What kind of joke was this!
'Who's the real monster here?'
Lying there, Zank felt his mind sinking into a fog.
As the feeling of his own body faded, he realized the noise—the endless, deafening noise that had tormented him so long—had finally gone quiet.
An image rose in front of Zank the Beheader, the thing that had weighed on him most in life.
It was back when he'd first taken the job at the prison and become an executioner.
Among them, he was the headsman—the one whose task was to take the heads off the condemned.
Day after day he faced their pleading and their curses, and under all that pressure he brought the blade down and cut head from body.
Once, when a severed head rolled a few times across the ground and happened to stop facing him, eyes bulging, refusing to close in death, he felt himself going mad.
It was work he couldn't stop even when he wanted to.
The moment he tried, his superiors would yell at him and force him back to it.
Little by little he went numb to the beheadings—until one night, out of nowhere, a voice reached his ear, cursing him, crying out for his life.
From then on the voices never left him, tormenting him every waking moment.
The crushing pressure only ever eased when he killed.
So the prison's condemned stopped being enough, and he started picking targets at random, cutting them down with no distinction.
Man or woman, young or old—in the end, they all looked the same before they died.
"Finally... it's quiet..."
Zank's breath left him for good.
...
Taeko still held the pose from the killing blow, unmoving.
Something had shaken her to the core, and it left her confused.
A tangle of feelings crowded her chest with nowhere to go, her hand was trembling.
She could barely keep hold of her blade.
Drip.
A tear fell onto the hilt, her vision blurring fast enough that she realized she was crying.
'What is this? Why am I—'
Taeko sank to the ground, her mind all confusion. She clutched her head, feeling like it might split apart.
'Is it because of that old woman? A face I have no memory of, one I know full well was just an illusion—so why, the instant I cut through it, did I feel such strong guilt, such terrible grief? Do I really not know her...?'
Tatsumi edged closer, concerned. "Hey—are you okay? Are you hurt?"
As terrifyingly strong as she was, and as frightening as she'd looked cutting that man down, the plain truth was that he was only still alive because she'd saved him.
Otherwise he'd have died inside the killer's illusion.
Taeko couldn't have cared less about his concern.
She was just lost in her turmoil, and the knot she couldn't untangle fed a fierce urge to destroy.
"Don't touch me!"
The instant Tatsumi reached out, her pupils shrank, and Windcutter shot straight for the boy's eyes.
The strike was too fast—far beyond anything Tatsumi could react to.
By the time he realized he was about to be cut, there was no time for him to do anything.
A hair's breadth from disaster.
A blade, sheath and all, came flying in.
Crack!
The sheath struck the edge of Windcutter with a sharp sound.
The impact knocked her cut off-line, and it swept past at an angle beside Tatsumi's head.
The sharp edge shaved off a patch of his hair. Thankfully, no blood—strands of hair were far too fine to meet the conditions for a wind vortex to form.
"Gwaaah!"
Tatsumi yelped, nearly wetting himself in fright.
Two or three centimeters more—just that little bit—and he'd have lost an ear today at the very least!
"Tatsumi!"
A girl's voice came from not far off, and it put him at ease. He turned to look, and sure enough, it was his Night Raid comrade—Akame.
Her face was tight with worry. The moment she'd noticed Tatsumi was gone, she'd been retracing their route to find him, with no luck.
Then, after a good two or three passes, she'd caught the faint sounds of fighting and followed them here.
The instant she found him, she let out a breath.
But before she could finish exhaling, she saw he was about to become another corpse under the blade.
With no time to think, she threw her weapon to stop whoever was swinging that blade.
Murasame's power didn't tell friend from foe—one graze of that edge and even she, its master, would be finished—so she'd thrown it sheath and all, to keep it from hurting Tatsumi by accident.
She'd made it just in time.
Akame darted forward and put herself between the boy and the threat.
With her weapon knocked aside, Taeko looked more unhinged than ever.
One hand clutched her head, the other gripped Windcutter, and she leveled the blade at the two in front of her.
"You—you two are..."
Akame's face surfaced in her mind.
But not the Akame standing in front of her—an Akame from the past.
Taeko didn't have enough of her wits left just now to tell them apart.
Things like "the Imperial Assassination Squad" and "Oarburgh" and other headache-stirring fragments echoed through her head.
"Enemies."
Taeko clenched her teeth and decided to wipe out the pair in front of her. It felt like the only way she'd ever find peace.
"You're enemies!"
Her figure vanished in an instant.
When she reappeared, she'd flickered right up in front of them.
Akame had no weapon in hand now, and against the sudden attack she could only wrap the trench coat off her shoulders around one arm to use as a shield.
The coat was made from a special fiber with strong protective qualities, able to turn aside sword strikes and rounds from light firearms.
She raised the coat-wrapped arm to block Windcutter's slash—and at the same time, luckily, launched a spinning kick.
The blow sent Taeko flying backward.
Akame hurried over to Murasame and snatched it up, then checked the wound on her arm.
'Not bad— it was just a shallow cut.'
Nothing that would even get in the way of her strength, let alone her fighting.
Taeko landed on her back. She aimed her blade at Akame, and with a slight shift of the hand gripping Windcutter, moved to use Gale Claw.
For some reason, a sudden chill ran down Akame's spine.
Her instincts had saved her life again and again, so she pulled all her focus together and locked in.
But all at once, a figure came into her view, and the tension eased from her stance.
Snap!
Just as Taeko was about to trigger Windcutter, she felt a hand clamp around her wrist.
She startled and scrambled to counter—but whoever it was seemed to have read the move, blocking it before it even came.
"Easy—you can stop now, Taeko."
At the sound of that voice, the girl went stiff all over. She turned dumbly to look at the person behind her.
"Sen... pai?"
Having stopped her cold and seeing her go still, Noah used his poison Teigu to synthesize a sedative that would drop a person fast.
The girl's body went limp, and she collapsed straight into his arms.