"Teacher Takagi's research?"
Kawakami Tomie tilted her head to one side, let out a contemptuous snicker, and spoke with pointed disdain.
"Don't tell me you actually think his research has any real value. Please. He's just a high school teacher. Everything he documented was blindingly obvious."
"True — but those blindingly obvious phenomena still contained useful data. Controlling, altering, and dividing one's own flesh — if you could do that consciously and at will, it would be an extraordinarily powerful ability."
"Don't make it sound so simple."
Kawakami Tomie's brow furrowed with displeasure. She hooked a chair toward herself with her foot, sank into it with languid ease, and crossed her legs — the toe of her high heel tapping lightly at the air.
"That idiot never actually figured anything out, but you've seen the phenomena he catalogued, haven't you? When my mental state is unstable, my body fragments. That's all it is. You're reading way too much into it."
"I'm not reading too much into it. You're selling yourself short."
Aamamiya Rin leaned forward slightly, his gaze fixed on Tomie's eyes.
"Genuinely, Tomie — you're far stronger than you think you are."
She had always been the passive victim — cut apart, dismembered, and then reborn. But chapter after chapter, as Junji Ito drew her story, Kawakami Tomie's abilities had been steadily climbing in the details, accumulating power that she herself had never stopped to measure.
In The Little Finger, Tomie could control the speed of her body's recovery.
In The Old Ugly, Tomie could dissolve her body down to individual cells — and slip out through the cracks in stone.
In Control, Tomie could parasitize a host's body entirely, commanding their every movement — and, like a vampire, compel her host to bite others and drain their life force.
Kawakami Tomie possessed cellular-level mastery over her own body. Even if she couldn't access it now — the potential was already inside her.
"So what you're saying is... my ceiling is manipulating my own cells to reshape my flesh? What's the use in that?"
Kawakami Tomie listened to Amamiya Rin finish, then tilted her head and turned the question back on him.
"Hmm... in the simplest possible terms, you could become... the Ultimate Being. Humans have limits. You don't."
A certain man — a man who had stopped thinking — surfaced unbidden from somewhere in the back of Amamiya Rin's mind.
"Who even understands what that means! All I want to know is whether we can kill that Apology Demon!"
Kawakami Tomie stared at Amamiya Rin, who had inexplicably started getting worked up, and couldn't help rolling her eyes at him.
"I don't know."
Aamamiya Rin caught himself and answered plainly.
The Ultimate Being was still a biological entity. Their opponent, after all, was a demon capable of wiping out humanity in a single stroke. But if the body were trained to its absolute limit, and the ultimate sword technique mastered, and the divine blade from Siren obtained...
"Heart, technique, strength, weapon — all four at their peak might be enough to fight it. Ideally paired with a Soul Blade to constantly replenish vitality and shorten regeneration time. And if possible — acquiring the ability to fly and project energy from that supernatural transfer student."
Aamamiya Rin found himself quietly grateful.
Thank goodness Junji Ito had once drawn a short manga adaptation of Siren.
Short-form manga didn't call for combat tools — but horror games provided their protagonists with exactly that kind of countermeasure equipment.
"So there IS a way."
Kawakami Tomie's eyes lit up in an instant. Like a shark that had caught the scent of blood in the water, she snapped to her feet and launched herself at Amamiya Rin.
Jet-black hair cascaded down, sweeping across his cheek with a faint, ticklish softness. Kawakami Tomie leaned her head slightly down, her breath warm and fragrant as orchid — a gentle heat drifting past the curve of his ear — and her voice curled with delighted mischief.
"Hehe~ I knew it. You're all complaints on the outside but you come through in the end, don't you? Weren't you making that whole troubled face just a moment ago?"
"I'm not a computer. I can't spit out an answer the second you ask a question."
The impact of her throwing herself at him sent Amamiya Rin stumbling forward. He braced both hands against the workbench to steady himself and raised one arm with mild exasperation to press back against her shoulder.
"I need time to think — to connect the clues I know and work my way toward a conclusion."
Tomie's arms coiled around his neck like water serpents. Her body pressed fully against his back, her chin resting on his shoulder as she tilted her face to look at him sidelong, smiling warmly.
"Mm, mm. Sure, let's say that's how it works. So what exactly do we do? Darling."
"Pressure Training — I don't need to tell you that part, do I?"
Back then, after the very first round of Pressure Training, the Tomie Network had already been flooded with thoughts of beating Amamiya Rin to his knees.
The Tomies hadn't been joking.
It wasn't just Tomie No. 25, who had experienced it once — several others had gone ahead and tried the Pressure Training for themselves, and every single one of them had pushed through the full regimen.
"Isn't muscular women your thing?"
Kawakami Tomie had caught the unspoken implication in his tone, and she grinned at him with languid amusement.
"One of them. And that was in the past."
Aamamiya Rin corrected her without a flicker of embarrassment.
"The real foundation of mastering the body should be Dhyana, the Gate of Contemplation, self-hypnosis, and — most fundamentally — medicine. The last one goes without saying: you can't reshape your flesh into whatever form you need without first understanding the human body through medicine.
As for the former — it's straightforward, given everything I understand about Tomie. Every single one of your cells almost certainly has its own independent will. It's just suppressed by your subconscious while it remains inside your body. It only breaks free when it flows outside, or when your mental state becomes unstable.
What you need to do is look inward through the Gate of Contemplation — and then hypnotize your own cells through self-suggestion, coaxing them to shift and change according to your will."
Aamamiya Rin paused mid-sentence, a thought catching him off guard.
Wasn't this just another expression of mind over matter?
So — the more abnormal the existence, the more easily they could bend reality through will alone?
"The Gate of Contemplation... no. Absolutely not."
The smile vanished from Kawakami Tomie's face. Her brow knitted tight, her expression flooded with open revulsion.
"Fine, we skip that. Hypnosis alone works too — it'll just be slower."
Aamamiya Rin accommodated her without argument.
He understood perfectly well — Kawakami Tomie would never willingly use the Gate of Contemplation. Even the last time had been an impulsive act, and on top of that, she'd turned it on him.
"Hypnosis? That actually sounds decent. Time is the one thing we're never short on."
Kawakami Tomie's eyes flickered with thought. She unwound herself from Amamiya Rin's neck and straightened up.
The following day. The medical school building.
Through long stairwells and winding corridors, brushing past the NPC residents of the Dream World, Amamiya Rin pushed open a wooden classroom door — and his footsteps slowed.
The lecture hall could seat a hundred. Right now, it was nearly full.
Not just NPC students — the fifty-odd Kawakami Tomies were there too, wearing all manner of different fashions, every one of those identically beautiful faces wearing the exact same expression of irritated impatience. As if they'd all been happily window-shopping just a moment ago and had been forcibly dragged to school without warning.
"Quite the turnout."
Aamamiya Rin clicked his tongue in genuine surprise. Even on the very first day he had entered the Dream World, he had never seen this many Tomies gathered in one place at once.
____
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