Chapter 50 - Mizuko ShirogetsuHollow NightI was still formuting my pn of attack when Katoru lunged at me. My shield shot up instinctively. Sailing through the air like a missile, two of his arms collided and made deadly contact, causing me to slide a few yards back.

  “COME ON!” He taunted, having pursued my kickback from his blow with a flurry of several more.

  His fists drummed on the shield’s surface like rainfall against a window, each impact deepening the crevasse stretching across the makeshift barrier’s surface. My stance was low, head cowering.

  In that moment of pure focus, it was as though I could deconstruct each vibration that travelled along the buckler’s slippery surface, denoting the exact moment it crossed the border into the bones of my increasingly weary forearm.

  It was one such moment, just as I felt another strike crash against the shield, that I drove my shield-arm against it. At some point, my right arm had coiled by my side and was gripping the longsword with so much force I felt my upper arm tremble.

  I only got to see Katoru’s expression for a split second before I ran him through.

  His hair had become wispier and thinner, on the verge of emaciation. The flesh from his right cheek up towards the right side of his forehead was sickly pinkish and raised. I wondered if he’d had an accident with fire at some point in his life.

  Regardless, I noticed this characteristic in particur because the area had slowly begun to burn with his signature bckish fme once I felt the tip of my bde rip through his lower stomach. It almost distracted from the look on his face. I read the sensation of incredulous pain being conveyed by his eyes.

  “Yield,” I said, “Yield, now.”

  At the same time Liu was raising his head to look at me, I lowered mine to re-inspect the stab site.

  Much to my dismay, it wasn’t his body I had stabbed through, but his two shadowy auxiliary limbs that were now circled around his waist. Their palms were out, slowing the progress of my sword until it attained a full, final halt. The bde’s apex was inches away from drawing Liu’s blood.

  I had the strange feeling Katoru had intentionally allowed me to get exactly that close. No closer, but also no further away.

  Liu first hammered his fist down my forearm, breaking my contact with my weapon. I watched my arm drop toward the ground uselessly before a hard knuckle crashed against my nose. My vision blurred and I sensed my feet were no longer on the ground. There was a faint whistling noise followed by a spsh of pain enveloping my back, having been smmed against some kind of surface.

  I opened my eyes and my vision steadied. My nose was throbbing. A few metres below me I could see the street I was just stood on, scorch marks and holes in the tarmac dotted along the surface. Shards of gss and debris belonging to the building I had crashed into drizzled down onto the pavement below.

  Liu was in the process of melting my weapons and only then did I realize my hands were once again empty. Plumes of dust and smoke then began to rise from behind me and I coughed. Katoru had disappeared behind them.

  Despite fighting a desperate inward battle to keep panic from settling in, I had not lost my faculties of strategic thinking.

  Think! I remember pleading to myself. If I were him in this scenario, how would I –

  Another whistling noise shot through the derelict avenues, and for a split second I thought I saw something like a bullet unch into the sky. I lowered both my arms in front of me. Soon after, a squall like the aftershock of a titan jumping wafted around the space, but I fought to keep my eyes open.

  I heard him before I saw him. Looking up, a bulky bck mass was plummeting from directly above me. I gritted my teeth. Katoru was drawling something, but I no longer had interest in what he was saying. He was only a few metres above me when I drove my heels against the wall, causing my body to jerk forwards out of the crater I’d created.

  I increased the grip in my hands to an inhumane amount, and in mid-air spun back around to face my origin point, just as Katoru was reaching my previous location.

  “Checkmate,” I whispered.

  I pulled the icy bludgeon I’d manifested and sent it hurtling into Liu’s downward trajectory. I involuntarily closed my eyes and inwardly winced at the bone-rattling thunk that then swept across the area.

  My mid-air trajectory began to slope downwards just as the sheer force of my blow, in addition to his downward momentum, sent Liu careening straight through the building I had just leapt off of, creating several circur, noisy ruptures through the structure until his tumbling mass shot out onto the other side.

  I, on the other hand, nded squarely on my feet, though I was in no shape to give chase just yet. In my right hand, all that remained of my hammer beyond its handle were cracked shards of ice. Thanks to the tarmac’s temperature, a wispy stream of water vapour rose upwards, disappearing somewhere beyond my perception.

  A smudge of crimson painted the back of my hand after brushing it against my philtrum, and I sighed.

  I got back to work after that.

  The building appeared to have been some kind of office space – at one point, anyhow.

  Columns of desks were id out with even spacing in rows and columns. Bck leather computer chairs were assigned to each one. Each desk had its own separation screen in front, and the desks at either end of each row contained a screen to block out the passageway at the centre of the room. This gave the property an intense quality, as though the work being undergone here required the upmost concentration.

  Further down into the distance I noticed a poster that began with the words ‘What is technical data?’ as its header, with various diagrams and illustrations residing underneath.

  In the wake of our scuffle, however, dust and debris from the colpse of several walls scattered across the floors, spshes of sandy brown powder staining the once perfectly navy carpets. Loose bricks had smashed through desk surfaces and monitors, leaving wooden shards intermingling with gss fragments as their only remains.

  Each step I took through the cavernous breaches summoned a hollow echo that sauntered through the building. I began to feel a poignant sense of aloneness as I reached the other end of the building and moonlight spilled in to illuminate the utter destruction caused.

  Katoru was just getting to his feet when I dropped down a few metres away. We had ended up at a side street a few clicks away from AMX.

  I remembered the first night here as though it happened years ago, when our situation was still bizarre and outndish enough to dull the danger, and we were still one contingent. We’d been sent out to several locations to light those mps, and AMX was the first.

  We were told they would ward off Noise and act as safe zones.

  Yet, despite our recent travels all across the pne, I had yet to see mps lighted anywhere but Center Street. Furusawa was the st to have the lighter before he –

  A pained, paroxysmal cough interrupted my ruminations, accompanied by a spsh of red against the tarmac in front of Liu. He was struggling to his feet, legs shaking and trembling. His extra arms had vanished, and one of his arms hung limp at his side.

  “Stop,” I appealed softly, spurred by a sudden twang of guilt. “All this infighting avails us nothing. It’s exactly what they expect from us. ”

  He looked up at me then, and I had to bite down the gasp that threatened to escape my lips.

  Liu was crying, but not out of sorrow, guilt, regret, or even pain. In the millisecond that his eyes met mine, I knew in my heart that the only reason for his tears was that Katoru wanted me dead in that moment more than anything else in the world – and I had defied him grievously by continuing to live.

  Behind us in the direction of the Shibu Department Store complex, the sound of a sudden explosion, like the colpse of a tower, reverberated in the wind and met our ears.

  With every second that passed away from my sister, my anxiety grew, but I could not rip my eyes from Liu. Something had changed, and was continuing to change in him even now.

  I got the sense that from here onward, I had no allowances for mercy - if I was still interested in seeing the sun rise, that is.

  Practically snarling at me, Katoru found a shaky bance as I prepared my armaments.

  We had come to a wordless agreement that we’d only stop once one of us had ceased to continue breathing, and I had no choice but to oblige. If I let him go here, he would come after me either in this world or, worse, reality.

  He would pose a constant threat to Junko and I, and that could not be allowed to pass.

  I had deduced an important aspect of Liu’s EXS ability at that stage, and that was this simple fact: the more anger, or perhaps hatred he harboured, the wilder and mightier his powers became.

  However, as he would soon come to learn, the brightest fmes leave only ashes.

  This time I would be the one to engage. I was needed elsewhere, and time was absolutely of the essence.

  In response to my closing of the gap between us, Liu remained stationary but once again summoned two auxiliary arms to aid him in combat, only this time, their appearance had changed.

  The limbs had grown markedly thinner, but longer and sharper like the legs of a spider. Solid wisps of bck smoke rose from their sharp tips, and I could feel them practically begging to shred through my flesh.

  Still, with a new resolve, I continued to close the distance. As I got closer, I become aware that Katoru was standing unevenly, one knee bent awkwardly whilst the other was buckling at just the effort of standing.

  Simirly, his right elbow was pointing at his one o’clock and still dangling limp by his side.

  I took note of these observations as I began my final assault.

  Once I’d reached a few paces away from Liu, I reached into my haori and gripped onto several of the throwing knives I’d fashioned earlier. Three in each hand, I flung them toward my quarry and watched in satisfaction as they circled around him.

  With movement not an option, Katoru was forced to remain stationary and defend against the onsught. With the precise thrusts, sweeping motions, and shielding of his bck appendages, seemingly all of the projectiles had either been deflected on to the ground, or sunk and vaporized out of the dark fires of the limbs.

  As, I was directly front of him by the time he’d finished.

  I hit him two, three, four times across his torso, my makeshift knuckledusters rattling against his bone with a sub-zero impact. I ended my combination with a step back, guiding my right shin into Liu’s stomach after reinforcing it with a thick vergs shin guard.

  Katoru stumbled backwards, drooling small rivulets of red essence as one of his new arms lunged at me. I weaved to the left quickly enough to escape with a scratch to my left cheek, that stung with a searing heat so painful I made a commitment to keep my distance from then onwards.

  Unfortunately, I had not been watching the position of the other leg, and noticed it far too te as it was poised to carve directly through my skull. That was when I heard a bloody thunk as a curved flying object found Liu’s back.

  The sudden pain and shock had brought my execution to a welcome halt, and I fought the urge to smirk as I leaped back. Unbeknownst to Katoru, my hail of throwing knives was simply a distraction for the true payload – a boomerang hidden amongst them that surreptitiously flew past, circling back just in time to find its mark.

  This opening was all I would need to bring the battle to a close, and to that end, I had just the tactic in mind.

  In both hands, I formed ice bos, frosty weights connected by gcial interconnected cords. I pulled my left arm back and released, sending one hurtling toward Liu’s feet.

  Gritting his teeth and still reeling from the boomerang affront, he rolled clumsily to his left, which is when I released the other bo in a crescent-like trajectory, still aiming for his feet.

  As if in concession, Katoru’s appendages briefly elongated, piercing into the ground before lowering briefly, and then thrusting upwards, lifting Katoru into the air.

  Once again, he had moved just as I predicted. Still in mid-air, the slight grimace on his expression had devolved into a distraught scowl now that he was looking in my direction.

  With one hand I held the bow straight, and with the other I pulled the string hosting the triplet of spiked ice arrows toward my cheek.

  "Let's see you dodge this."

  Just as Katoru was approaching the apex of his upwards momentum, I let the arrows soar. Helpless, he attempted to brace himself by raising his one functioning arm, but it was no use. All three arrows had found their mark – one in the bicep of his raised arm, one in the front of his left thigh, and one on the right side of his upper chest. Puddles of red began to pool under his dusty tattered shirt.

  A cautious relief was starting to spread over my body as I dropped my longbow, and I exhaled wearily.

  It’s finally over, I remember thinking, regrettably failing to notice the fact that Liu’s spider-like arms had not retracted from their ground. In truth, they hadn’t helped him to jump at all. They had only extended and raised him upwards continuously, for even now, Katoru was still suspended in mid-air, the arrows melting into vapour.

  These findings had only been made clear to me when two sharp, unbearably burning pointed edges ripped out of the ground and met my right leg and left arm, tearing through them like paper.

  I screamed as they did so, and felt their burning surfaces travel in and out of my body like worms burrowing through earth.

  Immediately I dropped to my knees just as Katoru fell to the ground, still.

  Hearing my own panicked, anguished shouts, the searing pain shot through my body like wildfire, each movement of Liu's fming appendages having tore deeper into my flesh.

  My scream was lost to the night air, but I could not afford to be consumed by the agony at such a crucial junction. My mind raced, and instinct took over.

  Ice. I needed ice.

  Without hesitation, I focused on the areas where the fiery spikes had pierced me. I forced the ice to flow, encasing the wounds with a yer of crystalline frost. The cold bit into my skin, but it was a welcome relief compared to the blistering heat. The ice hissed as it made contact with the fmes, steam rising where the two elements met. I gritted my teeth and pushed harder.

  The burning subsided as the ice cooled the wounds, the bleeding slowing to a trickle as the cold constricted the torn blood vessels. I could feel the edges of the icy casings solidifying, forming a protective barrier around the punctures. The pain was still there, throbbing beneath the surface, but it was muted now. Controlled.

  As my breathing settled alongside my heart rate, I resolved to finish Liu while he was seemingly knocked out. I would need to get to a location with a vantage point and take him out from afar, to avoid anything like this happening again.

  It was when I was solidifying the details of Katoru’s capital punishment that I noticed a flicker of light in of the corner of my eye, like the briefest fshing of a faulty lightbulb. In fact, the gesture was so familiar that I did not even turn my head in its direction – but I could not help but sigh.

  She didn’t bother hiding either. With steady, measured steps, she walked out into the silent battlefield and approached until I could practically hear her breathing.

  “Have you come to finish the job?” I offered. My eyes were closed.

  At this, I could sense her pause. Then, I felt something heavy being lifted up into the air, just over my head. It did not take me very long to surmise exactly what.

  “Well,” Hoshino began calmly, “I guess you were right. There might just be a killer in me after all.”

  At that, I smiled.