In the alley, the gathered crowd had gone completely blank.
What they were seeing went beyond everything they had ever known in their lives.
An Ultraman out of a tokusatsu show, running loose in the real world? Were they honestly not dreaming?
A boy who looked like a high schooler stared, dazed. Then his arm shot up and he slapped the friend beside him across the face, hard.
The crack of it rang out, unbelievably crisp.
"Ow! What the hell was that for?!"
His friend yelped, clapped a hand over his cheek, and glared at him, shocked and furious at once.
"Did that hurt?" the boy who had swung asked flatly, eyes still fixed on the red-and-silver giant tearing the place apart.
"Obviously! You put your whole damn arm into it!"
His friend was angry enough to swing back.
"Oh."
The boy nodded, his face going almost perfectly blank. "Then I guess we're not dreaming."
"Screw you!"
The slapped friend kicked him off his feet. Sprawled on the ground, feeling very real pain, the boy finally snapped back to himself - and that tiny scuffle detonated the mood all at once.
"Ultraseven... the show's actually real!"
"No way. Tsuburaya was doing this for real?"
"Ultraman genuinely exists?"
"Which means the Land of Light is real too?"
"Old man Tsuburaya was shooting documentaries? Don't tell me he really was a Venusian."
…
The residents stood stunned, at a loss. Faced with something this far past reality, their breathing turned heavy, and their eyes began to sting with heat.
If Ultraseven was real, then what about the others? Ultraman Leo, Ultraman Zoffy, Ultraman Ace, Ultraman Tiga! And that utopia of a homeworld, the Land of Light!
"Hold on! That Ultraseven... something's off about him!"
A young man cried out, staring at the giant of light that had nearly finished demolishing the Saeki house, doubt and alarm working across his face.
"Off? What's off about it? You think that's a guy in a suit?" the man beside him shot back.
"It's not a suit actor - but it isn't Ultraseven either!"
The young man had gone pale, his voice trembling with excitement and a fear that was sharpening by the second.
"What are you talking about? That's Ultraseven, plain as day."
Hearing the panic in his voice, the people around him turned disapproving looks his way.
Ultraseven was the crowning masterpiece of the Showa era. The Poke Ball itself was inspired by Seven's Capsule Monsters. Most people here had watched Ultraseven, and even those who hadn't could identify him by that signature blade on his head.
"I'm telling you, it isn't! That's Delusion Ultraseven! The Delusion Ultraseven from Ultraman 80!" the young man said urgently.
"Delusion Ultraseven?"
The crowd exchanged looks.
Compared with Ultraseven, Ultraman 80 was fairly obscure. Not many of them had seen it, and the name alone didn't clear anything up.
Still, "Delusion Ultraseven" did not sound like the name of anything wholesome.
"That's right! Delusion Ultraseven was a doll that belonged to Tajima Naoto. After Naoto got hit by a biker gang and ended up hospitalized, all his hatred and negative feelings toward them gave birth to negative energy. The boy's Ikiryo and that energy went into the Ultraseven doll together, and it became Delusion Ultraseven."
The young man backed away step by step, dread and unease in the way he looked at the thing.
As he spoke, a murmur of doubt and disquiet rippled through the crowd. The feverish excitement cooled, replaced by scrutiny and hesitation.
Every roar of that giant's fists, every building it caved in, the sheer brutality of it - they could all feel the violence in it now, and it made their hearts stutter.
"Delusion Ultraseven... a monster born from some kid's grudge against a biker gang... that can't be all that dangerous, right?"
A middle-aged man forced a smile and pulled his wife, who had come out to gawk with him, backward.
"The problem is, when Delusion Ultraseven showed up again in Ultra Super Fight a few years back, the setting was that he's a vengeful-spirit superhuman formed from the malice of every monster the original Ultraman ever defeated."
The young man kept his eyes locked on the rampaging figure not far off. He swallowed, his throat bobbing, and his voice came out bitter.
Even as a fanatical Ultraman devotee, all he could tell was that the thing out there was Delusion Ultraseven. Which version of Delusion Ultraseven it was, no pair of eyes could determine.
And besides, the Ultraman 80 version wasn't necessarily much safer.
Just then Sato came stumbling back into the alley, the heavy Sony camera clutched to his chest.
"...a vengeful-spirit superhuman formed from the malice of every monster the original Ultraman ever defeated."
Catching that line, Sato stopped dead. His stomach dropped, and the camera in his arms turned scalding.
"You've got to be kidding. Not an Ultraman... a monster? A vengeful spirit?"
If it really were an Ultraman, this shoot would be safe and would hand him fame and money both.
But if it was a monster, then once it finished off that other white giant, would it really not start leveling the city and killing every human here?
Cold sweat slid down Sato's face.
Around him, the ones with weaker nerves had already begun retreating, but plenty of bolder people stayed put, phones out and raised, filming.
"To hell with it! For this godforsaken job!"
Sato glanced left and right, gritted his teeth, switched on the camera and pulled off the lens cap.
The machine hummed low. In the viewfinder, the duel between the red-and-silver giant and the pale, luminous shape came through crisp and clear.
Life left him no choice. He would take the risk and get the footage the station wanted.
Then something went wrong.
Delusion Ultraseven had lifted the blade from his head, about to cleave the Ikiryo Giant in two.
Bang!
In that instant, Delusion Ultraseven's left shoulder snapped backward as though struck by an invisible sledgehammer. A small burst of displaced air bloomed off the silver pauldron, and his body slid half a step sideways, out of his control.
He paused, seeming confused.
And then -
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!!
Muffled impacts burst across him without pause.
Chest, back, right ribs, thigh - invisible shocks detonated one after another all over his frame.
Delusion Ultraseven's body rocked violently under the unseen hammering, a small boat in a storm. He tried to plant his feet, tried to throw a punch back into empty air, but every attempt to gather force was broken apart by the next blow.
"What's going on?!" Psychic Tomie cried out - and the moment the question left her, she understood.
Ago's Ikiryo were nothing worth mentioning, just a thick pool of hit points. The true owner of this place, the only real threat, had been one single existence from the very beginning.
Kayako…
The Saeki house, a single-family home, had been reduced by Delusion Ultraseven and the Ikiryo Giant to something that couldn't even be called a condemned building.
The second floor had collapsed entirely. The bedroom and the roof had tilted down into the yard, snapped beams jutting out of the rubble like the broken ribs of some enormous beast, rebar twisting up toward the sky. Not one of the four outer walls remained whole. All that was left was a ruin of shattered concrete and splintered furniture.
And at the center of it all, in the deepest part of that ruin, there was not nothing.
Something thicker than darkness had settled there - hatred without end, rage, curse.
Kayako's hatred had never been this dense, this close to taking physical form.
How could she not hate?
The place her obsession was anchored, her home, had been torn apart without mercy.
Every beam that snapped was a nerve, long since frozen solid, being ripped out of her.
Every wall that fell was her shell being pried open, exposing wounds beneath that had never once healed.
That rotting structure was the body of her boundless hatred, the nest of her curse, the entirety of her world after death.
And now that world was coming apart.
"Kh-kh-kh-kh-kh…"
At the heart of the ruin, that sediment thicker than darkness began to breathe.
Not moving air - malice itself, swelling and contracting. With every breath the scattered tiles, wood chips and stones trembled faintly, and an invisible, grave-cold pressure spread outward.
The one surviving half-wall began to groan, pushed by some force no eye could see. Its surface, already crawling with cobweb cracks, gave off a fine, dense chorus of splitting sounds, and the outer face started to bulge.
It looked exactly as if something formless were expanding from inside, about to burst even this last outline wide open.
Hatred echoed through the air.
The air itself turned sluggish and heavy. Every breath was like inhaling shards of ice.
In the alley, the hands holding up phones began to shake beyond anyone's control.
The cold night wind carried an invisible terror. It brushed over them and soaked in through every pore, down to the marrow.
"What... what is this?"
Even Ago, whose spiritual power ran beyond the limits of human understanding, stood in the wreckage of the Saeki house and found herself shivering.
No.
It was precisely because she stood on the ruins of the Saeki house that she bore the full weight of the malice.
It was thicker than everything she had felt accumulated in that house since the moment she stepped inside, and inside it burned a fury that seemed capable of scorching the world to ash. Facing that fury head-on, she felt fear rise from somewhere deep and genuine.
"What is this?"
Psychic Tomie's expression had lost its earlier composure. Unease had crept into it.
Kayako should only amount to that much.
Delusion Ultraseven's power was still climbing. As more and more people witnessed him and truly came to believe he existed, he had already risen from a rough prototype to a form capable of pulling the blade off his head and fighting with it.
Kayako's abilities were formidable, sure, but in an actual fight, holding her down should have been effortless.
"This is bad…"
At that same moment, Amamiya Rin's face turned grave.
He stood in the back garden a short distance off, his gaze sweeping across the changing landscape ahead.
Bit by bit, Amamiya Rin worked out what was happening.
But it was already too late to stop what was coming.
From the moment anyone set foot inside the Saeki house, this future had been fixed.
Kayako - with her home savaged beyond recognition - had broken through her own limits.
BOOM!!!
Not the crash of an explosion, but a low, mournful wail. The ruins of the Saeki house sank sharply downward.
And then the black curse erupted upward.
It wasn't dust, because it ignored gravity. It was like heavy ink dropped into water, like the yawning mouth of an abyss, spreading out from the ruins in every direction in a frenzy.
Walls, streets, utility poles, people - everything that black tide touched took on a film of gray, withered shadow.
Viscous drops began to fall from the sky.
Black rain.
At first only a scattered few, smelling of rust, striking the ground and leaving dark stains.
Within moments it came down harder, unbroken black lines slicing the world into blurred fragments. The rain wasn't cold. It carried a thick, faint warmth instead, and where it landed on skin it left a sensation that would not wash away.
The curse released from the Saeki house spread through the rain.
In the alley, one man felt that something had appeared behind him.
What was it?
The feeling was impossible to ignore. It forced him to look.
So he turned his head, and out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a ghost-white figure pressed silently against his back, sodden black hair hanging down, nearly brushing his shoulder.
He couldn't scream, because farther out in his field of vision, behind another person, another woman in white stood just as quietly.
And farther still, another. Like a virus replicating.
An illusion, surely. It had to be some kind of hallucination.
"Aaah!"
"What - what is that thing?!"
"A ghost!"
…
Just as some clung to that comforting thought, scream after scream tore through the alley. Face after face twisted with terror, and no one who wanted to write it off as a trick of the mind could do so any longer.
In the rain, in the gaps where people's eyes moved away, in the instants fear took root, they grew.
Kayako. From the alley to the neighboring streets, to the windows of buildings farther out, pale figures surfaced endlessly through the black curtain of rain, multiplying in a way that violated physical logic.
"The worst possible ending. With the Saeki house torn down, Kayako lost her tether too. She's gone from an earthbound spirit to a curse that, given enough time, could blanket the world."
Amamiya Rin let out a soft sigh. The black rain soaked his hair and his coat, and behind him he felt that same bone-deep chill.
He knew what was standing at his back. He knew what had happened.
The curse was spreading, because the Saeki house had been destroyed by the power of Delusion Ultraseven and the Ikiryo Giant. The grudge had lost the boundaries that once held it to one place.
And he understood something more: if he didn't act, everyone here would die and become part of that spreading curse.
Amamiya Rin closed his eyes, shutting out the hellscape in front of him and the cold touch behind him. He drew a deep breath and took in almost no oxygen at all - only thick, saturated hatred filling his chest.
"No good... hatred alone isn't enough... Kayako. I have to make you truly understand my love."
Amamiya Rin laid a palm over his chest, murmuring to himself, and a voice with a strange, resonant cadence echoed through his mind.
____
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