Chapter Three: No One Lives Forever
1.
First year student Saotome Masami first fell in love when he was fifteen. Until that point, he had never opened his heart to anyone and simply remained a “nice guy” to the people around him. Needless to say, this was a major turning point in his life.
***
“Saotome-kun, you free Sunday?” asked his classmate Kusatsu Akiko, shortly after the start of the second term as they were performing their after-school cleaning duties.
“No plans to speak of.”
“See, Sachiko has some free movie tickets, and she said we should all go together.” Akiko had dark skin and high cheekbones. She looked at Masami, waiting for an answer.
“We?” Masami asked, leaning on his broom. This lowered his face to her line of sight. He was tall, with a face that had just enough charm to get him compared to pop idols. But it was always a different person every time, never fixing on one resemblance.
“You know Sakamoto-kun from class F? He made a pass at Sachiko and got the tickets, but she’s a little nervous about going it alone.”
“So, you need a discipline committee member as an escort? I know Sakamoto pretty well, and I don’t want to be a drag.”
“Oh, you don’t need to—well, maybe you do,” Kusatsu Akiko said, smiling weakly at him. She was pretty forthright with everyone else but Masami, but she couldn’t contradict him directly, because she was in love. Masami was well aware of this, and privately, he was annoyed by it. Until now.
But today, he simply smiled back at her, instead.
“But if you just want me to tag along, fine. Not like I’ve got anything better to do. If we run into the guidance teacher on patrol, I can probably talk us out of trouble.”
Kusatsu Akiko’s face brightened. “Really? Well, the truth is, Sachiko’s secretly pleased that Sakamoto-kun asked her, so I don’t think you’ll need to intervene.”
“Whatever.”
They both laughed.
You could never call Kusatsu Akiko a good-looking girl, but when she smiled next to the far more evenly-featured Masami, she gleamed like a still image from a soap opera.
***
When the four of them met at the station, they appeared to be a very close-knit group. They ran into Masami’s senpai on the discipline committee, Takeda Keiji, and he took one look at them and asked if they were “double dating.” There was clearly a hint of romance in the air.
The movie was a big Hollywood action movie, part three in a series, neither harming anyone nor doing anyone any good. The only part that Masami enjoyed was a bit where a minor villain was shot in the chest and knocked over backwards. His arms were flung out to the sides, and he slid backwards like a figure skater. In Masami’s eyes, he looked light and free.
They left the theater, and a passing group of teenagers glared at them murderously. Walking quickly, faces grim, they all carried bags with large square lumps inside.
“Cram school?” asked Noguchi Sachiko, this evening’s instigator. “I hope we never end up like that.”
“Yeah,” Kusatsu Akiko nodded. Masami remembered her letting it slip that she couldn’t go to college, because her father’s company was about to go bankrupt.
“That’s a long time from now. We ought to enjoy ourselves while we can,” Sakamoto Jun said, trying to distract Noguchi Sachiko.
“Yeah, just forget about it. Just live your life. Not like you can live forever,” Masami said breezily.
“Oh look, it’s Yurihara from our school,” Noguchi Sachiko said, pointing.
Yurihara Minako, second year, class D. She was one of the best students in the school and legend had it that she consistently beat out the best students at other cram schools on their practice tests. But she didn’t look at all like the brainy type. Heck, she didn’t even wear glasses. Instead, she had long straight hair with the kind of shine that no amount of treatment could ever give. It matched her slender face, giving the impression of a Heian era princess.
Yurihara Minako passed by them as they whispered, walking at a slower pace than the other students, and vanished into the cram school.
“She’s so relaxed. You can just see the aura of her genius.”
“You know she was scouted by some prep schools, right?” Sakamoto said with a knowledgeable expression.
“Really? They can do that?”
From the fuss that they made, you would never have thought that they were talking about a senpai.
All the while, Masami remained quiet, smiling to himself. He didn’t even glance at Yurihara Minako.
They had promised not to let their eyes meet in public.
“Anyone up for karaoke? There’s a place near here with a great track list,” Kusatsu Akiko said brightly. She was in a good mood, now that she was out with her beloved Masami.
In the karaoke box, Masami sang easy pop songs, ones that had been all the rage up until recently, but had passed their peak, and everyone was starting to get sick of them now. He almost always sang that sort of song at karaoke. He preferred an American band called The Doors, which had broken up ages ago (long before he was even born) when the lead singer died of a drug overdose. But he never told anybody. The Doors weren’t in a lot of karaoke machines, but he never sang them even if they were.
He had a good voice, but since everyone was a little tired of his selections, they never really seemed all that interested.
He always applauded other people’s performances, never forgetting to keep up appearances. He never stuck out, was occasionally a little scorned, but he never made anyone jealous, and no one ever realized that he was keeping them at a distance.
He bought drinks for everybody. He took them directly from the tray when the waiter brought them and even passed them around himself.
He put Kusatsu Akiko’s drink in her hands. Nobody saw him drop a small tablet, about five millimeters across, into her cup before he handed it over. Yurihara Minako had “synthesized” the tablet, and as promised, it quickly dissolved into the diet cola. Kusatsu Akiko never noticed a thing.
2.
The first girl that Saotome Masami fell in love with was a second year student, Kirima Nagi. He told her this in May. She rejected him quite harshly.
“Sorry, but I don’t have the time,” was all she said.
“Is… is it because I’m younger?”
“No, not really… You’re normal, right? Me? I’m nothing but trouble. Thanks, but sorry.”
“O-okay.” He was far less hurt by this than he’d expected. Quite the opposite; he found himself rather relieved to be brushed off coldly.
It was two months before he identified the source of those feelings.
***
“Hey, Saotome, you take Kusatsu home. I’ll take care of Noguchi,” Sakamoto whispered in Masami’s ear as their time in the karaoke box ran low.
“Sure. Good luck,” Masami whispered back.
As the four of them left the shop, Kusatsu Akiko suddenly proclaimed, “I…I don’t feel so good.” Her face was white as a sheet.
“That’s too bad. I’d better take you home,” Masami said, putting his arm around her shoulders.
“Uh, hang on! Saotome-kun!” Noguchi Sachiko cried, all flustered. She was about to be left alone with Sakamoto.
“You two have fun. Don’t worry, I’ll look after her.”
“Er, but…”
“You heard the man. Let him go,” Sakamoto said, cajoling. As the men had planned, they split off into two pairs. Noguchi Sachiko was steamrolled under Sakamoto’s promises that he wouldn’t “try anything.”
Afterwards, he did get her to a hotel, where they had relations, but Noguchi Sachiko’s parents found out and her old-fashioned father stormed the school, tracked Sakamoto down, and cursed him out in front of everyone. But in all the fuss, the two of them never had a moment to notice the events that followed. They had completely forgotten they were ever with Saotome Masami that night.
“Bye!”
“Yeah,” Masami replied, as the four became two.
“I feel sick…” Kusatsu Akiko’s voice grew gradually weaker in Masami’s arms.
Masami never spoke a word. He simply hauled her along as if she were a piece of luggage. The silence was deafening.
Kusatsu Akiko was in no condition to be insulted. Her face was well beyond pale; you could see the blood vessels under her skin.
Not caring, Masami dragged her into the backroads. All they did was leave the lights and noise of the main drag for a narrow back road, but it was as silent as a graveyard, seemingly light years from the bustle of the city.
Before them was a giant parking garage that had failed in its bid to reopen and had thus been abandoned. The land was intended to become an office building, but the owner had been unable to find any clients, and had had no other choice but to make it into a parking garage. As luck would have it, the owner had then gone bankrupt, and it was now just another of the country’s forgotten bad debts.
Masami slipped between the railings of the surrounding fence, holding Akiko under his arm. She said nothing. She had already stopped breathing.
He dragged her up to the seventh floor of the parking lot. This far up, there was no chance of them being disturbed by thrill seekers.
Leaving Kusatsu Akiko on the ground, Masami stuck his face outside. It was pitch black all around them. Even if a normal human on the ground had been looking upwards, they could never have seen him.
He looked at his watch. It was a digital watch with a backlit screen. Unlike radial watches, it had the advantage of not making a sound.
The time confirmed, he nodded to himself.
Staring into the blackness below him, he waved his hands.
There was a small noise from far below him, like someone pushing a tack into a board.
Within an instant, a human shape appeared in the air in front of Masami.
It was a girl.
The shape slid past Masami, entering the parking lot. It landed right at the top of its arc; there was no sound as its feet touched the floor.
The girl had jumped all the way to the seventh floor.
She turned towards Masami. She had long, bountiful black hair plastered to her head and a cram school bag in her hand.
It was Yurihara Minako.
“Were you successful?” she asked.
Masami nodded. “Over there,” he said, pointing to Kusatsu Akiko’s corpse, which lay on its side, no longer moving.
“That one? The other girl was better,” Yurihara said, frowning. Agitation could not be farther from her mind.
“Not really. This girl has friends all over. Lots of friends from Junior High,” Masami replied, voice devoid of warmth.
“Does she? Then fine. You know more than I do, Saotome-kun.” Yurihara handed her bag to Masami. He took it like an obedient little hotel bellboy whose only job was to serve.
Yurihara stooped down in front of Kusatsu Akiko.
“Mmm… Seems like a waste not to eat her now,” she said, her beautiful face contorting.
“Yeah, but if we use her, you’ll be able to assimilate four or five more in no time,” Masami chuckled. “For now, we wait, Manticore.”
“Human society makes it hard to move.” Yurihara the Manticore said, sighing. She lowered her face next to Kusatsu Akiko’s.
Her long hair started to get in the way, so she held it back with her fingers, and kissed the corpse tenderly.
Her tongue pried the body’s mouth open, forcing a gaseous form of the essence manufactured inside her body into Kusatsu Akiko.
Watching this monstrous, sinister spectacle unfolding in the darkness, Masami was entranced. As if he felt sexual pleasure, his face was even more ecstatic than at the moment of ejaculation.
For thirty long seconds, Yurihara kept her lips pressed to the corpse’s.
Finally, she pulled away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips were bright red, but not from lipstick—the color did not rub off on her hands.
The color of her skin was so sleek she appeared to be wearing makeup, but this was also her natural state. When she had copied the real Yurihara Minako, she had copied the makeup as well.
“She should be revitalized momentarily,” Yurihara said, with a satisfied smile.
“Hmm…” Masami said doubtfully. To make sure, he kicked the corpse lightly. Its fingers twitched. “Good.”
Bit by bit, the entire body began shaking violently, as if it were lying on top of a high voltage electric fence.
Then the torso shot upwards, as if on a spring.
The eyes and mouth popped open, and a blue liquid, neither tears nor saliva, came pouring out of them.
“Woah! Can’t let that touch me,” Masami said, backing away from the sweet scent wafting off of the volatile liquid.
“Yes. For humans, it will work like a drug. It would not do for you to become addicted as well, Saotome-kun.” Yurihara placed herself between Masami and Kusatsu Akiko. “Look here, woman,” she ordered.
The no longer dead Kusatsu Akiko did as she was told, slowly rolling her head towards Yurihara. The flow of liquid had stopped.
“I have given you power. Power to corrupt humans. Use this power to supply me with more humans.”
In normal society, Yurihara’s words were unthinkable, but the previously dead girl nodded.
“Corrupt them well. When they suddenly vanish, we want the humans around them to assume that this was the logical next stage of their recent poor behavior. Including yourself.”
Behind her, Masami nodded proudly, like a parent whose son had just correctly answered a question on visitor’s day.
Yurihara whispered, “You have no memories of what happened here. You went bad of your own free will…”
3.
Five minutes later, Masami was walking along the street, once again supporting Kusatsu Akiko.
“Mm…mm?” Her fainting spell ended, and her eyes opened. “Wh-where are we?”
“Ah, good. You’re awake,” Masami said, stepping away from her.
“Eh? I was asleep? Oh no! Why didn’t you wake me?” Kusatsu Akiko asked, quite flustered.
“I shook you several times.”
“Oh no! I’m sorry! I wonder what…uhhh…” She tried to figure out the last thing she remembered, but she couldn’t remember a thing. Obviously, it never occurred to her that she had died and was now merely functioning as a puppet, thanks to the stimulus of the drug.
“You’re pretty heavy, you know that? It was hard work carrying you,” Masami said sternly.
Kusatsu Akiko turned bright red, but for some reason, she wasn’t that hurt by his words.
They parted ways in front of the station.
“See you at school tomorrow.”
“Yeah…don’t tell anyone about tonight. Especially…” she started to say a name, but trailed off.
She felt like there was a boy who she really didn’t want to see her in an embarrassing moment like this, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember his name or what he looked like.
“Especially who?” Masami asked, with a knowing smile.
“Mm… Never mind,” Kusatsu Akiko’s love had vanished with her memories.
“I had fun today,” Masami said kindly.
But she simply replied, “Oh?” as if she didn’t care at all, and turned her back.
She felt like there was a big, gaping hole in her heart, but she had no way of telling that her will and spirit were swiftly vanishing.
Masami paused to watch Kusatsu Akiko venture into the station, then swiftly turned on his heel and walked back into the city.
Yurihara was waiting at the Tristan coffee shop. She was seated in a booth towards the back.
“It went well?” she asked. She was wearing glasses and had her hair in a sauvage style. Masami knew that Yurihara could control her hair at will, but these quick hairstyle changes always took a moment to get used to.
“Yeah, her emotions are already fading,” Masami replied. He sat down and ordered lemon tea and marron cake to soothe his sweet tooth. “Without knowing what she’s doing, she’ll make all of her friends try a drug that even she doesn’t remember getting. Like a sleepwalker in the night, she’ll regurgitate the fluid made by the cells in her body. She won’t even try to figure out where it comes from. Her brain is shrinking, and she can’t be bothered to make decisions on her own.”
They looked at each other and giggled.
From the side, they looked like any peaceful, harmless young couple. But Saotome had already sacrificed the lives of three girls to Yurihara—the monstrous man-eater known as the Manticore.
They had met two months before, just before summer vacation.
Masami was a member of the tea ceremony club, largely because it never did anything. He had heard that it was a good idea to have been a member of a club in high school when it came time to apply for universities or jobs. Yurihara Minako was a member, as well. Much like Masami, she hardly ever bothered to show up for the club’s infrequent meetings.
One day, it suddenly started to rain in the evening, despite blue skies all afternoon. The whims of summer. Masami had not planned to go to the club meeting, but since he had no umbrella, he thought he might as well kill some time in the tea room. He turned around at the shoe boxes at the entrance to school and went back inside.
The tea ceremony club didn’t have a room of their own; they simply borrowed a room that was usually used for student guidance, as it was the only Japanese style room in the school. The faculty sponsor was the assistant principal, Komiya, and he was much too busy to ever show his face at meetings.
That day, the room was deathly silent and there was no sign of any other students.
Next to the door was the tea ceremony club attendance book. If your name was written in this, it appeared that you had attended the meeting. Even if you rarely came, as long as your name showed up in the book, you were treated like an active member and could stay on the rosters.
Masami opened the book, and was about to write the date and his name, when he realized there was already an entry for that date. Someone else was already here.
Yurihara Minako.
“……?”
Even if she had gone to the bathroom, it was strange that she hadn’t left her bag. Before now, Masami had never even had the slightest interest in Yurihara Minako. She had a reputation for brains and beauty, but had never mattered to him in the slightest. And, like many a man before him, he had always been baffled by the idea of beauty.
He had already lost his virginity in Junior High to a girl with a face covered in zits, who was widely reputed as being rather ugly. Their relationship was kept secret, but less because he was embarrassed and more because he just didn’t want to listen to everyone else’s shocked commentaries on the subject. He didn’t think anything at all about dating an ugly girl. In fact, after she started dating him, her pimples vanished and actually she became quite pretty. She soon left him for another boyfriend. But Masami wasn’t particularly upset. He had never actually loved her to begin with; he simply used her to relieve his sexual appetites. Instead, she ended up crying and apologizing, even though it had been her idea to break up in the first place.
Masami no longer remembered that girl’s name and he couldn’t remember Yurihara Minako’s face all that clearly, either. He knew she was supposed to be good looking and that she had good grades, but that was about it.
“Senpai, you here?” he asked, taking off his slippers and stepping onto the tatami in his socks.
He opened the shoji leading into the inner room. It was less of a room than a storage area for tables and cushions.
The moment he opened it, his eyebrows leapt upwards.
In the storage area, Yurihara Minako was upside-down against a pile of cushions, face twisted around so that it faced the same direction as her torso. Her head was on backwards. Her neck was broken with her spine clearly severed. Her eyes were open and empty.
She wasn’t moving…at all.
She was dead.
The first thought that flashed through Masami’s mind was relief that he had not written his name in the attendance book. He didn’t want to get mixed up in something like this.
He took a step backwards.
This saved his life.
A hand with razor-sharp claws passed through the air just in front of his face.
Some hidden killer had attacked him.
(What—?!)
He looked up.
There was a naked girl clinging to the ceiling, hands and feet thrust in the cracks between the wood paneling. He thought it was a woman, but only assumed this because he couldn’t see any male genitalia between its legs. Later, he was to learn that there was no genitalia there at all.
The girl grinned. “You saw me,” she whispered. “Now that you have seen me, I cannot allow you to live,” she continued as if she were sharing a joke. If there had not already been a corpse lying beneath her, he would not have taken her seriously.
Masami was stunned. He simply stared blankly up at her, immobile.
If he had been a girl, he would have heard the legends. He would have thought, It’s Boogiepop!
She moved like the wind. She kicked Masami in the chest, sending him flying into the opposite wall before he knew what had happened.
“—Gah!” He yelled as his back slammed into the wall. He moaned in pain, “Unh…” and was about to pass out, but he knew deep down that he couldn’t let himself succumb to his body’s frailties.
She laughed softly as she approached. There were traces of mud and leaves on her body. The mountains behind the school ran deep. She had probably ventured through them and come out at the school.
She looked like a majestic wild animal; she had a strange beauty about her—a strange fearlessness he had never seen anywhere else, an established aloofness found only in things that were beyond human understanding.
Masami simply stared up at her.
“Nice timing. I had just thought that it would be better to copy a male than a female. I shall take your shape,” she said, reaching out towards Masami.
As if freed from possession, he blinked and said, “Wha-what?” He frowned, “C-copy?”
“Yes. I shall become you and blend into human society. No one will ever be able to find me.”
“Hunh.” His face scrunched up—but not because he felt despair at the sight of his approaching demise. No; the next thing he said was, “In that case, it would be far more effective to keep me alive.” He sounded a little put out by this.
The girl frowned. “Why…?”
“Oh, it’s just that you’ll just have a much easier time as a stuck up teacher’s pet with no friends at all, like our little Yurihara Minako here. If you try to take my place, people will notice the difference. I’ve strived to maintain at least mid-level popularity here. People know me.”
He sounded deeply disappointed by this—because he was.
He wanted to be killed by something much more powerful than him. Even with Kirima Nagi, he had not really wanted to date her; he had wanted her to kill him.
Such was his nature. And for the first time, he understood this truth about himself clearly.
He didn’t know why exactly. There was obviously nothing out of the ordinary happening at home and he had no childhood trauma to contend with, like Suema Kazuko had almost encountered. But there it was, clear as day.
A deep search for something kind of reason, would have revealed it as a reaction against his life style—a way for him to fight against his deliberate pretense of mundanity. But that was far too shallow a reason to satisfy a psychiatrist. People like Masami, who had a fetish for indirect suicide, were not particularly unusual.
“……?” The naked killer looked down at him, baffled. Until now, everyone who had ever seen her had felt nothing but hatred and fear—but this boy showed no signs of either. “Why are you so quiet? You do not struggle…you do not beg?” she found herself asking.
“That’s because I love you,” Masami answered, honestly and quite sincerely.
“Hunh?” For the first time in her life, the girl was dumbfounded.
***
“You were right, Saotome-kun. Yurihara Minako’s form fits my needs well. Nobody thinks it strange if I don’t talk to them in class. She was always like that, apparently,” the Manticore said, in the dimly lit coffee shop. Her face so perfectly matched Yurihara’s that for all intents and purposes she was Yurihara Minako, as the former owner of that name had long since been erased from the face of the earth.
“I thought so.”
“The classes at school resemble some sort of game, but this studying for exams is utterly pointless. I just have to read the explanation and I can understand anything.”
“You’re much smarter than most of us humans, then.”
“Even Yurihara Minako’s parents haven’t noticed the difference. They communicate with her so cautiously. Are all humans like that?”
“Mostly. But be careful. There are a few egoists who think other people are a part of themselves. My parents, for example.”
“Shall I kill them for you?” Yurihara suggested airily.
“Not yet. It’s still too early,” Masami replied just as evenly.
“True. We must be cautious until we control the world,” she giggled.
“Exactly,” Masami grinned back.
At this point, the waitress brought the lemon tea and cake Masami had ordered. She overheard them talking about “controlling the world,” but just assumed that they were talking about some sort of new video game.
She did, however, think that the couple was far too horny, and that they should get a room before they started making out right there in the restaurant.
They can’t even be out of high school yet, but they’re acting like newlyweds. They’re all over each other! she thought. She was still reeling from a harsh break up, so she slapped the bill on the table a bit roughly and left.
Masami carried on, “Should we make ourselves any new slaves beyond Kusatsu Akiko?”
“Yes—if possible, I’d like two or three more. Too many, and we might get noticed, though… But at some point, we’ll need them on a larger scale. Better to test the process out now.”
Their plan was simple: remake human society with themselves at the center. Yurihara certainly had the power to make that a reality. She could become any human she wanted and could make any human do her bidding.
The idea was Masami’s. He offered to cooperate with her, but when she told him of her powers, he found himself rubbing his hands together with glee.
“We can use that,” he said eagerly.
When she heard his plan, it sounded quite reasonable, so she agreed. All she’d thought about before now was her own survival. She’d never actually thought about the rest of the world. And more importantly, she had always been alone. She’d been cloned as an “experiment” and had no family of her own. The only person who had ever told her “I love you” was Saotome Masami, whom normal society would classify as a crazed lunatic.
“But there must be agents from the ‘institution’ pursuing me. What should we do about them?”
“At the moment, all we can do is hope that they don’t find you. Give it a little more time, and we’ll be able to fight back.”
“And demolish anyone who wishes to ‘erase’ me as a ‘failure’?”
“Exactly! You’re no failure. You’re going to be the new ruler of the world,” Masami said forcefully.
Yurihara rested her hand on top of his. “Saotome-kun, you are my prince.” The man-eating monster stroked the hand of her Mephistopheles, while sweetly whispering, “I love you.”
It may have been twisted, but they were unmistakably in love.
4.
As they had planned, Kusatsu Akiko gradually began to come to school less and less often. Her family was falling apart, and was behind on her tuition payments, so nobody thought this at all unnatural.
She got her friends hooked, and Yurihara and Masami took them. The first one they nabbed was Suzumiya Takako, second year, class F.
It was easy to take her. She and her friends always gathered in seclusion, and all that Yurihara and Masami had to do was follow them as they left and simply take them down.
Unfortunately, they were unable to alter them in the way that they had Kusatsu Akiko. They died, but they did not return.
“It seems it requires a very delicate balance.”
“Good thing we decided to experiment first,” they said, whispering in the darkness.
They had been killing high school girls from Shinyo Academy and other local schools, one after another. To cover this up, they laid down a few red herrings to throw off the authorities.
Once the precedent had been established, the rest of their work went smoothly. There were no signs of fuss at school. At Shinyo Academy, there had been a special meeting and a resulting morning lecture, but that was all. Missing person reports had probably been filed with the police, but they were buried in a mountain of missing girls totally unrelated to them at all, and swiftly forgotten about.
“The students that ran away were all slackers to begin with,” the guidance teacher told Saotome at the discipline committee meeting.
This generalization was so insensitive to the students’ individual circumstances that the committee president, Niitoki Kei, stiffened her tiny body and turned her cute, childish face downwards to hide her steaming glare.
But Masami was taking minutes, so he wrote the gist of the comment down in his notebook. “Disturbance in behavior precedes disappearance.” As he wrote these words, he was expressionless.
He never let even a faint smile steal across his lips.
Everything was going exactly according to plan.
Still, he was left expressionless. Nothing the teachers said and nothing happening around him could change this. He had killed five people without so much as remorse, and here he was, still acting like an ordinary student.
But when the teacher stated that, “Incidentally, the infamous Kirima Nagi failed to arrive this morning. Make sure to keep an eye on her, hear? No telling what that girl’s plotting in the shadows,” Masami’s cold heart skipped a beat. He didn’t show it, but even now that he had the Manticore, hers was one of the few names that could affect him.
***
Kusatsu Akiko’s behavior became strange a month after she had been altered.
Even when she came to school, she seemed particularly out of it.
When people spoke to her, she barely seemed to notice, much less reply.
(…Uh-oh.)
Masami figured that Kusatsu Akiko had begun to break down much faster than expected.
They couldn’t leave her like this. She was clearly evidence. If she collapsed somewhere and was taken to a hospital, they would surely discover her condition, and the “institution” that made the Manticore would soon find out.
So Yurihara was forced to eat Kusatsu Akiko, and the first stage of their experiment ended. Unfortunately, they had still not managed to recruit a second subject with any real success, and it was putting considerable strain on both Masami and Yurihara’s relationship.
“Damn it! Why doesn’t it work?!” Yurihara yelled, growing ever more high strung.
“It’s nothing to worry about. We will have many more opportunities.”
“I know that, but…” Yurihara said, and then looked up at Masami. “I’m sorry. I’ll get it right next time.”
“We should wait a while,” Masami replied calmly.
“Why? I can do it now!” Yurihara said almost shrieking, her voice clearly echoing through the empty parking garage.
“That’s not the problem. We’re reaching the limit of what we can do in the school. We have to look for more prey elsewhere. But we need to prepare. Not only for more experiments, but for your food supply as well. We’ve taken care of both of them at the same time so far, but you need other forms of nourishment, don’t you?” he said gently, his tone showing a marked contrast to the horrific meaning behind his words. He rested his hand on her shoulder.
“All right, we shall do as you say.” Yurihara nodded obediently.
***
The day after Kusatsu Akiko vanished, Masami got involved in something a little out of the ordinary.
During break, he was on his way back from returning a slide ruler he’d borrowed from the teacher’s room, when a female teacher came flying around the corner, extremely flustered.
“Y-you! You’re on the discipline committee, aren’t you?!” she asked, her face brightening the moment she saw Masami.
“Yes, Saotome, 1-D,” Masami replied.
“Thank god you’re here! Please keep watch! Don’t let her get away!” she shouted, and continued on down the hall.
“……?” Masami looked puzzled, and walked in the direction that she had come from. It was the staff bathroom.
Since it had been a female teacher, he poked his head through the door. He had no particular enthusiasm for ladies restrooms, but he didn’t hesitate at all in his actions. He simply walked straight inside.
But once inside, he was badly shocked.
“Oh, it’s you, Saotome-kun,” said Kirima Nagi, in the flesh, standing smack dab in the middle of the white room, nodding at him.
“S-senpai, what’s going…?” He didn’t need to finish. The moment he asked, he noticed the unlit cigarette in her hand. “That’s…!”
“Yeah, well, you know how it is,” she said, making no effort to hide it.
“They caught you, didn’t they? But why? And in a place like this?”
“Whatever,” Nagi gave him a half grin. It made quite an impact. It was this sort of impression that had made him fall in love with her in the first place.
“Senpai, um…” he tried to talk further.
She cut him off. “Sorry again about that other thing. I still think it’s better for you this way.”
“Oh, no, that’s…”
“Oh, hey, you were 1-D, weren’t you?”
“Yeah…”
“Were you friends with Kusatsu Akiko?”
Masami thought his heart was going to leap out of his mouth.
“Er, n-not really…” he mumbled.
Nagi glared at him. “You knew her?”
“I went out with her once.”
“On a date?”
“No! I mean, uh, it was like…” he said, scrambling to form a coherent sentence
Nagi looked at his face, and grinned again. “Not what I’m asking. You notice her acting weird lately?”
“Well, yeah, I guess so.”
“How long?”
“Maybe…two or three weeks?”
“Matches up…” Nagi whispered to herself.
Masami felt a shiver run down his spine, but he didn’t let it show.
“Matches what?”
“Mm? Oh, never mind,” Nagi said evasively.
“Something happen to Kusatsu? If there’s anything I can do to help, senpai…” he pressed.
“Nah, it’s nothing important.”
“Of course it’s important. I mean, this is deliberate, isn’t it?” he said, taking the cigarette out of Nagi’s hand.
“Hey, Saotome-kun,” Nagi said, troubled.
“It’s something big enough that you’re deliberately getting yourself suspended, isn’t it? Let me tell the teachers.”
“They won’t do anything! Teachers are nothing but wage slaves,” she said coldly.
Masami couldn’t argue with that. He had suggested it precisely because he had the same opinion. If they left things up to the teachers, everything would be forgotten in no time.
“Then…” he persisted.
Nagi took his hand and held it tightly.
“Thanks, but no. You’re normal, and you shouldn’t have anything to do with this.”
“But…” he said as three male teachers came stomping into the ladies room.
“You again!” they shouted at Nagi.
Nagi was unaffected.
“Um…” Masami tried talking to them, but they didn’t even look at him. One of them took the cigarette out of his hand, and said, “This is evidence!” thrusting it out towards Nagi.
She said nothing.
She was hauled off to the guidance office like a wanted criminal.
Masami followed after her, looking worried, but one of the teachers told him to go back to his room, so he simply watched them leave.
There was nobody else around, and the color in his face slowly faded.
“…………”
From down the hall, he heard the office door slam open. All Masami could do was turn and walk away. There was no emotion left on his face.
“…………”
Nagi’s choice of words kept echoing through his mind. She had said, “Matches up.” All he could think was that it matched up to the first girl who had “run away,” Suzumiya Takako.
Nagi knew something.
Something too close for comfort.
“…………”
His mask cracked for just a second, letting out a glimpse of his true face underneath.
His eyes were withered, inhuman, like a man who has just wandered in the desert for a week with no water and let sand creep into every pore on his body.
5.
“Kirima Nagi? Why would she?!” cried out Yurihara when she heard Masami’s story. They were in the pool changing rooms, where thankfully nobody ever dared to come during winter.
“I don’t know. But she’s clearly caught wind of something.”
Masami told Yurihara about Nagi six days into her suspension. During that period, he was stalking the girls that they had planned next to entrap and kill. It quickly became obvious that Nagi was taking them down one after the other—all of Kusatsu Akiko’s Junior High school friends. Today, he’d seen her attack Kinoshita Kyoko, and make her promise never to take drugs again.
In the shadows of the school, it was clear that she was playing out some sort of hero fantasy of her own.
“Why?! We did everything right!” Yurihara cried out hysterically.
“Yes, we did. Which is why she hasn’t caught wind of us yet,” he said quietly. But inside, he knew just how precarious of a position that they were in. If they had been just a little bit late in disposing of Kusatsu Akiko, Nagi would most certainly have deduced what was wrong with her. It had been a very close shave.
“We can’t kill anyone else from Shinyo Academy. We don’t want her suspecting that you’re a student here.”
“Why don’t we just kill her?” Yurihara suggested.
“Not yet. I don’t know how much she knows or how she found out. We need to know that, at least.”
“She needs to die! We won’t leave any evidence behind! And she’s crazy—nobody’ll notice when she vanishes.”
It was obvious that they were in the same class. Yurihara knew Nagi all too well.
“But her current parents are very rich. And she’s got several hundred million yen in the bank. She disappears, and I guarantee you that it won’t be put down as a runaway. When money gets involved, there’s no telling who’ll come out of the woodwork. That’s how human society works.”
Yurihara remained silent. She looked at the floor, bit her lip, and then whispered petulantly, “…Is that the only reason?”
“Eh?”
“Is that the only reason you won’t kill Kirima Nagi? There’s another reason, isn’t there?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Saotome-kun, don’t lie to me. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
Masami looked away.
“Wh-why do you think that?”
“Am I wrong? I’m right, aren’t I?” she asked as she looked up and glared at him.
“I…” Masami started to say, when suddenly…
“—what are you doing in here, Echoes?” a cheery girl’s voice asked, as the door to the changing room swung open.
From the stripes on her uniform, it was clear that she was third year. And a bright and sunny girl at that.
“Uh, oops? My mistake, sorry!” she said, scratching her head.
“Ah! D-don’t—!” Masami yelled, pretending that the girl had caught them in the middle of a romantic moment. It was okay, though. She hadn’t overheard them.
“Sorry! Sorry! You two have fun now!” she commented, smiling. She was clearly blushing from embarrassment as she started to duck back out the door.
But at that moment, Yurihara’s body shot forward like a bullet. She let out a hiss like a king cobra, and sank her teeth into the back of the third year girl’s neck.
There was a sharp cracking sound.
“W-wha?!” cried Masami, trying to get between them, but he was already too late. She had bitten through the girl’s spine, killing her instantly. It was over before the girl even realized what was happening to her.
“What the hell were you thinking?! I just told you not to kill at school!” Masami yelled, turning on Yurihara.
But when he saw her face, his manner changed.
She was as white as a sheet and shivering violently. “H-how…how is he here?” she whimpered with her latest victim’s blood splattered across her mouth.
“What do you mean?”
“Him! Echoes! He’s here!”
“Who—or—what is Echoes?”
“My ‘original’! The over-evolved man!” She hugged her hands to her chest, but that didn’t stop her shaking.
“C-calm down! You can explain later. First, we have to get rid of this body!” Masami yelled, glancing down at the girl’s corpse. Looking closely, he recognized her face. “She’s…Kamikishiro Naoko?”
She was one of Nagi’s few precious friends. That was how he knew her. Nagi had taken a year off in Junior High due to illness, but she had been in the same class as Kamikishiro at the time.
(Why is Nagi’s friend…? Is this just a coincidence? No, it can’t be…)
He felt the last piece fall into place. Just as they had disposed of Kusatsu Akiko in the nick of time, once again Fate had given them a desperately needed chance.
“Don’t worry, Manticore. The advantage is on our side.” He smiled, and gently put his arms around her trembling shoulders.
“Eh?” she questioned as she looked up, and was greeted with a warm and knowing nod and a luminous smile.
***
They carried Kamikishiro Naoko’s body to a secret room in the basement. Yurihara leaned over the corpse and began disposing of the evidence.
As he watched, Masami grinned.
(I’ll make sure you live through this. I promise. Whatever happens to me…it’ll be worth it.)
A single line of a song ran through Saotome Masami’s mind.
For some reason, it was not a song by his beloved group The Doors. He had forgotten the exact name of it; it was just a song that he had overheard somewhere and barely remembered. He couldn’t even remember the whole line; just a snippet echoing through his mind like a broken record.
It was a song by a band that wasn’t anywhere near as famous as The Doors; they were a freak band called Oingo Boingo that were famous for their weirded-out tunes. The name of the song was “No One Lives Forever.”
The poppy, cheery tune didn’t match the sinister name, nor the blood-ridden lyrics. Masami began singing under his breath.
“…No one, no one, no one, no one, no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one…”
His smile continued till the rest of the phrase, “lives forever,” came back to him. The smile contained more than the radiance of one prepared to sacrifice his life for the object of his affections—there was a hint of evil and of deeply personal pleasure to it, too.
In front of him came a sound like wind whistling through a crack in the wall as the man-eater consumed the girl.