Just as Ayanokoji Kiyotaka had predicted.
Every qualified participant had raised their black weapon, nerves drawn wire-tight. Even the force-drafted outsiders — Kaneda Satoru, Machida Koji, and the others — had picked up on the shift in the air and gone silent without being told.
The only exception was Sudou Ken.
He pressed a hand to his still-bleeding forehead and complained into the quiet:
"What's going on? Why's everyone clammed up? Didn't we say we were taking down those two monkeys—"
"Shut up."!
Ryuuen Kakeru's brow snapped together. He was half a second away from barking at the idiot to get out of the X-GUN's detection line of sight—
When Kamuro Masumi, stationed on the flank and watching the radar display without blinking, suddenly cried out.
"It's here! Above us!!"
Crack——!
The cry had barely left her mouth before the ventilation ducts overhead exploded apart.
Razor-tipped flesh tentacles erupted like black lightning from multiple angles simultaneously, each one screaming toward a different target.
The first in line — completely unguarded, standing at the very front — was Sudou Ken.
A bone-blade, aimed clean at his throat. His mind went blank. He froze.
He was milliseconds from a clean decapitation.
And then — Chris, the closest to him, moving before Kamuro had even finished shouting, launched into a full sliding tackle.
"Wha—!"
Sudou Ken spun out sideways like a bowling pin.
Chris, using the momentum, snatched the battle blade that flew from Sudou's grip — pivoted off the wall, wrist rotating — and carved a perfect crescent arc through the air, severing two tentacles mid-flight.
But that was only the opening move.
Because this was clearly never just an assassination attempt aimed at Sudou.
The remaining five or six tentacles moved with something that looked disturbingly like intention — threading past Ryuuen and the others in the front row, driving straight toward the people in the back who held the capture guns.
"Look out!"
Ryuuen Kakeru's shout rang out.
But against speed that completely outpaced human reaction time, even a warning was close to useless. Even with mental preparation, your body simply couldn't keep up.
Kamuro Masumi only had time for a sharp gasp before her instincts took over — she jerked the Y-GUN up in front of her like a shield.
Snap!
The crack of shattering metal rang out.
But the tentacle didn't follow through and pierce her body. The instant it severed the weapon, it snapped back — as if it had touched a live wire.
And she wasn't the only one.
Shiranami Chihiro. Even Shiina Hiyori, who had been vigilant the entire time. Every capture gun in the back line — gone.
In a single instant, every control-type weapon they had — except the one currently binding the Chimpanzee-Man and locked in its cooldown — had been rendered completely useless.
"...Damn it."
Katsuragi Kohei's expression went stone cold.
Ryuuen Kakeru's face had gone a shade of iron.
Their plan had been simple: use Sudou Ken as a decoy to draw out the hidden Parasyte, then pin it with the capture guns' zero-delay net before it could react. Once it was bound, the initiative was entirely theirs — drain it slowly, or teleport it out. Either way, they held the cards.
What none of them had expected was that the Parasyte would hold back this long.
It had waited — had chosen to wait — for the exact moment their nerves peaked. And in that single strike, it had systematically destroyed every weapon that posed it a real threat.
From his position in the shadows, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka watched the whole thing unfold.
Was it the moment Chris handed the capture gun to Shiranami Chihiro? Did that motion let it confirm the Black Sphere weapons' usage limits?
If that was the case.
This Parasyte's intelligence is... something else entirely.
——
Tap. Tap.
The sound of leather dress shoes, measured and unhurried.
Every tentacle retracted in one fluid motion — like a tide pulling back — and converged on the figure standing at the boundary between light and shadow.
A man in a well-fitted suit. Hair combed back without a strand out of place. His face composed, unreadable — the kind of expression that told you nothing.
Ichinose Honami raised the X-GUN and trained it on him — only to find the targeting reticle on the stock display locked in grey: OUT OF RANGE.
She bit the inside of her lip. Something heavy and helpless settled in her chest.
And in Ayanokoji's mind, his assessment of this Parasyte climbed another notch.
That precise control over distance... it's not below mine.
——
Then — without warning — the man called Goto stopped walking.
He straightened his cuffs with one hand. Let both arms drop naturally to his sides.
A gesture of no hostility.
"First time we've met."
"A little abrupt, I know — but allow me to introduce myself."
"My name is Goto."
He glanced down at the severed tentacle stumps still twitching on the floor:
"As you've seen — I'm a creature called a Parasyte. By all appearances, I'm something from a world different from your own."
"To be honest — while our kind does require a human host to survive, I have not killed a single person from this world since I arrived here."
"Which means..."
His gaze swept the group:
"Between you and me, there is no score yet that demands a fight to the death."
"Before we understand why we were brought to this world... perhaps we could cooperate?"
"Cooperate?"
Ryuuen Kakeru laughed — the genuine, incredulous kind, the sort a person lets out when they've heard something so absurd it almost loops back around to impressive:
"You've got to be kidding me. You just wiped out half our arsenal in one move, and now you want to talk about live and let live?"
"What do you think this is — a game of house? Monster."
Goto's expression didn't shift. He stated it simply, like reading from a report:
"Communication between two parties is only possible when there is parity between them."
"I have already witnessed what those weapons can do. If I hadn't first demonstrated my own strength to establish that parity — would any of you have been willing to hear me out?"
"..."
No one answered. No one could.
At that moment, Ichinose Honami took a step forward.
"Then, Goto-san."
"Since you claim there is no grievance between us — could you explain how your kind came to take on this human appearance? What is that process, exactly?"
"The person whose body that was... are they still alive?"
"And can you guarantee that, going forward, you will not feed on human beings?"
Goto's eyes narrowed — almost imperceptibly — and he took a half-step back.
"By your reasoning..."
"There's nothing left to discuss, then?"
Click.
The answer that came back was the soft, clean sound of a trigger being cocked.
Sakayanagi Arisu smiled — light and easy — and lowered the capture gun in her hands:
"Not 'nothing left to discuss.' You never had any intention of negotiating. Not once, from the very beginning."
"This 'dialogue' of yours — it was never about reaching an agreement. You couldn't guarantee a full sweep in one go, and you were worried we might have some card up our sleeve you hadn't accounted for. So you've been buying time. Watching. Reading us."
"Am I wrong?" She tilted her head slightly. "You frightened little... Goto-san."
Goto, exposed, didn't bother defending himself.
He glanced at Omelos — already wrapped in a teleportation beam, the light beginning to swallow him — and something that looked like caution flickered briefly in his eyes.
This technology — the ability to silently erase or displace a living creature without a sound — it was outside the scope of anything he could model.
Sakayanagi was right.
Even as the pinnacle organism — a unified body housing four Parasytes — even knowing beyond any doubt that he possessed the physical power to crush every human being on Earth.
Faced with a sudden shift in the world's rules, faced with a group of humans holding technology he couldn't categorize — the instinctive, biological fear of the unknown had reached up and pulled the predator's arrogance back down. What remained was something older. Caution. Survival.
"As I expected..."
Goto shook his head. He began to move backward, slowly, steadily.
"Human beings... I cannot understand this species. Hirukawa was right."
The last of his words faded into the dark.
One by one, the remaining flickering neon lights shattered — and he dissolved completely into the shadows.
"He ran?!"
Katsuragi Kohei locked onto the red dot moving rapidly across the radar screen, his expression grave:
"No. He's looking for an opening."
Ichinose Honami moved without hesitation — waving Kamuro Masumi and the others who were now effectively unarmed back toward a safe zone, along with the force-drafted outsiders.
Chris turned his head.
His eyes landed on Sudou Ken, who had just hauled himself up off the floor — the sharpness completely gone from his gaze now, replaced with something quieter.
"Can you move?"
Sudou Ken pressed a hand against his still-bleeding calf and said nothing. Which probably meant it didn't hurt. Or that he was pretending it didn't.
"Then fall back with Sakayanagi's group," Chris said, tone even and flat. "The fight from here on out — you can't be part of it."
Sudou Ken set his jaw.
He stared at the battle blade in Chris's hand — the one that had been his — then looked at Ryuuen and Katsuragi, already locking into formation.
In the end, the dopamine had run dry. The pain rising in its wake won without a contest.
He let out a sharp, involuntary hiss — and without a word, head down, walked away.
With the dead weight handled, Chris gripped the blade and stepped back in reverse — closing the distance between himself and Ryuuen Kakeru and Katsuragi Kohei as they settled into their defensive formation.
"This is bad."
Katsuragi Kohei kept his eyes on the screen:
"Sakayanagi's surviving capture gun is almost back in play — but it's too smart. It keeps hovering right at the absolute edge of our firing range. We can't get a lock."
Chris exhaled and fed them the intelligence at the right moment:
"That tracks. Every Parasyte we've encountered before — only the head and arms could transform into tentacles, which severely limits mobility."
"But Goto is a unified composite of five individual Parasytes. It fills every gap. Every weakness, patched."
"So we charge it head-on?"
Ryuuen Kakeru clicked his tongue and spat: "And they call this a twenty-point boss — no wonder it doesn't go down easy. Without the combat suits, it'd be kiting us to death..."
Before he finished—
"Chris."
Ichinose Honami stepped closer, eyes steady and resolved.
"Let's go in together."
"We're the only ones here wearing combat suits — the only ones who can actually take a hit from it!"
Chris met her gaze for a beat. "Alright."
——
In the dark.
Hidden, unmoving, watching — Goto had been listening to every exchange between Chris and the others. Cross-referencing it against what his own body had already tested firsthand. Triangulating. Calculating.
The precise firing range of the Black Sphere's weapons: confirmed.
The muscles in his rear legs detonated with sudden, immense force.
Five tentacles fanned outward, spreading wide and slow — like the claws of something that had decided it was done waiting.
——End of Chapter——
Note ①— Hirukawa: Hirukawa Takeshi. In the original Parasyte manga, an extreme eco-terrorist who believed humanity was a toxin to the Earth — and that Parasytes were the antidote. He was famously quoted as saying, "Littering is a worse crime than murder." He was ultimately shot dead by the military under the mistaken assumption that he was a Parasyte himself. Only after his death was it confirmed he had been fully human all along. Make of that what you will.
____
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