Iri’s tale continues. See Part I.
Content warning: blood, violence.

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The small three-tailed fox dragged Iri’s limp body into the cabinet and pressed her against the back wall. His paws shook as he tore cloth with his teeth and bound her bleeding stump as tightly as he could manage. Blood slicked his fur. His breath would not slow.

A pressure gathered in his chest. Then inward behind his eyes. His fur lifted as if brushed by a storm he couldn’t see. A cold tremor ran through him, sharp enough to make his legs falter. He whimpered, confusion turning to pain. He loved Iri. He loved her enough to stay.

His body did not agree.

The pressure worsened. Light flickered along the corridor. Somewhere close, glass shattered.

He turned and saw the five-tailed fox moving through the hall, power breaking from it in uneven bursts. Lamps died as he passed. The air screamed. The sound of its growl did not travel through ears, but through bone.

Terror surged, pure and unreasoning. The three-tailed fox forced the cabinet doors shut around Iri and fled, legs carrying him before thought could follow.

Later, foxes would say a fourth tail appears when suffering hardens into refusal — when a fox decides they will never again be the one who bears the cost.


Iri awoke hours later, in pain. Her stump burned beneath soaked, poorly bound bandages that cut into her skin. She tried to stand and spilled out of the cabinet onto the floor.

It was dark. Her paw brushed against broken glass as she searched for footing.

The silence pressed against her face, thick enough to feel. Memory arrived in fragments. She panicked, scrabbling through glass and blood to find her tail.

She lifted it close to her chest, shaking. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay,” she whispered as tears accumulated in her eyes. After a moment, she took the tail between her teeth and staggered toward the blurred outline of a lit doorway.

Outside. Iri kept walking, in a daze, through the humans’ broken city streets to the dirt roads and grass fields. Passersby hid their children’s eyes from her bloodied body and made space, nothing more. Iri barely noticed the discarded fox corpses scattered along the trail.

She thought of the five-tailed fox thrashing and slicing its way out. Without it, she would not have escaped. The debt sat heavy in her chest — unpayable, unanswerable — but real. Heavy in thought, she kept walking until she found a large, warm tree and leaned into it.

It was not a tree. It hissed, “You smell like the nine-tails.”

Iri’s eyes widened and she yipped in surprise as she jumped back. Sparks of fear lit down Iri’s spine as it continued growling, “Small, injured foxes like you are the bait. You’ll expect me to help you while the nine-tails closes in.”

She snapped to attention and looked the creature in the face. It was the five-tailed fox. It walked forward as she trailed backward, all five tails fluffed with static.

“I saw you,” she squeaked out as she stumbled backward onto the ground, her words quivering, “I saw you killing everyone.”

The five-tails stared at her in deep contemplation, its fiery eyes piercing hers with untempered warmth. After an uncomfortably long silence, it simply turned the other direction and stood. Iri composed herself and slowly walked to its side.

Iri followed the five-tails in silence for miles until it said, with some tone of melancholy in its voice, “Be careful out there, little fox.”


A fox does not grow a fifth tail unless it has once held itself together. But five tails is not a promise. It is a memory.

It seemed the five-tailed fox had passed this place many times, but had never noticed it before. Birds in the distance started squawking. She and the five-tails looked around, but nothing seemed amiss. The birds’ cries did not fade. They vanished, as though the air had never learned how to carry sound. There were no unfamiliar powers in the breeze.

Iri had the sudden, impossible sense that she was only now arriving at something long decided. When they turned to continue forward, the nine-tails emerged. His power went undetected as it was already formed of the ominous world around them.

After a brief moment of recognition, the five-tails screeched at Iri, “Traitor!” It spun to snap its fangs at her neck, its claws slashing a fresh wound into her side. Electric fear tore through her. The sight of her blood seemed to panic the five-tails further, and it sprinted away the wrong direction. Toward the nine-tails.

A wild cackle reached Iri’s ears as she ran, only turning back long enough to see the five-tails correcting its way and evading attack by the nine-tails. It had saved her yet again, and it had cost her blood.

The nine-tails had not struck her. It had only made the strike inevitable.