Chapter 2: White Fox Office
Tokyo, Shibuya Ward.
As one of the busiest commercial districts in all of Tokyo, and arguably all of Japan, Shibuya was crowded with famous department stores, designer boutiques, restaurants, cafés, entertainment venues, and the sort of nightlife establishments that ensured the district never truly slept. It stood alongside Shinjuku as one of the capital's most restless places, a city within the city where neon, money, and human desire flowed without pause.
Even now, with dawn only beginning to brighten the sky, the streets were already coming alive.
Office workers in suits hurried toward the station with sleep still clinging to their faces. Tourists with cameras around their necks wandered about in small groups, drawn toward the famous landmarks before the day's crowds fully swallowed them.
On a quiet street near Yoyogi Park, tucked between much more modern buildings, stood an old two story shopfront.
Its exterior was weathered. Its windows were modest. Its presence was so understated that most people would pass by without giving it a second glance.
Only the plaque hanging at the entrance stood out.
[White Fox Office]
That was all.
No slogan. No business classification. No explanation.
In Japan, offices of every sort were common enough, especially detective agencies and law firms. But this place had no professional signage beyond its name. To outsiders, it looked vague. To the neighbors, it was even more mysterious. Even the people living nearby were not entirely sure what kind of work the White Fox Office actually handled.
Inside the second floor office, however, the atmosphere was very different.
"Finally done."
Gin Tsumugi leaned back in his chair and stretched, first his shoulders, then his neck, working out the stiffness that came from sitting too long at the desk. His gaze fell on the thick stack of freshly drawn talismans in front of him, and satisfaction flickered across his handsome face.
The papers were neatly arranged, each one inscribed with exorcism Sanskrit and precise spiritual formulae. The brushwork was smooth, disciplined, and full of restrained spiritual force.
"Close to three hundred sheets. That should last for a while."
His eyes narrowed slightly, a faint smile curving at the corner of his mouth.
"And my role playing progress is almost there too."
The moment the thought crossed his mind, an interface appeared in his field of vision.
On the left was the image of a young man in a white onmyoji kariginu, a black folding fan in hand. His features were clean and refined, his bearing calm and elegant. The figure looked exactly like Gin Tsumugi himself, but elevated somehow, as though filtered through a more mythic lens.
On the right was a line of information.
[Abe no Seimei: Progenitor of Onmyodo]
[Role Playing Progress: Childhood 95%]
[Character Abilities:
Basic Talisman Compendium: Advanced
Five Pointed Star Incantation: Advanced
Shikigami Contract: Intermediate
Word Spirit Technique: Beginner
Uho: Beginner]
This was Gin Tsumugi's greatest secret.
His cheat.
The Character Role Playing System.
And from the very beginning, the identity he had drawn was anything but ordinary. He was role playing Abe no Seimei himself, the legendary Great Onmyoji and the acknowledged founder of Onmyodo.
That alone had been enough to keep him alive in this chaotic world, where spiritual disasters, curses, monsters, and all manner of supernatural threats had already seeped too deeply into ordinary life to be dismissed as rumor.
It was also the reason he had been able to leave school behind, set up his own supernatural affairs office, and establish a respectable reputation in Shibuya before even reaching adulthood.
"Even if I do nothing but draw talismans, I should be able to fill the progress bar in less than a month."
He considered that for a moment, then dismissed the panel from his sight.
At almost the same instant, the office door opened.
"Director, you stayed up all night again."
The voice was light, pretty, and edged with displeasure.
A petite girl walked in, wearing a beret and supporting herself with a cane. Her face was delicate and refined, but her expression carried the weight of someone entirely unafraid to lecture the man in charge.
"You really don't take care of yourself."
"Call it a burst of inspiration."
Gin Tsumugi smiled, utterly unbothered. "I figured I might as well finish the whole batch while the feeling was still there."
The girl clicked her tongue softly, though the reproach in her eyes did not quite hide her concern.
She was Iwanaga Kotoko, his assistant.
To ordinary people, she looked like a fragile young girl with a sweet face and an unfortunate disability.
To the supernatural world, she was something else entirely.
The Goddess of Wisdom.
The Princess of monsters.
An existence that stood between humans and the Yokai, having paid for that position with one eye and one leg. She served as a mediator, a negotiator, and at times a judge for disputes among supernatural beings. Ghosts could touch her. Yokais listened to her. Spirits acknowledged her.
And for the White Fox Office, she was invaluable.
No matter how one looked at it, she was an absurdly useful employee.
The office benefited from her network among yokais and wandering spirits, while she, in turn, made use of the office's capabilities to handle the sorts of difficult cases that even the supernatural world found troublesome.
A nearly perfect arrangement.
"Any news on Tomie?" Gin Tsumugi asked.
Kotoko's expression sharpened at once.
"No."
She stepped farther into the room and shut the door behind her.
"Ever since someone picked up her trail last month, she's vanished again. I had the yokai's and restless spirits looking for her, but nothing came back. Not a single reliable lead."
"That doesn't surprise me."
Gin Tsumugi began sorting the completed talismans into charm pouches as he spoke.
"With Tomie's nature, if she wants to disappear, dragging her back into the light won't be easy."
Kotoko moved over to the sofa and sat down, brows knitted.
"Which is exactly why she's still a threat. As long as she hasn't been sealed, she remains a hidden danger, especially to normal people."
Her tone was grim.
Tomie was not the sort of thing that could be ignored.
Something beautiful, abnormal, and horrifying all at once. A thing that spread obsession, madness, violence, and self destruction with nothing more than her existence. Worse, when she had escaped, she had not escaped alone in any meaningful sense.
She had left behind copies.
Many of them.
And every one of those copies wanted the same thing.
To kill the others and prove that she, and only she, was the real original.
Kotoko's face darkened further.
"If those idiots from the Onmyo Bureau hadn't acted on their own, it wouldn't have turned into this mess."
Her irritation was genuine.
But irritation changed nothing.
Tomie had already escaped. Complaining now was about as useful as cursing the weather.
Gin Tsumugi did not bother commenting on that point. Instead, he sealed the last packet of talismans and looked up.
"You said there was new business?"
"There is."
Kotoko pulled a file from the documents she had brought and handed it to him.
"Yesterday, I accepted a bounty request from the Non Scientific Supernatural Forum. Based on the preliminary report, it looks like a haunting. Possibly a vengeful spirit case."
Gin Tsumugi took the file.
For him, it was good timing.
Role Playing Progress rose in two main ways. The first was ordinary training, like drawing talismans and refining spiritual technique, but that was slow and steady work. The second was direct exorcism. The stronger the supernatural target, the more progress it yielded.
If the case was real, it would save him quite a bit of time.
"This might be enough to push the progress bar to completion," he murmured.
Then he opened the file and began to read.
The document was not a formal report.
It was closer to a diary.
A frightened girl's fragmented account of her own descent into a nightmare.
[September 10: Father, Mother, and Brother clearly died in the car accident. So what are the things appearing in the house now?]
[September 11: When I woke up this morning, I almost believed the accident four days ago had only been a dream. The breakfast Mother made felt normal, but the coldness and bloodlust in Brother's eyes made my scalp go numb.]
[September 12: They want to eat me. Yes... they want to eat me...]
[September 13: I tried to escape, but the moment I stepped into the hallway, Brother was standing behind me, staring. I didn't dare move.]
[September 14: Blank]
[September 15: I'm hiding in my bedroom and don't dare go out. They've become more irritable somehow.]
[September 16: They started knocking on the door. Then smashing it. Their disguise is gone. Now all I hear are inhuman roars and panting. I knew it... they aren't Father and the others...]
[September 17: I found that they seem unable to cross into the bedroom.]
[September 18: Blank]
[September 19: I don't know how much longer the bedroom door can hold. Still no one has accepted the mission on the Non Scientific Supernatural Forum...]
[September 20: They're getting more and more agitated. Someone please save me...]
The room fell quiet.
Kotoko watched Gin Tsumugi's face while he read, but his expression barely changed.
The language was simple, even clumsy in places, yet the despair soaked through every line. The writer had not been trying to dramatize her fear. That was what made it feel so raw. These were not the words of someone crafting a story. They were the last coherent traces of someone cornered by terror.
Gin Tsumugi read the entire thing once, then went back and read it again, more slowly.
For exorcism bounties posted on the forum, a firsthand account like this was rarely reliable in a literal sense, but it was still useful. People trapped inside supernatural events often failed to notice the most important details precisely because they were too close to the danger.
What they recorded in panic could still be dissected, compared, and reconstructed.
Patterns could be found.
Timing could be checked.
Contradictions could expose the truth behind the haunting.
Without understanding the source, nature, and progression of the phenomenon, it was difficult to judge what they were dealing with, much less prepare an effective response.
After a while, he closed the file halfway and tapped a finger against the cover.
"It does resemble a vengeful spirit case on the surface," he said at last. "But there are too many points that don't line up."
Kotoko rose from the sofa and came over.
"You noticed it too?"
"Of course."
He turned the file back around and pointed to several entries.
"If these were ordinary evil spirits, she shouldn't have lasted this long. Based on the timeline here, she's been under threat for more than ten days. That's abnormal."
He spoke calmly, but his conclusion was firm.
A normal human trapped with true evil spirits for that length of time would have died long before now, either from direct attack or from having their life force drained away bit by bit.
Three days.
That was usually the upper limit.
Ten was absurd.
Kotoko leaned slightly over his shoulder and pointed to one section.
"I had a theory. Maybe it's because of her room. According to the record, that space seems to block whatever is haunting the house. If the bedroom functions as some kind of barrier, that would explain how she stayed alive."
"It explains part of it," Gin Tsumugi said, "but not enough."
He did not reject the idea outright. He simply was not convinced.
What a victim saw in the middle of a supernatural event was not always the truth. Hallucinations, curses, memory distortion, overlapping spiritual interference, even simple panic could twist perception. The diary was useful, but only as a reference.
Never as final proof.
He flipped to the last page.
There, beneath the record, was the victim's identity and address.
Minato Ward. Onarimon Junior High School. Sora Kasugano.
Gin Tsumugi let his eyes linger there for a moment.
Minato and Shibuya were close enough. By subway, it would take less than half an hour. Add in the rest of the commute and the round trip would still be manageable, though it would easily run past an hour.
That settled it.
He closed the file completely.
"I'm going."
Kotoko looked up at him.
"For training?"
"That's one reason."
Gen Yumo stood and reached for his coat with an ease that suggested the decision had already been made before he finished reading.
"But more importantly, White Fox Office already accepted the request. Once we take a case, walking away without even looking into it isn't an option."