“Can you repeat that again? I must have misheard you.” Eva asked Karasuza. The two, as well as Yukiko, were sitting in a park not too far from the shrine.

“It sounded like you wanted our help in demolishing an abandoned building to punish some thugs.” The young Yuki-Onna carried on for the Kitsune.

“Yes. If we tore down the ruin they sleep at, they will need to move on and not harass the people around us anymore.”

“Or,” Eva began to counter, “they run some elderly person out of their home and take that over and carry on just as before.”

“And even then,” Yukiko amended, her stern gaze drilling into the angry girl’s eyes, “they’ll just endanger someone else.”

“But we got to do something about them!” Karasuza grumbled, hands slowly forming fists.

“Can’t we just report them to the police?” Eva suggested with a sigh. “Shouldn’t dealing with this sort of hoodlum be their job?”

“It’s not that easy.'' The youngest of the three began with a frost filled sigh. “Yes they should deal with this. But making them lock up idiots like what Karasuza wants us to deal with is just gonna cause more trouble for youkai all over japan. One bad idea of those three Tanuki caught on camera and all of Japan will know we still exist.”

“Ugh. I see.” The German grumbled, “So we do have to deal with them ourselves.” Soon a relative silence fell over them. Karasuza was still quietly grumbling about her idea of ‘appropriate punishment’. But the Yuki-Onna and Kitsune were both thinking hard about what they could do about this.

“Say Karasuza, how much room does that remote temple of your dad have?” Yukiko suddenly asked after an idea had occurred to her.

“Quite a lot really. Not that much of it is used, why?”

“Well, from how you rant about him from time to time,” the youngest of the three began to explain, her face already filled with schadenfreude, “He sounds like a very capable, but even sterner taskmaster.”

“Yes, which is why I tried to run away from him.” the half-tanuki replied, very confused. “But what does my father being an ass have to do with these three Tanuki?”

“Well, how about we drop them with him to straighten them out?”

“If you could get those bastards there, sure.” Karasuaz replied with a shrug. “But I doubt they’ll just let us drag them there.”

“But what if we make them want to go there?” Eva suggested, drawing the other two forward into a conspiratorial huddle. “Here’s what we are going to do.”

~~~

Late that night, three Tanuki were ripped from the soft calm embrace of sleep, by a reverberating twang. By the time their heads had risen from their pillows of garbage and rotten wood, the air vibrated with the next two notes of an eerily slow and cold melody.

And with the next the temperature in their hut plummeted to match the tone of the melody haunting them.

Another and the walls were covered in a thin layer of ice, causing the three Tanuki frozen in fear to sprint towards the front door.

But just as they entered the main corridor, they froze in fear. Floating just off the ground was the ephemeral form of a Kami. For no mere Kitsune could fill the air around them with such an oppressive aura of divine fury. Especially with their face hidden behind a wooden mask.

One more note played by the still unseen Instrument caused a wall of ice to creep from the ceiling to the floor just behind the three hoodlums.

“You.” The Kami rumbled through the hallway, “You have tormented my worshipers for too long.”

As fire sprang to life in the ephemeral hands of the terrifyingly beautiful female floating above them, one of the Tanuki found the courage, or stupidity, to speak up. “Did that little sissy dressing up as a miko finally come crying to mommy huh?”

When flames began to dance at the tips of the Kami’s fox tails, the music began to take a faster, more aggressive turn.

With the ghostly blue flames’ light reflected off the now fully frozen walls, even the most stupid of the three Tanuki was cowed back into silence, before one of the flames found its way underneath his most prized possessions. But cowed as he was, even the burning pain managed to elicit more than a whimper from him.

“If you do not want me to roast you alive like the vermin you are,” The kami demanded, “You will follow my servant to the mountains, where you will do penance under my chosen Taskmaster.”

After getting just three meek nods in reply, the kami dispelled the flame beneath the Tanuki. With a wave of her tail, the ice blocking the entrance parted like a curtain, revealing the waiting form of a black haired miko.

As they passed underneath her, the Kami’s form began to fade, but she left the Tanuki with some final parting words. “I will know if you tried to run off again, and I will punish you for it.”

Once the Tanuki were well out of view, the ice filling the building began to flicker like a mirage and slowly fade from view.