"Nicole, look out!"
For one short instant, every one of them stared in horror at the white hand hurtling toward Nicole.
The yellow eyeball set in its palm gleamed with an eerie, malignant light as the hand closed around Nicole's slender throat and slammed her flat onto the floor.
"Ghk - ahh, ahh."
Nicole thrashed, hammering her fists against the Sacrifice's arm. The suffocation was crushing, driving her heartbeat into a gallop, and her struggles turned wilder by the second.
"Let go of her!"
Anby and Twiggy went in first, one blade each, both biting deep into the Sacrifice's arm.
The Sacrifice writhed in obvious pain, yet it showed no sign of releasing its grip - as though it had made up its mind to take Nicole down with it.
Nicole's face flushed scarlet, then darkened to a bruised purple, and her awareness began to blur at the edges.
But right as she was about to black out, a white flash cut across her vision. Her body suddenly felt weightless, and then the air came flooding back to her.
"Hahh - hahh - hahh - I'm... I'm alive."
Nicole went limp and slid to the floor, and what dropped beside her was the Sacrifice's great hand, sliced clean in two.
What she didn't realize was that even though someone had just saved her life, nobody's face had relaxed. If anything, they were all watching her rescuer with open worry.
"Eeek!! M-monster!"
Perlman took one look at Twiggy and his eyes bulged. Thoroughly terrified, he half-crawled, half-scrambled backward to put some distance between them.
Anby's expression was complicated as she looked at Twiggy. "Twiggy! That's..."
Twiggy's right hand, the one gripping the saber, was covered in dense black crystals and the Fissures that marked Ether Corruption - exactly the way it had looked back when Twiggy first fell into Ether Corruption.
"It's fine. I just pushed myself a little, that's all."
As she spoke she glanced at the band around her right wrist, her face calm, betraying neither joy nor sorrow.
Ever since the day she gambled her life inside the Hollow and injected the prototype of her own making, Twiggy had stopped being human in any strict sense. It was simply that, day to day, everyone quietly avoided thinking about it.
The same as earlier, outside the door, when Fairy flagged a suspected high-risk Ethereal individual.
That warning hadn't been about Geno alone.
And now Twiggy had let a sliver of that power out - and power always comes with a bill attached.
The moment she used it, Ether Corruption came knocking right along with it.
"You sure you're really all right?"
Billy finished checking Nicole and found she'd only passed out briefly from lack of oxygen. Anby, meanwhile, kept her worried eyes fixed on Twiggy - this was hardly the first time she'd forced herself past what her body could take.
"Don't worry, I'm completely fine. Go help Geno, quick."
Twiggy waved them off with feigned lightness, then turned to go back and support Geno.
And just as she moved to slip the wristband back on -
something went wrong.
BOOM!
While Twiggy and the others were dealing with the crisis behind him, Geno hadn't allowed himself a single moment of slack, holding the shield up to protect them all.
As for the Sacrifice that had broken through, he trusted his teammates to handle it. His job was making sure the front held.
But no sooner had he heard the thing was dead - before he could even let out a breath - than he saw more Sacrifices come charging in.
Those great hands didn't strike at all. They flung themselves flat against his crystal shield, swelled violently, and then blew themselves apart with a thunderous crack!
The self-destruction dumped an enormous amount of damage in a single instant. Geno's shield shattered outright, and the blast wave picked him up and threw him backward.
"Guh?! These lunatics!"
Geno was honestly staggered. It was the first time he'd ever seen a style of fighting more reckless with life than his own - these Sacrifices were spending their own bodies to clear a road for the Sacrifice soldier troops.
With the shield gone, Geno and the rest had no choice but to slug it out head-on.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
A storm of gunfire filled her vision. Twiggy gave up on restarting the wristband, hefted her saber, and charged straight in, meaning to carve a bloody path open before anyone else could.
Billy stayed over Nicole, shot after shot covering Anby and Twiggy as they pushed forward.
Seeing all this, Perlman's first instinct was to bolt - but in the chaos he had no idea where to bolt to, so he wound up crammed into a corner beside Eous, shaking.
"Boo-hoo-hoo~ Please, anybody! Somebody save me!"
"Do you have to be this pathetic?!"
Eous edged away from Perlman in undisguised disdain. It didn't have any combat ability either, but at least it wasn't sitting here making things worse.
At the same time, its main body back in Sixth Street was running calculations with Fairy without pause, hunting down the nearest Hollow Fissure and trying to find the group a way out.
"Come on, faster, faster... got it!"
Escape route pinned down, Eous hurried to call out to Geno and the others - only to snap back to the scene and find the situation had shifted again.
"Hyah!"
From where Eous stood, Geno and Twiggy had both pressed forward together, trying to break through at a single point.
But the Rebel Soldiers reacted just as fast, and they had no fear of dying.
Every soldier the two of them cut down would haul itself back off the ground moments later, turn into a Sacrifice, and come at them all over again.
Two fists can't fight four hands, though. Even with the perfect coordination between them, even with Billy and Anby covering, an accident was bound to slip through.
In a corner neither of them could watch, a Rebel Soldier seized his chance and lined his sights up on Twiggy's exposed back.
Bang! The muzzle flash was blinding, the bullet spun out trailing ripples of displaced air, and flew dead straight at Twiggy.
"Look out!"
Billy spotted the cheap shot first, but it was already too late.
By the time Twiggy turned around, the bullet was right in front of her face, and the certainty of death came flooding through her.
Geno, beside her, moved on instinct to put himself in front of Twiggy - he was thick-skinned enough that one bullet wouldn't matter.
But before he could, a white light blazed up out of Twiggy.
It was like a burning sun rising in the dead of night, so bright that not one of them could keep their eyes open.
When Geno managed to open his again, all he saw was a familiar figure standing between Twiggy and the shot - and the bullet, as though it had struck a wall, lost every bit of momentum and drifted slowly to the floor.
"You're..."
This person - no, this ghost - he'd seen before. Wasn't this the female ghost who had shown up in front of the two of them once already?
Before Geno could make sense of any of it, he heard Twiggy cry out, and then she dropped to the ground.
"Nngh?!"
Twiggy had seen the female ghost in front of her too, but before she could react, a heat spread through her hand, followed by a wave of total weakness - and she collapsed where she stood.
____
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