fresh blood gushing out of her. The corpse had its face crushed and was overall melted, so it was possible it was not actually her. However, that theory did not hold here. I simply recognized too many things about her.

I recognized the beautifully manicured fingers.

I recognized the smooth line of her back.

It matched the memories in my mind so perfectly I shuddered. I could not help but shudder. She was collapsed there limply…no, her entire body was twitching as the blood flowed out like a frog leg with electrodes attached.

I managed to squeeze a voice out of the depths of my dry throat.

“Hishigami…Mai-san…?”

I may have called her name because I was hoping for a response.

Even though she had no mouth. Even though she had no head.

My legs almost collapsed underneath me, but then I realized the redness gushing out was flowing toward me. When I thought it would touch me and sully me, strength reentered my legs. And then I realized something else. I felt it would sully me because it was coming from a corpse. I no longer even thought of it as being Hishigami Mai.

And with that realization, the fear that had been numbed over by the shock came flooding in all at once.

“Ah...ah...aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

I would be killed.

I would be killed if I stayed there. This was a situation where a human on her level had been easily decapitated. A normal high school student like me did not stand a chance!!

I swung my arms around and ran away.

I had no idea what I was screaming. It didn’t matter what. I needed to get out. I needed to get out of the building. I ran through a long passageway.

But I stopped partway through.

My legs refused to move any further.

A single door lay before me. It was half open and a pure red color was splattered on the other side.

Dammit! What the hell!? Dammit!! That’s my uncle! He’s supposed to be a policeman! The symbol of this country’s power! Why…Why is his neck caught in a broken window frame and his legs severed!?

He was my relative, so I did not know whether I should run over crying even though he was so horribly damaged. But the fear held me back. I could not approach. There was something wrong about the situation. He had not died due to blood loss from his legs. He had suffocated with his neck caught in the window frame. It was clear someone had wanted him to slowly suffer as he died by setting a trap he could have escaped had he been able to use his legs at all.

That mystery-loving girl had been thrown on top of a gas burner in the kitchen and Madoka was swaying back and forth as she hung like a chandelier from the ceiling by a giant fishing hook meant for catching Pacific bluefin tuna. There was simply no hope. It did not matter who had done it. I could not imagine how this could all be summarized into an individual pursuing us. It simply seemed to me that the entire hotel was enveloped by some invisible power like some massive malice or grudge.

I was going to die.

I was definitely going to die.

I could not stop my erratic breathing. I could not put together a plan. I was next. In fact, I was the only one left. So who had done this? Was there any way I could escape? In fact…

In fact…

How?

How had it ended up like this?

Part 2 (Jinnai Shinobu)

As I was eating a popsicle on the porch of our Japanese house with a thatch roof that was only any use in the winter, my overall small granny called out to me.

“Shinobu. Shinobu.”

“What is it, granny.”

“It’s a stray cat. I do not mind if it rests here, but I do not want it to start using our yard as its litter box. I tried to chase it away, but it didn’t do any good. Shinobu, could you do something about it?”

“…Granny. That isn’t a cat. It’s a Nekomata. It has two tails. Those things can be deadly, so be careful.”

Cat Youkai were not all that disliked as they were said to take vengeance for their masters, but those were romanticized tales. They had the power to kill people, so you really did have to be careful.

I put on my flip-flops and headed out to the large yard. I then cautiously approached the Nekomata that was curled up below a tree covered in rhinoceros beetles.

“Nekomata, what are you doing here?”

“Can’t you tell? Doing my best to put up with this midsummer heat. I suppose you humans wouldn’t understand with your year-round air conditioning.”

“You can cool down inside if you want, but please don’t use our yard as a litter box.”

“A lady like me would never do something like that. Anyway, that sounds nice. I was starting to feel a bit irritable, so a nice cold bath would be great. Once my mood has been refreshed, I will no longer have to worry about harming anyone.”

“You like baths? But you’re a cat.”

“I am a Nekomata.”

And so I headed for the bath with the Nekomata in my arms.

“This is quite the high-tech bath for such a rundown house.”

“My grandfather insisted we get it redone while we can because he says the house could be designated cultural property at any time. That’s why the kitchen, bathrooms, bath, heating, and cooling are all more advanced than everything else.”

I turned the faucet and cold water started filling the wash basin, but the Nekomata began to complain.

“It will be too cold with just that. Add in some hot water.”

“You sure are picky.”

“That’s too much hot water. It can’t be lukewarm. I want this to be refreshing.”

“Fine, fine,” I replied and stuck the Nekomata in the wash basin.

Despite all her complaints, she seemed to enjoy it. I could hear a lot of purring.

Suddenly, I noticed a flat-chested Yuki Onna peering in through the gap next to the sliding door to the bath. My dad had allowed her to live with us as long as she stayed away from anything related to brewing as the temperature for that had to be precisely controlled. (Incidentally, my mother just generally loved Youkai.)

“…No fair…”

“What isn’t fair?”

“That Youkai suddenly appears and you are already taking a bath with her? And yet I have not received an opportunity like that after all this work I put into solidifying a foundation…”

“Oh, you’re jealous. Not only is that unsightly, but you are way off the mark there,” commented the Nekomata.

“What!? Wait, does this even count? I mean, she’s a cat!!” I said.

“I am a Nekomata. I am as much a deadly Youkai as she is.”

Even if you’re in the same category, there’s still a huge difference!! And why is Yuki Onna-chan reaching for the obi to her kimono!? You’re clearly choosing the wrong person to compete with here!! Are you planning to stick your ass in the wash basin!?

And then came the glamorous Zashiki Warashi. She must have caught scent of my misfortune. The huge grin on her face made it obvious at a glance what she was after. It was a little unclear what this had to do with her being a Zashiki Warashi, but I was past caring.

“Hey, Zashiki Warashi! Hold that Yuki Onna back!”

“No fair, no fair☆”

“Why the hell are you reaching for your yukata’s obi!? Don’t strip nude just for a joke! It isn’t funny when you have a body as nice as that!!”

Part 3 (Hishigami Mai)

The countryside could be annoying with all the Youkai, but big cities were hardly perfect. They were so crowded and filled with unhealthy exhaust and chemicals despite the area being thoroughly altered for humans to live in. I could only imagine the people there enjoyed shaving away their own lifespan.

I entered a chain café and a police detective with a glum look on his face waved me over to a seat in the back. What he was doing counted as work, so I could only be jealous of how easy public servants had it.

Even so, he did seem a bit stiff in his movements due to the wounds from repeated shots from a hunting rifle.

But by “our” standards, that didn’t even count as being injured. Also, he received medical care paid for with the people’s tax money, so I still say they have it pretty easy.

“What are you drinking?”

“What does it matter? By the way…what’s with that outfit? A tank top and hot pants? Did you forget how old you are? You look like a complete idiot. You look like a university student that carelessly got in with a specialized entrance exam and then couldn’t keep up with the classes.”

“If a real idiot wore this, there would be no helping them, but it works as a handy bit of camouflage for those who aren’t idiots.”

“I see. So what did you want to talk about? Let’s get this over with quickly.”

“Oh, c’mon. At least let me complain about my troubles to you. I’ve had some pain-in-the-ass people set their sights on me lately which isn’t any fun. Oh, I know. Could you maybe help smooth things out with them?”

“With you, it’s bound to be your own damn fault. I hate that I can’t arrest someone like you. There are just too many holes in the police organization. So who has their sights on you? The PSIA?”

“MI6. The CIA. Oh, and the European Security Force.”

“That’s clearly well beyond what the Japanese police can deal with!! What the hell did you do!? No, wait…no!!”

“You wanna know? You do, don’t you? Well, I heard a system for making use of Succubi had been established in Europe, so I decided to go take a peek. The system was so poorly made it looked like an idiot had designed it. In fact, the officials who had contacted the Succubus were the ones being contr-…”

“Stop!! Please stop! I don’t want to end up being some poor victim after hearing something I shouldn’t have!!”

Oh, c’mon.

And I was just getting to the good part.

“Why do you two sisters always destroy the boundaries of common sense…?”

“Oh? I’ll admit I may do that, but I thought my little sister was a bit more normal.”

“What is normal about a minor that shows up at the crime scene of every mysterious murder? I’ve had a flood of complaints from the Lifestyle Safety Division. They keep telling me not to let a child see those things and to solve the cases on my own. …I don’t know how word of it reached them, but I’ve even received complaints from the riot police.”

“Why don’t you just go ahead and marry her?”

“Are you completely unfamiliar with the concept of context!? And do you have any idea what Japanese law is!?”

“Oh, right. About that sister of mine.”

“Again, context please…”

“She says to take a week of paid vacation starting today.”

“Why!? I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!”

Well, that one wasn’t too surprising. My sister knew that was asking too much of him. That was why she had used me as an intermediary for the message.

“I have some tickets here. One for me, one for you, and one for my sister. That’s three in total. These tickets give us free lodging at a hotel in Fuuka Village, an Intellectual Village. You are headed there right away. Understand?”

“…I’ll keep this short. What happens if I just ignore you?”

“I will render you unconscious with this wet towel and stuff you in my travel bag. But then you won’t be able to call in to take a paid vacation, so you might lose your job.”

Part 4 (Jinnai Shinobu)

After dealing with the trouble in the bath, I retreated back to my room.

The air conditioner was running full blast within the room and for some reason the futon was spread out with the Zashiki Warashi lying in it.

“…What are you doing?”

“Don’t you think it’s unfair?” The Zashiki Warashi looked at me with a completely composed expression. “You caught a cold the other day, Shinobu. And who was it that nursed you back to health? For the most part, me. It’s not fair. It’s not fair at all. Don’t you think it’s unfair if you do not treat me kindly after I treated you so kindly?”

“…But you seemed happy enough wringing out the wet towel. I thought I might as well take you up on your offer.”

“You’re always so disagreeable, but you get so obedient when you’re sick. It’s like you revert to being a small child when you feel weak. I kind of like it. I’m starting to wish you had a cold year round. Heh heh… Heh heh heh heh heh.”

Don’t tell me this Youkai that is supposed to bring fortune to my household is always lazing around in an attempt to weaken me.

“But this is a completely different issue. To make things fair, you need to pay me back for my kindness. I want you to nurse me back to health too.”

“…You just thought the porridge you fed me looked good, didn’t you? And Youkai are damn hard to kill, so I doubt you can even catch a cold.”

“Oh, I didn’t overlook that. If you will recall, I took off my clothes and took a cold bath just a bit ago.”

“Eh!? You mean that was meant to be foreshadowing!?”

I decided it was best to play along, so I went to get a towel and a wash bath filled with water.

From inside the futon, the Zashiki Warashi said, “I want to eat some vanilla ice cream.”

“You seem healthy enough to me.”

“Blow on it for me.”

“That’s not how that works. That’s for hot foods.”

The Zashiki Warashi stubbornly refused to sit up, so I had to lift up and support her upper body while I carried the spoonful of dairy product to her mouth.

I had already finished my summer homework and had nothing else to do, so I didn’t really care. I just hoped the Yuki Onna wasn’t watching me with an odd look in her eyes again.

For some reason, the Zashiki Warashi turned the TV to an educational program.

She then said, “I think I’ll grow sick of this after half an hour.”

“I thought you might.”

“But since you seem to want to nurse me back to health so much, I’ll stick with it for the rest of the day.”

“And that’s not how being tsundere works.”

Then my beaten-up old cell phone with a broken camera lens started to ring.

The Zashiki Warashi looked a bit annoyed, but I had to give the phone priority.

It was from Madoka-san, my strange beauty of a classmate who lived in the Sanatorium.

“Shinobu-kun, let’s head to a hotel.”

“What is it, Madoka? Have your morals completely crumbled?”

“Ah ha ha ha ha. Sorry, but a whole group is going. I have an extra ticket, so I was wondering if you wanted to come along.”

…No, I think this is a pretty big deal even so. Are you sure they haven’t crumbled? Well, maybe she’s just taking the idea of the “student summer break” too lightly.

And on a different note, when did Madoka and I get so close???

“Where is this hotel? The beach? The mountains?”

“Somewhere far away.”

“Good enough for me. I’ll go convince my parents, so tell me where to meet you and when.”

I jotted down the necessary information and hung up. Convincing my parents…well, I doubted it would be easy, but I had to try. After all, this was a student summer break. I could feel unnecessary power welling up within me.

And then I noticed the Zashiki Warashi looking up at me from the futon like she wanted to say something.

“No fair.”

“What?”

“Shinobu, you still have a lot to learn about fairness. And so I want to go too.”

“I think she said she only had one extra ticket. And with a bourgeois like Madoka, I’m betting adding on an additional ticket would be ridiculously expensive.”

“Are you forgetting that Youkai are traditionally treated a lot like humans but there is no legal basis for that treatment?”

“I don’t follow.”

“I can stay there for free if you insist that I am your pet.”

…Doesn’t…the idea of being treated like that…make you sad?

I felt an intense urge to comment on that, but that Zashiki Warashi was probably just bored. The lead-in to the cold bath and nursing her back to health had been pretty forced. She obviously just wanted something exciting to happen.

But they said bad things would happen if a Zashiki Warashi abandoned your house. I decided it would be best to have her let off some steam before she truly got sick of our house and went off on some journey.

Part 5 (Kotemitsu Madoka)

I am the kind of person that does not believe in any of those ideas that says the fate of the entire planet has already been decided by Nostradamus, the Mayans, the Aztecs, or any other prophecies.

However, I do believe in small, fleeting bits of luck. In fact, anyone who has not felt something like that by their teenage years has already lost in some way. They will likely never make anything of themselves.

This is Madoka-san telling you this and I have around 30 billion Japanese yen, so you can trust me.

But even so, those small, fleeting bits of luck are usually something you cannot affect under your own power. Teenagers have a tendency to believe that the outcome of any sort of competition they are in is dependent on their own talent, effort, ideas, or some brilliant move of theirs, but they are wrong about that. Humans are complexly interrelated with others simply by being alive. And I am not trying to be reassuring when I say that. More often than not, that interrelation is a negative thing.

Learning to understand how others feel is not just some nice thing to do; it is the one and only secret technique to acquiring certain victory. There’s some famous quote about knowing your enemies and knowing yourself, but that is not quite accurate. What you need to know is the general flow of opinions and ideas whether they belong to your enemies, your allies, or even complete strangers.

Complete strangers will often affect the outcome without you even knowing it.

And so…

I am surrounded almost entirely by people that trip others up, people that grow envious of others, and people that rampage around based on nonsensical resentment or imagined victimhood. That is why I end up treating the rare innocent and good people like they are exceptionally precious.

“…Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh heh heh. You mustn’t underestimate a problem child, class president. To you, I may just be one address among your triple digit total of addresses, but to me, you are a highly valued comrade among my single digit total of addresses. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.”

“Madoka, you’re turning into the kind of pervert that only geniuses are allowed to be, so be careful.”

Whoops.

I was frightening Enbi who I had been speaking to over the phone.

Even after moving from the city, she had remained one of those few “innocent and good” people.

“So this trip is to an Intellectual Village called Fuuka Village?” I asked.

“Right, right. It’s centered around dairy farming, so it should be a wide open area. And it’s full of events that let you come into contact with animals.”

“I hear the cows and horses have their health more strictly managed than someone in a fitness club’s weight control program.”

But putting aside that idyllic vision (the residents of Intellectual Villages had digital values for things like “tranquility”), I was a bit worried since that mystery freak was so intent on going. Unfortunately, I knew that anything she was interested in had to do with human death.

Even so, she was still “innocent and good”, so it did not go so far as needing to actively avoid her.

“Enbi, there is one thing I need to know before we go. There are no well-known legends that have been told about Fuuka Village since the Edo period, are there?”

“Did you manage to find someone for that extra ticket?”

“There aren’t mysterious serial murders at set intervals, are there? The inn isn’t owned by a beautiful widow, is it? Office ladies don’t have a habit of heading to the hot springs in groups, do they?”

“And here I was worried that you wouldn’t be able to find any friends are ‘more than friends’ after transferring away, Madoka.”

Part 6 (Jinnai Shinobu)

The day of the trip finally came.

One of the numerous downsides of an Intellectual Village was the relative lack of public transportation connecting to the outside world. This meant everyone heading out on a trip would naturally end up at the same station at the same time.

If I called it a train that never saw rush hour, people might imagine a vehicle of the bourgeoisie, but it was actually just a local line. Even if you counted the up and down tracks separately, the train only made 5 trips each day. …It seemed completely insane and I saw no way they could make a profit off of it.

By the time I arrived, the healthy and well-behaved Madoka-chan was wearing a white dress and an elegant hat. She was looking 150% as ephemeral as ever and sitting on a bench in the empty station (the station was not operated by robots or anything). When she spotted me and the Zashiki Warashi next to me, her eyes opened wide.

“I see someone with large breasts that I did not invite.’

“She’s my pet. She can wear a collar with a bell on it if it means she stays for free.”

“…Shinobu-kun. When did you get such full-fledged perverted tastes?”

“Don’t look at me. She’s the pervert that suggested it.”

Hmm. Come to think of it, I might be willing to wear a collar if it would save me a few hundred thousand yen.

“And let me be clear. I worked hard to keep the destruction of common sense contained to this level. All last night, I had to put up with a Yuki Onna and Nekomata shouting about how unfair this is.”

I had finally won out by saying it would be hard to bring deadly Youkai belonging to our house out of the Intellectual Village. The issue was a bit different for stray (?) ones as they could come and go as they please, but it had still worked. I had a sinking feeling that meant that Nekomata was planning to stay.

Meanwhile, Madoka gave me a puzzled look from the bench.

“(Hmm. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with the Zashiki Warashi coming, but adding an unexpected irregular character to the cast list is bringing us closer to the kind of situation Enbi likes so much. I hope this trip works out okay.)”

“Hey, Madoka. The train’s about to arrive. If we miss this, we’ll have to wait until nightfall.”

“You’re right. Worrying about it isn’t going to help. (Even if the kind of serial murders that Enbi likes do happen, it doesn’t matter as long as we don’t get wrapped up in them.)”

Madoka seemed to convince herself of something and then headed over to the ticket machine. The station supported the use of IC cards, but neither of us had one. We just bought everything we wanted over the internet, so we did not feel the need to leave the village very often.

I walked past a sign saying “Make sure not to bring in any outside pollen or germs!” and approached a different ticket machine.

The Zashiki Warashi gave a puzzled look while standing next to me.

“I see a kid’s ticket, but I can’t find the pet ticket.”

“…If you keep this joke going, you might end up stuffed inside an airplane’s cargo hold.”

Notes

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