Katsumi’s body fell backwards in shock. For a moment, she thought it had been something that Seiji did. It seemed impossible knowing him and his abilities. Then she saw him falling over as well from the attack. “Who… Where…”
The force of the attack did more to Takako than anything else. Like she had said before, the state of the body meant very little to her. She fell back against the ruins of the first floor of the school to get support. “To punch through even the reinforced uniform… Who was it?” Takako started to look around for the source.
However, despite the piercing shot through both of them, even Seiji returned to his feet. The bestial rage didn’t look to have softened in any meaningful way. He only looked more pissed off now. Which made Takako groan with some disappointment. It hit both of them, but she hoped that it had more stopping power to put him down so she could just easily finish him off. “Such a pain. You just won’t die.”
“…Yuki…”
“Still going on about that nonsense…” She pulled Katsumi’s body back up to confront Seiji once more. “I can’t believe a single person would put someone into such a blind rage. It’s like he’s immortal or some such stupid thing.”
“That’s a more accurate statement for yourself than him,” replied a voice to a question that was never asked.
Takako flipped Katsumi’s head around to hunt down the sound of the voice. She was on the search once more for the unknown interloper. “Who are you?”
“Not fond of things you can’t see or control?”
“There’s nothing I can’t.”
“I’m sensing fear in your voice.”
“I’m not afraid! There’s nothing that can be done to me.”
“Very true. From what I’ve seen. I can’t kill you as you are. So why are you afraid then?”
“I said I’m not! Get out here and I’ll show you who is!”
“Is it the unknown or the voices from the darkness? Does it make you feel like how you were before? Locked within your own mind.”
“Who the hell are you? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know more than you think. I know your story. After that, it just took a little thinking to figure you out. You seem complex, but you’re quite simple. You’re afraid of going back.”
“Shut up and get out here now!”
“You’re right. I do need to put an end to this.”
“Bold words. Think you can back—“ Suddenly, a large metal gauntlet appeared from nowhere hitting Katsumi’s face interrupting Takako’s taunting. She flew backwards from the force, but it didn’t last for long. Another appeared behind her hitting her back in the direction that she came from. “…the hell!”
Takako could barely keep up with what was happening. It was only three floating giant gauntlets half of the size of a human, but they were hitting her too fast to react and get her bearings. She had to take the pummeling until she figured out the speed of them. With time, she managed to slice through with her blades and break the cycle.
Already bloodied from Seiji’s fight, she barely looked any different, but the damage to Katsumi’s body was extensive. It was only thanks to her enhanced body from Yuki that she survived everything. Takako treated the body with no care or regard to safety.
No one had yet appeared on the battlefield. “Damn…still hiding…” Takako scanned the ruins of the first floor for anything.
“Just handling something.”
The voice came in the direction of Seiji, who she had forgotten about with the new threat. However, unlike before, he was neither fuming or even standing. In fact, most of the talismans that had been covering him had fallen away. His shredded clothes exposed his bloodied body.
Next to him, a new figure stood, likely the one that had been talking to Takako the entire time. “You put down the animal.”
“I simply stopped him from doing something that he’d regret.”
“And what’s that?”
“Killing the girl you’ve taken over.” The figure turned towards Takako and started to walk to her. “That’s something that I’ll take on.”
“Bold words.”
“It’s quite simple.” They suddenly leapt forward bouncing through the air like a dance. Another gauntlet appeared out in front, grabbing Katsumi. Metal fingers clamped down covering her body from under her shoulders to her waist. Then the dark figure grabbed a hold of Katsumi’s left arm with another massive gauntlet that they wielded personally. Bursts of blue light ignited from vents all around the gauntlet’s forearm creating thrust. It only took a moment for a pop of the shoulder and arm to be dislocated followed by the tearing of skin and spray of blood.
They tossed the torn limb aside as Takako ground her teeth with annoyance, clearly not feeling the pain. The unknown person made no hesitation to move onto the next arm. Rather than lose both, she roughly punched through the gauntlet around her torso to break free. “Damn you!”
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“I told you it’s quite simple. The girl’s going to bleed to death as I ripped off each of her limbs at your suggestion.”
Chapter 332 – Back-to-back Take Down
Even in the moonlight, Takako couldn’t see the face of her strange attacker. The school had long lost power. It was as though the very shadows cloaked them from sight. Nothing from the look of their face could tell her anything about them. Only the sound of their voice, a grave tone that meant business. There was no doubt about what they would do.
She took a step back from the stranger trying to figure out a solution. The stunning attack left her momentarily confused and paralyzed. It didn’t last for long as the stranger went back on the attack. They targeted her remaining arm, the right arm. Defending it with greater degrees of preservation, Takako dodged and evaded the attacks.
During the fighting, it started to bring Takako back to her right mind. “What are you doing? You’re one of Yuki’s friends, right. This girl is important to you. You can’t kill her. You’re just bluffing.”
Jumping into the fight, the stranger danced around the air kicking and punching off attacking Takako from all sides nearly at once. She had trouble keeping up with the speed and precision of the shadowed figure. “I’m not one of their friends. So the fate of this girl doesn’t matter to me. Killing is sometimes a necessity. You won’t dissuade me.”
“Who the hell are you?!”
“No one.” Spinning around in the air, they kicked Takako down into the ground from the height of twenty meters in mid air. They quickly darted down taking advantage of the stunned state to remove the remaining arm from Katsumi’s body.
Anchored in place by another gauntlet, Takako could no longer move Katsumi’s body. “Bastard…”
“This girl’s body is no longer useful to you. So run away back to your real body and wait. Wait for him to come to you. Because he’s still alive and won’t stop until he’s reached you. Go hide in fear.” The light from the girl’s eyes dimmed along with the force in her body. Takako’s possessed presence had disappeared.
Walking out of the crater, the stranger went over to Seiji’s body. They knelt down next to him seeing that he was starting to come around. “You’ve woken up.”
Seiji blinked a little trying to get a sense of his position. Everything felt wrong. Then he looked up in the direction of the voice he heard. The sight of an all black figure that completely seemed to defy the light made his head tilt. “What are you doing here, Nerine?”
The black bled off of her figure like she had been completely drenched in water. “How’d you know it was me?”
“I just did. It was obvious to me.” He awkwardly tried to get up, but found himself falling over. The lack of the left arm that he was relying on took him back. “What the hell is going on?!”
“How much do you remember from your fight?”
“Everything…” he answered immediately, only to have to start thinking. The doubting look on Nerine told him that he forgot or missed something. “I remember getting really angry with that Takako girl for lying to me.”
Without the need to hear anymore, Nerine already figured all of it. “You lost consciousness after that moment and your instincts took over.”
“My instincts? What do you mean? What happened to me?”
“You became surrounded by your talismans. The same ones that appeared during your fight with Cosmas. And you lost all doubt you had about fighting Takako.”
Seiji hung his head down trying to remember what Nerine was telling him. Then he looked around the grounds of the school. It looked several times worse than he remembered with large holes that he didn’t remember them having before. And Takako was nowhere in sight for him. He looked back to Nerine. “Did I—“
“No, I stopped you. I knew how it would have made you feel.”
A sigh of relief came out of his lips. “…thanks… I thought I had this under control. I thought I had faced this after beating that bastard!”
“You can’t out run or control this. It’ll always be at your side. You just have to remember yourself.”
“Damn it!” Seiji pounded his fist into the earth making it rumble under them a little. He could feel the dark shadow hanging over him once more. It was something that he had almost forgotten about with everything calming down. Yet Nerine was right. It was never gone.
For the first time, he looked around at the ground. He saw the talismans around him. It wasn’t the first time he had seen them, but they were something that he generally ignored. He knew what they were. ‘These things again… Why…’ Seiji lifted one of the talismans up. Most looked spent and torn.
“What are these things?” Nerine inquired, as it hadn’t been the first time she had seen, but never fully understood their meaning. She knew what they did for Seiji. They had surprising properties.
“Sacred talismans. If this was the old world, they would just be useless relics from a more superstitious time, part of rituals. However now…they…”
“What?”
“They have real power.”
“What is it supposed to do?”
Seiji turned the talisman towards Nerine. It was covered in Japanese writing that she didn’t understand, that much Seiji knew. “It varies depending on what is written on the paper. In the case of this one, it’s a protective ward. It’s supposed to ward off evil spirits.”
“Supposed to?”
“Well, I don’t know what it actually does now. I can tell you what they say, but their purpose or power is unknown to me.”
“But you create them.”
“I know. They come from me, but I don’t know why or how. I’ve preferred to ignore them, but it seems that they pop up just to spite me.”
Nerine thought back to the temple where Seiji lived. She had given little thought to things until this moment, but quickly tied them together. “So you’re a priest?”
“No!” Jumping up to his feet, he wanted to distance himself from the whole thing. It wasn’t the sort of topic he wanted to enter. “I’m no priest.”
“But how do you know all of this stuff then?”
Turning away from Nerine, Seiji tried to cross his arms, but found that only having one made it very difficult to do so. He sighed, finding that his situation wasn’t very good. And Nerine slid around wanting to know more. She wasn’t taking silence as an answer. “When I was younger my grandfather trained me. I stopped, but that old bastard’s teachings are hard to forget.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Nerine…stop.”
She quickly backed off from Seiji seeing an unfamiliar look in his eyes. There were more words spoken by them than he said aloud. She heard them clearly. ‘There’s something deeper going on here. But I can’t ask… He doesn’t want me to ask… There’s something painful buried…attached to it…’
“DIE!!” shouted a new voice that had a familiar sound. It was Takako once more, she had grabbed someone else after she abandoned Katsumi’s body. It was an adult male wielding a large sword that had a slight glow hanging around it.
Nerine stepped up in front of Seiji, who clearly wasn’t ready for another fight. However, Seiji brushed her aside. “Seiji?”
“She’s mine. This is unfinished business.”
“But you’re not healed.”
“I feel fine!” As the man charged in with his oversized sword, Seiji slid in catching the wrist from underneath. He threw off the attack to stagger the man. Then Seiji wound up his hand and slammed it against the forehead of the sword wielding adult. The force of the hit knocked the man off his feet and crashed him into the earth. Seiji finished the motion and knelt next to him, his hand still against the forehead.
Nerine came rushing to Seiji’s side to help, but found that the man no longer moved. She became a little concerned about what Seiji might have done to him. “What did you do to him?”
“Something that I’m going to regret.”
“You didn’t…” She leaned in checking on the state of the body, which looked to be completely unharmed. There was only a little dirt from the impact with the earth. This only confused her further. She stepped around the unmoving man as Seiji removed his hand. On the forehead of the man, affixed a talisman like the ones she saw on Seiji. “What did you do?”
“What I promised I’d do to her. Forced her out of the body she was squatting in.”
“But how?”
“An exorcism of sorts. It’s a type of talisman used to remove evil spirits from possessing someone.” Seiji stood up rubbing his hand against what clothes remained on him. He kept rubbing his hand as though it was covered in mud and he wanted to be clean. “I don’t like this at all. Something’s wrong with me and I need to figure it out after this is all settled. I won’t become like him.”