Four Masks

“	Ha ha ha...Be gone with you boy! Return to the world of the living!	„
	~ The frequent words of the Four Masks whenever Yuri temporarily secures his sanity.

The Four Masks are characters in the videogame Shadow Hearts. All four 'live' in Yuri's heart and gnaw at his soul. They plague Yuri constantly throughout the game and unlike the rest of the villains in the game they are not concerned with world conquest or destruction but are just concerned with making the main protagonist Yuri suffer and attack him personally without the help of any of his friends most of the time. If the player does not hold off their advances between every few battles they will summon a grim reaper Yuri has come to call Fox Face, to kill him in the real world.

Yuri's Inner Demons[]

Yuri is a Harmonixer, a person capable of defeating demons and monsters and fusing their essence to his body in order to transform into a monstrous manifestation of their demonic powers. However Yuri has many dark feelings within him and does not have the spiritual balance or training most Harmonixers in his line have had so his heart has become a graveyard in the truest sense for the souls of the vengeful demons who he has slain. The Four Mask are the four oldest spirits or perhaps the four broadest culmination of the demon ghosts Yuri has slain and fused with. They wish to avenge their brothers and constantly manifest the hatred of whatever monsters Yuri has recently slain. The longer Yuri goes without clearing the Malice the Masks build up in his heart the stronger the manifestation gets. If the manifestation grows unchecked the Masks use it to open the gate of darkness in Yuri's heart and summon their grim reaper Fox Face to strike at Yuri in the real world.

Over time Yuri will encounter a terrible angel called the Seraphic Radiance. In order to prevent it from destroying the world Yuri decides to fuse with it. Though he subdues it he loses himself in the creature's Malice and loses control of his body to the Seraphic Radiance and the Masks. When his friends finally manage to find him he is completely lost in his own mind and thinks he is still a child and the party are monsters attacking him and his mother. After fighting them and being defeated Alice, Yuri's love interest, goes into the Spirit Graveyard of Yuri's heart and speaks with the Masks. The Mask at first bid her leave but when Alice says she is willing to do anything to save Yuri even risk her soul one of the Masks becomes intrigued at the notion and convinces the others to give her a chance to reacquire Yuri's soul. In exchange for the chance the Masks say they will take her life at some future point when they feel it will hurt Yuri the most.

Alice confronts Fox Face and eventually helps Yuri regain himself though she never tells him about the deal since there is nothing that can be done to stop it and he will just become more hurt. After the point when Fox Face is defeated the Malice acquired from defeating foes appears to have stopped at first.

Bad Ending[]

If Yuri does nothing to attend to the Masks for the rest of the game eventually after defeating the final boss The Masks will kill Alice on the train ride over to her aunt and uncle in France just as Yuri is finally about to make a peaceful life with her and the world is saved. Their servant Atman, the keeper of souls pacts, will come for Alice just before the boss of the game. The Battle is hopeless and cannot possibly be won and Alice will continue to live through the boss battle but be living on borrowed time then pass away in her sleep next to Yuri on the train. The Masks will laugh and mock Yuri but never quite tell him what they are laughing at and he is left unaware of what has gone on until Alice's death.

This is actually the canon ending, the first part of it.

Good Ending[]

If the player follows the extra-quests of the game before meeting Koudelka, collects all three magical books Albert Simon uses throughout the game, summons each Mask with the books and Malice and defeats them then Yuri will be able to help Alice when Atman appears to claim Alice's soul. Once all the books are acquired the Masks themselves become enraged at Yuri for trying to find a way around the deal and attack him in the real world, this time personally not with conjurations. If defeated the Masks become powerless and Yuri keeps them around intentionally for the sole purposes of being able to gloat to them about it and they will eventually decay into nothingness when the game is over.

This ending is non-canonical, in a way it is though. At the end of the sequel game, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Yuri goes back in time to when he first met Alice to change things around. So presumably the new game the player gets upon completion is in fact Yuri having lived with Alice dying, going through the events of Shadow Hearts: Covenant and then getting the good ending by doing the extra side quests. It is actually far more likely the player will overlook something at first and get the bad ending. So the retry for the good ending is canonically coming a full game later.

Nature[]

Yuri and Anne attacked by the demons in their neighbors' bodies.

The Four Masks claim to be the oldest of the demons Yuri has slain and absorbed. If this is literal and not just a boast the Four Mask may indeed have a truly personal level with Yuri. Yuri's powers first awakened when the Taoist Sage Dehuai sent demons to attack Yuri and his mother Anne. Dehuai was an enemy of Yuri's father Jinpachrio "Ben" Hyuga, who had sacrificed his life to stop Dehuai, but not before literally tearing Dehuai limb from limb in the process - Dehuai needing prosthetics ever since. In vengeance for his injuries, Dehuai sent demons to devour Jinpachrio's widow and son before either even knew he was dead. Dehuai summoned demons to possess the bodies of the Hyuga's neighbors which Yuri and his mother see breaking in. Yuri notes that one of them is the father of one of his friends and another one is the uncle of another friend, but their faces look off. Anne is able to quickly recognize the men are in-fact demons. The demons giggle and state no matter how much they eat they are never full - implying either the demons ate the families of the men they possess, or the demons possessed the other family members and then ate out the insides of the bodies they currently inhabit - either way everyone in the village is dead one way or another, with Anne and Yuri being the final two to finish off. Anne tries to shield Yuri but is killed by one of the demons. In a rage at seeing his mother killed by what look like his neighbors, Yuri's powers were first triggered, and he likely turned into the demon Death Emperor - his basic dark Fusion form. When Yuri came to he was standing naked in the twisted corpses of the creatures that had killed his mother - he states he cried all night pleading for his mother to awake before everything finally sunk in for him.

If the Four Masks are indeed the oldest four demons Yuri slew, they would be the four demons who killed his mother. How fusions usually work is the demons, ghosts and wicked humans Yuri kills are absorbed into Yuri, who builds his fusions off the their collective life-force before needing to deal with the left-over formless hate excreted afterwards. Because of this, most of Yuri's Malice fights are not specific souls out for vengeance but just an amalgamation of their various negative traits reshuffled as beings of pure emotional strife; However, it is possible that the awakening of his fusion abilities took in the souls, whole. If this occurred the Four Masks are almost certainly the same demons who killed Yuri's mother. The Masks claim to be Fear, Envy, Anger and Hate - as such they have merged with these less desirable aspects of Yuri's soul and torment him by gaining a foothold internally. Defeating the Masks relieves Yuri of their foothold in his soul and have them fade away entirely. In the sequel Shadow Hearts: Covenant, the cult Sapientes Gladio curse Yuri - sealing his fusions and gradually rotting his soul, requiring Yuri to deal with his Malice all over again, however the Four Masks do not return. With Yuri conquering them any inner turmoil he has as of that point, even with the curse, is still only his internal spiritual issues, and no longer an outside force. The Four Masks are truly gone, their final thoughts ether glee they managed to destroy something Yuri loved before they faded into oblivion, or resentment at being unable to get him one last time - spite the entire center of their existence even unto death.

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