Chapter 5: Leave the Anthromorph-Slaying to the Serial Killer!

Yuichi arrived on the island just before sundown.

“Graaaah!” With one final burst of strength, he pulled himself up on the pier. Once he was up, he released Natsuki, rolled onto his back and went limp.

He checked the time. It was 6:00 PM. He had been swimming for close to five hours with nothing to eat or drink. Understandably, he was exhausted.

“Are you okay?” Natsuki asked him in concern. She was just as soaked as he was, which just happened to render her white blouse completely see-through. But he was in no mood to think about that at the moment.

“I’m not okay at all... where are the others, anyway?” he asked.

“They don’t seem to be in the area.”

“...You’d think I’d get a little more appreciation...” he murmured. Mutsuko was one thing, but he’d thought at least Yoriko and Aiko would come to greet him. It was a big disappointment.

“You did very well.” Natsuki squished Yuichi’s wet hair around. It was a small gesture, but it did make Yuichi feel better.

Of course, feelings were only that. It didn’t change the state he was in.

He was at his limit. He could barely move. He’d hit the wall. He’d also hit low blood sugar, due to hunger.

There was no way he could get his body to listen to him now. He could hardly even think straight.

Still, he began to realize, there was definitely something strange going on. Mutsuko should have known he’d arrive in this condition and made preparations.

“...Hey, is there any food or water nearby?” he asked.

Anything would do. The island was inhabited, so there must be something.

“Hang on, I’ll look around.” Natsuki left and returned after a while. It was faster than he expected; she couldn’t even have left the harbor.

“Here.” Natsuki offered him a nutritional supplement bar and a plastic bottle.

Yuichi took them with trembling hands, crammed the supplement into his mouth, and washed it down with the water.

That calmed him down a bit. Slowly, he sat up.

“There’s more. Eat lots.” Natsuki handed him all the supplements she was carrying.

“Thanks... where did these come from?” Yuichi asked.

“They were over there.”

Left by Mutsuko, Yuichi thought. Still, that was a pretty detached way of doing things. It wasn’t like her.

Regardless, he needed to eat them and recover. Yuichi stuffed as much food as he could into his mouth. “You eat too, Takeuchi. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

At his urging, Natsuki ate one of the supplements, as well. Although she had been carried the whole way, just being in the water consumed a lot of a person’s energy.

“We’d better change our clothes fast, or we’ll freeze to death,” Yuichi said. Even though it was summer, the temperature would still drop once the sun went down. They might lose all the energy they had recovered.

Feeling quite a lot better now, he finally stood up.

“Look at this... There’s definitely something strange going on,” Yuichi noticed.

The luggage was piled up nearby in a haphazard heap. The tents, the utensils, and all the food... even the bags with changes of clothes had just been left where they were. There was one open bag, and it was full of the nutritional supplements from before.

“I brought them from here,” Natsuki said as she followed him.

“I wonder where they are and what they’re doing,” Yuichi said. It looked like they’d just left all their luggage behind. “For now, let’s just get changed. Your luggage is there, right, Takeuchi?”

Yuichi picked up the bag that contained his change of clothes, and looked around for a place where they could get changed.

Natsuki carelessly removed her blouse.

“Hey! You can’t get changed here!” he exclaimed.

“No one else is watching. You should get changed right away, too,” she said.

“Why are all the women I know so indiscreet...” He already had two sisters who felt comfortable getting naked in front of him. Learning that Natsuki was the same way was kind of disappointing.

But realizing this was no time for modesty, Yuichi steeled his nerve. He stripped off the weights along with his wet clothes and underwear, wiped dry, then put on a new shirt and jeans.

He considerately kept turned away from Natsuki the whole time.

After a while, he decided it must be safe, and turned around.

Natsuki stood there, dressed in a full-body black leather bondage outfit. It was covered all over with what looked like holsters, with medical scalpels mounted in each.

“Um, Takeuchi?” Yuichi was utterly dumbstruck. He couldn’t help but be impressed.

“Sakaki,” she said. “You understand the situation, right? Is the blood not properly flowing to your brain yet?”

“Huh?” It was true his head wasn’t working right. The gears in his brain had slowed tremendously.

“I thought so,” she said. “You need to snap out of it. They wouldn’t have just left their luggage out here. They must have been taken by someone.”

“Taken by whom?” he asked.

“Why don’t we ask them?” Natsuki pointed.

Yuichi turned to look...

A cow was standing there. Above its head was the label “Anthromorph (Cow).”

Actually, it was more like a person with a cow’s head. The black and white blotches suggested a Holstein, and the chest was especially large, suggesting that it was a female.

Yuichi knew another word for a creature like this: a Minotaur, the bull-headed monster from Greek legend.

Next to it was “Anthromorph (Pig)” which had a pig’s head, and brought to mind a certain character from Saiyuki.

An elephant-headed creature that evoked the god Ganesha bore the label “Anthromorph (Elephant),” while another resembled a white equine. At first, Yuichi thought this one had a horse’s head, but there was a horn growing from his forehead. The label said “Anthromorph (Unicorn),” so that was probably right.

There was also another with a canine head, similar to what he had seen before. Although this one technically said “Anthromorph (Dog),” it was hard to tell it apart from the werewolves.

Up until now, they had all been mammals, but there was also an “Anthromorph (Snake)” that had a snake’s head, bending forward on a long neck.

Though a chaotic assortment, they were all anthromorphs. It felt vaguely like a fairy tale had broken out around him.

Yuichi realized that he was currently not fully in his right mind. It was a shock to realize he hadn’t noticed so many obvious presences in the vicinity.

“Not good... I haven’t recovered at all,” he murmured.

First, he needed a way to force his condition back to normal. Yuichi began to focus his breathing...

✽✽✽✽✽

Aiko and the others had been captured without resistance. They were totally outnumbered, and they knew that a little struggling wouldn’t change anything.

Fortunately, their opponents were apparently quite confident in their ability to keep the prisoners in line, so they hadn’t felt obligated to rough them up at all. They clearly thought that if their prisoners tried to run or resist, they could easily put them down.

The girls had left their luggage out in the open when they had taken it off the boat, but the anthromorphs had shown no interest in it, only bothering to confiscate their cell phones, watches, and such. Afterward, they were taken by car to the anthromorphs’ headquarters.

Kurokami Island’s most distinguishing feature was the volcano that towered over it. It got higher and higher up as one moved towards the center, and about halfway up the slope squatted a peculiar Japanese-style mansion.

Its inconsistent architectural style suggested a building that had been added to repeatedly over time, but it was large enough that it was hard to take in the full scope of it at a glance.

The minute they got inside, Aiko could tell that something had changed in the air around them. It felt kind of slimy, kind of sticky. There was a sour smell about the place; it made her skin crawl just standing there.

They were led deeper inside.

It was dim there, with only naked light bulbs to provide light. It was hard to say if that was intentional, but it meant that there was always darkness somewhere around them.

How long had they been walking? It was around the time that Aiko had completely lost track of their current position that they appeared to arrive at their destination.

It was a sliding door prison — a Japanese-style room lined with wooden lattices.

They were sent inside of it, and naturally, the door was locked behind them.

Their only guard was a single human man who sat in front of the door. But he was most likely an anthromorph, and could transform if he had to.

“What’s gonna happen to us?” Aiko asked with a sigh as she took a seat on the tatami floor.

She genuinely had no idea what was going on. They had come to the little isolated island for their training camp, and minutes later, monsters had appeared and locked them up. This was not what she had been expecting, to say the least.

Mutsuko, for her part, seemed unaffected. “Whatever will happen, will happen! For now, let’s take it easy and wait and see.” She lay down on the tatami floor, completely at ease in this situation.

“How are we going to go to the bathroom?” Yoriko asked, inspecting the room. Apparently, she wasn’t scared anymore, either.

“The toilet is... there,” said a voice from somewhere in the room’s dim light.

Surprised, Aiko looked towards it, and saw two girls squatting there. One was pointing towards a door. It seemed there was a toilet, at least.

“They’ll feed you, too. At least, a little bit. We’re sacrifices, apparently, so I guess they don’t mind if we look a little scrawny...” the other girl said with a trace of sarcasm.

“Um, who are you guys?” Aiko asked hesitantly.

“I’m Akemi,” the girl with the ponytail said. “That’s Manaka.”

So the girl with the ponytail was Akemi, and the girl with long hair who had pointed out the toilet was Manaka. That was how Aiko memorized them. They both looked older than her — they were probably out of high school, at least — and were both dressed in simple kimonos that looked like pajamas.

“Did you say... sacrifices?” Aiko repeated.

“Seems so,” Akemi said. “At the next full moon, they’re holding a festival to their god, and we’re the tribute. So I guess we get to live until then? We’ve got futons, and some changes of clothes if you don’t mind stuff like this... It’s pretty awkward to have that guy leering at us all the time, but otherwise they take pretty good care of us.”

The girls were in college, it seemed. Five of them had come to Madono Island for summer vacation. They had fallen asleep in their inn, and when they’d awakened, they’d been trapped in here. Which meant that the girls didn’t even know that they were on a remote island called Kurokami.

“A remote island, huh? Which means even if we get out of here, we can’t get back home...” Akemi said, sounding less frustrated about it than one might think. She must have already resigned herself to the situation.

“There were five of you, you said?” Aiko asked.

“Yeah. So why are there only two of us here, you mean? Are you guys virgins?”

“U-Um?” Aiko asked, wondering if she’d heard the girl right.

“I asked if you’re virgins.”

The second time she was asked the question, Aiko looked around, confirming the responses of her fellow club members.

“Well, yes, but what does that have to do with anything?” Aiko whispered self-consciously.

“I think they’re putting the virgins in here,” Akemi explained. “The other three played around a lot... and virgins and sacrifices usually go together, you know?”

“Ah...” Aiko wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“Bingo,” the man sitting outside the prison spoke up suddenly in a voice that somehow felt as sticky as the air around them.

“Boy, what a shame,” he continued. “I thought all high school girls these days played around.”

Chills ran up Aiko’s spine as she felt the man undress her with his eyes.

“Wanna know what happened to the other three?” There was a sadistic tone to his voice that made their fate easy to imagine.

“No! Don’t say it!” Manaka screamed, covering her ears.

The man didn’t seem to want to have to deal with her starting a fuss, so he didn’t say anything more. Aiko was glad for that; she didn’t want to hear any more of the man’s cruel words, either.

“Hey! Why don’t we do some image training, like Gohan and Krillin in Dragon Ball Z? It really kills the time during situations like this!” Mutsuko happily shattered the mood.

“Um, Mutsuko?” Aiko ventured.

“Noro! It’ll be fine, so relax, okay? Once Yu gets here, everything’s gonna work out! We’ve just got a lot of time to kill until then, that’s all. Wanna play Word Chain? What about you guys? Manaka, Akemi?” Mutsuko blithely called to the two college girls.

“Mutsuko and I aren’t worried, so you can calm down, too, Noro,” Yoriko said haughtily. “Of course, the situation being what it is, I’ll be a bit nicer to you.”

Aiko was starting to feel like she was the silly one for worrying.

✽✽✽✽✽

Yuichi regulated his breathing, using that to force his body into fighting condition.

He couldn’t tell if the anthromorphs around them were friend or foe yet, so he wouldn’t necessarily have to fight. But if he did, he had to be prepared.

“Kill the man. The woman’s a virgin, so we’ll take her,” said the unicorn anthromorph, who was apparently their leader.

Those words confirmed to Yuichi that these were enemies.

“Your special skill is so creepy! What the heck?! I know you’re a unicorn, but still! It’s so gross that you can tell that by smell!” the cow told the unicorn. She sounded like she really meant it; they must not have been particularly good friends.

“They’re fighting with each other...” Yuichi whispered.

“Don’t let your guard down,” Natsuki responded quickly.

“Shut up, virgin!” the unicorn guy snapped. “How can you be a virgin with tits like that, anyway? Give me a break...”

“That’s sexual harassment! Knock it off or I’ll sue!”

The other anthromorphs just watched as the cow and the unicorn bickered.

It didn’t look like they were going to be fighting right away, so Yuichi evaluated his situation again. They were standing in the middle of a pier about ten meters wide, sticking out from the land over the ocean.

Jumping into the water would be the easiest escape route. But given Yuichi’s weakened state, he wasn’t sure how far they could get.

The anthromorphs had fanned out in front of them, as if to cut off any escape route further onto land. From left to right, it was pig, cow, horse, elephant, snake, and dog.

“What should we do?” Yuichi murmured. “I don’t think I can fight for very long...”

“We’ll just have to beat them all,” Natsuki agreed. “From what I can see, there are six here right now. I don’t see any sign of reinforcements, but if any get away, they might call for some. If we want the freedom to search the island for the rest of our club members, we’ll have to beat every last one of them.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what it comes down to,” Yuichi agreed. “It wouldn’t be hard to knock one or two of them down and make a run for it, but that would lead to trouble later...”

Yuichi wasn’t sure he could hold out long enough to beat them all, though, which was why he had asked Natsuki for advice. But it seemed she had an answer to that, too.

She took one step in front of Yuichi.

In response to that, the cow and the horse realized their prey was getting ready to fight, and they stopped their bickering.

Natsuki reached behind her with both hands and picked out as many scalpels as she could hold.

The anthromorphs were just about to move when Natsuki swung her arms forward as hard as she could.

The follow-through posture was like the unfurling of wings. The scalpels went flying, drawing red lines behind them. It was hard to tell if the anthromorphs even saw them.

One scalpel opened a hole in the elephant’s face, while another took off the unicorn’s head. A third and a fourth cut open the dog’s stomach and bisected the snake’s head.

Following Natsuki’s throw, Yuichi leaped into action, running after the scalpels. He got around behind the uninjured cow and pig and thrust the heel of his palm at each. Both fell to the ground with a dull smack.

With the anthromorphs neutralized, Yuichi fell limply to the ground.

He really was still hungry. Yuichi needed more food than you would expect for a young man of his size and build. Though the dietary supplements had given him the vitamins he needed, they hadn’t had a lot of calories.

He looked over at one of the scalpels, which had hit the ground nearby. There was a red string attached to its handle. That must have been why they seemed to trail red.

“Ah, that’s something the club president taught me,” Natsuki said.

Putting strings on throwing weapons was a wise move, Yuichi reflected. It made them fly straighter.

“A little risky, wasn’t it? It’s hard to put a lot of power behind a thrown scalpel...” Yuichi said, looking over the tragic state of the anthromorphs.

“You remember I can cut through steel, don’t you?” Natsuki asked. “At this range, even if they’re not in my hand, I can still put considerable power behind them.”

As a thrown weapon attack, it would be hard to defend against. Yuichi remembered the first time he had fought Natsuki, and he had to admit that it was definitely a troublesome attack.

“So what’s with the outfit?” he asked.

Natsuki was wearing a black leather bodysuit that clung to her curves. He had wondered the same thing when she’d come to training in a leotard, but she looked even more like an assassin now.

“The club president prepared it,” Natsuki said. “It’s convenient. It holds a lot of scalpels.”

“Sis, what are you getting up to now...?” Yuichi muttered. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you could buy in a store, so Mutsuko must have designed it and had it made somewhere.

“Are they alive?” Natsuki asked as she looked at the cow and the pig. They had returned to human form, perhaps due to having lost consciousness. One was a girl with a cow’s horns and tail; the other was a man with a pig’s ears and snout. They were both naked except for cloth wrapped around the girl’s hips and chest, and the man’s hips.

“...We probably don’t have to kill them,” Yuichi said. “Just depowering them is enough. But they were trying to kill us, so I won’t complain about the ones you killed.” Even as he said that, he knew it sounded like he was making excuses.

“I see,” Natsuki said. “Then I won’t complain about your way of doing things, either. Can I bring something to tie them up?”

“Yeah. There’s probably something in Mutsuko’s luggage.”

As Natsuki made a beeline to the bags piled on the ground, Yuichi found himself watching her walk away. Usually he would have noticed the preliminary signs of attack and never be distracted like that. But Yuichi was completely off his guard.

The pig-man suddenly sprang up.

He must have been waiting for his chance, because he turned to his beast form in an instant, and kicked out with a hoof.

Yuichi’s response came too late. Even though he knew that the attack was coming, his body wouldn’t respond quickly enough.

He just stood up, preparing to take the attack and counter it.

But the hit never landed.

Blood shot from the pig-man’s forehead.

Yuichi turned around. Natsuki stood there, arm outstretched in a throwing stance. She had thrown one of the weights Yuichi had been wearing before.

“Look alive, would you?” Natsuki called. She searched through Mutsuko’s bag and produced a rope.

“Yeah, no excuse for that one,” Yuichi agreed.

“I could so easily kill you right now, Sakaki,” Natsuki murmured. She exuded malice.

Or rather, Yuichi could detect the faintest movements of her muscles, the kind that would presage a killing strike, and he interpreted that as malice. In that moment, Natsuki really was thinking about killing him.

“...But I won’t,” she concluded. “Knowing you, you probably have something up your sleeve.”

But it was only for a moment. She quickly dismissed it, and the malice around her dispersed.

“I don’t have anything up my sleeve in this condition...” Yuichi muttered self-reproachingly.

Natsuki didn’t respond as she began tying up the cow anthromorph with the rope.

Yuichi recognized that rope. It was made from braided artificial spider silk, the strongest textile in the modern era. Anthromorphs were likely stronger than humans, but there was no way they could break through that.

“We should hide for a while,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah. We need to recoup.”

Natsuki threw the dead anthromorphs into the sea, but the bloodstains around the area made it clear that there had been a battle, and taking any more time to try to cover that up would likely be pointless.

After disposing of the bodies, Natsuki broke the lock of a small warehouse on the harbor and opened the shutters. She dragged the cow anthromorph in and left her.

Yuichi thought about helping, but Natsuki finished everything in the time it took him just to limp over.

They entered the warehouse and closed the shutter. They didn’t intend to stay long, so they’d decided the minimal cover-up would do well enough.

Yuichi collapsed on the floor, while Natsuki rested her back against the wall. The anthromorph cow was on the floor, as well.

“So, what do we do next?” he asked Natsuki once everything seemed stable.

She said nothing.

“First, food,” Yuichi decided. “I need to eat to recover. Meat. I need to eat meat.”

“...You mean you want to eat me?” Natsuki asked, her face slightly red.

“I don’t have time to play along with your jokes right now. Come on, beef or something.”

“No! Don’t eat me! No matter how delicious I might be...”

The sudden cry caused Yuichi to look over at the source of the voice. The cow-girl had awakened.

“I wasn’t planning to eat you!” he shouted.

“Don’t worry,” Natsuki assured her. “Sakaki means it in a sexual sense. That’s the reason he let you live. If he’d wanted to use you as provisions, he would have killed you, wouldn’t he?”

“S-Sexual? Is that the reason you didn’t kill me?!” The cow-girl gulped.

“Seriously, enough with the jokes already,” Yuichi muttered. “I’m not up to playing along with them right now.”

“Boring,” Natsuki complained.

Yuichi felt anxious; Natsuki was clearly picking up some habits from Mutsuko.

Regathering his calm, Yuichi turned to talk to the cow-girl once more.

“Hey, I have a few questions. Could you answer them?”

“What will you do to me if I don’t?” The cow-girl wriggled, trying to maintain her distance. It seemed she was still under a misapprehension about the situation.

“If you don’t want to answer, I won’t make you,” Yuichi said. “I won’t try to force you to talk. But I will have to leave you where you are, unfortunately. If you answer my questions, I’ll take off the rope.”

After a moment’s thought, the girl acquiesced. “...Okay.”

“Okay. First, why did you attack us?”

“The island is preparing for the festival,” the girl said. “We’re supposed to attack outsiders on sight. We ended up on patrol around the island when we suddenly found you.”

“On sight? Isn’t that a little reckless?” Yuichi asked.

“Not really. The island’s residents are all people like us. Outsiders aren’t welcome.”

“What did you mean when you said you ‘ended up’ on patrol?” he asked.

“It’s our first time being assigned this job. I never expected anything like this to happen.”

“Are there any other patrols?”

“Yeah. Quite a few, I think.”

“Do you know of anyone who’s come to this island besides us?” Yuichi asked.

“No. We only just came out here ourselves.”

“What happens when a patrol finds someone?”

“We’re supposed to kill them,” the anthromorph said. “Unless they’re virgins, in which case we’re supposed to bring them to the Kukurizaka house. But most of us can’t tell one from the other, you know? The unicorn guy’s a special case, see...”

“What’s Kukurizaka?” Yuichi cut in. If he let her go off on a rant about the guy she didn’t like, it might take a while.

“The family that runs the island,” the cow anthromorph said. “Their house is on the mountain at the center of the island. About halfway up, I think.”

“What happens after you take them there?” he demanded. That was what worried him. The others could be in a really bad situation right now.

“They’ll be sacrificed, I hear,” the girl said. “They’re going to be tributes to The Head of All, but they’ll probably be safe until then... you asked before, but did anyone else come here?”

“Yeah, some friends and family,” Yuichi said. “Now, my final question. Do you know where I can find some food? Not instant stuff. I mean real meat and vegetables.”

“Food? There should be fields in the area. There’s kind of a small supermarket a little ways away from here. Is that enough?”

“Yeah, that’s a big help.” As promised, Yuichi untied the girl. “Okay, we’re going. If we meet again, it’s going to result in a fight, so I’d appreciate it if you’d stay away. You don’t want to die, right?”

Yuichi couldn’t imagine killing her, actually, but any fight could end in death. He carried that thought with him every day.

He stood up, but got a head rush and stumbled. His exhaustion really was severe.

“Wait!” As they were about to leave the warehouse, the cow-girl called after them.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Hey, you want something to eat, right? Why not come to my house?” she offered.