Mamiya Yuka stood frozen for a long, long moment.
Not far away, another woman was equally motionless.
The woman wore a kimono. Her feet were bare. The skin around her lips was mottled with bruises, as though she had been struck repeatedly. Curtains of black hair fell across her face, half-veiling her eyes — yet even through that dark veil, you could tell her eyes were unnaturally, impossibly large.
Her hands were pressed together in prayer. On the back of each hand was a small, neat hole, and a red thread passed through the opening, its end tied to a tiny bell. The bell swayed without wind, filling the air with a crisp, clear ringing.
The kimono woman stared at the suddenly dead Amamiya Rin, her eyes brimming with utter bewilderment.
She hadn't even gotten around to cursing him yet. How had he just gone and died on his own?
After a brief, blank moment of stunned incomprehension, the kimono woman vanished without a sound, without a trace.
"What do I do? What do I do?"
Mamiya Yuka snapped back to herself — and promptly fell apart.
"Right — Amamiya must have prepared for something like this, right? Dying with absolutely no warning like that... there's no way it was random."
The thought struck her like a bolt from the blue. She yanked her backpack off her shoulders, grabbed the zipper, and tore it open, intending to search for some kind of clue.
What greeted her eyes instead was stack after stack of banknotes. Mostly ten-thousand-yen bills — Fukuzawa Yukichi's stern face staring back at her in bundles — with a smaller number of five-thousand-yen notes bearing Higuchi Ichiyo, and mixed in among them... several sheets of sandpaper?
Mamiya Yuka snapped the zipper shut so fast she nearly caught her fingers. She whipped her head around, scanning the area in a frantic sweep, terrified someone might have seen the small fortune crammed inside the bag.
Luckily, the surrounding area was pure chaos. Everyone's attention had been swallowed by the fire and the mayhem spilling out of the hospital lobby. A few people had glanced in the direction of the two figures huddled in the corner, but none had come close.
"I can't talk my way out of this. There is no talking my way out of this!"
Mamiya Yuka pressed both hands flat against the backpack and sank to the ground, her face a portrait of pure despair.
A crime scene. A dead body. A bag stuffed with cash. Her own fingerprints all over said bag.
What conclusion would anyone draw from that combination?
If Mamiya Yuka herself were looking at this from the outside, her first instinct would be: robbery and murder. And the primary suspect would be her.
Her mind was spinning faster and faster, going absolutely nowhere.
She was a rookie reporter who investigated supernatural phenomena. How had she ended up here?
Then — a series of violent detonations erupted from the direction of the hospital lobby.
Scorching blasts of superheated air came roaring outward, shot through with gouts of flame. More than a dozen fire-wreathed figures came stumbling out of the building, barreling straight through the jets of dry chemical from the extinguishers as if the powder didn't exist — sending the would-be firefighters scrambling backward in sheer terror.
"Oh no."
Mamiya Yuka's scalp went cold.
That Aizawa Yuuma — was he seriously planning to start a massacre out here in the open?
Committing mass slaughter in a hospital, performing curse-kills in broad daylight, in front of dozens of witnesses... at this point, somehow, it didn't even seem far-fetched.
Mamiya Yuka shoved every other thought out of her head. She gritted her teeth, heaved the backpack onto her shoulders, and then hauled Amamiya Rin upright — and immediately bolted for the road. She threw her arm out, flagging down a passing taxi with all the desperation of a drowning woman grabbing a rope.
It took Mamiya Yuka every last ounce of effort she possessed to get Amamiya Rin back to where she lived.
It was a reasonably new apartment building — nothing extravagant, but well-maintained and clean. The kind of place where management actually cared.
Its only flaw, if you could call it that, was the cemetery sitting directly behind it.
Not that Mamiya Yuka considered it a flaw at all. She would have been thrilled to encounter a ghost in that cemetery. Unfortunately, she seemed to lack whatever talent was required to see them. She'd been living here for nearly two months and hadn't spotted a single supernatural presence.
She shouldered her apartment door open with her back, dragged Amamiya Rin inside with great effort, and turned to lock it behind her.
The apartment was a textbook Tokyo single-occupant layout. A narrow entryway just inside the door. A miniature kitchen to the left, the washing machine squeezed in beside it. Further in, the space opened into a combined bedroom-and-living-room.
Small, but sensibly laid out. Just not particularly tidy.
The desk by the window was buried under open folklorist texts, supernatural interest magazines, and interview notebooks. The walls were plastered with newspaper clippings and photographs — blurry ghost images, printed urban legend dossiers, miscellaneous paranormal research. A professional camera bag stood in the corner, and a tripod was propped carelessly against the wall beside it.
She settled Amamiya Rin on the tatami mat against the wall, then dropped herself onto the floor beside him and stared at his body with a deeply troubled expression.
Smack.
Mamiya Yuka slapped her own forehead.
"What was I even thinking? I actually brought a corpse home?"
But if she hadn't brought him home, she couldn't exactly have left Amamiya Rin's body lying on the side of the road, could she?
"Ugh! What am I supposed to do!"
She let out a long, helpless groan.
Call the police?
That idea was strangled the instant it surfaced. What would she even say? This man was fighting a horde of burning undead at the hospital and then spontaneously dropped dead?
Take him back to the hospital?
Even less realistic. He was dead. Bringing a corpse back there would be walking directly into a trap of her own making.
"Maybe... ask someone?"
Mamiya Yuka mulled it over, pulled out her phone, and scrolled through her contacts.
[Higa-san]. [Kirisaki-sensei].
Those were the only two she could possibly turn to.
Higa-san was a psychic — and rumor had it her older sister was a famous one, kept on retainer by government agencies.
Kirisaki-sensei was a folklorist. Mamiya Yuka had once overheard her taking a phone call; apparently, Kirisaki-sensei's younger brother worked in a special division of the Metropolitan Police Department.
Bother the sensei, or bother Higa-san?
Mamiya Yuka was still turning it over in her head when Amamiya Rin's body suddenly convulsed.
It was like watching a fish react through spinal reflex alone. His upper body jolted rigid and snapped upright, launching itself clean off the tatami mat.
"WAAH!"
The sudden movement scared the life out of Mamiya Yuka. She lurched backward, crashed onto the floor, and her heart nearly flew straight out of her throat.
"A-Amamiya-kun?"
Her breath frozen in her chest, she stared wide-eyed at the moving corpse and called out with extreme caution.
Before the words had even fully left her mouth, Amamiya Rin's body went limp — like a puppet whose strings had been cut — and toppled straight back down. His spine hit the mattress with a heavy, muffled thud.
Silence reclaimed the room. As if nothing had happened at all.
But how could Mamiya Yuka possibly pretend she hadn't just seen that?
Her heart was still hammering. She hesitated for a few seconds, then steeled herself and shuffled closer.
First, she reached out and held her fingers beneath Amamiya Rin's nose.
A faint, faint warmth — the ghost of a breath — drifted across her fingertips.
Her eyes went wide. She quickly pressed two fingers against the side of his neck.
Beneath the skin, his pulse was slow and feeble — but it was there. One beat, then another. Steady, unmistakable.
"...What?"
It should have been good news, and she knew it — and yet Mamiya Yuka still couldn't stop the same bewildered cry from ripping out of her as when she'd confirmed he was dead.
Half-dead out of nowhere. Full of life out of nowhere. Dropping dead on the spot out of nowhere. Coming back to life out of nowhere.
Aamamiya Rin — was this guy even human?
Mamiya Yuka muttered her complaints under her breath as she scooted back and let herself collapse against the floor, breathing out a long sigh of relief.
Human or not — he was still her lifesaver. As long as that held true, alive was better than dead. She'd take it.
---
Aamamiya Rin's consciousness slowly fought its way up through the black, churning chaos, and clarity returned.
He opened his eyes.
He was sitting in a spacious lecture hall. At the front of the room, a white-haired professor stood at the blackboard, writing out a complex series of equations in steady, deliberate strokes.
The afternoon sun poured through the tall windows, scattering warm pools of light across the desks and the chalk-dusted board.
____
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