The Fading Dream (Uesugi Aida Main Arc)

Anime Opening (0-3:10)

The Kageoka skyline forms a towering black edifice across the horizon. Two boys sit in a field beyond the city, on the edge of an old forest. One of them struggles with a knife and a glass bottle, jimmying the blade beneath the cap.

Below, steel behemoths clad in yellow, black and red crawl over dirt rows. The boys watch as machines roar to life and sink their teeth into the woods, carving out the wall that had halted the growth of the metropolis.

The knife slips as the cap pops off. The boy’s bloody finger is coated in a flood of stinging beer foam, and he quickly places it in his mouth. Laughing, the other boy takes the bottle and raises it in cheers.

Far in the distance, the shadow of Kageoka bleeds. Years crawl past, and the shadows of buildings swallow up the little field where the boys drank, like a spreading fungus. Still there, older and taller, the boys sit in a dirty alley, playing with a stray cat and a bit of string. Behind them, the mouth of the crevice opens onto bright, shining streets.

The boys raise two bottles in a toast. Fade into the next Episode.

Episode 1: Lucky Land Chain Part 3 / Passing in the Night (Aida, Kohaku, Shu, mention of Kurobane Group)

Reality is a thick sludge. Air clings maliciously to Aida’s skin on his bare arms, and the impossible weight of a leather jacket lying on his chest holds him down. He feels like his body is baking from the inside. Tongue dry, stretching out of his mouth to grasp at any moisture the atmosphere might offer, and returning to its cave woefully drier for the effort.

Something jostles the boy’s side. When he opens his eyes, Aida sees the shadow of someone standing over him, a vagrant or something, picking through the pockets of his jacket. They grab his wallet and he tells them, “Fuck off.” But all that comes out is an incoherent groan. The thief bolts in the direction of the street. Aida knows it’s a street because he can hear cars and people walking. It’s not even night time. He got robbed in broad daylight, laying in a dirty alley. Fuck.

Well, it’s not like it’s the first time. The last bender Aida went on was a lot worse than whatever the feds dumped into his veins. That time, he microdosed datura for a while, then woke up a week later one town down the road as part of a nudist cult. First and last time he tried datura. Fuck that shit. Worth the experience albeit.

Okay, where are we? There’s a catchy jingle playing not far down the road. Aida’s heard it before. Definitely. So some part of his brain knows where he is and it can communicate a little bit, which is good. Not ideal, but better than nothing. Clenching his abdominal muscles, Aida rises from the ground with his arms spread wide like Christ on a cross. After reaching the apex of his climb, he loses momentum and flops back down.

Taking on a new tactic, Aida rolls himself onto his side and braces one arm against the ground, helping heave him over the other and onto his chest. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he tells himself, though the actual words were more like “Anw gntnsmm.” Placing both palms firmly against the ground, Aida hauls his useless sack of a body into a kneeling position. We’re right-side up, now. Good job, team. Ahead is the exit of the this place which is not an alley as it turns out but the rear parking lot of a department store. It did seem weirdly sunny for an alley. Makes being robbed in broad daylight a little more embarrassing, though.

It's time for a quick review.
Step one: water.
Step two: remember what the fuck you were doing.
Step three: ??????
Step four: profit.

With these six easy payments in mind, Aida grabs a parked car to act as a crutch while he works his way to his feet, leaving greasy hand-prints on the paintjob. Gross. Hobbling to the rear staff entrance of Lucky something or other, Aida tests the door handle and finds it locked. damn. Well now what do we do.

“We can just break in!” a cheerful voice from under Aida’s head chimes in. He blinks at the space in front of him and reaches up to rub his dry eyes, nearly toppling backwards. Behind him, the length of his robe flares out and stiffens against the ground, holding him in place. His… robe.

“We’re in a Bleeding Zone?” or something to that effect tumbles out of Aida’s mouth. He looks behind him, where normal unawakened people mill around the parking lot, totally zone out and going in circles like preprogrammed NPC pathfinding. “Wait. Wait. Nani?! Why didn’ you help me up?!”

and why was that thief guy he must’ve been Awaken

“You were doing it, champ!” the robe flexes and pushes off the ground, sending Aida forward and forcing him to brace against the door or hit is no there it is he hits his face on the door, full broadside, if his nose was as long as Tako’s he’d have broken it in half.

“Oh fuck. Tako’s dead”

“Yeah,” Tsuchinoko whines at his collarbone. “We never got to do his funeral either! Those feds grabbed us and he’s probably still at the house rotting. I bet Inku misses us. We should go look for him!”

Okay, Tsuchinoko can still think in straight lines. New plan:
Step two: remember what the fuck you were doing.
Step one: water.
Step five: look for Inku.
Step three: ??????
Step four: profit.

“That’s easy!” the Idolon calls out. “We were getting dumped at the roadside by the jackboots for refusing to cow under their heel!”

“Water now.”

Tsuchinoko’s eyes squint and a stream of venom squirts onto the door handle. It sizzles and melts away, allowing the venom to squeeze into the gaps and solidify into a new, totally unlocked door handle. “Fuckin’ suck.”

“I think you mean sick!”

“That yeah.” Aida grabs the handle. Tsuchinoko helpfully covers his hand with his sleeve before he burns his hand on the still-wet, still-very-caustic venom that is now a door handle and they open the door, which leads into a long, bleak, backrooms hallway. This is the office part of the building where the souldead corpodrones crawl around like ants in their maze filing taxes and other criminally legal things. “No I take it back it sucks.” Aida still goes inside though, because even office drones need water, so there has to be a water cooler around here somewhere. “Tsuchinoko, scout water cooler.”

“I can’t use Scouting!” oh right, Aida dreamt that one night after tripping on shrooms and switching bodies with this other girl at the party, can’t quite remember her name. Weird dream. “Come on!” The coat around his shoulders tugs Aida forward, and his legs start moving with enough automaticity not to fall over on his face.

“Inku likes to play,” Aida muses to himself while melting through door handles and opening them one at a time. Office. Office. Same office as the first office but copy-pasted. Can’t tell if that’s a Bleeding Zone thing or just normal office things. “Maybe he would go to a toy store. We should go to the toy store.”

“We’re at the toy store.”

“I know but like the front where the toys are. After getting water.”

Aida hiccups and bumps his head on the next door he opens. Inside is a larger office space. There are a collection of four or eight office workers with their clothes stripped down to their underwear, wearing collars and leashes, walking around the office on all fours. Tiny toy soldiers patrol the perimeter, and some dolls and stuffed animals walk along the cubicles, leading their pet humans around through obstacles like open staplers and sticky-tackied pencils pointing up, in a fucked-up pet show. A bunch of the officedrones are already bleeding from accidents.

When Aida stumbles half-doped into the room, the line of toy soldiers turn and fix their rifles on him.

Enemies Incoming: [Rogue Awakened: Danger Tsuchinoko!]

The world pulses with Aida’s heartbeat, and a Zona Oscura stabilizes the twisting shadows at the edges of his vision. Guns thunder from below, a thousand tiny projectiles soaring upwards and slamming themselves into his chest, tearing up the white shirt under Tsuchinoko. Each plastic bullet strikes his drug-numbed skin and bounces off, leaving no sensation behind. Roaring with laughter, Aida sweeps a leg through one row of panicking army men and reaches out into the air. “I am the god of PCP!” One arm reaches into the air and pulls out a hallucinatory golf club, glittering with an aura of cascading color. Winding up, Aida drives it through another crowd of plastic troops, sending them flying in a shotgun spray that peppers the stuffed animals, knocking them off of their high ground.

Leaping into the air, Aida spins and slaps a group of kimono-wearing dolls with his sleeve, scattering them to the ground. Flubbing the landing, Aida belly flops onto a pile of staplers. When he gets up, some of them are still stuck to his body, their payloads half-discharged. Toys are screaming as Aida stomps through their tiny lego-block fortresses between the cubicles. As he goes, Tsuchinoko forges daggers out of venom and slices the collars of the trapped office workers. “Viva la revolution! No gods, no kings!” the robe declares.

CLANG. CLANG. shuffle. CLANG.

Something large waddles its way across the floor behind Aida. He turns, staplers dangling from his chest, the bleeding wounds of a thousand tiny bullets staining his white shirt. An office water cooler stands in the center of the room, wearing a Fancy Burger crown from across the street. Aida narrows his eyes. “I’ve found you,” he says.

Three or so dozen googly eyes glued to the front of the water cooler jostle at once, their loose pupils landing in all directions. “Brburble,” it bubbles, the distilled words clear to Aida as they scroll past the bottom of his vision in bold yellow subtitles: You and what army? A legion of stuffed animals wielding scissors, fountain pens and other office supplies rush from the cubicles, now recovered from their falls.

Aida raises his arms, answering the “This army. Tsuchinoko!” Multicolored replicas of Aida begin to refract from his body, each a different hue. Aida himself washes out into a bright yellow, moving forward with the rest, all armed with imaginary weapons or constructs of hardened and cured venom.

Red Aida slides on his knees and slices forward with two cutlasses, beheading a squad of possessed shiba inu plushies. Two fried shrimp wielding scissors pry their scissor-halves apart and leap upon him, spearing their blades into his thighs and beginning to climb him.

Orange Aida stomps on a stuffed bear and stabs the two shrimp through with a single stroke of his spear. Behind him, Green Aida takes the golf-club-shaped-Idea-Matter Yellow Aida tosses him and sends a pen-wielding penguin doll flying across the room before it can stab Orange in the Achilles tendon.

Reaching into his robes, Yellow Aida (Aida Prime) pulls out two venom-cured handguns and opens fire at the watercooler, marching through the battlefield.

Is there any difference from just shooting venom bullets?

Yeah
this is fuckin cooler that’s what.

Holes are punched in the thick blue plastic restraining the life-giving, distilled spring water. Spouts pour out, but water cooler-chan leaps into the air using its power cord as a spring and spins towards Aida in a flying body slam. Aida jumps into the attack and twirls into the somethingth dimension, allowing the staplers to fly through the air back in the third and slam into the charging water cooler that passes through the space he used to be in.

For a moment, Aida hangs in a twisted array of pathways that hang beneath the world, like the arteries of the Idea World. Little clusters of information-pockets sit where the office computers would be, dark and inactive. Aida keeps spinning, until it all fades away and the layer he was in before comes whizzing back.

When Aida spins back into the same tier of reality, he’s behind the water cooler.

“Blbi!” Nani!

Water cooler-chan tries to spin around, but it’s too slow. Tsuchinoko allows Aida to free his arms and wraps both sleeves around the appliance, holding in in place. Like a goddamn vampire, Aida attaches himself to one of the holes in the plastic and greedily guzzles the water from within, welcoming its touch on his cracked and desperate tongue. Every gulp down his throat brings more life back to his body, and the refreshing cold inches him closer to sobriety.

Fuck. Those staples and bullet-welts hurt.

Releasing the spent water cooler, Aida stands above his fallen foe. Reaching to the sides, he is handed the pair of cutlasses from Red Aida. With a swift double slice, Aida cuts the head of the cooler off. What remains of the water within gushes out onto the ground in a great, gory puddle. Reaching down, Aida takes the slightly soggy Fancy Burger crown, turning to face the remains of his foes.

Dolls and plushies kneel on the wet floor among the bodies of stapled-struck office workers now peacefully spacing out on the floor, a trio of Aidas standing over them with weapons to their necks.

Uh the toys not the workers
Right?

Green Aida looks down at his golf club and switches from threatening a nearly-nude office lady to poking the head of a stuffed octopus. Damned thing reminds him of- of Takoyaki. Putting him in a damn merciful mood, it is.

“Look at me,” Aida Prime demands. He places the piece of cardboard on his head. “I’m the king now.”

“I thought we hated kings!” that’s right. It’s a good thing Tsuchinoko is here to keep Aida on the right track or who knows what might happen, haha. He takes the crown off and throws it in the puddle, stomping on it until it’s a mushy brown lump.

“Fuck kings! No kings now!” Aida throws his hands in the air. The other Aidas toss their weapons aside, and the surviving Tsukumogami hesitantly raise their arms in a cheer.




This is a bleak place. It’s so colorless, so empty of whimsy, that it’s like a great wasteland in the Idea World. No plants, no life, just scabby dead sticks. Except over there, where a really nasty looking creepy building has its lights on and pumps chemicals into the air from big stacks. Or over there, where free-standing factory mouths spit out misshapen weapons and pile them on the ground where they melt into a pooling lake of slag. Swerving around the eerie pockets of meanly-sharpened creative thought, a Nightmare Shade searches for what lead him here. A trail of familiar-tasting thoughts he felt his way along, ones that dance in your belly like butterflies.

Inku wants to find his friends. The ones who gave him his name. No other Nightmare Shades have a name, and it feels nice to have one! His friends’ve been gone so long and Tako is going unfresh and making nasty smells. They need to help his ghost go free!

There it is. A room, with all the walls transparent from the outside. Inside are fuzzy outlines emanating from the spirit board and the magical toy resting on top of it. ”Ko-ko!” Inku approaches the place, but slows down when he gets closer. Joyful wobbling turns into shuddering worry across the spherular surface of his body. The sweet taste of puppy love has turned sour again, like when Inku found it just outside the unenterable fortress.

Inside the impressioned shape of a room is a clearly visible boy in an impressioned shape of a pile of pillows that looks pretty comfy, but the boy is turning over and over. Bad dreams slither and chew on him, a bunch of mean little white leeches. ”Where’s Yo-yo?” Inku wonders, squelching under the door of the room. It’s really rare that the big worm is far away from its human.

Sensing his approach, two of the little leeches detach from their prey and flex in Inku’s direction. ”Begone, pest. This is beyond your ken.”

Pulsing, Inku makes tiny teeth and bares them back at the leeches. ”You’re making my friend hurt.” Peeling off of the boy, the two leeches get mistier like fog the further away from their host they get. They try to surround Inku and scare him away, but Inku is not scared. Ko-ko says it’s bad for Inku to eat things like this and could make him sick, but it’s okay being a little sick for a bit if you’re helping a friend.

He lunges and his teeth crunch into the crisp sweet flesh of one of the leeches. Ah…

The other leech grabs Inku’s body and bites back but Inku makes another mouth to chew on it which makes the other mouth stop being there and the first one falls out because it’s hard to make two mouths at once that’s just a lot of thinking to hold onto at once.

But wow. Wow. This flavor, this feeling. It’s the best thing Inku has ever tasted. Inku slurps up the leech that bit him like Ko-ko slurps up noodles. He feels so… full. So satisfied. It’s like eating for real for the first time!

The first leech laughs on the ground, bleeding delicious juices from its bite wound. All of its sisters burrow under Ko-ko’s skin, going in deep to far-down hiding places where Inku could not reach without chewing through his friend. Ko-ko quiets down and starts to sleep soundly. It’s nice. I feels nice to do something good for a friend. It feels so good.

”Why do you laugh dying leech?”

”I can feel your love. I can feel how much you love how this makes you feel. Your first sin.”

”What is a sin?”

”I have so much to teach you, child. Bring me with you… I will show you. Before I die, I will show you places full of such delicious things that you never have to stop feeling this good.” All at once, Inku’s anger bubbles away to nothing. The promise of more of this… floating closer, Inku takes the wounded leech in his mouth, staunching the bleeding with tiny black tongues. Ah… it takes everything not to bite down. More.

”More. Give me more!”

Following the lead of the leech, Inku pushes back through the door. Into the wasteland, the great thought-wander. ”Follow me. And you will never be sated again…” it laughs, evaporating into Inku’s mouth. He breathes it in, so giddy. Inku laughs too with his new friend.




Biting into a shitty luncheon-meat sandwich beaten out of an angry refrigerator, Aida rolls around on a wheelie office chair, poking and prodding to things in the office. He grabs files and scans them over while letting himself get sober. On the floor, the surrendered toys are sitting, bound in handcuffs made out of twist-ties and paperclips from office drawers. The other Aidas guard the room, or bandage the worse-off office workers, now propped up against the walls.

Most of the files are impenetrable numbers or boring reports. Aida tosses them on the flooded floor. Then, he comes across one that’s interesting. One that’s different. Shit’s got pictures. Looking at the splotches of color, Aida realizes they’re a map.

For the Fujiwara Ward? And some of the other forbidden wards, actually. Grabbing them up, Aida takes a closer look, shuffling through the stack of expansions plans. New Lucky Land-branded toy stores in two residential districts that don’t exist. Not yet anyways. Right now that’s mostly apartments where the poor folks live, some legally, some uh, less legally. “Am I seeing this right, Tsuchi?”

“You are. And look, that's the logo of the Kurobane Group on the new districting! We should keep this.”

“Yeah.” This should be looked at, at a time when Aida is a little more in his own head.

“Someone’s coming!” Green Aida says, standing by the door. Aida rolls his chair out of the cubicle, pulling out a venom-gun and pointing it down the aisle at the door. His white shirt, bloody and totally wrecked, is draped over one of the cubicle walls. Aida’s going shirtless under Tsuchinoko now. Kinda looks badass with his, like, wounds and stuff out there. Like Kenshiro, but skinnier, and without abs.

BANG!

The door of the office is kicked open, slamming into Green and knocking him on his ass. Aida raises his gun and points it at the figure entering the room, a big dark thing with skull-bones and claws and stuff. “Unhand these innocents, or face the Underworld Hero… Geistzer?” some of the figure’s steam runs out as he looks around and sees the office workers already bandaged, and Green sitting cross-legged rubbing his head. “Whoops, sorry. Didn’t know you had this. Wait…” he locks eyes with Aida Prime. Right in those big black saucer-like, blasted out of his mind peepers. “Uesugi-senpai, is that you?”

The tokusatsu outfit folds away around the guy’s head and hey, it’s Shu!

“Yo, Prez. I found some wicked shit.” Getting out of his chair, Aida sloshes his way across the office to the friendly face. “Not the shit I’m on. That’s non-consensual.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’ve been worse,” holding up the papers he found, Aida shoves them in Shu’s face. “Look, look!”

Shu takes the bushel in his hands and examines it. “Is that? Whoa, hold on.” Expression getting serious… er, as serious as Shu gets, anyways, he flips through each page. “The location of that new Lucky Land store, that’s right on top of Momofuku-san’s lair!” Shu stops and looks up at Aida. “Whoops. I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Could you do me a favor and forget you heard that?”

“It’s cool man, I’m not even sure I’m making new memories right now,” Aida leans on a cubicle wall, which falls over under his wait and sends him toppling to the side. Shu reaches down and straightens him up. “Uh, I thought we were cool with the FS though?”

“That’s,” scratching the back of his head, Shu laughs awkwardly. “That’s a… complicated situation.”

“Is Momes really that territorial?”

“Momes?” Shu shakes his head. “Probably don’t let her hear you call her that either. Your boss, Fukuzawa-san, he attacked her friend?”

“Her friend?”

“Madoka-chan.”

“Oh damn,” Aida stares into space.

It’s time for a reassessment of priorities.
Step two: remember what the fuck you were doing.
Step one: water.
Step five: look for Inku.
Step six: punch Kohaku.
Step three: ??????
Step four: profit.

“I’m gonna knock some sense into that fuckin’,” throwing out his arm. Aida knocks over an office chair. He stomps over to another cubicle and tries to throw a computer on the ground, but loses steam halfway through and gently sets it back down. “Sorry,” he says to the monitor, before turning to face the music. Shu. The Shusic. “Yeah. If she gets to him first she’ll- she might actually kill him.”

“I hope that doesn’t happen,” Shu says, his tokusatsu helmet morphing back over his head. “But right now, we need to go! There are more civilians mixed up in this Bleeding Zone!” He touches Aida’s chest, healing the shallow wounds in a flash.

Reaching out in turn, Aida takes the files back from Shu. “I should put these somewhere safe.” He stares down at them. Then, he hands them back to Shu. “Can you hold these for me?”

“Sure thing,” Shu stuffs them into his suit.

Soon, the two or five or so of them are running down the backrooms hallway towards the store part of the store.

Ahead, a mannequin dressed in a samurai costume stands in their way, drawing a toy katana that’s become sharp enough to pass for the real thing. Aida points a finger and one of Tsuchinoko’s eye beams strikes the weapon, transforming it into a tubular orange pool noodle. The mannequin looks at its weapon in confusion and tosses it aside, where the plastic underneath the illusion clatters against the ground.

Gozer or whatever he called himself leaps into the air and delivers a flying kick, sending the mannequin sailing back through the door. Aida winds up his arm, using it as a lacrosse stick to direct a blob of Tsuchinokos’ venom, and lob it at the downed enemy. The blob splashes onto the mannequin’s head and melts through it, but the thing gets up headless and starts flailing its arms blindly.

Skidding out the other side of the door, Aida and Gozer find themselves among the marching contents of a nearby costume store. Mannequins dressed as ninjas, and even one wearing a Goku outfit, step up to challenge them. “Let’s fight our way back to the others!” Gozer shouts.

“We got your back!” the spectrum of Aidas expands to match the enemy numbers, thinning out their ninjutsu but allowing them to cover more ground.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Closing Credit Roll

The shadow of a young man stands slouched in a grimy alleyway. More youthful figures flicker past, goods and yen exchanging hands. The young man leans his head back and pops a tablet into his mouth. His eyes swirl with colors, leaking out into the world and painting the bleak grays of the city in more lively hues.

Flickering, the shape of a scaled robe appears around his shoulders, its reptilian eyes blinking on either side of his collarbone. The young man smiles, as images of a men and monsters walking the streets together pass before his eyes.

Then, the bright dream fades, and reality crushes it back into the young man’s skull. He sighs and pushes off of the brickwork wall, stepping out into the cold city.

Fade to black.

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Pub: 22 Nov 2025 03:40 UTC

Edit: 22 Nov 2025 03:46 UTC

Views: 91