Chapter 7: World Domination Starts at Seishin High!

The next day was Saturday. Yuichi picked up Aiko in the morning and headed for school. If vampires really had infiltrated the school, they had to investigate.

As they neared the gate, they saw a bit of a commotion going on.

The gate was closed. Hanako Nodayama stood in front of it, facing off with a group of students. She had the label “Vampire?” above her head.

“Are you kidding me?” Until now, Yuichi hadn’t really believed the monster hunter’s words. He was convinced they couldn’t possibly go after the school.

“Ms. Nodayama is...?!” Aiko said in shock after Yuichi explained the situation to her.

“Hey, Ms. Nodayama. Nobody mentioned anything about this to me...” Shota was one of the students arguing with Hanako.

“The school is closed. Got it?” she said. “I mean, obviously...” She had her usual can’t-be-bothered air, but somehow seemed even more listless than usual.

Yuichi walked up to Shota. “What’s going on, Saeki?”

“Hey, that you, Sakaki? You here for club, too?” Shota asked Yuichi as he noticed him.

Yuichi gave a noncommittal response.

“Our good friend Hanako here won’t let us into the school,” Shota replied. “I don’t get it.”

Shota must have come to school for club activities. He was carrying a sports bag.

Yuichi looked at Hanako. There were the traces of a scar on her neck, and her eyes seemed empty.

“Has something happened here?” Aiko asked Hanako.

“Look, you really think I know? All I was told was to tell you that it’s closed. I’m just doing my job, so get it through your heads and go.” Even if she was under a vampire’s control, Hanako was still Hanako.

Shota didn’t look convinced, but he must have realized he wasn’t getting in. He left, head tilted, and the other students followed suit. Yuichi and Aiko remained at the gate with Hanako.

He looked past her to the school grounds.

Hanako had claimed the school was closed, but there were Vampire?s wandering around on the lawn. They all seemed to be moving sluggishly; perhaps the sunlight really did weaken them.

It would be simple enough to get inside, but it didn’t seem like that alone would solve the problem.

“Perfect timing, Sakaki. I was told to get in touch with you,” Hanako said abruptly. “Let’s see, what was it again? ‘Come by tonight so I can kill you,’ I think.” Hanako looked up at the sky as she tried to remember.

“Um, that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a teacher should be saying to a student...” Aiko said hesitantly to Hanako.

“Look, I’m just doing my job.” Hanako groaned in exasperation.

“Ms. Nodayama, what if I try to go in during the day?” Yuichi asked, just to be sure.

“Um, he’ll probably kill all the teachers, so please don’t? We’re not just servants, we’re hostages, too.”

So he had taken all the school faculty hostage...

But that much wouldn’t change just because Yuichi came at night. If it was equally risky one way or another, he had no reason to play into his hands and put himself at a disadvantage.

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking, but he really wants to slaughter you personally, so if you come at night, he probably won’t use the hostages as shields,” Hanako said. “So I’d really prefer it if you’d do that, y’know?” That seemed to be all she wanted to say to Yuichi, and she wouldn’t say any more.

Yuichi led Aiko a little ways away from the gate.

“...I didn’t think my brother would be this stupid...” Aiko said, her expression suggesting genuine disbelief. “Why would he go so far? What’s he going to do next week?”

Once the students came back to school, it would be obvious it was occupied..

“Maybe that’s when he’ll try to conquer the world...” Aiko seemed to be trying to sound cheerful, but wasn’t really succeeding. “He wouldn’t... would he?”

The monster hunter had told him about the powers Kyoya could use now, and one of them was the ability to enslave others. He could suck someone’s blood to get them to do whatever he wanted. It was a power that, if used right, certainly could be used to take over the world.

“You think things will keep getting worse if we don’t do something? Yuichi asked.

“I guess we can’t just call the police, huh?” Aiko said.

“If he has the whole faculty under his control, it probably won’t do any good,” Yuichi agreed. “They probably have some kind of cover story for if the police come asking around.” It was a more serious situation than he had thought. “Still, there’s something weird about all this. Why does your brother want to kill me?”

Yuichi couldn’t remember ever meeting Aiko’s brother, let alone doing something to deserve his resentment. Aiko didn’t seem to have any idea how they were connected, either.

Yuichi decided to go home for now. Mutsuko should be there, learning more about vampires.

“This is really bad!” was the first thing out of Mutsuko’s mouth when Yuichi walked in the door.

“Yeah, definitely,” he agreed. “We’ve confirmed that Noro’s brother is at the school.”

They took a seat at the low table in Mutsuko’s room, and Yuichi explained what he had seen.

“I already knew that!” Mutsuko took out her tablet computer and showed the screen to Yuichi.

Yuichi could see images from their school in a series of windows on the screen. Inside the building, the courtyard, the pool, the gym, the sports fields... Every so often, the viewing angles changed.

He paused. “Okay, I have a lot of questions about this. First off...”

“This is the school, right? Why do you have this?” Aiko just asked right out, with none of Yuichi’s subtlety

“I installed security cameras! You never know when something might attack!” Mutsuko told them.

“Don’t give me that smug ‘I thought this might happen’ act! This is illegal!” Yuichi shouted.

“Sakaki, I think it’s a little late to be worried about legality...” Aiko ventured.

Aiko was right. Mutsuko had already engaged in more than her share of law-breaking behavior.

“Don’t you worry!” Mutsuko announced. “I put the utmost value on privacy, and I only use it for emergencies like this! So, anyway! As you can see, the school has already fallen into their hands!”

Glassy-eyed people were wandering around the school. Victims of Kyoya, it seemed.

“There seem to be a few different types among those affected. There’s this spaced-out type — their minds seem totally blank — the type that seems to have full autonomy, and the type that just keeps repeating a task they were ordered to perform.”

“That’s all well and good, but what did you mean when you said things were really bad?” Yuichi asked.

What she was showing them was certainly a problem, but Mutsuko’s words had seemed meant to indicate something more.

“Look at this!” Mutsuko used the tablet to call up the image of a classroom. About half a class’s worth of girls were sitting at the desks, staring forward, their eyes glazed over.

“Who are they?” Yuichi asked.

“Well? Notice anything?” Mutsuko asked him.

“Notice anything? Well, they’re all girls... Huh? Wait, that’s Orihara!”

“Ah! What’s she doing there?” Aiko cried, noticing at the same time.

Kanako was one of the girls in the room. She had the same glassy-eyed look as the other students.

Mutsuko just sighed. “Yu? That is true, but it’s not what I meant. You’re looking at the wrong thing! Shouldn’t it be obvious? They all have big breasts!”

“No one cares about that!” Yuichi cried. “Orihara’s more important, right? What’s she doing there?”

“That’s a good question,” Mutsuko said. “It seems they all got a call from the school telling them to come for extra lessons.”

“You mean... my brother...” Aiko stammered. Yuichi completely understood how she felt.

“Yes! By controlling the school faculty, he got access to the students’ personal information! So he chose the cutest girls with the biggest breasts and called them to school!”

“Big Brother, you dummy!” Aiko shouted.

“Now this is getting interesting! The survival club can’t sit silent while one of our own members is in danger! Call Takeuchi and let’s handle it together!” In spite of the grim situation, Mutsuko really seemed to be enjoying herself.

The group temporarily dispersed, with the agreement that they would meet up that night at the Chinese restaurant Nihao the China near the school.

Yuichi didn’t have much in the way of preparation to do, so he spent his day puttering around, while Mutsuko went off somewhere to “get things ready.”

As night fell, Natsuki arrived at Yuichi’s house in a white minivan.

“I bet that would be great for kidnapping!” Mutsuko exclaimed. It was an extremely rude thing to say, but Natsuki, its owner, didn’t seem to mind.

Yuichi and the others got in, picked up Aiko on the way, then arrived at Nihao the China. Incidentally, the van was driven by “Stalker” Sakiyama.

After they reached their destination, Mutsuko gave Sakiyama a new set of instructions, and he drove off on his own.

The group entered the restaurant and took seats at the round table.

“Oh, you’re all together today! What’s the occasion? Are you worried about us not getting enough business?” Tomomi, in her cheongsam, seemed very pleased indeed. The others were in their school uniforms, as Mutsuko had insisted that it was a club activity.

“What happened to your speech tic?” Yuichi asked.

“Oh, well, I used to do that because not many people came here, but it’s a little embarrassing to keep it up when the same people keep coming...”

“Try to have some actual policy!” Yuichi cried.

Even at night, there were no customers around. Aside from Yuichi’s group and the staff, the only other resident seemed to be a single rat that scurried around here and there.

“You know, it’s pretty gross to have rats roaming around in an eating establishment...” he commented.

“Huh? Well, even though we don’t have any customers, we still do proper cleaning...” Tomomi tilted her head, apparently confident in the shop’s hygiene standards.

Mutsuko ordered a random selection of dishes. As usual, the food was delicious; the lack of customers certainly wasn’t because of the taste.

“So, what are you doing here?” Tomomi asked.

“Well, we needed to secure a center of operations near the school. So I was thinking we’d use this place!” As she spoke, Mutsuko placed a pair of glasses on the table. “It’s a portable computer meant to look like glasses. We can use them to communicate! They’re still in the prototype stage, so they’re short range and you’ll have to stay close to use them, but they’ll let us see whatever you see, Yu!”

It seemed Mutsuko was planning on giving him orders from here. Yuichi put on the glasses experimentally, and found mysterious numbers and arrows appearing in his field of vision.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” he said. “What do the numbers mean?”

“They don’t mean anything, they just look cool!” she exclaimed.

“That’s stupid! Turn them off!” he snapped.

Mutsuko grumbled to herself as she pulled out her tablet and made a few taps and slides. The display immediately disappeared.

“So, what do we do?” Yuichi asked.

They were coming at night, as Kyoya had asked, but they hadn’t sorted out a more concrete plan than that.

“Just charge in there and sock him out!” Mutsuko declared. “What else do you need?”

“A little more specificity, please!” There were limits to how much irresponsibility Yuichi could take.

“Then... let’s see,” Mutsuko said, looking at Aiko. “Your brother seems to be in the student council room, but is there any way we can lure him out? If we do, we’ll have a lot more options.”

“Hang on a minute! You even have hidden cameras in the student council room?” Yuichi exclaimed.

“Well, you never know what a student council might be planning! You have to keep an eye on them!” she declared.

“They’re not planning anything!” he shouted.

Mutsuko pulled a mini-projector out of her pocket and projected it onto the restaurant wall as if she owned the place. The display showed video footage of the student council room.

Kyoya was paging through a leather-bound book with a listless expression.

He’s just posing, Yuichi thought, positive that the boy wasn’t actually reading a word of it.

“Orihara and the others seem to be okay,” Mutsuko said, checking the video again.

The display showed multiple locations at once, and Kyoya didn’t seem to be doing anything in the classroom where Kanako was at the moment.

“Sis, can Orihara be put back to normal?” Yuichi asked.

Mutsuko had told them that Kanako and the others were under a charm spell, but according to the monster hunter, charm and enslavement were different things. Something to do with how their reflexes worked... It was beyond Yuichi’s ability to understand it.

“Let’s see,” Mutsuko pondered. “The monster hunter guy said the charm won’t last very long, so if we get them out and lock them up somewhere, it should go away naturally, I bet. The bigger problem is the people who had their blood drained. Apparently their domination runs a lot deeper.”

“We have to kill the original,” Natsuki stated flatly.

“No way...” Aiko trailed off, speechless.

“Wait a minute. We can’t do that,” Yuichi protested. “This is Noro’s brother we’re talking about.”

“I don’t know much about vampires, but it’s easy to see that sucking blood confers a powerful geis upon their victims,” Natsuki said. “To save the victims, you likely have to kill the original vampire.”

“I see,” Mutsuko mused. “I’d rather not do it, for Noro’s sake, but we should be ready, if it comes to that.”

Mutsuko could really be very unfeeling when it came to people outside her immediate circle, and Aiko’s brother, whom she’d never met, was apparently too distant a connection to qualify for her sympathy.

Whatever Mutsuko’s feelings, though, it wasn’t so easy for Yuichi to prepare himself for the idea. Aiko bowed her head, as well, as if in shock.

“Of course, that’s a worst case scenario situation,” Mutsuko added, as if in consideration for Aiko. “If we can end this without killing him, we will!”

“Sakaki, let me offer you some advice,” Natsuki said, looking straight at Yuichi.

“What?”

“It’s about killing people. One of the primary reasons I can kill people is because I’m not thinking of them as the same species as me. Your sister said this before, but the instinctual resistance to killing really only applies to those of the same species, human to human. Humans have no trouble killing animals, right? At least, they don’t feel the same conflict as they do when they kill a human. So you just need to change your mindset: think of the person you’re fighting as inhuman.”

“Just change my mindset, huh?” Yuichi wondered if it would be that simple.

“If you pop your cherry on Noro’s big brother... Wow, that sounds pretty BL, huh?” Mutsuko asked cheerfully.

“Would you show a little consideration, Sis?!” Yuichi exclaimed.

“Shall I offer my advice, too?” Mutsuko offered.

“Sure, I can’t stop you,” Yuichi muttered.

“A vampire’s weak point is the heart!” she declared.

“So is mine!” he shouted.

“I don’t know if they’ll work, but take them along. Stakes of white magnolia.” Mutsuko handed Yuichi a few narrow pieces of wood the size and shape of pencils.

Yuichi put the stakes in his breast pocket. Did she want him to stab these through Aiko’s brother’s heart...?

The door fell inward with a bang.

“Huh?” Yuichi looked at the entrance in confusion, and saw the words “Anthromorph (Wolf).”

A humanoid creature covered in animal fur stepped onto the kicked-in door and lumbered inward, followed by more. There were seven of the creatures in all. Yuichi didn’t know what they wanted, but they certainly didn’t look friendly.

“Hey! Why did you kick in our door?” Tomomi asked indignantly.

“How did you know we were here?” Yuichi asked as he and Natsuki rose, ready to fight.

“The rat you saw earlier was his familiar, which told him where we were! And the monster hunter said he has ghouls and lycanthropes serving him, so he sent some of those after us!” Mutsuko exclaimed, as if she had known it the whole time.

“Tell us this stuff earlier!” Yuichi shouted.

“Wh-Wh-What?!” Aiko stammered in confusion.

“So there’s more than just one of them, eh?” Yuichi murmured.

The “Anthromorph (Wolf)”s were bipedal monsters with doglike faces that stood about as tall as your average human. He had seen one at the hospital before, so their existence itself didn’t surprise him, but the sight of them in the familiar Chinese restaurant felt like an intrusion into his daily life.

“Sakaki, aren’t you surprised?” Aiko asked, seeming slightly calmer, perhaps influenced by Yuichi’s own muted reaction.

“No, I am surprised,” he said.

And indeed he was. But panicking about an unknown enemy wouldn’t help him fight it. To be able to set aside surprise and do what he needed to do... That was the point of his training.

Yuichi looked around the store. Tomomi was an innocent bystander, and he didn’t want to cause trouble for her... But Tomomi, surprisingly, seemed absolutely calm.

“We do want more customers around here, but we don’t serve dog-people, okay?” she said. “And we can’t have you threatening our customers, either. Dad!”

“Leave this to Nihao the China!” A man with a braid dashed out of the kitchen.

“Who are you?!” Yuichi cried. But even as he asked, he knew the answer. It was “Nihao the China.” Nothing more, nothing less. It was written above the man’s head.

“Yu! Let Nihao the China handle this and go on ahead!” Mutsuko said, eyes glistening.

“As if!” Yuichi yelled, hesitant to follow the command.

Nihao the China dropped his hips and struck out an elbow to take out one anthromorph. It was a riding horse stance elbow strike; he must be a practitioner of bajiquan.

“I’ll help him, Sakaki,” Natsuki said, pulling a scalpel from her pocket. “You go.”

With that, Yuichi made up his mind. As Nihao the China used bodyslams and back slams to knock the anthromorphs around, Yuichi flew out of the restaurant.

Yuichi arrived at Seishin High School and walked through the open gate, heading for the new school building. The student council room would be on the fourth floor.

“Well? Can you hear me?” Yuichi asked.

“Loud and clear,” Mutsuko responded through the computer glasses Yuichi had put on.

“How are things on your end?” he asked.

“All done,” Natsuki said, her voice joining Mutsuko’s through the glasses. “Should I join you? I could finish him off if you can’t.”

“No, it’s easier if I go alone,” he said. “And I don’t want to put that responsibility on you.”

“Shall I interpret that as an expression of love?” Natsuki asked.

“Why would you?!”

“Sakaki... um... don’t take on more than you can handle,” Aiko added through the glasses.

“I’ll be fine,” Yuichi assured her. “We’ll talk first.”

Kyoya wouldn’t necessarily be unreasonable, Yuichi thought. Just because he was a vampire didn’t mean he wouldn’t be willing to talk. Maybe they could come to some kind of understanding.

Yuichi entered the school building, preparing to make his way towards the student council room. But he quickly realized there was no need. As he left the entryway hall that was full of shoe cupboards and headed into the corridor, he spotted a man walking towards him.

“Vampire II.”

The man approaching him was the archetypical image of a vampire. He wore a red-lined cape over full evening wear. He had long, silver hair that billowed out behind him.

“Big Brother!” he heard Aiko shout.

So this was her big brother, Kyoya.

He strode fearlessly up to Yuichi until they were about five meters apart, then stopped.

“Why did you send your men after me?” Yuichi asked.

“You were taking your sweet time, so I thought I’d send an escort... Just in case you were thinking about fleeing in fear.” Kyoya gave a dry chuckle.

“I’d been wondering what your beef was with me,” Yuichi commented. “You’re the vampire who attacked me the other day, right?”

Judging by the label above his head, Kyoya had been the man in the hood who had attacked Yuichi the day he’d gone out with Aiko. The hood had hidden his face at the time.

“But I still don’t know why you attacked me in the first place,” Yuichi continued. “What exactly did I do to you?”

“I was entirely indifferent to you at the beginning,” Kyoya sneered. “But then I saw how happy Aiko looked when she was with you... and I began to feel the urge to see her face contort in despair.”

“Huh?” Yuichi asked, baffled.

“Brother, why?” Aiko whispered weakly. It was surely an unbelievable thing to hear.

So, Aiko was the reason Kyoya had gone after Yuichi. He was focused squarely on her.

Judging from what Aiko had said, they had never been particularly close, but Yuichi had never imagined it would go this far.

“Look, I don’t know where the bad blood between you two comes from, but that’s a damn crummy thing to say,” he said. Any respect Yuichi might have felt towards a senior and his friend’s brother crumbled within him immediately.

“Ah. I see you don’t know what lurks beneath her surface! Everything she did, and she doesn’t even remember it... It’s ridiculous!” Kyoya flew into a sudden rage, as if remembering something. Whatever it was, it must have been awful, to drive such a wedge between siblings. But Kyoya refused to elucidate.

There was a moment’s pause.

While Yuichi was considering what to do next, he heard a sound of something ripping through the air.

“Huh?!” Yuichi couldn’t believe his eyes.

Huge bat wings were now spreading out behind Kyoya. Enormous wings connected by thin webbing were growing out of his back.

“Sis! He just sprouted wings!” Yuichi shouted.

“Oh, yeah! They said he grew wings to escape, remember?” Mutsuko agreed.

Yuichi had already seen the wolfmen, so he knew that monsters must exist. But knowing they existed was very different from seeing one transform in front of your eyes.

“Hey, you think those wings tore up his clothing?” Mutsuko asked.

“Nobody cares!” Yuichi shouted.

Kyoya tilted forward in a runner’s stance. There was a snapping sound of his wings catching air and he charged forward at unbelievable speed.

Panicked, Yuichi managed to dodge, sending Kyoya rushing past him before he spread his wings again to stop himself.

“What the hell?!” Yuichi knew the boy was a vampire, but he’d been expecting Kyoya’s abilities to fall within the usual human realm of expectation. He hadn’t really expected him to fly.

“Yu! Stay cool! He’s gonna come after you again!” Mutsuko declared.

“Shut up! This is bizarre! Why can he fly?!” Yuichi shouted.

Kyoya descended to the floor. “Hmm. Not a very precise way of moving, are they? But what about this?” Kyoya’s legs began to change.

Yuichi couldn’t explain what he saw, exactly, but the next thing he knew, Kyoya’s lower half had become a wolf’s body. His torso sprouted out of the wolf’s back.

“Huh?!”

“Ah, I guess his clothing is part of the transformation!” Mutsuko said, chattering away in his ear. “Well, that sort of transformation is impossible under the laws of physics anyway, so I guess he can do it however he wants!”

The wolf ran along the ground, planting its feet with great precision as it rushed at him with blinding speed.

The wolf tore at him with fangs and claws, giving the baffled Yuichi no choice but to dodge. He rolled along the floor, giving himself a little distance from the beast.

“Yu, you can’t be surprised by every little thing!” Mutsuko told him.

“This isn’t exactly a little thing!” Despite his confusion, Yuichi kept moving.

At last he decided he needed to counter the wolf’s continuous onslaught. He lashed out with a fist, but what followed struck him completely dumb.

His fist passed right through.

The wolf’s body had turned to mist, rendering his attack entirely meaningless. Yuichi dropped low as he followed through the attack’s momentum, then turned back around.

Kyoya was immediately on top of him again, having re-established his physical form.

“Listen, you never know what’s going to happen, so you can’t stop to be surprised by everything that happens!” Mutsuko shouted. “I taught you that, remember?”

Mutsuko had indeed taught him to roll with whatever he encountered. But that seemed all but impossible when dealing with a shapeshifting monster.

Kyoya flapped his wings, assaulting Yuichi with gale-force winds. Yuichi lowered his center of gravity to keep from being thrown off his feet, but it still left him frozen in place.

The wolf fell upon him once more.

Yuichi dodged its bite and tried to get around behind it. It was an instinctive reaction when dealing with quadrupeds, and Yuichi immediately regretted it.

He had forgotten about the monster’s human torso. Perhaps that was Kyoya’s plan — he hadn’t used it before now in order to get Yuichi’s guard down.

Now, Kyoya lashed out with a backfist.

Yuichi managed to dodge it, but what followed was completely unbelievable.

An enormous black fist lashed out at him as if from nowhere.

He couldn’t dodge it.

He raised his arms to block, but it wasn’t enough. The power of the blow sent him flying through the air.

✽✽✽✽✽

Nihao the China was a mess of broken chairs and scattered dishes.

The shop owner — also named Nihao the China — silently cleaned up while Tomomi grumbled at him. Nearly all of the damage had been caused by Nihao the China himself in the process of his rampage.

The defeated anthromorphs had returned to human form after being knocked unconscious, and he had thrown them out of the shop. He had said that if they wanted to run away, they were free to do so, and Mutsuko and the others were in no position to complain. This was his shop, after all.

Thankfully, the round table had been spared the damage, so the three remaining members of the survival club had chosen to stay there, watching the footage from the security cameras and Yuichi’s glasses projected on the wall.

“Sakaki!” Aiko stood up quickly as she saw Yuichi fly back. “Mutsuko! There’s no way he can fight him! No one ever told me that vampires could do things like that!”

But despite Aiko’s concerns, Mutsuko’s eyes continued to shimmer with excitement. “Incredible! I’ve never seen anything like it! But Yu’s own abilities are... hmm, maybe I should have researched some monster-fighting jukenpo?”

The image from Yuichi’s glasses blurred for a moment, then reinitiated. The feed showed Kyoya’s transformed body from a low angle; the device had been knocked off of Yuichi’s face.

“Mutsuko! Are you listening to me? Sakaki’s going to die!” Aiko entreated Mutsuko, who seemed much too laid-back about all of this.

“Well, I’ll admit he’s in trouble, but he hasn’t lost yet,” Mutsuko said.

“How is he supposed to beat something like that?” Aiko exclaimed.

“Good question,” Mutsuko said. “At his current skill level, he might not be able to.”

“Then shouldn’t we go help him?!”

“I don’t see how there’s anything I could do,” Mutsuko said with such flippancy that it must have been her honest opinion. “What about you, Takeuchi?”

“I don’t think I could beat it,” Natsuki evaluated cool-headedly. “Really, it’s a miracle that Sakaki is even still alive. The first hit would have killed me.”

Even Natsuki couldn’t have beaten it. It was on a completely different level.

“Fine... Fine, then!” With that, Aiko flew out of Nihao the China.

“What should we do? Do you have any ideas?” Natsuki asked, clearly flustered despite her outward calm.

“Good question,” Mutsuko said. “I don’t have any ideas, but I think Yu can win!”

“Why?” Natsuki was amazed that Mutsuko wasn’t at all worried. Her brother was clearly dying. It didn’t seem like the behavior of a girl who loved her brother.

“I believe in Yu,” Mutsuko said simply. “That’s all!”

✽✽✽✽✽

Hitting the wall drove all the air out of Yuichi’s lungs. He only just barely managed to stay conscious. He fell to the floor, face first, unable to dull the impact.

He’d positioned himself to land back-first to lessen the shock, but it had barely mattered. He hadn’t expected to fly back ten meters and crash into a wall.

It was the wing that had hit him — the wing, transformed into an enormous fist.

He had made a terrible mistake in judgment. The momentum had completely turned against him. Yuichi had underestimated what a vampire could do.

Perhaps it was because he was always around Aiko; he had convinced himself that it couldn’t be that bad. But this was a monster. Eyes shining red, fangs fully bared, huge bat wings growing from his back... It could turn into mist, and even into a wolf. It was completely unlike anything Yuichi had faced before.

It was an honest-to-goodness monster.

How could anything Yuichi knew about the world possibly apply to it?

The principles of his martial arts were based on expectations about human limits. He knew a few things about fighting animals, as well, but there was no reason to think those would work on a vampire.

Kyoya reverted to human form and stalked slowly towards Yuichi. “Hmm. It seems I’ll finally have vengeance for the humiliation I suffered at the hands of a lower lifeform like you. Well, you fought well enough... for a human,” Kyoya said, haughtily.

Yuichi couldn’t find it in him to argue. He could barely even move. He’d reached the limits of what he could do with the furukami. It was the only thing that had kept him from being killed on the first hit. The blood spilling from his forehead blurred his vision.

“You’re like a tiny thorn on my path to world domination,” Kyoya announced. “I just couldn’t move on until I’d paid you back for the humiliation you inflicted on me. Now, all that remains is to deliver your corpse to Aiko. Then I can leave the past behind me.”

Yuichi struggled to catch his breath. If Kyoya was going to take his time, then he had to make efficient use of that time. Yuichi picked himself up slowly, coming to one knee.

What do I do now?

Mutsuko and the others must have been watching, but no advice came. The glasses were on the floor nearby, but no voices came through it. The transmitter must have broken. In other words, he couldn’t count on Mutsuko anymore.

But Yuichi had no intention of going out quietly. Just because he couldn’t win was no reason to simply give up.

But can I do it? That’s Noro’s brother there... He was hesitant. Kyoya clearly wouldn’t stop and talk or see reason, but still, knowing that he was part of Aiko’s family gave Yuichi pause.

“Big Brother, stop it!” A voice cried out from behind Yuichi. He turned to look at it. It was Aiko, running towards him from the entryway hall.

“Idiot! What are you doing here?” Yuichi shouted.

Aiko interposed herself between Kyoya and Yuichi.

“Oh? I can’t believe you came right to me,” Kyoya said smugly. “Everything just seems to be going my way today.”

“This is all crazy! Knock it off and come back to your senses!” Aiko shouted.

“I am in perfect command of my senses. It was the way I was before — twisted and oppressed — that was mad. Don’t you agree?”

“What are you doing?” Yuichi demanded uncertainly from behind Aiko’s trembling form. He couldn’t let her stay there.

“I’m protecting you, of course!” Aiko cried.

“Please, just run away!” Yuichi shouted.

Kyoya flapped his wings, sending out a gust that sent Aiko tumbling backwards.

Yuichi sprang to his feet and seized Aiko in his arms. He hit the wall again, knocking the wind out of him once more.

“Aiko, you shall be allowed to die after him, writhing in the grips of deepest despair,” Kyoya said.

Yuichi was stunned by the sheer callousness in his voice. Kyoya’s hatred apparently ran deeper than Yuichi could have imagined. If Yuichi fell, then he really would kill Aiko.

“Sakaki...” Aiko turned in Yuichi’s arms to look him in the eye. “Mom told me that I have the power to protect the people I care about.”

Yuichi had a bad feeling about where this was going.

“I didn’t believe her... but if my brother can turn into something like that, then maybe it was true, right?” Aiko smiled, and with great trepidation, returned Yuichi’s embrace.

Yuichi couldn’t move.

“I’m sorry.” She pressed her face to his neck.

He could feel her tongue tracing along the line of his neck, licking up the blood that stained it.

He felt her fangs extend, then sink deep into his flesh. The pain caused him to writhe.

“Please! You don’t have to do this!” he shouted. “I...”

He couldn’t stop Aiko from drinking his blood.