東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Chapter 1:Urban Legend in Limbo

—1—


"She wants us to save somebody? Is that it? Is that all she said?" Renko blinked quizzically at me.

The time was the spring of Gensokyo's 129th season. A beautiful, peaceful morning, in which the Hieda Public Temple School was closed. The location was a detached storage building on the school's grounds, which a sign sitting just outside the door proclaimed to be the office of the Hifuu Detective Agency. In reality, while the building did serve that purpose, it was far more productive as the breeding grounds for the ever-growing nest of songbirds currently sleeping in its eaves. Inside of the office, Renko and I sat, discussing matters after I was unexpectedly spirited away into this office without warning by the actions of an unexpected guest the night before. Or rather, I should say an 'unexpected youkai.'

"There's someone who I need you to save." That had been all that the Youkai Sage, Yakumo Yukari had said to me last night. I said as much to Renko, then followed it up with "After that, she just said 'It was nice to meet you, Hifuu Club,' then she vanished from right in front of me."

"Merry, are you having an affair with the Youkai Sage? Running off and cheating behind my back while I'm sleeping right beside you? Does your Renko really mean nothing to you?"

She likely might have continued if I hadn't silently leaned across the table and silently landed a chop right in the middle of her forehead.

"Ow! Don't hit me, Merry, I'm a pacifist! I'm also a moralist, opposed to anyone having secret trysts with the Youkai Sage!"

"What can I say, Renko?" I asked, settling myself back into position on my side of the table. "She really doesn't want to meet you."

"What reason could she possibly have to hate me this much?"

Renko crossed her arms and groaned. Yakumo Yukari, the Youkai Sage, had never appeared before her, though she had appeared before me several times at this point.

I had my own hypothesis as to why the youkai sage had never allowed Renko to see her. Of course I had no way of testing my hypothesis, nor could I hope to interpret any results my testing might have produced. Even if I could prove whether or not I was right, I would have no way of knowing what the significance of such a finding might be.

Unlike my partner, I harbor no delusions of grandeur. As such, I fully suspected that my hypothesis was nothing more than a childish fantasy. I wouldn't be mentioning my theory to Renko either. It's not like she was any more capable of confirming it than I was, and introducing the idea to her would only serve to exacerbate her already tenuous grip on reality.

"According to the Youkai Sage, all of this is a clue that will lead us to Usami Sumireko."

"So all we need to do is save a certain someone, right? But she didn’t say who. How many people are there in Gensokyo, I wonder?" She scratched her head.

The population of the human village was actually a bit larger than you might expect for a remote mountain village, but it was still too small to be considered a proper city. At most it would be the size of a larger rural town in the Outside World. It was big enough to contain several distinct communities full of people who wouldn’t know anyone outside of their own neighbours, at any rate. In this way the presence of the occasional Outsider such as ourselves could easily go unremarked upon in the village and it wasn't all that uncommon for a youkai to sneak into town in the same manner. I couldn’t say whether you could see this as a sign that the village was more accepting than one might expect, or if it was just indicative of the sort of indifference that arises from having isolated communities.

I'm rambling again. What was Renko saying?

"...no matter how I look at it, we have too little information to go on. Did the Youkai Sage say anything else? Anything at all?"

"Yes, there was one other thing, I think..."

◆◇◆

"You had the right idea investigating that drum tsukumogami, but sadly that girl is a dead end. She's just the tip of the iceberg poking out for you to see. Everything you really want to know is still hidden beneath the surface. Something very important is about to happen. You two, who are always more focused on events outside of the human village, will need to be paying attention, or you might miss it."

◇◆◇

I repeated those same words to Renko, watching as her frown intensified.

The 'drum tsukumogami' that the sage had mentioned was of course Horikawa Raiko. She had told us that her user in the Outside World occasionally associated with someone who looked a lot like Renko. We assumed that must have been Usami Sumireko, but that was all that we knew about her. If you want more details about that meeting, see my previous casefile.

Usami Sumireko is how all of this started for us. She was Renko's great aunt, and had apparently referred to herself as a member of the Hifuu Club for some reason. According to Renko's grandfather's diary, she also possessed psychic powers. In her teenage years she had fallen into a coma from which she had never awakened, but before her death she had almost seemed to have predicted that Renko and I would enter her room someday, having left a notebook with the name of the Hifuu Club on one of her shelves. She was one of the prime suspects in our having been ripped from our own time and place and brought to Gensokyo.

I had met her once, but at that time, she was only a child. If you're curious about the details of that meeting, then I'd refer you to my second casefile, which also details the events of the Spring Snow Incident. The things that happened on that occasion were so vague and dreamlike though that I'm not entirely sure I didn't hallucinate them.

At any rate, by this point it seemed irrefutable that there had to be some connection between Gensokyo and Sumireko's coma.

"Well it would make sense if it were Sumireko that the Administrator is asking us to save, wouldn't it?"

"I'll admit that having us go back in time 80 years to prevent my great aunt from dying does sound like something that would happen in a science fiction story, but even in that sort of a situation we ended up way too far in the past, don't you think? If we were supposed to save her, wouldn't it make more sense for us to arrive at some point closer to the period when she's actually in danger?"

"Y-yeah, I guess that's true." By this point it had been many years since Renko and I first arrived in Gensokyo and got wrapped up in the Scarlet Mist Incident. If I think about it, I’ve actually been living with Renko in Gensokyo for far longer than I had known her back in the Scientific Century.

"If the Youkai Sage is the one who brought us here, then maybe her sense of time is quite a bit different than ours. She's supposed to be more than a thousand years old, right?"

"Don’t say that, Merry, it’s impossible to argue against that sort of an explanation. Whimsy, impulsiveness, carelessness and incompetence are all the natural enemies of logic. There’s no way to solve any mystery that hinges on something like that. I refuse to accept any explanations that are so boring."

I sighed. "Renko, it's one thing when you're spouting your theories in relation to inexplicable incidents but this is our lives. Could you not base your deduction on whether or not you personally find the solution interesting, O great detective?"

"What are you talking about, Merry? The Hifuu Club is sworn to uncover the hidden truths beneath reality and make the world a more interesting place." Renko laughed and puffed out her chest proudly. I couldn't see how she had anything to boast about there. I let out a tired sigh.

"Understanding why my great aunt fell into a coma is something I'd like to do for my own sake if no one else's, but putting that aside, let's try to determine if that's what the Youkai Sage meant or not. She said that we'll need to be focusing on what's going on inside of the village. I suppose that means that the person we're supposed to save isn't Reimu or Marisa."

"Renko, if there's something out there that was a real danger to either of those two, what exactly do you think we could do to save them?"

Personally I couldn’t imagine any sort of situation in which the two of us would be saving Reimu or Marisa. If anything, it was much more likely to be the other way around.

"You said she told you that we'd need to look for a clue that would lead us to Sumireko, right? Maybe that clue is someone here in the village who knows her. That could be the person we have to save."

"Who could that be?"

"Who knows? It's not like knowing that it's someone from the village that we need to save narrows down the field of potential victims much. Nearly every human in Gensokyo lives here."

"This is like Ellery Queen's 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝐺𝑢𝑛 𝑀𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑦. All 20,000 people in the stadium are potential suspects!"

"That's bad news for you, Merry. How are you going to write 20,000 names on your list of suspects?"

Actually, were there even 20,000 people living in the village?

As Renko and I both pondered the situation, the door to the office suddenly slid open.

"Good morning you two!"

Standing in the doorway was our part-time assistant Sanae, with a big grin on her face.

Renko and I looked at her then looked back at each other and shrugged. The question that seemed to be going through both of our heads was ‘does a living god count as a human?’ The answer was probably yes, right?


"...Let’s go ahead and rule Sanae out, at least," Renko suggested.

"Yeah, it definitely couldn't be Sanae."

Sanae was simply too close to us to have been anyone we'd have to pay special attention not to miss. Besides, she didn't live in the village.

"What are you talking about? It sounds like you two were just saying something rude about me?"

Renko waved her hand dismissively, saying "Don’t worry about it" as Sanae came in the door, her expression drooping into a sulk now.


—2—


Sanae Kochiya, our part-time assistant, is a living goddess and a full-time wind priestess in service to the gods of the Moriya Shrine. While working in that role, she was always calm, proper, reverent and eager to help. Around us she was willing to be a bit more unrestrained.

"Seriously? You? Saving someone? Are you sure, boss? I mean, isn't your role normally to endanger people? Did you hit your head or something?"

"It's not that shocking, is it? You're a religious person, Sanae, I'm sure people come to you all the time with their problems. Do you know of anyone in the village who you could imagine would be in danger and need my help?"

"People come to shrines to wish for divine help, not everyday sorts of problems. Questions about how to live your life are the sort of things we leave to the monks and hermits. Our shrine has real, actual gods in it! People come to us with big problems like how to get enough food, shelter or money. Those are the sorts of things we deal with. If anyone came to us with problems like those, we’d just try to sell them some amulets to attract good fortune. What more could anyone need than that?"

Sanae puffed out her chest proudly. While she had a bit more reason to be proud of herself than Renko, I'm still not sure that's the sort of thing to boast about.

"I mean we listen to people's complaints of course. The purpose of a shrine is to grant peace of mind and give people a place to exchange faith for blessings, but we don’t pry into the details of people's personal problems, and gods aren't really the sort to give you direct advice about your day-to-day struggles anyway."

"Yeah, I suppose that's true," Renko admitted with a shrug.

"What's gotten into you, Miss Renko? You're not usually as kind-hearted and concerned for the well-being of others as that other teacher here at your school. Oh! Did the Yama come by and sentence you to community service or something? Or are you trying to become another competitor to our shrine?"

"No, no, it's nothing like that, Sanae. I've got no interest in becoming a religious figure. I've been asked to help someone, but I don't know who it is that I'm supposed to help."

"You're being asked to do good deeds? You really did get assigned community service, didn't you?"

"I haven't even committed any crimes, though."

As Renko scratched her head the door opened again and someone else stepped into the room.

"If you're looking to do some community service, I happen to know of a serial offender who's constantly breaking curfew and trespassing without permission into dangerous areas I could ask you to catch," Keine Kamishirasawa said as she walked in the door. "I'll even give you a neighborhood watch armband to do it with."

"Miss Keine! It's Sunday, what are you doing here? The school is closed today, right?"

"That's a very guilty-sounding greeting. Do I even want to know what the three of you are up to this time?"

Keine stood in the entranceway of our office, hands on her hips and glowering at us all. Being as she was both our boss and our landlady, we couldn't help but feel small in her presence. Sanae was the only one who was still smiling, offering a carefree "Hello!" and a smile to Keine. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever written about the two of them meeting, but since Sanae is our friend and often comes to the village square to preach, she and Keine had already met several times.

"I know you two have been trying to make this detective business of yours work for a long time, but you never seem to have anything to show for it other than getting yourselves into trouble. I appreciate the value of letting young people find their own paths in life, but the two of you are teachers. Don't you think it's about time for both of you to settle down and do something respectable with your lives?"

"No, please, stop Miss Keine. We're already teachers," Renko pleaded. "Sanae, tell her we're good people." Renko said, scooting towards our assistant.

"What? You want me to vouch for your reputation?"

Keine sighed and stared hard at Renko as she tried to shrink behind Sanae. "Should I even ask who asked you to help someone?"

Renko blinked at the question and sat up straight, doing her best to put a serious expression on her face. "I'm sorry Keine, but as a private detective I have a duty to maintain the confidentiality of my clients. I can't disclose who's hired us."

"Renko, why are you taking on clients whose identities you can’t disclose? If you really want to help people, you should come work with the neighborhood watch. You’d get to do all sorts of things to make a real positive impact, like helping people find missing items or visiting with lonely elders or resolving interpersonal disputes."

Was that really the sort of problem that the neighborhood watch usually handled? How peaceful. I suppose that was a good thing though. I had seen how Keine was willing to work herself to the point of exhaustion during the Hopeless Masquerade Incident in order to protect the village, and I wouldn't want to see her have to go through something like that again.

"If you'd be willing to consider the idea, I could actually use your assistance with the watch next week."

"Oh? Why's that? Has something happened?"

"You heard about that amanojaku who was involved in the most recent incident, didn't you? She's still on the run."

"Yeah, what about her?"

The person in question was Kijin Seija. She had been on the run ever since the climax of the recent tsukumogami Incident. Renko and I probably had a better idea of what she was capable of than Keine did, as, along with Mokou, we had been there in Shining Needle Castle, and had even been captured and held prisoner by her. Keine didn't know about that particular little outing of ours though, so we didn't mention it. If you want more details about that incident, you can read my previous casefile.

"There's a rumor going around that a reward is being offered for her capture. Apparently Kagerou, Wakasagihime, and Sekibanki have all banded together and decided to hunt the amanojaku down after having all been affected during the recent incident."

"Oh! That's right! That's why I came here too!" Sanae exclaimed excitedly.

Incidentally, although I mentioned it in the last case, this was the moment that we first heard that anyone was offering a reward for Seija's capture. It wasn't hard to imagine who might be offering such a thing. Just about the only person who would be interested in finding Seija at this point would be Sukuna Shinmyoumaru, Seija's one-time ally in her failed revolution. She was also someone who could easily offer a compelling reward in the form of a wish from her Miracle Mallet.

"I got left out of the loop during the recent incident, but now's my chance! I'm going to find that wanted amanojaku and show everyone that the Moriya Shrine can resolve incidents too! You two will help me find her, right? We're going to gather so much faith doing this!"

Keine turned her glare on Sanae. "Don't get them involved in something like that, these girls are just ordinary humans!" Keine leaned down and grabbed the collar of Sanae's robes, hauling her to her feet.

"Hey! What are you doing?" Sanae cried as she thrashed around.

"This is exactly what I was afraid of!" Keine growled. "I came here to make sure I talked to the two of you before you could get involved with this, but I see I'm already too late. Even Mokou seems oddly interested in finding this troublemaker..."

Renko and I couldn't help but exchange knowing glances. I wasn't surprised to hear that Mokou would want a shot at Seija. If you are, please refer to my previous casefile.

"This is going to get bad... In addition to Kagerou and Wakasagihime, who you both already know, it seems like there's a bunch of other youkai getting involved in this for the sake of the reward too. I'll just come out and say it now: no matter who comes and asks for your help, you're not to go looking for that amanojaku, understand?"

"Understood. What are you going to do about this though, Miss Keine? Are you going to look for her?"

"Normally I'd leave this sort of thing to Reimu, but this recent incident affected a lot of people in the village because of all the tsukumogami it created. The village can't just let something like that go without a response, and of all the members of the neighborhood watch, I'm probably the best suited for this sort of thing. I'm going to go track her down. While I'm gone, I'd like the two of you to take over my duties at the neighborhood watch."

I could finally see what she was intending. Our investigations, driven by Renko’s recklessness, had always been a source of stress for Keine. She’d allowed us a lot of freedom to decide how we spend our time up until now, but it seemed that given recent events, she’d finally reached her limit and decided it was time to put a leash on us. Honestly, I could hardly blame her given everything we’d been through.

Renko looked over at me with a pleading expression, as if to say 'what should I do?' I merely shrugged at her. When it came to capturing Seija, we were already involved in the case to a certain extent, but we couldn’t tell Keine about that. As far as I was concerned, obediently complying with Keine's request seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

"Miss Keine, I’m not really sure if I’m ready to handle the duties of the watch." Renko pleaded.

"Don’t worry, things are peaceful now. There’s no ongoing threats to the village and I’ll make sure that amanojaku can’t get anywhere near it. Besides, I'vealready asked Kotohime to show you the ropes. So everything should work out just fine. I take it there are no objections?"

She left the question hanging in the air. Renko looked over to me then to Sanae and finally back to Keine. Finally she lowered her head and bowed formally. "...No. I can't think of any reason to object. The Hifuu Detective Agency will accept your temporary deputization and join forces with the neighborhood watch."

"What!? Really!?" Sanae shouted, still trying to free herself from Keine's grasp. Keine turned her withering glare on the priestess, who stopped writhing, instead shrinking away from Keine like a frog before a snake.

Keine nodded to herself then turned and left, closing the door to our office behind her. A moment passed in stunned silence before Sanae spoke again. "...Miss Keine seems like she's a good person, but I'm really glad she's not my teacher. The kind of teachers who can scold you and not be wrong about it are the worst."


—3—


And so, by later that morning, the neighborhood watch office in the village square had become the new, temporary home of the Hifuu Detective Agency.

"Hey there, rookies. Welcome to the force." Kotohime said with her usual pleasant but listless drawl as we came in the door.

"Thanks, I guess. But aren't you going to go after that amanojaku too, Miss Kotohime?"

"I'd love to go. Chasing down a wanted criminal and slapping the cuffs on them is what all police officers live for, right? But I don't get to do that. Keine told me I had to stay here and look after you two and police officers have to follow the orders of their superiors."

"Aw, that has to be a real burden. How about this though, Kotohime: if you want to skip town and go bounty hunting and forget about making us part of the neighborhood watch, we'll cover for you."

"I can't do that, it wouldn't be following Keine's orders. Besides, there's a chance that the amanojaku could end up trying to hide inside the village." Kotohime said that with the same sleepy drawl she always spoke with, and smiled. We should have expected as much. Keine wouldn't be Keine if she hadn't made absolutely sure she could trust her subordinates before leaving, but Renko still sighed as Kotohime handed us a pair of black armbands.

Sanae, of course, had left us behind and was probably on her way to go hunt for Seija on her own by now. Not that I minded her going off on her own. If Sanae were to tag along with us and try to act as a member of the neighborhood watch instead, I'm sure things would end up getting very complicated very quickly.

"By the way," Kotohime continued, "Keine mentioned something about you trying to save someone. What's that about?"

"It's a request that our agency received from a client. That client happens to be a person of very few words, however, and so unfortunately they asked us to save someone here in the village, but neglected to tell us who exactly."

"Oh. That sounds like a kind of shady client. Should I go and talk to them?"

"No, even if I could tell you who our client was, they're not someone you could easily meet, Miss Kotohime. Do you have any idea who they might have been talking about?"

"Hmmm…. I dunno, there’s kinda a lot of people who might need saving, depending on what you mean by that…"

Kotohime had a point. The way the Youkai Sage’s request had been worded, ‘saving’ someone might have meant preserving their life, but it could just have easily meant that there was someone who needed help completing some vital task, someone who was in the midst of a spiritual crisis or even that someone was in a financial pinch. If it was that last one we wouldn't be much help though.

'There's someone who I need you to save.' Just that one sentence was becoming a complex riddle to figure out, just like the sort of exacting and overwrought analysis you might find in Harry Kemelman's 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑁𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑀𝑖𝑙𝑒 𝑊𝑎𝑙𝑘.

"The fact that your client was asking you two to save someone would mean that whoever it is would need saving in a way that you two could help with, right?"

"Probably."

"Well, there are some types of problems you could help someone with and some you couldn’t. Like if somebody needed a whole bunch of money, could you save them?"

"That would be impossible." Renko and I both responded at once.

"Exactly. If it were that sort of thing, your client would have gone to someone with money, or if it was a spiritual problem, they would have gone to a shrine or temple. If it was a medical issue they would have gone to a doctor, and if they were being attacked they would have gone to Keine or the Hakurei Shrine. But instead of doing that, this person came to you right? So they must need a type of help only you could give them."

Renko nodded, her fingers playing with the brim of her hat. "That makes sense."

The Youkai Sage needed some sort of help that only Renko and I could provide... what kind of help could that possibly be?

"Merry. What's something we can do that no one else can? If our client had come to me directly then I would have expected that they must have heard of my established track record as Gensokyo's top negotiator."

"What track record? You're a negotiator who only butts in when your services are unwanted and you've only ever solved ridiculous problems."

"Come on, work with me here."

In my mind, Renko's talents lay more in getting people who wanted to work together to apply their efforts effectively rather than negotiating to get parties to see eye to eye. The fact that the sort of things she was skilled at and the sort of things she was interested in doing were two parallel lines that would never meet was really a bit of a tragedy.

"Maybe it has something to do with all the youkai you guys know," Kotohime suggested. "Someone in the village might want to do business with a youkai and need you to act as a middle man."

"Hmm, I suppose that could be it," Renko admitted, crossing her arms and looking up.

"I'll go and make us all some tea," Kotohime suggested. Saying that, she stood up and shuffled out of the room.

Once she was gone, I turned and whispered to my partner. "Renko, don't you think this situation is probably just straightforward?"

"What do you mean?"

"The Youkai Sage told us that this request would be a clue that would lead us to Usami Sumireko. If you think about it, there's one thing we have that no one else in Gensokyo would."

"I see what you're saying... You're thinking that knowing the future of the Outside World might be important here."

Being as Renko and I had come from the Scientific Century to Gensokyo at the beginning of the 21st century, we had a bit of historical knowledge of things that might still be yet to occur in the Outside World.

"The Youkai Sage said she wanted us to save someone in the village though, right? I don't see how knowledge of the future history of the Outside World would help with that... What's supposed to be happening in history right now? Isn't this about when the coronavirus pandemic started? Maybe we should go talk to Eirin at Eientei..."

"I'm pretty sure that's a few years later. Besides, how would an infectious disease get into the human village? I haven't heard of any new Outsiders arriving recently and there isn't anyone in the village who can freely cross between here and the Outside World, is there?"

"Oh! Merry, that's it!" Renko declared, suddenly looking up.

"What's it? I mean what's what?"

"The Youkai Sage said that looking into Raiko was me being on the right track, right? Do you remember what Raiko told us when she figured out who it was that I resembled?"

"She mentioned that she was a drum from the Outside World, so—Ah! I get it!"

Renko nodded vigorously at me. "She's a tool from the Outside World and because of that she was able to connect to the other side of the barrier and draw power from humans outside of Gensokyo. A drum is just a tool, meaning that, as an object, it can pass through the Hakurei barrier without issue. What if there were a tool for communication that had connected across the barrier? If there were something like that, then someone on this side might have used it to talk to my great aunt!"

Suddenly realizing that she had been shouting in excitement, Renko glanced toward the door to make sure Kotohime hadn't come back yet then tugged the brim of her hat down and leaned toward me to whisper.

"Hey Merry. I know we agreed not to contact my great aunt in case we were the cause of her coma, but what if she found out about Gensokyo from someone else?"

I couldn't help but let out a small gasp. "...You think there's someone here who would have taught her about Gensokyo?"

"Exactly! And by doing so, they might endanger both themselves and my great aunt! That's probably who we need to save, Merry! We just need to find out who it is!" Renko stood up.

At just that moment Kotohime came back through the door, carrying a tray with three cups of tea. She looked over at the excited expression on Renko's face. "Oh, is something wrong?"

"Please excuse us, Miss Kotohime. I think it's time Constable Merry and I commenced our first patrol of the village. We'll be heading out now."

Renko grabbed my hand and began walking swiftly out of the room. She brushed right past Kotohime, but stopped short with a gasp of surprise as she did. I looked over to see Kotohime's hand clamped tight around the shoulder of Renko's trenchcoat, holding her in place as her fingers pressed into the fabric.

"Yeah, naaah~" Kotohime drawled sleepily. "I don't think you're gonna do that."

"Um, Miss Kotohime, could you let me go?"

"One of Keine's other orders was that I make sure that you don't use your position as a member of the watch to do anything foolish or selfish. So I think the best thing to do would be to just sit down and have some tea."

"But, the patrol..." Renko whined weakly, wincing as Kotohime's grip tightened even further.

"I already poured the tea, Renko. Let’s just all sit down and enjoy it."

Beneath Kotohime's hand the trenchcoat creaked slightly. Kotohime's eyes were closed and the placid smile on her face had taken on a slightly frightening edge.

"Ah, that hurts, that hurts! Okay, let's have some tea! Tea for everyone!"

"Okay, let's just take it easy~" Kotohime drawled, releasing her. Renko rubbed her shoulder as she turned and headed back toward the table. I could only shrug my shoulders and sigh at Renko.