Amamiya Rin led Tomie away from the area around the boxing gym, threading through several streets where the lampposts were flickering on one by one, until they reached his own studio apartment.
「Sit.」
He gestured for Tomie to take the sofa, then pulled open a drawer and retrieved the pocket watch he kept there for regular use. He settled into the seat diagonally across from her and began working through the standard hypnotic induction procedure.
His voice was steady, each step clear and deliberate. With the slow pendulum swing of the watch and carefully measured words, he guided Tomie into a hypnotic state with practiced ease.
The focus drained out of Tomie's eyes. Her gaze grew hazy and soft, her eyelids sinking lower and lower, until at last they closed entirely. Her head tilted back to rest against the sofa, as though she had simply fallen asleep.
Amamiya Rin watched her breathing gradually slow and deepen into a steady, even rhythm. Satisfied that she had crossed the threshold into deep hypnosis, he moved immediately to the next phase.
「Now.」
His voice dropped lower, smoother — warm and unhurried, like a stream winding over rounded stones in a mountain valley.
「I want you to slowly… let go of everything in your mind. What happened, what you thought about, what you meant to do… all of it, let it go… Imagine a blackboard covered in writing, and you're wiping it clean, stroke by stroke, left to right, top to bottom… the letters fading, disappearing. Until finally, not a single word remains — just a clean, empty darkness…」
The fingers Tomie had resting on the sofa arm — slightly curled before — slowly unclenched. Her fingertips went limp and fell.
Her whole body sank deeper into the cushions, the full weight of her neck resting against the backrest, chin tilted gently upward, the elegant line of her throat exposed.
「Your mind is growing emptier and emptier, lighter and lighter…」
Amamiya Rin continued guiding her, his pace neither rushed nor dragging.
「No thoughts at all now. Comfortable. Quiet… Like a newborn child — you don't need to think about anything, you don't need to understand anything…」
The faint trace of haughtiness that always lived somewhere in Tomie's expression — so habitual it was almost invisible — dissolved completely. Her face became something rarely seen: blank, still, almost fragile.
Amamiya Rin let his voice go softer still, until it was barely more than a murmur of breath, like humming a lullaby with no melody.
「Hungry, so you cry. Tired, so you sleep. Uncomfortable, so you squirm… Every response belongs to the body's most primal feeling, its most immediate impulse… That's right — no thinking, no choosing. Let the body decide what it wants to do…」
At that moment, a faint whimper rose from deep in Tomie's throat — the kind of unconscious murmur that escapes someone in the middle of sleep.
Her cheek drifted slightly to the right, and a few strands of dark hair slipped down across her face.
「Abandon your reason. Surrender everything to instinct. Whatever you want to do — do it… Let your body follow that feeling wherever it leads…」
Tomie's lips parted the barest fraction — as though she had tasted something, or perhaps they were simply dry.
The rise and fall of her chest seemed, perhaps, a fraction deeper than a moment ago. But the change was so slight it was almost imperceptible.
Amamiya Rin drew a slow breath and spoke the final invitation in a clear, unhurried tone.
「Let this feeling… take complete control of your body. No thinking. Hand everything over to it. It is you, and you are it.」
The last word faded. Silence filled the room.
Tomie lay exactly as before, motionless.
But in the air, something had shifted — a restlessness entirely unlike the calm of a moment ago had begun to spread, slow and wordless.
On the sofa, Tomie's body was changing in ways the eye could just barely follow.
With each rise and fall of her chest, it was as though some sleeping beast inside her was stirring awake.
Her lips parted slightly. Between those rows of neat, white teeth, the two upper canines were lengthening in utter silence — pressing through the soft flesh of her lower lip, drawing a tiny bead of blood. She didn't notice. Unconsciously, her tongue swept it away.
That faint trace of blood in the air acted like a switch being thrown.
「Ngh… hh—」
A low, hoarse rasp clawed its way up from deep in her throat — and Tomie's tightly shut eyes snapped open.
The eyes that had always held either coquettish beauty or imperious disdain were now flooded with something irrational — a wild, primal savagery.
Her pupils had contracted to needlepoints. Fine red threads were creeping across the whites. More unsettling still was the change in her face itself: the jaw seemed to have shifted forward slightly, her nostrils were flaring, and that breathtaking face was twisting — distorting toward something vicious, something bat-like.
The neatly trimmed, rounded nails had begun to grow from the edge of the nail beds at a speed that defied all reason, sharpening, curving, becoming ten gleaming hooks.
This — Amamiya Rin had seen it before. On Kawahara Miyuki.
「Blood…」
Tomie's gaze locked onto Amamiya Rin as though drawn by a magnet, fixed and immovable.
More precisely: it was locked onto the pulse flickering beneath the skin at the side of his neck — that tempting vein, throbbing softly with every heartbeat.
「HRAAAAH——!」
With a shriek, Tomie exploded off the sofa. The movement was so sudden it left a blurred afterimage in the air — a speed that exceeded the absolute limit of human muscle.
Ten fingers curved like hooks, she tore through the air with a high, keening shriek and lunged directly for Amamiya Rin.
Tomie's charge was ferocious — but Amamiya Rin was not unprepared.
He had anticipated exactly this.
The instant Tomie's eyes flew open, every muscle in Amamiya Rin's body had already locked taut. When that inhuman shriek rang out, his right hand swept back and closed around the tachi leaning against the single-seat sofa beside him.
This blade was far better suited to his hand than that rough bone knife had ever been — and its quality was the same. When his thumb pressed lightly against the guard and eased it forward, a thread of cold light — clean and sharp as autumn water — came spilling out.
「Kshaaaang——!」
The bright, clean ring of steel filled the narrow living room. In that same instant, Amamiya Rin stepped forward with his right foot, dropped his center of gravity, left hand still braced firm on the end of the scabbard — not yet fully drawn — right hand driving the grip forward with full force. This was the opening stance of the Iaijutsu drawing slash.
「Simple Domain — Suigetsu!」
Cold light flared. The arc of the tachi leaving the scabbard and the momentum of that lunging step merged into one seamless motion. The blade swept upward in a diagonal slash — low-left to high-right — and the flash of steel reflected in Tomie's pupils.
But the vampirized Tomie, though stripped of all reason, possessed combat instincts that were terrifyingly sharp—
No. That wasn't the whole of it. It was more precise to say that Tomie knew Amamiya Rin's swordsmanship far too well. She might not have the deep muscle memory, but she didn't need to think to read the opening of any technique he used — it came to her before thought could form.
Against that fierce, lightning-fast drawing slash, Tomie — at the very last possible instant — crossed both wrists and pressed all ten pale, razor-sharp claws together like a shield, slamming them hard into the path of the blade.
「CLANG——!!」
A shriek of metal on metal exploded in the room, sparks spitting between claw and blade. Amamiya Rin felt a savage, enormous force travel up through the sword — the impact shuddering deep into the web of his grip.
A killing-blow Iai slash, stopped dead.
But Amamiya Rin had planned for this as well.
The essence of Iaijutsu was never just the first cut.
In the very moment the blade was checked — the two forces locked against each other — his left hand moved.
That left hand, which had been braced all along on the end of the scabbard, used the recoil generated by the body's forward drive and the blocked right-hand swing to swing the scabbard upward like a short baton — its hard tip driving with precision into the nerve bundle on the inner side of Tomie's raised wrist.
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🔥 New history: Uchiha Reborn in Jujutsu Kaisen: The System Thinks I'm in Konoha, but I'm Not
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