The shop owners and their staff pushed into the hospital lobby with fire extinguishers raised, blasting jets of dry chemical agent to beat back the flames.
And yet, for all that suppression, the fire showed not the slightest intention of going out.
Because it was no ordinary fire.
The well-meaning bystanders had no idea what they were dealing with. They could only mutter to themselves in bewilderment — why won't this thing die?
"Hah... hah... breathe..."
Using the brief chaos and cover as her window, Tomie managed to fall back further. She pressed her back against a cold lamppost, watching the white-misted hospital lobby as she worked to steady her breathing.
"Amamiya-kun, what do we do now?" Mamiya Yuka came jogging over, camera still in hand, and asked Kawakami Tomie with careful caution. "Should we call the police? Can the Metropolitan Police Department even handle something like this?"
"Garbage. All of them."
Kawakami Tomie didn't mince words.
"Gar — garbage?!"
The sheer bluntness of it — barely even a dismissal, more like a direct insult — made Mamiya Yuka's cheek twitch.
"That's a bit much, don't you think? I actually have inside information — I've heard the Metropolitan Police Department has a special division for exactly this kind of incident. And I might even have a connection to that division."
She pushed back with a word of protest, her expression edging toward smug, her body swaying ever so slightly with self-satisfaction.
"A special division?" Kawakami Tomie shot her a sideways glance and let out a short, derisive laugh. "Also garbage."
That Police History Compilation Office — the only one with any real ability there was Indou Ranko.
The rest of them — onmyoji, exorcists, that whole crowd — they could handle run-of-the-mill evil spirits well enough. But the moment anything conceptual was involved, they were completely useless.
Kawakami Tomie had no interest in calling Kazumi Junya to file a report either. She looked up at the state of the hospital lobby, turned it over in her mind for a moment, and then decisively abandoned any thought of regrouping and charging back in.
There was no countering Aizawa Yuuma's curses. No matter how much backup she brought, they'd only be dead weight. And even with fire extinguishers on hand, there was no telling how many of the dead he could summon — probably no upper limit at all. According to Amamiya Rin's own words, this world ran on idealism; idealist abilities had no ceiling.
And killing Aizawa Yuuma himself wouldn't solve anything — it would only vent a little rage.
Without destroying the Apology Demon, killing one Aizawa Yuuma would just produce another.
The goat-headed, bat-winged demon sat cross-legged above the sea of fire consuming the lobby. When Kawakami Tomie's gaze swept toward it, the corners of its mouth split all the way to its earlobes in a smile that carried equal parts mockery and provocation.
"Utterly useless."
Kawakami Tomie could have ground her teeth to powder with rage. Unable to do anything about the Apology Demon, she turned her fury on the body she was currently inhabiting.
She looked down at this feeble, unworthy shell. Her palms trembled faintly from the prolonged gripping and striking. Stinging pain radiated from multiple points along her arms and shoulders where the flames had licked across them. The sleeves of the hospital gown had been burned away in large, ragged holes, and the exposed skin beneath was a grotesque tableau of burns and swollen blisters.
Pathetic. Amamiya Rin, always pushing them to train and study — and he turned out to be the weakest one of all!
"Hmph!"
Almost instantaneously, the collective will reached its consensus. Without a moment's hesitation, they withdrew from Dhyana entirely — and handed the body back to Amamiya Rin.
In the next instant, that sensation of being forcibly synchronized, of an outside will commanding the body, vanished.
Amamiya Rin felt as though his consciousness had been hurled out of a calm, still lake — and into a storm. A crushing, soul-breaking exhaustion and vertigo crashed over him like a monstrous wave, threatening to swallow his awareness whole.
Without Kawakami Tomie's synchronization holding him up, Amamiya Rin couldn't maintain consciousness. His body, already battered from the fight, was even more depleted than before.
The ringing in his ears intensified. His vision blurred, fading nearly to black. Sharp, stabbing pain lanced through his skull in waves. His legs buckled, and he slid down the cold lamppost, collapsing onto the frigid pavement below.
"Huh?"
Mamiya Yuka had been muttering to herself about how dramatically Amamiya Rin's attitude kept shifting — perfectly friendly back in the hospital ward, then suddenly calling everything garbage the moment they reached the lobby.
She hadn't even gotten the chance to ask about it tactfully before she watched his condition crash entirely.
"Amamiya-kun, are you alright? What's going on? You keep changing every few minutes."
Mamiya Yuka crouched down quickly, still grumbling, and moved to help him to his feet.
"..."
Amamiya Rin tried to speak — but the extreme exhaustion and total mental depletion hit like a dam bursting. They obliterated his last shred of consciousness completely. His vision went dark. Mamiya Yuka's startled cry grew impossibly distant.
Then, all sensation cut out at once.
Mamiya Yuka noticed immediately that something was wrong.
Amamiya Rin's eyes were still open — but his pupils had lost all focus, staring blankly into the empty air ahead. His body had gone limp in a way that wasn't right, his arms hanging with a strange, unnatural looseness.
"Hey! Amamiya-kun!"
She patted his face.
Ice cold.
She brought her fingers to his nostrils. No breath.
She pressed them to the side of his neck. No pulse.
"Wha... what?"
Mamiya Yuka's head spun, the world tilting beneath her.
Dead? He's dead? He was a force of nature just moments ago — cutting through forty undead like they were nothing — and now, barely a few minutes later, he's just... dead?
At almost the exact same moment, across the city, every single one of the Tomies paused.
Their vision flickered black. A dense, suffocating darkness closed in around their minds, as if trying to swallow their consciousness whole.
(Is Amamiya Rin dead?)
(That feeling... could it be sudden cardiac arrest?)
...
Dozens of Kawakami Tomies were struck simultaneously by the shock to their collective awareness. But it was a one-time blow — they pushed through it quickly and confirmed what had happened.
(Hahahaha! That's hilarious. Did that idiot literally work himself to death?)
(Too bad. A death like that won't finish him off for good.)
(Anyway — what about the Apology Demon? It seems like there's nothing we can do about it?)
(Forget the Apology Demon for now! Our faces! Our faces are the most important thing right now! What is wrong with my face?!)
(Aren't those the same issue? The face problem was caused by the Apology Demon in the first place.)
(What if we just slash the face open and let it heal itself?)
(Great idea. You go first.)
...
After thoroughly mocking Amamiya Rin for a good while, the Tomies promptly put his sudden death out of their minds.
After all — setting aside the fact that their cells were already influencing his physiology — they were still breathing, still continuously supplying oxygen to his neural network.
Amamiya Rin might look dead on the surface. But he hadn't actually finished dying yet. He didn't even need to be revived.
Compared to Amamiya Rin, they cared far more about their own appearances.
Looking like this — if they ran into any of the impostors now, they'd be laughed to death on the spot.
The Tomies treated Amamiya Rin's sudden death as a punchline.
Mamiya Yuka, however, found nothing funny about it whatsoever.
Her expression had frozen on her face. Her eyes were full of blank, stunned incomprehension.
She simply could not process what had just happened.
A man who had been completely alive and fighting like a demon just moments before — she'd looked away for one second, and he was dead. What on earth had just happened?!
Inside her head, Mamiya Yuka was screaming.
____
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