Part 101: The Little Death
Part 101 - The Little DeathAfter picking all eleven of the triggers, we're now onto Ending B. The end of Chapter 9 and beginning of Chapter 10 are the same. The divergence starts with Sena and Kozue making their way to Shinsen station, and what they find there. So, without further ado...
SFX: The sound of a Noah Terminal can be faintly heard.
The station itself was completely underground, being located in a tunnel, and the only outside light that reached it was a faint amount coming in through the outdoor exit area at the end of the platform.
Now, due to the earthquake, all the light fixtures had gone off, and it was terribly dim, much more so than usual.
Aoi Sena stepped onto the platform, carrying Orihara Kozue on her back.
There had been no need for her to buy a ticket.
She didn't spot any station workers anywhere, and the ticket machines were out of service, too.
When she looked at the tracks, the rails there were visibly warped. Naturally, the trains had been at a standstill since yesterday.
Kozue's breathing began to sound painful from time to time, but she wasn't conscious.
There was dried blood plastered to her forehead.
Gigalomaniacs couldn't use their power to heal their own wounds.
Pain compelled them to be reminded of the reality of their injuries.
They couldn't create local shared recognition to the effect of, "I'm not wounded." They couldn't make it be as if nothing had happened.
Their human instincts wouldn't permit it.
Which was to say nothing of the fact that one couldn't construct local shared recognition when the other person was unconscious. Sena could now do nothing to help Kozue.
Her expression was harsh.
She gave the lowered Kozue only a single glance, then soon shifted her gaze back to the station premises. And, glaring at a certain fixed point, she ground her teeth together.
"I've finally found you....!"At the end of her line of sight.
One was a tall man wearing a high-quality suit. From head to toe, he gave off an aura of refinement. He had excellent posture, and a relaxed smile played about his lips.
The other was a homeless man clad in filthy clothing. His hair was overly long, and his face had been left unshaven. Since he had his head lowered, it was impossible to be certain of his expression.
The two of them had overly contrasting appearances.
All they did was stand quietly in this dark station platform, where there were no other people.
In the past, her mother and little sister had met with a gruesome end before her eyes. And these people themselves were the culprits who had killed Sena's family.
The homeless man--Hatano--murmured desolately, his head hanging.
"I tried to stop that experiment. But once its gears had been put into motion, I couldn't make them halt on my own." "This man--"Hatano took a darting glance at Norose's countenance.
Norose said nothing. His attitude of being utterly at ease remained impeccable.
"This man handed down a directive for the experiment to continue." "I hadn't desired what resulted afterward...." "This man, Norose.... is the one at fault." "Please understand, Sena."Sena felt revolted as she listened to his words of repentance.
"You stood by and watched Mom and my sister die." "Those are the cold, hard facts." "If you regretted it, why did you run away?" "In order to protect the world." "Bullshit....!" 
"I can't commend you for rebelling against your parent."
"Indeed, the result of my orders was that your family came to a tragic end." "We had already been able to collect sufficient data, you see." "It was truly a worthwhile experiment."
"Worthwhile....?" 
"Kill him, Sena!" "He's the ringleader!"
"You don't have to tell me--!"
Her target was Norose Genichi.
Sena followed it with her eyes.
"....!?"Shocked. She looked at the headless body before her.
It had been wearing a suit a second before, but now it was in a homeless person's tattered clothes. Powerless, it went toppling over backward.
In age, countenance, and demeanor, he was a completely different person from her father.
After tracing an arc and falling, it had splattered blood on the floor.
It was her father's face. Her father's head. Sena couldn't tear her eyes away from it.
--Bewitchment brought about by a delusion.
As she came to that realization. Sena's breathing went fast and shallow.
The man who was previously supposed to have been her father, who was now a separate person, called Sena's name in an intimate tone.
"What you did just now, doesn't it make you pretty much the same as your daddy?"
"........."
Her father, now only a head, had his eyes turned in Sean's direction.
"Decapitating your own father, that's pretty harsh, man." "Da.... d...."
It was the scream in Sena's heart. Upon hearing that cry, which resembled madness and seemed to curse reality, I came running to Shinsen Station.
But by then, it was already too late.
When I entered the dim premises, the faint smell of blood hovered in the air. Kozu-pii was lying down by the wall, unconscious.
And on the platform, there was Sena's form, sunken down, her back facing me.
Her head was lowered, making her long hair cover her face, keeping me from seeing her expression.
Next to her was a headless body.
The round object lying fallen a short distance away was the head that had once been connected to the corpse, I realized.
Hatano-san. Becoming aware that it was him, I bit my lip.
A lone man stood on the tracks.
Though he was in a suit, he also wore a rucksack, and from within it reverberated a nasty mechanical noise.
Suwa Mamoru. A detective in the investigative department at police headquarters.
I had met this man before. And--I knew what this man had done.
"Originally, I'd just come to get rid of them eyesore Hatanos." "Nishijou-kun. Thank you so, so much for jumpin' into the fire of your own accord for me." "See, they told me to grab ya if I spotted you."
"Who told you....?" "It's secret."A flippant smile. That way of smiling brought his late partner, Detective Ban, to mind.
But there was a decisive difference between them.
Detective Ban's smile had been a performance, meant to set the other person off-guard, or else irritate them.
When it came to Suwa, on the other hand, this sly smile itself was his true nature.
"Hey you, do you know where Norose is?"
"Look here, Nishijou-kun."Suwa shook his head exaggeratedly and let out a sigh.
Without taking my eyes off Suwa, I cautiously jumped from the platform down to the tracks.
It ended up so that I was shielding the motionless Sena with my back.
"Ban.... you're the one who killed him...." "....So what?" "Killing someone, even though you're a detective...."
I clenched my Di-Sword tightly.
"I have no obligation to use honorifics.... with a prick like you."
"....Hey, now." 
I could tell clearly, even from this distance. The smile had disappeared from Suwa's face.
"You're a murderer, too....!" "I won't let you say you aren't. You killed Hazuki Shino....!" "I'd like to fucking waste you any second now....!" "........."
Was that all there was to it?
I gulped down a breath.
"I'll restrain myself, if only for the sake of the salvation of the divine light, but in exchange...." "I'm gonna make sure--" "I kill your heart."I immediately started to brandish my Di-Sword. Nothing was going to come of brandishing it, though.
Pushed back by it, I almost fell over. So I desperately braced myself.
But my body didn't go through with it, and instead I curled up in a ball on the spot.
I couldn't control my own body. It moved by itself. Like it didn't belong to me.
Before I knew it, my surroundings had gone dark. Below me was a nighttime vista that one might easily mistake for a field of stars.
I came to the realization that I was standing somewhere incredibly high up.
Beside me were four guys and girls I'd never met. No, I'd seen one of them before. Yua. For some reason, she wasn't wearing her glasses.
....No, not Yua.
She was Mia. Yua's younger twin sister. Who should've died a month ago.
And my body wasn't my own. I was wearing an unfamiliar school uniform. Even my stature was more brawny.
To begin with, I could guess who I was based on the fact that there were only four other guys and girls near me, crumpled down, petrified, and wailing and crying.
This body into which my consciousness had climbed.
It belonged to one of the five victims who had died in the first New-Gen case, the "group dive"--
Without my will having any bearing on it, my field of sight slowly moved. It slid to the side. I turned back toward the heliport.
"Shogun," who had filmed that video, must be there--
The "Shogun" who'd cornered me at O-Front had put on a similar get-up.
But was he really "Shogun"?
No....
No matter how I looked at it, his legs, sticking out slightly from beneath the black cloak, were clad in slacks.
On top of that, they were as thick as those of a regular adult male.
They weren't the skinny, pitiful legs of "Shogun"--of Nishijou Takumi-- whose bones protruded visibly.
Looking more closely, even his seated height was totally different. The cloak kept them hidden, but his shoulders also appeared fairly broad.
At the very least, he wasn't Nishijou Takumi.
Nor was he carrying a video camera.
Moreover.
From the darkness spreading out at the fake Shogun's back,
I heard dragging footsteps.
And not just one set of them.
It wasn't a hallucination; those peculiar footsteps belonged to many, many people. It meant that several dozen "somethings" were lurking beyond the darkness.
These footsteps hadn't been a part of the video uploaded on MewTube. Besides, there was no way such a large number of people could've accessed this heliport.
What the hell was the source of this sound....?
The four others next to me screamed and wept in lamentation. Disregarding my will, my body, too, let out a cry and began shaking.
Something was approaching.
If we were in a cheap horror movie, these scraping footsteps would turn out to be from zombies.
Zombies, their rotting bodies swaying slowly as they walked, both their hands extending limply in front of them.
But that was only what happened in movies.
A mob of zombies couldn't possibly show up in reality, much less in 21st-century Tokyo....!
So what about it?
My chest seemed about to cave in with fear. I wanted to look away, but the owner of the body I'd entered wasn't averting his eyes.
At last, those unknown beings began to emerge from the darkness. They flooded the heliport. Sealing off our escape route.
I didn't know whether to describe this as getting the wind knocked out of my sails. What appeared were perfectly ordinary people.
They wore suits, student uniforms, parkas. They were different ages and genders, but all of them were the sort of people you'd normally see walking around Shibuya at night.
None of them said a word. They simply wove a dissonant melody, made up of the mingling of their numerous wild, nasal breaths.
For some reason, I couldn't see their expressions too well. It was like all of their faces were made of paint blurred by water.
Their faces were vague, disintegrating.
Were their faces truly deformed? Or else had my sight, watching them, gone off-kilter? I couldn't tell.
With lethargic but certain steps, they were coming our way. Like robots ordered onward by a single program.
I'd thought maybe the fake "Shogun" was giving them orders, but he didn't appear to be doing so. Once in a while, he moved his wheelchair forward a tiny bit, and afterward, he didn't budge an inch.
The five young people, being driven back, had nowhere to run.
In order to escape from this incredibly high place, 180 meters above the ground, their only option was to "dive."
Holding their blades, the crowd approached. Little by little, bit by bit. They'd already closed the distance to the point that I could reach them if I stretched my hand out.
Still silent even at this final stage, drawing near us without attempting to leap upon us all at once, the horde moved about bizarrely, but as a result, seemed far more dreadful.
Enough to make me think I wanted to get out of here right away. Even if it meant jumping off.
"Whose eyes are those eyes?"The voice I heard unexpectedly. It was that of the real "Shogun"--Nishijou Takumi.
But I heard it not from the direction of the "Shogun" wearing a Darth Spider helmet, but rather from straight overhead.
Apparently I hadn't been the only one to hear it.
The five of us, who were being hunted down, stood up as if we'd received our cue, joined hands with each other, and looked up at the night sky.
Naturally, all that spread out there was a starscape. I didn't see "Shogun" anywhere.
He'd been looking in on our thoughts--
Male Group Diver: "Whose eyes are those eyes?"
My field of sight slowly panned across. And mysteriously enough.
It went right to the roof of a building standing close beside Cornelius Tower--the adjacent building, not Sign City, which was on the other side of the Shuto Expressway.
"A building standing close beside Cornelius Tower." Despite the fact that nothing of the sort existed in reality.
Even so, the five of them harbored absolutely no doubts about those stairs possibly being illusory.
Holding each other's hands. It was exactly how the "group dive" incident had concluded.
They hadn't taken the "dive" because they wanted to.
We were falling. A horrendous wind pressure lashed at my body.
The girl next to me, holding my hand, screamed in a voice like a beast howling. She clutched my hand so hard, her nails dug in.
The amount of time it took us to plummet 180 meters felt like an eternity.
The dark earth rushed up with breathtaking force.
Since the area around us was also dark, I came close to lapsing into a hallucination of being sucked down endlessly into the middle of darkness.
And then.
Were crushed
With a crunching sound.
The pain of it grabbed hold of me without my expecting it. That single blow, leading straight to death.
Its impact made it seem like my entire body had exploded and been ground down to a fine powder from the inside out.
I experienced the sensation of my heart contracting violently from the shock of it.
I was walking along Tamagawa Street. My body was completely intact.
Even though the previous sensation of colliding with the ground lingered distinctly within me.
I was walking normally down the street, not that what I willed had anything to do with it.
This body, too, was sturdier than mine. This wasn't me, either. I had a nasty premonition.
Suddenly, there was a strange man walking toward me. When I saw him, I was forced to acknowledge that my hunch had been right on the money.
The man I passed was clothed in a suit, but for some reason, he wore a Darth Spider helmet on his head. The image he made was much too surreal.
There were no other passers-by. I wanted to flee from here this very second.
Despite that, the owner of the body my consciousness had come into turned back toward the Darth Spider man I'd just passed.
Darth Spider was standing right behind me.... so close, it seemed like I could feel his breath.
Coming from my blind spot, he socked me in the stomach.
After some time, I felt a searing pain in my abdomen.
Before me stood Hazuki Shino, her nurses' whites open, her stomach bloody. Though she was deathly pale, she gave me a kindly smile.
In her hand was a scalpel. She slowly laid it against my belly.
Hazuki's hand pressed down. A rift appeared in my skin.
Blood sprayed from the wound, catching on Hazuki Shino's face. Even then, her smile remained pasted on.
I watched, overwhelmed by dread and pain, as she gradually slashed me open.
I had viewed this spectacle once before. When I read Hazuki's memories.
In short, this was the "pregnant man" incident.
The pain in my stomach was becoming unbearable.
Screaming and crying, I tried to somehow escape by squirming, but my limbs were tied down to the bed, and I couldn't move away.
Shaking myself made the pain in my abdomen grow still more intense.
"Fufu.... May the divine light save you...."
Her fingers writhed inside me, and the feeling of them came through to me clearly. And, just as I had seen before in her memories, Hazuki forced my wound to open up on both sides.
The sensation of skin and flesh ripping.
Taking it straight on, sans anesthesia, I--and the possesser of the body into which I'd entered--lost consciousness, then soon woke again from an excess of pain.
But Hazuki went on making the wound widen impossibly.
I'd long since stopped caring about little details like which part of me hurt, about where in my body the pain was erupting from.
I had the illusion that all of my nerve endings were being pierced through with burning needles, one by one.
And I passed out again. But I couldn't escape. The pain mercilessly forced my consciousness awake.
My body convulsed. If it meant being released from this suffering, I though I'd be fine with biting my tongue off.
This woman was insane.
She took the remants of the fetus she'd removed from her own body, and plunged it into the depths of my stomach.
Her hand--and the fetus she held there--shoved aside my innards, boring into me, gnawing deeper and deeper.
I started to vomit blood, and it got caught in my throat, and even while I seemed about to suffocate from it, I went on emitting wheezing screams.
Maybe because the pain had made my brain release too many neurotransmitters, my head felt weirdly vague, but the pain still didn't ease up, and I began to understand less and less of what was happening.
Pain was all that controlled me.
Hazuki withdrew her hand from my stomach and nodded with satisfaction.
"You've held up so well."She said softly, as if she were dealing with a patient, then abruptly fainted and collapsed in place.
At almost the exact same time, somebody entered the operating room. The sound of his shoes rang out.
But I had zero interest in whoever it was, and went on bawling and shrieking, exposed to nothing other than excruciating anguish. Seeing the unnatural swelling of my abdomen, I panicked.
Together with the pain, I had begun feeling a kind of itchiness. It itched. It itched so bad.
I wanted to scratch at the wound. But my hands were bound to the bed, and I couldn't do it.
He picked Hazuki up in his arms and left the operating room, then, after some time, returned by himself.
I didn't know what he was thinking, but he had a sewing needle and some fishing line with him. And he began ponderously stitching together the opening of my wound.
At this point, the pain it caused was absolutely nothing compared to the pain of having a foreign object pushed into my body, and the pain of my flesh tearing apart.
Darth Spider's suturing was incredibly sloppy. An elementary schooler could've done a better job.
When he pulled at the fishing line, it chafed against the holes he'd made in my skin. The wound grew more itchy.
An unbearable itchiness. An itchiness that seemed to seethe up from inside me.
Itchy. Itchy. So itchy.
I wanted to scratch it. If he'd let me, I'd be happy to die.
The ache and the itchiness subsided minutely. But it didn't mean they had gone away completely.
Now, even as I walked through the neighborhood of Shinsen, itchiness in the depths of my body, and the sensation of something foreign in my abdomen, and a pain like having fine needle plunging in and out all over my body:
They stayed behind in me as markedly as a tumor, continuing to psychologically torment me.
A dark road, with few people on it, located away from the heart of the city.
As I walked down it, I spotted a human figure coming my way. Since the road was narrow, we would have to angle ourselves sideways to pass one another.
But I went cold when I saw the appearance of the figure walking toward me. It was that Darth Spider man again.
We crossed paths. Darth Spider displayed no particular reaction.
My heart went into a tumult. An emotion resembling obsession rose at the back of my brain.
A nasty old asshole had been hitting on my woman. It pissed me off. I wanted to kill him.
That feeling, truly coming out of left field, drove me into motion.
The face of "my woman" was vague in my memory. I couldn't recall her clearly. It was doubtful that she even existed in the first place.
Despite that, the face of the "nasty old asshole who'd been hitting on my woman" appeared vividly at the back of my mind.
I'd seen that face before. He was the victim of the "staking" incident.
And in front of my eyes was the victim who'd died there. I was tightly clenching the aging man's neck.
His body convulsed violently, and bubbles frothed from his mouth, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
I went faintly cold, tasting the sensation of someone's life disappearing in my own hands.
At last, the man's body stopped moving.
After confirming this, I--Komaeda, who'd carried out the actual homicide in this case-- I took my hands off his neck, kicked his fallen corpse once in the side, and began to make my departure.
Staking Victim: "Aaah...."
Hearing a voice, I turned around to look, and the man who should've been dead had risen, the whites of his eyes showing. His hands reached for me.
With a shriek, I punched him down. But though his movements themselves were sluggish, he kept rising, without fail. I seized his neck again.
In the same way as before, more powerfully than before, putting my whole body and spirit into it, I strangled him as hard as I could. With enough strength to snap the bones in his neck.
He soon stopped moving again. This time, I put my ear to his mouth, making sure he wasn't breathing, then let go of him. For some time, I watched over him.
His expression itself remained absolutely unchanged; he had the face of one who was dead. Yet he rose and approached me.
As I started to retreat, terrified, my foot trod on something.
When I looked down at my foot with a start, a huge number of cross-shaped stakes were scattered across the roadway.
A phrase from one of Phantasm's songs played at the back of my brain. "Strike the stake, strike the stake"
I had to drive a stake into the monster in front of me, and stop him from moving. If not, I'd be in trouble.
Controlled by that sense of danger, I hurled the rising man back against the wall. And picked up a stake.
Although the pain from it, and the sensation of an object in my stomach, kept on torturing my nerves to their very limit.
There were two human forms in my field of sight. They watched me steadily, with bated breath. One was Darth Spider.
The other was Hazuki Shino. Her uniform wasn't stained by blood now, and so I soon figured out that this wasn't the "pregnant man" incident, but instead something taking place at a different time.
I had been made to lie in bed. The needle for an IV drip was stuck in my arm.
But it wasn't as if anything were flowing into me. The liquid pouring down the IV tube was flowing backwards.
Blood.
A terribly grungy-looking bucket was the only thing at the end of the tube. Blood filled it to the brim.
Into it fell one drop, then another drop, of the blood dripping from the tube.
My head went blank. I was outstandingly dizzy.
That pleasant feeling, like my consciousness were about to go off into the distance, mingled with the ongoing pain left behind in me from the "pregnant man." And I was overcome by an amazingly peculiar sensation.
As if they were showing off to me, Darth Spider and Hazuki Shino embraced each other gently, like lovers, supporting one another. Hazuki had a blissful look on her face.
I couldn't comprehend how she could make a face like that, right in the middle of creating the dessicated corpse from the "Vampyre" case.
But before I could think about why I had trouble understanding it, the pain turned severe, and my throat became incredibly dry, and my sight steadily went dark.
I was being forced to vicariously experience the sequence of "New-Gen" murders. The pain and fear from each one of them. I was being forced to taste it.
If so, then there were still three remaining. Becoming aware of that, I despaired.
"Doctor."
"Dr. Takashina."
"If possible, I'd like to ask your advice about something." "We'll catch people's eye out here, so come this way."
I shouted "Don't go" in my heart, but of course my voice didn't reach him.
I--Dr. Takashina--followed her without harboring any suspicions whatsoever.
While I stood there in startlement, he pushed something like gauze over my mouth. I then lost consciousness.
SFX: The sound is that of a electric surgical saw, like one that might be used for cutting bone.
It wasn't just vibrating. It was being whittled away. I felt that sensation distinctly.
A number of lights, like a gathering of eyes, hung down from the ceiling. Shining brilliantly, they illuminated my face.
"Doctor, I've removed your cranium." "Your dura mater is so very lovely, Doctor."Hazuki said in a tone of rhapsody, then used a pair of scissors to cut away the tough membrane covering my brain.
Feeling it directly as it happened, I was entrapped in an impatient, sickened frame of mind.
I--rather, Dr. Takashina--hadn't known that Hazuki was capable of performing surgery, not to mention open-brain surgery. That was why astonishment came first, followed by my noticing that anesthesia kept my body from moving.
Hazuki wasn't the only one in the operating room. The man with the black thing on his head--Darth Spider--was there, too. He stood there, immobile, without saying a word.
"There are examples of human beings who have lived for over a week, despite being braindead, and without the help of artificial respiration. Did you know?"Smiling gently, Hazuki murmured something strange by my ear.
"In other words, doesn't that mean one can continue living for some time, even 'without a brain'?" "I do wonder how long you'll be able to live, Doctor...."I shuddered. An unknown terror roiled through me.
Hazuki held a spoon up before my eyes. The spoon soon left my field of sight.
"May the divine light save you, Dr. Takashina...."
The sense of something entering and moving around in there. There was no pain. Even so, it was more than enough to repulse me and terrify me.
SFX: SPLAT
Hazuki shook something like a lump of gel down on a tray set nearby me.
I glanced to see what it was, moving my eyes alone.
A clean pinkish hue. But its shape was smashed. Almost like salmon roe.
Once I understood it was part of my own brain, my dread reached the melting point. I begged her to stop.
"Haa, haa.... Salvation...."But Hazuki's hand didn't stop moving.
On the contrary, her expression shifted to one of esctasy, and her cheeks flushed as she recklessly dug deeper into my--into Dr. Takashina's--brain.
SFX: SPLAT
Suddenly I was having so much fun, I wanted to burst out laughing.
SFX: SPLAT
Suddenly I was filled with a horrible hatred.
SFX: SPLAT
Suddenly I felt blissful.
SFX: SPLAT
Suddenly a fierce lust surged up in me, and my chest tightened ardently.
They dwelt separately from my heart, my soul, the consciousness known as me, thrusting at me the ambiguity of my own existence.
As my psyche went to shreds via this mental rape, which would ultimately lead to the denial of my existence, I found myself walking under a railroad overpass.
Taking the order into consideration, this time it would be the "delicious hand"....
As expected, my body had become female. I was awfully hungry. Maybe the victim had been on a diet or something.
I crossed paths with the Darth Spider man again.
He appeared and disappeared when I least expected it. Given how much his appearance made him stand out, why hadn't the police or the media picked up on any information about him?
"That sure looks tasty."Darth Spider spoke for the first time. He pointed at my right hand as he said it. A surreal spectacle.
For some reason, it was holding five unwrapped skewers of chicken. Each skewer was sticking out from between the fingers of my closed fist.
Warm-looking steam. The juicy scent of cooked meat.
It stimulated my appetite. My mouth watered. Unable to take it for another second, I bit in.
An intense pain bolted through my fingers. But I didn't stop chewing.
It was the first time I'd ever eaten such delicious skewered chicken.
Lots of juice poured out of the meat, splashing to the ground.
Delicious. So delicious, I thought I'd die.
I polished off the five chicken skewers in the blink of an eye.
Without my noticing it, Darth Spider had disappeared. But I didn't give a damn about such a weird guy.
I wanted to eat more. My stomach sought more food.
The fingers of my right hand throbbed with pain, but my appetite far surpassed it.
I looked back at my hand. I hadn't just been holding skewered chicken.
When had I obtained it, and how long had I been carrying it?
That, too, stopped mattering in the face of my hunger.
I sank my teeth into the meat with all my might.
Excruciating pain.
I tore it apart with my teeth.
I masticated it.
I tasted it.
I swallowed it. It was a soft and fairly fatty meat. I bit further into it.
Both my hand and the area around my mouth had gone slick with lard, but I didn't let it bother me. This was a deliciousness I'd never experienced before.
I bit the meat off the bone. Fat spread in my mouth, seeping in, like it was melting, leaving behind a unique aftertaste.
It hurt. For some reason, it hurt so bad, I thought I'd die. But I kept chewing.
Compared to the size of the bone, there wasn't very much of the meat itself. I'd soon devoured all of it.
At the end, I licked up the thin scraps of flesh just barely clinging to the bone, savoring even the bone's taste, almost sucking at it.
I gave them a good gnawing. Pain so intense I almost crumpled in place ran through me, and with tears streaming down my face, I lapped up the juice seeping pleasantly out from within the bones.
I ripped one of the bones off, and while collapsing in place from how the stimulation of it seared me, I rolled it around in my mouth. Crunch crunch. Munch munch.
When I swallowed it, it got trapped in my throat, and I couldn't breathe. I unconsciously began to swing my legs around, kicking out wildly.
But without my taking heed of it, a cord had been wound around my ankles, and I couldn't move freely.
Darth Spider stood before me.
As I writhed, the exposed bones of my right hand struck the ground, and the vibrations from it sent pain spreading through my whole body, like waves on water.
As I walked, I leaned on the shoulder of a thuggish guy with his face pummeled to a pulp, looking like he was about to cry.
The three of them were in an awful state, myself included. Their clothes were drenched in blood, and their faces had puffed up, and they'd chipped a number of teeth.
The one who had done this was probably.... me. They were the trio of thugs who'd picked a fight with me. And after this, they would have their torsos "torn apart," and would die.
Again, the Darth Spider man stood at the end of their path.
DQN A: "Hey, you prick, what the fuck was that all about!?"
The guy who was lending me his shoulder yelled at Darth Spider. But with his face looking the way it was, his intimidation factor pretty much dropped by half.
DQN A: "What the hell was that Nishijou motherfucker...."
DQN A: "He was like a frigging monster...."
"So he beat you at your own game, and you ran away, huh. How lame." DQN C: "Anyway, just give us the money...."
"Money?" DQN C: "Don't screw with us, c'mon....!"
DQN C: "You said it yourself, dickhead, that you'd pay us if we gave Nishijou a working over!"
One of them seized at Darth Spider. Grabbing him by the collar, he heaved him up and smacked the black helmet.
DQN C: "You set us up for something pretty fucked up back there. Don't you be lookin' down on us....! Take it off, take it the fuck off!"
He forced the helmet to come off.
He was Hazuki Shino's accomplice. So he'd been the other New-Gen criminal....
Suwa rammed a knee into the belly of the guy who was making a grab for him. The polish evident in how he carried himself set him utterly apart from the thugs and their violence.
SFX: THUMP
The ground shook slightly.
DQN C: "Wh, what was that....?"
SFX: THUMP
I felt a prescence. At Suwa's back. Immersed in darkness, deep in the narrow alley.
Something was there. Moreover, it prompted me to imagine it as being of abnormal size. In addition, it let out an uncanny growl.
Though we couldn't see it, the vivid bloodlust emitted by that monster made all three of our hearts wither utterly.
SFX: THUMP
Its brown skin glistened wetly, and its colossal head sat low upon its shoulders. Its red eyes glinted fiercely, and its mouth was torn wide across its face on either side, and its wrists were as thick around as logs.
That bipedal monster came up to Suwa's side, then opened its mouth all the way. Its rows of sharp fangs shone, reflecting the light of the street lamps.
Its roar was as low as a growl, and put greater fear in me than any beast I'd heard before in my life.
It had the ferocity to make those who heard it quiver down to their very souls.
DQN A: "Wh, what is this...."
Suwa alone appeared completely unbothered by this monster's appearance. On the contrary, he touched the monster's leg with apparent satisfaction, stroking it.
"This is one of the aliens from it." 
I tried to run. There was no way I could escape.
I tried to call for help. There was no one in the area.
An overwhelming power discrepancy. The difference in our latent potential as species was much too great.
With the beast before us, we three were all too helpless. For the first time in our lives, we experienced heartfelt fear.
When people end up like that, they fall silent, shrink back, become unable to move so much as a single finger.
The monster let out one breath. And it swung down its log-like arms.
DQN C: "Ugehgogoaaaaahh!"
Suwa's gaze penetrated me. I awoke to the fact that he was the one setting this alien to work.
I told myself this was a delusion, but it didn't do any good. Faced with absolute terror and overwhelming violence, I just sank down and pissed myself. Afterward, it was all I could do to look dazedly up at that monstrosity--
Three times? One time? Seven times?
Four times! Two times! Five times!
Human flesh is pretty damn tasty.
It hurts.
No more.
Dark Spider's get-up is surreal. A gag.
Well, how many times have I died? Who're you saying died? I'm not dead.
That monster is, like, straight out of a horror movie. But Suwa said the monster came from "Spark Wars." Yeah, what about it?
Human flesh is pretty damn tasty. The bones, too.
Why does Darth Spider wear black?
Hazuki Shino is hot stuff. But she's scary. She's crazy. That's what makes her a hottie.
If Darth Spider is made of bones, what's his meat?
How many times have I died for a gag? Wait, is it a gag or what?
Not passed away. Died.
Death. DEATH. death.
it's surreal. no more. look, bones.
i don't wanna die. black. i died.
