Incidentally, chocolate cigarettes are delicious when eating it outright as a snack, if one doesn’t want to smoke it. And as a second aside, tobacco cigarettes are packed with enough harmful substances that eating just one stick is enough to be fatal.
When Nanami finished smoking her first one, she found another being proffered to her. And just like that, despite having come here to kill herself, Nanami found herself merrily chatting with a suspicious-looking stranger in the middle of Mt. Fuji’s Sea of Trees in the dead of the night.
“I’ll have you know, I’ve been chasing hitodama for about 10 years already. And I can tell you for a fact that after the Super Water Sphere Incident, they’ve been appearing much more frequently and for longer periods of time. Like, significantly more so. I almost suspect that they may be related somehow. I’ve seen somewhere in the news that supernatural phenomenon have been occurring all over the world too. Have you heard of anything, Okishima-san?”
“Umm...... oh yeah, I think I saw something on social media about mystery circles appearing at the Parthenon?”
“Social media! You young people and your tech nowadays. If I remember correctly, that’s something like email, right? I’m afraid I don’t know too much about that sort of thing.”
“Erm, social media is a bit different from email, but......” Nanami smiled wryly in response to that line that could be said only by someone who truly didn’t know what they were talking about.
Suspicious Uncle said in a slightly pathetic tone of voice, “Okishima-san, can you help spread the word about the hitodama in Aokigahara in my stead? To be honest with you, it’s been getting quite tough chasing them all by myself. I really want more people to know and come to help me search. I can even give you a little bit of compensation for your time.” Even as he was speaking, he took out several ten thousand yen bills from his wallet.
Nanami was extremely flustered. The conversation had veered into a direction that she had not expected at all. “What, eh, but no, I came here to kill myself though. All the talk about compensation and work honestly just frightens me to no end.”
“Hmm, so you’re not afraid to die? But if you’re not afraid to die, doesn’t that mean there’s nothing you’re afraid of?”
“That’s not quite......”
“Can you please postpone that just a little bit and help me do the social media thing? Come on, um, pretty please? I don’t have that many acquaintances, you’re the only one that I can rely on for this. See, I’m literally begging you here!”
While looking at Suspicious Uncle lowering his head in entreaty, Nanami found herself thinking, “Well, if that’s all that he’s asking......” Perhaps the chocolate cigarettes had also helped to break her out of her depression and return to a calmer state of mind.
She had thought that she would just cease to exist when she died. She would just go poof, and there would be no heaven and no hell waiting for her. She had thought that it would be an escape.
But if there are those who become hitodama after they die......
If there really is some sort of an afterlife......
It might not be so bad to live on just a little longer to make her afterlife just a little better, she thought.
Nanami raised her hands in surrender. “All right, all right, I’ll do it.”
“Oho, is that so! So you’ll do it! You’d be saving a life, in more ways than one!”
Suspicious Uncle took Nanami’s hands and shook them vigorously. There may have been some sort of a hidden meaning in his words, but she chose to not pay it any mind.
After they worked out the specifics of the kind of advertising that Suspicious Uncle wanted on social media, Nanami followed behind him out of Aokigahara. He paid her an initial deposit for her work, and was just about to part with her on the promenade. However, he turned around at the last moment as if something had just occurred to him, and asked, “By the way, Okishima-san. Would you happen to be a fan of superpowers?”
“Eh? Not particularly so. Why?”
“Ahh, just asking. Well, see you then.”
“See you. Thanks, Suspicious Uncle.”
Instead of disappearing into thin air or anything else equally suspicious, Suspicious Uncle reached into a pocket to pull out an onigiri like the ones that can be bought at a convenience store. Then he just walked away normally, munching on his onigiri along the way.
Nanami saw him off, then also walked off herself. For the first time in a long time, she did not feel afraid while heading home.
⚔
For a whole week, I mass produced diversions all over the world, at times flying over to do it personally, at times manipulating from far away. I made mystery circles, enacted poltergeist commotions, floated balls of fire, caused frogs and fish to rain from the sky, enacted various incidents of cattle mutilation, and arranged fleeting glimpses of large-scale living creatures in lakes. It was truly as if the occult boom seen by the end of the previous century was back again in full force.
Some decoys paid off, while some fell completely flat.
I repeated the large creature thing in Lake Biwako for three nights in a row, but all of the eyewitnesses turned out to be the super tight-mouthed kind. There wasn’t even a whisper of a rumor going around. Talk about a waste of effort and energy.
In contrast, the hitodama at Mt. Fuji’s Sea of Trees turned out to be a homerun success. The intelligence operative that I ended up hiring there went so far as to make numerous fake accounts, and successfully stirred up a bit of a storm on social media. Eventually, she got hired by the security department at Kaneyama Tech. During the course of our back-and-forths, I learned that she had been made to learn self-defense by her parents when she was young and that she had a 2-dan in aikido. I recommended her without thinking much of it, but then Kaneyama Tech hired her on the spot without even doing an interview. Apparently they just happened to be in dire need of a woman who was both smart and could handle herself in a fight. To my relief, she settled in with them quite quickly.
When I met her in Aokigahara, she had said that she was there to kill herself, but maybe she was just one of those “suicide scammers” who would repeatedly threaten to kill themselves despite having no intention of following through with it.
In this way, my numerous attempts at decoys all failed or succeeded to varying degrees in a very large range of outcomes. However, the sheer quantity of them did successfully throw the police and mass media into a chaotic frenzy. Kaburagi-san also did a good job taking advantage of this situation to extend her influence even further within CIA and PSIA by helping her spies to burrow in even deeper.
With this, we finally had the room to get on with the traitor event. It turned out to be a very, very long detour indeed.