Because the blow was so strong and so fast, Amon is launched backward and embedded into the wall of flesh at the far end.
He coughs, spits, tries to breathe but struggles to get air into his nose. With heavy breaths he manages to get up while fixing his stance and gripping his spear with both hands. Maybe from the pain, or because he is furious, his face is painted red.
And with that face, he attacks.
The first slash whistles through the air, the second leaves a dark and sinister trail behind it carrying the evil aura of the weapon's demon, and the third cuts the entire seventh floor from one side to the other.
The fourth is blocked by Arata with his forearm coated in blood that he uses as armor.
But the force is so great that it pushes him, drags him backward, and the two of them go through the floor, out through the building wall and falling down.
The people who have been surrounding the building for hours get worked up and start shouting, raising their phones to record. The police keeping order quickly form a barricade and push the onlookers a little farther back.
So in the end only Arata and Amon are left near the building.
"Damn it..."
Amon curses with a dark expression when he sees Arata look toward the crowd with an interested gaze.
He is regretting that last move, because pushing Arata with that much force knocked him out of the building, where there are ordinary people.
'Looking at them like that... is he going to kill them too?'
But he didn't know that the reason Arata was looking at the crowd was because he saw a familiar person.
A man in a police uniform, currently pushing back the waves of people trying to get closer to take photos and videos.
That man is Rei's father.
'No, I have to kill him before that happens.'
With that thought, to protect these people, Amon swings the spear and cuts off one of Arata's arms.
The arm comes free and arcs through the air, blood spraying the ground. But in an instant the arm dissolves into blood, that blood flies back toward the stump, and the arm regenerates.
Arata kicks. Amon manages to get the spear in front of him, the kick connects with the shaft, and it is strong enough to push him back through the building again.
Several shouts come from the crowd, and it sounds like they are cheering Amon on while cursing the monster.
Amon gets up out of the rubble. In a rage he launches himself out again and attacks, and attacks, and attacks. His spear moves so fast it leaves trails in the air. Every strike uses the demon's aura and carries enough force to split concrete.
And Arata dodges all of them, angling his body, taking half a step, tilting his head, making every attack pass by millimeters. When he takes a hit it's because he wanted to take it, and the wound closes before the blood touches the ground.
Amon notices, and it makes him angrier.
'I'm giving everything I have, I'm using a weapon with a demon inside it, and this damn monster is just playing with me.'
"Fight seriously!"
"Huh? But I am fighting."
"Liar!"
Amon drives the spear into the ground and the street cracks in a spiderweb around his feet. He launches himself so fast he leaves a burned mark in the air.
Arata catches the spear tip between two fingers and stops it a centimeter from his eye.
Pushing with his entire weight, and with all the strength the weapon gives him, Amon plants his feet into the ground to the point that the concrete sinks further with every second. But the spear doesn't advance a single millimeter more.
"Heh, so much hate... Well, either way, you're fighting with a head full of rage, and that makes you fast, but it makes you stupid."
"Shut up..."
Arata turns his wrist, the spear is deflected, and Amon stumbles forward. He takes a hit to the side, just an open hand without using the kagune, but Amon feels his ribs crack and goes flying again.
And this repeats.
The ghoul hunter attacks, the ghoul plays with him, Amon takes a hit that doesn't kill him but hurts like hell, gets up and attacks again. Over and over and over again.
Each round Amon gets worse. The rage eats away at his head bit by bit. The demon in the Cursed Gear feels it and feeds on it, and the dark aura pouring out of the weapon gets thicker and more uncontrolled. Amon is barely thinking anymore, he just wants to drive the spear into that blue-haired monster laughing at him, nothing else, nothing else exists anymore.
He starts attacking without measuring anything, without seeing where he is and without caring what's around him.
One slash passes near a lamppost and splits it in two, while another hits the base of the building.
—Slash! Slash! Slash!
Taking hit after hit, the building that was already wrecked inside and full of holes from the fight starts to groan.
Amon doesn't notice because the fury is clouding his mind. He throws an enormous slash loaded with the demon's full aura and it lands square on the building's support column.
The shockwave keeps expanding and tears through the building behind it too.
Both buildings start to lean, and tons of concrete, glass and steel begin coming down.
And below, right where all of it is going to land, is the crowd behind the barricade. The expressions on people's faces freeze, and they look up at the two falling buildings whose shadows are already covering them. Hundreds of people who won't have time to run.
That's when Amon wakes up, when the rage evaporates all at once and his blood runs cold.
"Ah..."
Because of that slash he made, all those people are going to die.
He stretches out his arm toward the crowd and opens his mouth, but there's no time to shout.
But then...
Arata, who was standing calmly off to the side, looks toward the crowd and then upward. The six black tentacles burst from his back all at once, shoot upward, and start tearing apart the falling concrete blocks, breaking them into small pieces and knocking them off course.
At the same time he cuts his palm with a finger. Blood pours out of the wound. Without falling to the ground, the blood stretches and soon there are dozens of thin red threads firing toward the crowd.
"No!"
For a second Amon thinks he's going to kill all of them at once.
But the blood threads wrap around people's arms and waists. The blood ropes pull taut and hundreds of people at once are dragged away from the zone where the building is coming down.
People scream as they fly backward and land on top of each other, but every one of them ends up outside the collapse zone.
Meanwhile the tentacles move in dark blurs that even Amon can't track properly, pulverizing the large debris in the air so that what reaches the ground is dust and small fragments.
When the last block falls and the dust starts to settle, there isn't a single civilian dead.
Amon is on his knees on the ground, watching.
"Why...?"
Without understanding what happened, he turns his eyes toward Arata and asks in a shaking voice.
"Why did you save them? You... you swallowed dozens of my men in there. You killed Mado-san. Why save these ones? It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make any sense!"
Maybe because Amon is someone who sees the world in simple terms. Humans are good, monsters are bad. That view of his seems to be getting torn apart in front of his eyes.
Arata slowly retracts the tentacles and the wound on his palm closes.
He looks at the crowd for a while, then answers without looking at Amon.
"Because I have people I love."
"...What?"
"I have people I care about and want to protect. And if I let myself go, if I start killing anyone who walks past just because I can, at some point I stop being someone who can be around them. I'd become a thing that only knows how to kill."
He turns slightly toward Amon.
"I kill the ones who come to kill me, and I kill the ones who go after my people. But those people over there did nothing to me. I'm not going to lose the little that's left of who I used to be out of laziness to move a few tentacles. If I lose that, I have nothing left."
Amon listens, and instead of calming down, the corners of his mouth tremble and his eyes go wide.
"The little that's left of who you used to be...? You have the nerve to talk like that? You? The Chimera, the one behind the Night of the Bloody Moonlight. That night you destroyed all of Kyoto. Do you even remember it, or is it just another day to you? Didn't you kill all those people...?"
"Ah, here you go with that line again... Well, whatever."
Arata tilts his head.
"I didn't kill them. If anything, you could say I saved them."