/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Before long, we'd reached the part of the mountain where the path split, and I led Yamame off toward the clearing that housed the entrance to Lady Kasen's senkai. Only as we got close did I realise that I had no idea if Lady Kasen had changed the path to the entrance in the time since I'd last been by, but I had to hope that she'd not gotten the chance between her own state of depression over the arm and keeping all her pets healthy. Reimu was waiting for us, not far from the main path up the mountain and with her arms crossed as the rain weighed down her bow and made it droop downwards. Sometimes, I wondered if it was alive, and moved in response to her emotions, but that was silly so I never thought about it much beyond a passing joke. I waved at Reimu as we approached, and asked her what the situation was. "...Yeah, we can go in." She said, rather more slowly than I'd expected. "Just...keep your wits about you. Three major oni in close proximity is a dangerous situation regardless of how well you know one of them. All it takes is one of them having a stupid idea, like seeing who can shout the loudest, and they'll all go for it." Even Lady Kasen would go for it? I asked quietly. "Maybe not her, but the arm? Definitely." She breathed in deeply. "Alright, come on." She beckoned us both, and we began to tread a path that was just slightly different from the one I had used most recently. I asked Reimu how she had known it, and she shrugged, saying that she'd just been lucky and caught Kanda on his way in. Personally, I thought that was a very lucky coincidence, but after everything I'd learnt about Reimu, lucky coincidences seemed to always happen around her.

The path was long and winding, and Yamame asked me just what we were doing twice, but I told her to just wait and see. And eventually, we approached the clearing, and I let Yamame go in ahead of me because I had yet to see anyone else's reaction to seeing senkai for the first time, apart from Ibaraki-douji's arm herself, which had been a very different situation to this, and thus seemed to not quite count.

And Yamame did not disappoint me, letting out a gasp as we emerged into the sunlight of a perfect day inside Lady Kasen's senkai. We walked toward the cliffside slowly, and I watched her as she gazed around her in wonder, at the perfect sun high in the sky, at the peaks around us, the dojo itself and the seating areas that Lady Kasen had set up around it. She paused for a moment, and I knew that she was hearing the waterfall. The place was very serene, and I did greatly enjoy my time there. It was relaxing, and I said that to Yamame as she stared around. "It's about to be the opposite." Reimu suddenly said, her hand shifting into position around her gohei. She was staring at something, not on this peak, by the dojo, but off into the distance, several peaks down until it was nothing more than a vague speck. "Brace yourself." She told us.

Yamame squinted off in the direction she was looking. "Is that-!"

And then, before she could answer, there was something very blurry and very fast rocketing toward us. After I'd noticed it in the air, I heard a booming sound that almost made me stumble. Reimu kicked me enough to make me stumble just slightly to the side, and the blurry thing rocketed past me, slammed into the rocky terrain, then left a trail running almost to the edge of the clearing and back out of Lady Kasen's senkai. Their body slammed down into the ground, and I stared as they sat up and shook their head in an attempt to clear the dizziness. "Phew!" Ibaraki-douji's arm sighed, stumbling to her feet. "Not good enough! You call that a punch!?" She yelled at an extremely loud volume, waving at something in the distance. "Be a proper oni and throw me more than three measly peaks!"

A roaring laugh sounded from somewhere in the distance. I squinted and could just about make out a yellow shape. Possibly Yuugi Hoshiguma, I supposed. "Ha! You thought I was trying!?" I heard her shout back.

I wondered just what we'd walked in on when Reimu subtly shifted in front of me and caught the arm's attention. "Hey." Reimu said sharply. "Still keeping your nose clean?"

The arm shook some debris out of her hair and dislodged a rock that was stuck on her horn. "Why, yes. Yes, Shrine Maiden, I have not made any attempts to leave this place, though I confess that I would like to." The arm rolled her neck and stretched her arms. "I appear to have been reunited with some figures from a long, long time ago. Do I have you to thank for that?" She nodded toward the distant shapes, off on the other peak. It wasn't just Yuugi, I could see. There was a shorter person that I thought was probably Suika Ibuki, and next to her, another pinkish shape that I assumed was Lady Kasen. "I hadn't expected them to be quite the way they appear to be." The arm commented. “In mood or appearance.”

Arm-chan > Kasen