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Rumi stared out across the Honmoon as she felt the last notes of ‘Golden’ fade from her throat. They had done it. 5 years of grueling work and sleepless nights built on the countless generations of hunters before them. The Honmoon was finally gold.
And!
…
And…
And she finally saw the trap for what it was. There was no searing pain, no elative joy, nothing that could suggest that her patterns had left. Nothing around her had changed. She hadn’t changed.
What had changed were the fans.
All around her, she could see the effects of the Honmoon taking root; what had once been a welcoming place for all had begun to twist. Ladies subtly pulling out makeup compacts or quietly slipping on a surgical mask to cover blemishes. Men glancing at each other, quietly sizing the other up.
It was a trap, she realized, one laid centuries before by Gwi-ma, woven into the psyche of a hunter in a moment of weakness…
Rumi would have slapped herself if she weren't on stage. Gold. The symbol of purity, royalty, perfection. Celine's favorite phrase came to her mind, unbidden, “Our faults and fears must never be seen.” Gold. Weak. Malleable. Unchanging.
The Saja Boys weren't meant to destroy the Honmoon before it was Golden; they were meant to ensure its completion by keeping her and her bandmates too busy to ask why. How could she have failed so badly?
Her introspection was interrupted as she felt Mira and Zoey step up next to her.
The opening bars of ‘Takedown’ felt like nails into her heart.
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Mira stared at the Honmoon, a rare smile gracing her lips, “She did it”
Zoey stared at the choreographer, frowning, “Does it feel like we just walked into a trap?”
Mira stared at the usually optimistic Lyricist, “Not like you to beat me to the punch for pessimism, where’s the trap? The Honmoon is golden, Gwi-ma is sealed away, sure, we’ll need to make sure that the Saja Boys are taken care of, but what’s your worry?”
Zoey stared in mounting horror, her Shin Kai coming to her hands out of reflex, “This! All of this! Mira! You’re smiling! And not in your ‘I’m actually really happy about this thing’ you’re smiling like I do, something I have only seen you do when a reporter mentions your parents.”
Mira blinked for a moment before seeming to come back to herself, a small crease between her brows sitting like a returned crown as she realized what had happened, “It was like everything had to be perfect. Like Celene’s motto, just turned up to twenty…”
The opening notes to ‘Takedown’ rang like a funeral bell
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Rumi tried not to panic as her least favorite song in the Huntr/x line-up played.
This wasn’t how this was supposed to go! The Honmoon was supposed to cleanse her demon marks, not make them stronger! Why would Mira and Zoey do this?
She felt hands shoving her shoulders, not choreography, not even the improv they would do on occasion, this was meant to trip her and make her stumble
“Zoey’s” face held a disgust Rumi would never have believed the Makane capable of… and then she saw the flash of painfully familiar purple.
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“MIRA! Rumi’s in trouble!” The panic in Zoey’s voice cut through Mira’s confusion like a knife, “What do you mean, Zoey?”
Mira followed the rapper’s pointed finger to a TV showing the stage… where Rumi was performing with… Mira and Zoey.
Her phone was out of her pouch in a millisecond, thumb pressing ‘3’ on her speed dial as she took off with her bandmate back towards the stage. Bobby’s confused voice picked up on the first ring, “Mira? How are you…?” he was cut off by Mira, who was Not panicking, “Bobby, we have a problem. We'll explain everything later, but right now, Rumi is on stage with impostors and needs our help. Have you stayed in practice from back before our debut when you used to help mix and remix our songs?”
“Uh, yes? Why-” Bobby’s confused voice was cut off as Zoey stole the phone, “Bobby, you need to get up to the sound booth Now and mix out “Takedown”, and mix in” How It’s Done”. Start at the Bridge where we swap over to the rap.”
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“Got it. You can count on me.” The normally easy-going manager's voice was unusually serious. It wasn’t often he heard his girls sounding this scared or serious. Fortunately, despite the loss of his Idol physique, he still managed to maintain a good running speed.
Bobby glanced at one of the many backstage TVs, trying to get an idea of where they were in the song, and felt his heart shatter. Rumi wasn't the most social of Huntr/x, but he still knew her well enough to recognize a panic attack.
He doubled his speed, making note of everyone he elbowed out of his way so he could apologize to them later.
His girls needed him. That was all that was important.
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These weren’t her bandmates, Rumi realized with a painful twist as she was shoved once again.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be! She could Feel the patterns curling up her throat. Her whole body screamed in terror as she felt hands shoving her shoulders again, her jacket slipping.
The Honmoon turning Golden was supposed to fix her! Her left eye went blurry, and she fought not to hiss, and her right palm suddenly gained small puncture wounds
But… The Honmoon wasn’t what we thought… maybe… Maybe there’s nothing to fix… The Small voices that sounded like Mira and Zoey, Not Celene, not for a long time, doused her panic faster than ice water on a birthday candle.
There… Wasn’t anything to fix…
Rumi almost laughed at the irony of the fact that the first time Huntr/x’s diss track of demons was performed live, it was being done so by 2 and a half demons. Whoever was pretending to be Zoey had a slip in concentration and, for a moment, their marks shone a deep purple. Rumi set her teeth as she felt her throat finally unclog, “When your patterns start to show, it makes the hatred wanna grow out of my veins…”
The doppelgangers blinked in surprise as she turned, vision cleared into an inhuman sharpness while her new talons tickled her thigh.
She stared at the impostors, head held high as she slipped the jacket off her shoulders, revealing her patterns to the world. She would have to deal with the fallout of this later. Right now, there were Demons to kill, and she was still a Hunter, Patterns, or no.
Voice clearer and stronger than it had been in weeks, she joined in the song.
“I don’t think you're ready for the Takedown!”
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Zoey groaned from where she had bumped into Mira’s back, the taller woman having suddenly come to a dead stop “Mira? What’s wrong?” The rapper peered out from behind the dancer as Mira raised a trembling hand to the TV screen, “Rumi has patterns.”
What.
“Rumi has patterns and a glowing eye.”
Zoey blinked, realizing she had spoken aloud, “Rumi has patterns? Guess that explains why she’s always in long sleeves… does it matter right now?”
Mira felt her heart harden before shaking off the whispers of Gwi-Ma the Honmoon telling her that imperfections should be shunned, “Right now, no. That might be a trick or an illusion. We Know Rumi is there with 2 definite demons. We can deal with the demons we don’t know before the maybe demon we do”
“Jackets off,” Zoey muttered, mostly to herself. Mira stared down at the maknae, “Pardon?”
Zoey blinked, realizing she had been heard, “We’re going to need to make sure that Rumi and the fans can all tell who’s who. They still have their jackets on. if we have ours off…”
“... Then they’ll be able to tell us apart, while still looking like this is part of the act! Good idea!”
The pair took off running, their black jackets discarded.
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Fighting while still maintaining timing with the song was always difficult, especially when your dance partners very much weren't. Fortunately, the demons didn’t seem to have had a plan past “Reveal her patterns to the world” and had resorted to just trying to beat the tar out of her, a silent agreement between them that while the claws stayed sheathed, so did her sword.
She had no idea what Bobby was going to say about this mess, especially as she delivered a punch to “Mira” hard enough to break a mortal’s nose, ‘We should give him a raise. Maybe 4%? He’s definitely going to have earned it after tonight’ The fact that Mira’s voice continued to sing, even while ‘Mira’ staggered, her mouth most definitely not following along with her lyrics, almost made her laugh, though all that came out of her mouth was a triumphant, “I’mma gear up and take you down!” as she drew what little of the ungilted Honmoon that remained, swirling it up and into her fist, the blue hue shifting to iridescence, ready for the next punch. She was going to make sure that this was going to hurt.
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Bobby gasped for air as he finished climbing up to the sound booth. Maintaining cardio or not, 3 flights of stairs were enough to humble anyone.
“Hey Steve, I have a bit of an emergen…cy” The words died in his throat as he realized that it was not Steve, the sound manager, nor was it one of his myriad gofers behind the mixing booth.
He palmed his taser behind his back. First, the crowd gets weird, then Takedown starts playing, then he gets a call from two of his girls claiming that they aren't on stage, and finally, Steve isn't in his booth. The only people more dedicated to something (and feral when disturbed…) were his girls whenever some poor fool interrupted their pre-show feast snacks.
“Hi, sorry to interrupt, but there's been a last-minute change of song, and I need to mix it in.”
Bobby felt his heart drop into his stomach as Romance Saja turned around, eyes glowing yellow and teeth sharp, “Perfect. Dinner and a show…”
Bobby screamed as the demon lunged towards him.
He drew his Taser and fired.
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Mira and Zoey skidded to a stop behind the backstage curtain and looked out. Bobby’s voice crackled in their ears as if on cue, “Ok, get ready. You're going to need to cue Rumi in, but I'll swap over to How It's Done after the next ‘Gear up and take you down.’ You've got 15 seconds, go”
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“A demon with no feelings don't deserve to live”
Rumi promised herself to unpack how this song really made her feel later, right now, she was blinking tears out of her eyes after catching a fist to her nose, 2 v 1 combat, where she didn’t have backup or her sword was not her idea of fun.
On the other hand…
She grinned a bloody, fang-filled grin as Mira and Zoey stepped up behind their demonic counterparts while flashing lightning-fast Hunter signs letting her know the plan.
Watching her best friends, soul mates, step up behind the demons was balm to her soul.
Their voices strong and their belief unwavering, the trio smirked
“Imma gear up and take you down”
Their timing was perfect, Bobby’s mixing was immaculate, the drums of Takedown merged perfectly into the last notes of the bridge for How It’s Done, Rumi found her voice, preparing to sing even before her mind sent the instructions
“Yeah, something about when you come for the crown
That's so humbling, huh?”
A split kick to DeMira’s chin had the demon spinning back to the real choreographer's open arms,
“갑자기 왜 그래? 먼저 건드려, 왜? 이제야 포기해, what?”
Barely a nod between them had Zoey grabbing her demon by the arm and spinning it to crash into the other.
Blood lust in her eyes, the rapper summoned 3 of her Shin-kai and flicked them to her band mates their small size nearly invisible to the crowd, who was finally waking up from the Golden Haze as the Honmoon began to have streaks of blue, green, and scarlet race through them, “Nothing to us, run up, you're done up, we come up
From sunup to sundown, so come out to play
Won either way, we're one in a million
We kill 'em, like, really? You want it? Okay”
Bouncing the demons between them like a game of 2 ball pinball, the demon hunters began whittling their prey's resistance down so that a single cut was all that was needed, “Heels, nails, blade, mascara”
DeZoey found itself caught in Mira’s uncompromising grip before being slammed into the stage in a perfect suplex. The pink-haired grappler never once breaking beat, “Fit check for my napalm era”
DeMira got caught in the stomach by Rumi’s now-human fist, sending it tumbling to its knees into Zoey’s waiting arms, the rapper pulling the demon’s head to her level with a tight arm around its neck, “Need to beat my face, make it cute and savage Mirror, mirror on my phone, who's the baddest? (Us, hello?)”
Zoey pulled out her phone to take a selfie before the knife hidden in her other hand ripped the demon’s throat open from ear to ear, the fake Mira vanishing in a cloud of pink smoke.
Rumi grinned sharply as DeZoey began slowly sliding backwards, realizing that they now couldn't teleport thanks to the energies the trio were pumping into the Honmoon, the gold now almost completely replaced by a shimmering rainbow.
“Knocking you out like a lullaby, Hear that sound ringing in your mind,”
Zoey stepped forward, followed by Mira, strutting like they were on a catwalk with movements like tigers, “Better sit down for the show
“Cause I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna show you,”
Rumi hurled Zoey’s knife between her bandmates, striking the Demon formally pretending to be Zoey in the heart, dispersing it into dust that was quickly consumed by the new Honmoon.
“How it's done, done, done”
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“So… Do we get to talk about this?”
Rumi groaned from her face-down position on the comfiest couch known to man, before forcing herself upright, “Honestly, I don't know too much myself. All Celene ever told me was that my dad was a demon and SOMEHOW got Mom pregnant. I’ve had patterns in some regard for as long as I can remember, though they grew a lot over the last 2 months… The more I tried to hide them, the more they grew. All the way until I lost my voice. Jinu basically blackmailed me into talking to him after he found out about my patterns and we… Kinda… maybe… trauma bonded a little over having patterns…”
Mira’s face could have been carved from a particularly unimpressed stone, “Celene Knew? We’ll be coming back to you, talking to Jinu more than us later. I do kinda understand that… but Celene???”
“What I’m pretty sure Mira is getting at,” Zoey began, uncharacteristically still, “Is that Celene taught us from day one to kill things with patterns, while you were standing next to us, and she knew it… Wow, last night could have gone so much worse…”
Rumi paused, realization sinking in, “With how… brittle… the golden Honmoon was, it might have shattered…”
The trio shuddered, picturing the calamity that could have fallen.
“So, what do we tell Bobby?”
The duo stared at Mira, “What?” Rumi asked incredulously, Zoey winced, “Well, we did kinda call him while you were on stage with the evil doppelgangers… he definitely deserves one…”
Rumi nodded, a tune that had been playing nonstop in her head ever since the Idol awards ended finally worked its way out,
“Nothing but the truth now…”
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Bobby shuddered as the burn of Soju hit. None of the Huntr/x girls drank, saying it “Was a boring waste of time drinking mediocre tasting drinks that don't even do anything,” so when they asked him to come up to the penthouse and handed him a large glass of Soju, he knew something was up.
And boy… Was something up…
“So, to summarize, demons exist, you hunt the demons, they were at the Idol awards trying to break the magic barrier that stops the end of the world from happening, the Saja boys were a demon boy band who tried to cause the end of the world, and the person I tazed, who then vanished, was a literal demon who was trying to eat my face. Did I miss anything?” Bobby nearly ranted, before downing the rest of his glass and refilling it, not liking how Rumi was smiling guiltily, fangs looking concerningly sharp… ‘wait… Fangs???’
“So… my dad was also a demon, and I have demonic markings and sometimes my eye glows yellow?” Rumi’s voice was near glass-shatteringly high by the time she had finished speaking
“And your father was a demon. Okay. I'm assuming that you're not going to eat my face?”
Rumi’s face flushed red, while her patterns flushed an embarrassed pink, “No!” she denied, burying her head in her hands as Zoey began to cackle, “Best as we have been able to figure out, Rumi is as human as we are, save for some cosmetic changes,” Mira gestured to Rumi, whose patterns had finally returned to their iridescent tone that they had turned after the Honmoon’s new hue change, “Which is what we need to discuss. How has the public reaction been since the Idol Awards?”
Bobby quickly came back into focus, the discussion of work flooding his body with sobriety “General response has been mixed, no one's quite sure what's happened, and for once, they aren't jumping to conclusions. What on earth are you thinking of telling everyone? The Judges are still discussing what to do, whether to give you the win by default because no one has seen the Saja Boys since last night, to postpone judging and see if another group gets a popular vote, or to just cancel it this year. Regardless, there's been a handful of interview requests and jumping to conclusions or not, everyone is still trying to figure out what happened."
Bobby stared at Zoey as she threw her hand in the air like high school, “Zoey, this isn't class… but yes?”
The group’s designated gremlin smiled, “Well, I have some ideas”
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“Welcome back to the Night Show! Now. It's been a week since the excitement of the 43rd Idol Awards, and I am here with, now, Sixth time reigning Idol champions, HUNTR/X!”
The crowd’s enthusiasm was electric as the Girl band made their way out to the main stage as ‘How It’s Done’ played in the background. Rumi found herself fighting to keep herself calm so her patterns didn’t light up like LED strips in front of the crowd. It had been years since she had been out in public showing anything above her wrists, but Mira had convinced her to go out in one of her only (Stage Worthy) T-Shirts, her iridescent marks on display for all.
“It is SO good to be back!” Zoey’s excitement was tangible as she vaulted the couch, only years of experience letting Mira block and redirect her flailing foot before it connected somewhere painful. Her bandmates chose a more sedate method of sitting down. Seo-Yun, the late-night host, fought to keep herself from bouncing; it didn’t matter how many times they were on her show, but Huntr/x always stole the show. “So. It's been a week since the Idol Awards. How have you all been?”
The girls gave an unusual look at each other before Mira replied, “Interesting… but good.” Seo-Yun blinked at the strange answer before charging on, “So. The questions on everyone's minds. Rumi, as group leader, what was the idea behind those amazing duplicates of your bandmates? Were they always part of the performance of the song, or were they an ingenious last-minute edition by Mira?” She paused, words dying in her mouth as the Girl band stilled, glancing at each other, “So… about that…” Zoey began, before Mira took over, “In all honesty, that whole performance was a mess. It's been long enough that Bobby has given the green light to talk about it, but… uh… Rumi! You want to take this?” The half-demon gave Mira a golden side eye before returning her focus to the show host “Like Mira said, the performance was a mess. We aren't sure who those back-up dancers were or how they managed to get costumes and makeup that convincing for Mira and Zoey, but we are leaving that to the investigators. Suffice to say, it was not part of our plan. We're all just glad that it looked good”
Seo-Yun blinked, realization shooting through her, not part of the plan? IMPOSTERS???, a horrifying clarity settled into her bones, no matter how this interview ended, it was going to be the most important one she gave in her career, “Is that what happened with that new song? The internet has been calling it ‘Takedown’. seemed like a huge departure in tone from the usual content of HUNTRIX’s music. What inspired you to write this much darker and more aggressive song?”
Zoey laughed self-consciously, “That one is actually my fault… Takedown was a creative exercise that was never meant to see the light of day. Sometimes, as part of the creative process, we just start writing based on a random prompt we find… sometimes that gets to the point of near full production, such as Takedown. They're not songs we're particularly proud of, nor usually really like… It's like a sketch artist drawing hands and apples again and again. just a way to explore and try out new things.”
‘What is going on? Idols, even ones as open as Huntr/x don't normally admit to faults…’ her musing was halted as Mira continued from Zoey, “Much like the backup dancers attacking Rumi on stage under the guise of a dance routine, we are letting the investigators work out how they managed to get a song that was never meant to be released off our private servers,”
Rumi glanced at the Pinette, more quickly continuing, “We are just really thankful for our manager, Bobby, who was able to remix How it's Done so smoothly.”
Seo-Yun actually felt herself stumbling, forced, for once, to glance to the side to her note prompter to remind the show host of what she wanted to cover, “Are we allowed to talk about the… tattoos? They’re amazingly detailed, and they must have taken a lot of time to get done. How did no one notice? And why would you try so hard to hide something that you have clearly put so much work into?”
Rumi blushed slightly, a lifetime of panic and shame sending a tiny ripple of purple racing down her patterns, hopefully too quick for the audience to pick up on. She sucked in a breath. time for the make-or-break answer of the interview, “They’re… Not…” she took a sip of water and another breath to calm her nerves, lying since you started talking did not make telling the truth easy, “They aren’t Tattoos. They’re a hereditary skin condition I inherited from my father. As best as all the doctors I’ve ever gone to can tell me, it just makes my skin show the skin stripes that everyone already has, but unlike everyone else, mine get a different colour other than skin tone on skin tone.” There. It’s out in the open. Can she go throw up now? Rumi deliberately didn’t look down as she felt Mira and Zoey giving each of her hands a comforting squeeze.
Zoey, thankfully, was always ready with an info dump at a moment's notice, “So they’re actually called Blaschko lines, everyone has them, but they’re usually the same colour as the rest of your skin, Rumi’s on the other hand…” She trailed off, glancing at the half-demon, who nodded, “Rumi’s on the other hand, has a lot more visibility when blood is flowing through, which is why they looked purple on-stage last week.”
It wasn’t the Worst interview Seo-Yun had ever done in her career with this many curveballs thrown out unexpectedly, but it was definitely a podium position at this point, “If enquiring minds must know? Why now? Or perhaps better yet, why hide it?”
“I was always planning on revealing them after Golden was announced, but between the press tour for Golden and then the lead-up to the Idol Awards, it really just slipped everyone’s mind…” Rumi glanced down at her hand, her iridescent stripes refusing to betray the fact that she was lying through her slightly sharper teeth, “I do wish I had my own chance to reveal them, and not have that decision taken away from me by the impostors, but at this point? I’ll take it. As dramatic as it was, it was still about the best it could have gone.”
Seo-Yun glanced down at the message from her backstage crew telling her to wrap up the interview, it seemed that Huntr/x had shocked more than her with the constant reveals… she cleared her throat, “Well, this has been an amazingly educational experience for all. Thank you so much for giving us this glimpse behind the scenes! Before we finish, do you have anything else you want to say to the fans?”
Shockingly enough, Mira leaned over to her desk mic, her trademark ‘I'm about to cause trouble’ grin plastered on her face, “In honour of Rumi, you know what you did, I am pleased to announce our new single, 'What it Sounds Like' will be released in 14 days, 12 hours.”
Rumi, who had been trying to stop her bandmate, groaned and buried her head in her hands, muttering, “I said I was sorry,” just loud enough to be heard. Zoey, who had been stopping Rumi from stopping Mira, threw her head back and cackled.
They may have been a logistical nightmare to book, but damn it if Seo-Yun didn't love hosting Huntr/x…
“Well, you heard it here first, folks! This has been Huntr/x telling you, This is what it sounds like! I'm Seo-Yun, and goodnight!”