Akame studied the boy in front of her, a flicker of confusion crossing her face.
"Are you with the Guard too?"
She had him completely pinned with a single hand on her blade. If she wanted to, the smallest push would be enough to shatter him.
Tatsumi strained to keep his own sword steady, teeth clenched. "Do I have to be with the Guard to save someone?"
His knee was slowly buckling beneath him, and he couldn't make sense of any of it.
'How is a small girl like her so strong? She's pinning me with one hand — one — and there's still this monstrous weight behind it. I can't hold—'
His arms were about to give out.
And right as he was sure he was finished, he heard the girl murmur, "Then you're not a target, there's no reason to cut you down."
All at once the pressure on his arms was gone.
And it wasn't only that the weight had lifted — the girl herself was gone, as though she'd never been standing there at all.
'Don't tell me—'
Tatsumi hurriedly looked back.
What he saw was Ogre's severed head, still turning through the air where it had been sliced clean off his shoulders, the dazed expression frozen on his face.
He hadn't seen it coming — hadn't imagined for a second he could be cut down that easily!
"AKAMEEEEE!!!"
Seryu snapped her twin guns back up and emptied them at the black-haired girl, fingers mashed against the triggers in a frenzy.
This time, though, a towering figure came down out of the sky and planted itself squarely in front of Akame — a huge suit of armor, standing between them like a wall.
Every round slammed into it and ricocheted away without leaving so much as a scratch.
Off to one side, Leone caught a patch of bushes twitching at the edge of her vision.
She smirked, sauntered over, and shoved her hand straight in.
A moment later she dragged out a shrieking blonde girl by the collar.
"Eeek—no, no, don't kill me, let me go!"
"Ohh, and there she is! Almost let the whole reason we came here slip right through my fingers — that's what you get with pests running underfoot." Leone's grin pulled into something feral and hungry as she glared at the girl squirming in her grip.
"So tell me, my lady, where exactly did you think you were running off to?"
The girl was so terrified she wet herself where she hung.
Seeing that, Tatsumi immediately shouted, "STOP!"
He hurled himself at Leone with everything he had.
Mine, watching him come, squeezed off a lazy shot in his direction, and the bullet whipped past close enough to graze the tip of his nose.
He didn't slow down for a moment.
He dropped into a sliding tackle and shot in right under Leone, who let out a resigned sigh and loosened her grip rather than hurt the kid.
The second the girl came free, Tatsumi seized his chance, swept her up into his arms, and scrambled back to put some room between them.
He glanced down at the shaking girl and figured she had to be the daughter of the family that owned this estate, maybe the last one left alive.
"You people came here for money, didn't you?" he roared. "Fine — but that's no reason to butcher a child on top of it! If a single one of you has any humanity left, at least spare this one!"
The righteous fury in his shout rolled over the entire clearing.
Every hand stilled, and they all simply stood there, looking at the boy silently.
After a moment, Leone couldn't help but sigh.
Then she stepped out of her own accord into the wash of moonlight, and her face came into full view.
"..."
It was a face Tatsumi wouldn't have forgotten even if he'd been burned to ash.
"You're that big-boobed scammer from earlier!"
Leone had no room left in her for jokes now.
She walked straight up to the only building on the grounds.
"Kid, the darkness in the Capital runs deeper than anything you can picture. You want to know whether we have any humanity left... — I honestly couldn't tell you. But that demon standing behind you, the one wearing a little girl's face? She doesn't have a shred of it."
With that, she drove a single punch clean through the warehouse doors.
Clang.
The shock jolted the sword right out of Tatsumi's hand, and he let it clatter to the ground.
His eyes locked on what waited inside, held there by the countless corpses strung up in the dark.
Not one of them was whole.
Every last body was missing limbs, and every one was covered in the marks of torture.
As he moved closer, his gaze snagged on a single corpse that felt sickeningly familiar, and he couldn't tear his eyes away.
His whole body began to shake.
One thought surfaced and refused to leave no matter what he did, so he stepped in closer to see for himself — to prove that thought wrong.
"Sa... yo?"
His eyes went slowly wide, and the strength drained out of both legs at once, dropping him to his knees.
Kneeling there, gazing up at the hanging body of the girl he'd grown up alongside, Tatsumi could no longer make a sound.
Catching that broken call, Leone's expression shifted.
She understood it now — the companion this boy had lost was somewhere among these victims.
'What a pain. I only ever meant to scam him.'
And yet, through some strange quirk of fate, she'd ended up granting his wish for real.
She'd told him she would help him find his friends.
Just — not like this.
This didn't count as helping. She figured she owed the kid an apology for it.
'Sayo.... is dead?'
Tatsumi's thoughts were a tangle.
Sayo had been the only girl among the three of them, an older sister and someone they'd looked up to all at once.
She'd been lovely, with long hair so silky that any girl would envy it, skin as pale as snow, and a near-obsessive love of keeping clean.
And now here she was, cut down without a shred of mercy, hung stripped bare in a room heavy with corpses and rot, her right leg gone completely.
From the look of the wound, it had been torn off while she was still alive.
'What did they do to her before the end? How much did she suffer?'
Thud.
"I—I don't know anything!" the blonde girl cried. "I've never even been to this place, it wasn't me, none of this has anything to do with me!"
She looked at Tatsumi with a desperate, pleading stare.
He'd just saved her life.
Right now he was the only thing left for her to cling to.
So what if he was some lowborn nobody — as long as he kept her alive, she'd do anything he asked!
'Hmph.'
"Deny it all you like. It's just squirming before the end." Leone couldn't have cared less what came out of the girl's mouth.
They'd dug up the whole truth long before tonight, and every single person who died here had it coming.
Before Tatsumi could even start to surface from his grief, a thin, ragged voice drifted out of the dark of a cage.
"Tatsumi... hey. Is that you, Tatsumi?"
The boy's eyes flew open.
He forced himself to his feet, made his way to the cage, and clamped both hands around the bars.
Something dragged itself out of the far corner, squirming across the floor like a worm.
"Ieya... su?"
Tatsumi looked at his brother, tortured until he barely resembled a person anymore, and felt something give way inside him.
When Ieyasu saw what was happening outside, he immediately pointed at the blonde girl with pure hatred.
"Her. It was her! She's the one who killed Sayo — right in front of me, with her own two hands, she tortured Sayo until she was dead! Hey — Tatsumi! Do it! Avenge me — avenge Sayo!"
"Tatsumi!"
"AAAAAAAAHHHHHH—!!!"
Something in Tatsumi tore loose.
He scooped up the sword he'd dropped, walked to the blonde girl, and split her chest open with a single stroke before she could get out another word.
"Wait—no, no, no—!"
Slash!
Blood sprayed across everything.
But there wasn't a flicker of doubt left in Tatsumi's eyes. He flicked the blade clean and slid it back into its sheath.
From inside the cage, Ieyasu shot him a thumbs-up.
"Hah! That's our Tatsumi for you. Looking good out there!"
Leone watched the boy turn into something else entirely in the span of a few seconds, and something sharp flickered through her eyes.
Killing.
For a great many people, it was the one thing capable of reshaping who they were — for fighters, soldiers, and assassins most of all.
Before someone had actually taken a life, it didn't matter how much raw talent they showed; there was no telling where they'd end up.
But how a person changed after that first kill was one of the truest measures you had.
Even with a sworn enemy on the other end of the blade, killing intent that didn't waver and a clean cut with no hesitation weren't things just anyone could manage.
And what counted for even more was the calm that came afterward.
Even within Night Raid, only two people carried that kind of extraordinary nature.
One was Akame — though she'd been raised and drilled by the Empire itself, which meant that, strictly speaking, she only counted as half.
The other was Sheele.
The two of them were like assassins born for nothing else.
The difference was that Akame could turn her hand to plenty besides killing, whereas Sheele could barely manage anything that wasn't.
This time, Leone genuinely believed the boy had the makings of something rare.
It also brought to mind the very reason she was working the Capital in the first place: to sniff out people worth bringing into Night Raid.
Truth be told, apart from Sheele, she'd never expected much from anyone.
And then a kid from the middle of nowhere had gone and caught her off guard!