"After being gone all this time... What do you think you're doing showing up here, Ayato?"
The blue-haired young man looks around the room without any hurry. His blue eyes slide toward the couch, then the table, and finally the cups of coffee steaming on the tray. Once he's done that, he looks at the five girls standing there.
Then he lets out a scoff.
"How comfortable you look."
"What?"
"Sharing coffee with friends in a nice house. You always knew how to pick the easy road, didn't you, nee-san?"
Touka narrows her eyes.
"While we were sleeping in tunnels and eating whatever we could find, you were here playing human with your little friends."
Ayato takes a step forward, crushing broken glass underfoot.
"Just like our father, who was after peace. That's why you got weak. You always were, but now it's worse."
Behind him, the hooded ghouls spread out to both sides like a fan opening and block the window and the door.
"I didn't come here to argue with you anyway."
"So why the hell are you hanging around here?"
"To pick something up."
Raising his chin, Ayato gestures with it toward Rize, who is leaning against the table with a cup in her hand.
"Her."
"..."
The moment those words land, the room goes silent.
With the atmosphere shifting all at once, Rize tilts her head to one side, and the soft smile on her face stretches a little wider.
"Ara? Me?"
"Kamishiro Rize. We've been looking for you for months."
"Fufu~ I don't appreciate people other than darling looking for me. Even so, what are you looking for me for, if I may ask?"
"That's not your concern. You're just coming with us."
Touka walks to the table and stands in front of her.
"No."
"I'm not asking your permission, nee-san."
"Ayato-"
"I'm not here to negotiate."
With a bored, blank expression on his face, Ayato speaks while putting his hands in his pockets.
"You hand her over, or we take her by force. I don't care which."
His eyes pass briefly over Rei, Saya and Meiko, and although he's surprised for a few seconds that women this beautiful could exist, he doesn't linger.
They're three humans not worth a second look. Though they might be worth something as good quality meat.
"Last chance. Move."
Touka doesn't move.
"...Fine."
Ayato raises his hand, and with a mocking expression on his face, he gives the order. And the hooded ghouls launch themselves forward.
"Fufu~"
Rize sets the cup down on the table without hurrying and turns her head toward Touka.
"Touka. Arata talked to me a little while ago, you know."
"What?"
"He said some sewer rats were coming and that we'd be wise to use as much force as we want."
Touka's eyes open for a moment and then go dark.
"...Ah. Perfect."
—Splash!
Two kagunes deploy at the same time inside the room.
The first kagune deployed is a wing of blood that looks like it's made of flame, surrounded by lightning that crackles and claws at the ceiling.
The second kagune is four rinkaku tentacles that unfold from Rize's lower back and open in the air like the petals of a flower.
By that point the first ghoul to reach Rize leaps with his sword-shaped kagune held out in front, aimed at her chest.
Without turning her body, a single tentacle moves from Rize's back and in the next instant the ghoul goes from being in midair to being pinned to the wall of the room three meters behind, his right arm on the floor and separated from the rest of him.
"Fufu~ Sorry, did that hurt?"
"Gaaah!"
"I should have started with legs. Arms come off too easily."
Almost at the same time, another ghoul throws himself at Touka from the side.
Touka's eyes, her face shadowed by the incandescent light of her kagune, shine beneath her violently swaying hair.
At the same moment, she pivots on one foot and hits him with the back of her hand. The ghoul is launched upward with a dislocated jaw, punches through the ceiling of the room and disappears into the second floor.
There's a sound of furniture breaking.
"...That was Arata's room when he visits."
Touka cracks her neck.
"Ayato. You're paying for that."
Three more ghouls push off at the same moment their ally gets slapped away, one from the front and two leaping in from the sides.
Touka realizes it's a maneuver they probably spent time practicing, because even the arrangement and the types of kagune they use are the kind that would put an ukaku user like her at a disadvantage.
However, against that rehearsed strategy...
Touka walks straight through the formation.
She grabs one by the face and slams his head into the floor, and the floor caves in. The second one she catches by the wrist mid-motion, pulls, and the arm comes out of the shoulder with a wet sound. The third manages to take half a step back before the kagune wing reaches him and sends him into the wall with enough force to leave a full-body imprint in the plaster.
One of the remaining ones tries to be clever and attacks Touka from behind while she's occupied.
Rize sighs.
"Mm. That's rude."
A tentacle crosses the entire room, catches him by the ankle and slams him into the floor twice before letting go.
"Touka, you have one behind you."
"Not anymore."
"Fufu~"
In less than two minutes, the room in Touka's house is wrecked, and the floor is covered in ghouls who aren't moving.
Ayato watches all of it with his eyes wide open.
He brought twelve ghouls. Twelve ghouls he picked himself.
What the hell just happened?
"Do you know what time it is?"
But Touka's voice pulls him out of his train of thought.
"...Ah?"
Touka walks toward him, and the lightning from her kagune lights up the room with every step.
"I asked if you know what time it is."
"What the hell are you-"
"It's six thirty."
Ayato takes a step back without realizing it.
"And do you know how long I've been getting ready?"
"Nee-san, shut up and-!"
"An hour and a half!"
—Crack!
Touka's fist reaches his face before he sees the movement, and Ayato goes flying backward and crashes into the hallway wall.
'Luck...'
Ayato thinks as he gets up, spitting blood.
'It was luck. I dropped my guard because I was watching the others.'
He deploys his kagune and launches himself.
Touka intercepts him halfway by catching his kagune with her bare hand and yanking it down. Ayato smashes face-first into the floor.
'No. It isn't luck. She's hiding something. Yes, she has to be using some trick. A drug. Maybe that disgusting black blood.'
He gets up again and using his butterfly-wing kagune, attacks diagonally, aiming at Touka's side.
But she moves her shoulder two centimeters and the crystallized, razor-edged ukaku kagune passes right by. Bending her legs slightly, she drives her knee into his stomach.
Ayato's eyes go wide as air escapes his mouth along with saliva. He feels a couple of ribs break inside him.
"I had a date."
—Bam!
"A. Date."
—Bam!
"That he asked me out on."
Ayato tries to cover his face with his arms, and Touka breaks both of them.
"You son of a bitch!"
—Bam!
'...Ah.'
In that moment, while taking heavy blows to his body, Ayato understands something.
His sister being this strong... it isn't luck or a trick, and it isn't the result of using the black blood.
She's simply stronger. Far, far stronger. From the very beginning, the word "fight" was never the right one to describe what's happening in this room.
Ayato drops to his knees and then onto his side, and can't get up anymore.
'But... how? How did she get this strong? Wasn't surrounding yourself with loved ones and living a peaceful life supposed to make you weaker?'
Touka stands in front of him with a terrifying, chilling presence pouring off her.
Both she and Ayato know it's only a matter of lifting her foot and bringing it down for him to die.
Ayato looks up at her with one eye, because the other one is swollen shut.
"Why...?"
"Mm?"
"Why are you so strong...?"
Touka looks down at him with irises red as blood flames and sclera as black as a sky with no stars. At the same time her kagune begins retracting slowly along with the lightning, which stops crackling.
"Because you're too weak."
Faced with an honest, calm answer, without resentment and without pride, Ayato opens his mouth intending to say something, but his throat closes up.
Then he loses consciousness.
"..."
Touka lets out a breath and runs a hand across her forehead.
Her hair, which Rei had spent so long styling, is now completely ruined. There's blood on her clothes, and her makeup is wrecked. Not to mention that the room now looks like a battlefield.
"Hah... damn it. All that work wasted."
Then her body goes rigid for a second or two as she remembers something.
She slowly turns her head.
Saya is standing by the table with her arms crossed and an annoyed expression. She looks at each beaten ghoul in the room as if they were garbage bags left in the wrong place.
Meiko is also standing there with a severe, serious face and the makeup container still in her hand. Even though she seems to be in shock, which is understandable considering she didn't know her friends were monsters, she looks at Touka and shows no sign of fear.
And Rei...
The girl with the orange-brown hair has dilated pupils and a completely pale face. Her eyes are fixed on Rize's kagune, which still hasn't fully retracted. And her breathing is getting faster.
"Damn it..."
Touka takes a step toward her, because she's known Rei for years, and she can more or less guess what that girl is about to do.
"Rei, wait. Listen to me..."
Rei runs past her and out through the broken door.
"Rei!"
Touka moves to go after her, but a hand grabs her arm.
"Let her go."
Rize sighs and says those words while shaking her head.
"Let go of me, bitch! She isn't-!"
"I said let her go."
Rize looks at her with a blank expression.
"You're not going to be able to explain anything to her right now, and chasing her down the street with blood on your clothes is only going to scare her more."
"..."
"Darling can handle her."
Touka goes still, and after a moment, lowers her arm.
"Tsk..."
×××
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