“They got away!?”
The Ghoul Investigators crowded around the hole and could only stare down into the darkness with the bitter expression of a dog that had chased a chicken all the way to the end. It was too deep and too dark to just jump in after them blindly.
The oldest investigator among them asked, “Does anyone know what’s down below?”
“Th-that... According to the schematics, there’s a drainage reservoir tank!”
“So it’s a dead end. Did they give up? Either way, good. Hold this position until backup arrives—!!”
Rumble
A deafening sound, almost like thunder, surged up from beneath the hole.
The investigators, sensing that something had happened, began to stir.
“What’s going on!”
“We just confirmed it! The heavy rain that started around Ward 12 at 12:25 has spread across the entire city, including Ward 7! It looks like the water rose to a certain level and the floodgates opened!”
“Floodgates? So the Ghoul bastards planned to escape through there!”
“What do we do? Should we pursue them?”
The answer to one investigator’s question came from above their heads.
“Don’t bother chasing the ones who already got away! More importantly, maintain battle formation!”
It was Hitokawa, shouting as he dropped from the air. Behind him, the Kakuja monster was bearing down with terrifying momentum.
“KRAAAAH!!”
BOOOOM
Hitokawa’s legs hit the ground first as he dodged aside, and the monster’s body crashed down like a shell, shaking the concrete.
Its eyes still burned with a hideous madness, but its body was no longer what it had been.
One eye had been pierced by a Quinque, and one arm had been severed, leaving the regeneration incomplete and the shape distorted.
It had been through a battle with Eto, then a series of clashes with the En and Black Doberman alliance, and just now a chaotic melee that had even involved Hitokawa and Arima. Even with its horrifying regenerative power, its limits had finally begun to show.
But even if its regeneration had weakened, the Kakuja’s overwhelming destructive power had not disappeared.
The investigators each raised their Quinques with tense expressions. None of them were sure they could handle the Kakuja monster on their own.
Then a swift shadow flashed past, and someone snatched the Quinques from the investigators’ hands.
“I’ll borrow these for a moment.”
“What!?”
“Hey, what are you doing!”
The figure was Arima. With weapons of many forms—spear, blunt weapon, whip, sword—clipped at his side, he sprinted toward the monster’s flank.
The monster’s vicious eyes tracked Arima’s movement as they turned.
It was acting on instinct alone, without reason, but the repeated battles had carved Arima’s danger deep enough into that instinct.
“KRAAAAH!!!”
“If you interfere with my mission, I will eliminate you.”
He dodged the arm swung at him to turn him into minced meat by leaning his upper body back.
Then, like a carp swimming against a waterfall, the spear-shaped Quinque surged up beneath the monster’s arm and pierced through its armpit.
Thud
“Krrk?!”
The Quinque that had gone through the armpit burst out through the shoulder and drove into the monster’s neck. That was only the beginning.
Sliding down toward the calf, Arima drove sword- and awl-shaped Quinques between the knee joints. The impact from the back of the knee forced the monster down onto one knee, and the tips of the Quinques that came out through both legs stabbed into the concrete floor.
The monster thrashed, swinging its still-not-fully-regenerated arm in a desperate struggle.
Arima wrapped it with a whip-shaped Quinque and dragged it behind the monster’s neck. The arm was wrenched back behind the shoulder, and Arima drove the whip’s blade-like handle between the monster’s ribs.
“KRAAAAK!!!”
The monster writhed and rampaged in resistance.
But each time it did, the number of Quinques embedded in its body only increased exponentially. It was like a spider wrapping prey in webbing and stealing away its freedom.
Once Quinques had been driven into its abdomen, solar plexus, collarbone, liver, spine, and even heart, the monster’s struggles began to fade. The light in its eyes dimmed little by little, like a candle burning out.
Thud!!
For the finishing blow, Arima stepped onto the monster’s shoulder and brought a long sword down onto the crown of its head.
The monster’s Kakuja had become so thin it could no longer even be called armor, and it could not resist. The blade that bored into the top of its skull did not stop until it punched through the jaw.
The light in the monster’s eyes vanished completely, as if it had died on the spot. Arima pulled the Quinque free from the monster’s head, stepped down to the floor, and let out a breath.
The investigators could only stare at Arima and the dead monster in disbelief.
All of this had happened in the span of just a few blinks.
In that short time, the Kakuja had been rendered helpless one-sidedly, and in the end even its life had been taken. How could they not be stunned?
Hitokawa, who had personally collided with the monster and experienced its terrifying strength, was especially dumbfounded.
At this rate, if he had just thrown Arima enough weapons and stayed out of it, Arima probably could have finished the job alone.
Hitokawa approached the dead monster, unable even to lower his head properly, and examined the Quinques embedded in its body.
‘He pierced every spot where a kakuhou would likely be.’
The kakuhou was one of a Ghoul’s vital points.
Figuring out where a Ghoul’s kakuhou was located somewhere in its body was basic Ghoul-hunting knowledge. Hitokawa had also narrowed down a few suspicious spots while observing the monster.
But identifying them and striking them accurately were two very different things.
To pierce every kakuhou with a single Quinque each, without any wasted motion, was almost miraculous. And against a Kakuja monster, no less.
‘This isn’t just genius. He’s beyond the human category.’
Unable to hide his bewilderment, Hitokawa turned to look at Arima.
He saw only Arima’s back as he walked toward the hole without the slightest hesitation.
“Hey! What are you doing!?”
“I will pursue the escaping Ghouls.”
Whoosh
Before anyone could even tell him there was no need to chase them, Arima threw himself down into the hole. Straight into that raging current where the drainage was still underway.
Hitokawa and the other investigators rushed to the hole in confusion.
Arima was already gone into the darkness. Below them, only the sound of water draining away at high speed could be heard.
“W-what do we do? Should we go after him too?”
“If you’re confident you can survive that flood, go ahead and jump in.”
When Hoshino asked, Hitokawa rubbed his forehead as if he was already too tired to think and answered.
Just from the sound alone, there was no way to guess the scale of the drainage. There was no way pursuit was possible.
It was a route the Ghouls could use because they were far tougher than humans. Of course, even they would have a hard time coming out unscathed, but the odds of dying were low.
On the other hand, even if they had the ability to hunt Ghouls, they were still human in the end.
Only two kinds of humans would jump into a place like that: fools who believed they wouldn’t die, or fools who had already resolved to die.
Arima was a fool who believed he wouldn’t die.
At least, he seemed to have the ability to back that up. He was another monster, one who had hunted down a Kakuja monster by himself.
To leap into the water after Arima, you’d have to be a fool prepared to die, and fortunately there were no such fools among his group.
‘If there were, I’d like to see their face once.’
After muttering that inwardly, Hitokawa turned to the investigators and said, “For now, we wait until the water drains and backup arrives. No matter how weird that bastard is, we can’t just let him go alone.”
As Hitokawa spoke, thinking of Arima, the other investigators nodded in agreement.
Watching them disperse to regroup, Hitokawa sighed and looked down into the hole.
“I’ve been assigned an annoying one, in more ways than one.”
I opened my eyes.
I met the gaze of two round eyes staring steadily into my face.
“...Eto?”
“Yes.”
“...This isn’t heaven, is it?”
“If heaven were this filthy, damp, and smelly, I’d want to escape immediately.”
Listening to her, I remembered what had happened before I lost consciousness.
I had tried to swim against the raging current, but after being slammed into a wall like I’d been thrown there, I lost my memory from that point on.
I had sensed death then, but if I was talking to Eto now, I guess I hadn’t died.
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
“Hmm... Looks like I’m fine.”
My body was scraped up, bruised, and battered all over, but nothing seemed broken. Still, bacterial infection looked like a real risk, so I’d need antibiotics once we got back.
At my words, Eto nodded in relief.
Then she raised her tightly clenched fist as if to show it off.
“Then brace yourself.”
“...Huh?”
By the time I realized something was wrong, Eto’s fist was already buried in my abdomen.
Thud!!
“Cough!!”
My stomach was crushed, my diaphragm forced upward by the pressure, and I reflexively coughed out breath that tasted like stomach acid.
Even while I clutched my abdomen and curled onto my side in pain, I could feel Eto’s cold stare pinned to me.
“E-Eto...?”
“....”
Eto clamped her mouth shut and started alternating her fists in a steady rhythm.
The motion itself might have looked like a dutiful shoulder massage from a child to her parents, but the force behind it was unmistakably filial abuse.
Thump! Thump! Thud! Thump!
“Ghk?! E-Eto, wait! Cough! You hit bone! You hit bone! Aaaagh!!”
I screamed and tried to resist, but Eto didn’t stop, and her tone remained infuriatingly calm.
“Oh? How strange. Didn’t Dad like pain like this?”
“Who would like this kind of thing! I’m not a masochist! And even if I were, getting hit by my daughter for pleasure would put me at the level where society needs to lock me away!”
“Would someone like that do something this reckless?”
“....”
I had nothing to say to Eto’s sharp jab.
I averted my eyes and said, “M-my body’s tough, okay...?”
“How tough could it possibly be compared to a Ghoul’s? You collided eight times with other Ghouls being swept along by the current, fourteen times with concrete fragments and trash carried in with them, and twenty-one times with walls and floors at tremendous speed. If I hadn’t wrapped Dad in my Kagune, one of your arms or legs would have been torn off no matter how lucky you were.”
“....”
For some reason, it had been strange that I’d come out of that current with my body miraculously intact. So Eto had protected me.
But if I admitted that my reckless behavior had been justified, I was afraid the fist barrage that had just stopped would start again, so I tried to come up with some excuse.
“I-I trusted my daughter! Do you really think I planned a stupid move like this without thinking?”
“I’m almost moved by my father’s genius. Just how smart were you to calculate even the timing of when I’d regain consciousness? When I came to, you were already in the middle of jumping into the hole. If I hadn’t sensed your killing intent toward you, I would have stayed unconscious until the moment I was swept away by the water. Did you even calculate that you’d become the target? My admiration is blooming for my father, whose schemes are worthy of Zhuge Liang.”
“Th-tha...”
I was done for. I’d tried to talk my way out of a corner, and instead I was losing ground.
As if to say there was no room for argument, Eto raised her fist again.
With no other choice, I decided I’d just have to take the beating until she ran out of anger, and I curled up as much as I could to protect myself from the coming impact.
But no matter how long I waited, the feared fist never came down. Instead, a warm droplet fell onto the back of the hand covering my head.
I cautiously lifted my head and looked at Eto.
Transparent streams were running down her cheeks.
“Why do you always... do such reckless things?”
Eto was crying.
She didn’t look angry at my stupidity so much as overwhelmed with the fear and grief of nearly losing someone precious to her.
“There were... other ways... At least if it had just been Dad... there was definitely a way to survive...”
“...I’m sorry.”
I pulled Eto into my arms and apologized.
There had definitely been another way. Surrendering to the Ghoul Investigators.
If I revealed that I was human, I wouldn’t be able to avoid punishment for helping Ghouls, but I wouldn’t die. It was definitely a better option than risking my life in the middle of raging currents.
“...But that would have been a way for only me to survive. If I’d done that, I’d definitely have regretted it.”
That would have guaranteed only my own survival, while Eto and the others would not have been safe. If things went badly, they’d be exterminated on the spot; if things went well, they’d end up in Cochlea.
Hitokawa was over there, but as a Ghoul Investigator, he couldn’t openly help us. In fact, if he defended us, it could put him in a difficult position too.
So I gambled, sacrificing my own survival rate to raise everyone else’s.
I had no idea how badly my legs were shaking while carrying out that plan. When the current started dragging me along, I even prayed to a god I never usually bothered with.
In the end, the gamble paid off. I survived and managed to shake off the investigators. But no matter what the result was, Eto could never have approved of what I’d done.
One tiny mistake, and I would have crossed a river I could never come back from.
For Eto, it must have been even more terrifying than when the Kakuja monster attacked.
“Hic... uuu...”
Eto sniffled in my arms and still didn’t stop hitting me. But it didn’t hurt like before, so I stayed quiet and let her vent while I soothed her.
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