One Kick Girl — Chapter 84: "When Silence Screams"
POV: Raon
---
Nothing hits harder than the moment a villain realizes they can bleed.
Baron Silence staggered backwards, one hand clutching his cracked chestpiece where my kick—no, Echo-chan's amplified kick—had landed.
The factory's neon lights flickered back to life. The world sounded like a radio reconnecting to its frequency: the hum of machines, the buzz of electricity, the frantic gasps of technicians getting their hearing back.
And then—
A sound that felt entirely wrong: Baron Silence breathing.
A ragged inhale. A pained exhale.
Like he'd never done it before.
His eyes locked onto me. They weren't furious. They were curious.
"Impossible," he whispered.
Silence didn't obey him anymore.
---
THAT'S WHEN THE SCREAM STARTED
It began at the edges of the room. A thin whine. The kind you hear after standing too close to a speaker at a concert.
Then it grew.
A keening howl that was not physical sound but negative space collapsing inward. Like every muted particle he'd ever collected had been shoved into reverse.
Shion clamped her hands over her ears. DJ Bloop, barely reconstituting, pixelized mid-regeneration.
And I couldn't block it either.
The scream was inside the body.
My knees buckled. My vision pulsed.
Silence was screaming.
Baron Silence spoke over it, each word like a scalpel:
"You don't understand me, Raon."
Yeah, that's fair. To be honest, I don't understand… most things. Like taxes. Or why ramen toppings cost extra. Or why the Bureau insists on calling me an "asset" instead of "mildly radioactive kick gremlin."
But this guy?
He was a whole new level of headache.
---
THE ROOM BEGINS TO BREAK
Sound waves—no, absence waves—tore through the factory architecture. Floors buckled. Steel folded like paper.
Every scream came from a pocket of silence erupting and dying at once.
Shion's eyes widened, her voice finally breaking through:
"HE'S OVERLOADING HIS RESONANCE!"
"English, please!" I shouted back.
"He's weaponizing his own suppressed frequencies—"
"That's not ENGLISH!"
She groaned. "He's exploding with everything he's ever muted!"
Ah. That I understood.
The Baron was on Silent Overdrive™.
---
AND HE STEPS FORWARD
Baron Silence peeled the cracked fragments of static-armor from his chest. Beneath, a spectrum shimmered— like someone had replaced his ribs with glass prisms reflecting dead music.
Not metaphorical music. Actual music.
Scraps of songs swallowed across eras: a muffled orchestra, a child lullaby, a metal concert in the third range, an anime OP someone pirated in 240p.
He was a graveyard of sound.
And I had kicked a hole in the tombstone.
He raised a hand.
My body screamed warnings. Every atom begged me to move.
I didn't.
I kicked instead.
Heel-first, straight forward.
A chunk of stolen opera snapped out of him like a sonic whip, collided with my leg— and the air LIT UP.
Gold sparks.
The factory floor cratered.
I spun, landed in a messy skid that would make every martial arts instructor cry.
Baron Silence… laughed.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't even vocal.
It was like a social media notification ping morphing into a chuckle.
"You took from me," he murmured.
"I want it back."
He pointed at my leg.
And I felt it: a foreign resonance pulsing in my shin, like Echo-chan's fragment had hitched a ride.
—A high note.
—A rebellious one.
—A frequency that refused to be owned.
I grinned.
"You can pry it from my cold, snack-filled skeleton."
Shion groaned across the room. "RAON. PLEASE. NOT THE SNACK LINE—"
Too late.
---
HE CHARGED
Not fast. Not dramatic.
Just inevitability given form.
Like the moment you see a delivery rider approaching and you KNOW they're about to ignore the red light.
Baron Silence moved through everything. Dust avoided him. Light bent around him. Sound drowned in his wake.
I let him come.
Then I remembered something: Echo-chan's voice hit him once.
Not me.
HER.
I inhaled.
My lungs felt heavy, filled with every scream in the room.
And I yelled.
Not words.
Just the sound she taught me—
> "AAAAAAAAAAA—"
The Echo-chan note burst from my chest, uncontrolled, messy, a cosmic scream-baby of stars and defiance.
The Baron hit it like a freight train into a brick wall.
His body jerked.
The scream in the air flipped polarity.
Shion shouted: "IT'S WORKING! KEEP SINGING!"
I coughed. "I'M NOT— COUGH —A SINGER!"
"You're doing great!"
"I SOUND LIKE A DROWNING GOAT!"
"It's on brand!"
Baron Silence reeled backward, static cracking down his face like thunder.
He hissed:
"You don't deserve her frequency."
I wiped my mouth, blood or spit or cosmic noise who knows.
"Buddy…" I lifted my leg, Echo-chan's resonance swirling golden around the heel.
"…I don't deserve ANYTHING."
And I kicked.
The air shattered.
Baron Silence vanished into a thunderclap of stolen symphonies.
The scream stopped.
---
AFTERMATH
The room settled into a near-normal hum. Shion sagged, exhausted but alive.
DJ Bloop rematerialized, glitchy and annoyed.
"Yo—never—invite—him—again," they croaked.
I collapsed onto my back, staring at the factory ceiling.
My leg still glowed faintly gold.
Echo-chan's resonance.
Permanent?
I hoped not.
I didn't want to be a pop idol. I barely handle being a martial arts disaster.
Shion sat beside me, whispering:
"You saved us."
"Nah," I muttered, staring at the lingering gold shimmer.
"Echo-chan saved us."
Shion smiled.
"Maybe. But you kicked it."