Amon climbs the stairs with his hand tight around the handle of his case. Mado walks beside him humming a song, and behind them comes another squad.
But unlike the Cursed Gear users, these are regular investigators with standard Quinque briefcases and customized firearms loaded with RC rounds. You could say they're backup, just in case.
They reach the sixth floor and...
"Ugh!"
Amon's nose is hit by the heavy smell of blood, and he can even taste it at the back of his throat.
It doesn't surprise him, because when he looks up he sees the walls. They're covered in red, and the wall itself looks like flesh with veins running across the surface, throbbing as if the building were breathing.
"Hoho..."
Mado crouches in front of one of the walls. He runs a finger along the surface, lifts it, and looks at it. The flesh sinks a little where he touched it and then returns to its place.
"So it really is organic matter. Look, look, Amon-kun. That boy who escaped wasn't crazy after all."
Amon looks around.
"If this is real..."
Speaking in a heavy voice, he thinks about what this could mean.
"...then this entire floor is a trap. It can swallow anyone who walks through here. That's why we lost the squads."
"Mmm, what an unpleasant way to die, fufu."
Amon doesn't respond to that. Instead he lowers the briefcase hanging from his left hand and opens it. Inside are several cylindrical metal objects with a valve at the tip.
"In that case we only need these. RC gas."
He takes out four cylinders and distributes them, two in each hand.
"If he's using some ability to transform the building, and the transformation is flesh, then all this flesh has to have RC Cells. There's no other way for it to hold together. And if it has RC Cells..."
"The gas destabilizes it. Good reasoning, young Amon."
Amon pulls the pins and throws the cylinders in different directions down the hallway. They roll across the floor of flesh, bounce, and start releasing a whitish smoke that spreads fast, filling the corridor from one end to the other.
The gas touches the walls, and the flesh trembles.
Soon the whole hallway shakes as if having convulsions. Across the entire surface eyes of different sizes begin to open, weeping threads of blood, and after the eyes come mouths that open and begin to moan.
They are human voices, or rather, they are the voices of the soldiers the building swallowed, repeated over and over by the flesh that digested them.
Amon recognizes some of those voices. He worked with those men in the past while hunting ghouls.
He clenches his jaw hard.
"Chimera..."
His fingers close tighter around the handle of his case.
"I'm going to kill you. Tonight I kill you."
The flesh keeps trembling, the moaning grows weaker, and little by little the surface begins to retract. The veins shrink, the eyes close, the mouths close, and everything pulls back inward until the building's normal concrete is exposed again.
"Works perfectly, fufu. My little invention."
"Let's move."
They head up toward the seventh floor.
On the way, Amon notices something that unsettles him.
On the sixth floor there were at least the moans of the flesh, but now, as they approach the seventh, everything is silent.
It would be normal to hear gunfire, kagunes clashing, some shouting.
Amon frowns and something turns over in his stomach.
"There are no sounds of fighting."
He says it as he climbs the last few steps.
"The three Black Quinque users went in a while ago. We should be hearing combat. Unless..."
Without finishing the sentence, they enter the seventh floor.
And Amon stops dead.
Along with the blood there are piles of shell casings on the floor, which means they fired an enormous amount. There are pieces of bodies scattered around. They're the first squads, the ones who lost contact at the start.
But what makes his blood run cold is further ahead.
Three rifles driven into the floor, standing upright, muzzles pointing up. And impaled on those muzzles are three heads.
The heads of the Black Quinque Series users.
"...Well, well."
Mado looks at the heads with his head tilted.
At the end of the hallway, where the light doesn't reach and everything is dark, someone is sitting.
An office chair. And in the chair, a young man with his legs crossed. He has his chin resting on one hand and is watching them with curiosity.
His two red eyes glow in the darkness.
"You finally made it."
Hearing that monotone voice, Amon opens his briefcase. Mado opens his at the same time.
From Amon's case comes the heavy double-headed spear. From Mado's case, four red glowing tentacles materialize.
Both weapons give off a purple aura. And that aura makes the air feel cold and sinister. It's a little hard to put into words but even the backup behind them feels it, several taking a step back without realizing it.
Arata looks at the two weapons from his chair, and his smile sharpens.
"Hooo. Those look tastier than the last ones."
Mado's eyes light up all at once.
"Ah? Tastier? Young man, young man, did you already eat the Black Quinques?"
Arata opens his mouth and shows a row of sharp teeth.
"Is it because they're weapons carrying a lot of evil inside? They smelled a little off, honestly."
Amon hears that and narrows his eyes in disgust.
"Evil? You're going to talk about evil?"
He takes a step forward, gripping the shaft of his spear harder.
"Could there be anything more evil than you? Chimera. On Christmas night two years ago you destroyed Kyoto. Do you know how many humans you killed that night? How many children. How many women. How many elderly. Does none of it weigh on your conscience?"
"Huhuhu..."
Arata laughs with his shoulders shaking.
He gets up from the chair and starts walking slowly toward the two of them.
"Weigh on my conscience? Why should it?"
Rage rises into Amon's face. Waves of dark energy start pouring out of his cursed weapon uncontrolled, stirring the air around him.
Mado looks at him.
"Amon-kun, he's provoking you on purpose. Calm down. If you get that worked up you'll lose control over your own body, and then the weapon will do what it wants, not what you want."
Amon breathes deeply. It takes a couple of seconds but the dark energy settles.
"...Sorry. You're right."
He lets out a long sigh. Then he reaches into his belt with his free hand and starts pulling out more cylinders, scattering them down the hallway in every direction.
RC gas starts pouring out and covering the whole place again.
Arata tries to materialize one of his tentacles. It starts coming out of his back, and the tentacles flicker and dissolve before they can form.
He looks over his own shoulder with a raised eyebrow.
The gas got in through every pore. He can feel it moving through his blood, working its way into his kakuhou, destabilizing everything from the inside.
"I see. So that's how these annoying things work. They destabilize the RC Cells directly."
"Fufufu, what do you think?"
Mado licks his lips.
"A pretty effective invention against ghouls, don't you think? And let me brag a little. I'm the one who invented it."
Arata flexes his hand, testing how his body responds.
"Mm. Yes, it's good against ghouls. With this gas, plus these Cursed Gears you're using, you've improved quite a bit. No wonder the ghouls have been so desperate lately. There's a rumor going around that the CCG has gotten much more dangerous, that they're exterminating ghouls at a terrifying rate. I suppose this explains why."
Without waiting for him to finish talking, Amon lunges.
At the same moment the floor beneath his feet breaks from the force. His speed and physical strength shot up several times over thanks to the Cursed Gear, so much that he doesn't recognize himself when he fights with it.
Arata angles his body. The spear blade passes centimeters from his neck, keeps going, and cuts the wall and the floor behind him into two clean halves.
By that point Mado is already coming from the left. Four red tentacles extend and strike at Arata from four different directions at once.
Amon steadies himself, pivots on one foot and swings the spear again. This time it connects, the tip punching through Arata's right shoulder.
"Hoh..."
Arata feels the weapon's demonic energy entering the flesh and burning him from inside, like someone shoved molten iron under his skin. It resembles the holy energy he felt from Iscariot a few years back. Only this one is more aggressive and rabid.
"!!!!"
Before Amon and Mado's eyes, the wound that should neutralize a ghoul's regeneration closes in less than half a second.
Other regular Quinque users throw themselves at him, and from behind the backup opens fire, shooting nonstop with RC rounds.
Arata stands there in the center of the attacks.
They cut off his left arm below the elbow. Mado's tentacles wrap around his right leg and pull, dropping him to the floor. Amon's spear goes through his head from one side to the other. RC rounds tear apart his chest right where the heart is, opening a smoking hole.
For several minutes Arata's body takes hundreds of attacks that leave him unrecognizable.
Amon and Mado stop, and the others stop firing as well.
Is it over?
Amon thinks it but doesn't dare believe it.
"A little disappointing."
Mado says it in a flat tone, not sounding pleased, like someone promised a show and given less than what he expected.
"I didn't think it would be this easy. Defeating Chimera... but I don't like this feeling. What do you think, Amon-kun?"
Amon doesn't like it either. What's in front of his eyes makes no sense. They've been chasing this monster for years. In that time they lost entire squads, and just today they lost three Black Quinque users, and now he simply stayed still while taking hundreds of attacks?
The back of his neck starts to prickle. Would it be right to call it the feeling of someone watching you from behind? He scratches the back of his neck without thinking.
—Chomp! Cruuoosh!
A wet, heavy biting sound, followed by a crunch.
Amon turns around.
And sees every one of the men being eaten.
Enormous mouths have erupted from the floor, gaping wide open, and are closing around the backup. One swallows an investigator whole from the waist up while another catches two at the same time. The screams last barely any time at all, because the mouths chew fast.