Published at 31st of August 2019 1:11 am

Volume 1, Lingering Pain - VI

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

The rain has made shallow puddles form on the four lane asphalt road of the bridge, many of them ankle deep. The raindrops fall in harsh angles with no sign of respite, and the wind howls so fiercely, it almost seems able to topple the street lamps like weak trees. The sky above and the sea below are both fields of total blackness; the lights from the port and the city already so far off and unreachable as to seem like looking at the moon.

A figure can be seen walking in the distance. The black uniform she is wearing gives her the appearance of a raven, blending into the night and barely visible. Her purple lips breathe heavily with each step she takes. When she steps into the light of a street lamp, she comes upon a phantom some distance from her, who now speaks.

“I finally found you, Asagami.” In the midst of the storm’s chaos, the phantom stands, almost ethereal in her white kimono. The red jacket worn over it, flapping in the wind, looks more like a scarf of blood from a dis- tance. Under the light of the lampposts, they look at each other.

“Shiki…Ryōgi,” says the raven.

“I told you, you should have gone home like a good little girl. But you’ve tasted blood and found a liking to it. All the killing, all the murder, you’re enjoying it, aren’t you?”

Though separated by ten meters, and dampened by the noise of the wind, their voices carry towards each other clearly.

“Are you not describing yourself?” accuses the raven. “I find no pleasure at all in what I have to do.” Breathing heavily, the raven affixes her gaze on the phantom, then covers her face with her left hand, the eyes peering out between the fingers shining with hostility and murder. In answer, the phantom readies herself, knife on her right hand.

“Like they say in this country, ‘third time’s the charm.’” The phantom makes a bored laugh. The raven will certainly do for tonight. “Ah, how alive I feel now. We’re murderers you and I, birds of a feather. Just stay the way you are now, and this’ll be quick.”

And with those words, the phantom and raven both move towards each other, whatever chains holding them back now released.

In a sudden burst of speed, Shiki starts to sprint towards Fujino, her pace seemingly unhindered by the wet asphalt and the rain. Only three seconds to close the distance with Fujino, enough time to force her fragile body to the ground and drive a knife through her heart. But Fujino need only look at her target, and on this score, she has the advantage. The three seconds prove to be decisive.

A faint light glitters in Fujino’s eyes. She focuses on Shiki’s left leg as the axis of rotation, and in only a moment, the spell starts to manifest. In that same instant, Shiki feels the pull of the unseen hand on her leg, and with an explosion of force, jumps quickly to one side, making water splash in the opposite direction. But if the spell slackened due to that, it was not to any reasonable amount. This spell was no projectile. As long as Shiki remained within sight of Fujino, she couldn’t escape it.

I may have underestimated her, goddamit, thinks Shiki. She runs again, and in an attempt to escape Fujino’s line of sight, her path describes a circle around the girl in black.

“Don’t even think you can esc—“ Fujino starts to say, but is cut off when she sees Shiki take her run all the way to the bridge’s guardrail and leaps forth and downward. A second or two later, Fujino hears the sound of win- dow glass breaking: the roof of the parking lot, right below the bridge. “How reckless of her,” murmur the purple, smiling lips. While she had slipped away for now, Fujino had kept her vision on Shiki’s left hand, and she could swear that she saw Shiki’s jacket sleeve twist. If she was right, she had destroyed her arm.

“I…am the stronger one,” Fujino says, even as the pain in her stomach too grows stronger with her proclamation. Taking the ramp and descend- ing back to the parking lot once again, she attempts to hold back the pain. Her score with Shiki Ryōgi must be settled here, tonight.

To Fujino, the parking lot seems darker than before. Her eyes are still adjusting to the extreme darkness, and it makes navigating her way more difficult than she had expected. Construction materials are also stacked and scattered haphazardly all over the place, and one or two times Fujino almost slipped and lost footing trying to make her way through the convo- luted mess. Though only a scant few minutes since their first encounter, Fujino has failed to find any trace of Shiki. Already, she regrets her deci- sion to follow Shiki down here, as all the obstacles make for good cover and concealment for the knife wielding woman. Even if Fujino knew where Shiki is hiding, as long as she couldn’t actually see her, Fujino’s spell would only hit what Shiki was hiding behind.

In that brief clash on the bridge, Shiki had already read Fujino’s spell, and withdrew to a place where she could have a fighting chance. It makes Fujino realize how disadvantaged she is in fighting. Even so, I am the stronger one, she thinks. If I can’t see her, then I’ll strip this place bare. Randomly, Fujino starts to destroy anything that might offer cover. Support pillars, stacks of iron poles, guardrails, wall partitions—with each twist and crack of concrete, Fujino’s pain throbs faster, and the tremors in the build- ing grow stronger.

“Okay, now you’ve officially lost it,” resounds a voice in the shadows. Fujino turns toward it, the sound seeming to come from behind a pile of construction materials. She destroys it in a blink of an eye, only to see Shiki dart out of it to the side. Wasting no time, she rushes towards Fujino.

“I have you!” Fujino exclaims, and sets her sights on the phantom clad in white. Shiki continues her charge, her bloodied and battered left arm outstretched.

There is a moment’s hesitation from Fujino, and then she works her spell. With a sickening crunch of ripped sinew and bone, she bends Shiki’s already wounded arm, and finally breaks it. But when Fujino casts her eyes on Shiki’s neck to finish the job, she finds that the girl is but one solid pace from her.

Shiki’s knife catches light for an instant and glints. She thrusts straight towards Fujino’s carotid artery in a graceful, merciless path, the glint on the blade seeming to leave a silvery thread as the cold steel travels through the darkness.

But Fujino saw Shiki smiling malevolently, even while her arm had already been viciously destroyed. Terrified at the sight of it, Fujino had moved long before Shiki’s thrust had even started, and she was already ducking under the knife when it neared her.

Clicking her tongue at her miscalculation, Shiki recovers from her missed attack, readies her knife for another strike, and starts to spring towards the offensive again, but not before Fujino recovers from her daze and weaves her spell at Shiki’s torso.

“GO AWAY!” yells Fujino, unleashing her attack at the same time. Shiki, for her part, decides that she missed her chance and evades the point- blank blast by a hair’s breadth. It only takes her a leap and a moment’s sprint to recede back into the shadows that concealed her well only sec- onds ago. A good opponent: she knows when to retreat. “Is she crazy?” murmurs Fujino between deep, ragged breaths; for once not borne from her stomach pain, but from the rush of adrenalin and the nervousness starting to set in. Her vision darts from shadow to shadow, scanning them for movement. She never saw where Shiki chose to hide, and she has no idea when and where she’ll choose to strike from again.

Fujino feels the nape of her neck, where Shiki had almost hit her. As it turns out, the knife had nicked her flesh there a little, a wound making itself known when Fujino lightly brushes a finger over it. I destroyed her arm, but why didn’t she stop? She keeps replaying the moment in her head: how she crushed Shiki’s arm and she kept on coming, her eyes, her sadistic grin. Shiki was enjoying this. I’m panicking, even though I sent her running, and yet she enjoys herself! It almost seemed as if she was actually happy that I destroyed her arm.

I’ve not enjoyed a single one of my murders, but she’s different. All the fighting, all the murder, it must be like a drug to her, and the more extreme it is, the more enjoyment she gets out of it.

And yet, Fujino tries to dispel from her memory how sweet she thought the fragrance of blood was on her first murder, how soft the touch of blood on her hands were, and how they gave rise to a feeling beyond words that gripped her heart. The pain that she felt seemed like life to her, and it only seemed logical for her to discover herself in the pain of others. Though it is a sensation she has tried to escape since that accursed night, she finds that the pain of others stimulates her, as it makes her imagine the pain they go through. There is no better thing that makes Fujino feel alive than this fascination and feeling of control. But these are thoughts she dare not entertain and tries her hardest to deny.

If, like me, Shiki feels disconnected from her own life, then what does she do to compensate for that disconnection?

“Ah, fuck, that did not go too well,” utters Shiki to herself, out of sight behind a pile of debris that was once a wall, courtesy of Fujino’s crude method of searching earlier. The left arm that Fujino had twisted was long dead. Shiki had thought that since it was just a pile of useless flesh anyway, that she’d use it as a shield and bet it all on one decisive attack, but Fujino accidentally gained a new lease on life thanks to her unexpected coward- ice.

Shiki takes off her jacket and uses her knife to cut off a sleeve. With some creative application of her mouth and remaining arm, she wraps the sleeve around her left upper arm, fashioning a crude dressing to stem the bleeding. She can’t feel anything from it anymore, and the thought that she might never be able to move it again gives her a momentary chill, but also a strangely gratifying sensation. Keep it up Asagami! You’ve been handling this fight like a pro so far, thinks Shiki. Then again, that sensation just might be her consciousness slipping due to rapid blood loss. Well, Mikiya always said I was as stubborn as a mule. At the very least, it’ll clear my head some.

This fight with Fujino is exactly the kind of experience Shiki signed up for, a battle where one slight misstep can mean curtains for both of them.

The excitement Shiki draws from the tension of mortal combat is like a drug. And to Shiki, who constantly feels imprisoned in her own unreliable

memory, this is the only thing that can affirm the small spark of life still left

in her, and allow her to declare it as her own. Base and primal perhaps, but

it gets the job done. If Fujino Asagami seeks pleasure in murder, as Shiki

thinks, then Shiki uses it to feel alive again.

Shiki listens to the echo of Fujino inhaling, then exhaling…a pause, and then it repeats—strained, deep breaths that betray her pain and her trepidation. Though Fujino is yet to be injured, her breathing is as labored as Shiki’s. In the darkness, the cycle repeats itself, creating a sort of met-

ronomic rhythm: they inhale and exhale at the same pace, their hearts simultaneously pump blood in their adrenaline-fueled bodies, and their thoughts are mutually focused on each other, twins on the swaying cradle

of the Broad Bridge, rocked and buffeted by the storm. And for the first time, Shiki feels some semblance of affection towards Fujino, so much so that she feels the need to wring the life out of Fujino with her own hands.

Even though I know there’s no need for me to, Shiki thinks. She’s known since meeting her in the café that she was already damaged goods, and

quite close to dying outright. There was no real need for her to come here

and fight her. But that’s how humans live. Shiki thinks back to what Tōko said some time ago, that humans are creatures who give meaning to mean- ingless actions, and derive purpose from it.

And like this situation, some people would scorn it as meaningless, while others would derive purpose from it. Where does one begin and another

end? You establish your own boundary while the consensus of others ulti- mately determines it. The world is full of such empty boundaries. That’s why the ones who get to decide where the edge lies are the ones who toe the line: like me, or Mikiya, or even Fujino. We aren’t so far from each other, Fujino and me. But this place isn’t big enough for both of us psychos.

“Another dance, then,” Shiki whispers again. “But this time, with my Eyes seeing the strings in your special effects magic.” Shaking her head to

bring back some bit of the consciousness she’s already lost with the blood,

Shiki stands up. Her right hand holds the knife with a firm grip.

If Fujino won’t back off herself, then Shiki will just have to eliminate her.

Shiki reveals herself to Fujino, emerging from behind her cover a stone’s throw away. Given that her body temperature is already over 39°C, Fujino can’t be blamed for not thinking that her condition isn’t giving her any hal- lucinations. She blinks once, just to confirm that what she’s seeing is real.

“You’re insane to come out of hiding like that,” Fujino says. She wastes no time, immediately focusing her will on working the spell. Her vision begins to distort. She wills one axis of rotation each for Shiki’s head and legs, and bends. Like cheap cloth, Shiki’s body is torn apart into so many bits and pieces.

Or at least, it was supposed to be.

Before any such damage could be dealt, Shiki raises her right arm, and with a single slash, excises Fujino’s “distortion.” The points of rotation Fuji- no had created are warded away by the knife, dying as easily as any living being.

“Things without form are difficult to see,” Shiki begins to say. “But thanks to you firing that spell all over the place too much, I can finally see it. Your spell’s nimbus is a spiral of green and red. Really quite beautiful, if I do say so myself.” Fujino has no idea what she’s saying. The only thing she knows right now is the primal instinct of prey: if she can’t stop Shiki, she’ll kill her.

In her mind, Fujino repeatedly utters her pathetic curse, trying to will it into reality.

Bend! Bend! Bend! Bend!

With each repetition, a new manifestation of the spell appears in the air in front of Shiki, but she dispels it each time with a swing of her knife, and each time the pain in Fujino’s stomach is pushed further and further to its limit.

“What…are you?” Fujino and Shiki lock eyes. Fujino sees only a deep emptiness, and Shiki sees only fear.

“There’s a flaw for everything in the world,” says Shiki. “Air, intent, and even time. Humans need not even be said. If there’s a beginning for every- thing, then there’s also an end. My Eyes see that end, the death of every- thing. And once I see that death, all anything needs is a single, light push, that sends it barreling off into entropy. Magic, just like yours.” With those sinister Eyes, Shiki glares at Fujino. “That’s why, if there really was a God, he would fall just as easily against me.”

And with that, Shiki runs at Fujino, every footfall barely touching the ground; an ease of movement that belied her injured state. As Shiki approaches, she tackles Fujino and, sitting on top of Fujino with both legs straddling her body, she pins her to the ground. With her executioner now so close to her, Fujino’s throat trembles.

“Are you…going to kill me?” Fujino asks, her mouth quivering. Shiki does not offer a response. “Why are you going to kill me? I’ve only killed because I was in pain.” At this, Shiki laughs.

“Still in denial? Then riddle me this: why are you doing that same smile you did back when we last met? Even now, you look like you’re enjoying yourself. Why is that?”

“That’s impossible.” Fujino almost hesitates to say it. Slowly, she places a hand on her cold lips. Without a doubt, it’s bent into the rictus of a smile. She tries to remember what her face looked like in the puddles of blood borne from her murders. Did they, too, reflect a smiling face? I always felt something every time I committed murder. Was it happiness like Shiki says? Even when I was violated, I felt no pain, so did I turn to murder to pleasure myself?

“In the end, this is all so much fun to you. You can’t help but be attracted to causing pain, and that’s why you’ll never stop suffering. You’d keep kill- ing without a reason except for yourself.”

“That’s…the answer?” murmurs Fujino. She can’t accept it. She doesn’t even want to think about it. I’m different from you, she keeps repeating in her mind. But Shiki’s reply destroys everything.

“Hell, I should know. I said it before, didn’t I? We’re similar, birds of a feather.”

Shiki raises her knife, and Fujino cries out one last, desperate call: a scream, as hard and as strained as she can perform at the top of her lungs, for one last pathetic curse.

“BEND!”

And as if in response, the parking lot building trembles with the force of an earthquake. In the moment before Shiki’s knife falls, Fujino’s mind wan- ders to the outside, to the raging storm, and the violent waves in the bay. Resisting the burning sensation her fever has in her mind, she envisions both ends of the bridge, like a view from on high. One axis of rotation for either end—

And then they bend.

A tremor resounds, like scores of thunder all happening at the same time. The walls and the iron bars inside them groan and scream, while the ground itself cracks and tilts in upheaval. Similar cracks slowly snake their way across the ceiling, with little pebbles falling away from it. Though the entire structure is collapsing in on itself, Fujino can only stare. Shiki had been on top of Fujino until a moment ago, when she inadvertently slipped when the floor gave way, as if the ground itself swallowed her up. If Fujino didn’t move now, the same thing might happen to her. She knew, though, that with the athletic ability Shiki had so far demonstrated, it is likely she survived. It would only be a matter of time before she returned to the chase.

Outside is the storm, and below her, the bay. Though burning with fever and burdened with a body that seems adamant to refuse her mind’s com- mands, Fujino manages to will herself to stand up. Slowly, she begins to walk, extricating herself from the parking lot towards the shopping mall, which has so far sustained little damage. Still, the once rectangular prom- enade is now bent in places.

It only takes her a few steps before collapsing face-down on the floor. It’s taking her an enormous effort to even breathe, let alone move her legs. Her head is in a daze, and her sight is failing her. The only thing she feels right now is the one thing that has been her constant travelling companion: the violent pain inside her body. I’m going to die, thinks Fujino for the first time in her life. It hurts so much, I can’t take it anymore. If living on means enduring this searing ache, then perhaps it’s better to just die.

Stunned and lying prone on the ground, Fujino coughs, and this time, blood comes with it. With her quickly fading vision, only the slow spread of the blood she’s vomiting is clearly visible. Red blood, like the blood red memory of a time long past: the burning horizon etched in her mind, for- ever lighted by the setting sun.

“No, I don’t…want to die,” she whispers weakly, fighting her earlier thoughts while reaching an arm out in front of her. If her legs won’t coop- erate, then her arms will just have to do. She makes slow progress crawling on the ground, inch by bloody inch, but she is driven forward by her fear of death, and its white phantom harbinger. The only sensation that Fujino can feel now is the lingering pain.

It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.

That simple declaration is the only thing Fujino can bring to mind. Now that she has finally gained a sense of pain, ironically, she has grown to detest it. The pain feels like a hundred different needles all in her stomach, but Fujino can’t allow herself to die now. Not now, when she has done nothing, but so much more is left to do. Too pathetic, too empty, too miser- able.

The needles bury themselves deeper, burning her stomach like an acid. She’s losing more ground to it every second, clawing at life madly, search- ing for something that can make it easier.

It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.

My life, my words, my memories; I want all of them to linger on like the pain of a scar.

The words echo in her mind, echoing the pulse of the pain. It’s the same pain as the one she used to make the other people suffer, the realization of which is the most painful thing of all. The weight of the blood she has spilled presses so heavily in her mind that she cannot even bring herself to an empty apology. Her body convulses, and the blood in her throat is the sign of the last gasp of pain. When she vomits the blood, her vision, and what little light she sees, starts to sink into darkness. Her mind only brings her back to that rain-soaked night, when he met him again, and he asked her if her stomach hurt. To that memory of him, she speaks the desire she has kept for so long, a thing she wished she could have said much earlier.

“It hurts—so much…so much that I could cry.”

And to the memory of her dear mother, she asks a final question. “Mother, is it all right for little Fujino to cry?”

Alone and in sorrow, all Fujino can do is cry, but somehow, doing that eases the pain. He was right. You’re not supposed to hold the pain inside, but show it outside. I’m glad I met him again, so he couldn’t see me like this.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” someone says to Fujino, barely audible at the edge of her consciousness. Almost blind, Fujino can only just make out Shiki standing next to her, knife still in hand. “If it hurts, then you should have said so earlier.” The words ring out like a farewell. Yes, that’s what he would have said too. If I could have only said it on that day three years ago, if I just let everything out, what could have happened? What path would I have taken? I can’t even imagine a better life now. I’ve committed so many sins, taken so many lives, all for the sake of my own pleasure, that I can’t bring one to mind.

Fujino stops her breathing, and in those last few seconds, the pain finally fades. She never feels the knife swooping downwards, piercing her chest.

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