The Eminence in Shadow

Chapter 4

Lurking in the Darkness in Fantastical Japan!

“Where am I?” I mutter in confusion.

Getting sucked into a black hole and vanishing alongside the darkness is a pretty baller way to make an exit.

That was the logic behind me jumping in like I did, but I never expected it to spit me out in the ruins of some city.

“Well, I can always just run home, I guess. Still, this place looks weirdly familiar…”

With that thought in mind, I glance around and realize something.

The ground is made of cracked asphalt, and although they’re covered in ivy, there are utility poles all around and even a bunch of dilapidated houses by the sides of the road.

The nameplate on one of them reads

“Tanaka.”

“No way… I’m in Japan?”

I take a good long look at everything around me.

There are crumbling houses, plants growing up through concrete, rusted-over cars…

“Yeah, this is totally Japan.”

Dunno why, but I’m back.

In fact, this is even the town where I used to live.

I guess after I got reincarnated over into my new world, I must still have been linked to Japan somehow.

“Well, here I am.”

The question is, what happened here?

This definitely wasn’t how things were when I left. There’s no one around, so I guess there must’ve been some sort of big disaster or something.

Mysteries, mysteries…

“Hmm?”

Suddenly, I sense someone behind me and whirl around.

There’s someone there, all right.

“Master Shadoooooow! Ow!”

Beta comes tumbling down.

She lands on her butt, then looks around with her eyes wide.

“Master Shadow, thank goodness you aren’t hur—wait, where are we?!”

You really didn’t have to come, Beta.

Wait, scratch that. I just got a great idea.

She doesn’t know a thing about Japan, so I can use this chance to do a sweet eminence in shadow bit.

“Have you figured out where we are?” I ask her.

“Huh? We, um…” She thinks for a moment, then hangs her head. “I’m afraid not.”

“We’re in another world… This world is called ‘Earth,’ and this land is called ‘Japan.’”

“W-wow! To think that you already investigated the names of the world and country we’re in…!”

“I just took the available visual data, organized it, and analyzed it. Surely, that much is obvious.”

“Your wonders never cease, my lord!”

Beta’s eyes are practically glittering. Heh, this is pretty fun.

“So, Master Shadow, why did you decide to come to Urth?”

“Gaea whispered to me and told me to shine even brighter.”

I just jumped in the hole because I thought it’d be cool, but there’s no way in hell I’m gonna tell her

that

.

“So, you mean that you weren’t satisfied…and that you’re seeking to reach even greater heights?! Oh, what a noble mentality!”

“Yeah, that. What you said.” I’m tired of being in Shadow mode, so I switch back to acting like my usual self. “For starters, we should get changed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our outfits are too conspicuous for this world. Let’s go to the Tanakas’ place and find some new clothes.”

I don’t sense anyone around, but if anyone spotted us like this, they’d think we were cosplayers or something.

“What’s a Tanakas?”

“The people who live here. See the nameplate?”

“No way… You’ve already deciphered this world’s script?”

“Yeah, I’ve figured out how most of this world’s language works. It’s easy, really. All you have to do is look for the patterns.”

Beta is so moved, she quivers. “Th-that’s incredible. Learning a language just by looking for patterns is a feat so unthinkably complex, I can’t even… Only Master Shadow could make it seem so simple.”

Bwa-ha-ha, bask in my radiance. Thanks to my past life, I have a flawless command of Japanese.

“Let’s go.”

On that note, I grab Beta—who’s taking some sort of notes—and barge into the Tanakas’ house at top speed.

The Tanaka house is in a sorry state. The building itself has fallen into ruin, and the food is too rotten to eat.

I start out by rummaging through the rooms and grabbing whatever articles of clothing catch my eye.

I end up settling on a hoodie, some jeans, and a pair of sneakers—the perfect outfit for an autumn afternoon like this one.

Then, we have Beta.

“Master Shadow, I really do apologize for all the trouble.”

She’s modeling yet another outfit.

“What do you think about this one…?”

“…Beta, that’s what we call a ‘school swimsuit.’”

When Beta comes out from behind the door, my eyes meet navy fabric, fair skin, and bulging flesh.

The swimsuit is practically bursting at the seams.

“A suit for swimming, you say…? But it’s fantastically elastic, and the material is efficient and easy to move in.”

“Maybe, but you’ll be chilly as hell.”

“I can just use magic to make up for—”

“Vetoed.”

“Aw…”

Beta slumps her shoulders and leaves the room.

I wish she’d just gone with the outfit I put together for her. She said, “Thank you so much!” when I gave it to her, but the look on her face told a different story, so I told her she could pick whatever she wanted and left her to her own devices.

As it turns out, no good deed goes unpunished.

I sigh and get back to my rummaging.

This is fine, though.

It’s not like we’re in any sort of rush, after all. No harm in taking things slow.

As a former Japanese citizen, I’m kind of curious about what happened to this world. I hope humanity didn’t go extinct, but I guess you never know with these things.

The three things we need right now are food, water, and intel.

I keep looking through the rubble and eventually find a couple of phones and tablets. I test them to see if they’ll turn on, but no dice. There’s some paper media, too, but most of it is too weathered and rain-damaged for its text to be legible.

I can just barely make out the words

“Japan Collapses”

on a scrap of newspaper, followed by something illegible.

It’d be one thing if it said “Japan’s

Economy

Collapses,” but man. “Japan Collapses,” huh?

I wonder if they meant it metaphorically or in actuality. If it’s the latter, something really bad must have happened.

Once I finish searching the room, I head to the hallway and open the next door down.

When I do, I’m greeted by a surprise.

“I

thought

I smelled blood…”

Inside, I find three bone-bleached corpses.

Their blood and bodily fluids have long since dried up, but the smell still faintly lingers. From the look of it, they’ve been dead for at least a few years.

They’re accompanied by bloodstains, and not just on the floor. There’s blood splattered on the walls, too. Plus, their skeletons have been crushed, and there are a couple bones unaccounted for.

However they died, it clearly wasn’t pleasant.

“Too grotesque for a normal old homicide…”

Was it revenge, maybe? The work of a serial killer? Or something else entirely?

I lay out the shattered bones and try to rearrange them into some semblance of their original shapes.

“The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the backbone…”

There’s no way I’m gonna be able to completely reconstruct the skeleton, but even so, I’m able to fit a bunch of the parts back together.

The bones begin to tell a story—a story of teeth.

When I reassemble one shattered femur, I find a deep set of bite marks in it.

The teeth definitely weren’t human. Whatever bit these guys, it had a big-ass mouth and some pointy, pointy fangs.

“Was it a big dog? No, it’d have to be something even larger…”

We’re looking at something about as big as a lion. The problem is, lions aren’t native to Japan, and while one could have escaped from a zoo, that’s so unlikely it’s barely worth considering.

Huh.

I guess it could’ve been a bear?

No other likely culprit comes to mind, but whatever did this, it was definitely a carnivore.

Not only did it attack the poor saps who lived here, it ate them, too.

“…Excuse me, my lord?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m so sorry to keep bothering you, but what do you think of this outfit?”

When Beta comes in, she gives the skeletons a brief glance, but quickly turns her attention back to me and does a twirl.

I dunno what metric she’s basing these outfits on, but how much skin they leave exposed seems to be a high priority for her.

“Beta…where did you find that?”

Once again, the outfit she’s chosen is risqué as all hell.

“In what looked like a bedroom. It was under the bed, almost like someone was keeping it hidden.”

Yeah, I’ll bet.

“Beta, that outfit…isn’t for day-to-day use.”

“But it looks just like my slime bodysuit, and it fits me perfectly.”

“‘Perfectly’ is a bit of a stretch. Literally. That’s a BDSM outfit.”

The black, glossy fabric sticks tightly to her skin, and what’s more, there’s so little of it that, just like last time, her body is bulging out of it. All it would take is a single jostle to send certain parts spilling right out.

The outfit is clearly designed for nighttime activities.

“Beady Essem?”

“Yup. It’s designed for an

extremely

specialized purpose.”

“What a shame. And it’s so cute.” Beta slumps her shoulders dejectedly. “I even found this mask and whip with it, too…”

She dons the lustrous black mask and cracks the whip.

“I assume they used this to conceal their identity and fight evil, just like we do. I’m a little puzzled about the whip, though. It seems a touch too flimsy to use in an actual fight.”

She cracks it a couple more times, causing her whole body to jiggle as she envisions trying to use it in combat.

“Beta, that whip is a weapon made specifically for subduing a very weak creature. A weak little pig that’s practically dying to be told what a bad boy they are…”

“I didn’t realize Urth had pigs like that… I’m learning so much.”

Beta’s eyes gleam as she nods contemplatively.

“I must say, Master Shadow, I’m amazed! You’ve already figured out what this world’s specialized clothes are for, and it hasn’t even been an hour since we got here!”