Rei's legs, as she stands near the bench, won't stop shaking.
In front of her, where one of those men had been standing a moment ago, all that's left is a red cloud floating under the streetlight and slowly coming apart in the air.
'Eh... w-what just happened?'
No scream of pain, no sound at all, so Rei has trouble understanding what occurred. After all, that man who was talking suddenly wasn't there anymore, and that's everything Rei managed to see.
But...
'Was that Arata's voice...? Then he...'
He's the one who did that. That's the conclusion she reaches as the strength starts leaving her legs and she drops onto the bench.
She asked him that question on the bench a little while ago. She asked if he had killed anyone. He told her yes while she listened, cried, hit him in the arm and even called him an idiot. But while he was saying it, it was only a word, something that had happened somewhere and at some point far away from her. Rei hadn't thought for one second about what it would be like to see it.
"...What just-?"
One of the three remaining ghouls looks at the spot where his companion had been and doesn't finish the sentence. Not far from him, another ghoul takes a step back, and from the way he moves his head side to side, Rei understands that he didn't see anything either.
"You bastard!"
The ghoul who stepped back is surprisingly the first to let out a furious shout and shoot forward at a dizzying speed. The second ghoul launches himself right behind him, using his tail to strike the ground and pick up more speed. The tall, heavyset ghoul runs after them.
Watching all of that, three dangerous man-eating monsters closing in on Arata, Rei grabs her right arm and squeezes it.
She knows Arata is a monster, but that doesn't erase the feelings that have been growing beside him all these years.
If anything, the worry on her face only deepens for him.
The fight between monsters begins and she tries to follow it with her eyes. Even though she used to take pride in her speed and her reflexes earned through her practice with the spear, this time she realizes it's completely useless.
She's seen Touka fight. This very afternoon, inside the living room of her house, she watched her move so fast that she struggled to understand what had happened until a body was already going through the ceiling. And she's seen Rize too, with four tentacles coming out of her back like a beautiful, soft flower until one of those tentacles tore off an arm. Rei believed that after that she more or less knew how far the brutality of the monsters known as ghouls went.
What's happening in the park doesn't resemble any of that.
A tentacle cuts through the air toward Arata's side and he leans his body slightly and the attack carries on and buries itself in the grass.
At the same moment, the ghoul behind him had jumped at some point and comes down from above Arata, though he misses too.
Getting close enough, the big one dressed in white lands a solid hit on Arata's shoulder. Dust rises while smoke comes out of the holes in the man's mask. In the middle of the dust the sound of impact can be heard, one that sounds like something heavy splitting. But Arata doesn't step back, in fact he doesn't move a centimeter.
After taking that hit, Arata vanishes from his position. Rei blinks, and by that instant he's already behind the one who struck him.
"Gh!"
However, instead of attacking the big one, he attacks the other ghoul.
The grass tears up in chunks. A tree splits in half with an enormous crack and falls across the stone path. Something splatters the back of the bench, very close to where she's sitting, and Rei goes pale before moving away from there.
As expected, human eyes can barely follow the movements of the attacks, so Rei can't make out anything at all. To put it another way, she only sees the results a bit later, maybe a second or two after everything has already happened.
Still, it's enough for her to realize something
'Arata doesn't attack first.'
Not once has he attacked first. Instead, he waits for them to come to him. And only then does he move to make them miss before doing anything against the monsters himself.
"Jason! Are you sure we can take on this monster-"
"Shut up and keep going."
The big ghoul answers, and his voice sounds deep and calm despite having just lost two of his followers.
'Jason?'
Rei has no idea who Jason is, but, considering that mask, could it be a made-up name referring to that horror movie about a masked killer she watched with Arata and the girls?
While such thoughts cross briefly through her chaotic mind, Rei startles at the way that masked man moves.
Even though he's considerably large, the speed he reaches is something she didn't think possible. Running at high speed, he drives his kagune into the ground and launches himself with it, crossing half the park in the blink of an eye.
Even though he passed by at a considerable distance from her, Rei feels the air hit her directly in the face, while her long hair whips violently.
Rei hadn't noticed earlier, but at some point one of the two remaining ghouls stopped screaming.
Then Jason changes direction.
At first Rei doesn't understand what she's seeing, because he was clearly headed toward Arata and suddenly he veers off. She sees the kagune drive into the ground again before that enormous body spins in the air. Only when he's already shooting forward does she understand that he's coming toward her.
"!!!"
From the tips of her toes to her scalp, a cold sensation spreads and her thoughts freeze.
'Spear... My spear.'
Unfortunately she doesn't have enough time to realize that she doesn't have her spear in that moment.
At that precise instant, blood mist appears behind Jason at a startling speed. Before Jason can get close enough to Rei, the mist condenses and takes Arata's shape, one hand closed around one of the extensions of Jason's kagune.
That enormous body coming at full speed stops dead, suspended in the air, and a groan of pain escapes from under his mask.
"And where do you think you're going?"
Once he says that in a calm voice, one that sends a chill down the spine of whoever hears it, he pulls on his kagune.
Jason loses his balance completely, lets out a growl, and before he can react in any way, Arata throws him upward. The enormous body is launched into the night sky.
Rei, coming out of her freeze, lifts her head on instinct to follow him with her eyes.
"Grr...! Damn you! Damn you!"
Jason twists as he rises, trying to right himself, desperately searching for some surface to grab onto with his kagune.
Rei thinks Arata simply got him off his back, maybe throwing him far away so he'd stop being a nuisance for a moment before he came back to cause trouble again.
—Splash!
Then a tentacle comes out of Arata's back.
It happens very fast, and really it would be more accurate to describe it as something that flickers in a blur before disappearing again. Rei isn't sure she actually saw it.
When she hears a wet sound in the sky, she looks up again. Jason's body jerks violently in the air.
There's a hole open in his stomach. A hole big enough to fit a soccer ball, and big enough to see the stars in the night sky through it.
"Huh?"
Rei goes rigid as she watches Jason's blood, instead of falling, float in the air along with Jason's enormous body.
Not even a second passes before the blood starts moving on its own. The droplets stretch and lengthen, then join with one another until they take the shape of something like long, thin threads.
Those threads of blood coil around Jason's arms, his legs and his neck.
"What... what is this? Let go of me! LET GO!"
Jason thrashes with everything he has, but the threads don't give at all. The more he moves, the more the threads start sinking into his flesh. His kagune strikes the air several times without finding any surface to hit.
Accompanied by a horrific whistling sound, the threads tighten around Jason.
—Tap... Tap... Tap...
The sound of something hitting the grass. Cubes of flesh.
When the last of those cubes touches the ground, in that place where crickets had been singing, everything falls into absolute silence.
Rei brings both hands to her chest. Her heart pounds so hard she can hear it in her ears, and no matter how she tries, she can't breathe normally.
"..."
Rei looks around. She sees pieces of flesh scattered on the ground, the ordinary night mist stained with ghoul blood, and thick red pools in the holes left by the fight.
She tries to work out how long the fight lasted. It can't have been much, maybe a few minutes at most.
By then Arata turns around.
Rei lifts her head to look at him. She notices that expression is no longer on his face. When he walked toward the ghouls and spoke to them, Rei saw on his face a look she never thought she'd see on her childhood friend, the one she's known for years.
She wouldn't know what to do if Arata used that expression to look at her.
To her relief, he's looking at her exactly the way he always has.
Rei opens her mouth, but nothing comes out of her throat except an "Ah..."
"You asked me earlier if I regretted being a monster, didn't you?"
After a few seconds, Rei nods without taking her eyes off him for even an instant.
Arata smiles. It's an enormous smile. A smile full of teeth.
"I don't regret it."
In a world full of monsters...
"Because being a monster lets me protect the people I love."
...being a monster is a privilege.