No matter what — once the moisture in blood is flash-evaporated by extreme heat, blood ceases to be blood.
After the flames came the rising steam.
Mahiko dismissed the fire. What remained were a handful of people roasted to human jerky, their bodies crusted over with congealed, faintly charred scabs of blood.
Mahiko rubbed her chin. In the end, she relented slightly — using Idle Transfiguration to patch them up just enough, restoring them to a state of complete paralysis, wholly incapable of movement.
Based on the intelligence Mechamaru had provided... and the fact that they'd started sealing the Curtain before Mahiko had even arrived, it was clear enough: these were the people who had been impersonating her and causing havoc all over the place.
Even so, Mahiko left them alive — for now.
There was no rush. She could always confirm they deserved to die and finish the job later.
Mahiko raised her eyes, her gaze settling on the innermost storage room of the fire station.
The door bore a cursed seal — a protective ward. They were hiding something in there. And there were traces of Cursed Energy threading deeper inside, which meant that some members of this shadow unit hadn't come out to fight her. Instead, they'd retreated into the storeroom.
Why?
Mahiko smiled, curiosity sharpening her expression, and stepped toward it.
......
Yoshino Junpei had already sunk into despair — and from despair, had sunk one layer further, into a numbness toward despair itself.
Perhaps the universe simply delighted in heaping punishment on certain people. Or perhaps it was human nature — to always curse one another.
He had been bullied relentlessly at school. Every attempt to fight back had come to nothing. He'd once believed his misfortune had already reached its peak.
He had a single mother whose life was already hard enough, so he'd never wanted to be a burden. He'd told himself: just endure the three years of high school. After that, things would get better.
Today, he finally understood — his bad luck had no bottom.
"Wh-what do we do..." The person next to him was trembling.
Junpei, on the other hand, sat in the corner with his knees drawn to his chest, staring blankly at nothing.
He'd been kidnapped and dragged to some place he didn't recognize. These kidnappers seemed to possess some kind of bizarre ability. They had taken people captive, apparently to feed some kind of monster.
The people they'd abducted were the food.
Clang!
The door burst open. One of the kidnappers, disguised as a firefighter, came rushing in, then immediately shoved the door shut and locked it behind him.
Everyone still alive in the warehouse flinched. Junpei knew the pattern by now — every time this man came in, someone died.
Who was going to die this time?
"Damn it... damn it..."
But this time seemed different.
Every previous visit, this man had walked in calm and unhurried, like he owned the place. This time, he was panting, frantic, clearly rattled.
"This is insane... how are we supposed to hide this thing..." He began shoving at the massive iron cage sitting in the center of the warehouse.
The cage was too heavy. He couldn't move it.
It was the kind of enclosure you'd see at a zoo — the sort built to hold a lion — completely sealed on all sides. There was only one opening, and from that opening dangled a human hand.
The monster's hand.
The hand was caked in dried blood, completely motionless — but Junpei had already watched that hand kill people. Every time this man came in before, he would grab someone at random from among the captives and throw them in front of it. The moment that hand made contact, the person's body would twist and bloat, swelling larger and larger, until they burst like a balloon.
Old captives kept dying; new ones kept getting dragged in to replace them.
Junpei had already watched four or five people die.
The fear of death had long since gone hollow inside him.
Smack!
A slap landed across his face.
"Help me push!" the kidnapper snarled.
He was clearly desperate. He seemed hell-bent on shoving the cage deeper into the warehouse, his face flushed red with the effort — which, absurdly, just made him look ridiculous.
Junpei looked up and met the man's eyes.
"What are you staring at?! You got a death wish?!" the kidnapper threatened.
Junpei knew he couldn't beat him.
He knew because he'd already tried. He'd fought back when he was first taken.
The torn, still-bleeding cuts on his face were the answer to how that had gone.
These kidnappers — every single one of them had abilities that defied normal human limits. An ordinary person had no chance.
Boom... boom...
Explosions had started somewhere outside. Probably more of those supernatural powers at work.
Junpei didn't particularly care.
He simply looked at the kidnapper in front of him, and shook his head with quiet certainty. "No."
"You little—!" The man's temper snapped. He abandoned the cage entirely, lunged forward, and drove a kick into Junpei's side, sending him sprawling. "You think you're so tough?!"
The boy went down hard. His head cracked against the wall; the world lurched and spun. He reached up and felt dampness — his scalp had split open and was bleeding.
"Ha." Junpei wanted to laugh. But his face was cut and every smile sent a spike of pain through it, so he simply let the sound come out without the expression. "You're really panicking, aren't you."
"Laughing?!" The man's composure shattered completely. He grabbed Junpei by the collar and hauled him up off the ground. "Then you can just die!"
He closed his hand around the boy's throat and squeezed, crushing the laughter out of him.
And Junpei just kept smiling. Even as the suffocation clawed up into his skull. Even as the blood from his face ran down over his eyes and blotted out his vision.
He smiled.
Yeah.
He'd always thought he was a bit of an idiot.
When he was being bullied, too — same as now. People always had it out for him. And sometimes, when faced with someone else's cruelty, the smart move was obvious: endure it, smile, play nice. But he could never quite manage that. He always fought back.
Which was why he'd ended up the sole target of every bully in school.
Which was why he was now being strangled by a criminal, on the verge of losing the last faint flicker of his life.
And then—
Fwp—
"Aah—! AAAH!!"
The hand around his throat suddenly lost all its strength. With a thud, Junpei crumpled to the floor. The man who had been choking him was now screaming in pure terror, blood spraying out of him in wide, wild arcs.
Junpei looked up.
At some point he hadn't noticed, the heavy doors of the warehouse had been opened. The light outside — not particularly bright, but real — poured in through the gap.
It cut in like a seam. Like a road opening up from nowhere.
It fell across a girl's long blue hair, gilding it with a thin wash of gold.
To Junpei's eyes, she looked like an angel.
"All your friends are already dead," the blue-haired girl said, patting the head of the man now sitting on the ground wailing without a shred of dignity. "What do you say — want to go join them?"
Mahiko was teasing him.
The man took it literally.
"DAMN YOU—!!" Terrified out of his mind, the man scrambled to flee — but as he ran past the iron cage, the hand jutting out from its opening snagged his ankle and sent him pitching to the ground. He twisted around in horror to look, and found that the hand reaching from inside the cage had closed its fingers tight around his foot.
"No, wait—" His voice shook.
There was no reprieve.
A second later, the man's voice warped into something inhuman. His body began to swell — ballooning outward, larger and larger — and then, with a thunderous boom, he burst apart.
Mahiko blinked, surprised.
Bang!
Bang!
The iron cage began shuddering violently from within, each impact crashing louder than the last.
Ah.
Her eyes flickered slightly. Mahiko already understood exactly what this was.
Haha...
She turned to look at Junpei, reached out, and touched him — healing every wound on his body in an instant. Her expression had shifted: dead serious, and brimming with barely-contained excitement.
"Can you move? If you can, get everyone else in here out — as far away as possible." She looked at the boy. "Because once the fight starts in a moment, this whole place might get leveled."
____
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