The Goblin's Feast Under a Crimson Sky
The Tokyo sky was drenched in a deep crimson sunset. Having finished their day's work, the city's countless people—those who both laughed and cried—dragged their weary shadows across the pavement as they walked off in every direction, painting the streets with their presence.
Beneath the roof of a street stall hoping passersby might stop in, a young man lost in gloomy thoughts tilted back his glass. The telephone poles cast long shadows in the sunset that sliced straight across his stall. Anyone with an obsessively sharp eye might have noticed the large figure approaching by stepping through those shadows.
“Ha. This bastard. The second I look away, he’s already pounding down drinks.”
I’d only stepped away for a moment, yet there was the protagonist looking all pathetic and sucking down alcohol. What the hell was I supposed to do with him…? For now I sat beside him and simply watched the guy.
Stealth Lv.5
You can act with greater secrecy.
Concealment Lv.6
The lower your heart rate, the further you slip from awareness.
Darkness Lv.2
You become natural within darkness. Your presence blurs in the shadows. You can manipulate shadows.
Thanks to my stealth-type skills leveling up so much, people often failed to notice me even when I was this close—as long as I stayed out of their direct line of sight and didn’t draw attention.
The protagonist looked more depressed than usual. Something must have happened to him.
After the business with Horiki, I somehow felt unsettled and came out for a drink for the first time in a while. Whenever I tried to drink, a goblin would always appear and drag me into the goblin’s dream, so perhaps this time I had secretly wanted to be caught by him again and forced into that exhausting ordeal. I didn’t want to go all the way to the pleasure district only to face the prostitutes once more, so I simply stepped into a nearby street stall.
Surprisingly, no matter how much time passed after I started drinking, the goblin’s dream never began. Perhaps I had truly graduated from the goblin. The feeling was refreshing, yet somehow lonely; it seemed I had grown attached to him after all.
It was right when I had let myself relax. Without either the owner or me noticing, the goblin had been sitting there for who knows how long. He snatched my glass, drank from it, and was eating takoyaki that had appeared from nowhere.
The owner was startled by the goblin’s sudden appearance. He simply stared with round eyes, looking back and forth between us, swallowed once, then told the goblin that food had to be purchased here.
The goblin stared blankly at the owner (whose hands were shaking so badly it was painful to watch). Then, as if performing magic, he produced a crisp 1000-yen bill from his hand and offered it to the man.
Naturally the owner, who had suddenly received a sum equal to about six months’ rent, turned deathly pale. He waved his hands, insisting there wasn’t enough change and that he could not possibly accept so much money. But when I saw the goblin’s expression turning savage, I quickly stepped in and told the owner to accept it for now and prepare as much food and alcohol as he could.
Looking resigned, the owner closed his eyes and took the bill. He brought out every dish on his shelves, asked us to wait a moment, then went to the nearby stalls and began talking with the other owners.
I had thought only I could see the goblin. Watching him do all this threw me into fresh confusion. Had I somehow broken his seal…? I was lost in such thoughts when the goblin suddenly spoke.
It was the first time the goblin—who had only ever issued one-sided commands—had asked me a question, so I was a little flustered. Still, he never seemed to understand words properly anyway, and since this was the same goblin who had seen straight through my ugliness from the start, I decided it didn’t matter. I began talking, starting with the incident involving Horiki and moving on to everything else.
The time the maids raped me as a child. How I always performed actions that didn’t match my true feelings. How I could never understand other people. The dark sea where Tsuneko and I had tried to die, and the goblin’s night. How my father used to terrify me but somehow no longer seemed so frightening these days. And—though it felt awkward to say in front of him—the stories of how the goblin had tormented me.
By the time my story drew to a close, the owner and the other stall keepers had lined up long tables and begun carrying over and arranging a mountain of food.
They kept bringing dish after dish and cup after cup without end. The goblin burst into hearty laughter and shouted, “Eat it all!” then started throwing an impromptu feast right in the middle of the street.
It was a true goblin feast.
The street had grown noisy before I knew it. I sat beside the goblin, tasting the many different plates and sipping a little alcohol. When I set my cup down and glanced sideways, the goblin had vanished at some point and a random old man was sitting there instead, happily enjoying the feast.
The owner, who had been busy carrying food for a while, noticed the goblin was gone and asked where he had disappeared to. When I told him the goblin had vanished at some point, he sighed, dropped heavily into the empty seat, and said one thing.
Truly, it did.