It was then that a clatter of heavy footsteps came from the mouth of the alley, along with shouts edged with tension.
"People up front! Stay calm! Don't push! We're police!"
"Move aside! Move aside! What happened here? Is anyone hurt?"
Several out-of-breath officers forced their way through the agitated crowd and charged in.
The next second they froze as if pinned by a spell, every one of them rooted where he stood, mouths hanging open, eyes under their helmets bulging until they nearly left their sockets.
"That... that's..."
One young officer's voice came out dry, barely able to finish a sentence.
"Ultraman...?"
An older officer muttered it, blinking hard, glancing around on reflex, wondering whether he had wandered onto some large film set - or worse, into an area leaking some hallucinogenic gas.
But the wrecked buildings and the raw, unfeigned emotion on every face argued against both guesses.
"It really is... Ultraseven?"
Another wave of people shoved their way in.
It was the television crew, racing over after Sato's incoherent but information-packed phone call.
The reporter still had a microphone clenched in one hand, the cameraman a heavier professional rig on his shoulder. They looked up, and the surreal sight in front of them struck them just as hard.
Still, unlike the police, who knew nothing, their professional instincts overrode the shock within a heartbeat. The cameraman had already pushed his lens in, capturing every detail of the giant.
Ultraseven slowly lowered his head, and it was plain to see: the beam lamp on his forehead had begun flashing violently, bright and dim, bright and dim.
He gave a nod to the people ringing the alley, and the glow across his body began to draw inward. That powerful frame turned gradually transparent, and under countless watching eyes he broke apart into a swarm of drifting golden motes, scattering into the cool night wind without leaving a trace.
In the alley the cheering died down. After a brief silence, the crowd erupted into an even wilder clamor.
"Ultraseven! Ultraseven!"
"Mr. Dan!"
Someone started it - nobody could say who - and the crowd surged past the police lines, pouring into the ruined heart of what had been the Saeki house.
Ultraseven had cancelled his transformation right here, so it was obvious! Ultraseven's human host, or the human shape he disguised himself as, had to be somewhere in this rubble!
Carrying that thought, people scrambled into the ruins of the Saeki house, flashlight and phone beams sweeping wildly across the wreckage.
But once inside, they found no sign of Dan Moroboshi. What they found instead were two women lying tangled together.
That was Psychic Tomie's work. She had used the gap while Amamiya Rin and Kayako were locked together to ambush Ago and kill her outright, riding the backwash of the Cluster Beam to annihilate Ago's soul - a soul that should have been overwhelmingly strong, but had already burned away most of its spiritual power in the fight.
She had no interest in letting another knockoff of herself run around. So Ago had to die.
"There's someone here!"
"Two women!"
"They were on the scene earlier! Is it them?"
"Does Ultraman have female hosts? Seven's a guy, right?"
Heads bent together, faces full of confusion.
"It's Miss Ago! And Miss Azuki!"
The television people had already recognized the pair on the ground as Ago and Azuki of the comedy duo Huánghun Jinshí.
"Those stand-up comedians?"
"No way. Ultraseven turned into a comedy act this time? Nothing about that fits!"
The crowd traded looks, more baffled than before.
Even if Ultraseven didn't have to take a male form, surely he wouldn't pick a pair of comedians?
Then again, nobody could rule it out entirely.
The police shouldered their way into the center, trying to take control, secure the scene, and call for medical support.
Nobody noticed that, earlier, while every eye was fixed on that final blaze of glory, one unremarkable figure had slipped away from the noise under cover of the rubble's shadows and the dark.
A few hundred meters off, the secondhand jeep sat quietly under a roadside tree. Amamiya Rin lay slumped in the driver's seat like a puppet about to come apart at the joints, eyes open only a slit, his heavy head nodding down again and again.
Tired. So tired.
He might take Ultraseven's form, but he wasn't Ultraseven. Every expenditure of energy, movement included, came out of his own soul - the soul manifested by Nature-Light.
To wipe Kayako out for good, that last Cluster Beam had fired away nearly all the strength his soul had.
"Don't get a sweet deal and then whine about it. You've got the power of an Ultra Warrior. So what if you're a little tired, if it costs a little more?"
The door swung open from outside and a lithe figure vaulted in, dropping into the passenger seat.
The door slammed. Amamiya Rin turned his head.
In the passenger seat sat Kawakami Tomie - more precisely, Flesh-Mod Tomie, in a sports tank top and shorts, sprawled comfortably, forehead damp with sweat, breathing as steady as ever.
"What are you doing here?"
"Night run. Wasn't paying attention and ended up over this way."
She shook out her hair and shot a glance toward the ruins in the distance, still loud with noise.
Then Tomie turned sideways and looked him over, up and down, making no attempt to hide it, her eyes mixing appraisal with irritation.
"Tch. You know what, I think you're playing this a little dirty. Pulling out that kind of power all at once..."
Her hand shot out, callused fingers pinching his cheek without asking permission, kneading hard as she grumbled.
"The whole power scale's broken now, isn't it? I trained that hard for that long, and you leapfrog me in a single night!"
"It's not that dramatic. The Ultraseven I transform into isn't even [Light]'s complete form," Amamiya Rin said, letting her squeeze, his voice a little muffled.
"So far I've successfully created the strange tale of [Ultraseven], but a strange tale like that is, at its core, the manifestation of an Ikiryo. It looks overwhelming because my conviction is strong enough and because the [strange tale] handed me Seven's skill list. In practice it's just extreme effectiveness against bodiless vengeful spirits and curses. Against the physical world, forget comparing it to Ultraman - it doesn't even match the physical qualities a human being of that height ought to have."
An Ikiryo was, in the end, only an Ikiryo, and a [strange tale] only a [strange tale] - unless he could complete the third part of what [Light] envisioned: carrying the concept of light that existed on a cosmic scale.
Short of that, even if all of humanity believed an Ultraseven existed in this world, the Ultraseven he became would never match a real Ultraman in raw power within the material world.
____
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