PROLOG
Sendai Wounded 
Exalted Patriarch Yasuo Sanjo and his Priests hurried away from the bones recovered from the Village of Kurokawa. Something about those skeletons had really upset the Exalted Patriarch upon first seeing them. The signs were clear; the Mons were there; and the Postcognition confirmed it all – they were Rokurokubi. But was there really an infestation of them living unknown among the people of Nippon now? Exalted Patriarch Sanjo hoped that it was not true – for such a thing would cause much disruption and bloodshed before it could be rooted out completely.
Summoning the senior members of the Order to the holy meeting room deep within the depths of the temple, Exalted Patriarch Sanjo was just about to lay charge upon them to travel throughout Nippon and seek out these Rokurokubi – who would need to be discovered and exposed, before they could be dealt with – it would be a secret crusade – one that he could only trust to the highest and most honorable members of the Holy faith.
But before he could get into the matter, the entire temple shook suddenly to its very core, then again and again. A look of confusion and concern crossed everyone’s face, as Exalted Patriarch Sanjo commanded everyone to hurry from the temple, to see what was happening.
Once outside, everyone could see that the sky over Sendai was roiling black and unnaturally thunderous – and worse – fiery meteors were pounding down upon Sendai from the darkness above, shaking the earth with the force of their impact and ripping the city asunder. Fires were also springing up everywhere from the blasts and the ancestral palace of the Daimyo was being hammered most fiercely, crumbling under the assault.
“No!” Exalted Patriarch Sanjo gasped. Then turning to the assembled Priests, he recomposed himself and spoke – “We must get down into Sendai and help keep those fires in check.”
No one hesitated, immediately moving down into the city with the Exalted Patriarch, even as the meteors continued to fall.
As they went, two Earth Elementals and two Water Elementals manifested near Exalted Patriarch Sanjo, and he began directing them as to which places needed the most attention first. Once everyone was down in the city however, the bombardment stopped – thought the fires still raged uncontrollably.
Then suddenly, a female demon with four arms and a great rack of horns rose up from the ground in front of the company – it was Kyoso-No-Oni, the ten foot tall first circle demon – and concubine to the father of all demons – Massaki Dai-Oni. She held in her hands a black burning hoop of wailing steel, which she then threw at the feet of Exalted Patriarch Sanjo. When it hit the ground, it spread out suddenly with a shockwave to fifty feet in diameter and broke open the earth with a tremendous force.
Exalted Patriarch Sanjo leapt back from the hole before it opened under his feet, but half of his Priests were not so lucky; caught off guard and falling into darkness below.
No sooner had the hole opened to swallow the Priests however, than it began to disgorge a clambering hoard of thrall demons, all clawing their way up from the depths of hell below. The burning black hoop was a gate to the underworld and an open mouth that spewed forth the Oni therein – with no end.
It was something that the Exalted Patriarch could not close with casual magic – it was something of the gods themselves – forged from the blood of the Demon Father himself!
Immediately, the Oni pouring up from the earth began to attack everything in sight, particularly the Elementals that Exalted Patriarch Sanjo had brought to help put out the fires. As the remaining Priests engaged the demons in a fight for their lives, Exalted Patriarch Sanjo shook his head – “I was a fool to trust Yunikawa,” he said ruefully. Then radiating his spiritual energy in a blinding glory, and with a satisfied look of pride on his face, he stepped over the edge and fell into the hole.
There was then a sudden burst of searing white light and the cold ring of snapping steel – when the spots cleared from everyone’s eyes, they saw that the ground had suddenly closed up on the Oni and that only a broken hoop of black metal remained – its unholy flames even now flickering out.
Exalted Patriarch Yasuo Sanjo was gone.
The Kyoso-No-Oni meanwhile, frowned with a look of mild disappointment and then sunk back into the earth, not to be seen again.
The rest of the night was then spent fighting the hundreds of Oni that had crawled up from ground with every ounce of might the Priests, Samurai, and Occult community of Sendai could muster. The cravenous beasts would not stand and meet in a clean fight however, but ran amok throughout the city, killing and carrying people off wherever they could. It was a chaotic hunt to track them all down and kill or drive them from Sendai – while the city burned around everyone’s ears.
But by the next morning, the Oni had finally been dealt with, either slain or chased into the mountains; and the people left alive set about to recover from the horrible disaster.
High-Priest Midori Onishi; the High-Priest of Sendai’s Temple of The Five Gods (and now the most senior member of Sendai’s Spiritual Community), joined his own Priests to those of the deceased Patriarch and with them, returned to the Temple of the Ancestors – which by some miracle still stood undamaged by the fire and stones that had fallen from the sky. But that was little consolation; for they arrived to find that all the apprentice monks and those who had remained behind had been slain, and now lie scattered across the temple grounds in their own blood.
That and the bones from Kurokawa, which the Samurai of Sendai had brought back with them – they were gone! Only the broken and empty carts they had used to transport them remained.
As High-Priest Onishi took in this awful scene, a moan from one of the apprentice monks indicated that he was yet alive. Going to him, the High-Priest could see that he had been mortally wounded – he would die and there was nothing he could do to save him.
Opening his eyes, the lad forced himself to tell High-Priest Onishi what had happened –“We watched the fire fall on Sendai… When the others had left… four beautiful Samurai-ko and a Korean came among us and attacked… We tried to stop them… we tried… then two immense and corrupted boar demons appeared and gobbled up the bones… One went north and one went south …*
With that the young man died in the High-Priest’s arms...
