The Strongest Little Brother’s Commonplace Encounters with the Bizarre?!

by Tsuyoshi Fujitaka

  “Oh?” Yuichi asked, disinterestedly. “So what interesting things do they do?”

  “They undo your Twitter follows!” Mutsuko proclaimed with a terror-stricken expression.

  “Uh... so? If you unfollow someone, just follow them again.” Yuichi was dumbstruck by how pointless it sounded.

  Aiko, for her part, just looked confused.

  “What are you saying?” Mutsuko exclaimed. “You unfollow without realizing it! The person who got unfollowed will be all like, ‘Why did they unfollow me? Do they hate me?’ It undermines human relationships! It hinders communication! It’s a terrible yokai!”

  “Um, if you’re really friends, you could probably just say ‘I’m sorry’ and fix it...” Aiko suggested. She didn’t seem to understand the danger of it.

  Yuichi felt the same way; it seemed pretty easy for two people to get over something like that.

  “But it’s not just that... what they do on Twitter is just a side job,” Kanako said, her tone chilling. “The real horror is when they take away your faves on internet fiction sites! I’ve worked hard to improve my stories to get more faves, and then all of a sudden, they just went down. It’s just terrible...”

  When a reader on a fiction site liked a story, and wanted to read more, they’d add it to their favorites. Having your story added to a lot of people’s favorites — in other words, having a large number of “faves” — was proof of your work’s popularity. Rankings were based on faves, too, so increasing those was one of the goals of the amateur author.

  “Maybe they just took them off because they started to find the story boring...” Yuichi said thoughtlessly, then immediately regretted it.

  Kanako turned her eyes away in shock, then bowed her head forlornly.

  “Oh, Yu, you’re so mean! You hurt Orihara’s feelings!” Mutsuko exclaimed.

  “Sakaki! That was going way too far!” Aiko burst out.

  “Huh? Oh, uh, sorry...” Yuichi apologized sincerely while rebuked by both of them.

  He was outnumbered, so making excuses wouldn’t work, and he really was in the wrong this time.

  But Mutsuko continued to pursue the matter. “Yu! A mere apology won’t restore Orihara’s smile!”

  “U-Um, well, if you would go out with me again to do more research...” Kanako timidly raised her face, suggesting the blow really hadn’t been that great.

  “Um, helping you research won’t restore the lost faves, though,” Aiko pointed out. “Besides, your book is already published. Why do you need faves on a website?” Her voice was calm, but she looked a little sour about the whole thing.

  “O-Oh, but... oh, that’s right! Internet popularity can affect sales! So I need to do research to get more popular...” Kanako’s voice continued shrinking, probably because the book she was currently writing didn’t require research. In that regard, Kanako was very honest.

  Unwilling to remain locked in the awkward atmosphere, Yuichi stood up and made the declaration. “Okay! So I just have to beat up this fave-stealer yokai, right?”

  He didn’t really understand it, but if it was the thing removing her faves, then beating it up should solve the problem.

  “I’m not sure this is a problem you can solve with punching...” Aiko muttered.

  Yuichi pretended not to hear.

  After finishing club activities, Yuichi, Mutsuko, and Aiko headed for an internet cafe in the shopping district.

  Kanako decided to go home early, saying she shouldn’t stay out too late.

  “So, does this fave-stealer yokai do its hacking here?” Yuichi asked suspiciously.

  It was extremely hard to believe. Why would a yokai hang out in a place like this?

  “Yes, I’m sure of it!” Mutsuko declared. “I ran a scrupulous investigation, and I found out that the recent fave-removals have all been done from this cafe!” She pointed boldly at the net cafe.

  A “Cheapest in Town!” banner hung streaming in front of the entrance.

  When Yuichi had said he’d beat up the fave-stealer, Mutsuko had started running some kind of investigation on the club room’s computer. She had apparently found the fave-stealer very quickly.

  “Um, how do you know that?” Aiko asked uncertainly. Aiko wasn’t particularly internet savvy, so it was natural that she wouldn’t understand.

  “I hacked into the fiction site’s server and checked the personal history of all the users who’d recently removed their faves!” Mutsuko declared. “There, I found a very suspicious pattern! An unnatural number of users were accessing the internet from the net cafe’s IP when they removed their faves! It’s got to be connected!”

  “Sis, could you not proclaim your felonies loud enough for everyone to hear?” Yuichi asked wearily.

  The three entered the cafe, checked in, and headed for an open booth. Aiko was looking all around curiously; she must never have been to an internet cafe before.

  With drinks in their hands, they took their seats.

  “Will that IP thing tell you where they’re sitting? And if they’re even here or not?” Aiko asked, sounding like she really didn’t get it at all.

  “No problem,” Mutsuko said confidently. “It looks like he’s still on the net right now. I planted some spyware into the server which is feeding me information in real time. He seems to be unfaving at tremendous speeds, so we just need to find someone who looks like they’re doing that!”

  Mutsuko showed off her smartphone proudly. Incomprehensible lines of letters and numbers streamed across the screen. Yuichi had no idea what she was showing him, but he had a vague inkling that it was probably illegal.

  “Even so, would someone like that really do it out in public?” Yuichi asked. “If he got a private room, we can’t just barge in...”

  Yuichi looked around.

  He was there.

  There was a person in an open booth in the corner, busy manipulating his computer. Above the person’s head were the words “Fave-Stealer.”

  That removed all doubt. Yuichi didn’t know if this person was a yokai or not, but he was clearly messing around on the internet.

  “That’s him.” Yuichi pointed surreptitiously.

  “Huh?” Aiko asked. “How’d you... oh, yeah! Of course you’d know.”

  Yuichi’s Soul Reader let him read the label over someone’s head and identify what they were. It was an extremely useful talent for a situation like this, though if he ever ended up in a mystery story, he would probably be insufferable.

  “Well, now that we’ve found him, what do we do?” Yuichi asked. He couldn’t just attack someone in the middle of an internet cafe.

  “Let’s drag him home!” Mutsuko declared. “Then we’ll interrogate him about removing Orihara’s faves!”

  “Drag him... I don’t know about that...”

  “It’s okay! He’s a yokai! It’s okay to abduct and confine them!” Mutsuko announced.

  “I’m... not sure I agree with that...”

  It seemed wrong to decide a guy messing around on a computer in an internet cafe must be a yokai and abduct him. But just watching him wasn’t solving anything, so Yuichi decided to talk to the fave-stealer.

  Slowly, Yuichi approached.

  The fave-stealer was small in stature, with a hood covering his face. The fact that you couldn’t see his face at a glance suggested he was trying to hide it.

  “Hello. Could I talk to you?” Yuichi asked.

  The fave-stealer failed to respond, too absorbed in his computer. Annoyed, Yuichi reached for the hood.

  “What are you doing?!” the person shouted, turning around angrily.

  “Huh?” Yuichi paused for a minute.

  It was a girl.

  The fact that she clearly wasn’t human further added to Yuichi’s shock: she had round ears on top of her head.

  “Ah?!” Realizing he had seen her ears, the girl quickly replaced the hood, and stood up in a panic.

  The next thing he knew, she was running for the door to the cafe.
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  “What should I do?!” Yuichi shouted.

  “Chase her, of course!” Mutsuko declared heroically.

  Yuichi and the others flew out of the net cafe in pursuit.

  “I can’t tell which way she went!” Yuichi shouted.

  Just outside the cafe was the throng of the shopping district. It would be difficult to find her mixed into all this.

  “Sakaki! The labels! Search the labels!” Aiko cried.

  “Oh, that’s right!” At Aiko’s prompting, Yuichi started looking around. He could see the label “Fave-Stealer” retreating into the distance.

  “This way!” Yuichi pointed in the direction the girl was going.

  It was hard to get by with so many people passing through, but the girl was in the same boat. The chase lasted for a while with no change in the distance between them.

  It was possible she’d get away, at this rate. But just as Yuichi was starting to panic, the situation changed.

  The girl was accosted by someone who led her into a back street.

  “What happened?” he wondered.

  “They seemed like they knew each other... yokai buddies, maybe?” Aiko asked.

  “It looked a little more threatening than that...” he said.

  They turned down the alley to pursue the girl.

  “Hey! Let me go!” the girl screamed.

  “What, don’t I even get a hello? Huh? You forget who’s on top around here?” The person who had grabbed the girl was a tall, gangly man with silver accessories jangling all over his body. Not exactly a respectable person. Above his head was the label “Scythe-Weasel.”

  “The scythe-weasel is a yokai, right?” Yuichi asked.

  “Huh? No way! That’s what he is?” Mutsuko exclaimed. “That’s a kama-itachi, a seriously major yokai! But he’s so seedy-looking! He looks like just your standard hoodlum!”

  He wondered what image she’d had of the kama-itachi that had spurred Mutsuko to criticize a man she’d never met before.

  The “scythe-weasel,” or “kama-itachi,” was, as the name suggested, a yokai weasel with scythes for hands. But unlike the fave-stealer, this one appeared human at a glance.

  The man released the girl and slammed her roughly against the wall.

  The blow had clearly left her staggered. Looking like she was in pain, she met Yuichi’s eyes.

  “Run, you guys! This is no time to be chasing me!” the girl cried, clearly at her wits’ end.

  “Huh? You were followed by humans?” the scythe-weasel asked. “Pathetic little... Ah, well. Curse your bad fortune and give up, humans...”

  The kama-itachi smiled eerily and as it advanced on them.

  ✽✽✽✽✽

  The osaki was a yokai said to take the form of a weasel. It existed to explain disparities in wealth.

  In the olden days, brokers came to villages to buy up various resources. When these brokers decided on the price for the goods they were buying, they used scales. The yokai known as osaki liked scales, and would sit on top of them whenever they were set out.

  Some osaki liked to sit on the plate side of the scale, while others liked to perch on the weight. Therefore, a house that had an osaki living in the plate of their scale would be paid a little more for their goods, while the houses with an osaki living on the weight would be paid a little less.

  The reason this yokai was thought up was to avoid discord in these small villages. Two people thought they were doing the same thing, yet they received different results: one house became wealthy, while one house became poor.

  In reality, they saw different results because they were doing different things, but there was no way for them to know that. They were just trying to avoid the discrimination and jealousy that came from differences in wealth. By wisely leaving things vague, the villagers had somehow managed to muddle through.

  There was no difference in the families themselves, they’d claimed. It all came down to what kind of osaki lived with you.

  That was the reason the osaki yokai was born.

  ✽✽✽✽✽

  “And so, the osaki has adapted to the modern internet environment and become the fave-stealer!” Mutsuko declared.

  “Y-Yeah,” said the fave-stealer. “It’s not like I’m doing it to be mean. I’m just trying to stave off feelings of unfairness by letting people blame me for their lost faves. I’m basically like... yeah, a scapegoat! A sacrificial lamb!”

  “But you’re a weasel,” Mutsuko said.

  The round ears on top of her head did look like those of a weasel, but Yuichi didn’t know enough about animals to judge at a glance whether they were weasel ears.

  “You seemed to be working pretty hard to me,” Aiko pointed out, her demeanor chilly.

  Yuichi, Mutsuko, Aiko, and the fave-stealer were in Yuichi’s room on the second floor of the Sakaki household. Yoriko had said she’d be hanging out with friends before coming home, so she wasn’t here at the moment.

  “W-Well, I do like to imagine the faces of the people acting depressed after their faves go down,” the fave-stealer said with a wicked grin.

  “But why do you always do it from the same internet cafe?” Yuichi asked. “It would be harder to track you if you changed it up a little.”

  “That place is the cheapest in town... but I’ll be more careful from now on,” she said.

  “I guess yokai have their worries, too...” Aiko, for some reason, seemed sympathetic.

  “But wow, I’m impressed that you beat that scythe-weasel!” the girl exclaimed. “They’re the strongest there are in the weasel biz! I’ve never seen a yokai beaten up that badly! It was really something!”

  “What else is there in ‘the weasel biz’?” Yuichi asked.

  “I guess you did manage to settle it with punching, Sakaki...” Aiko said with a weary sigh.

  Yuichi had taken down the kama-itachi down with a single front-kick. It had been about to do something, but Yuichi had no intention of waiting to see what it was. After he’d taken out the kama-itachi, the fave-stealer had been happy to do whatever he said, and so they’d brought her back to Yuichi’s house.

  “Oh! But scythe-weasels are actually a trio,” Mutsuko said. “The remaining two might come back for revenge...”

  The yokai kama-itachi existed to explain sudden, inexplicable cuts people got when they were walking around.

  They had originally been known as the kamae-tachi (“readied sword”), but that term had been corrupted to “kama-itachi” (“scythe-weasel”). As the name might suggest, it didn’t originally have anything to do with weasels.

  There were a lot of legends about the kama-itachi, and one of them was that they acted as trios: one to trip the person, one to cut them, and one to apply medicine so that the wound wouldn’t bleed.

  “But I don’t really get the point of it,” Yuichi said. “Why go out of their way to heal the wound after they caused it?”

  It was there to explain why the wounds wouldn’t bleed, but it still felt pretty random. He wished people would give a bit more thought to these things.

  “I’m not sure,” said the girl. “They’ve never told me. I’m the lowest of the low in the weasel biz, so it’s not like I get to have in-depth chats with the kama-itachi. He mostly just bullies me, like you saw before...”

  “Seriously, what is ‘the weasel biz’?” Yuichi asked. “What business do you do?”

  The fave-stealer still hadn’t answered his question about that.

  “Yu, it’s simple!” Mutsuko declared. “The healing at the end was their goal from the start! They don’t actually care about the tripping and the cutting! The healing is their goal, because they’re testing the medicine’s effectiveness! They’re researching wound salves!”

  “The kama-itachi are there to explain sudden wounds, aren’t they?” Yuichi asked. “Don’t you think you’re getting it backwards?” Her explanation raised questions of when their research would finally bear fruit. “Well, we’ve got her back here. What do we
do now, Sis?”

  “Good question,” said Mutsuko. “We know she’s an osaki now, so the answer is simple! We just need to do an osaki-barai!”

  Osaki-barai: a ritual to drive an osaki from the scales it was sitting on. It was said that villagers in the old days took those rituals quite seriously.

  “Hey, give me a break!” the fave-stealer said quickly. She probably didn’t want to undergo such a ritual.

  “Let’s not,” said Yuichi. “I’d feel bad exorcising her. We just need to do something about Orihara’s faves... so, stop doing things to make Orihara sad, okay?”

  “You’re the one who made her sad, Yu,” said Mutsuko.

  “Would you give that a rest?” Yuichi couldn’t help but grimace. “I apologized, okay?”

  “Very well. I will never again interfere with this Orihara person!” the fave-stealer swore earnestly.

  The next day...

  “S-Sakaki! I-It’s number one! I’m number one!” Kanako rushed into the club room in a tizzy, cell phone in hand.

  Yuichi, Mutsuko, and Aiko all peered at the cell phone’s screen. The fiction publishing site ranking was on it, and Kanako’s story My Demon Lord Is Too Cute to Kill and Now the World Is in Danger! was ranked number one for the day.

  “Th-This is...” Mutsuko’s eyes opened in surprise. “Orihara! This is the work of the yokai fave-adder!”

  “What?! What’s that? Isn’t it good if it adds them?” Kanako seemed purely happy about it, and thus was dubious about Mutsuko’s reaction.

  “It’s a new, bad yokai that just appeared recently!” she exclaimed. “It creates multiple accounts and increases your faves from a single access point, which makes it look like the novel’s author is doing something shady! It’s more dangerous than the fave-stealer, since accounts accused of skewing rankings could be deleted!”

  “Um... Sis... that’s really a rude thing to say,” Yuichi said. “Maybe she just had a surge in popularity?”