Breathing.
Inhale. The heart. The pump. It carries oxygen.
To the muscles, to the brain, to the kakuhou.
Calories, oxygen, RC cells—everything is being burned through at a terrifying rate. No, it's practically going up in flames.
Pain. Signals sent from the muscles, the lungs, the heart, the kakuhou. Warnings from a body pushed past its limit.
Suppress it with endorphins and adrenaline.
Set pain and fatigue aside, analyze every piece of information coming in through sight, hearing, and touch. The brain issues its next command. Breathe. Move the body.
And evade.
KWAAANG!!!
A sharp, scale-like Kagune grazed past and smashed through the wall.
The outside was laid bare. A purple sky. Dawn, by the clock.
Attacks came again from both sides. Scale-covered tendrils, knife-like feathers. Rinkaku and Ukaku.
Charging straight in and dodging was impossible. She mapped out an escape route.
Behind her. She threw herself through the hole the Rinkaku had just made.
The city was still asleep. Before she dropped into it, she jammed her fingers into a crack in the concrete. Defying gravity, she hurled her body upward.
She planted a foot on a window frame without glass and, blasting out her Ukaku, climbed the outer wall of the abandoned building.
The world was still asleep. The odds of anyone witnessing a Ghoul climbing a building wall like a lunatic were low.
With that judgment, she scaled the building's roof in one breath.
She landed on the exposed rooftop and drew a deep breath.
She had to make up for the oxygen she was lacking. But she still couldn't relax her muscles.
If she let her guard down even a little, her body would collapse.
"Haa! Haa! Haa! Haa!"
Not enough oxygen. Dizzy. Nauseous. Thirsty. Hungry.
Hungry. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry.
Meat. Meat. Meat. Meat. Meat. Meat. Meat. Meat.
I want to eat meat. How much time has passed? Meat with sweet juices running out of it. Did Uncle Hitokawa manage to save Dad? I want to chew it up and swallow it and erase this hunger and thirst. Is Dad safe? Meat. Hitokawa. Meat. Dad. Meat. I want to eat. Meat. Dad. I want to eat. Dad.
I want to eat Dad.
"No!!!"
No. That's not it.
I don't want to eat Dad. No, I do want to eat him. Stop. Don't think. Because he's so lovable. Why am I like this? Because he looks so delicious.
You wanted to eat him back then too, didn't you?
Years ago, what you really wanted wasn't the Ghoul in a police uniform.
It was the Dad standing beside him.
CHOMP!!!
Eto bit into her own forearm.
She had to get rid of that grating ringing in her ears.
Her reason was starting to crack under the strain of severe exhaustion and hunger.
Was this because she had eaten Ghoul flesh back then?
Or was this Eto's true nature?
There was no way to know right now.
BOOM!!
The rooftop floor exploded.
A Ghoul wearing an insect mask crawled up through the opening, and right behind him the section chief blasted out his Ukaku and climbed the building wall just like Eto.
"That damn brat is a real pain in the ass."
"Kehahahahaha!!!"
Leaving the deputy chief to laugh to himself, the section chief looked at Eto.
Even with the enemy right in front of her, Eto showed no sign of moving.
Her shoulders rose and fell as if her breathing was ragged, and the Ukaku on her shoulders only lingered like a flame on the verge of going out.
At a glance, she looked like she had burned through all her stamina, but she had already shown that same act once before and caught them off guard with a counterattack.
The voice coming from behind the mask was unmistakably a child's, but it carried a cunning that could not be underestimated.
Just as he was fixing his Ukaku feathers in place to cut off her breathing without rushing in.
"Heh..."
A laugh drifted over.
Not the grotesque laughter of the section chief beside him, but the bright, lively laugh unique to a child.
It was Eto. She was laughing.
Had she suddenly gone insane? As the section chief stared at her, she abruptly lifted her head.
CHILL!!
Eto's gaze, caught through the gaps in the mask, was enough to raise gooseflesh along the section chief's forearm.
"Meat...♪"
Eto murmured in a slightly airy voice.
A change in perspective. She didn't have to eat Koma or human flesh.
**
"Go the hell to sleep, you bastard!!"
Hitokawa kicked off the ground and charged.
He had trained his body to fight Ghouls. Subduing an ordinary human, much less an injured woman, was nothing to him.
But that only applied when the opponent didn't have the trait of being a crazy bitch.
"Ahahahaha!!!"
Minami swung the axe. Not at Hitokawa, but at the bottle sitting on the iron bed beside him.
When I saw that, I shouted in a panic.
"Watch out! That's sulfuric acid!!"
"...?!"
By the time he reacted, it was too late.
The bottle shattered, and sulfuric acid sprayed out along the axe blade. Some of it flew straight toward Hitokawa.
Feeling he couldn't dodge, Hitokawa spun his body around. He spread the Ghoul Investigator's coat to shield his hands, face, and the rest of him, then quickly tore the acid-soaked coat off and threw it away.
Thanks to that swift substitution, he escaped without taking the acid directly.
The coat on the floor and the axe blade in Minami's hand hissed as foam bubbled up.
"Ahaha! What a shame~. If that had hit properly, your face would've turned into something really interesting!"
"You little—!!"
Hitokawa, enraged, started to charge again, but Minami's next move froze him in place.
She set the axe blade on the edge of a shelf nearby.
It would have been fine if it were just an ordinary shelf, but it was packed with bottles of unknown chemicals.
"This place used to be a pharmaceutical company, you know~. Looks like the company went under and they just left all the chemicals behind. We've been using them for corpse processing~. There are even a few dangerous drugs that are harmful to the human body mixed in."
Minami smiled sweetly and turned her gaze toward me and Hitokawa.
"What do you think would happen if I smashed all of these? If poisonous gas started forming down here underground, that'd be bad, right? Or do you want to try Russian roulette by getting splashed with some random chemical? You might be fine, surprisingly~."
"There's no reason for us to humor your stupid little games!"
"Wow, you really don't know how to play along, do you~? No wonder kids don't like you."
"Don't hit me where it hurts!"
It was a difficult situation.
We couldn't subdue Minami right this second, but leaving her alone was dangerous too.
She was threatening us with an axe and chemicals now, but the moment we looked away, she might grab something else and tighten the noose around our throats.
We had to finish this here.
Hitokawa must have felt it too, because he tightened his grip on the greatsword. He was ready to subdue Minami even if it meant taking a fatal wound.
Whether the injury was his or hers.
I reached out and stopped Hitokawa as he was about to rush in again.
"Can you leave this to me for a second?"
"What are you planning? You think that woman will listen to reason?"
"We have to try. If force doesn't work, talk. If talking doesn't work, force. That's how it always goes, right? Remember when we used to play that box-pushing game as kids."
Hitokawa looked at me strangely, as if wondering why I was bringing that up now, and then his expression changed for a moment. Seeing that, I turned back to Minami.
Minami looked at me with eyes that seemed to be waiting for whatever would come out of my mouth.
"What? You trying to persuade me? Are you going to pull some cool speech like a protagonist in a novel and change the heart of a heroine who went down the wrong path? That sounds fun. Go on, then. I'm looking forward to seeing whether you can change me."
"Persuade you? Hell no. I'm not doing that."
Maybe she could tell my sighing words were sincere, because she looked surprised.
"Oh? Really?"
"There are all kinds of values in this world, and I know that no matter how ugly an act looks, it can mean something different to the person doing it. The only things that can change that are arrogance—believing only you are right—or a change within the person themselves. I'm not that amazing. I'm not arrogant enough to think my own sense of justice is absolute, and I don't have some grand trigger that can change you. Ah, don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean I have any intention of accepting your disgusting behavior, either."
There was a line, and eating human flesh out of necessity to survive was one thing. But I would never approve of people killing others for some so-called art and indulging themselves in it.
Minami, hearing that, grumbled as if she'd lost interest.
"What a letdown. So? What are you going to do then? Beg for your life?"
"I'm going to insult you."
"...Huh?"
My unexpected answer brought the first real look of confusion to Minami's face.
And I didn't care. I drew in a deep breath and dumped out every feeling I'd been bottling up until now.
"Hey, you bitch!! Do you know how much hell you put me through today!? Starting with the mess after Hitokawa found out about Eto's identity, there's no end to it if I start listing everything! What, you want to become a Ghoul? You want to turn me into your masterpiece? Did you chew up your middle-school delusions and common sense through your ass and puke them out through your mouth or something!? If you want to say that kind of crap, then do it after a steel beam falls on your head from the sky!!"
Minami took the barrage of abuse in stunned silence, like a mute who'd been fed honey.
As for me, I felt a little better. When something bad happens, you've got to let it out with your voice. It feels like the pressure in your chest gets blown clean away.
But I still couldn't stop here. I steadied myself and used the most taboo technique in the entire arsenal of insults.
"Is that funny personality of yours because you take after your parents? They must be having a great time rotting in the afterlife."
That's right—an attack on her parents, and disrespecting the dead. No matter how much I'd been put through, I felt guilty going that far, but I had to follow through.
Because parents were the key word for her.
"...!!"
For the first time, Minami's expression hardened.
Her mouth opened as if to say something, her gaze fixed squarely on me. Right now, everything around her was focused on me.
I'd been waiting for this exact moment.
"Now!"
"Haaah!!"
SCREEEAAAK!!
At my signal, Hitokawa shoved the iron bed with his whole body.
The bed, not fixed to the floor, slid straight toward Minami along with Hitokawa's body.
"?!"
By the time Minami reacted, it was already too late.
The iron bed slammed into her and pinned her against the wall.
The impact knocked the axe from her hand, and she was crushed between the bed and the wall, coughing out a breath.
"Cough!!"
Minami was subdued. But it still wasn't over.
Maybe the impact of the bed had jostled the axe, because two bottles filled with an unknown liquid rolled off the shelf. I didn't know what was in them, but if they fell like that, they'd hit Hitokawa and Minami, who were closest.
"Taah!!"
I threw myself forward to catch them before they hit the floor. We'd come this far by plan; I wasn't about to ruin it at the very end.
The "box-pushing game" I'd mentioned to Hitokawa was a game that had been popular at our elementary school back then.
We used desks instead of boxes, but the name was still box-pushing. Two people formed a team and won by pushing the opposing team all the way to the wall.
Hitokawa had remembered it and moved exactly as I intended.
Back then too, I'd often used the tactic of confusing the opponent with my words while Hitokawa shoved in for a surprise push.
A plan only possible because we'd been friends for so long. The result was...
"...Did it work?"
"...It worked."
Only after showing each other the bottles we'd barely snatched up with both hands could we finally breathe a little easier.