Published at 4th of December 2019 10:58 am

Volume 2, Part V: Chapter 15

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

Waiting until the time he and Enjō agreed upon, Mikiya Kokutō finally sets foot for the second time on the building’s grounds. The path that runs through the garden seems to be deserted. The grass in the garden surrounding the path is as rightly emerald green as grass should be, but strangely lacking its distinctive smell. He passes through it and into the lobby, bright with its electric lighting.

Not a sound can be heard. The fluorescent lights make no reflection off of the immaculate surfaces of the singularly cream colored walls and floor, yet the entire place leaves no corner or nook left unlighted. When Mikiya last came here, it was still morning, and he had felt a sort of tepid disquiet. But this night visit is different. It’s almost as if the building is pregnant with a suffocating stillness. Every step he takes produces an echo: minute, almost unheard, only for the sound to vanish into oblivion less than a second later. Now, the silence is chilling, oppressive, and close to being physically thick, making Mikiya’s every step heavy. Like the building recognizes his foreign nature and works to expel him.

Still, he is decided, and can’t back down now, not when there are people counting on him. Forcing his way through the thickness of the air, he proceeds through the lobby.

“Guess I should start with the third floor,” he mutters. He decides not to use the stairs, as using the elevator would probably attract more attention, leaving Enjō to do the work he needed. So he pushes the up button beside the elevator door, and hears the low howling of the machine’s activation. The lights above the door indicate that it’s descending from the fifth floor. Before long, the door starts to open silently, quite a contrast to its noise just moments before.

But even as the elevator door is starting to open, Mikiya already sees someone inside it. Without really knowing yet who it is, he gulps and takes a step back.

“Ah, so you’ve come. What perfect timing, too. I was just thinking of paying a visit to your master’s sanctum,” says the man in the blood red coat as a smile slowly spreads across his face. He steps out of the elevator with teetering steps, and holds something in one hand. His attention is solely affixed on it, facing it with an expression halfway between dread and joy. Mikiya looks at it, only to find a disgusting lump rising up in his throat. But he can’t look away from it.

“It is so perfect, is it not?” the man asks mockingly. “I think it has utterly captured my heart.” Now he laughs in apparent enjoyment as he flaunts the object he is holding. And still Mikiya can’t look away from it.

For the object the red coated man is holding in one hand is the head of Tōko Aozaki.

Tōko’s head is remarkably well preserved for the state it’s in. The flesh still holds some sort of living warmth, and it looks unchanged from when it was still alive. They eyes closed in seeming slumber, and the untainted face look straight out of a painting, like she’s returned to some purer state of being. Except of course for the fact that she’s lost everything from the neck down.

With a hand pressed over his mouth, Mikiya tries to fight a losing battle against his urge to vomit, but it’s not going all too well.

“How admirable of you to have come to take revenge for your mentor. Aozaki must have inspired great loyalty in such a lowly apprentice for you to trouble yourself so. To be honest, it makes me jealous.” The smile in Alba’s face seems warped and distorted, as though it was a smile carried too far in the service of showmanship. “Obviously, your mentor has passed from us. But not completely. Oh no. She yet has ears to hear, nerves to feel, and a mind with which to understand. It is a mercy, to be sure. I did many things in the service of destroying this woman, and I intend to express my gratitude to her. No, I will have her cling to life for a while more, at least.”

He draws closer to Mikiya, each step a shuffle and a stomp, drunk in his own triumph. “Why, you might ask?” he hisses. “Because after years of defeat from this woman, it feels refreshing to finally become her better. Just killing her outright would be an insult to all the time leading up to this moment, an act better than she deserves. She will have to feel pain. Oh, don’t worry yourself, friend. She’s lost her entire body. She’s got much more serious problems to deal with than a little pain, I’m sure.”

Alba then lays the fingers of his other hand in Tōko’s face in a gentle caress. Then he takes two fingers and, with a sudden thrust, inserts them forcefully into both eye sockets, forcing fresh blood out as he draws out the familiar eyeballs from their now open cavities. The cheeks of Tōko’s face are bathed in streams of red tears. Separated from their owner and soaked in her own blood, the eyeballs look different and alien to Mikiya now. Only two globular pieces of meat. Alba holds out the hand holding the eyeballs toward Mikiya, gesturing for him take it.

“You see?!” the red-coated man says in a half-crazed shout. “That must have hurt, but she didn’t even make a sound! But worry not, for she still feels pain as surely as we do. Her mind tells her so. Aozaki was always a stubborn one, but I wonder how she feels about her eyes being gouged out? Does it hurt, Aozaki? Enough to make you cry blood, evidently.” He turns his attention away from the head and back to Mikiya. “You! What do you think? You’re her apprentice so you must understand how she feels. Well? Can you?!”

Mikiya doesn’t answer him. The scene is enough to numb him to inaction, let alone think anything except how to process the spectacle before him and how to survive this encounter. Alba looks on, affirming his satisfied look with a chuckle.

“In truth, however, I would have wanted to make her suffer not just pain, but the humiliation of being reduced to her current state. No matter. I can do something better anyway, but I need you.” He looks back at Mikiya again. “I wonder, how would you feel if something you’d built, cherished, and cared for is destroyed right before your very eyes, as you sit there, helpless and unable to even scream. If it were me, I certainly wouldn’t be able to take it. Not even killing the person who did it would be enough, oh no. Do you see it now, Aozaki?” He turns back to Tōko’s head. “I want you, who has only given me indifference, to feel enough hatred to want to kill me. The best revenge I could hope for. Though Alaya has robbed me of the role of plunging my arms deep into your breast and pulling out your heart, this opportunity is still more than I deserve!”

As he continues to talk to the severed head, he suddenly grabs it with both of his hands, and returns his attention to Mikiya. “The moment I discovered Aozaki had an apprentice, I was so happy I couldn’t contain myself. I’ve had my eye on you since we met. Curse not me but your mentor for making you known to me. Ah, but worry not. You will not join her just yet in hell. Though I said this head yet lives, we have reached the point where we must first make a small adjustment—”

He grins as wide as he can muster. Then, with a great force, he takes the severed head in between his two hands and squeezes it as a vise would. In only a few moments, the thing that was Tōko Aozaki compresses, blood pouring out of fissures in the skin from Alba’s strong grip, until finally it is shattered into an unrecognizable pile of meat and blood that falls to the ground.

“—Tada! And now she’s dead! It’s magic!” And then the red-coated man laughs with a vigor that fills the once silent lobby.

Without a word, Mikiya books it, the sickening display repeating itself in his mind and burning away any sense or reason he still clung to. Not thinking where to go, he directed himself to the east building’s lobby. His mind can’t bring up the memory of the last time he went there, or the details of the room. It is, in fact, a supreme effort for him to just keep from screaming.

“It’s time to end this show, I think!” Alba calls after him. “Don’t worry! You will follow soon enough!” His laughter fades, and he starts to follow after Mikiya at a leisurely pace, the hands swinging at his sides dripping with fresh blood and scraps of meat.

The sewer twists and turns, mazelike in its complexity. With no light in place to guide him, and only the steady flow of the sewage to return his mind to the passage of time, Tomoe wanders the dank passages. Luckily, Mikiya gave Tomoe everything he needed, including a map of the sewer infrastructure and a flashlight. Eventually, through these, he manages to reach the place where he’s supposed to be in. Above him now lies the manhole he needs. He turns off the flashlight and sets the duffel bag down leaning on the wall, careful not to let it be carried away by the stream of sewage. He fishes around for a crowbar from the bag, and then climbs the ladder steps embedded into the sewer wall, going up a height he can’t determine.

Tomoe’s head hits something metallic, which is all the sign he needs. He feels around with one hand for the gap he needs to slide the crowbar into, then inserts the hook end into it carefully. Finding purchase, he pushes to open the gap wider. Then, with what strength he can muster, he pushes with his shoulder until the cover finally gives way, flipping across the floor with a hard metallic gong. He sticks his head out of the whole to find the entire parking lot similarly dark Satisfied, Tomoe goes back down to retrieve the bag, then climbs back up and tosses it up first. Next comes Shiki’s sword, then finally himself.

Without a light to guide his bearing, he pauses for a moment to listen to his surroundings. A strange feeling steals its way into him: that of being there no threat to actually discover him even as he sneaks around. The feeling of complacency. Though with the vastness of the parking lot, coupled with the darkness, Tomoe should have every reason to be comfortable in that feeling. From somewhere nearby, he hears the sharp hissing of steam echoing through the vast emptiness.

“The sound…of steam?” he whispers to himself as recalls something vague in his mind he thought he’d cast away. This particular darkness and the smell in the air are both known to Tomoe. Worse, they are familiar, tinged with the feeling of stepping over the threshold of one’s house.

His bones ache as if in response to that familiarity, and the sound of their trembling is worsened by his mind, replaying them over and over again. He studies his perimeter yet again, and this time finds a beacon glow in the distance, a warm orange light that calls to him. When Tomoe sees it, he suddenly feels hot, as if his mind just caught up to the real temperature of the room. His feet draw him closer to the orange light in the center of everything, and he starts to hear the faint sound of the hissing noise he’d heard before.

As Tomoe edges deeper into the room, his eyes start to adjust to the darkness. Along the walls to his side are large canisters, arranged in an order he can’t yet discern. The floor is littered with long, narrow tubes that lead to somewhere undetermined. And still, not a soul makes its presence known. The company Tomoe keeps now is only the sound of rising steam, and the noise of water boiling, both of which are getting increasingly louder with each step toward the center of the room. Both noises echoing in the confines of Tomoe’s past.

Saying nothing, he walks with a heavy pace that matches his body’s sudden weight. He is nearing the limits of his stamina. He is closer to the glow now, now able to see where it emanates from: a glowing hot metallic plate. Every so often in regular intervals, an amount of water is set to pour on top of it, boiling it and turning it instantaneously into a mist of steam floating up to the ceiling. The ceiling itself, as far as Tomoe can see, is filled with a complex series of pipes absorbing the steam and funneling it into the canisters in the sides of the room through which they are connected. A respiratory system.

Tomoe unconsciously does a nervous laugh as he sees this, and his curiosity takes him to the prominently displayed canisters. There are countless numbers of them, each about a head big. Though he can’t see them just yet, Tomoe notices that something is floating within the formaldehyde solution contained within the canisters. And finally he sees them.

Brains. Human brains.

The tubes he had seen before on the floor are the same ones in the ceiling, spreading their length around the room but all ultimately connected to one canister, and all ultimately leading upwards and through the ceiling of the underground parking lot. Probably connected to all the other rooms in the apartment buildings, thinks Tomoe.

“Like a cheap dime novel horror,” he remarks quietly with a smile, and then walks along the perimeter of the wall. He should have thought of it before. There was no way the people here lived the same yesterday, down to the detail, every day of the month. It’d only be cause for suspicion to anyone outside looking in too closely, which Alaya obviously didn’t want. Instead, they will have small changes, little details that change every day. But the day, for the most part, progressed in a similar spiral. A time to wake up, a time to eat, a time to play, a time to work, and a time to die and live again. And for this, they needed them to be, on some level, alive. Though Tomoe finds it hard to conceive of the situation—bodies animated by remotely stored human minds—that is what he beholds before him. Every day these minds are forced to live a closed loop of impermanent death and uncertain rebirth, living only to die in the night, experiencing it with the disconnect that comes from the mind and body being separate. A particular brand of hell if Tomoe ever saw one: A prison for the soul made to resemble some crude facsimile of life that didn’t get the point, repeating the same dream until the sleepers can no longer distinguish dream from reality. Like the nightmare that kept plaguing Tomoe Enjō every night.

Tomoe brushes his fingers lightly on the cold surface of one of the canisters. “Hah…I see how it is now,” he mutters, as the canister sends a chill running from his arm to his body. At that moment he hears a voice—no, not a voice; more akin to a communicating consciousness, emanating from the object. Did he imagine it? Regardless, it communicates only one thing.

Save me.

Tomoe chuckles despite the intrusion in his mind. After all, what could he save? Does it want to return to its original form, or perhaps escape from the cycle it’s trapped in? Either way, both are impossible tasks.

“All I’ve proven I can do is kill,” says Tomoe, amused at his own irritatingly cheerless observation. “Besides, even I wanted to be saved. Problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to be saved from. Probably better that way, since there was no way to save me in the end, even if we stretch the meaning of the word. I’ve had the impulse to kill boiling up inside me from the start, and now I’m past the point where saving mattered,” he utters almost apologetically.

Now, Tomoe sets about rummaging among the canisters scattered along the wall, trying to find the one that curiosity and logic tells him he should be able to find. The lack of it would be even more strange than its presence. The mage Alaya didn’t kill anyone to procure these brains for his sick experiment, only harvested them after their owners all did the deed to each other. That’s why the one thing that is the source for Tomoe Enjō’s repeating dream—or the reality that occurred half a year ago—should lie somewhere in this pile. And sure enough, within a few short minutes, he finds the canister he was looking for. He didn’t want it to exist, but everything pointed to it, and now, he doesn’t know what to feel.

He smiles a twisted smile as he touches it gently, fascinated as one would be when looking at a mirror that reflects him twisted and wrong. Finally, the proof is laid out before him. He looks upon himself. Two tubes extend out of it. One reaches upward to the ceiling, but the other is cut. A faulty machine, a discarded piece of equipment thrown out from the comforting safety of the regularity it once knew.

At that point, almost on cue, a sharp sound breaks through the repetitive sound of the steam, and Tomoe looks to its source: the left elbow that had pained him most among the other parts of his body since yesterday. From there, he casts his eyes downward, and he sees what made the sound.

His left arm, elbow to fingertips, fallen to the floor.

He never felt it slough off. Blood red liquid oozes and drips from the newly torn limb. He looks inside the cavity of what remains of his arm, and sees that among the things that look like skin and bone contained within, it also sports objects seemingly shaped like cogs and gears. They tick, louder and more incessantly now, like an annoying clock, the sound of them strangely familiar, and almost comforting. A sound he has heard on many an occasion beforehand. Tomoe hears the ticking as some old memory, like another name for him, asserting what he really is: the person who killed his mother to ward off a nightmare, and, dancing to the invisible strings, ran from his act in shame is

“…me.”

Tomoe’s mind blanks, and he cannot prevent himself from falling to the floor on his knees. He giggles quietly, privately, but then it builds to the boisterous yet disturbing laugh of a madman, reverberating across the expanse of the empty parking lot.

“This is ridiculous,” Tomoe says with difficulty. “Right from the start, right from the fucking start, I was already a phony.”

He cannot think of anything else. Only the revelation that, on some level he had always known, fills him with a laugh of self-ridicule he can no longer contain.

It’s was all bullshit, Tomoe thinks to himself. I…me and my family had zero chance of avoiding that tragedy, even if we repeated the damn act a million times. We had no way of changing how it all would end. We’re all just fakes, manipulated by Alaya. He knew I couldn’t do anything, and let me run.

The ceaseless ticking in his arm and the multitude of ethereal voices from each mind crying out to him for help are all infuriatingly annoying. Irritating. Making him lose concentration. A maddening cacophony forcing him to slip away from the solid truth that he had just learned, the truth he sought for so long: that everything is a lie. In desperation, he edges closer to the glowing metal plate in the center of the room, the voices getting louder every second. He raises his torn off left arm and presses it onto the searing hot surface of the metal plate.

Tomoe screams an animal scream, a guttural noise of anguish beyond comprehension. The stump of his left arm sizzles and smokes. The blood stops flowing, the wound cauterized. The ticking fades. The voices are slowly silenced. The pain shoots well through his entire arm and fires up seemingly every nerve in his body. But it is only for a few precious moments. Afterward, he raises his arm from the metal plate, traces of burnt flesh coloring its edges. He may have already gone mad. But—at least for now— he finds resolve, and remembers the real reason he has come back to this place of madness.

Gasping for breath and sweating harder than he ever had before, Tomoe searches desperately for the elevator and finally finds it in a corner of the room. The light indicates it has stopped in the first floor. He pushes the up button and calls the machine down. Double checking the knife in his pocket, and slinging the sword over the shoulder of his good arm, he goes inside. He looks back over his shoulder at the room that challenged him, the room now filled only with the disturbing regularity of the sound of the water and the hiss of steam, and blanketed otherwise by silence so total that no one except the sleeping, dreaming souls wrapped in their lie of a life may hear the final moments of one who would die here.

Which is the real spiral: the never-changing life, or the never-ending life? This building is a machine that is wrapped in both sides of infinity, where even dying isn’t a permanent setup. You just get free do-overs the next day. It’s a perfectly maintained cycle. I wonder if the cycle had some kind of flaw, would my mother still have killed me? Would I still kill my mother? It’s an impossible question to answer. It wouldn’t be the same life. This entire place is built on the death of others. Without that, this place has no meaning.

Still, how I wish this spiral had a paradox.

He makes an impossible wish with no answer. Tomoe feels his entire body screaming towards its final hour, but he still manages to push the button to take him to the tenth floor.

Mikiya Kokutō keeps running as hard as he can, past the point where his breathing can keep up. He spares no moment to look back and see if Alba is following him. Finally, he finds that his feet have taken him inside the east wing lobby, and he stops.

A dead end? He thinks, incredulous. Sure enough, aside from the stairs that leads to the second floor balcony, the place has nowhere else to go except where he came from. Stopping here, and realizing that Alba isn’t following him with the same urgency with which he is fleeing, gives him the moment he needs to collect himself and focus.

Crap, why did I have to up and panic like that? Though he thought he was prepared for anything they might throw at him, he was evidently not prepared for the sight of the head of the very friend he was joking with just yesterday to be destroyed right in front of him. Relatively speaking, I handled that much the same way anyone would. Still, both his knees are trembling not just from nervousness but the strain of having to run at a pace he wasn’t used to, and he has to press down on them with both hands to calm down.

For now, I need to find some way to get away from him. He quickly scans the lobby, turning in all directions. As he does this, he hears the heavy echo of footsteps coming from the corridor he just went through.

This is bad. Mikiya starts running again, more composed this time. He makes a break for the stairs, having nowhere else to go, but no sooner has he climbed three steps when he hears a sharp, keening sound that lasts barely a second. At almost the same time, his feet lose their purchase on the floor, somehow deprived of what strength he had forced into them and forcing him to fall on the stairs on his knees. He reaches out with his hand toward the railing, seeking to use it to raise himself up, but fails. He slips downwards, back to the first floor, and collapses side first on to the staircase. Quickly, he looks at his legs and finds a dark red stain spreading downward in his slacks, originating from his knees. They’ve been pierced by something from behind, he observes now with a kind of detachment, as though it is another person’s knees he is examining. He feels no pain. Not just yet. The adrenaline is working its magic, so the wounds feel more hot than painful.

“Easy now, young man. Can’t have you breaking your neck falling on the stairs, now can we? I have plans for you. Fortunately, that spell was only enough to stop you, and not burst your knees open at the seams.” Alba comes walking, arms spread wide in a sick sort of welcome.

Mikiya says nothing, only trying to crawl his way up the stairs even as the wound has his undivided attention. Despite what Alba said, the blood is pouring out of the wounds as fast as spilled drink. Slowly, though he doesn’t realize it yet, Mikiya’s consciousness is fighting a losing battle.

“You are a conjurer, or summoner, or a worker of familiars much like

your mentor, are you not? Then call your pets forth, or suffer the shame of being unworthy of the moniker of a mage.” When Mikiya does nothing, Alba frowns.

“Hmph. It seems our dear Aozaki was not as good a mentor to you as I thought. But I expected nothing less from her, as she is full of such flaws. The story of how she the Ordo granted her title is one such example. The Ordo grants the titles of color to the mages they deem with the most potential. I know that ‘Ao’ in Japanese means ‘blue,’ and true to her surname, Aozaki desired this rank, this highest of honors. But the Ordo judged her unworthy of it, instead granting it to her younger sister, who was deemed her family’s rightful successor, and snatched everything away from her. Aozaki entered the Collegium to best her sister in the Art, but even here, she is defeated. Ironically, she was given the title of ‘Red.’ But because the ‘Tō’ in her name means orange, I think it is even more appropriate for her! A color that seems completely unable to own up to her title of Red. It was perfect!”

Alba reaches the foot of the stairs looming above the immobile Mikiya while wearing a smile of supreme satisfaction.

“Count yourself lucky that you meet your end in the same place as your mentor. Being Aozaki’s apprentice, I thought that you would make a sport of yourself. Alas, you were nothing but a disappointment.” He takes a knee beside Mikiya, and extends a hand slowly towards his face. In contrast to Alba’s leisurely movement, Mikiya’s arm suddenly springs into action.

“Wha— ” Alba’s surprise lasts for only a moment. But it is the only moment Mikiya needs to exploit. His upper body moves, bringing a hand from under him, brandishing a silver knife that he had hidden beneath his jacket. It is the silver paper opener of Tōko Aozaki, brought by Mikiya just in case, but thinking he would never need to use it. Now he closes his eyes shut and thrusts it toward Alba.

It’s the first time in his life he’s ever had any murderous intent and actually carried it out. It is a feeling foreign to him, and for that reason he closed his eyes so as not to see the entire thing directly. The solid feeling in his hands tells him that the knife has struck home against…something, certainly. For sure, he knew the red-coated man was unprepared, then cursed but was cut short. He couldn’t have dodged a strike at such close quarters.

Hoping that he hadn’t inflicted a wound too serious, Mikiya opens his eyes. His fading consciousness blurs his vision for a moment until it resolves into a coherent image…of Alba looming before him with his outstretched hand, the knife stuck quite deeply and straight in the center of that same hand’s palm. His grin is wider than ever.

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It is only a small moment of incredulity for Mikiya. But it passes like an hour.

“What a bad boy you are to do such a thing to me,” Alba spits out mockingly. “It’s only fun until someone loses an eye.” As he says this, he extends his other hand to Mikiya, this time with haste. He grabs Mikiya by the face, holds it tight, raises it slightly, then slams it down onto the steps of the stairs. The back of Mikiya’s head makes a dull sound in the impact. Losing no time, he raises Mikiya’s head again, and slams it back down again. And again. And again. Each time, repeating the same phrase.

“Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!” Each accompanied by the same dull thud, both sounds resounding in the vastness of the lobby. Mikiya’s grip on the knife loosens as he loses consciousness. Eventually, even his breath falls lighter and more desperate. At this, Alba finally stops and stands up.

“Ah, what a pain. A pain such that would have made me cry. I would have wanted to let you live, but I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to bear the shame of it.” He extracts the bloodied knife from his hand as if brushing off a leaf, and nods to himself and his own words in approval. “Well, I do believe I’ve done what I’ve set out here to do. Though I do have a passing interest in Alaya’s little experiment, I do believe I should be getting back to Germany. The air here in Japan is not good for me, you see,” he says to the unmoving Mikiya. Alba turns away from the body, and starts walking away, heading for the corridor that leads back to the central lobby.

But before he is able to do so, he hears something he doesn’t expect. Another set of footsteps echoing from that same corridor; high-pitched falls, the sound of which is recognizable to him. He, in fact, heard them only yesterday.

“Impossible.”

But he has no time to think, and soon enough, the origin of those footsteps stands in the lobby, large suitcase in tow. Now, as before, Tōko Aozaki blocks his way.

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