The sole daughter of her late clan abiding, Taishi Lord’s counsel and cohort, a Tao adherent of not inconsiderate pedigree, Futo of the Mononobe family made a face. Observationally, she rapped her knuckles on her cage’s bars.

This it was. Stout bamboo poles in a lattice, twined together with waxed sinew and tin wire. Yea-tall thing, enough spacious to pace about albeit not to repose. Gaps ample enough to stick a head out and peer down the precipice of the rock shelf and the vertiginous, distant landscape below. Mayhap a shoulder, should she wedge one in sidewise – yet not on her life her chest or her proud hips. Nowise to go in any case except straight up or down the sheer, craggy cliff face of the lofty Youkai Mountain.

Indeed, indeed. It was much, much a cage. And it couldn’t hold her.

To avow so, Futo puffed herself up like a fish and flung a selection of choice taunts at the lone Tengu patrolman left behind to watch her.

The lupine lackey shook his silvern, dog-eared head alongside the pom-poms of his tokin whence he knelt quietly on his overcoat – yet ignored elsewise the likening of his chic ponytail to that of a mangy spaniel’s. He dripped more oil from a bamboo tube onto the waterstone before him and carried on whetting his curved, vicious-looking cavalry sabre. Good job, too. Went to show he cared for his quarries’ comfort, even if said comfort should come in its finality. Scrape-scrape-scrape it went, a clarion call to flee for humans and versant fauna likewise.

Sated – on that front if not others – Futo deflated into silence. Her own impressive hat had been lost someplace in the turbulent circumstance of the previous hour, and her knees were a mite chilly in the upland breeze, but the spry shikaisen kept herself drawn. Smart. An etching-perfect pantomime of a pert, female captive. The sword’s grinding ground away her patience as well, although she knew it for what it was; of this, she was iron-certain. The insides of her confoundedly unremoved clothes piled on the proof. Tension electrified her like one of Tojiko’s bad moods.

Futo bit a lip, which anywise was well-bitten from dealing with the complexities of this world to which she and her Taishi Lord had awoken, and eyed her aloof Tengu warden. Those broad, beige, manlike hands of his. The crook of cerebral focus on his brows. The conspicuous absence of a snout or a nose long beyond the handsome norm. The, withal her insults, dashing ponytail.

The wicked Seiga had had the right, pox on her; these were as well as people. An eccentric, inimical people, never to forget oneself – but all the same a people. They licensed from a learned shikaisen as personable of an approach as dear Tojiko, the mask, Kokoro, or her own – shudder, humanity! – friend, Ichirin. The affright of the inhuman instilled in her by her teachers in her beforetime youth may object still, but, in her second one, reality flexed its elbows.

It was as the wicked Seiga had said. And, what the wicked Seiga had said was, with aplomb, “My lady Mononobe, have you not power? Have you not youth unperishable? Immortality? What stand you, my lady Mononobe, to lose? Go. Mingle! Come and fathom the unfathomable.”

And all of these, Futo had done. From the books in her Lord’s Senkai sanctuary amassed, she had gleaned; in the fires of her fights alongside and against the youkai of Gensokyo, an understanding she had forged. These were not, when the fires smothered, the calamities and boogeymen described to her in hushed tones by afeared help and supplicants. These were alive and logical. Thinking, sapient creatures with simple, if oft inscrutable wants. Ichirin had shown her how simple in more than one and more than three of the human town’s boozing establishments.

To this salient thing – and one another – Futo had attached the cause wherefore she had not sent the Tengu wafting on the wind as a puff of smouldering fur. Why she had brooked for a squad of three to snatch her off of the Sun-blasted, rural road whence she had been enjoying her morning jog and the sight of field hands young and old matching, shirtless, to their muscle-sculpting work – precluding a wildfire.

Simply, there had all but had to be a reason.

Thus as they, who had ferried her away the field hands’ alarmed cries and over the verdant woods of Gensokyo to the captivity she now endured, Futo had itched to learn what it’d be. For there had been misgiving in a spate among the youkai-wolves once the dainty Taoist woman had been ushered without ado inside her cage. A miscommunication to hear them growl it, huddled together in whispered conference.

Why had they done this thing? Were they by law not to harry the humans of the town? Why had an order come, therefore, to abduct one of their number? And how came it, on Lord Tenma’s toes, she had taken it all in such quaint, confident stride?

“Gives my tail the snarls, it does,” she’d heard one confide.

“Hear, hear,” another had concurred.

Confusion had reigned; and, once tails had lowered and ears anew stood agog, two of her three Tengu captors had flown father up the Mountain to consult their officers – leaving Futo in the solitary charge of their blade-loving brother. She had let them to it, tacit, sharing in their confoundment.

And… she had read the stories, besides.

She had read the stories, in truth, with quiet, intense fascination. The tales of Tengu kidnappings and their afterwise occurrences. The piquant accounts of women who had been returned.

The pin-detailed, arousing descriptions of drunken, animalistic sex. Of nightlong orgies and wanton impregnation.

The insides of Futo’s olive thighs tingled at the memory of reading of one Empress Somedono: lusted after by a Boddhist priest whose want had grown so sore, he had turned himself into a Tengu and used of his terrible powers to copulate with a bewitched Somedono in every earthly manner and debased position before her stupefied court. Futo had read and re-read the tale – pink of cheeks and shallow of breath, fingers pumping beneath her fundoshi – featuring herself in poor Somedono’s place: spellbound and made to lustre the Tengu’s prodigious spear, tip to half, between her womanhood’s moist petals in front of her husband and courtiers – before then sinking her hips to his lap and submitting to him her noble womb. She had climaxed – inside the fantasy and without – whimpering, blankets thrown by her kicking legs, knowing she may never un-know what she now knew.

The wicked Seiga had said it true. What had Futo to lose?

Her thoughts looped back to her contemporary bind, where she found one of her palms feeling up a breast through her uniform’s vest. This was the other thing, second to curiosity. Once the day (and, for preference, night) was out, Futo would have her own licentious account to pen. The story of how she, now an initiated daughter of Gensokyo, had been abducted, caged, stripped down to her birthday suit and then forced to mate with the beastlike Tengu to her shame, woe and secret, guilty pleasure.

The story was nicely forging onward; her Tengu warden had her now exclusively to himself and, had she only the say, would’ve been her pick of the pack anywise. Tall, with the flamboyant tail and the cold, predatory eyes, Futo may easily as nothing picture his rugged, savage form in the nude: pinning her hips beneath his own and glaring her down, tyrannising her hopelessly wet womanhood with harsh, repeated, womb-deep thrusts of his inhuman tool. The sword laid across her throat, menacing, should she but think to resist him. Her thighs clenched, twitchy, and her belly fluttered on the inside for the bestial, interspecies, impregnation sex she was prepared to commit with the fiercely handsome, Tengu guard.

Now, if only he’d speed it along somewise.

Scrape-scrape-scrape went his sabre, and not the euphemistic one. And not a glance Futo-wise. He had the cast of a man born to polish his sword, popping right out of his mother with an oilstone and rag in baby hands. Around him, diligence seethed the stiff, Summer air.

There was a touch of uncertainty upon Futo’s mind now. It wasn’t overmuch; on the Mononobe scale, it was the faint darkening of Tojiko’s gaze when root vegetables were mentioned in a humorous context, but there it was. Was he not attracted? From her book experience, Tengu had the same male sensibilities as human men or abouts; neither were the female Tengu, of whom Futo had seen a handful, unconventionally wrought.

Was she undesirable, then, in her revivified body? Inconceivable – unlike her. Comments in wealth from wonderstruck townsfolk had held her to be “a dervish of joy” and “a view to die for;” and, as for the smuttier side of the coin… mornings spent hawking her charms around the footslogging field hands had seen catcalls and beyond cast her wise. More than an inch beyond in some cases, as it were.

This noon was – would be, for Gensokyo daren’t disappoint her – no different. Otherwise, Futo would kick it. It fain could do with a punt anywise.

Thus, tingling in her underwear, Futo punted on the Tengu’s mother wit.

“Ho, youkai!” she hailed her gaoler. “… Said I: HO!”

There was a flick of the steepled, canine ears, though little elsewise indicating she was anything beyond a Futo-shaped pebble in the periphery of his slitted eyes. The cunning sage she was, she waited three more strokes of steel on oily stone ahead she did a volte-face.

“… Heed!” she cried out, sleeves flapping skyward (or anywise the roof of her cage). “Heed, youkai! Yon, yon your brethren swooping come!”

Scrape-scrape-scrape. And not a hint of an inkling of a purchase.

The sage was momentarily dumbfounded. She had reconciled herself to the outlook of having evermore to parley with her fists and knees firstly of everything whilst in Gensokyo and grown knuckles like an ape’s for and from this purpose, but she was also piqued. Not getting caught on her hooks was distasteful, if commendable; failing altogether to acknowledge their bite was out-and-out a crime. Futo poured her gaze at the Tengu in frustration, a spark missing the kindling by a yard. Imagination succoured her in this dire time, supplying what his penance would have been had their positions as jailer and jailed been switched. Slow, ungentle and nightlong, that was what.

Knees quivering in their weakness, she cupped her own breasts and swept her fingers across their stiff nipples over the layers of her clothing, picturing all the time the handsome Tengu spent and sprawled on her bed afterwise just such a night. He mightn’t wash himself of the smell of her arousal for a week. A fortnight for his prick. The sheets would’ve had to be burned.

Her Lord, assuredly, would in His house ill suffer like debauchery, but… Tojiko would have thundered something to be heard were it found out her mother had smuggled a monster into the Senkai for the purposes of lewd, recreational sex. Or elsewise, Futo dared fantasise, she might’ve joined her mother in presenting to the handsome youkai-wolf the best and the worst of humanity. With those great dumbbells and plump mouth of hers, gods of luck leaning his wise.

Ahead of that, regardless, he’d need notice firstly the woman pleading with him under her stuffy dome to gainsay her bluster and challenge her basest mores. Of which, he was doing no more nor less than none.

Scrape-scrape-scrape went her Taoist forbearance. And presently wore through. Futo grabbed at the cage’s bamboo bars and rattled.

“Wood youkai!” she jeered, spittle flying for effect. “Ptui! Curmudgeon! Craven! Of womenfolk afeared, are you? Of ballocks unpossessed! Come you here, that I may to you what-for show!”

And now did his ego budge. Or leastwise what budged was the sabre: flashing out in an upward stroke which sent the grubby oil spraying. The Tengu footman sallied forth, smooth as water, after his beloved weapon: launching with virile speed into such a whirligig of a kata it’d leave the abutting air in ribbons and his ponytail wrapped scarf-like round his neck. Whilst Futo was being mildly impressed by the artistry on display, the sabre drew its ultimate cut and hung there with its hooked, business end levelled at her face and the Tengu’s on the blunter side.

He measured her head to shoulders, remaining measured himself as he spoke. “Why ought I?” he desired to know. “Why ought I, in fact, to heed your words at all? You reek of dust, sweat and rut. More beast than a woman.”

It lay not in its nature since Futo’s tempestuous teens for her heart to thump inside her throat, yet it did so now, the wayward thing. He’d smelt her; all along whilst whetting his weapon razor-thin, her beastly jailor had smelt the thrill gelling beneath her skin or, more to the like, underwear. A smell more pungent, ostensibly, than shorn metal and oil. As good that it was. Never ahead now had she felt so randy for a man wearing his hair in a ponytail.

Still, it did not do yield. Not in combat – nor in the bedroom, such as it was. Thus did Futo stanchion her hips with her arms in the attitude of a wroth housewife. “‘Rut!’ Sweat, I’ll take,” she granted; “but ‘rut!’ Miscreant! A beast you may be; humans, natheless, do not into ‘rut’ go!”

On the Tengu glowered, only rotating his sabre onto its flat. “Smells a fragrant heap like rut to me,” he assured her. Then eased his stance. “Say. I wish you neither harm nor wrong. Why do you not sit tight and wait the sentence from on high? This is a misunderstanding; bet you my best boots on that.”

“It not rut is.”

The youkai-wolf sketched a shrug with his broad shoulders. “Fine. Matters not to me. Sit and stay, lady; my colleagues’ll be along any minute, your fate in their teeth, whatever it—”

“It not rut is,” repeated Futo, steady and scowling.

They held each other’s eyes, two fairies in a pantry after different treats (but still the same pantry).

The one at arms raised them to bear firstly. “I’m no Crow nor pup,” said he, with no small trace of disdain; “I know the smell of a female after a male. You’re it. You’re it all over, woman. Could scent you from the other side of the Mountain. If it isn’t rut then I’m the goddess Yasaka.”

Futo’s fists gripped her uniform’s skirts. “Ascertain, then.”

The Tengu wrinkled his brows above his sword. “… Beg yours?”

“Ascertain,” said Futo once more, fidgety from anticipation of the thing about to pass. “Smell me. Close up, not from the Mountain endlong. Ascertain it not rut is. Herein.”

And, so having advised, the vaunted shikaisen lifted the skirts, slowly, up above her waist.

Ahead of her the Tengu footman, wrongfooted by this lot, performed an apt servant-walked-in-on-his-lady-relieving-herself impersonation as her bare knees, thighs and what was surely an unorthodox set of underwear were introduced to his purview. There was a slack-jawed spell of ethical and dictionary confusion.

Spats. That’d, anywise, been the word Ichirin had used upon gifting to Futo this and a handful more pairs, citing Outside World ingenuity and their usefulness for exercise. They were, true, snug and ready in absorbing perspiration, which she had come to appreciate in her morning jogs; furthermore and more strikingly now, they were snug, black and skin-tight: hugging her thighs, hips and crotch with closeness like a corset’s. She hadn’t to peek to know the outline of her womanhood was lewdly moulded in the glossy fabric, smack between the dimples whence her loins split to become her athletic legs. The tight, triangular gap which’d elsewise have been left betwixt them and the roof of her groin – and which Futo had discovered was ideal for repeatedly sliding long, stiff objects into, for preference by a brawny field hand after some downtime – was generously widened for the Tengu’s gawping study once the bold shikaisen shuffled wider on her feet.

On their front, where her womanhood’s slit was impressed in obscene detail, the spats were stained dark – and not for she’d been running circles around her inhuman quarry.

Whilst Futo thrilled from the indecent exposure – to a beast, a youkai, no less – said beast youkai in turn strove, with overall indifferent success, to pry his eyes away the prize of her visible womanhood. The pride of his species writhed behind them like eels in a basin.

In the end and none too soon, with a frantic flourish he slammed his sabre down into its sheath and, afterwise a rush of stamping strides which would’ve put to shame an incensed elephant, pitched himself on his knees before the cage’s bars.

“Give it here,” he snapped, all his want and attention pasted to the it in question.

Winningly, Futo stepped forth.

Then and there a pair of strong, masculine hands gripped the smooth hemispheres of her butt, tipping her against the bars, causing her wound-up body to judder with startled excitement. No man had ever handled her like that. Nor beast. No man nor beast, neither, had ever then crammed their face: nose, mouth and chin, up into her sweaty crotch. The daughter of the late Mononobe clan all but cried out her shame… although she of Gensokyo held herself fast in vindication.

Simple wants. Ichirin’s lessons couldn’t have landed truer. And none had been more signal than the one she’d learnt having once overstayed with her friend the closing hours of the latter’s latest drinking haunt. The owner of said place, a man of some girth and even more grit, had come to collect on Ichirin’s tab or, failing to, chaperone them both out to the benighted street, neither of which Futo, who had drunk herself half-deceased on rice wine and shōchū, had been in a condition to oblige.

The barkeep had thus sighted down at the more vertical of the drinkers, lingering on her bare feet, bronzed calves, prudish skirts, the thin undervest she’d skinned down to to cool off and lastly Ichirin’s belligerent yet comely face. He’d gathered his business wits, at about the same speed as he poured a pint.

At glass-rim last, he’d rumbled what follows: “Say. I’ll forgo your and your girl-pal’s tab. Would like that, would you?”

“Will do ssso, will y’?” Ichirin had slurred, cheerfully thumping the table. “Good man, there!”

“And let ‘e two of you to conk out till your feet return,” had been the added perk. “If, sure, you’ll do some’n for me in exchange.”

“Name ‘t, Goodman,” she had prayed him.

And, with a perverse, twain-handed gesture which had roused the expiring Futo ever-so-more awake, he had, indeed, named it.

Alcohol and repressed wants had ruled over what’d suggested itself unpersuasively to be Ichirin’s religious allegiance. And, swaying to and fro, her friend had stood up to surrender her buxom self unto the barkeep’s greedy hands.

Thereupon the fast sobering shikaisen had found about these modern youkai neighbours of hers and her Lord’s something of which she’d never beforehand been apprised. The portly barkeep hadn’t had to do more than fondle Ichirin’s breasts over her undervest or partake greedily of her butt for two minutes for the youkai priestess’s voice to thicken and her undies to turn out steamy and damp once he’d eased them down her thighs. He hadn’t had to hoist one of her long, folk-dancer’s legs up to his waist, rather upsetting Ichirin’s balance, for Futo to smell, even over the wine in her stomach, how wet and eager her old-maidish friend had been.

He’d doffed his trousers, had the corpulent barkeep, freeing his crude cudgel of a penis – then slid it beneath Ichirin’s groin, using of the engorged tip to feel out the curtained entrance of what he’d referred to in urgent whispers as her “pussy.” For his part, there’d be little aught catlike in the firm, implacable push that would see the “pussy” crammed to full, down to his shaggy testicles, of his burly, rigid prick. It had been everything Ichirin could do to gasp and cling to the man’s barrellike gut as he’d guided her womanhood back up his sloped length by her buttocks for a round-trip – and then let it to descend by itself till her crotch had once more slumped vulgarly against his. He’d hefted the she-youkai’s upraised leg next – sucked a wet kiss on her obliging mouth – and begun the deed in earnest.

The extramarital, compensated, standing sex following, witnessed through Futo’s half-lidded eyes, would blow out of the water everything the ageless Taoist had indulged herself before in Gensokyo. The hale, full-bosomed body Ichirin indwelled had surrendered unto the brusque man its closest guarded secrets and received obvious pleasure in reimburse. She’d hiked and tweaked her hips so that his every thrust would see her secret, female turn-ons set off upon his ribald curve; she’d rise on the tiptoes of her one floored foot so he must jog his mighty girth to slide his whole spear inside her warm, slippery sheath. His burdensome sack would smack the underside of her pale butt whensoever he’d topped her up in this manner. They’d groaned down each other’s throats whilst their privates had wrestled each other sloppily for dominance.

She would peak and climax well ahead he might, would the debauched she-youkai: staring upwards, a witless, toothy grimace plastered to the bottom of her face, quaking shoulders to toes and choking back sultry cries whilst her “pussy” had squeezed and squirmed and squirted copiously around the man’s hilted tool down below. And then, afterwise she’d soused his shoes and trousers thoroughly in her come, the only mumbled worry she would nurse would be that the loud squelching of further post-orgasm child-making might wake her nearby – and definitely, yes, indeed fast asleep – friend from her drunken stupor once it’d inevitably resumed.

Still, resume it had; and Futo had shammed two additional hours of alcoholic shikai over which she would lose ever more of very real sleep in the oncoming nights.

Twice and thrice this would repeat. Twice and thrice again would Ichirin settle their tab with her pussy’s lips gobbling down the fat, throbbing length of the barkeep’s prick-shaft – lambasting his endurance whilst he’d sown his human seed deep inside her youkai womb. Twice and thrice more would Futo repair home in hot, slimy unmentionables, on thighs atingle, with a head headful of fluff and an ache to rub out at the nearest opportunity privacy accorded. All for a youkai couldn’t have said “No.”

Seemed they never could, your youkai. Not to the oldest of pastimes.

Anywise could not her Tengu gaoler. His tail thrashed left to right to left, faster the deeper he buried his handsome nose in Futo’s groin. There was no mistaking, nor had she the wish to mistake, the fraught lungfuls of her smell the youkai-wolf imbibed with every one of his hungry breaths. His powerful, sword-loving fingers gripped her butt as though she were the thickly leather-bound handle of one. Troublesomely, she fancied what they might do to her own little sheath provided some scented oil and the invitation.

He smelt her reaction. Must have, for he was peering up at her from above a mouthful of her crotch, dark as a thundercloud in a mood.

“If this isn’t rut…” he muttered.

The words rumbled against her womanhood in a funny yet not laughable way. His lips were, so to speak, smack on hers – kissing her pussy through the moist spats in a kind of physiological paradox. Futo beamed at her jailor the bright, hawkish smile of a noblewoman about to give her valet the best, last day of his career. To explain to a wolf the fine differences between a beast’s rut and a woman’s arousal would’ve been as useless as, oh, tits on a Boddhist; for that cause then she opted to pet his empty head into calm. The strands of his silvern hair proved coarse, doglike beneath her hand – except those about the stiff, canine ear, where they softened into puppy fuzz.

Futo thumbed it with affection whilst she spoke. “Mm. Who think you I to mate with wish?”

The Tengu uttered gruffly into her crotch. “No dimmest,” he said. “There’re no human males abouts.”

The last Boddhists of reservation fled the battlefield of Futo’s mind. “Are not you male?”

“Tengu, lady,” said the Tengu, truthfully; “meanin’, for yours, not human.”

“Yet erect you stand,” Futo wagered.

The Tengu sniffed. Hard. “Stiffer ‘an morning wood, lady.”

She hazarded, “Be it, perchance, rut?”

“Yes. Yours,” he returned the serve. “Spreading on me. Speakin’ whereof – spread these pretty legs. Wider. Yes. There’s a good lady.”

Something within Futo, for certain the self-same part which’d complied at the first overtone of command and let him to further separate her thighs, rode roughshod over the wroth she should’ve felt at a youkai lording over her his unmerited position. It kept her still, athrill and pliant, even when his hands were shifted from her rear to her front, a calloused thumb on either side of her tender, female area.