Amamiya Rin suddenly realized he had been letting his own assumptions get the better of him.
He'd been operating on the idea that not everyone was as unlucky as he was — which was why the last time Fujino Terumi had come to him with her worries, he'd written it off as something she'd worked up in her own head, scaring herself.
But… in the Junji Ito universe, there were at least five separate indiscriminate world-ending phenomena!
One round of dissolving, one round of The Hanging Balloons, one Zombie crisis, one Gyo, one Hellstar Remina.
And then there were the other miscellaneous incidents that could trigger the end of the world as a side effect.
No one could possibly be unlucky enough to keep running headfirst into ghost stories one after another?
Wrong!
Because surviving even one world-ending phenomenon already counted as a stroke of incredible luck, never mind a second or third?
So long as their lives were tough enough, every single person in this world was inevitably going to live through five different apocalypses.
Five apocalypses! Isn't that unlucky enough for you?
Having pinned down Fujino Terumi's address, Amamiya Rin was ready to take Tomie and head straight over.
"Next time. I've had my fun today — I'll keep you company next time."
Tomie stretched out lazily and said it without any urgency at all.
"Hm?"
Amamiya Rin's stride faltered, and he turned his head back to look at her.
In the night, the cheap mask on her face had gone a little crooked; on the lower half of her face that was exposed, the corner of her mouth was tipped downward, the very picture of someone who couldn't be bothered.
"I'm no soft-hearted do-gooder, killing time playing hero with you. If you want to play the damsel-in-distress rescue game, leave me out of it — I've fought enough for one day."
With her hands clasped behind her back, Tomie strolled right past Amamiya Rin at her leisure.
"Is there really no room to negotiate?"
Amamiya Rin took off the mask, an expression of vexation written across his face.
He could feel it — Tomie really wasn't going to come along on this rescue.
She might have picked up the hobby of working out, but Tomie was still Tomie — willful and self-centered as ever.
"No — way!"
Tomie spun around, crossed her arms in front of her chest, drew a great big X with them, and dragged the syllables out long.
She cocked her head to one side. Beneath the mask, a flash of mischief glinted in her eyes, and her tone went airy.
"Of course, you could just go ahead and force-sync with my body, take over and use it to rescue Fujino Terumi — willpower-wise you have the upper hand on me, I can't fight you off. How about it? Want to do that?"
Amamiya Rin looked at her, and for two seconds he was silent.
"No."
He gave his answer.
Their relationship had grown a great deal more harmonious over the long years; the handful of clauses they'd once laid out in their contract didn't really bear bringing up anymore. The Tomies had reined themselves in significantly in how they handled others, and had taken to absorbing knowledge on their own initiative, while he likewise hadn't synced with Tomie's body in quite some time.
Forcibly seizing control of Tomie's body in order to go save someone else would only crack apart the harmonious relationship they had built.
Tomie kept her arms crossed; the eyes behind the mask seemed to narrow.
"Hmph, how should I put it? Not a particularly surprising answer. You're just that kind of guy."
That said, Tomie turned away and, crunching across the carpet of broken stones and dust, began walking toward the other end of the alley.
Her footsteps echoed in the empty lane.
Just as her figure was about to dissolve into the darkness at the alley's mouth, she tossed back a line without turning her head — her voice mingling with the night breeze, sounding slightly muffled and yet unusually clear.
"A guy who can't even bring himself to barge into that woman's place, dragging it out for so many days and still hasn't gotten anywhere with her… you'll manage just fine on your own. To insist on pulling me along is making a fuss over nothing."
The words fell, and her silhouette vanished completely around the corner of the alley.
Amamiya Rin stood there for a moment, let out a soft breath, the faintest of smiles tugging at the corner of his mouth, then lifted his foot and walked on.
At Shimokitazawa Elementary School, along with the wail of the ambulance sirens, Kazumi Junya and Kogure — having received word — also hurried over from somewhere nearby.
The two of them strode briskly toward the school building, just in time to see paramedics carrying out a stretcher with a person on it. By the look of it, one of the school's teachers — a thick wad of bandaging wrapped around his neck, one half of his face soaked in blood.
"How's the casualty's condition?"
Kazumi walked up, flashing his ID.
"Laceration to the neck, right eyeball destroyed, hemorrhagic shock, needs surgery immediately. There's also a teacher with minor injuries and five students — they got a fright, but no serious bodily harm."
The man answered at once.
Kazumi nodded, stepped aside to let them through, and once the paramedics had taken the casualty away, he and Kogure headed straight upstairs.
The moment they reached the third floor, a smell of mingled scorching and some sort of chemical product hit them in the face, along with the noise of a clamor.
"Kenta! Do you have any idea what time it is?! Why didn't you come home? Don't you know your mom is worried sick?"
"But Dad, we saw Ultraman!"
"Still talking nonsense!"
"Michina, I thought you were a well-behaved child."
...
Kazumi swept his gaze across the scene.
The middle of the corridor was a disaster zone — wall plaster peeling, scorch marks on the floor, the fire-extinguisher box torn brutally open, broken glass and chunks of cement strewn everywhere.
Several adults who looked like parents were chewing out their own clueless children, their angry voices reverberating up and down the hallway.
A middle-aged man, looking very much like a teacher, was off to one side bowing repeatedly in apology: "I'm truly, deeply sorry — I failed to look after the children…"
"This scene — looks really frightening."
Kogure took in the marks of destruction on his surroundings, his face going grim, a hint of dread flickering through his gaze.
He wasn't afraid of armed robbers and the like — what he feared was urban legends like the Slit-Mouthed Woman, ghost stories about the inhuman.
"I'm with the police — what happened here?"
Kazumi strode quickly over, calling out to the still-arguing crowd.
Before his words had even finished, the whole group turned to look at him.
Kazumi Junya, his expression unchanged, produced his ID.
The middle-aged man who looked like a teacher visibly let out a breath of relief and hurried over: "Officer, I'm the teacher on night duty here — there was an attack incident here a little while ago…"
As for what had happened — you could call it complicated or you could call it simple, and Kazumi quickly grasped what had gone on.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman had slipped into the school at night and attacked the teacher on duty along with a few students who had secretly stayed behind. Then two people in masks had shown up.
One had been wearing an Ultraseven mask, leaning on a cane; the other had been wearing an Ultraman Leo mask — a woman.
"Wearing Ultraman masks?"
Hearing this, Kazumi started inwardly and cut off Teacher Ando's account.
"Could it be those two oddballs we ran into?"
Kogure was startled too. He and Kazumi both thought back to the two people they'd seen earlier on patrol.
At the time they'd assumed those were just immature adults — but now it looked like… those masks, could they have been deliberately worn to hide their real faces?
"That Leo, she was incredibly skilled — she fought the Slit-Mouthed Woman for ages, the Slit-Mouthed Woman couldn't beat her. Then she used a charging move — yeah, exactly like Alien Kali's high-speed charge. That Leo must have been early-period Leo — hadn't gone through the Jeep training yet, so she was beaten. She was hurt pretty badly back then, just lay there not moving. Then Ultraseven showed up. The Slit-Mouthed Woman grabbed the other teacher as a hostage, but Ultraseven took out the Slit-Mouthed Woman with a single swing of his cane…"
Teacher Ando had picked up that Kazumi and Kogure seemed to know those two, but he didn't press the issue — he just honestly laid out everything he'd witnessed.
____
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