東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Epilogue: Hisoutensoku

—Epilogue—


It's impossible to know if Renko's giant robot show really achieved anything or not, but in the weeks afterward, the rumors about a daidarabocchi died down and eventually vanished completely. That wasn't the end of our troubles, however.

—

"Why are people telling me that that village is being protected by Hisoutensoku instead of the Hakurei shrine maiden now!?"

This complaint had come, predictably enough, from Reimu, who was standing in the doorway, glaring daggers at Renko. The sounds of her shouts were enough to disturb the family of birds living on the roof of the storehouse. At the time that Reimu stormed in asking this, Sanae happened to be in our office, and she was the first to answer, smiling sweetly as she did.

"It's because the village was protected from a giant youkai by me and Hisoutensoku! Their faith is grounded in provable, reliable results."

"What giant youkai? Marisa spilled everything, it was just Alice's doll! Renko, this was all your idea, wasn't it!? You may not be a youkai but if you've become a full-time henchman of the Moriya Shrine, that's just as bad! Villager or not, it's time I did something about you."

"Renko and Merry aren't henchmen, Reimu, they're just worshipers at my shrine."

"No one's taking any business from you, Reimu. It was just a bit of harmless entertainment. We don't even have Hisoutensoku anymore, we gave it to Alice as payment for her cooperation, so there's no danger of the Moriya Shrine using it for any nefarious schemes."

"You gave it to Alice? Don't you mean Rinnosuke? I saw it all folded up at Kourindou."

"What? Sanae, you gave it to Alice, I thought."

"She definitely took it..."

"Maybe she's renting some storage space from Kourindou. It's probably too big to fit inside her house, even all folded up."

When I pointed that out both Renko and Sanae both clapped their fists into their hands, saying "Oh, I see" in unison. After that, Renko turned her attention back to Reimu. "At any rate, it's out of our hands now, so calm down, Reimu. The whole reason we had to have that giant robot show in the first place was for your sake, after all."

"Huh? Me?" Reimu frowned suspiciously at Renko.

"You were the one saying that Merry and I should do something to keep the rumors about a daidarabocchi from spreading after all. That's why I came up with the idea of creating a big spectacle in which a stand-in for the daidarabocchi was defeated by Hisoutensoku. Now that everyone's seen the daidarabocchi be destroyed, there's no threat of it materializing, right?"

Reimu stood for a moment, glaring at Renko without speaking. "Basically, you're telling me that this is all my fault for letting myself be fooled into believing something Cirno told me and I should be grateful that you cleaned it up for me," she muttered.

"Well, I wasn't going to put it that bluntly," Renko said with a grin.

Perhaps feeling a little guilty for being so easily talked into believing Cirno, Reimu frowned and looked away. "Alright, fine. You saved the village from a made-up threat for me. Why'd you use one of Alice's dolls though? If you wanted a scary youkai to destroy, why not ask the temple to let you exterminate their Nyuudo. That would have been closer to a daidarabocchi, right?"

"Well we had to go with one of Alice's dolls because that's what the daidarabocchi was to begin with."

"What?"

Reimu stared at Renko, completely dumbfounded, so we quickly explained about Alice's Goliath Doll Spell and how that had been the basis for Cirno's belief in the daidarabocchi.

"What was she planning? Why would she be trying to make a gigantic doll?"

"Apparently she got the idea after seeing how big Suika could get."

"Suika?" Reimu crossed her arms and frowned while looking up at the ceiling for a moment. "So basically, this is all Suika's fault."

"Well, I suppose so, but it depends on how you draw the line of cause and effect.."

"Alice saw Suika get gigantic, came up with the idea to make one of her dolls that big, Cirno saw it and thought it was a youkai, which set this whole incident in motion and resulted in you staging a ridiculous fight outside of the village, right?"

"You can certainly trace a chain of events like that if you like."

"So it's all Suika's fault... Well enough about that for now; the important thing is that Hisoutensoku won't be coming back on its own, right? Alice would have to find some way to make it move again first. Do I have that right?"

"Yes, you do. Hisoutensoku needs the power of a geyser to inflate it. I don't think Alice could manage something that large on her own."

"Good. What happened to the daidarabocchi doll? Does Alice still have that?"

"She does. It was only pretending to be defeated. Alice set up a bunch of gunpowder pyrotechnics as part of the ruse but the doll is still intact."

"So then she could make it big again? That would cause the rumors of a daidarabocchi to start back up, wouldn't it?"

"Not on her own. With just her power it can't even get close to that size. She needed the cooperation of Marisa, Patchouli and Miss Byakuren to make it as big as Hisoutensoku. There's a chance someone might see it again, but there's no way they would think it was big enough to be a daidarabocchi."

Reimu grunted. "Hmph. I admit, it seems like you were thinking ahead. "

"Lady Suwako was also worried about a divine artifact like Hisoutensoku becoming a tsukumogami if it was just discarded, so she made Alice promise to take good care of it and maintain it."

"I suppose I can't really complain then. You've cleaned up your own mess and one of mine too. I'm grateful, I guess, but if you're going to do something like this in the future tell me ahead of time."

"Well, I would have liked to involve you Reimu, but I figured you would have insisted on being the one to defeat the daidarabocchi..."

"Of course! Protecting the village is my job. It 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 have been me defeating that thing!"

Renko always manages to say the wrong thing. Just when Reimu was on the verge of calming down, too. What could I do but shake my head and sigh.

"You two really have become Moriya cultists. And you're the one leading them on!" Reimu said, pointing accusingly at Sanae. "Just how much of my shrine's business are you going to steal!?"

"It's not stealing if you're not making any sort of effort to gather faith for yourself."

Reimu growled at Sanae’s words, her shoulders tightening.
"Fine! Whatever! I’m sick of dealing with this! Whenever Renko gets involved in anything it always ends up this way! I'm going home!"

Without another word she spun on her heel and stomped out of the entryway, leaving the door open as she floated off into the sky. From what I heard, she flew straight home and spent the rest of the day bombarding Suika with danmaku without warning, making full use of rather unsportsmanlike invincibility powers to shoot at Suika with impunity until she was completely satisfied. Rest in peace, Suika.

◇

It was quite understandable why Reimu might have been so angry about not being the one to save the village from the daidarabocchi.

"Hisoutensoku has arrived! Eat this, villains!"

"Grrraaah, you beat me...KABOOM!"

"The village is saved! Hisoutensoku wins!"

Since then, all of the children in the village have been playing Hisoutensoku. Even at the temple school, we have children in the courtyard waving tree branches at each other as if they were Onbashira.

"Classes are over for the day, kids. Time to go home before someone puts an eye out."

Keine clapped her hands and the children ran off, saying "Okay! Bye, teacher" over their shoulders as they did so. Keine stood with her hands on her hips, watching them go and shaking her head before turning and coming back into the staff room with a dumbfounded expression on her face.

"If you do something like this again please try not to make the children play strange games."

"Pretending to be heroes is a pretty standard game for children in the Outside World."

"The children have plenty of heroes in their life to look up to already. They should be looking up to the adults in their lives who work day in and day out to make this village a safe place for them to live, not some giant doll."

"Well it's our job as adults to teach them that, right?"

"I suppose so..."

This time around I had been able to convince Renko that it was better for both of us to get Keine's permission to stage the battle between Hisoutensoku and the daidarabocchi ahead of time rather than surprise her with the event. I doubt Keine had really envisioned just how much a spectacle the show was going to be when she said yes though. When we saw her immediately after the conclusion of the fight she had a pretty unhappy expression on her face.

"Hisoutensoku is an imaginary hero, but the children who admire him want to become heroes themselves and protect others. That's the true duty of a hero."

"So Hisoutensoku is an embodiment of an ideal, is that what you’re getting at?"

"More or less. It's more effective to get children to want to be good people on their own than to just tell them that that's what they should aspire to, right?"

"I suppose you're right," she said with a sigh and a momentary glower at Renko. "I just wish it hadn't been so violent. Someone's going to get injured if the kids keep chasing each other around with sticks."

"Well there won't be any more appearances of Hisoutensoku so I'm sure all the excitement will die down soon."

"I hope so," she sighed as the cheers and cries of the numerous children still in the yard rose and fell across the grounds of the temple school.

—

With Hisoutensoku in Alice's hands, and her having no way to power it, it seemed likely that the memories of the protector god would fade. However, even as we entered autumn, we were still hearing the story of the village's invincible defender, despite the fact that there had been no more sightings of Hisoutensoku. Perhaps the longevity of this story had something to do with the villagers already having become familiar with Hisoutensoku due to the kappa bazaar, or maybe the show Renko had put on was more captivating than we had anticipated.

Perhaps Hisoutensoku's enduring popularity was a sign of just how little entertainment was available to the children of the village, or maybe it was the mystique of something that appeared only briefly then vanished, never to be seen again, unlike Reimu, who appeared regularly.

We figured there was no harm in that. After all, even if the rumors about Hisoutensoku grew so persistent that they caused a youkai to be born, that youkai would likely be the 'youkai of protecting the human village.' With that in mind, we were quite optimistic that everything would turn out well…

◇

"Well detectives, you've really done it now. Honestly it was foolish of me to entrust something like this to a pair of humans."

Once again Renko and I were in a dream, with Doremy Sweet floating before us and looking down on us with something between contempt and dismay.

"What's the point of hiring you two to solve a crisis if you're just going to replace it with another one? Now I've got to clean up a completely different mess."

"Hold on, what do you mean?"

"You'll see soon enough. My workload has increased tremendously and now there are all sorts of gaps between the Dream World and Gensokyo that could be exploited. I don't have time for this. You two better fix things properly this time!" With that, Doremy disappeared, leaving the two of us standing alone in the bare and infinite plain of the Dream World.

—

A few days after we had that dream, we were sitting in our office when we were once more met with a knock on our door, accompanied by a cheerful greeting of "Hello, hello, good afternoon!" from the other side.

I opened the door to find Shameimaru Aya smiling happily up at me from the other side, dressed in the same newsboy-styled outfit that I suppose served her as a human disguise. We invited her in and she wasted no time in producing a printed flyer from her bag.

"We've been discussing the possibility of holding another Futuristic Water Youkai Bazaar. This time with the official co-operation of the tengu, and on an even larger scale than before."

"Really?"

She handed the flyer to me. A glossy picture had been printed in bold colors on it. It was an image of Hisoutensoku standing tall. I recognized the art style as belonging to the same tengu who had drawn the action manga that Aya had shown us before.

"Hisoutensoku seems to be very popular in the village right now," she continued, "so one of the key features will be the sale of Hisoutensoku-themed merchandise."

"Wait, you're monetizing Hisoutensoku's design now?"

"Yes, that's the plan. We have Hisoutensoku dolls, sleepwear with Hisoutensoku prints, Hisoutensoku pencil cases and stationary sets, Hisoutensoku masks, and Hisoutensoku candy, all targeted at human children."

It was like a fully realized character merchandising plan. A shrewd, if nakedly capitalistic business model.

"Do you think marketing kappa and tengu-made goods toward the children of the village is a good idea?"

"Ayaya, that's already been addressed. The goods are going to be sold by the Moriya Shrine. We tengu will only be handling the back end of things."

Renko paused for a moment, looking at the flyer thoughtfully. "This merchandising scheme was all Lady Suwako's idea to begin with, wasn't it?"

"You guessed it! It seems a little worldly for a goddess to me, but then again I suppose the charms and fortune-telling slips sold at shrines are basically character merchandising for the gods, so it's only fitting that they should merchandise the character of their divine creation."

"Well, alright. What do you need us for then, did you want us to act as consultants and help you to come up with ideas for Hisoutensoku merchandise?"

"No, no," Aya said, shaking her head. "I'd like to get your opinion on this instead."

Saying that, Aya reached into her bag and pulled out a bound volume with a glossy cover. The image on the cover of it was identical to the image on the flyer. I'm not sure if the book had used the flyer as a cover or vice versa but between the two of them there was only one difference—the cover of the book had bold 3D lettering across the top, spelling out a title: 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐓𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐧 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐤𝐮.

"Miss Shameimaru, is that another volume of tengu manga?"

"Yes, it's our second prototype!" she declared with a big smile. "After reflecting on our previous failure, we decided to work directly with the Moriya Shrine this time, who provided us with a story and manuscript as well as guidance on the use of stylistic techniques used in Outsider manga. The quality should overall be dramatically improved. We've even included a detailed battle between the Giant Robot Hisoutensoku—the village's defender—and the evil youkai planning to destroy Gensokyo!"

I glanced over at Renko with a worried expression.

"Please, have a look and tell me what you think."

"Sure..." Renko said, picking up the book. She flipped open the cover and began to read it carefully, seeming to peruse each panel with a great deal more concern than she had with the previous issue. About 20 minutes later she handed it to me. The serious expression on her face filled me with an uncomfortable apprehension as I thumbed the book open and began reading it.

As Aya had promised, it was much more interesting than the previous tengu manga. From the opening, which depicted a mysterious, mist-shrouded giant striding through the forest, to the dynamic depictions of the fight scenes, everything in the manga was a vast improvement. Even the portrayal of the characters left little to complain about. Once Hisoutensoku made a proper appearance on the page, it felt properly awe-inspiring, while the evil youkai was depicted as terrifying, cruel and powerful. It was definitely high quality enough to be sold in stores.

There was, however, one twist to the story which definitely stood out. After I finished reading it, I turned to Renko, who nodded at me with a serious expression.

Renko met my eyes then turned to Aya with a concerned look. "It's an excellent manga, Miss Shameimaru, however there's one thing I'd like to ask. The evil youkai's ultimate technique... where did the idea to have him punch the ground to awaken a giant catfish and cause a devastating earthquake come from?"

"The artist responsible for this volume had a dream in which Hisoutensoku struck the ground, causing an earthquake, so they decided to put that in. It would be a bit too brutal of an attack for a hero to use though, so they gave it to the villains. It's perfect, don't you think?"

In my mind I could see exactly how the scenario would play out according to Gensokyo's logic. If this manga was produced and sold at the bazaar it was sure to be an instant bestseller. Hisoutensoku was still popular with children from all walks of life and something like 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑢𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝑇𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑛 𝐻𝑖𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑜𝑘𝑢 would spread amongst the village's young readers like a wildfire. Hisotensoku itself would no doubt be reused as an advertising balloon. Once that happened, it wouldn’t be long before the people would be clamoring for another spectacular fight between their beloved protector and a giant youkai. Even if there were no other giant youkai around, the village’s desire to see a worthy adversary fight Hisoutensoku meant that sooner or later a youkai like that was bound to appear.

"Come on, tell me what you thought of it! Let me hear your honest opinion, no matter how frank," Aya prodded, her eyes sparkling with anticipation. She almost certainly had no idea that whoever was behind this manga was being manipulated through their dreams. If that was the case then it was entirely possible that Renko and I were the only people in Gensokyo capable of preventing another incident from occurring.

"Renko, what should we do?" I whispered, raising my hand and leaning towards her.

"How should I know?"

"Well, this is your mess, isn't it? You're the negotiator here, couldn't you try to talk them out of this?"

"I'm just a great detective."

Aya tilted her head curiously as we whispered back and forth.

It was a difficult problem. How could we stop the distribution of the manga in the village without hurting Miss Shameimaru who was understandably proud of her much-improved creation. Was it even possible to stop the kappa from running another Futuristic Water Youkai Bazaar at this point?

Unfortunately there isn't space here for me to relate the details of all of the terrible struggles my partner endured trying to negotiate things after that. Instead, I will close this case with the words that Renko exasperatedly shouted once it all over:

"Merry, remind me never to resolve an incident again!"

—

Until next time, dear readers. This is Maéreverie Hearn, the less-troublesome half of the Hifuu Detective Agency signing off. I wish you well.

[𝐄𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝟏𝟎 - 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐤𝐮]




𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝:

Thank you for reading this far once again.

As always thank you all for your comments as well. I am Asagihara Shinobu, the author.

Initially I had never planned to do a Hisoutensoku story, but as various aspects of the Dream World were recently revealed in AoCF, I started to wonder, could Meiling's dream in Hisoutensoku actually have saved all of Gensokyo?

This novel is what emerged from that daydream.

The story of Hisoutensoku is rather odd compared to the story of most incidents, so I thought it would be fitting if this novel took a different approach as well. I hope you enjoyed it.

While I was writing this though, I really got to thinking — Paradigm City from 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐵𝑖𝑔 𝑂 really is a lot like Gensokyo, isn't it?

At any rate, the next story will be Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires. I look forward to the beginning of its serialization soon. Until then, thank you for your continued support of the Hifuu Detective Agency.