Memory Reaper's Ascension - Chapter 235: Meeting

Chapter 235: Meeting

Ishiki shook his head and focused on what was important right now. And that was assuming that that the demon had gone out through the manhole behind the school building, there was a high chance that it might have even entered the school building.

’I have to get Nina to safety. Every children in there… But how do i take action according to that?’ His brows furrowed.

He did not move immediately and instead thought deeply about it.

’If I go up now and pull her out of school — if I send the evacuation order and empty the building — what am I working from? A leaf near a manhole? Damnit, what do I tell them, that a demon has entered the school during day?’

’And if I do it and the demon is already gone? I’ve showed my hand. I’ve told it that I know where it’s been. And I’ve told anyone watching that Nina’s school is a place I respond to with a full evacuation response. Which is its own kind of information.’

’But if I don’t and it goes up—’

He put that thought in a folder and closed the folder.

’if it has gone up then, there it is sure to change something and as it changes I will know before it happens because I’m forty meters away and Ghost Blade is active.’

“Uh… sir?” Shiro’s voice brought him back. He has been lost in his thoughts for far too long and didn’t answer his earlier question.

Though he doubted that the question needed an answer now.

“Keep moving,” he said.

They both followed the branch north, tracing the null-signature east. That thing was either out of his range or hiding very intently, bot of the situations suggested that it knew that Ishiki was following him.

There was another question he thought of, why was that it was only taking on unliving objects as its body, earlier he thought maybe i didn’t get a chance to take on a human.

But now that he think about it, that thing changed from a rock to a leaf without him even noticing and that too even within seconds. So, it was a new kind of demon and it didn’t have a body.

So, how can he be killed? Earlier in the scenario, the dragon had caught the demon and eaten the soul…

He was still thinking about this when something entered his perception of [Ghost Blade].

It entered his perception range from the tunnel junction directly behind Shiro from deep down.

A sudden sense of danger enveloped Ishiki’s senses. The type when he knew that the enemy was much stronger than he was.

It was large. Much larger than a rock or a leaf.

It was in the side tunnel. Shiro was standing at its mouth.

“SHIRO — JUMP BACK!” He screamed.

Shiro’s reaction was a fraction late — not much, not the catastrophic fraction, but enough. He registered the shout and moved, pushing back and sideways off the wall, and the thing that came out of the side tunnel caught the edge of the movement.

A sharp line of impact across his left cheek.

He hit the far wall and steadied, hand up, torch still in his grip by reflex — swinging the beam toward the tunnel mouth.

The beam landed on nothing. The side tunnel was empty.

Shiro stood with his back against the wall, breathing controlled but present, one hand pressed to the side of his face. When he took it away there was a clean cut along his cheekbone.

He looked at it. Then at Ishiki.

“What,” he said, “was that.”

But Ishiki didn’t reply… Shiro turned the torch toward him and found him standing completely still, staring ahead at the channel in front of them.

The expression on his face was not the readiness of a player identifying a threat. It was something else entirely — the specific, brief quality of a person who has been hit by a recognition they were not prepared for and have not yet finished absorbing.

Shiro followed the line of his gaze and moved the torch.

The beam crossed the drainage stream and landed on the far walkway.

Something had landed in the channel four meters ahead of them.

The beam outlined a human body, but something was very wrong about it. He was not an average human body size. It stood taller than any human he has ever seen.

Shiro moved the torch around and found that the human was not entirely human even.

The right side was still human at least — a face that was younger than his own by two years, with the features of someone who had once been quick and specific about things.

The left side had been going somewhere else for three years.

The arm was fully black from shoulder to fingertip… it was not discolored or bruised, but replaced by something that looked sinister and hideous even by the standards of demons. The hand at the end of it had talons where fingers had been, long and dark and carrying a faint iridescent edge that the beam caught at an angle.

Half his face had gone as well and that too not grotesquely, but with the specific creeping quality of a process that had been advancing with patience.

Golden veins sprawled outward from his left eye across the cheekbone and jaw, fine as hairline fractures in old porcelain, branching and rebranching toward his temple and his throat. The eye at their center was fully gold, the iris was replaced by a single vertical slit running through it like a line drawn with a very steady hand.

The right eye was still human.

Still the same.

Kenji raised the black arm slowly. Brought one talon to his mouth. The blood on the tip of it — Shiro’s blood, from the cut in the cheek and then he licked it away with the unhurried consideration.

He paused for sometime then his mouth curved.

“Not too good,” he said. The voice was the same. That was the part that landed hardest — it was completely, recognizably the same voice. “Yours would taste better, I’m sure of it.”

The golden eye found Ishiki in the dark.

“Right, Ishiki.” The smile stayed. “It has been a long time.”