I keep following.
About ten blocks north, two more join them coming from a different direction. Then three more from the east. None of them interact with each other, none speed up to catch the one ahead.
From what I can tell, they're converging on the same point without making it look like they are.
When they reach a dark street at the edge of an industrial zone, with a warehouse at the back whose windows are boarded up with plywood, there are eight of them in total, and they go through a side door one by one.
I climb to the roof of the building across the street and send an All-Seeing Eye through the gap in one of the boarded windows.
Inside I can see more, about twenty-five in total. Some sitting on crates, others standing, and in the back someone has put several dark plastic bags on a table, and two of them are dividing up the contents into smaller portions.
I don't need to see inside the bags to know what's in them.
They've been using this meeting point for a while, to distribute resources and share information. This is a parasyte community.
Among them are the ones called hunters, the ones responsible for finding good quality prey. This way, if only the hunters attack, they don't draw much attention as long as each one spaces out their kills.
"Heh."
I smile and let my eyes narrow.
I couldn't care less what they do to other people, but it makes me angry that one of them treated Meiko like a lamb being fattened up.
Not to mention that one of these days, their targets might be people who are close to me and dear to my heart.
I don't like that at all.
I drop from the roof and enter through the side of the warehouse. The wall is sealed with a metal sheet, so I push it aside without making noise.
It smells bad inside.
The first three I take out before they realize someone's there. Blood threads from my fingers, straight to the head cutting clean like small pieces of tofu. They drop with wet sounds, and the others take a few seconds to react.
When they do, some of them come at me with transformed limbs and heads and flesh blades extending from the tentacles, and others try to bolt for the door at the back.
I let the ones fleeing go for now since I can track them with the eyes later. The ones attacking I cut down as I move through them without stopping, because a parasyte dies when you sever the head and separate it from the host. For the ones that have fully fused with the host body, I have to reduce them to pieces.
With my speed and control over blood, it's not a job that takes long.
Twenty-two seconds for the twelve that stay to fight.
I stand still in the middle of the warehouse.
Then I hear something with my enhanced senses. Someone moving.
Unlike the ones who tried to run, this one hasn't moved at all from the start.
In the shadow behind the table, and when they step forward into the small reach of the fluorescent tube buzzing overhead.
I see it's a stocky man with broad shoulders, wearing a construction worker's outfit, and he's smiling.
—Scresssh!
With that wet sound, tentacles burst from his back as he comes forward.
Rinkaku-type kagune. Four dark, thick tentacles. And mixed in among them, thinner translucent filaments that move separately from the kagune.
I narrow my eyes.
A ghoul with a parasyte.
Or rather, a ghoul and a parasyte that are no longer two separate things.
—Swooosh!
I lunge at him, and the tentacles come from two angles at once. I dodge both, but the third attack, one of the parasyte's tentacles, grazes my left side and leaves a clean cut through the clothes.
My blood starts to flow.
I step back and watch him from a distance as the wound closes.
I throw four blood blades from different angles. He cuts two with his kagune, and the third and fourth go through his left and right shoulder. He glances at the shoulder, and the wound starts closing too.
I notice his regeneration is faster than normal for a ghoul.
"Heh, so you're the one who killed those two, right? And now you've finished off all of them."
He's still smiling as he rolls the shoulders that have already closed up.
"And you did nothing to help any of them."
Saying that, I lunge again at the same time I materialize a single tentacle aimed at his head.
He deflects the blow with his forearm, grabs my tentacle and pulls. The force shoves me to the right. Before I can recover my footing, a tentacle hits me in the back and I get launched into the warehouse wall, which breaks outward, and I land in the alley behind it.
I get up off the ground as the wound in my back regenerates.
The hybrid steps through the hole in the wall and stands in the alley in front of me. His eyes shine with amusement and he's got a wide grin on his face.
As I look at him, I think about something that never made sense to me.
In the past I've already come across ghouls that have been parasitized.
A normal blade can't damage a ghoul. A parasyte infects its target by taking control of part of its body. Under normal conditions, a parasyte that is nothing more than a worm shouldn't be able to get through a ghoul's defenses.
But there are several ghoul parasytes.
I remember what Kiriko told me. The myth of creation.
If everything comes from the same origin, if they're different pieces of the same being, then a parasyte that found a way to break through a ghoul's defenses wouldn't be that far-fetched.
Could you think of it as two pieces of the same origin finding their way back to each other?
...Though that's just my guess. I still don't know if it's right.
The hybrid tilts his head.
"Done thinking?"
"Maybe."
I release blood from both arms at the same time and start walking toward him as I shape it.