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For a long time, things had been watching Mafuyu. Shadows in the corner of her vision, human-shaped but wrong. Some were close enough to be mistaken for strangers, just barely maintaining the illusion, but most of them were crude looking, eyes too dark, teeth too sharp and bodies too still. At first she tried to make sense of them – maybe a trick of light, some early Halloween lovers trying out costumes.
She stopped believing that very quickly.
The first one she encountered from closer was almost entirely human looking. A girl, pale, hair long and silver, with a smile that stretched over her face, eyes slightly too large. Too knowing. Like it already knew who Mafuyu was.
When Mafuyu reached out she felt the air go still. The spirit tugged her toward somewhere quiet, empty, hollow. If her Shizuku hadn’t called her name, she thinks she might have joined it.
After that she learned to filter out their calls. To look without seeing. To walk past and ignore the unusual. The shadows would linger, trying to bring her attention to themselves, but she walked past them, her gaze flicking elsewhere. They moved on, seeking out some other poor soul.
Pretending disinterest became almost as natural as pretending to be someone else.
One morning, the weight of the shadows pressed harder than usual. Mafuyu walked the halls, head low. The halls smelled faintly of chalk and artificial cleanness, but beneath it was something else – metallic, almost like dry blood. She didn’t want to notice it, but she did.
Always did.
A shadow shifted behind a pillar but when she looked directly, there was nothing. Only a faint shimmer left behind, like the light shining through a window. She felt the air tighten around her chest. It pressed lightly, almost expectantly.
Footsteps echoed in the empty hallway ahead – soft, irregular, heavy. Not her own. Something was there, watching, following. She couldn’t see it, but she felt its presence pressing against the edges of her perception, close enough to raise the hairs on her arms.
She passed the gym corridor. The windows glinted against the winter light. For a fracture of a second, she thought she saw a figure pressed just behind the glass, short brown hair hanging limply, body unnervingly still, only her eyes moving.
Her heart stuttered. She blinked. Then nothing, only herself in the reflection.
“Mafuyu-san!”
Mafuyu turned her head, ready to put on her mask but she froze. In front of her stood a classmate – one she was on good enough terms with for first names – but just behind Mayumi a figure hovered.
Its face was grotesque; more monster than human. Its eyes were fully sunken deeps voids, sucking in all light coming its way. Its jaw hung in pieces, jagged in impossible angles, showing off fractured, broken teeth glinting as though it was smeared with blood. It drifted slightly, hovering over Mayumi, hands bending in ways physics shouldn’t allow. Every time her eyes dared to look away it crept back into her vision, grinning with unhidden malice.
Mayumi stepped closer. “Good morning. You look a little pale. Are you okay?”
“Of course, I’m just a little a tired.” Even in the face of spirits her mask slipped on easily, her voice forcing lightness into it.
The thing didn’t speak. It was patient, waiting – for her to notice, to falter, to show the smallest sign of fear.
She tried to focus on Mayumi. But the comforting warmth she expected from another person didn’t reach her. Every movement Mayumi made – the tilt of her head, the rise and fall of her chest – was mirrored and distorted behind her by the figure. Almost like it controlled her with practiced ease.
The spirit – and with it Mayumi – leaned closer, its hollow eyes locking on Mafuyu’s. Her chest tightened.
This was it.
She can no longer ignore one of them.
A wet tearing sound echoed inside her skull, as if something was unraveling from within. Her teeth ached, her tongue twitched, and the pressure behind her eyes grew tighter with each pulse her heart made.
Then she felt it.
A faint warmth brushed against her shoulder, almost a whisper of motion. The tearing in her skull eased, leaving only a faint pulse. Her lungs filled with air she hadn’t realized she was holding, but it felt borrowed. Edges of dark brown hair swam at the edge of her vision, a presence that didn’t scream or demand, but simply was. The shadow hissed, twisting and shrieking without sound, frustrated, unthreading itself from Mayumi.
Mafuyu swallowed. Her hands shook on her bag. “I’m sorry, I still have to attend to something before classes start. I’ll see you soon.” she said, stepping past carefully, keeping her eyes on the floor. The warmth lingered at her back, soft and steady, fading only as she rounded the hallway.
The morning passed in a slow blur of noise and routine. The classroom was too bright, the chatter too sharp, every sound piercing through her skull. The teacher’s voice droned on from the front of the room, each word layered over the distorted, scratchy whispers, barely audible.
Mafuyu sat by the window, her hands folded neatly over her desk, eyes fixed somewhere between the clouds and her reflection in the glass. The world outside looked flat, like someone painted the reality over. She could see her own faint outline reflected over it – her eyes duller, her face too still. Her reflection seemed to lag the slightest, making her look away with a pulsing heart.
Something lingered there, faint and patient, as if waiting for her to acknowledge it.
She didn’t.
Between classes, she caught glimpses of figures where there shouldn’t be any: a face peering from an empty stairwell window, a dark silhouette in the reflection of a trophy case, unmoving.
During break, Mayumi waved her over to eat together, and Mafuyu joined, moving through the motions of laughter and small talk. She smiled when expected, nodded at the right moments. All the while, something scraped faintly against the window behind them – an invisible hand of Mayumi’s earlier friend – dragging slow lines across the glass.
No one reacted.
The rest of the afternoon dragged. The final bell came as a relief. Students poured out in waves of sound, chatter echoing through the halls. Mafuyu gathered her things slowly, her movements practiced, mechanical. When the room emptied, she stayed seated for a moment longer, eyes closed, trying to relax.
The building creaked softly, settling into its after-school quiet.
She rose, adjusted the strap of her bag, and stepped into the hallway. The light was dimmer now, the sun already sinking low. Her shadow stretched thin against the floor. The faint warmth she’d felt earlier brushed past her again. A ghost of a touch, reassuring and foreign all at once.
She made her way toward the kyudo range.
The range always carried a calm stillness she couldn’t find anywhere else. The moment she stepped onto the polished wood floor, sound seemed to thin out – her uneven breath, her quiet heartbeat, the wind outside – until only the faint creak of the bowstring remained. That silence should have been calming. It wasn’t.
Something else was here.
It began small: the faint rustle of fabric that wasn’t hers, the sensation of someone standing behind her, too close. The smell of rot. Every time she raised her bow, she felt eyes tracing the line of her arm. The air warm and heavy, carrying decay. Something breathed in the space behind her, slow and deliberate, and Mafuyu could almost hear it—an impossible, rasping inhale that didn’t belong to her, didn’t belong to anything living.
Her hands tightened on the bow, knuckles white, and the arrow trembled against the string. Every movement she made was mirrored in the corner of her vision by a shifting darkness, a silhouette, following her every motion with unnerving precision.
Mafuyu drew a slow breath, lined up her shot. The arrow tip trembled. Her vision blurred slightly at the edges; she could feel it again, that same pressure she’d felt in the hallway. That same warmth, subtle against her shoulder. The heavy rotting scent oozed away, replaced by paint and sweet perfume.
Somewhere at the far end of the range, a figure shifted. It wasn’t human, not fully. The silhouette sitting cross-legged in front of the target wall, where no one should’ve been. Brown hair fell just below her jawline, and though she was couldn’t see very well, there was familiar about her gaze.
Mafuyu’s chest tightened, in a faint memory, her hands trembling against the bowstring.
Someone behind her murmured “Asahina-san?” – a senior, puzzled over her never-before-seen hesitation – but the voice sounded like it came from another room.
She blinked, and the air changed around her. The figure at the target tilted her head, eyes locking onto her firmly. They were clear, unblinking, full of something unreadable. The light from the window cut through her, refracting like water.
The string slipped. The arrow flew.
It passed straight through the girl’s head, embedding itself into the bottom of the target with a dull thud.
Her breath hitched. No one else seemed to react. Her gaze locked on the figure. Unharmed, still sitting by the target. She was still watching her, calm, almost sad.
Then the she began to fade – edges dissolving into the air – until only a faint shimmer remained. Mafuyu lowered her bow. Her heart thudded hard once, twice.
The wind picked up, rattling the windows.
The faint warmth returned at her side – no voice, no sound, just the echo of a presence she could almost name.
She knew, instinctively, that it would follow her now.
She was chosen.