I couldn’t believe my eyes. I even pinched my cheek, wondering if I was dreaming.
But the scene in front of me didn’t change. If it had, I would’ve been shocked in a completely different way.
Because it was Eto.
Eto had appeared, moving as normally as ever. The wound that had pierced straight through her abdomen was nowhere to be seen.
“E-Eto! How did you...?”
“I’m not really sure myself. By the time I came to, the wound was already healed.”
Eto said, glancing back at me.
“I’m not certain, but I think someone fed me human flesh while I was unconscious. When I woke up, there were bloodstains nearby.”
Human flesh. Had Eto healed herself the same way the Artist had eaten his comrade’s corpse to recover?
But who? In this abandoned building, the only people who could provide human flesh were me and Hitokawa... Ah!
No way... could it be?
There was someone. Someone in this building who could have provided it.
But she should still be tied up in the room on the second basement level. Even if she had escaped, why would she help Eto?
“Dad! Watch out!”
Eto’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. Now wasn’t the time to dwell on that.
A Kagune, swollen to nearly twice its size, surged down the hallway as if it meant to fill the entire corridor.
Eto kicked off the wall, swinging around to strike its flank, while I dragged Hitokawa’s collapsed body aside to dodge.
KWA-GA-GA-GA-GA-BOOOOM!!
The Kagune, its trajectory thrown off by Eto, slammed into the wall instead before whipping back toward the Artist.
His face was twisted, veins bulging as if he’d been dealt an unforgivable insult.
“You little brat who should’ve stayed dead...!! You had to butt in at the most important moment and ruin everything?!”
“Who was it that tried to wreck someone else’s peaceful family first? The nerve of you!”
Huh? Eto’s mouth had gotten sharper. Who had she been fighting to train it on?
Leaving the likely culprit, Hitokawa, tossed in a corner, I gripped the hilt of the greatsword and my pistol once more and rushed forward.
“Eto! Can you pin him down? At least keep that Kagune occupied!”
“Got it!”
As I crossed the hallway, Eto kicked off the wall and ceiling, charging the Artist.
“You little brat!!”
The Artist unleashed his Kagune.
She slipped between the whipping tendrils with agile footwork, closing the distance instantly.
Using her Ukaku as a booster, she drove her foot down with blinding speed, but the Artist’s reaction time was formidable.
He leaned back to avoid the kick and snatched Eto’s ankle in one motion.
When a dangerous cracking sound echoed from the trapped ankle, Eto’s expression hardened.
At that moment, I hurled the greatsword hilt.
“Pathetic!!”
Clang!!
The Artist knocked the flying hilt away, but Eto didn't miss the opening. She slammed her opposite leg down onto his forearm.
With a sickening crack, his grip on Eto’s foot broke.
She tried to follow up with the freed leg, but the Kagune had already retracted and was crashing back toward her, forcing her to leap away.
After landing and tumbling once, Eto caught the greatsword hilt the Artist had deflected.
She tossed it back to me and said, “Sorry, Dad! He’s a lot harder to deal with than I expected.”
“Yeah, if he can keep up with your speed, he's definitely a pain... How are we supposed to take this guy down?”
“What do you mean 'how'? We have a perfectly good tactic called ganging up on him. Are you just going to let that go to waste?”
““...!!””
Suddenly, a voice cut in from the side, and a hand snatched the greatsword hilt from my grip.
Eto and I stared at him in surprise.
“Hitokawa! You’re awake! But are you sure you should be moving already?”
“You’re bleeding all over the place. Don’t push yourself.”
“Shut up. A Ghoul kid and a civilian are fighting an S-rate Ghoul, and the only Ghoul Investigator here is lying around asleep? I’d be too embarrassed to show my face.”
Hitokawa grumbled as he spoke.
He acted like he was fine, but his pale complexion suggested otherwise. Still, if I told him to sit out, he’d refuse flat-out.
I started thinking of a way to talk him out of it, then gave up and looked at the Artist.
He snapped his arm back into place—the one Eto had bent—and turned his head toward us.
He looked thoroughly irritated. Between the repeated interruptions and the uninvited guests, he seemed to be in a truly foul mood.
I didn’t think he’d be holding back anymore.
I let out a tired sigh and said, “Let’s not die.”
“Yes. I won’t die.”
“Yeah. Not dying.”
That was enough for a battle cry.
To put an end to this nightmare of a day, to make it home alive, and to settle the bad blood handed down from my father to me, we charged the Artist.
Baring his bloodshot Kakugan, the Artist growled.
“I don’t need materials or anything else anymore... Die, all of you!!”
The Artist unleashed his Kagune upon us.
Three massive tendrils, each strong enough to crush an adult man's body. There was nothing in their wild thrashing but pure killing intent.
Eto, moving the fastest, met one of the huge Kagune head-on.
It was a sharp, scale-covered tendril that looked as if it would shred skin like a plane if it even grazed you.
Eto lifted herself with her Ukaku, spinning her body to slip past the tip of the tendril by a hair’s breadth.
She didn’t stop there. She stomped down on the side of the Kagune and, prepared to burn through a massive amount of stamina, unleashed her Ukaku at full output.
The force shoved the Kagune off course, sending it crashing over the second one.
KWA-GA-GA-GA-GA-BOOOOM!!!
The two Kagune tangled together and drove deep into the corner between the wall and the hallway.
Thanks to Eto’s quick thinking, two of the three were pinned. The remaining one came flying at me and Hitokawa.
“Haaah!!!”
Hitokawa shouted, blocking the strike with the broken greatsword hilt.
BOOOOM!!
The impact was monstrous.
A normal person couldn’t have stopped a tendril as thick as a tree trunk, but Hitokawa was a Ghoul Investigator.
They were people who trained their bodies for the sole purpose of fighting monsters like this.
He looked like he might snap at any second, but he had successfully held the Kagune back.
I slid across the hallway, slipping through the narrow gap between the floor and the Kagune.
The pain of my back scraping the ground hit me, but it was better than dying.
Once I cleared the area under the Kagune Hitokawa was holding, the Artist’s face came into view straight ahead.
I aimed the pistol, with only one shot left, at his head.
“Let’s finish this!!”
“Takaki Komaaaat!!!”
The bastard screamed and threw his body back.
“Huh?!”
“Tch!!”
Thud!!
The Kagune Eto and Hitokawa had been holding back knocked them away. Freed, the Kagune lunged from both sides like a Venus flytrap, trying to crush my throat.
Even so, I didn’t run. I pulled the trigger.
He hadn’t charged me with his body; he’d made the fatal mistake of simply flailing his Kagune around in a rage.
If I didn’t shoot now, I’d never get another chance!
“Haaah!!!”
Bang!!
BOOOOM!!
***
“Huff... huff...”
I exhaled, my breath ragged and heavy in my chest.
I had definitely fired a Q Bullet at the Artist. And his Kagune had definitely come down on me. That was what had happened.
But I was alive. The reason was Eto, who was holding onto me and panting just as hard.
“Dad, are you an idiot?! If you decide it’s impossible, then run! What’s the point of fighting to the end? Do you think you’re the protagonist of some hot-blooded manga?!”
“I don’t think that’s something you should be saying...”
“What was that!”
Just before the Kagune crushed me, Eto had poured the last of her stamina into her Ukaku, slipped between me and the attack, and grabbed hold of me.
Then, like a football tackle, she hauled me away, barely escaping through the gap in the Kagune.
Thanks to that passionate tackle that would’ve made a professional athlete weep, my chest was throbbing as if a rib had been broken, but at least I was still alive.
“What happened to him?”
I pulled myself free from Eto’s arms and stood up.
The Artist stood there as if time itself had stopped. His Kagune lay sprawled on the floor, motionless.
Did I miss? I had definitely aimed for his head.
The moment I thought that, the Artist’s body tilted.
He toppled forward like a rotten tree falling over, then—
Thud!
—suddenly stepped forward and braced himself, stopping his own fall.
“You...! You bastard...!!”
The Artist’s voice was badly shredded. When he turned his head toward us, the damage became clear.
From his left forehead to his right temple, the bullet had carved a deep groove through him.
His skull had cracked open, exposing a faint glimmer of white brain matter to the air, and the pressure of the bullet had pushed his left eye so far out it looked ready to fall from its socket.
It was a wound anyone would call fatal, but he wasn’t dead.
“I-I’ll... kill you...!! I’ll kill you!!”
He was stuttering, as if the shot had rattled his brain, but he was definitely alive. And he was still overflowing with killing intent!
The Kagune that had lost its strength began thrashing again.
Oh no! Did Eto’s impact shake my aim when she saved me?!
Even knowing the cause, there was nothing left I could do.
I was out of bullets, and Eto had exhausted herself saving me.
With no way out left, I swallowed hard.
“Dieeeeeee!!!”
The bastard screamed and swung his Kagune.
At that moment.
Crash.
A bottle flew in.
Not from anywhere else, but from the open ceiling directly above the Artist’s head.
The bottle shattered, and the liquid inside soaked the Artist’s body. I realized right then that the liquid was anything but ordinary.
Sssssssssss!!!
The liquid began to bubble and hiss. The Artist’s skin where it touched was burning away in an instant.
“Kraaaaaaagh!!!”
Hydrochloric acid...?!
The Artist screamed in agony, and I could tell exactly what the shattered bottle had contained.
Hydrochloric acid was burning through his body in real time, and some of it even seeped between the cracks in his skull.
Writhing in pain, the Artist lifted his head. His eye, the one untouched by the acid, turned toward whoever had dropped it.
“You...!! How dare you betray me...?! How dare you...!!”
Baring his teeth, the Artist changed the direction of his Kagune.
It was aimed straight at the floor above, as if he intended to drag whoever was up there down to hell.
But that final wish of his was never granted.
Thud!
One short, dull sound.
At that single sound, the wildly thrashing Kagune stopped moving.
The Artist’s eyes rolled back as if he had died on the spot, and he pitched forward.
Between the back of his neck and the back of his head, around the medulla, the blade of the broken greatsword hilt was buried deep.
“Huff... huff...”
The one who had driven the greatsword hilt into the back of the Artist’s head was breathing hard, utterly exhausted.
Thud!
Then he collapsed in the opposite direction from the Artist. Eto and I barely managed to steady ourselves before rushing to Hitokawa.
“Hitokawa!”
“Mister Hitokawa! Are you okay?!”
While Eto and I stopped the bleeding from Hitokawa’s wounds, we looked up at the hole in the ceiling.
Now it was flooded with the bright light of morning, but there was no one there anymore.
“...What the hell is this?”
Hitokawa, who had somehow managed to stay conscious, muttered as he looked at the bottle in my hand.
It was a bottle of hydrochloric acid. The same kind used for cleaning and industrial work. The one that had been thrown down from the floor above to burn the Artist alive.
“Who the hell threw this?”
“I don’t know. But whoever it was, they saved us.”
Hitokawa frowned and looked up at the ceiling again.
“There was definitely someone up there.”
“Yeah. And they vanished before we could see them.”
Eto, who was sitting beside me, hugged her knees and stared at the ceiling too.
“Maybe they were helping us from the start.”
“Maybe.”
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t just a random act of kindness.
Someone in this building had helped Eto before. And now someone had thrown hydrochloric acid at the Artist from above.
There was only one person I could think of.
The woman tied up in the room on B2.
“...We need to go check downstairs.”
Hitokawa’s voice was low and rough.
“If she really did this, then we owe her.”
I nodded.
“Yeah. But first, let’s make sure none of us die from blood loss.”
Eto gave a small, tired laugh.
“Dad, you say the weirdest things at times like this.”
“You’re one to talk.”
We exchanged a look, then all three of us started moving again.
Whatever was waiting below, we were going to find out.
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