Amamiya Rin had no way of knowing about the lingering unease still coiled in Fujino Terumi's heart.
After all, even Fujino Terumi herself couldn't quite tell whether what she felt was anxiety born of stress, or something else entirely.
And Amamiya Rin was far too busy — how long had it been since his training retreat at Kikoku Temple? He couldn't say precisely, but it had been no more than half a month.
In the span of roughly ten days, he had already been swept up in a succession of incidents: the Vampire, the curse, the Apology Demon, the Slit-Mouthed Woman, the Ikiryo — one after another.
Of these, the only one that could genuinely be called resolved was Kawahara Miyuki's Vampire incident.
The rest were either unresolved threats still hanging over his head, or troubles that continued to fester and spread.
Faced with a burden this crushing, where would Amamiya Rin ever find the leisure to sit and chat with Fujino Terumi at a comfortable pace, or take the time to understand how she was feeling?
「Ugh…」
Another spasm of pain clenched through his stomach.
The thought of those troubles piled mountain-high, and the unknown threats lurking still in the dark beyond — the pressure of it all nearly took on a physical weight, squeezing down on Amamiya Rin's stomach.
For one fleeting moment, an unbearably tempting thought flickered through his mind.
To abandon everything in the waking world. To retreat entirely into the Dream World and simply live there.
But the thought had barely surfaced before a stronger tide of reason snuffed it out.
He only drew a long, slow breath — as if trying to displace every last pocket of oppression that had pooled in his chest — then let it out, and quietly dispelled that weak impulse from his mind.
After that, he picked up his phone, found Mamiya Yuka's number, and called.
「Amamiya-kun?」
The call connected almost before the first ring had finished — and from the receiver came Mamiya Yuka's voice at once, bright and full of energy.
The background was somewhat noisy; he could faintly make out the sound of passing cars and the blur of voices, as though she was out on the street or somewhere equally bustling.
「You finally called back.」
She spoke quickly, with a note of complaint, though mostly what came through was a sound of relief.
「I've called several times these past two days, you know — I was starting to think you'd gotten caught up in another one of those terrible incidents.」
「Just woke up. My sleep runs long — you should know that by now.」
Amamiya Rin kept it brief, skipped the pleasantries, and cut straight to the point.
「Anything you needed?」
「There is, actually! The follow-up on that dissolution incident from before — have you found out anything new? Kazumi's people are keeping it completely airtight, and no matter how much I wheedled and pestered, I couldn't get a single thing out of them. Witness interviews are restricted too. It's maddening.」
Mamiya Yuka said it in a rush, urgency plain in every word.
「I wouldn't know. Since leaving the hospital, I haven't had any contact with that matter. An incident at that scale — it's better left entirely in the hands of the police.」
Amamiya Rin's answer was clean and unhesitating, without a trace of wavering.
In truth, however, he was not entirely without contact.
Through the Tomie Network, he could confirm the situation regarding Aizawa Tomie.
During the hospital dissolution incident several days prior, Aizawa Tomie and Aizawa Yuuma had been taken into custody together by the police, and were being held to this day in a classified detention facility.
But there was one detail that sat with him in an odd, uncomfortable way.
Over these past several days, Aizawa Tomie's features had been undergoing a slow and irreversible transformation — gradually converging toward the standard Tomie template.
The process was not instantaneous; the traits of her juvenile form could still, for the moment, be distinguished from a Tomie at full maturity.
But if the police conducted a thorough investigation and cross-referenced her against their database, they would very quickly discover a striking resemblance between Aizawa Tomie and the Tomie individuals already on record.
What would happen then? Amamiya Rin couldn't predict it precisely.
But judging from how Japan's government had always regarded Tomie — with extreme wariness and a consistent pattern of handling — the most probable outcome was simply to expel her outright, much the same way Kayako treated Tomie: viewing her as something as loathsome and disposable as a cockroach.
「I see. I was hoping you'd have something more in-depth.」
The energy in Mamiya Yuka's voice dropped noticeably, weighted with undisguised disappointment.
「You'd be better off not getting yourself actively involved in this sort of thing.」
Amamiya Rin gave a quiet sigh. He knew Mamiya Yuka's curiosity and drive burned like wildfire — a simple warning from him was unlikely to make much difference — but that didn't mean the words didn't need saying.
「…Was there anything else?」
「Yes, yes! There's another thing — a very strange thing. Our magazine's editor-in-chief, Sayama, has suddenly gone missing!」
「Missing? That sounds like a matter for the police.」
Amamiya Rin raised an eyebrow and said it plainly.
「There's no way to file a report yet. Sayama is a healthy, able-bodied adult — the police won't open a missing persons case just because he's been out of contact for a dozen hours or so.」
Mamiya Yuka explained.
「Then what leads you to the conclusion that he's actually missing? Perhaps he's simply switched off his devices for a while and gone somewhere quiet — wanting some time to himself, temporarily cutting ties with the outside world. For people under heavy stress these days, going briefly off the grid isn't uncommon at all.」
Amamiya Rin raised the reasonable counterargument.
「That's impossible. This month's special issue is about to go to print, and Sayama is the primary person in charge of it. Right up until late the night before last, he was still working overtime at the editorial office. He's famously conscientious about his work — and there's been no word of any personal emergency or family crisis. For him to vanish at a critical juncture like this, dropping everything? It's completely out of character.」
Mamiya Yuka pushed back immediately.
「All right — even granting that the circumstances are suspicious, it still falls within the police's jurisdiction. You've told me about it, but I'm not sure what I'd be able to do.」
Amamiya Rin followed her logic through.
「It's not that simple, obviously. You know what our magazine covers, right? We specialize in urban legends and paranormal phenomena. I had a look — the material Sayama had been compiling for the feature is all drawn from real cases involving supernatural incidents, and most of them are disappearances. I think Sayama may have inadvertently made contact with one of those occult incidents, and been spirited away — what you'd call Kamikakushi.」
The term Kamikakushi — in folk tradition, the phenomenon of a person being silently taken away by gods, demons, or spirits, vanishing from the ordinary world without a trace.
Mamiya Yuka evidently believed that Sayama's disappearance was no ordinary matter, but something intimately connected with the supernatural.
「So, Amamiya-kun — would you look into it with me? I have a feeling there's something seriously wrong here. With your abilities and my wits—」
「No.」
Amamiya Rin cut her off. His voice wasn't loud, but it was uncommonly clear and decisive — leaving absolutely no room for negotiation.
He walked to the window and pulled back the curtains.
The morning light spilled in, and countless motes of dust danced through its brightness in erratic, swirling paths.
Amamiya Rin narrowed his eyes and exhaled a long breath out toward the window.
Honestly, as far as Mamiya Yuka's theory went — even if it turned out to be true, Amamiya Rin wouldn't find it the least bit surprising.
Or rather: it would be depressingly, excruciatingly normal.
In the world as it stood, this sort of thing was almost pitifully commonplace.
Folklorists, archaeologists, occultists, paranormal journalists — all of them belonged to high-risk professions with mortality rates that hovered somewhere around ninety-nine point nine percent. The editor-in-chief Mamiya Yuka had mentioned could be loosely classified as a paranormal journalist.
People like that — who spent their careers in sustained contact with the incomprehensible, who dug deep into the uncanny tales that ordinary people fled from — sooner or later, the curses turned back on them.
That kind of ending was almost an inevitability.
「Come to think of it, Mamiya — what's the mortality rate at your magazine? Or the disappearance rate, I suppose I should say?」
Amamiya Rin couldn't help but ask.
「Huh?」
Mamiya Yuka was thrown completely off balance.
From where she stood, the question was absurd on its face — this was a magazine office, not a police precinct or a school. What on earth would a magazine office have a mortality rate for?
If Amamiya Rin could have heard Mamiya Yuka's thoughts at that moment, he would have had a quick retort: even the mortality and disappearance rates at police precincts and schools couldn't hold a candle to an outfit like theirs.
That was simply the world they inhabited. That was how absurd it had become.
But Amamiya Rin understood Mamiya Yuka's bewilderment.
He also knew that for now, she couldn't quite understand why he would ask something that seemed so abrupt and out of place.
He didn't press the point any further. Instead, he shifted the subject himself.
Amamiya Rin pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and said with firm resolve: 「I have urgent matters on my hands at the moment. I can't get away.」
「Urgent matters? Oh — did something happen? Some kind of paranormal incident? Do you need my help?」
Mamiya Yuka's attention snapped to it immediately, and she pressed him with rapid questions.
「The Slit-Mouthed Woman — have you heard that name before?」
Amamiya Rin thought for a moment, then without concealing it, disclosed to Mamiya Yuka the urban legend he was currently investigating.
「The Slit-Mouthed Woman? Ask anyone else and you probably won't get much — but I know about her.」
Mamiya Yuka turned it over briefly, then said with evident enthusiasm:
「That urban legend that spread like wildfire more than a decade ago, right? Someone hiding their face under a scarf, asking people whether they were pretty — and if you gave the wrong answer, you'd be attacked with scissors… But wasn't there something later about it being a prank? Hadn't the police dealt with the culprits? Why are you suddenly asking about this?」
Quickly her tone shifted from reminiscence to something more probing.
She seemed to have worked it out — Amamiya Rin must have gotten involved in something related, or he wouldn't be asking out of nowhere.
「I encountered her last night,」 Amamiya Rin said calmly. 「Near Shimokitazawa.」
「…What?!」
Mamiya Yuka drew a sharp breath. 「Seriously? You ran into her? A living Slit-Mouthed Woman? No — the Slit-Mouthed Woman of legend? She actually exists? So the police report back then was fabricated?」
「I used the method from the old stories — the hair-wax incantation, repeated three times. She withdrew.」
Amamiya Rin omitted the gory details of the struggle that had come before and reported only the outcome.
「But I'm not certain the incantation was actually what worked, and I'm not certain what I encountered was truly the Slit-Mouthed Woman. There were similarities to the legend, but quite a few differences as well. I need more detailed material about what happened back then — do you have a way to get that?」
Mamiya Yuka answered without a moment's hesitation, her voice brimming with energy: 「Understood. I'll head back to the office shortly and go through the archives. Our magazine definitely has the relevant coverage and compiled materials from that period. Wait for me — once I've sorted through it, I'll send everything to you.」
「Then I'll leave it to you.」
Amamiya Rin said.
「Not a bother at all! If anything, being on the trail of two possible major paranormal incidents at once… it's…」
Mamiya Yuka trailed off, her tone suddenly complicated — a tangle of excitement and exasperation.
「…An embarrassment of riches! Ugh, damn it all!」
She wished she could split herself in two — one half staying at the office, working alongside her colleagues to dig deep into the paranormal truth that might be hiding behind Sayama's disappearance.
The other half flying immediately to Amamiya Rin's side, to personally take part in tracking and investigating the newly surfaced Slit-Mouthed Woman.
Unfortunately, she had no technique for splitting herself into copies.
And Amamiya Rin, who did possess such a technique, also refused to add more pressure to himself at a time like this.
Amamiya Rin ended the call. The spasming sensation in his stomach had grown more pronounced, and he pressed his palm against it firmly.
「That's what you get for sticking your nose in other people's business,」 Vampire Tomie said, watching him, and pursed her lips.
「Easy for you to say. Unless you want to spend forever running from everything inside the illusion of a dream — in this world, there will always be great terrors that have to be faced. The only difference is when and what form they take.」
Amamiya Rin said it with calm rationality.
Vampire Tomie shrugged, then climbed down from the bed as well and dressed.
「I'm heading back — there's still some equipment to assemble.」
Armaments Tomie did not continue arguing with Flesh-Mod Tomie. She dressed, cast a cool glance around the room at everyone present, dropped those words, and left alone.
「Rin — are you really not coming to train with me?」
Once Armaments Tomie had gone, Flesh-Mod Tomie also made to leave, but before she did, she looked toward Amamiya Rin with hopeful expectation.
Amamiya Rin declined, naturally.
Her gaze shifted to Vampire Tomie.
「What about you? What are your plans?」
Vampire Tomie stretched with a luxurious ease, her pale skin seeming almost to glow faintly in the morning light.
「Me? I should be heading back too.」
She wound a strand of hair around one finger, a glimmer of slyness flickering through those pale-gold eyes.
「I have a ranch out in the countryside that still needs tending to.」
She licked the corner of her lips.
「And I might as well check whether there are any unruly impostors in need of cleaning up.」
Amamiya Rin caught the meaning behind those words.
「Mind the boundaries,」 he said.
If Vampire Tomie used any excuse she liked to devour other Tomies, that would once again be a disaster.
For the sake of the greater enemy ahead, what he needed most right now was for the Tomies to stand united.
Competition was fine — inevitable, even — but competition could not be allowed to become slaughter.
「I know, I know~」
Vampire Tomie drew the syllables out, leaned in, and swiftly pressed her lips to Amamiya Rin's cheek — leaving behind a small, cool impression.
「Take care. Get in touch if anything comes up.」
And just like that, only Amamiya Rin remained in the room.
He washed up quickly, changed into casual clothes suited for easy movement, grabbed his phone and wallet, and headed out the door.
There was an internet café of decent size near the apartment. Amamiya Rin booked a private booth, and once the machine was running, typed in the URL Professor Matsuura had sent him.
The page loaded, and the design was unexpectedly plain — sparse, even. One might call it bare.
A white background. Standard black typeface. Not a single image, logo, or decorative element in sight.
At the top, a single line: 「Tomoyoshi Psychological Counseling Office.」 Below it, a bulleted list of services: stress relief, overcoming fear, habit correction, memory adjustment, potential development… The language was ordinary, even vague.
And yet — given the context of Professor Matsuura's carefully guarded, heavy-handed description — those perfectly mundane phrases now seemed to carry something wordless in the spaces between them.
Below that, the only contact information was a single email address.
Amamiya Rin considered for a moment, then chose a reason at random and submitted a booking request.
Sent. The wait for a reply: unknown.
____
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