Amamiya Rin sheathed his blade and let out a long, slow breath.
His heart was still hammering in his chest. The muscles of his arms trembled faintly from the extreme exertion, and a phantom ringing had set up shop in his ears like tinnitus.
Several minutes passed before he felt like himself again.
Tomie's severed head had rolled to the floor, but that face — still locked in bestial savagery, bared fangs, eyes wrenched wide, crimson pupils fixed unblinking on Amamiya Rin's position — showed no intention of letting go. As if it meant to tear him apart with the sheer force of its gaze.
Even separated from her body, the primal ferocity had not fully gone out of her.
Amamiya Rin dropped the tachi, stepped forward, and reached down with both hands to lift Tomie's head. He brought his lips almost to the curve of her ear, adjusted his tone with deliberate care, and let his voice sink in, slow and low.
「Now. Listen to me.」
Warm breath brushed her earlobe.
「You can hear it already. You can hear my voice.」
Tomie's breathing stalled for an instant — despite the fact that her lungs were no longer in the same place as her head.
「Listen to this voice. This is my voice. Remember this voice. Remember — Amamiya Rin…」
His voice was like a rope lowered into deep, still water, feeling for something to catch — trying to hook the self that the berserk instinct had submerged.
Little by little, he coaxed. He searched for a gap in the familiarity forged during their exchange — those sword trajectories she had watched a thousand times, had even experienced firsthand, the near-instinctive recognition built up across long, tangled dreams.
He drew his own image, patiently, out from that region of her mind buried beneath the animal.
Tomie's eyes stayed wide — but deep in her pupils, that aggressive focal point began to blur and tremble, like the surface of still water broken by a stone, rippling out in confused rings.
「So then — who are you? Who is the person who lives and dies alongside Amamiya Rin? Who is the person closest to Amamiya Rin? Who is the person destined to share the rest of her life with Amamiya Rin? A bond that cannot be severed. A curse that cannot be erased. Two people tied together by such a connection — one is me, named Amamiya Rin. And the other — who is she?」
Tomie's breathing became heavy and uneven, broken by something like the halting effort of difficult thought.
In her wide-open eyes, the animal cloudiness was being stirred by something far more complicated.
「Think. Remember. Push through the fog. Remember who you truly are. Recall your name — Kawakami Tomie!」
A few seconds of silence.
「…You are so unbelievably annoying! You — you, you!」
The muscles of Tomie's face began to twitch faintly. The distorted contours drew back, little by little. The fangs slowly retracted. The red threads drained from the whites of her eyes.
「Put me back together this instant! I look absolutely hideous like this!」
She blinked. When her eyes opened again, they were brimming with the familiar arrogance.
Only then did Amamiya Rin exhale.
He placed Tomie's head back onto her headless neck. The moment the two surfaces met, the flesh began to writhe and knit together.
Within a few seconds the neck was whole again, leaving behind only a faint red ring that was nearly invisible — and that too faded almost immediately.
Tomie raised a hand and felt her neck — intact, undamaged — then grabbed Amamiya Rin's arm and hauled herself to her feet. She rolled her neck left and right, rotated her shoulders and arms, satisfying herself that her body had fully returned.
「How do you feel?」
Amamiya Rin let her grip him, waiting until she had finished moving before he spoke.
「How do you think?」
Tomie gave him a look, released his arm, and turned to run her fingers through her long hair, which had tangled and knotted in the fight.
「Getting your head cut off is not a pleasant experience, I assure you. Everything went dizzy, my field of vision started spinning randomly, and I couldn't even manage a decent scream when I wanted to curse you out.」
She worked through the tangles and crossed her arms, her expression settling into something slightly more serious.
「But your hypothesis was correct. It was indeed a problem of cognition.」
She paused, as if organizing her thoughts, recalling the experience of consciousness rising and falling.
From being hypnotized, to sinking into sleep, to the self being set loose, to a slow awakening.
Throughout that process, Tomie had perceived a second personality within her mind.
It was not anything deeply hidden. It was simply her own knowledge and impression of vampires — and when she had fallen dormant, that impression and that knowledge had grown active, spawning the conviction that she herself was a vampire.
「Killing, drinking blood, bathing in blood, staying forever young — that impression fused with my consciousness and suddenly came to life, displacing my original self and taking command of this body. Then, when you severed my head and performed the awakening hypnosis on me, the small fragment of my true self buried within that consciousness — mostly composed of bloodthirsty, frenzied instinct — began to wake, slowly remembering what kind of person I actually am, giving the berserk vampire a name: Kawakami Tomie.」
Tomie's account aligned almost perfectly with Amamiya Rin's analysis.
「Same as my analysis. Just as I thought…」
Amamiya Rin murmured to himself.
There were countless iterations of the vampire myth, but the vampire Tomie had become was undeniably rooted in the underlying logic of Junji Ito's worldview…
No. Not just Junji Ito's worldview — the underlying logic of J-horror itself.
Just as with the Ikiryo — many of the yokai in Japanese horror were born from living humans. Even without death, extreme emotions like deep resentment could transform a person into a monster. As a Japanese horror manga artist, Junji Ito's creative work naturally carried that same understanding.
「Extreme emotion… a distorted self-perception… and perhaps the collective impression projected onto a person by others around them…」
Amamiya Rin muttered, his thoughts racing. He had already worked out the underlying mechanics of how kaidan were constructed — and now faint sparks of inspiration were beginning to kindle.
Perhaps… just perhaps… following this thread, he might be able to create a kaidan — or rather, become the kind of benign spirit that took the form of a beautiful white-clad youth — and do so while remaining among the living.
The idea was audacious to the point of recklessness, and laced with unknown risks — yet it was not without a certain feasibility.
But… to be thinking about all this now was getting a little ahead of himself.
He pushed the churning thoughts back down and returned his attention to what was in front of him.
「Tomie. How are you feeling right now? What's the status of that vampire power of yours?」
Amamiya Rin looked up and pressed her for an answer.
「Hehehehehe!」
The corners of Tomie's mouth curled up irrepressibly, sketching a smile laced with a trace of wild madness. Those beautiful eyes were blazing with an almost frightening brilliance, as if fire burned deep in her pupils, and her posture shifted without her noticing into something strange and imperious. She declared in a high, elated voice:
「Cows eat grass, Tomie eats steak, and I eat Tomie — to feast upon Tomie is the mark of the true Kawakami Tomie!」
「So you've already taken command of that power?」
Her proclamation was a little disconnected — but Amamiya Rin could hear the meaning beneath the words.
Become a vampire. Feed on other Tomies. Devour all of them. Become the one and only Kawakami Tomie.
Could it be… that from the very beginning, Tomie had been plotting this — concealing it the entire time through Hypnosis suggestion techniques, showing the other Tomies only what she wanted them to see on the surface?
「Exactly. The moment the vampire personality gained the awareness that it was Kawakami Tomie, it was immediately assimilated by me. From now on, Kawakami Tomie is the vampire, and the vampire is Kawakami Tomie. All I have to do is shift my intention, and I can become the vampire at will. And what's more…」
Her skin lost its color at a visible speed, turning cold and pale as fine porcelain.
Her neatly trimmed nails lengthened and sharpened without a sound, catching the dim light with a metallic gleam.
The line of her jaw stretched slightly, her cheekbones became more pronounced, and the whole structure of her skull took on a subtle, predatory quality — trending, faintly, toward the angular ferocity of a bat.
At the same time, the two canine teeth of her upper jaw pierced through the flesh of her lips, baring their white, sharp tips.
The vampire's appearance was identical to what it had been before.
But it was still changing.
Tomie closed her eyes, her brow furrowing slightly as if focusing — and those inhuman features began to recede one by one.
The prominent cheekbones slowly drew back. The elongated jaw gradually contracted, returning to its original elegant, refined curve. Of all the vampire's hallmarks, only the sharp fangs remained.
She opened her eyes. Deep in her pupils, a pale gold threaded through with the color of blood — wild and strange and utterly unashamed of it.
「That's more like it. A bat face? Far too ugly. It doesn't meet my aesthetic standards. A vampire named Kawakami Tomie should look exactly like this.」
Amamiya Rin was silent for a few seconds, then said with some surprise: 「So… you used your own self-image to forcibly reshape and fix the vampire's form? You made the vampire look the way you think it should look?」
Was that even possible?
No — he shouldn't phrase it that way. The right phrasing was: of course that was possible.
Amamiya Rin felt his earlier analysis and conclusions become even more solidly confirmed.
「Precisely.」
Tomie laughed — that sinister, beautiful face full of imperious pride.
「If the underlying logic of becoming a vampire is cognition, then why should Elizabeth Báthory's impression and my own impression be able to turn me into a bat-monster — but I can't turn the bat-monster into the kind of vampire I want? I believe my vampire form should be this — powerful, beautiful, dangerous, and utterly one of a kind. Therefore, it shall be exactly that.」
Arrogant and domineering, and entirely genuine. The original Kawakami Tomie had always been like this.
But the Kawakami Tomie of today had something extra — a wild edge born of power. The madness that comes from strength.
「Leaving aside the appearance for a moment — what about her abilities?」
That sort of thing was simply not what Amamiya Rin cared about.
Power was what mattered. Appearance? Form is emptiness, emptiness is form — he had understood this long ago. The pity was that the Tomies hadn't grasped it yet, and didn't want to. Because if they truly did, they would no longer be Kawakami Tomie — and he would no longer need to worry about being assimilated and overwritten by them.
「You are, without question, the most boring person alive.」
Tomie tilted the corner of her eye upward and regarded Amamiya Rin with clear displeasure.
They had been together long enough that — bluntly speaking — she knew exactly what he was going to do before he moved. Naturally, she could read his thoughts just as easily.
「Strength is approximately five times my baseline. My hearing has sharpened as well. My skin can absorb blood as nourishment, reinforcing my life force.」
Displeasure aside, Tomie went ahead and laid out her abilities.
「That doesn't sound like much of an improvement, honestly.」
Upon hearing this, Amamiya Rin made no effort to hide his disappointment.
The strength boost was decent enough — but with the pressurized training gym available, that kind of improvement barely registered anymore. Flesh-Mod Tomie's strength hadn't quite hit five times a normal Tomie's either, but she was close.
As for hearing — perception was already his strong suit. Enhanced hearing was just gilding the lily.
Absorbing blood as nourishment to reinforce life force? Tomie had always been capable of that — she could even parasitize a host body, latch onto a target, and indirectly drain their life force, sucking them down to a desiccated husk.
Wait. If that was the case — had Tomie always been a blood-type creature to begin with?
「It is not the same thing!」
Tomie objected immediately. She absolutely refused to look like a fool who had gone through enormous effort for nothing in Amamiya Rin's eyes.
「I can control blood now! Yes — absorption is a form of control, but I can push it further. I can actively direct the circulation of blood within my own body. For instance — like this!」
Before the words had even finished, Tomie's right leg snapped forward.
「Boom!」
The floor beneath her foot let out a dull, heavy crack. Her figure blurred for an instant, and in the blink of an eye she had vanished from her spot and reappeared directly behind Amamiya Rin.
The speed was stunning. Not quite at the Slit-Mouthed Woman's level — but it already exceeded Amamiya Rin's reaction speed in his normal state.
「Do you see? I can accelerate the blood flow to specific areas, directing concentrated blood to targeted parts of my body to temporarily spike their explosive output — like injecting ultra-high-octane fuel into an engine in an instant. It doubles localized strength, and the neural reaction speed of the brain can also break past the human ceiling. And this is only the first attempt. The more I train, the more precise my control becomes, and I'll be able to do far more with it.」
Tomie turned around, arms crossed over her chest, chin lifted.
Amamiya Rin gave a slight nod.
When it came down to it, this was still straightforward physical enhancement — no development in a supernatural direction.
A pure power-type Tomie — who could possibly compete with Flesh-Mod Tomie on those terms?
That was what he thought privately. But outwardly, Amamiya Rin made no move to dampen Tomie's enthusiasm. He gave her honest, positive acknowledgment.
In the Dream World, time surged at a rate entirely unlike the waking world.
Day after day, year after year — Amamiya Rin's life was soaked in sweat and the unending rhythm of strikes.
Straight punches, hooks, uppercuts. Probing, pressing, countering.
Tens of thousands of repetitions and live exchanges, until every punch was pure instinct, honing his boxing to professional grade.
He did not neglect his swordsmanship either.
Swordsmanship was the core. Between empty-hand and armed combat lay a mountain's worth of difference — the boxing was only for those moments when he had no weapon in hand.
While Amamiya Rin refined his techniques, the various Tomies were each pushing deep into their own domains.
One group of Tomies plunged into the vast ocean of the biological sciences. The deepest knowledge was locked away in laboratories, academic papers, and the spoken words of professors.
But medicine, cell biology, molecular biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, bioengineering — the body of knowledge in each of these fields was enormous and dauntingly complex. Even the textbooks within their reach held enough material to occupy decades of serious study.
And in year after year of research, they did precisely that — gradually deepening their understanding of cells, and sharpening the precision of their control over the body's division.
Blood-Clan Tomie, in order to deepen her command over blood, joined the study group as well. The group's research agenda also included the alchemical system of Paracelsus — and that line of inquiry had begun to bear fruit.
A separate group of Tomies kept company with machinery and chemical formulas. In Armaments Tomie's view, the human body had its limits — no matter how much you polished it, it could never match steel that had been forged through a thousand trials.
Flesh-Mod Tomie's strength was formidable, certainly — but an exoskeleton power armor would be stronger without question, and the destructive output of firearms and artillery would always exceed martial arts.
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