Had he failed?
Amamiya Rin asked himself.
His body was wrapped in layer upon layer of Ikiryo, heavy as though he bore a thousand pounds.
No! He hadn't!
His gaze turned cold. His left hand released the hilt, abandoning the tachi that the Ikiryo's power had clamped down on and refused to let go.
The freed left hand darted toward his waist, quick as a lightning flash.
Drew the pistol, raised his arm, took aim.
The motion flowed without a single gap, as if he had rehearsed it a thousand times over.
The black muzzle replaced the stalled sword tip, leveled at the still-shaken Azuki.
Milady, times have changed!
The lingering dread on Azuki's face froze, turning to stunned disbelief.
"Bang—!!"
In that instant the muzzle roared, fire spat out, and the bullet tore through the air, spinning as it burst from the barrel!
The round ripped through several thin layers of spectral obstruction and, trailing a scorching current of air, drove into both of Azuki's legs!
With two blossoms of blood, Azuki shrieked and crumpled to the ground.
"A gun? Why does he have a gun?"
Ago flinched, and paying no mind to the screaming, fallen Azuki, she scrambled in a panic toward the back of the living room sofa.
Before the gunsmoke had even cleared from the muzzle, Amamiya Rin had already holstered the weapon.
He didn't press the advantage—a dead esper was more trouble than a living one, and one target robbed of the ability to act was all he needed.
For the moment, all of Amamiya Rin's attention was fixed on the swarm around him—those densely packed Ikiryo pressed against his face, his back, his limbs.
Too many!
His field of vision was full of blurred, ghostly outlines. They needed to do nothing at all; their mere presence turned the air thick as glue. Every breath seemed to tug at the spectral bodies crowding his chest, and the pressure pushing on his whole frame was like countless hands dragging him downward.
Amamiya Rin did not advance—he retreated.
The toes of his right foot twisted inward while his left slid half a step forward and to the left, his shoulder drawing in, his right elbow sinking low. From beneath the ribs of two Ikiryo pressed almost against each other, he forced his way through a narrow gap, slipping past like a sea fish swimming against the current.
The Ikiryo on his left was drawn by his movement and lifted an arm to grab at him; its fingertips grazed the skin of the back of his neck, leaving behind a cold, numbing trail.
Amamiya Rin did not stop. Enduring the Ikiryo's corrosion, he ran for the staircase.
His footwork was fiendishly cunning—the steps of kendo and the steps of a boxer, both brought to full play in this moment.
Now sliding sideways, now dropping low, now spinning, now leaping back, he avoided head-on collisions with the Ikiryo and kept from getting tangled up with them, his body weaving through their midst. The tachi in his hand was not for killing; it served more like a probing staff—tapping, flicking, parrying, drawing—knocking aside the pale arms reaching for him without wasting an ounce of strength.
It happened in the blink of an eye. The space between the entryway and the living room was barely a dozen meters, and by the time Ago poked her head out from behind the sofa to look, Amamiya Rin had already charged up the stairs toward the second floor.
"Don't even think about running!"
Ago's shriek came up from below, hoarse and edged with madness.
"You're dead! You're absolutely dead! No one can save you!"
Her face contorted and warped in the dim light, her usually rather pretty features now scrunched together like the demon's grimace on a crude mask.
More Ikiryo surged out from all around her, erupting like a burst dam.
Thousands of ghostly shapes crawled out of the shadows behind her, dripped down from the ceiling, wriggled up through the cracks in the floorboards, and like a hive whipped into fury, swept toward the staircase with a low droning hum.
The air groaned, crushed beyond its bearing.
Amamiya Rin did not look back. He kept climbing.
The stairway was narrow, and the Ikiryo came at him from behind, from the sides, from above.
He swung the tachi, the blade slicing through spectral bodies with the feel of cutting through viscous jelly, white light scattering and gathering again.
For every one he cleaved apart, twenty or thirty more lunged from around him.
Pale fingers grazed his back, his left arm, his right leg one after another; the touched spots bore no wound, yet a corroded stiffness spread through them.
Ago and Azuki seemed unable to control their Ikiryo with any efficiency. Each Ikiryo could exert only the barest minimum of interference on matter—but tiny interferences, accumulated past a certain magnitude, dealt damage that could not be ignored.
Amamiya Rin drove the Crimson Lotus Breathing Method to its limit.
Scorching air surged between the lobes of his lungs and rushed along his blood vessels to every limb and bone. His blood flowed faster, his skin flushing an abnormal faint red, the rising heat barely resisting the corrosive stiffness the Ikiryo brought—but the price was a sharp drain on his stamina.
He could feel his heart slamming heavily against his ribcage, every beat carrying a fatigue of strength failing him.
There were still too many Ikiryo.
They filled every inch of the stairwell, like a soundless white blizzard.
Amamiya Rin was not running—he was trudging through waist-deep snow.
All that remained in his vision were swaying ghosts and dissolving points of light. Mixed in his ears were Ago's hysterical screams, the faint shrilling the Ikiryo raised as they moved, his own heavy breathing, and the drumbeat of his heart against his eardrums.
The pressure mounted higher and higher, the tachi grew heavier and heavier, every swing like wielding a ponderous war glaive. His strength bled away fast, and it was becoming hard to move normally while stamping out every Ikiryo that assailed him from all directions.
Seven or eight steps still lay ahead.
But pale arms had already coiled around his ankle, and more ghosts poured in from the second-floor corridor into the stairwell mouth, forming an airtight wall.
It seemed… he really was about to be dragged into hell by this endless white.
"Pop!"
At that very moment, a soft sound.
Not an explosion—more like a bubble bursting.
No! It wasn't a sound the ears could hear at all, but a sensation—the feeling that something nearby had been destroyed, that something had burst.
Even with the Ikiryo's shrilling filling his ears, that sound came through clearly.
Then—
"Pop, pop-pop, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop—!!!"
That bursting sound, so dense it made the scalp crawl, erupted from within the second-floor bedroom.
As though countless membranes filled with water were punctured in the same instant.
On the second floor of the Saeki house, a bizarre scene unfolded.
The Ikiryo that had surged in earlier, packed densely together, were now bursting apart on their own with no warning at all.
No external force could be seen striking them, and there was no violent collision between them either.
It was as if bombs had been buried inside them beforehand, all detonating at once.
White light flickered, scattered, and winked out madly in the bedroom and along the corridor.
Each Ikiryo that burst released a small puff of chaotic spiritual pressure, and with thousands upon thousands of them destroyed at once, the entire bedroom trembled violently.
In the blink of an eye, the second-floor corridor was swept clean.
And amid that bursting white light, something deeper, something far thicker, flowed out.
It was malice.
It was resentment.
It was a curse accumulated over who knew how many years, long since rotted and gone rancid, yet unfathomably obsessive!
This malice, formless and insubstantial yet heavy as lead, spread out through the space like thick ink dripped into clear water, blanketing the entire staircase and creeping toward the first floor.
The pressure on Amamiya Rin's body vanished all at once.
That eerie, dense bursting sound came pouring out of the second-floor bedroom like some chain reaction, spreading swiftly along the corridor, and now it swept downward along the stairs.
Those pale arms coiled around his limbs and dragging at his torso, those ghosts clinging to his skin with their bone-deep chill, crumbled apart piece by piece around him like a sand painting washed away by the sea. Every swaying white outline in his vision quivered and warped, at last bursting into fine white sparks.
Amamiya Rin staggered, nearly losing his balance.
The burden lifted so abruptly that his body felt an illusion of weightlessness, but muscle memory made him drop his center of gravity at once, the tachi held level before him in a defensive stance… No!
A defensive stance was useless. In what was to come, the tachi was likely useless already. Against a grudge like Kayako's, so-called struggling and fighting were of no use whatsoever.
Amamiya Rin's mind stayed calm from beginning to end, judging everything around him with rational thought throughout.
Even as his body's sense of crisis triggered instinctive defensive reactions to danger, his reason had already, in an instant, worked out the best plan.
Amamiya Rin's wrist gave a shake, and the tachi slid precisely into its sheath with a soft click.
He gathered in all his vital energy—killing intent, malice, the will to fight—and every ripple of emotion was forcibly smoothed flat. His consciousness sank inward, like a pebble dropping into an ancient well, without stirring the slightest ripple.
His eyelids lowered slightly, his gaze drawn inward.
In the depths of his mind, a single point of self-nature's light hung like an ancient mirror suspended in the void, illuminating all ten directions.
The aura pervading his whole body changed with it—no longer the right-mindedness that opposed the outer world, but a pure, unstained clarity, like a lapis-lazuli pure vase, transparent within and without, refusing no filth, tainted by no dust. It was like the Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom: when a thing comes, it reflects it; when a thing departs, it retains nothing, mirroring all yet giving rise to no discrimination.
"What's going on?"
Ago shivered, and Azuki, whom Ago had just dragged behind the sofa, also wore a look of bewilderment.
It was panic—a panic laced with terror.
Because something incomprehensible had happened.
Hundreds, thousands of Ikiryo had all met destruction in a single instant, and they didn't even know the reason for it!
Ago and Azuki had once encountered so-called demons, and so-called espers as well. Those people, facing what was to them an inexhaustible power of Ikiryo—no matter how confident or arrogant—would in the end be worn down of their strength and flee in defeat.
Wiping out a thousand Ikiryo all at once—no enemy had ever managed such a thing.
"What did she do? How did she do it?"
Shock, blankness, a thread of dread spreading within them—Ago and Azuki formed the same thought toward this unknown phenomenon.
It wasn't that they believed the demon upstairs was too powerful to fight. Even with tens of thousands of Ikiryo wiped out, to them it was a loss of only one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand.
That dread was merely a reaction to the unknown.
Click, click…
Click, click, click…
Click, click, click, click…
All at once, like joints grinding, or like bubbles squeezed up from a throat, that sound came out of the second-floor bedroom.
One after another, unhurried and unrushed, yet carrying a soul-piercing coldness.
The hairs on the backs of Ago's and Azuki's necks stood on end in an instant—not from fear, but from a state of high alert.
Here it comes! She's coming!
The clicking sound drew nearer and nearer.
Ink-thick darkness flowed out of the bedroom, and then a hand with abnormally twisted knuckles gripped the doorframe.
The nails were a dark blue-black.
Then came the other hand.
Both hands clutching the doorframe, a figure crawled out of the bedroom in a posture no human could ever achieve, joints wrenched completely backward, crawling to the very top of the staircase.
Amamiya Rin saw her.
Kayako.
She twisted in a way that violated the human body's structure to the extreme, her neck bent into a right angle, her cheek pressed against the steps, her black hair spilling down like seaweed to cover most of her face, leaving only one swollen, bloodshot eye exposed. Her limbs' joints bent backward, and like a spider, propping herself on knees and elbows against the steps, she crawled downward, stiff and slow.
Clack… clack…
It was the sound of bone grinding on bone, accompanied by that never-ceasing clicking of her throat.
With each step she crawled down, the air around grew a degree colder, the light a degree dimmer.
A pressure far surpassing that of the Ikiryo—one condensed purely from malice, agony, and endless curses—spread out from her, sweeping toward the first floor.
Amamiya Rin did not move, his eyelids lowered, his gaze resting on Kayako ahead.
Kayako lifted her head, and those eyes brimming with resentment met Amamiya Rin's own, transmitting their thick grudge and curse into his consciousness through the shared stare.
Die! Die! Why are you still alive? Why do I have to die? Why do you get to have happiness? Why can't I! It's not fair! It's not fair! Everyone die! Let everyone who has happiness taste my pain!
Amamiya Rin could seemingly hear Kayako's inner voice—the very malice she conveyed to the living.
The fury of being betrayed, the agony of being tormented, the unwillingness of being killed, and the hatred for all living things.
It was pure malice, malice the Ikiryo could not begin to compare with, needing no further rhetoric to describe it.
Amamiya Rin's expression did not change. He gazed calmly at Kayako, and what welled out from his whole being was an undiscriminating compassion, flowing quietly like moonlight, shining equally upon the very source of all this suffering.
For the first time, Kayako's grudge met such an object.
No fear, no revulsion, no resistance—only a hollow, empty peace, and beneath that peace, a strand of mercy that embraced all suffering.
This mercy was not feigned sympathy, nor deliberate consolation, but the natural outpouring of Amamiya Rin's years of practice, of a mind that had realized the myriad sufferings of the world—without hindrance, without discrimination, without inverted dreams and delusions.
Of course, this mercy was not directed at the Kayako who, as an extension of the grudge, slaughtered the innocent indiscriminately.
It was directed at the meaning of the grudge itself, at the Kayako who had lived before.
A so-called grudge is a curse laid down by one who died bearing resentment; the resentment and rage they held pent up formed a doom others could not escape, and the birth of every curse meant the cruel death of an innocent person.
The Kayako who had lived before—though she was somewhat… once quite an abstract case, the past was still the past. She had committed no sin worthy of death; her death was only a misunderstanding, and a husband of brutal temperament.
Though the malice extending from the grudge had to be eliminated, the grudge and Kayako herself were pitiful and pathetic, and Amamiya Rin's pity for them came from the heart.
____
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