The Fox and the Nine-Tailed Woman
Something, suddenly?
The thing that had burst out when the glass door shattered earlier flashed through my mind. If something were to appear out of nowhere, wouldn't it appear in exactly that kind of way?
But there was no sound, no flickering of the lights — none of the usual signs.
"Where? Which direction?"
"The direction you have not yet gone," came the answer.
Holding my breath, I fixed my gaze on the far end of the corridor, ready to bolt the instant anything strange showed itself.
From the darkness at the end of the hallway, a faint silhouette was gradually drawing closer.
It was...
"A person?"
A figure in tattered clothes, walking slowly with both hands covering its face — a human shape, with both arms and both legs fully intact.
A survivor? This was the first time I'd seen a human other than myself in the Backrooms, and I felt genuinely glad.
Selapis and Yagwang-i were here too, but they didn't count as humans, did they? The only gallery member I'd met was an angel, so part of me thought — so there really *is* another human in the Backrooms after all. Because honestly, everyone except me wasn't human, right?
For now, since that person might be a gallery user, I decided to post on the gallery first and ask.
But the gallery's reaction was very different from what I'd expected.
"What the...?"
Then, in another comment, I realized exactly what it was.
"Ahh. I see!"
Back then my whole body had been stinging and aching with burns, and I'd been too out of my mind to think of memorizing my reflection in a mirror or anything like that. Looking again, the build was exactly identical to mine, and the worn-out clothes and the single shoe on one foot matched my old self perfectly.
So that's what I had looked like.
"Ah... ugh..."
The thing let out an unpleasant sound, something like a low grinding rasp.
When it lowered its hands, its face was collapsed beyond all recognition.
No — even with burns, it shouldn't have been *that* bad.
Its eyes, nose, and mouth were all sliding off its face.
Black mucus dripped in thick globs from the mouth hanging at its jaw.
It reached its hands slowly toward me, in a way that looked almost like it was asking for help.
"I think it would be best to evade at once."
Selapis's voice sounded in my head.
Whoosh!
Its speed suddenly surging, the thing raked its sharp claws through empty air.
I had instinctively stumbled backward at Selapis's warning and dodged, but the thing bent forward, as if about to leap at me.
In the very instant it launched itself, flying straight at me —
Whirrr—
A mechanical hum sounded from the far end of the corridor.
Faster than the thing flying at me, a cylindrical machine-like creature swooped in, seized it mid-leap, and slammed it down into the floor.
A cylindrical metal shell.
About the size of eight robot vacuums stacked on top of each other.
The crushed thing thrashed and clawed wildly at the cylinder, but not a single scratch appeared on its outer wall.
Keeeee—
A sound came from the cylinder's underside, and then —
FWOOSH!
A blinding light erupted.
The crushed thing, without so much as a sound, dissolved into white light — leaving not a single fragment behind — and vanished.
"So this is what cleans the corridor?"
Maybe that was how the glass door fragments had vanished so completely, too.
Selapis spoke up at once.
"I believe it would be best to flee."
"Why?"
"Because your appearance — caked with the blood of scratched-up fools and the dirt and dust of the cave — will look to it like nothing more than filth in need of cleaning."
Keeng—
Beep—
At once, a beam-like light swept over my body, scanning it — and the cylinder began charging toward me at speed.
I spun around and started running too.
"Wait, isn't this thing's actual purpose just to process *everything* that's in the corridor!?"
"That does seem closer to the correct answer," Selapis admitted.
Keeeee—!
The cylinder came rolling toward me at terrifying speed.
Where was I supposed to evade to? If it was about cleaning what was stuck to my body... then a wash in a bathroom would have fixed that. But one look was enough to tell it was charging at me to clean away my *existence* itself.
If I — if my very self, my current existence — looked like something to be cleaned away...
Then what if I assimilated with my surroundings and became the most natural thing possible?
As I ran, I spotted the open door of Room 3I2 to my side.
I swerved instantly and dove through the doorway.
A mechanical arm shot out from the cylinder, nearly snatching my body — I brushed past it by a hair, ducked inside 3I2, and slipped swiftly through.
Thud!
Earth and wood. Grass. The smell of a pond.
The moment I crossed the threshold, my body sank close to the ground.
Grass crushed beneath my fur-covered legs.
If I was in a forest in this fox form right now —
BOOM!
The pursuing cylinder passed straight through the door and into the forest of 3I2.
Keeng—
Keiiing—
The cylinder immediately began scanning everywhere, wildly — and then its scan touched my body.
Keiiing—
But sensing nothing amiss, it swung its scan elsewhere at once.
A fox belonged in a forest, after all. The fox that had originally lived here had been a black one, but in this fox form I wasn't so alien a presence in this place — or so I reasoned.
And — success.
To the cylinder's sensors, I would register not as misplaced filth cluttering up corridors and rooms, but as an ordinary animal belonging to this room's ecosystem.
Losing its target, the cylinder turned, rolled back outside, and sped off toward the far end of the corridor until it vanished.
A sigh of relief escaped me at once.
Granted, it was the whining cry of a beast.
Rustle.
The sound of brush stirring made my ears prick up on their own.
I turned my head toward the source of the noise.
"Kang...?"
A familiar silhouette near the pond. The black fox.
It seemed to have come after hearing the commotion just now.
"Kang!"
Seeing it again, I felt an inexplicable warmth rise in me too.
Maybe it was because the tension of being hunted for my life dissolved in an instant.
The fox trotted through the brush toward me, its swishing black tail looking wonderfully soft.
"Rope! You must get away from it at once!"
"Kang...?"
At Selapis's voice, I tilted my head.
Just as my phone had become invisible once I became a fox, the garment made from Selapis's flesh clone was also invisible on my current fox body.
Had my ears become a beast's, oversensitized to everything else?
Selapis's voice soon faded and disappeared.
Maybe it really had just been an auditory hallucination.
The black fox, now right in front of me, pressed its nose to mine and nuzzled its face against me.
Its warm body heat put me at ease without my even willing it.
"Oh dear, Rope...!"
The newbie. CaveEscapeRope. In other words, Rope.
It was fine that he had disguised himself as a fox in the forest to shake off the cylinder robot. But the black fox visible there was a dangerous entity.
To be precise — to Rope himself, both he and the black fox would appear as nothing more than foxes. But to Selapis, who could *see*, the fox's true form, stripped of its illusion, was visible as well.
Eight black tails.
Long black hair.
A beautiful nude woman with fair, fine skin pressed her body against Rope, nuzzling him.
What Rope saw was not a fox but a man wearing Selapis's flesh clone — and he was accepting the embrace.
He would take it as fox-kin affection, or a bit of play.
Soon the black-haired woman layered her body over Rope's.
Rope, believing it all to be play, flinched slightly in surprise.
But somehow, his eyes soon grew hazy as he received her.
"Rope! Snap out of it!"
As if he could no longer hear even her words, he showed no reaction, slowly entwining his body with the woman's.
Breath mingling with breath.
"Geek!"
The black fox burrowed into my chest.
Was I just that glad to see it after so long?
Or had I been that shaken when it vanished without a trace before?
Soon the fox climbed on top of me as if in play.
The black fox's hot body heat layered over mine.
My mind grew a little hazy.
"...pe! ...ake up...!"
Beneath my floating consciousness, I felt our bodies tangling together this way and that.
What was I doing...? I couldn't quite tell.
Somehow, deep breaths kept spilling out of me.
It felt as though something that had been lodged deep inside my body was traveling up and out of me.
Not pleasure so much as a deep weariness came flooding in.
I forced my drooping eyes open with effort.
What was before me was blurring — and changing.
The black fox's form became a black-haired woman with eight tails.
And near the woman's hips, a new tail was sprouting.
Eight tails had become nine.
The woman gave a bewitching smile and looked back at her nine tails.
Clack!
The woman rose to her feet and walked toward the door.
And then she slipped out through it...
I lost the consciousness I'd been clinging to, and in an instant everything before my eyes went black.