The Maw of the Full Moon
Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
From the fissures of the red moon poured a voice like a wind of scraping metal.
It could have been a foreign tongue, or a wail, or the shudder of some rusted machine.
It was a sound no human ear was meant to bear; the moment it reached them, a cold numbness seized their chests.
“Grrrrngh……?”
“Grrrngh……?”
The savage cries of the hounds twisted into something uneasy.
The vast pack began to tremble as one, and from the frontmost ranks they slowly started to rise.
“Once it’s finished swallowing every monster…… nothing will be left.”
“G-good heavens…….”
The full moon was becoming something else entirely.
The rent it had torn open was no mere crack. It was a colossal mouth.
Through the endlessly widening black gash a golden tongue of flame twisted and writhed, and as if the world’s gravity itself had been inverted, the monsters began to be sucked into the air.
Grrrrrr.
Grrrrrr.
The hounds’ fierce barking transformed in an instant into terrified whimpers.
Their entire bodies tore free of the ground and shot upward.
As though some vast, invisible hand had plucked them up all at once, they rose in orderly fan-shaped ranks.
The sight of the hounds hanging en masse in midair was as unreal as an alien abduction.
Like the white searchlight of a UFO drawing its prey skyward, they were slowly absorbed into the beams of light spilling from the full moon’s maw.
Hina could not tear her eyes away, as if she had fallen under a spell.
“M-Minel…… the, the wheel…….”
The moment she stared at the moon devouring the monsters, a pain like something clawing at her brain flooded in.
An agony as if an ice pick were driving into her skull.
A pressure that seemed to twist her eyeballs from the inside out.
Hina loosed a soundless scream and finally clamped both hands over her head.
Her vision filled with a crimson fog of blood, and a metallic din rang endlessly inside her ears.
Her lips trembled as a moan slipped free.
“Aaaagh. Aagh.”
“Close your eyes!”
But Hina could not shut them of her own will.
Clutching her head with both hands, she strained to look away, yet her eyes remained locked on the full moon, unmoving.
Minel had no choice. He stretched a hand toward the torn-off door frame for balance and shielded Hina’s front with his own body.
“Ah…… ha…….”
The instant the full moon vanished from sight, Hina’s eyes closed and she collapsed into unconsciousness.
Minel hastily pinned the steering wheel with his knee, reached out, and pulled Hina’s thigh off the accelerator.
The car gradually lost speed and at last came to a stop.
He scrambled outside and checked whether any hounds were still pursuing them from behind.
Whether luck or misfortune, the hounds that had been chasing him now floated helplessly in the air, their legs thrashing pathetically as they drifted past overhead.
“…….”
What was unfolding defied ordinary accident; it was more like some heretical festival.
The black swarms of hounds were sliced away at precise angles, like pieces of a cake, and shoved one after another into the moon’s mouth.
The spectacle was horrific and yet, at the same time, strangely orderly.
Looked at another way, it was as if ink spilled across white paper: as the hounds were drawn into the moon’s maw they left behind a fan-shaped stain.
Minel felt a sudden throb in his temples. At the same time a heartbeat pulsed inside both of his eyes.
Even for someone who had witnessed countless mysteries, the scene of moon and hounds was a vision of pure madness capable of stirring a mystic’s trance.
“What a sight…….”
Shaking free of the trance, Minel quickly averted his gaze and checked on Hina. Fortunately she showed no serious injury.
After moving her into the passenger seat, he started the engine again and drove for home.
Once they arrived, Minel looked back toward the hounds.
There had been so many of them that the mad vision was still continuing.
“Minel! What—what the hell is that? Don’t tell me you did it?”
Steno came out of the house and shouted. The distance must have spared her the trance.
“No time. Just wait.”
Minel gestured to Isil, and in that instant the android streaked toward him.
The moment Isil’s arms locked around Minel’s waist, the world dropped away beneath his feet.
Vwoooooooom-!
The ground receded in a heartbeat; the car, the house, Hina and Steno shrank to the size of toys.
His heart seemed to leap into his throat, yet Isil’s mechanical strength never wavered.
Though he was merely being carried, Minel felt as if he himself had become an eagle.
A fierce wind hammered his face.
His breath flattened; a whistling pressure howled endlessly in his ears.
Minel instinctively squinted, yet the spectacle of full moon and hounds forced his eyelids open.
The moon’s mouth still gaped wide.
From below it had looked like simple suction, but up close it was different.
It was almost a grotesque festival procession.
Or a parade of corpses marching through a nightmare.
Then, at the far edge of that black lake, a rectangular passage came into view.
“There!”
Isil responded at once to Minel’s cry.
Lightning erupted from the android’s entire body as they changed course, and the vast surface of the moon filled Minel’s vision head-on.
Between the black-crimson fissures, at the spot one might call its brow—
there, astonishingly, was a clear rectangular hole, and above it a faint green light was blinking.
An emergency-exit sign.
A perfectly ordinary pictogram of a running human figure.
“Ha…… give me a break.”
Minel let out a short laugh.
He had half-expected it, yet he still hadn’t believed it would actually be true.
At the end of a nightmare vision, that little human sign.
Absurd—and yet, somehow, exactly like the Backrooms.
Time to head back.
Isil, reading Minel’s mind before he could speak, began the descent at once.
They punched through the dizzying altitude and set down again in the front yard of the house.
Everyone had gathered there. Hina had regained consciousness and was warning the others not to look at the full moon.
The instant his feet touched earth, Minel sucked in a breath and shouted.
“There’s an emergency stairway. Chori first! Hurry!”
Steno’s eyes went wide with shock; Chori, still not fully grasping the situation, approached in a daze.
Minel scooped her up at once and passed her to Isil.
With mechanical precision the android gathered Chori into its arms and rocketed skyward again.
After that, Hina, Steno, and then Riale……
One by one, Isil ferried them to the emergency stairway bored into the full moon’s brow.
There were no complications.
Yet with every passing moment the black lake of hounds was growing thinner.
“This is getting dangerous…….”
What had first been dense and heavy as black ink was now as faint as smoke.
The throng being sucked upward dwindled, and the full moon writhed as though it were about to snap its jaws shut.
Just then Isil returned.
“We’re going. Now.”
“Command acknowledged!”
Isil encircled Minel’s waist and shot straight up into the night sky.
But at that moment the full moon, as if enraged at not having filled its hunger, suddenly yawned its mouth wide open.
A ferocious suction force erupted; the skins of the remaining hounds were stripped away in an instant.
Not content with that, their limbs began to disintegrate and scatter through the air.
From the moon’s crack, now drowned in a deep, thick golden light, the same sound as before spilled forth once more.
Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
Whether language or hallucination, the sound made the very atmosphere vibrate.
At the same time the moon’s fissure grew even larger.
The storm-like suction it generated began to whip up whirlwinds on every side, as though determined to snatch Minel and Isil as well.
Even the moonlight pouring from its own body seemed about to be dragged back in.
“Fly!”
Minel felt Isil’s metal arms, straining against the pull, twist as though they might snap.
Their bodies pitched wildly forward and back; his vision spun.
It was like a golden vortex swirling across black paper, and at its heart the emergency stairway.
Isil poured out maximum output.
Vwooooooooooom-!
Trails of lightning scattered behind them like sparks.
Isil flew the way a fighter jet draws a razor line to dodge missiles.
Yet the full moon’s mouth only yawned wider along that same line.
As if it refused to let its prey escape.
“Higher! Faster!”
Minel shouted even louder.
Isil immediately carved a half-circle and went into a steep dive.
In the instant the sky inverted, a dizziness as if the entire world had been flipped washed over them.
Isil and Minel shot through the narrowing gap of the vortex.
In a situation where they could not tell one inch from the next, there was only a single thing to trust.
Far ahead, the little green running figure flickering as it fled up the inner stairs.
The emergency exit itself.
“We’re almost there!”
At Minel’s cry Isil wrenched out its last reserves and detonated lightning across its entire frame.
Flesh screamed as though it would tear; the wind sliced their faces like blades.
They twisted their bodies to nearly a right angle and charged.
Behind them the whirlwinds born of the full moon closed in, ready to swallow Minel and Isil at any moment.
Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
The full moon loosed one final, enormous roar, and Chori, Steno, Hina, and Riale all stretched their hands outward at once.
“Minel!”
“Grab on!”
“Over here!”
“You’ve made it!”
Isil fired its final burst of thrust and flung itself into the gap; Minel and Isil were seized by four pairs of hands and held fast.
The moment they crossed the threshold—
six bodies tangled together in a single heap and went tumbling across the floor.
“Ugh!”
“Kyaa!”
“Ow ow ow…….”
“…….”
The ridiculous knot of arms and legs made the life-or-death chase of moments earlier feel almost farcical.
Then the realization that everyone had escaped washed the tension from them all at once.
Chori, still draped across Minel’s back, burst into peals of laughter; Steno scowled fiercely and muttered under her breath.
Hina steadied her spinning head and slowly caught her breath, while Riale gently stroked her back.
Isil stood a little apart from the rest. Faint current still crackled from the joints of its mechanical arms, proof of the violent flight just past.
“Recharge required. Transitioning to inventory storage mode. All command protocols will be rejected until fully charged.”
Expressionless, Isil looked at Minel, then suddenly lunged—only to open the inventory with a clear chime and slip neatly inside.
Minel let out a long breath, braced a hand on the floor, and pushed himself upright.
“Everyone all right?”
At that short question they all nodded.
Then, without anyone needing to speak first, they turned as one toward the gaping emergency exit.
Beyond it the panorama of the 4th Floor lay open as before.
The broad green hills.
The endless rows of houses.
At the center, City Hall, and in its courtyard Mayor Seus, head tilted back, staring straight at them.
“…….”
“…….”
“…….”
He wore a calm expression, as though he had watched the entire affair unfold.
To Seus they were above him; to the six inside they were facing him head-on, so that each side seemed to be standing against a wall.
Then the yellow moonlight washed across Seus’s face.
There was no emotion in it at all—not even the sense that a living creature stood there.
Had Seus truly been nothing more than an NPC?
Yet the feeling was a little different from that of an NPC.
“Look over here!”
At Chori’s call they all turned. A large door stood there.
Above it the mark “5F” was carved with perfect clarity.
Excitement lit every face—until, without warning, Minel simply collapsed onto the floor where he stood.
“Let’s sleep here first and go in later.”
He closed his eyes without waiting for any reply and wore a peaceful little smile.
Watching Minel, who had just accomplished the unbelievable and now sank into sleep like a child, the others could only stare, too dumbfounded to utter a word.