She’d always believed she was on the side of justice.
Like her father.
She was sure being a police officer wasn’t just a job to him. It was the way he lived.
Her father was utterly devoted to his work, and he always came home after his only daughter had gone to bed. They rarely interacted as family; he’d never gone on a trip with her, let alone visited her class on parents’ day or watched her athletic meets.
However, whenever Mao’s father saw her do something bad, he was kind enough to scold her harshly, no matter how small her misdeed. In her father’s mind, “good” and “bad” were clearly defined, and he never let the excuse that she was just a child blur the lines.
She’d wanted to be her father.
Mao had possessed a shard of the Mirror of Illumination in her eye almost since birth. She believed that the moment people did bad things, they became something inhuman and that the police existed to vanquish them.
However…
“You have a strong sense of justice, Mao, just like your father.”
“That’s a policeman’s daughter for you, all right. You’re so serious.”
The adults around her meant their remarks as high praise, but they always soured her mother’s mood. She’d get through the situation by pasting on a diplomatic smile, but when they got home and she and Mao were alone, she’d tell her, “There’s no way you take after that man.”
When Mao wanted to learn aikido, her mother was ferociously opposed. When her husband gave her an earful over it, she retreated into sulky silence and eventually started leaving home for long periods.
“Be anything you want, but don’t be a police officer,” her mother always said. Then she’d list all the hardships she endured as a police officer’s wife, and when Mao didn’t get it, she’d rage at her for her ingratitude.
Mao didn’t want to become her mother.
During the winter of Mao’s third year of middle school, her mother burned to death in a gasoline fire.
The root cause had been an affair. When Mao’s mother left home, she’d been going to see the man she was cheating with, and they’d been using a minivan with dark tinted windows as a love hotel.
“Burning car on the side of the road. It looks like someone’s inside.”
By the time the fire engine received the report and raced to the scene, ferocious flames were erupting from the car’s interior.
The occupants had kept the engine running for heat; they’d gotten carbon monoxide poisoning from the exhaust, and then someone had splashed gasoline around inside the car.
The man had been unconscious when he burned to death, but her mother’s corpse showed signs of having tried to escape. One of her hands was stretched toward the open car door. Had she been attempting to crawl to safety?
Mao’s father was arrested ten days later.
Mao knew it was a mistake. Her eye still saw her father as human. However, he pleaded guilty to his wife’s murder and died without ever revealing the truth. He’d killed himself.
The media covered the incident heavily, and even after Mao moved in with her paternal grandfather, they were at the front door day after day after day. The world seemed to loathe the fact that Mao’s grandfather had also been a police officer.
There were anonymous threatening letters and prank calls from withheld numbers. The words murdering public servant were scrawled on their mailbox and front door, and her grandfather was spit on by a local man he’d just happened to run into while taking out the trash.
His Shiba Inu, Dumpling, whom he’d kept in the yard, was kicked by a rubbernecker who’d come onto their property without permission. After that, the mere sight of passersby frightened the animal so much that he’d yelp and bark.
Dumpling started living with Mao in a room on the second floor with all the shutters closed tight. He’d been an old dog already, and he died before half a year had passed, still unable to go on the walks he’d loved so much.
The stress had taken its toll on her grandfather, too, making his chronic illness worse. No longer able to stand by and watch, other relatives showed up and drove Mao away. They cursed her to her face, calling her a cancer; her grandfather apologized in tears. “I’m sorry. It’s all because my boy made himself a murderer.”
“No,” Mao had muttered to herself. “It’s because this world isn’t just.”
However, she no longer had any chance of being hired as a police officer, and that left her with no way to capture the monsters running rampant. She could either avert her eyes and run away—or she could kill them.
Mao was taken in by relatives on her mother’s side and changed her last name. With their support, she began attending an online high school, but almost nothing interested her. The next thing she knew, she’d started wandering around busy districts like Shibuya and Shinjuku all day long, looking for monsters. When she found one, she’d find out where they lived or worked by tailing them or lying in wait. Then she’d get their personal information. In the blink of an eye, the list she’d collected had close to a hundred entries.
The world itself seemed like a demon horde’s night parade.
That said, just having a list didn’t mean there was anything she could do about it. She imagined herself punching, stabbing, and killing every person on it, one by one. Each time she came close to impulsively acting out those fantasies, she remembered her grandfather apologizing to her—and then she gritted her teeth and bore it.
When it came down to it, was killing a bad person really that wrong?
Her father might have scolded her and said it was. Her grandfather might have told her he was sorry. But this hopelessly unjust world had trampled their rightness under its feet.
And in that case, everyone should just go to Hell.
Somebody, please punish these people.
Mao published her list of monsters on a blog, filling the post with all her resentment, anger, and hate. However, all she got in return were malice, criticism, and mockery, and she ended up having to delete or shut down her blog time and time again.
Somebody, please—anybody.
Anybody would do. They didn’t even need to be human.
And at last…
“I’ll grant your wish. In exchange, I want you to lend me your eye’s power.”
A white-haired oni appeared and punished those hundred sinners in her place. All except for the five who’d lost their lives before he got to them.
As long as Mao was his assistant, she could be on the side of justice.
Mao didn’t want to be a police officer anymore.
She wanted to be Ibara Rindou.