"That's absurd."
On the second-floor corridor, dust shaken loose from the ceiling settled on Amamiya Rin's shoulders as he watched the chaos below.
Two three-meter giants, each forcibly welded together out of countless Ikiryo, were tearing apart everything in sight.
Every punch landed heavy enough to set the air humming, shattering the endlessly spawning Kayako duplicates with ease. Black hair coiled up like a rising tide and snapped under sheer mass, and the walls and floor collected fresh scars with each thunderous impact.
They were nothing but spirit bodies, with pitifully low efficiency at interfering with matter, so how could they manage this much? Reading novels every day feels great, ttks.tw is fantastic
Amamiya Rin watched at his leisure, unmoved.
Ago and Azuki had high numbers, sure, but no skills to make those numbers count. Impressive as this looked, it stood no chance of beating Kayako.
No... the moment they fused a mass of Ikiryo into one large Ikiryo, Kayako's victory became inevitable.
In that instant, the bodies of the Ikiryo giants burst open without warning.
The chest of the left giant caved in and ruptured out of nowhere; at the same moment a gaping hollow blew open at the right giant's shoulder and neck.
Then came more. Holes, tears, craters — every kind of horrifying wound blooming like invisible flowers across the giants' torsos, as though numberless unseen hammers were striking from every angle at once. The enormous spirit bodies shuddered violently, without even the room to strike back.
The blows had no visible origin and no visible passage, only the result of force landing on flesh. The Ikiryo giants staggered backward, their vast frames convulsing under invisible impacts, the aggregates wobbling unstably as if they might come apart at any second.
Ago and Azuki were finished.
Amamiya Rin reached that conclusion calmly.
Ago and Azuki had no idea what those sudden wounds on the Ikiryo were, nor what had been bursting the earlier ones apart. He, however, had already worked it out.
It was interference with time.
Just like in Ju-On: The Grudge 2 — a character hanged from the ceiling in the future, legs swinging endlessly, knocking over a teacup that sat on a table in the past. Kayako had linked the future to the past.
The same principle applied here. Kayako had deliberately provoked the chaos so the Ikiryo giants would rampage inside the house, and the results of that destruction were being transferred by Kayako from the future into the present.
More than that, Kayako, as a grudge, could not be destroyed.
Immortality and imperishability plus a skill that warped space and time — the stronger the enemy's attack power, the more readily it invited their own death.
The instant he finished that judgment, Amamiya Rin stopped hesitating.
He turned and retreated into Kayako's bedroom, slid the window open, braced one hand on the frame, and vaulted out.
A second-story drop meant nothing to him.
The Crimson Lotus Breathing Method surged through him. He adjusted his posture in midair, bent his knees on landing and rolled to bleed off the momentum, gravel biting into his palms. Without pausing, he came up running and charged for the living room.
The sliding door between the living room and the garden had already been knocked crooked by the earlier shockwaves, hanging half off its frame. Amamiya Rin turned sideways and slipped through.
The scene inside was far worse than it had looked from the second floor.
New hollows kept blasting open across the two pale giants' bodies, and kept knitting shut again.
Ago and Azuki still had no grasp of Kayako's ability. Relying on soul-force vast beyond human comprehension, they sustained the Ikiryo giants, went on wrecking the haunted house, and went on absorbing attacks arriving from some moment in the future.
Azuki sat on the floor behind the sofa with her back to the garden, the gunshot wound in her leg still seeping blood, her body trembling faintly.
An opening.
Amamiya Rin made no sound. He hunched low and shot toward Azuki like a hunting cat.
Part of Azuki's attention was drained by the bullet wound in her leg, part by steering her Ikiryo duplicate against Kayako. She sensed nothing of the danger closing from behind.
In one motion, Amamiya Rin's left arm locked around her throat from behind while his right hand seized her jaw, wrenching her head toward him and prying her mouth open.
"Mmf — !!"
Azuki's eyes flew wide in terror. She thrashed desperately, hands clawing blindly backward.
Amamiya Rin didn't budge. Something surged up his throat, and more than a dozen half-transparent nerve threads tipped with needle points shot out of his mouth and drove into Azuki's open mouth.
The threads pierced soft tissue and linked precisely into her cranial nerves.
Puncture, coil, splice — one seamless motion.
"Gah — !!"
Azuki's body spasmed, her eyes rolling back. As the cranial connection took hold, countless memories that were not hers, sensory feedback, surges of emotion, all came crashing into her brain like a levee giving way.
The vast, tangled torrent of information swallowed her sense of self almost at once.
Resist? Impossible.
Azuki possessed nothing like Tomie's terrifying obsession with self. Under the weight of tens of thousands of years' worth of memory fragments and other women's egos, her psychological defenses tore like wet paper. Her body had not yet converted to Tomie physiology, but her mind had already been assimilated into Tomie's understanding of the world.
And so, in the space of a blink, a new Tomie was born.
She blinked. The panic and rage that had belonged to Azuki drained from those eyes like mist under sunlight, replaced by a matter-of-fact arrogance and a contempt for everything.
She rolled her neck, and Amamiya Rin let his arm fall away. The newborn Psychic Tomie caught his arm in return and pulled herself up onto her feet.
The movement tugged at the muscle around the gunshot wound in her leg, and the sharp pain made her frown.
But such a trifle didn't interest her. She cupped Amamiya Rin's cheeks in both hands and stared into his eyes from inches away.
"Tch. How ugly."
She muttered it, displeasure thick in her voice.
"Turning me into a plain-looking woman like this. You awful thing."
Psychic Tomie's irritation wasn't aimed at Amamiya Rin.
No — it wasn't that he escaped it entirely, only that he wasn't the whole of it.
What galled her far more than Amamiya Rin was this face. Conversion to a Tomie physiology took time, and for now she was still wearing Azuki's mediocre features.
For Kawakami Tomie, even a beauty counted as ugly standing before her. And mediocre? How was that any different from being a hag?
(Tch! Another one!)
(Hmph! This time a real fake has shown up.)
(Don't let there be a next time! Rin, fakes like this only dilute the purity of Kawakami Tomie!)
(They're all fakes, but this eyesore is even shoddier than the rest.)
…
Sensing the newborn Tomie, the Tomie Network churned with undisguised rejection.
Displeasure, disgust, mockery came surging in, nearly drowning the newborn Psychic Tomie.
Even inside the Tomie Network there was a pecking order: ordinary fakes, fakes whose faces differed from Kawakami Tomie's, and fakes converted from other women.
Psychic Tomie, as she now stood, was unquestionably at the very bottom of it.
Of course, bottom of the ladder or not, a psychic who had alienated herself into a Tomie would never show weakness, and would certainly never consider herself the weak one.
(Shut up, all of you fakes. I am the real Kawakami Tomie. What right do inferior counterfeits like you have to lecture me?)
She raised an eyebrow and fired the words straight back.
(Huh?! Who are you calling a fake?!)
(The nerve! I've never seen a fake this shameless!)
(I'll kill you! You're the first one I kill in the future!)
…
Her sheer righteous confidence enraged the other individuals in the Tomie Network. None of those Tomie could fathom it — Psychic Tomie was a fake whose face and body hadn't even converted to Kawakami Tomie's yet, and she had the gall to stand there and accuse everyone else of being counterfeit?
For a moment the Tomie Network seethed with fury.
(Deafening. A flock of chattering, low-grade imitations.)
Psychic Tomie's brows drew together, and she hurled the thought right back, laced with heavy scorn.
(I am the true Kawakami Tomie. The eternally unchanging, beautiful soul resides here. You fakes who can only lean on your mutant flesh — what right do you have to point fingers at me?)
Unlike Flesh-Mod Tomie, who saw beauty in a powerful frame and a sculpted body; unlike Vampire Tomie, who wanted to devour all the other Tomie; and unlike Mara Tomie, who wanted to erase every other Tomie consciousness — the Tomie converted from a psychic had her own Tomie philosophy.
(Hmph, soul? We're immortal and imperishable. Does a Kawakami Tomie with a soul even count as Kawakami Tomie?)
The other Tomie sneered, refusing to grant Psychic Tomie's premise at all.
And while Psychic Tomie was busy arguing doctrine with the rest of them, one of the Ikiryo giants fighting Kayako — cut off from its supply of spiritual power and its repairs — saw the countless spirit-lights composing it collapse utterly amid the violent turmoil, vanishing into nothing.
Ago noticed the anomaly at once. Her own giant smashed another Kayako to pieces with a punch as she whipped her head toward Azuki.
She saw Amamiya Rin. She saw Azuki's rigid body. And she saw the eerie white tendrils extending from Amamiya Rin's mouth, buried in Azuki's throat.
"Azuki?! What did you do to her?!"
Ago shrieked, turning her giant and sending it charging their way.
"So loud. I'm not any 'Azuki.' Hanging a name that ugly and graceless on me is an insult. It's ridiculous."
Psychic Tomie let her hands drop from Amamiya Rin's cheeks and turned toward the charging giant and Ago behind it, contempt written across her face. She sneered, her tone as dismissive as if she were appraising garbage.
She closed her eyes, gathered her focus, and lightly kneaded her temples.
"This ugly face... these chattering counterfeits... and that shrieking, stupid woman... unbearable. All of it is unbearable. Die. All of you die. Why were you things ever born?"
She deliberately magnified every last ounce of negative feeling inside her.
Loathing for her own skin. Hatred for the existence of the other Tomie. Revulsion at Ago's calling out. She forced every one of those emotions to breed and swell through techniques of self-suggestion, boiling them to their peak in a matter of seconds.
The autosuggestion wound through her consciousness like poison ivy, and the cultivated savagery roared in her depths until, with one final breach, all that artificially amplified negativity found its floodgate.
"Haaah — !!"
Her eyes snapped open and a shriek tore out of her that no human throat should make.
In that instant, with her at its center, the air of the living room seemed to be stirred by a vast invisible hand, twisting and spinning wildly.
Nearly solid psychic power, laced with churning malice and boiling negative emotion, gushed out of her like a black fountain, and in midair it condensed, compressed, and took shape at a frenzied pace.
Silver and red interlaced. The outline of a body with clear armored plating at the shoulders sketched itself in fast; a sharp bladed crest formed above the brow; an ominous blue-white glow lit along its whole frame. A dark red giant, its contours slightly blurred, roughly four meters tall, radiating pressure and chaotic malice far more terrifying than the two Ikiryo giants before it, stood abruptly in the middle of the ruined living room.
Where it planted its feet, the floor gave way under the weight suddenly imposed on it and collapsed, throwing up stone chips and splinters of wood.
"Wh... what the hell is that?!"
The Ikiryo giant under Ago's control lurched to a halt, staring in alarm at the dark red giant that had appeared out of nowhere.
The pressure and chaotic malice radiating off it set her heart hammering on instinct.
"...Delusion Ultraseven?"
Amamiya Rin looked up at the newborn giant, and his expression turned strange.
No. That could no longer be called an ordinary Ikiryo giant at all.
"That's right. That's a strange tale — a strange tale born from the extreme emotion of rage! An Ultraseven variant! Delusion Ultraseven!"
Psychic Tomie wore a look of wild arrogance.
Ikiryo? Please. Those things were far too ordinary.
Psychic Tomie had lifted Amamiya Rin's plan for creating strange tales straight out of his memories, and without the slightest hesitation she had borrowed it wholesale to create a strange-tale form of her own.
Use extreme emotion as the fuse to breed an Ikiryo with a specific bent, then use the hypnotic craft of self-suggestion as a carving knife to shape that Ikiryo's outer form and inner concept. That alone would only produce the embryo of a strange tale — a shell meant to carry the power of belief.
Yet it went far more smoothly than expected. When she forged that shell with her own psychic power and Hypnosis, formless belief truly did descend. Somewhere in a corner of Tokyo, an urban legend about "Ultraseven descending to strike down monsters" had already begun circulating among a certain crowd, and hundreds, even thousands of people sincerely believed in this "fact."
That belief, pointed at "Ultraseven," found the most fitting vessel imaginable and poured into the freshly formed shell that stood there facing a monster, turning it into a genuine strange tale.
But the strange tale that was born — Ultraseven — did not take the orthodox form, because its creative core, Psychic Tomie, had a base emotional palette of pure negativity. The belief that finally descended fused with the malice she had bred, and so it entered the world in this ill-omened shape, Delusion Ultraseven, as one of Ultraseven's forms.
"Go! Finish that one off!"
Psychic Tomie pointed at the stunned Ago and the Ikiryo giant she controlled, a sweet smile spreading across her face that came close to savage.
Delusion Ultraseven moved.
It let out a soundless roar, took a heavy stride forward, raised its right arm, and drove a plain, unadorned straight punch trailing a fierce blast of wind into Ago's Ikiryo giant.
Shocked and furious, Ago hurried to bring her giant's arms up in a block.
"Boom!!"
Delusion Ultraseven's fist slammed flush into the giant's crossed forearms. The muffled roar came with a violent collision of two immense psychic forces, and the shockwave blew what furniture remained in the living room clean away.
That force also skidded the Ikiryo giant back several steps, toppling nearly half a ruined wall, and the lights that made up its body churned violently as a large swath of it disintegrated.
The gap was blatant. The newborn strange tale, Delusion Ultraseven, might be nothing more than a defective product born of negative emotion, but its quality, its power, and the sheer intensity of its existence far surpassed the crude Ikiryo aggregate Ago had piled together out of quantity alone. From the very first exchange, the outcome had never been in doubt.
____
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