「Tsk — it's just a few words. Come out for a moment. You can hear me perfectly well from the railing.」
Ishida Miwako outside pressed her, the impatience in her voice no longer particularly concealed.
「What — too grand to move for someone like me? Too much of a big star to oblige?」
Fujino Terumi paid no attention to the barbed words. She tilted her head and listened carefully, concentrating on the sound.
It was close. Far too close.
The quality of the voice — it didn't sound as though it were carrying up from the ground below. It sounded as though it were coming from somewhere high on the balcony itself.
A chill crept up her spine, colder than the night wind.
The fine hairs on the back of Fujino Terumi's neck rose. In the dim light her face had gone ghastly pale — the pale of a corpse, the near-rigid white of something no longer living.
「...I — I'm sorry.」
She drew a long breath, then pushed it slowly out. Fujino Terumi rubbed her own cheeks, steadying herself, and answered with careful composure, though the tail of her words carried a tremor she could not quite suppress.
「I'm really not feeling very well, Ishida-san. Could we be in touch tomorrow about whatever it is?」
「It'll only take a moment. I won't keep you long.」
The voice beyond the balcony refused to yield — and the more it refused, the more suspicious it became.
Fujino Terumi seized the curtain and hauled it shut.
「Why are you closing the curtain? Why are you shutting me out — Fujino Terumi! Do you look down on me? Is that it?」
The instant the curtain drew closed, the voice shot upward, turning raw and furious.
Fujino Terumi did not answer. She simply kept backing away, putting more and more distance between herself and the balcony.
「Come out! Fujino Terumi!」
The shrill voice seemed to press itself flat against the glass, erupting against the pane — shrill and frantic, all pretence abandoned now.
「Come out! Come out! Come out! Come out right now!」
The cries grew more urgent, more unhinged, each one stacked upon the last, hammering against the glass door, hammering against Fujino Terumi's nerves.
「Fujino Terumi! How much longer do you think you can hide? I have been here the whole time! I have been watching you the whole time!」
What was that thing?
Fujino Terumi had gone white, her breathing coming fast and shallow.
Could it be — could it be that the dread she had felt all these days had nothing to do with the Vampire? That it had been this creature, all along?
She took one step back, then another. Her heel caught the edge of the sofa and her balance gave way; she stumbled, and fell backward.
「Clatter!」
Knocked by the movement of her limbs, her phone tumbled and struck the floor with a sharp, clear crack — a sound that cut through the night like a shard of moonlight, snapping Fujino Terumi's gaze toward it.
The chaos in her mind went still.
Fujino Terumi's eyes lit up. She scrambled forward and snatched the phone from the floor.
Hands trembling, she scrolled through her contacts until she found the entry saved under 「Rin-kun」 — and pressed the call button without a moment's hesitation.
「Beep… beep…」
The waiting tone stretched out, agonisingly slow.
The screaming from beyond the balcony was growing wilder, growing closer — as though at any second the thing would come crashing through the door.
「Pick up… please pick up… Rin-kun, I'm begging you…」
Fujino Terumi bit down on her lower lip, clutching the phone hard enough to whiten her knuckles, on the verge of tears.
——
A school. A teaching block. A dim and silent corridor.
The figure of the Slit-Mouthed Woman seeped out of the shadows pooled against the wall like ink bleeding through paper, appearing without a sound directly behind Sekiguchi and Ando.
It was not until the children huddled inside the storage room had their pupils dilate and their faces contort with terror that the two teachers understood something dreadful was close behind them.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman raised her enormous scissors. The blades caught the pale spill of a dying torch — cold, hard metal, a gleam like frost on iron — their sharpened tips aimed at the back of Sekiguchi's neck.
Every hair on the back of Sekiguchi's neck stood up at once. An icy premonition of death closed around his throat, squeezing out his breath; he could almost feel the point of the blade about to pierce his skin, a phantom sting spreading through the flesh.
The scissors began to descend——
「Beep-beep-beep — beep-beep-beep —」
A sudden ringtone tore through the silence, reverberating down the dim corridor, jarringly, piercingly loud in the dead quiet.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman's movement stopped. She wrenched her head around, those eyes — brimming with venomous malice — nailing themselves to the source of the sound.
At the far end of the corridor, by the foot of the stairwell, a light had come on.
A man wearing a child's mask was down on one knee, his arm braced around something bulky and improvised — wound in coils of wire, it had the rough shape of a firearm — and its barrel was levelled in her direction.
Beside the man sat an open instrument case. Inside it: a car battery, and several cables running from the battery to the modified weapon cradled in his arms.
A woman, athletic in build and likewise masked, stood at his side with her arms folded across her chest, poised like a guard.
And at the edge of the scene, a bespectacled boy who looked no older than fifteen was craning his neck forward, trying to see past them and make out what was happening at the storage room end of the corridor.
「Of all the moments for this to happen… Is this some kind of classic movie cliché?」
Amamiya Rin glanced down at the pocket that was glowing and ringing.
Or rather — at the phone inside that pocket.
A flicker of wry absurdity passed through Amamiya Rin's mind.
The critical moment — an unexpected call — the operative blown because the enemy heard the ringtone. A classic scene straight out of the movies, and it had just happened to him.
Amamiya Rin exhaled quietly — and without a moment's hesitation, squeezed the trigger.
「Bang!」
The thunderclap of the shot tore the silence apart in an instant.
The electromagnetic coil drove the metal slug forward, trailing a scorching wake of displaced air — splitting the darkness of the corridor, streaking straight for the Slit-Mouthed Woman's skull.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman's pupils snapped to pinpoints.
Fast — the bullet moved almost too fast to trace!
But she was faster.
Before the shriek of the round splitting air had even faded, the enormous scissors in the Slit-Mouthed Woman's hands had already blurred into a smear of shadow.
「Clang!!」
A shriek of metal on metal exploded through the corridor, and sparks burst outward in a brief, brilliant flash.
The metal slug aimed at her head had been deflected — precisely, cleanly — by the flat of the scissor blade. Twisted fragments of spent metal skimmed past the Slit-Mouthed Woman's face, scoring a shallow red line across her ashen skin.
Amamiya Rin's pupils contracted.
She had deflected the bullet with her bare hands — no, not bare hands: she had used the wide flat of the blade and reflexes that defied any human measure to block it. But still.
This was absurd.
The reaction time, the precision — it was as he had suspected. The last time they encountered the Slit-Mouthed Woman, she had been caught before she could bring her full strength to bear. This was her real power.
Even as the thought shot through him, Amamiya Rin did not hesitate for an instant. His left hand worked the bolt with rapid, practised speed, ejecting the hot spent casing; his right hand reached to the magazine at his hip and fed in a fresh round.
But in that fraction of a second spent reloading, the Slit-Mouthed Woman's gaze had already locked onto his body.
That face… that build… Even through the mask, those eyes — that silhouette — and the memory, seared into her to the bone, of being pierced by a bone blade, surfaced from somewhere deep inside her.
「It's… you…!」
A howl saturated with venom and savage fury erupted from beneath her scarf.
In that instant, the temperature of the air in the corridor seemed to plunge several degrees. A killing intent so dense it felt tangible — enough to make every hair stand on end — came flooding out like a physical force.
In the same moment, Sekiguchi and Ando, along with the children, felt the crushing pressure on them suddenly lift.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman had abandoned them — targets that had been within arm's reach. Her legs drove hard against the floor; her body launched forward like a shell from a cannon, carrying all of that consuming killing intent and malice, and she hurtled the full length of the corridor — straight for Amamiya Rin.
____
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