Swordmaster Tomie stepped over the threshold of the main hall with the Soul Reviver's Sword hanging from her hand, the stench of blood and gunsmoke still clinging to her.
In the dim light of the room, Mara Tomie lounged sideways in one of the few undamaged chairs, winding a strand of her own long hair around a fingertip, her manner idle and unhurried.
The dignitaries, the politicians, the nobility - some twenty-odd of them - knelt on the floor in neat rows.
Heads bowed, palms pressed flat to the ground, their posture was one of total submission, every feverish gaze fixed on the space beneath Mara Tomie's feet.
The maid knelt nearest of all, holding up a cup of hot tea in both hands with painstaking care.
"Congratulations. With that Soul Reviver's Sword in hand, your strength has climbed another rung."
Mara Tomie took the cup, sipped, and set it back into the maid's hands, a faint smile curving her lips.
"There's nothing worth congratulating." (This book debuts first at Book-Hunter Daily Novels, ttk.tw, read anytime - bringing you chapters without errors and without scrambled order.)
Swordmaster Tomie answered coldly, her eyes sweeping over the room.
"And you? All finished here?"
"Here. Speak."
Mara Tomie lifted her foot and planted it on the head of a balding middle-aged man in front of her.
"Woof! Woof!"
The man's face was a mask of fawning eagerness. He kept his head down against the floor and barked like a dog.
"See? It's simple. These people were already brimming with greed and delusion and spite. Drawing out their demonic impulses, fabricating a new personality to replace the old one - for me that's as easy as picking up a cup."
Mara Tomie's eyes crinkled, and she went on with obvious relish.
"First I build an illusory world in their minds - the Animal Realm of the Three Evil Paths. Their personalities sink into ignorance and mindlessness, into a cycle of slaughtering one another, of being driven and butchered by others, until they arrive at the conviction that they are dogs. Then I implant the subconscious belief that I am their master, that they must obey my will or be slaughtered for meat. Their memories from when they were human remain intact, though. Dogs they may be, but they can still handle a politician's work."
She said it lightly enough, but Swordmaster Tomie understood perfectly well how monstrous a feat it was to rewrite the personalities of dozens of people in the span of half an hour.
Even with the power of the Soul Reviver's Sword to complete the Six Realms Five Rings: Kurikara Celestial Phenomenon, in the domain of the spirit she still fell short of this counterfeit in a great many ways.
"Well then... you handle the cleanup. I'm leaving first."
Swordmaster Tomie inclined her head slightly and turned to go.
She had killed enough. She had no intention of pressing further - go on killing, and what she would face next wouldn't be guns and cannons but missiles leveling the ground.
Setting aside the fact that she still couldn't stop force on that scale, a society in upheaval was no place for her and Rin to live a normal life.
"OK, leave the rest to me."
Mara Tomie didn't rise, only waved a careless hand in farewell.
Her gaze slid to the maid beside her, and she assigned a task of the utmost importance.
"Scrub the floor clean. Not one drop of her blood is to remain."
Taking control of this country step by step was work for the future. The task at hand, exactly as Swordmaster Tomie had said, was cleaning the floor.
Swordmaster Tomie had shed no small amount of blood in that battle. Left alone, it would mean another crop of counterfeits.
A hundred meters beneath the surface, in a conference chamber.
The core that truly kept this country running sat along both sides of a long table.
The stale, rotting smell of old men spread through the room and drained away into the ventilation ducts, but the atmosphere stayed heavy, as though a mountain range were pressing down from above.
At the front of the room, a large projection screen played footage that belonged in a fantasy film.
Drifting mist of blood. A horrifying four-armed giant. Helicopters bursting into fireballs in midair. The instant a command vehicle was crushed flat. The footage froze at last on the back of a woman holding a blade and a sword, then cut to close-ups of a battlefield strewn with wreckage.
The playback ended and the screen went a flat gray-white. The overhead lights came up, throwing light across one ashen old face after another.
"Preliminary casualty figures."
A woman in a lady's suit held a printed report, her expression bitter, fear flickering behind her eyes.
"On-site officers and special service personnel: one hundred twenty-seven killed. Forty-one critically wounded and out of action. The Superintendent-General, the Deputy Superintendent-General and their attending staff... all dead to the last man. Three of the new-model helicopters, total losses."
She finished reading and closed her mouth. A bead of sweat slid down her face.
No one spoke. There was only heavy breathing and the restless drum of fingers on the tabletop.
"Monster."
Aso forced the word out through clenched teeth, his fingers trembling faintly - whether from rage or terror, no one could say.
"A naked monster! That thing isn't human at all!"
No human being could be that strong. Everyone in the room took that as given. Even with every manner of augmentation, no one could fight an army single-handed.
"Continue."
Tokugawa's eyes were half-lidded, his voice steady as he gave the order.
"The perpetrator's features match Kawakami Tomie with ninety percent similarity. Barring surprises, the perpetrator should be a variant of Kawakami Tomie."
The secretary went on.
"Kawakami Tomie?"
Yoshida's face twisted strangely. He seemed to let out a breath of relief, and then a far greater alarm rose in its place.
As long as it wasn't one of those vengeful spirits that could hunt a family down through the bloodline, surely it wasn't the worst case? And yet the answer itself was absurd enough to chill the blood.
"What nonsense are you spouting? Kawakami Tomie? That frail little woman who can do nothing but bewitch men - she wiped out a special police unit, over a hundred men, in one go?"
Matsuura's head snapped up, his eyes wide, his voice climbing with shock as he shouted his disbelief.
The others exchanged glances, their faces written over with refusal and instinctive rejection.
This answer challenged their settled understanding of the world more than any unknown monster could.
Kawakami Tomie, with a blade in one hand and a sword in the other, had cut clean through a fully armed special tactics unit? A lamb goring a brown bear to death would be less ridiculous.
Kawakami Tomie, who had never displayed any power at all, had become a manslayer without the slightest warning.
Who could believe it? Who would want to believe it?
The secretary held her tongue and offered no rebuttal.
"Enough. Intelligence that reaches this room is not wrong."
Tokugawa's brows drew together, irritation and unease bleeding through his voice despite himself.
"You all saw the long-range footage. That woman took critical wounds in the assault and restored herself completely in a dozen seconds. That is the regenerative ability and the immortal body only Kawakami Tomie possesses. There's no mistake. I don't know why such a mutation appeared in Kawakami Tomie, but that woman is Kawakami Tomie."
"She is Kawakami Tomie... and even so, there's no treating her as Kawakami Tomie any longer. Her mental state is nothing like Kawakami Tomie's. That is simply a sword demon with an immortal body."
The old man surnamed Kujo spoke in a low, weighted voice.
Tokugawa had no answer. He opened his eyes, and that aged face was full of helplessness and an unease he could not conceal.
The men who styled themselves gods over others all shared the same state of mind now - a sense of powerlessness they hadn't felt in a very long time.
At this point, even finally identifying the killer who had murdered Takaichi meant nothing.
The face of Kawakami Tomie. God only knew how many tens of thousands of Kawakami Tomies existed in this world - and a sword demon strong enough to stand against an army also carried the deathlessness of rebirth from a single drop of blood. Knowing a thing like that, beyond driving a person to despair, what did it accomplish?
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