The three men who had declined the earplugs were now cooperating fully with any instructions given to them, which was the predictable outcome of ignoring experienced advice about something painful. The music that had poured out of the fog before the parade began was not something a human instrument produced — nobody in the team had a working theory for what had produced it — and the three of them had heard all of it.
The creatures that emerged from the fog afterward were, at first glance, exactly what Drake had described from previous years: a parade of Wano Country yokai in convincing costume. Mokumei — tree spirits, bark-textured and branching. Shiranui — floating fire, no visible body beneath the glow. Enormous disembodied heads bouncing across the stage on nothing visible, which the believers identified correctly as the Umizubō type. Crustacean-limbed figures that moved with the wrongness of something that had too many joints. Entities that looked like humans with significant physical abnormalities.
To the contestants embedded in the crowd, it read exactly as it had in previous years — elaborate production, skilled performers, probably an interesting way to spend half an hour before the actual work began.
The believers were not watching it as theater. They were watching it as arrival.
The reaction spread through the crowd in the particular way that mass belief spreads when it receives apparent confirmation: crying, laughter, prayer murmured at volume, bodies going to their knees, people reaching out to touch things that weren't there. They knew the names of every creature on the stage. They called them out. A few demanded stronger manifestations — more powerful ghosts, greater gods, something with the authority to actually address the crisis that was already burning its way toward the capital.
"This is exactly like what I've seen before," Drake said, from the rooftop. "Same structure every time."
Grus glanced at Helmeppo and stopped.
The rest of the team had settled into the loose posture of observers who've assessed the situation as non-urgent. Helmeppo was sweating. The hand working his Buddhist prayer beads was moving faster than usual, and his expression had the quality of someone working hard to keep their face neutral.
"Helmeppo." Grus stepped closer and put a hand on his shoulder. "It's actors in costume. There's nothing to be worried about."
The contact startled him. He inhaled sharply, and then for a moment he was somewhere else entirely, behind his eyes, hands working the beads.
"Something's wrong," Kujaku said.
Everyone was looking at him now.
He came back from wherever he'd been. Several breaths. Then: "Namu Amida Butsu."
"Helmeppo," Hibari said. "What did you see?"
He took a moment to arrange the words. "The Arhat Fruit gave me an ability. I call it Clairvoyance — you can think of it as vision that sees through surface material. Through disguises, through clothing, through walls. I can see the internal structure of a target's body."
He paused.
"The things on that stage are not people in costumes."
Nobody spoke immediately.
"Take the big-headed ghost. Drake, you said in previous years it was a person inside a prop suit. Under Clairvoyance, there's no person inside. The brain structure is present and normal — genuine brain matter, brainstem, everything. But there's no torso. No limbs. It is exactly what it looks like. And it's moving on its own."
Hibari's color had left her face. "That's not funny."
"I have never made a joke on a mission," Helmeppo said. "I have never made a joke about something like this."
Drake was very still. "Every previous celebration was performers. Every time I checked, it was humans in costume. This year—" He stopped.
The Beasts Pirates had evacuated. The intelligence pipeline from Orochi's inner circle had been compromised for years. Nobody had confirmed what was inside the fog this year. Nobody had checked.
SWORD looked at each other and then at the stage, where the hundreds of creatures that had emerged were still present on and around the performance area, making no move toward the crowd. They were waiting. Not performing — waiting, with the patience of things that knew something else was coming.
Todoroki Shoto's hands were no longer empty. He hadn't said anything, but the temperature around him had shifted slightly — warmth gathering on his left side, cold on his right.
Then the crowd below registered it before SWORD did.
"A stronger creature has arrived!"
It came from the night sky rather than the fog. A massive form descended — wingspan spreading wide enough to briefly interrupt the moonlight — and landed on the wall of the General's Mansion with a sound that went through the stone. Crow-winged, dog-bodied, red-furred, and large enough that its landing had weight. The Karasu-Tengu turned its red-illuminated eyes across the stage below as though it was looking for something .
On the opposite wall, something else arrived: a figure that moved with the quality of a story rather than a creature. Tall, unhurried. White kimono moving against a wind that wasn't touching anything else. Long silver hair falling clean down its back. A moon-mark luminous on its forehead, and on each cheek a pair of red demonic patterns that gave the face its particular character — beautiful and wrong simultaneously, in the way of things that had been beautiful for too long.
The Karasu-Tengu and the Inugami regarded the crowd below.
Drake was looking at them with the expression of someone who had been certain about something until approximately forty seconds ago.
These two had never appeared in any previous Night Parade. He was witnessing their arrival for the first time, the same as everyone else in the Flower Capital.