Chapter 58: Deep Ones Invasion
Outside the window, the moon hung like a judgment, pale and too close. A grim, pragmatic thought followed, cutting through the cosmic dread. Well, at least it’s the moon and not the sun. Why?Because the sun is a deadly laser.
The old, memetic phrase surfaced from the depths of Xiao Ling’s internet-saturated memories with perfect, dark clarity. It was a blunt, terrifying fact. The moon was a mystery, a potential prison, and a puzzle box. It had rules.
Anything with rules could be studied, contained, or perhaps even reasoned with on some celestial level.
Meanwhile, the sun was different. The sun was a continuous, unthinking thermonuclear explosion. One day, in billions of years, it would expand and melt everyone and everything into a uniform, screaming plasma.
It would turn the entire Earth, and every drama playing out upon it into deformed monsters before ceasing to exist entirely.
A mad goddess on the moon is a problem I can potentially stab, Su Yao reasoned. The sun is just scheduled indifferent annihilation. You can't fight physics.
The moon, for all its eerie silence and lost name, was a containable crisis. But the sun? The sun was the ultimate, unavoidable game over.
“One apocalyptic scenario at a time,” she muttered to herself, standing up. Her primary concern was now the moon’s mystery. The sun could wait its turn.
“Breakfast is ready,” Nohime’s calm, cool voice announced from the kitchen doorway. She stood holding a plate. Her expression was serene.
Su Yao blinked, pulled from her cosmic contemplations. “What is it?”
“Rice,” Nohime said, presenting the plate with a slight, formal bow. “An omurice, to be exact. I found the recipe in a magazine your aunt left. Many restaurants in Japan are closing down now because rice is becoming very expensive, you see. I was fortunate to observe their techniques before their final service.”
She placed the perfectly formed, ketchup-drizzled omelette and rice dish on the table. “It seemed a practical skill to acquire before the knowledge was lost.”
Su Yao stared at the impeccably crafted, almost too-perfect looking omurice. A legendary Snow Woman, wife of the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven, was serving her a Japanese diner classic she'd learned from the fading memories of bankrupt restaurants.
“Right,” Su Yao said, sitting down. She picked up a spoon. “The global rice market. Almost as frightening as a deadly laser.” She took a bite. It was infuriatingly delicious. “It’s good,” she admitted grudgingly.
Nohime smiled. A faint frost formed on the edge of the plate. “I am glad. It’s important to maintain proper nutrition, even as an adult.”
Su Yao took another bite of the perfectly crafted omurice, but the flavor was now overshadowed by a grim new thought. If restaurants are closing down because rice is too expensive, then the economy must really be in a terrible state.
She mentally ran through the logic. Clothing stores closing? That could be blamed on online shopping. Electronics? People upgrade less frequently. But food? A basic, daily necessity? When the businesses that feed people start shuttering because they can't afford the staple ingredient, that was a fundamental crack in the foundation.
Nohime, as if reading her thoughts, or perhaps just responding to the troubled look on her face, added calmly, “The price of food is rising all over the world.”
Su Yao put her spoon down. “That’s a red flag, a massive one.” Her eyes narrowed. Ancient instincts, honed by centuries of observing mortal follies, kicked in. “Food should be affordable. It’s the most basic requirement for stability.”
Her appetite was gone. “When it becomes unaffordable, it’s either catastrophic incompetence,” she paused, her voice dropping, “or it’s a conspiracy to reduce the Earth’s population through control by scarcity, starving the masses into submission, or at least into a more manageable number.”
It fit a horrifying, logical pattern. The world changed through slow, grinding, bureaucratic pressure on the global supply chain, rather than through flashy spells or weapons.
“The Yamato’s corporate structure is multinational,” she murmured, thinking of Suzuka Gozen’s sleek office. “What if they're manipulating commodities? Engineering a quiet, global famine to soften the world up for whatever comes next?”
Pushing the plate away, Su Yao stood up. “I need to talk to Director Hao. And I need to see the global economic reports the government is suppressing.” A grim smile touched her lips. “It seems the path to the apocalypse runs straight through the rice paddies. Let’s see who’s poisoning the well.”
Su Yao paused. Her hand hovered over her phone. The grim certainty of a conspiracy wavered.
But what if it’s simply the natural outcome of overpopulation? A colder, more rational part of her mind countered. Too many mouths, too little resources to feed them all?
She remembered Kayo’s lament, delivered with theatrical woe but a kernel of truth: “I'm jobless because humanity can already doom themselves without me doing anything.”
The thought was sobering. It was one thing to face a villain. You could find them, fight them, defeat them. But how do you fight a number? A graph trending upwards? The sheer, grinding weight of billions of lives pressing against the limits of a finite world?
A conspiracy was almost comforting. It implied an enemy with a face and weakness. This was just the inevitable result of a species that had mastered survival without mastering balance.
For a moment, she felt a strange, hollow sympathy for the Yamato corporation and all the ancient forces scrambling for control. They were all trying to position themselves on a lifeboat that was slowly, inexorably, taking on water.
She lowered her phone. The urgency to call Director Hao faded into a deeper dread. A conspiracy she could unravel. An enemy she could destroy. But the cold, impersonal arithmetic of resource depletion?
That was a tide no single entity could hold back forever.
“Maybe Kayo was right,” Su Yao murmured to the silent apartment. “The most terrifying apocalypse is the one we simply become.”
She picked up her spoon again and finished the omurice. It was delicious, a small respite in a world teetering on the brink of a very boring, very mathematical end. The mystery of the moon suddenly felt almost quaint after knowing the real monster was in the spreadsheet.
“Still,” she thought, wiping her mouth. “I should probably look into those economic reports anyway. Just in case it’s a conspiracy. It’s more fun to have someone to blame.”
Su Yao leaned back. The empty omurice plate was before her. Her mind, ever capable of holding cosmic dread and mundane irritation in equal measure, now turned to the classic pantheon of mortal paranoia.
The Freemasons, a secret society of men in aprons who supposedly controlled the world through handshakes and lodge meetings.
It seemed so, quaint. Like trying to rule the world with a particularly strict neighborhood watch. She'd encountered a few members centuries ago. They were mostly concerned with architecture and charitable dinners.
The Lizard People. Shapeshifting reptilians infiltrating governments.
Now that was more creative. She'd met a few serpentine yaoguai in her time, but they were generally more interested in hoarding treasure in mountain caves than managing tax policy. The bureaucratic patience required for global domination seemed entirely contrary to their cold-blooded nature.
Her thoughts settled on the one that felt most plausible. The conspiracy theory that only required human nature refined to its most avaricious peak.
The top 1%.
A class defined by a number. They could manipulate markets, hoard resources, and engineer scarcity from gilded boardrooms and private islands.
A famine would be a side effect of profitable commodity speculation. A price spike in rice was a market correction that just happened to starve a few million inconvenient people.
It was the most boring apocalypse imaginable. And therefore, the most likely.
She stood up. The resolution hardened within her. Whether it was an inevitable outcome of overpopulation or the machinations of a hidden elite, the result was the same: people would suffer.
Li Xuan had asked her to protect his descendants who were just as vulnerable to bread prices as they were to cursed spirits.
“Fine,” she said to the silent Nohime. “If the world is going to end because of bad economics, then I suppose I'll have to learn economics.”
It was the most tedious new battleground she could imagine. But a fox adapted to survive. Even if it meant reading stock market analyses instead of ancient scrolls.
Su Yao picked up the remote, more out of a need for mundane noise than any real interest, and flicked the television on. The screen lit up with a spectacular, chaotic scene. The camera work was shaky, as if filmed on a smartphone, and showed a raging battle on the city’s coastline.
A gigantic, reptilian creature with glowing dorsal fins and crystalline spikes along its back was emerging from the sea, swiping at fighter jets and crushing waterfront buildings with its tail.
And there, in the midst of the chaos, was Jian Feng in his regular clothes. His face was a mask of desperate concentration as he wielded a spiritual sword, deflecting a blast of corrosive energy from the monster.
The news banner at the bottom of the screen read:
LIVE: UNIDENTIFIED CREATURE ATTACKS COAST.
Su Yao stared. A piece of omurice, halfway to her mouth, was forgotten. “...What?”
Nohime glided over from the kitchen. Her feather duster paused as she observed the screen. Her pale eyes showed a flicker of recognition. “A Kaiju,” she identified. Her voice was as calm as if she were identifying a common bird.
“A ‘Strange Beast.’ They aren’t uncommon in this era. The last significant emergence was off the coast of Japan last week. This one appears to be a juvenile, perhaps drawn by the concentrated spiritual energy in the region.”
Su Yao dropped her spoon. It clattered against the plate. “A Kaiju. And Jian Feng is fighting it.”
She watched as Jian Feng, with a move probably taught to him by the Luo family, launched a brilliant arc of spiritual energy that bounced harmlessly off the creature’s crystalline hide. Then the Kaiju roared. The sound distorted the television’s speakers and swatted him aside like a fly.
He tumbled through the air and crashed into the remains of a Ferris wheel.
“This is the most ridiculous morning I have ever had,” Su Yao declared, standing up.
“Why is Jian Feng the one trying to play hero? Shouldn't the military be handling this? Or the government’s ‘Stabilization’ department?” She grabbed her jacket. “This is what happens when you cancel a decent exorcism show. The talent has to go freelance against primordial threats.”
Nohime tilted her head. “Will you be going to assist? It would be unfortunate if the city were destroyed before I finished dusting the ceiling fan.”
“I'm going to see if this is somehow connected to the Yamato or a mad moon goddess. And maybe stop Jian Feng from getting himself killed.” Su Yao shot her a look. She headed for the door. The television was still blaring with the sounds of destruction. “Keep the apartment clean. If a Kaiju steps on us, I at least want the ruins to be tidy.”
Su Yao stepped out of her apartment building and into a scene of pure, unadulterated chaos. The Kaiju was still thrashing in the bay, but now the streets were swarming with hulking, green-scaled humanoids with bulbous eyes and webbed hands, wielding tridents and jagged coral blades.
They moved with a slithering, unnerving grace. Their guttural cries echoed between buildings. “Reclaim the surface! For the Deep! For Father Dagon!”
People were screaming, running, and in some cases, fighting back with makeshift weapons, or, in a few cases, faint glows of nascent spiritual power.
Su Yao stood still for a moment. A Deep One lunged at her with a trident. Without even looking, one of her ethereal nine tails lashed out with precise, needle-like sharpness. The tip speared straight through the creature’s forehead. It gurgled and collapsed into a pile of fading sea foam and rotting fish smell.
Maybe I'm still sleeping, Su Yao thought, skewering another two Deep Ones that charged her. This has all the hallmarks of a particularly fevered dream. Kaiju, fish-people, apocalyptic invasions. It’s like someone took every B-movie trope and dumped it on my doorstep.
A third Deep One, slightly larger than the others, pointed a webbed finger at her. “The land-walkers will drown in the great tide! Your cities will be our new reefs!”
Su Yao yawned, using another tail to casually bisect it at the waist. “Yes, yes, very scary. You're reclaiming the surface. I heard you the first time.” She looked around at the pandemonium. This was a coordinated invasion. And these ‘Deep Ones...’
Her thoughts snapped back to the Yamato corporation’s multinational structure, their interest in spiritual resources, and their new, unknown Demon Queen. An invading army of ancient aquatic humanoids felt like something that would be right up their alley.
Either way, it was an intolerable disruption. Su Yao had a moon mystery to solve and a family to protect. An impromptu war with the fish-folk would have to wait.
Seeing a news van overturned and burning, its crew cowering behind it as Deep Ones advanced, Su Yao sighed. “Fine. But this is cutting into my schedule.”
Her motions became a whirlwind of precise, lethal strikes. Each movement effortlessly dispatched another invader. She moved through the street like a reaper. A path of dissolving sea foam and stunned silence formed in her wake.
She needed to find Jian Feng. If he was foolish enough to take on a Kaiju, he might know something. At the very least, he could be a useful distraction.
“Alright, you amphibious annoyances,” she muttered. Her eyes were scanning the skyline for the tell-tale glow of spiritual energy. “Let’s see how you like it when the fox comes to play.”
The real battle was finding out who had opened the floodgates. She had a sinking feeling it was connected to everything else.
Pushing further toward the coastline, the noise of battle began to be punctuated by a new, more disturbing sound. It was the precise, wet schick of a very sharp blade parting flesh. Su Yao turned a corner near a damaged fish market and stopped.
There was Momiji, fully manifested through Li Xuan’s mask. She had a Deep One pinned to a crumbling wall with one spectral hand and was using the other to wield a wakizashi made of condensed moonlight. With surgical precision, she was filleting its scaled arm, laying out neat, translucent slices of flesh on a nearby piece of corrugated metal like a chef preparing sashimi.
“Momiji,” Su Yao said. Her voice was flat. “What are you doing?”
The kijo looked up. Her expression was serene. “According to the legends,” she explained, as if conducting a culinary seminar, “eating the flesh of a ningyo can grant you immortality. Or, in this case, a close relative thereof.”
She gestured with her blade at the invading horde, “The texts are vague on whether it must be willingly given, but given the circumstances, I believe we can consider this implied consent through acts of war.”
Momiji offered a slice to Su Yao on the tip of her blade. “Would you care to try? The energy signature is quite unique.”
Su Yao, driven by a mix of morbid curiosity and the pragmatic need to understand any potential advantage, took the proffered slice. She popped it into her mouth. Her face was a mask of critical analysis.
“It tastes like frogs,” she stated after a moment’s consideration. “Very old, very salty frogs that have been marinating in low-tide effluent. The aftertaste is aggressively briny.” She swallowed. “I don't feel any more immortal. Just mildly nauseated.”
“A pity,” Momiji mused, taking a slice for herself. “Perhaps it requires a critical mass. Or a specific preparation. A nice ponzu might help.” She neatly dispatched the Deep One, which dissolved into the now-familiar sea foam. “They are everywhere. This is a full-scale emergence. It seems our problems are no longer confined to corporate boardrooms.”
Su Yao wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Tell me about it. Have you seen Jian Feng? The fool was trying to solo the Kaiju.”
“He was thrown into the Ferris wheel,” Momiji reported, pointing with her bloodless blade. “I believe he is still there.”
“Right,” Su Yao said, turning to go. “Keep researching. Try soy sauce instead of ponzu. If you find out who sent these things, let me know.”
“Of course,” Momiji said, already turning her attention to a new, unsuspecting Deep One that had rounded the corner. “Happy hunting.”
Su Yao left the kijo to her impromptu immortality buffet. The taste of ancient frog-people lingered on her tongue. The day had officially jumped the shark, or in this case, the Kaiju. If the Deep Ones were here and the Kaiju was their vanguard, then someone, somewhere, had just declared war.
Let it be known that Su Yao was never one to ignore a declaration.