Time seemed to freeze in that instant.
All the blood in Miko's body turned to ice. Her brain simply stopped functioning under the crushing weight of sheer terror. The monster's gaping black mouth hovered just inches from her face, the stench of decay and that marrow deep whisper wrapping around her like an invisible net, binding her in place.
It is over.
The thought surfaced in her mind with a kind of numb, despairing clarity.
Ding dong...
The convenience store's automatic door slid open again, the crisp chime dropping into the suffocating silence like a stone into stagnant water, sending faint ripples through the air.
A student in a Sobu High uniform stepped inside, unhurried.
Tall, slender frame. A quiet, composed presence. Beneath soft black hair, a pair of pale blue eyes that seemed to reflect the sky itself.
Natsume.
Like always, he had only stopped by to grab a bottle of milk on his way home.
But the moment he stepped into the store, his Six Eyes picked up the jarring flow of cursed energy swirling inside this cramped little space.
His gaze moved calmly, taking in the sight of the girl cornered at the end of the aisle.
Under the gaze of the Six Eyes, nothing could hide.
He saw the cursed spirit, a grotesque thing formed from pure grudge and hunger. Its shape was ugly, its cursed energy not particularly high, but the negative emotions clinging to it were thick and sticky, as it greedily drank in the fear before it.
What caught his attention even more, though, was the girl.
Yotsuya Miko.
He knew her, the quiet first year junior who never made much noise.
Right now, in his sight, her body was wrapped in a thin but surprisingly tenacious barrier, a shell built from nothing but raw "self suggestion." That fragile shield shuddered violently under the cursed spirit's pressure, spiderwebbed with cracks that looked ready to shatter at any moment.
Inside that barrier, he could clearly see her mental state balanced on a razor's edge. The tiny point of cursed energy that represented her life force flickered like a candle caught in a draft, wavering, threatening to go out at any time.
Her soul was screaming, shaking, but her body was still forcing itself to cling to that last sliver of composure.
Natsume Yuu's brow lifted, just a fraction.
So she has been living like this the whole time...
In an instant, he understood the vast weight of fear and strain hidden beneath her seemingly quiet exterior.
The hungry ghost cursed spirit had already noticed the arrival of a fresh "living thing." Its oversized head turned slowly toward the entrance, joints grinding with a dry crack, and a hiss that sounded almost like a threat seeped from the black hole of its mouth.
Natsume Yuu, however, walked straight past it and the girl without even glancing their way, heading down the narrow aisle as if nothing were there.
His movements were natural and relaxed, without the slightest hesitation.
The cursed spirit froze.
Even Miko, who had been one breath away from collapse, forgot to be afraid for a moment, stunned by the sheer absurdity of what she was seeing.
Natsume walked to the shelf with the rice balls, examined them seriously, and picked the plainest ume rice ball there. After that, he took a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerated case.
Holding his two items, he went to the register. Under the clerk's sleepy stare, he paid calmly.
The entire process flowed smoothly, step by step.
As if that monster, horrifying enough to shatter a normal person's mind, really was nothing but thin air.
"Th... thank you, come again..."
Yawning, the clerk handed him his bag.
Natsume Yuu took the small plastic bag and turned, walking back toward the corner that, for one girl, had become a dead end.
The hungry ghost's attention was now fully focused on him.
In its muddled perception, this newcomer carried a scent that stirred both craving and fear, a presence it wanted and dreaded at the same time.
Natsume stopped about a meter in front of the cursed spirit and the girl.
He crouched down and gently placed the ume rice ball and the bottle of water side by side on the cold floor.
Then he extended his index finger and tapped the rice ball's wrapper.
A faint thread of pale blue cursed energy, so weak it was almost invisible, slipped from his fingertip and seeped into the rice ball like a living stream.
In that moment, the ordinary food seemed to transform into something sacred, a delicacy of the highest order.
The hungry ghost cursed spirit shuddered violently.
It abandoned the girl's "delicious" fear without a second thought and fixed its entire being on the rice ball lying on the floor.
That longing was instinctive, carved into the core of its existence, irresistible.
"H... hungry..."
Its voice was more desperate than before. It dragged its swollen body forward with those dried out arms, inch by inch, painfully slow as it crawled toward the special offering.
It reached out with its filthy hands, clumsily tore open the wrapper, and shoved the entire rice ball into its cavernous mouth, chewing with a sickening grinding sound.
Something strange happened.
As it ate, the thick, pitch black miasma of grudge around it began to thin, fading at a speed visible to the naked eye. The curse born of hunger seemed, for a brief moment, to have been soothed.
The creature no longer felt quite so terrifying, no longer as vicious or on edge. It was just... eating, like some starved animal focused entirely on the food in front of it.
Only then did Natsume straighten, standing up slowly.
He turned and finally faced the girl who was still frozen in place, her soul half outside her body.
Miko's pupils were blown wide open with shock. She stared blankly at the scene before her, at the upperclassman who had just brushed aside her life and death crisis as if it were nothing.
There was no sharpness about him, no bloodthirst, no pride in having dealt with a curse.
His eyes were as gentle as a quiet night sky.
He walked over to her, stopping at her side, and spoke in a voice so soft it was meant for her ears alone.
"Pretending you cannot see them all the time, it must be really hard."