To put it simply, the Arson, Robbery, and Yokai Investigation Bureau was the outfit that handled nothing but the nastiest cases in all of Edo.
The magistrate's office was, at bottom, town hall, police station, fire brigade, and courthouse all rolled into one, but this Bureau was the branch that dealt only with the most vicious crimes among them.
Tōyama Kinjirō the Northern Magistrate, Ōoka Echizen the Southern Magistrate, and Onihei of the Arson and Robbery Bureau: these three were famed as the guardians of Edo, its three great heroes.
And it was Onihei's own case that the two of them had now taken on...
"Ha! Not bad, the pair of you. I'll tell you what you want to know."
And just like that, the man himself was happy to explain.
Onihei, known formally as Hasegawa Heizō, was an Oni-folk warrior with a pair of horns jutting from his brow.
Given that his specialty was the rough stuff, it was only fitting that the job had gone to one of the Oni-folk, the most battle-hardened race of them all.
His eyes and features were surprisingly fine, but his body was pure muscle, and though he stood shorter than Yasutaka, he was still a towering six foot three if he was an inch.
Yasutaka and Mōha had gone to ask after Kōen at the reception desk inside the Kabukimono Registration Ground, the fire-crime bureau's own outpost there, only to be told the man himself would explain it to them, and so they'd been shown into a back room.
The room was plain, bare enough that it was probably used for meetings and little else.
Clink...
Onihei sat himself down heavily on the tatami, the double gold necklace at his throat jingling as he moved.
Yasutaka and Mōha, for their part, knelt properly on the tatami in formal seiza, doing their best to look respectful.
"This Kōen fellow, I've got history with him myself. It started with a plea for help from a head priest I happened to know..."
And with that, he began to tell them about Kōen.
"He was left as a foundling at a temple gate, see. The head priest took pity and raised him, and the boy turned out to have a gift like nothing anyone had seen, grew up into a monk of tremendous dharma power..."
Just as he was quietly getting into the story, a monk walked in.
"Heizō. Pardon the intrusion."
"Ho! Iseki! Perfect timing!"
Onihei looked positively delighted at the sight of the towering monk.
The man was enormous, easily seven foot three, with yellow-green hair streaked through the front with a shock of red-violet, like a shooting star.
For some reason he had a Chinese lantern plant tattooed on his forehead, though somehow the man still managed to look sharp.
He wore a plain monk's habit, a light-blue kesa over black robes, and it suited his swept-up hair rather well.
The big man dropped himself down and spoke quietly.
"I heard you were talking about Kōen. Thought I'd better be here for that."
"This is the head priest I mentioned before. Name's Iseki."
"I do have a dharma name, you know. Kōken."
"Don't be so stiff about it."
Onihei chuckled lightly.
"This man's the head priest of Annei-ji Temple now, but before that he trained at Kan'ei-ji Temple. That's where he trained alongside Kōen."
"When I was a masterless wanderer, drifting from province to province until the emptiness of it finally got to me, and I took up training at the temple, he was already wearing the green kesa."
He gestured to his own light-blue kesa as he spoke.
"A seventh-rank monk while still young. But though his dharma power was excellent, his heart was still far from it, and he clashed with the other monks time and again."
Iseki's gaze drifted somewhere far off as he spoke.
"Then one day, a cursed implement turned up in the temple's Shinobazu Pond. It bore words meant to curse the shogun himself, and the whole place erupted."
"A cursed implement?"
A shadow crossed Yasutaka's face.
In a world where magic of every kind existed, cursed sorcery was cursed sorcery, plain and simple.
It was the dangerous kind of magic that could drive a person mad from afar, and it was forbidden outright.
"Kan'ei-ji Temple is the ancestral temple of the shoguns, one generation after another, so they investigated it thoroughly, and before long the finger started pointing at Kōen."
"Hmm... I don't know... kind of feels like bullying, doesn't it?"
"Smells like a setup to me... he got framed."
Yasutaka and Mōha both gave a bitter little laugh.
Whether the man had actually done it or not was beside the point. This had clearly been rigged against him from the start.
"Then testimony came out that someone had seen him throwing something into the pond in the dead of night. That made him look all the more guilty, and wouldn't you know it, the fool went and vanished."
"Whoa..."
"Well, now..."
It was the worst move he could have made, but then, staying put would only have guaranteed a wrongful conviction and a death sentence he'd never have escaped.
The shogunate, for its part, needed to produce some culprit to punish, or lose face entirely.
"There'd already been a succession dispute brewing at Kan'ei-ji over who'd be the next head priest, you understand. It's the shoguns' ancestral temple, after all, so the power struggles among the monks ran fierce. And he, mind you, was the current head priest's adopted son and a monk of rare, prodigious dharma power. The jealousy toward him was fiercer than most."
Iseki lowered his eyes, looking genuinely sorry, but went on speaking quietly.
"Then one day, while the shogun himself was there paying his respects, Kōen came wandering back, just like that. A rival monk of his saw his chance and cried, 'You traitor! I'll strike you down!' and let loose with a spell... and it bounced right back."
"...Bounced back?"
Yasutaka's face twisted in confusion, and Iseki formed a light mudra and began chanting a sutra.
"...Light Source Creation Vow!"
Fwoom...
A small, glowing orb of light drifted into being before the four of them.
It was the work of the Light Source Sutra, a spell that conjured a sphere of radiant light.
And right away, he chanted another sutra after it.
"...Dharma Power Vanishing Vow!"
Fwip...
The orb of light vanished, just like that.
Iseki went on.
"So you see, there is a Vanishing Sutra that can cancel a spell, but there's no sutra that can send one back where it came from. The monk who chanted the Hellfire Sutra was reduced to a charred corpse in the blink of an eye..."
"..." "..."
Yasutaka and Mōha both grimaced at the sheer wrongness of it.
For the record, in this world, spells were cast by reciting sutras.
"One monk after another stepped up and hurled spells at him, and one after another they bounced straight back. Then a warrior-monk came out swinging a naginata at him, and... he caught the blade bare-handed and shattered it."
"That's a monster..."
Mōha's face went pale.