At that moment, the girl Kawahara Miyuki had dragged to the floor beside them stirred.
She slowly opened her eyes, blinking in brief confusion — and then she saw what lay before her: Amamiya Rin, pinning down a creature with the face of a bat.
It should have looked like a scene of a monster being vanquished. To the girl, it looked like something else entirely.
Amamiya Rin had his back to her. The back of his shirt was torn open in a great ragged gash, and the exposed skin beneath was streaked with blood. A brutal wound ran almost clean across the nape of his neck — and from within that wound, several small, fleshy nodules had pushed their way out.
Each nodule was no larger than an infant's fist. You could just barely make out the blurred suggestion of facial features on them — like unfinished heads — dangling there, swaying faintly with every movement Amamiya Rin made.
The girl's eyes went wide. Her mouth fell open. Before she could make a sound, her eyes rolled back, and she passed out again.
Amamiya Rin had no attention to spare for her.
Every scrap of his focus was consumed by holding Kawahara Miyuki down. He had nothing left over to deal with the Tomie embryos sprouting from his back.
Even so, under his suppression, Kawahara Miyuki's struggling gradually weakened.
The bat-like face dissolved back into her beautiful features, and the crimson in her eyes slowly faded.
Kawahara Miyuki lay on her back in the dust, her gaze drifting back into focus, a tangled, anguished expression settling across her face.
Sensing that she had recovered her senses, Amamiya Rin released her. He yanked the bone-knife from his left shoulder, reversed his grip, and flung it behind him in one clean motion.
The blade swept across the nape of his neck. A few soft sounds — and the nodules hanging from his back dropped away, hitting the dust-caked concrete floor.
The moment they landed, they began to scream. It was Kawakami Tomie's voice — all of them — shrieking and hurling a torrent of vicious, cutting words at Amamiya Rin.
Faced with these newborn Tomies, Amamiya Rin let out a tired sigh and opted for the simplest solution.
He opened his mouth. Cold light flickered, and dozens of tendrils shot out from within, their needle-tipped ends driving straight into the oral cavities of each tiny Tomie, connecting with their cranial nerves.
He folded them into the [Tomie Network]. Brute force. Problem solved.
He turned back to Kawahara Miyuki. In the short window he had given her, she had clearly pieced together enough to understand the situation. Amamiya Rin looked down at her from where he stood and asked, calm and even:
"Back with us? I'm hoping you're capable of a normal conversation now."
"I'm the one who committed all those murders… aren't I?"
Kawahara Miyuki's voice was lovely even now. The words, though, were soaked in bitterness. She phrased it like a question, but her tone made clear she already knew the answer.
"I didn't witness you killing anyone with my own eyes," Amamiya Rin said, his voice quiet and heavy, "but everything here points to you."
He let a trace of sorrow show in his gaze.
He didn't believe a twenty-year-old idol at the height of her fame would kill for blood out of some vanity-driven desire for eternal youth. In all likelihood, she had suffered psychic contamination — that kind of thing was far from rare in Junji Ito's world.
But regardless of contamination or not, the blood of innocent people stained Kawahara Miyuki's hands — her entire body, really.
"I'd been suspicious for a long time," she said. "My dressing room kept getting wrecked. A knife kept appearing in my bag out of nowhere. I always had this creeping feeling of being watched. But every time I asked anyone about it, they told me it was normal — that it was par for the course when you were an idol. I believed them, until that day…"
Kawahara Miyuki's face drained of color. Remorse spread across her features.
"I was passing through Shimokitazawa when this overwhelming feeling hit me. My vision went black. My mind went blank — like I'd fallen into a void, no sense of reality at all. When I came back to myself, I was standing in a dim alleyway. And I saw her. She was killing someone — peeling the skin off a woman, splitting her open. She had this hideous, savage face. She looked up at me and said her name was Hattori Erisa." Kawahara Miyuki's voice dropped to almost nothing. "That was my real name."
"I should have realized it then. I wasn't witnessing a murder. I was committing one. But I was so lost in that fog — I couldn't hold onto the memory of killing. My own mind had deceived me. I told myself I had only stumbled onto a crime scene."
Kawahara Miyuki murmured it like a prayer, afraid to draw too close to the truth — but the truth had come to stand before her anyway.
"What happened to you?" Amamiya Rin pressed. "Do you remember what you experienced in this building the very first time? That paranormal program — what exactly occurred?"
Kawahara Miyuki's gaze grew distant. She reached back through her memory and spoke quietly.
"That episode was a vampire special. The production team had found all of this somewhere — I don't know how. Even then, standing there, I felt like the figure in the painting… was looking at me."
Her eyes drifted across the Iron Maiden and the portrait hanging on the wall.
"After the shoot ended, I took that book home with me — I don't even know why, it was like something compelled me. I had it translated later. It was written in Latin. It was a diary belonging to the famous Blood Countess, Elizabeth Báthory — it contained the dark ritual she performed: bathing in the blood of young girls."
She shook her head hard, a look of bewildered helplessness crossing her face.
"After that, I can't remember clearly anymore. It was like one long, endless nightmare. For stretches of time, it felt like my body was being operated by something else."
"These production crews," Amamiya Rin murmured, unable to stop himself, "have a talent for stumbling onto exactly the things they should never touch."
Then, evenly: "Even so — whatever the circumstances, you have to answer for what you've done."
He held her gaze. Kawahara Miyuki held his in return. The eyes that had once blazed beneath stage lights were dark now, utterly without luster.
She pulled her lips into a bitter smile. Tears slipped soundlessly from the corners of her eyes.
"I know. From the moment I came back to myself, I knew it would end like this. Whatever you decide to do with me — I'll accept it."
Amamiya Rin folded his arms and considered.
Kawahara Miyuki was a victim too. Killing her outright wouldn't do — and folding her into the [Tomie Network] was equally out of the question. A case like this… it was best handed off to Indou Ranko's Police History Compilation Office.
His main body could handle the formal handoff. There would even be a reward in it.
"Stay here for now. Someone will come for you."
Decision made, Amamiya Rin stripped off Kawahara Miyuki's outer jacket, used it to bind her legs, then stood and pulled the portrait down from the wall. He called out toward where Hayashi Naoko had been hiding behind a load-bearing pillar.
"Ms. Hayashi Naoko, please come out. I need to speak with you."
His words echoed through the hollow floor and died there. No response came from where Hayashi Naoko was hiding. Amamiya Rin raised an eyebrow and had just started toward her when Kawahara Miyuki shuddered from head to toe, snapping her head up. Shock rang through her voice:
"Hayashi Naoko?"
Amamiya Rin looked back at her. "That's right. Your makeup artist. She witnessed one of your crime scenes. She's the one who brought me here."
"That's impossible!" Kawahara Miyuki cut him off. "She's been missing for two months. The day before she disappeared — that was one of the gaps. One of the stretches of time I can't remember."
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan ;)🔥👻
🔥 New history: Oshi No Ko: Co-starring with Kana Arima
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