"So incredible! So strong! Getting to watch a fight this spectacular — dying would have been worth the price of admission!"
Click! Click-click-click!
Mamiya Yuka kept shooting from a distance, snapping frame after frame, practically huffing with excitement through her nose.
She'd never trained in Kendo, and she'd never picked up any other combat discipline either. Ask her to appreciate a duel of swordsmanship and she'd normally come up blank. But the fight playing out before her eyes right now — clean, fluid, without a single wasted motion — even she could see exactly how terrifyingly skilled Kawakami Tomie was.
Aizawa Yuuma, meanwhile, stood there in stunned bewilderment. He simply could not wrap his head around it: Amamiya Rin, a man who needed help just to walk, was fighting like an absolute beast.
Over forty attackers, and they still couldn't bring down a single person?
Aizawa Yuuma began to panic.
"Sumimasen! Don't lose! Sumimasen! For my sake — use your hellfire on him!"
Aizawa Yuuma's voice cracked with a sob, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"Please! Sumimasen...!"
Apology after apology poured out in an unbroken stream. The evil electromagnetic waves they carried began to shift and warp — and Kawakami Tomie felt her own body temperature rising.
It climbed until it hovered around forty degrees Celsius, and then it stopped, as though hitting a hard ceiling — a ceiling, however, that was calibrated to her limits, not anyone else's.
The dead who had been swarming Kawakami Tomie began to change. Beneath their ashen gray skin, a grotesque orange-red luminescence pulsed and bled through.
Then, without warning, searing flames erupted from their eye sockets, their mouths, even the pores of their skin.
WHOOOM—!
The flames engulfed the dead one by one, turning them into howling, human-shaped torches. The heat was extraordinary. When Kawakami Tomie slammed the steel pole across the back of one dead man's neck, the rod itself glowed cherry-red in the blaze — and the heat transferred straight into her palm, scorching the skin of her hand.
"Curses, one after another — tricks coming from nowhere, no way to guard against all of them. So this is what it feels like to be Amamiya Rin dealing with us?"
Kawakami Tomie quickly wrapped her sleeve around her hand. Her body bent boneless-smooth to the left, slipping clear of a charging fire-corpse — but the guttering flames grazed her cheek, and several strands of hair curled black and scorched in an instant.
The brutal heat warped the air around her. The stench of burning flesh spread in all directions. The dead, wreathed in fire, attacked with even greater ferocity — throwing themselves at her with a suicidal recklessness, spreading their burning arms wide.
Kawakami Tomie used her footwork and reaction speed to maintain distance, her wrist snapping the steel pole in a sharp whip. The far end connected squarely with a fire-corpse's throat, a powerful strike that shattered its larynx.
The burning man simply tilted its head back and kept walking, pressing forward against the pole without breaking stride.
In the same instant, the rest of the fire-corpses rushed in from every direction, completely sealing off any room to maneuver. Sheets of rising flame merged into an unbroken sea of fire that surged toward her.
At that moment, Kawakami Tomie understood — truly felt it in her bones — exactly what Amamiya Rin had experienced facing them.
Summoned from Hell, impossible to kill a second time. Hellfire that hard-countered her specifically. A cognition-warping uglification curse. And every other power of Aizawa Yuuma's — save for the dissolving ability, which only Amamiya Rin even remembered — all of it aimed squarely at her.
And that fever from within just now... if she hadn't absorbed some resistance to demonic power from the Daughter of the Demon, she'd probably already be on fire right now.
"Baka yarō!"
The curse snapped out of her, and paradoxically, it restored the calm that Dhyana demanded.
The verdict from their collective observation was unanimous — they could not win.
Even before Aizawa Yuuma had called down the hellfire, they couldn't have won. Amamiya Rin's body was simply too poor a condition — not because of injury, but because of the muscle atrophy and joint stiffness that came from long-term bed rest.
Self-healing couldn't fix that.
And the weapon was terrible.
One versus forty-plus undead — even Mike Tyson would drop to his knees, let alone her. And now Aizawa Yuuma had added hellfire to the mix. Pressing on any further would mean leaving Amamiya Rin's life here on this floor.
If Amamiya Rin died, that was one thing — but what if Aizawa Yuuma chose not to kill him? That was the real problem.
"Only option — retreat...!"
Kawakami Tomie shot a vicious glare at Aizawa Yuuma, who had already retreated to the safety of the emergency stairwell.
She dropped suddenly into a crouch. The steel pole spun once in her palm and swept low, smashing into the knee joint of a fire-corpse behind her.
Crack. The knee buckled, and the corpse went down.
Kawakami Tomie surged upright. Fixing her eyes on the direction of the lobby exit, she sprinted forward and launched herself into the air — planting both feet on the kneeling fire-corpse's shoulders, using it as a springboard to vault even higher. Her body tucked and spun in midair, legs driving down toward the heads of two fire-corpses below.
Thud. Thud.
Both impacts landed almost simultaneously. The two fire-corpses rocked back and crashed into the bodies behind them. Several burning figures tangled together as they fell, flames licking at one another, tripping up the others pressing in from behind.
Tomie hit the ground rolling, one hand pressing the floor to control her landing. She didn't spare a single glance at the chaos and pursuit behind her — she was already running, the steel pole swinging left and right in red arcs, slamming viciously into fire-corpse necks.
The fire-corpses staggered under the blows. Tomie didn't let herself slow down by even a single step, driving her body through the gaps that opened between them.
A wave of scorching heat crashed against her face. A burning limb scraped across her forearm — the fabric blackened instantly, and a searing pain bit into her skin.
But Tomie had no attention left to spare for any of that.
She forced herself through the burning wall, through the flames, and out the other side — carving a path through the fire-corpse encirclement by sheer will and momentum. She burst clear in a single breath, lurching and stumbling as she threw herself down the hospital's front steps, hitting the ground and rolling to bleed off the impact. The way she tumbled — staggering and scrambling — had absolutely nothing graceful about it.
Beyond the hospital entrance, chaos had already gathered.
Dozens, maybe a hundred people had crowded in from the street and the surrounding shops, drawn by the light of the fire from within. Some wore expressions of concern, others of morbid excitement — all of them pointing at the lobby, murmuring and speculating.
"What's happening in there? Since when do hospitals catch fire?"
"There are people burning inside! This is terrifying!"
"Where are the fire trucks? Why haven't they arrived?"
"Where's security? A fire that big and the security guards are just... gone?"
...
Frightened whispers, curious questions, and anxious shouts blended into one wall of chaotic noise.
The owners and staff of the nearest shops reacted quickly — they grabbed fire extinguishers from their stores and charged over. Seeing several fire-corpses come chasing out after Tomie, they immediately raised the extinguishers and aimed at the burning figures.
Hisss — hisss —!
Thick jets of white dry-powder chemical agent blasted out, coating the burning fire-corpses and smothering the flames on their bodies. The dead convulsed in violent coughing fits as the powder choked them, their movements growing sluggish.
____
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