𝘍𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘦!!
Eto lunged toward the ghoul before her, a kagune shimmering like dancing flames erupting from her back.
The operation was proceeding exactly as planned. The portly, middle-aged man—the one they called the Department Manager—had just finished a phone call with someone who seemed to be a colleague. Soon, the enemies would swarm toward this main entrance.
In the meantime, Hitokawa would slip through the back. The moment he secured Koma, he would call the CCG for backup, and it wouldn't be long before this place was crawling with investigators.
Eto only needed to make her exit when Hitokawa gave the signal. To do that, she had to conserve the stamina she would need for her escape.
These were the monsters who had snatched her father away. She wanted nothing more than to crush their faces into the dirt right now, but for the sake of the mission, she had to swallow her bile and move with cold precision. She simply had to fight well enough to avoid taking critical damage.
But the moment she committed to the clash, the ghoul charging toward her vanished from her line of sight.
"...!!"
Her survival instinct rang in her brain before the shock could even register. She kicked off the ground, twisting her body vertically in mid-air just as a thick, heavy leg slammed into the spot where her back had been a millisecond before.
𝘉𝘖𝘖𝘔!!!
The middle-aged man—the one the ghouls here called the "Department Manager"—had moved with a lethal speed that defied his bulky frame. He had launched himself off the ceiling and dropped onto Eto like a falling hammer.
"Nice movement. Did you dodge that through experience? Or pure intuition?"
As the Manager pulled his leg from the cracked concrete, a gaseous crimson light seeped from his shoulders. There was no mistaking it. It was an Ukaku.
He was the same type of ghoul as Eto.
'This might be a problem….'
She had never fought someone with the same type of kagune. In fact, her actual combat experience could be counted on one hand. Hitokawa had assumed that if Eto utilized the mobility of an Ukaku and focused purely on defense, she could buy enough time.
But that judgment was a mistake born from not fully understanding the nuances of ghoul combat. A fight between a human investigator and an Ukaku is one thing; a duel between two Ukaku ghouls is entirely different. If neither side can capitalize on their high mobility, it leads to a fatal opening. To prevent that, an Ukaku mirror-match demands that both maintain peak speed at all times.
It becomes a war of attrition. The moment Eto faced him, she understood this reality.
For Eto, whose success depended on conserving stamina, this was an incredibly disadvantageous situation. She was young, and because she only consumed the bare minimum of human flesh required to function, her RC cell reserves—and thus her stamina—were naturally inferior.
'In that case….'
Eto lowered her center of gravity. Her kagune, which had been flickering like a flame, extended further, solidifying into the shape of wings.
'I have to incapacitate him before I run out of gas.'
She couldn't take his life. Not if she wanted to keep her promise to Hitokawa, and not if she wanted to return to their ordinary life. Her target was the kakuhou. She had to destroy the organs that generated the kagune to strip him of his ability to fight.
There was no room to hold back. She would maintain a shred of mercy in her heart, but in battle, she would be as cold and precise as an owl snatching its prey.
𝘍𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘦!!
The Manager's kagune also surged violently, forming wings nearly one and a half times larger than Eto's. The tips of the plumage were honed like razor-sharp blades. With a wide sweep of his wings, the knife-like feathers were launched like bolts from a crossbow.
Eto leaped to avoid them, and that movement served as the starting flare.
𝘚𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘤𝘩!!!
Two crimson streaks tore through the thousand-square-foot concrete space in a chaotic blur. Footprints, claw marks, and the scorched trails of kagune were etched into the floor, walls, and ceiling wherever the red lines passed, their numbers multiplying endlessly.
𝘊𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘩!!!
They collided in mid-air. Both were pushed back by the recoil and landed on the floor, the results of their exchange etched into their bodies as wounds.
"Whew~ maybe I haven't been exercising enough lately."
The Manager clicked his tongue, clutching a gash in his side where a chunk of flesh had been scooped out. It was a wound inflicted by Eto's hook-like claws. It was lucky he was a man of some girth; if his subcutaneous fat had been any thinner, his intestines would have spilled out.
"But it looks like you're the one who needs more training."
The Manager's gaze shifted forward.
"𝘏𝘶𝘧𝘧! 𝘏𝘶𝘧𝘧! 𝘏𝘶𝘧𝘧!"
Eto stood there panting, her mask partially cracked. Blood trickled from her shoulder, back, and left knee, where knife-like Ukaku shards remained embedded.
"Your senses are sharp, but you lack experience. Especially in maintaining that unstable, gaseous Ukaku form."
𝘊𝘳𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩.
The Manager used his grip to crush the wound in his side. By forcing the mangled cells together with a ghoul's regenerative power, he was able to plug the hole, if not truly heal it.
"It's a common mistake for beginners. A gaseous Ukaku allows for ultra-high-speed combat, but the stamina consumption is extreme. You need to learn the process of 'fixing' the shape of the Ukaku to conserve energy."
Just like me, he seemed to say, as he displayed his kagune, which maintained a perfectly defined, sharp outline.
"Now, why don't you tell me who you are? Depending on your answer, I might let you live."
"𝘏𝘢𝘢… 𝘩𝘢𝘢. 𝘒𝘨𝘩!"
Catching her breath, Eto gritted her teeth and lunged at the Manager. However, her momentum was noticeably weaker than before, as if her strength was truly depleted.
"I've heard your answer. You've chosen death."
The Manager kicked off the ground and walls with blinding speed, vanishing from Eto's field of vision. He launched himself off the ceiling once more, dropping toward Eto's back, who now seemed to lack even the energy to dodge. He brought his foot down, aiming for her nape to snap her spinal column—
𝘊𝘙𝘜𝘕𝘊𝘏!!
In an instant, he witnessed a bizarre sight: half of his own vision was torn away.
"...!?!"
He couldn't even scream. Starting from his jaw and tearing through his mouth, nose, left eye, and forehead, his face was being systematically demolished as if by a chainsaw. As he collapsed to the floor, his balance shattered by the impact, he heard a voice.
"You've been lecturing me so arrogantly for a while now. Even without you telling me, I'm well aware of my own weaknesses."
'A child's voice…!?'
Though the sound was muffled by the mask, it was unmistakably the voice of a young girl.
"From the moment I realized someone had kidnapped my Papa, I've been thinking. I knew that, eventually, I wouldn't be able to avoid a fight. But I'm immature, I have no stamina, and I have almost no combat experience. So I thought. I thought and I thought and I thought. I spent the entire journey here thinking of a way to cover my handicaps—a way to reduce the waste of stamina from my kagune to prepare for a long battle."
The Manager pressed a hand to his blood-soaked face, staring at Eto with his remaining eye. Behind Eto's back, her Ukaku was no longer the flickering, dissipating mist it had been at the start.
It maintained a clear, defined shape. Just like the Ukaku the Manager had used. This was the weapon that had split his face open.
"I'm glad I got to see your kagune. It was like I was stuck on a math problem where I had the process but not the answer, and then I caught a glimpse of the answer sheet."
"You… you mastered the 'Fixing' of an Ukaku… in such a short time…?"
"Actually, I could have mimicked it the moment I saw it, but I chose not to. Someone told me: 'Deceiving a ghoul is our way of fighting.' I figured that rather than trying to overpower someone as cautious as you, it would be a better use of my stamina to catch you off guard like this."
"'Our'…? Who is 'Our'?"
"Who knows? Why don't you ask the half of the blood flowing through my veins?"
With those words, Eto sharpened the edges of her Ukaku wings like blades. Since she still needed practice to launch them as independent projectiles, she intended to pierce his kakuhou directly with her kagune.
"Damn it!"
The Manager tried to scramble away, but his body wouldn't obey him. It was only natural. The face is a concentration of sensory organs and vital points. Half of his had been shredded as if by a serrated blade. The pain, the mental shock, the loss of sense—it was an impact that would have rendered a normal human unconscious.
𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘣!!
"𝘎𝘢𝘩!!"
The solidified Ukaku wing pierced through the Manager's calf. Like a fish caught on a hook, his body was hoisted into the air and hurled toward the wall.
𝘉𝘖𝘖𝘔!!
"𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩!!"
The Manager spat out blood as he was partially embedded into the concrete wall. This was dangerous. He had no time to reorganize his posture, no leisure to manifest his kagune. Through his blurred vision, he saw Eto rushing toward him, her Ukaku poised for the finish.
'Target: the kakuhou. Location: the right shoulder, where the kagune originated!'
Eto sharpened the tip of her Ukaku into a spear and thrust it forward to penetrate the organ. It was the moment just before the wing would have pierced his shoulder.
𝘎𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘣𝘭𝘦!!
A massive vibration. A roar of sound.
Eto felt the floor beneath her feet tilting. Cracks spread in all directions like a spiderweb, and two streaks of dark-red tentacles erupted, blasting through the concrete like a chick breaking through its shell.
𝘊𝘙𝘈𝘚𝘏!!
Tentacles with sharp scales, reminiscent of a fish, surged up from both sides of Eto. They were like the mandibles of an antlion, rising to trap an ant wandering above.
"...!!"
Sensing the danger, Eto abandoned her attack and sprang backward. At the same moment, the two tentacles collided like snapping jaws, savagely crushing the space where she had stood. Having missed their target, the tentacles retracted into the gaping hole in the floor as if disappointed.
Then, a grotesque hand emerged from the hole and gripped the edge of the floor.
"𝘒𝘦𝘩𝘦𝘩𝘦𝘩𝘦𝘩𝘦!!"
A bizarre laugh, every bit as twisted as the hand, followed. Emerging from the hole was a face wearing the unsettling insect mask that Hitokawa had warned her about.
"You certainly took your time getting here, Assistant Manager."
The Department Manager spoke as he pulled himself from the wall. He was genuinely relieved. Despite the newcomer's strange appearance and behavior, he was a reliable ally who had appeared in a moment of crisis.
Conversely, beneath her mask, Eto's face grew grim.
'Tch. I wanted to take at least one of them off the board….'
The situation had turned against her, but having the attention focused so heavily on her was exactly what she had hoped for.
'Papa is in your hands, Mr. Hitokawa.'
𝘛𝘩𝘶𝘥! 𝘉𝘖𝘖𝘔!
Loud, crashing sounds echoed from the distance. It was proof that Eto was creating a disturbance according to plan.
On the complete opposite side of the main entrance, Hitokawa vaulted through a broken window and landed on the floor with as little noise as possible.
'I have to hurry. I don't know how long Eto can hold out.'
After confirming the gloomy hallway was clear, Hitokawa moved in a low crouch. Before long, he reached a staircase leading to the upper and lower floors. Next to the stairs was a building floor plan, likely left over from when the facility was a pharmaceutical company.
Three floors up. Two floors down.
He didn't have much time. He had to judge correctly whether to search the upper floors or the basement.
'Where would Koma be?'
The hesitation was brief. Hitokawa threw himself toward the stairs.