"The third component... right, I remember what you laid out before. [Light] has three parts. The first is your Nature-Light. The second is the light of hope in people's hearts. The third is the one set down by that so-called creator god of ours - the light capable of standing against the darkness."
Picking up on Amamiya Rin's thoughts, Tomie had the whole picture now. [Remember this site's domain - Tiantian Novels, the cure for boredom, ttks.tw, silky smooth reading]
For a mere strange tale, Nature-Light plus the light of hope - meaning Amamiya Rin's Ikiryo and obsession, plus the force of people's belief - was already enough to forge a strange tale by the name of [Ultraseven].
But an Ikiryo was still an Ikiryo. Set against flesh and blood, it carried an inborn deficiency in sheer mass. For something born from the union of belief and soul, matching the performance seen in a tokusatsu series was already an impressive feat.
Manifesting the kind of power written into the setting was another matter entirely. Even people who genuinely believed Ultraseven existed would struggle to picture how much raw force a forty-meter, thirty-five-thousand-ton Ultra Warrior would bring to bear in a fight. Reshoot the whole of Ultraseven, crank up his on-screen presence, and staring at a television screen would still fail to make it feel real.
Put simply: when the opponents were vengeful spirits and curses, Amamiya Rin could use the strange tale of [Ultraseven] to convert his own formless Nature-Light and willpower into a concrete, usable force.
But if the target was Hellstar Remina, that was a mantis raising its arms against a chariot.
Which made the third component of [Light] indispensable.
Only by folding a cosmic-scale concept of light into [Ultraseven] would [Ultraseven] stand any chance against Hellstar Remina.
"That said, isn't the concept a little too abstract? What exactly are you supposed to do?"
Tomie frowned. Whatever the subject, once it scaled up to the level of the universe, working out the specifics became nearly impossible.
"Mm... Hyper-Perception? Use Hyper-Perception to sense the light of hope out in the cosmos?"
Amamiya Rin shut his eyes, mulled it over for a moment, then said it in a tone that admitted its own uncertainty.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean? Be specific!" Tomie ordered, out of patience.
"Hyper-Perception is exactly what it sounds like - superhuman sensory ability, wide enough to take in the entire universe. The nerve cells leave the body and spread out into space... It's my own hypothesis, sure, but in that manga where the concepts [God], [the darkness that rules the universe] and [the light that opposes the darkness] all appear, there's a character who senses the whole universe, to the point that her physical body breaks down into a special spirit form."
Amamiya Rin fished his notebook out from under the driver's seat, flipped through a few pages, and found the rough plot summaries he had jotted down earlier.
"Right - it wasn't the whole universe she sensed, it was the heroine of that manga. And that heroine was chosen by God, crossed back through time several centuries, carried a cross up a hill alongside a man who seemed to be Jesus, and after her death became the concept of light within the universe."
"God? You mean that horror mangaka, Junji Ito? Why not just go find him?" Tomie said, floating the idea.
Why couldn't they go straight to Junji Ito and have him draw a side story for Ultraseven - a plot where Amamiya Rin meets Ultraseven and becomes his human host?
"Leaving aside whether he's an avatar of the creator god at all - even if he is, the heroine he chose is still nowhere near defeating the darkness. Counting on him to create a real Ultraman..."
Amamiya Rin turned his head toward Tomie, his gaze sliding over those sculpted lines of muscle, and let out a sigh.
Flesh-Mod Tomie's face darkened on the spot. Her hands clamped around Amamiya Rin's neck and yanked him hard against her.
Amamiya Rin's face slammed into Flesh-Mod Tomie's chest... which, honestly, was a bit hard, and a bit painful. She had compressed it too far.
"Are you trying to say I trained all my muscle straight into my brain?" Tomie asked, her tone genuinely dangerous, the strength in her arms climbing by degrees.
(No! Right now I'm thinking about Kayako!)
No sound would come out of Amamiya Rin's mouth, so he sent his inner voice through the [Tomie Network] without hesitation.
"Ha? Kayako? Don't tell me you regret turning into Ultraseven and wiping her out - that you want to dissolve her grudge instead," Tomie asked with a cold laugh.
Back at the Saeki house, Amamiya Rin had entertained the thought of reaching her heart to heart and unraveling Kayako's resentment, and Kayako had genuinely wavered in that moment - which was precisely why her final question had come out so thick with grief and fury.
(No. I don't regret what I've done. A clean, decisive death was its own kind of release for Kayako. Delivering her soul would have been a good deed, but I won't force it.)
Amamiya Rin's attitude was perfectly level.
The instant he chose to let his Ikiryo transform into Ultraseven, dissolving Kayako's resentment had dropped out of his list of options.
Vanishing while clutching hatred and rage and refusal - that too could serve as punishment for the evil Kayako had done.
What Amamiya Rin was actually weighing now was a different question: was it really over?
Had Kayako truly been killed? Was she dead all the way through?
Once you act, you finish it. You leave nothing behind to come back at you - least of all with a curse like Ju-on, which carried the potential to end the world.
But could a Kayako who could interfere with spacetime ever be killed thoroughly enough to leave no margin?
It worried him, especially when he remembered that moment in the fight when Kayako's power had swelled and surged.
He suspected that during that stretch of time she had been off killing somewhere - in some segment of the past, or the future.
"Tch! Why obsess over it? If Kayako really isn't dead all the way, you just wipe her out again when she shows up. Or are you planning to shoulder the blood she spills afterward too, just because you didn't finish the job?"
The force in Flesh-Mod Tomie's arms eased. She gathered Amamiya Rin against her chest, rolled her eyes, and said it with open irritation.
"Instead of fussing over trivia like that, you'd be better off thinking about consumption. [Ultraseven]'s output is lower than Tsuburaya's setting, sure, but the drain on you isn't lower at all. This time it was Kayako - she held a grudge against you personally, which is the only reason you could keep her talking long enough to charge up a one-hit kill. Run into another cursed spirit that can manipulate time, and can your energy really last?"
She had looked through Amamiya Rin's memories too. Japan's three famous ghost queens - Kayako, Sadako, Mimiko - every one of them possessed the ability to interfere with spacetime.
Kayako could produce spacetime dislocation. Sadako could reach out of the past and touch the present. Mimiko could generate a time loop.
Power over time. The market was practically flooded with it.
____
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