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<span class="mu-s"> Interlude: She can see all of them </span>
It was cripplingly frightening. More frightening than the high-school girl Saito Miko could stand. Sitting quietly in a fetal position on an office-chair and hoping to be beneath the monsters’ notice was the best she could do, despite realizing that it would eventually be futile; she’d been brought into their lair for some purpose, although she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. The room she was in had a guard, but fortunately it just stood silently in the doorway so she could ignore its presence. Part of her regretted giving herself up to them, maybe she could have made a run for it in the chaos rather than persuade the vampire to call off her minions that were coming close to killing the other people that were fighting them. No, that wouldn’t have worked. The instant she caught the vampire’s eye, she knew she couldn’t escape.
A few years ago, Miko had been pressured by her family into working as a shrine maiden after she inadvertently admitted to her grandmother that she could see spirits and auras, and over time she’d slowly become accustomed to seeing a variety of phantoms, ghosts, and the like. Apparently her eyes had a rare trait that only manifested once every few generations. The spirits that she could see were generally benign, in the sense that she could ignore them without them physically harming her; however, it didn’t stop them from being creepier than anything in mortal flesh, or so she thought at the time.
Contrasting that, the animated skeletons and zombies in the first city were a very real, physical threat, but one that she’d managed to keep clear of through good luck, desperate stealth, and the fact that she could make out a dark, faint aura emanating from them, allowing her to avoid making a wrong turn or getting cornered. The vampire calling herself Rusalka, however, had an aura so intense and unnerving that the mere sight of it caused Miko to feel palpable discomfort: it was like gazing into a crushing, abyssal vortex. The girl was fearful of what could happen to her if she stared at it for too long.
The auras of the heroic spirits like Diomedes, however, burned brightly enough to break that darkness, with a warmness that reminded Miko of the light of the sun. That warmth stood in stark opposition to the chilling malevolence that Rusalka’s aura possessed, along with those of her undead servants. Wights, she called them. A normal observer wouldn’t see them as very different from simple animated skeletons aside from their attire and an eerie glow in their eye sockets, but a few offhand comments from Rusalka allowed the girl to piece together their true nature.
