After ruffling Kohina's ssy mop of blue hair, Hair paid no further attention to the whimpering complaints that followed.
Not that it mattered much. The girl was tough. For soone carrying the Mantis Factor, that kind of force barely even qualified as a tickle — the real issue was purely psychological. She simply had no fra of reference for being treated like that.
And so.
Hair's gaze shifted — and landed on Tendou Kisara, who had been standing to the side this whole ti like a silent pillar, not saying a word. He raised an eyebrow and let his eyes drift aningfully toward Aihara Enju.
The implication was obvious.
— Your cue.
After all, every group needed both a hard face and a soft one. He was a god, and however approachable he tried to be, that gulf of identity still existed between them. In a mont like this, what was needed was an older female presence — soone who could ease the tension and play the role of a caring big sister.
Looking around, the options were limited. Kohina was a feral little maniac whose only hobby was cutting things in half. That left Tendou Kisara.
As the oldest mber of the group besides Hair himself, the responsibility clearly fell to her.
And so — Tendou Kisara caught Hair's look.
She blinked. Then, a beat later, she understood.
A flash of discomfort crossed that tightly-wound face. She fought it down, drew a long breath, worked her jaw slightly — doing her level best to massage the rigidity out of her own facial muscles and suppress the murderous aura still bleeding off her from earlier — and stepped forward two paces, deliberately softening her voice so as not to frighten the newcor.
"..."
"Um."
"Welco."
"My na is Tendou Kisara."
The words ca out bone-dry. She made a valiant effort to pull her lips into sothing resembling a warm smile — and produced an expression that sohow looked worse than crying.
It couldn't really be helped. For the past several years, her entire existence had revolved around sword training and revenge. The contents of her head were approximately ninety percent how to kill people and ten percent how to kill people more efficiently. The finer points of looking after small children were utterly foreign territory.
On reflex, Tendou Kisara raised her right hand — intending to offer a handshake as a gesture of goodwill.
But the hand stopped halfway.
Froze there.
Only then did she notice that her hand was still sared with blood.
"Sorry..."
"It's a bit... dirty..."
The stiff not-quite-smile collapsed off her face on the spot. She reflexively yanked the hand back and tried to hide it behind her — then thought better of it, since that was too obvious — and ended up scrubbing it frantically against her skirt instead.
Which accomplished nothing, because the sailor uniform was already filthy, and the rubbing only made the blood on her hand look more conspicuous by contrast.
"Scared you, didn't I?"
Tendou Kisara muttered under her breath, and for once, a rare flush of genuine embarrassnt crept across her face. The confidence that had been there a mont ago was noticeably absent.
Aihara Enju had been watching the whole thing with her head tilted back, those red eyes unblinking and fixed on Tendou Kisara.
She could see it clearly.
None of these people were what you'd call normal.
Every single one of them was wrapped in a fierce, dangerous air, and the tallic sll of blood that clung to them was heavier than anything Enju had ever encountered — and she had encountered plenty. It wasn't just blood, either. There was sothing else layered underneath it. Sothing that could only be called the scent of death.
Once upon a ti, that kind of sll would have made Enju want to run. She would have filed these people under dangerous — avoid.
But now.
Aihara Enju turned her head. She glanced at Hiruko Kohina, still crouched nearby, sending furtive wounded looks in Hair's direction every few seconds. Then she looked at Kami-sama himself — expression long-suffering, but standing there steady as a mountain, without a single trace of impatience.
And finally, her gaze drifted back to Tendou Kisara's hand — that blood-stained hand that didn't know where to put itself.
It was genuinely strange.
They looked frightening. They were covered in blood. They were clearly not all there, ntally speaking. And yet —
Why did this fumbling awkwardness — this careful, anxious effort not to scare her — make her feel so inexplicably at ease?
Was this what family felt like?
One ferocious little gremlin who was at least the sa kind of creature as her. One clumsy but gentle big sister. And one all-powerful Kami-sama who held everything together.
Honestly...
Not bad?
Whatever. It didn't matter what shape it ca in.
Just as long as she wasn't alone anymore. Just as long as she wasn't the one being left behind.
As long as Kami-sama was there — that was enough.
And so.
Aihara Enju suddenly released the hand she'd been holding — Hair's — and stepped forward.
Without a mont's hesitation, she reached out with both of her own hands — equally caked in gri, fingernails packed with black mud — and grabbed hold of Tendou Kisara's hand where it was still hovering indecisively at her side, not yet fully retreated.
Two equally filthy hands clasped tight together.
Aihara Enju gave a firm, decisive nod. Her voice rang out bright and clear, her brilliant grin scrunching the layer of gri on her face into wrinkles — making her look exactly like a little tabby cat that had just finished rolling in a coal pile.
"Mm!"
"I'm Aihara Enju!"
"Nice to et you!"
"From now on, we're companions!"
Tendou Kisara froze.
She looked down at their two hands locked together, and felt the warmth coming through from that small palm against hers. Small fingers, unusually rough for their age, with several tiny cuts across the back of the hand.
She raised her head. Looked at Aihara Enju's grubby little face. And the rigid tension in her shoulders slowly, quietly ca undone — the sharp edge in her eyes blurring and shifting into sothing far more complicated.
"Mm."
"Nice to et you."
In that mont — faced with this scruffy little cat who was half her size and grinning like the sun had co out — as if she'd caught whatever Aihara Enju was putting down, Tendou Kisara gave a small nod, and quietly closed her own fingers around that dirty little hand.
—
With that settled, Hair led the group out of the IISO building.
The outside world was suspended in the darkest hour before dawn.
The streets were in shambles. Evidence of last night's chaos was everywhere — shattered shop windows, overturned garbage cans, and the faint, wavering glow of fires sowhere in the distance.
At this hour, the Tokyo Area should have been waking up. Salaryn crowding onto subway cars, students rushing to school, breakfast stalls steaming in the early morning air.
But today — the entire city was dead silent.
Almost no one was on the streets, and the few people who were moved in a hunched, frantic scurry — hugging the walls with the wide eyes of startled mice, clearly wanting to be anywhere else.
Nobody had recovered from the terror of last night's Divine Eye, that massive presence that had blotted out the sky.
Hiruko Kohina, by contrast, was in an entirely different universe of emotional response — bouncing with energy across the deserted street, springing up onto a lamppost with no apparent reason.
And then —
Fzzt —
Fzzt-fzzt-fzzt —
All at once, the massive advertising displays mounted on the darkened building faces blazed to life simultaneously.
Not just the giant screens. The broadcast speakers along the roadside. The televisions inside every shop. Even the phones clutched white-knuckled in the hands of passers-by.
Every device was hijacked. Forced onto the sa signal.
The screens erupted into a blizzard of static — crackling, distorting violently, layered with the shriek of electrical interference — before the image snapped suddenly into sharp, stable focus.
A figure appeared at the center of the fra.
"Is that... the Holy Emperor?"
Tendou Kisara stopped walking. She looked up at the enormous screen overhead, and her pupils contracted sharply — shock bleeding through her composure.
The face on the screen was one that no one in the entire Tokyo Area could fail to recognize.
— The symbol of this region. A byword for order and purity. The ruler who sat forever untouched upon the throne of the Holy Residence.
The Holy Emperor.
But the Holy Emperor on that screen looked nothing like the person burned into the public's mory.
The Holy Emperor everyone knew was always impeccable. A ruler elevated above the world — dressed in a flawlessly white ceremonial gown, hair pinned without a strand out of place, wearing a perfect, picture-book smile, like a display doll behind glass.
But now.
On that screen —
— The Holy Emperor.
That white gown, once the emblem of supre authority, was now filthy and disheveled, sared all over with gri. The silver hair that was always pinned so precisely had co loose, hanging in untidy waves over her shoulders. Her face was streaked with ash and dust in equal asure.
A wreck. An utter wreck.
If not for that unmistakable face, and the ragged-but-still-recognizable silhouette of her formal gown, no one would have been able to identify her at a glance as the untouchable sovereign they knew.
And furthermore.
She was not standing in the polished, red-carpeted, heavily guarded press hall.
She was standing outside — in front of the gates of the Holy Residence itself. Out in the open, on bare concrete.
Behind her, there were no fully-ard Holy Emperor's Guard escorts with assault rifles.
Instead — a group of children.
— Cursed Children.
Standing at the front was the blind girl Hair had healed on the street the night before, alongside the girl in the flat cap who had been beaten to the ground by a patrol officer for stealing canned food.
In the fra, the Holy Emperor stood in front of them.
Using her own slender, slightly trembling body to place herself between the cara — and the children behind her.
She drew a long, slow breath. And when her eyes opened again, the ceremonial gentleness that had always lived in them was gone — replaced by a resolve that had never been there before.
"I am the Holy Emperor."
"But from today forward —"
"The one standing here is no longer the ruler of the Tokyo Area."
"I am a sinner."
The mont those words landed, every person hiding in their ho, sheltered in an evacuation center, stared at the screen in disbelief.
The Holy Emperor said what? A sinner?
The woman called the symbol of purity — confessing to being a sinner, on a citywide broadcast?
Before the shock could settle, the Holy Emperor continued.
"For a long ti, I believed I was protecting this city. Protecting every person in it. I sat in the high halls of the Holy Residence, reading polished reports, listening to my advisors' briefings — and I believed that was the whole of the world."
"But I was wrong."
"Catastrophically wrong."
"The peace I lived in was a lie I had been living inside. A so-called peace woven entirely from falsehoods."
"What I was truly protecting, all along, was a festering abscess."
The Holy Emperor raised her head and looked directly into the lens.
"Chief Advisor Kikunojou is dead."
The words hit like a bomb detonated through the airwaves, and the effect was instantaneous — every person watching went rigid.
— Tendou Kikunojou.
The man who had held the true levers of power in the Tokyo Area for over a decade — the so-called evergreen of politics, the elder whose approval even the Holy Emperor required — was dead?
"Chief Advisor Kikunojou died in the rot he himself had cultivated."
The Holy Emperor made no attempt to soften it. She stripped away the cover entirely.
"Embezzlent of the Monolith construction funds. Ordering Gastrea attacks to bury his cris. Sacrificing his own son and daughter-in-law to silence them."
"That was the Chief Advisor I relied upon above all others."
"As his ruler — I knew none of it."
"And in not knowing, I played my part in ensuring that every person in this city was made complicit in his sins."
"My weakness and incompetence were the soil those sins grew in."
"We have always told ourselves that the Monoliths protect us. That tal holds the Gastrea at bay. And so, with that comfortable lie in our pocket, we drove the Cursed Children out to the Outer District — let them live in sewers and ruins."
"We used them as tools. Treated them as expendables. Discarded them like trash whenever it suited us."
"And then — comfortable and safe behind our high walls — we enjoyed the peace their suffering bought us."
"We made a sport of discriminating against them. Persecuting them. Tornting them."
"And because of that —"
"Our arrogance has drawn down a god's wrath."
The Holy Emperor's voice rang out across the empty plaza, carried by the airwaves to every corner of the city.
"A god is watching."
"Watching what we do in the gutter."
"Watching how we have persecuted the children that god loves."
"And so the ti has co for us to atone."
"As in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis —"
"The cities' sins were so great that their outcry reached the heavens. And so the divine brought down fire and brimstone upon those cities and all the plain — upon all the inhabitants, and all that grew upon the ground — and consud them utterly."
"Now."
"A god has descended in person to settle this account."
"Just as the divine oracle declared —"
"From this mont forward —"
"All who have persecuted, despised, or turned away from those children beloved by the divine —"
"Are sinners."
"Sinners shall perish in the jaws of monsters."
"Only the pure of light shall be granted a place when judgnt cos."
"Our sins called down a god's wrath."
"We are all sinners. And we should be ready at dawn to face our judgnt."
As the Holy Emperor's final words fell.
The entire Tokyo Area plunged into a silence like death.
That silence lasted less than three seconds.
"Are you out of your mind?!"
And then the shouting began.
"Sinners? Who are you calling sinners?!"
"We're the victims! Those monsters killed our families!"
"Those red-eyed little freaks are the monsters! They've got monster blood running through their veins!"
Panic spread like a plague — and then curdled fast, fernting into the most primal kind of rage.
People were incapable of accepting the label of sinner. And they were even less capable of accepting that the Holy Emperor — the woman they had venerated for years — was now cursing her own people on behalf of a pack of Cursed Children.
"It's her fault!"
A heavyset man pointed at the screen, spittle flying.
"She's the one who angered the god!"
"Those monster brats have got inside her head!"
"Kill her!"
"Offer her as a sacrifice to the god — that'll put out the divine fire!"
"And the children too — kill them all!"
A riot ignited in that single instant.
When humans are pushed to the limits of their fear, they always need sowhere to put it. They flooded into the streets. If a god was furious, then find a scapegoat.
The Holy Emperor — and those filthy little Cursed Children at her side — were obviously the most convenient offerings available.
"It's the Holy Emperor! She angered the god!"
"She's sheltering the monster-children! She's a traitor!"
"Sacrifice her! Kill her! Kill those little monsters! The god will be appeased!"
That first roar was the spark dropped into the oil.
The crowd surged — a tidal mass of bodies — pouring toward the Holy Residence plaza.
"Sacrifice!"
"Sacrifice!"
"Kill them all!"
Rotten vegetable scraps. Stones. Soone had even pulled off their leather shoe and was gripping it as a weapon.
On the plaza before the Holy Residence, the dozens of Holy Emperor's Guard mbers who had been stationed there were now in full retreat — step by stuttering step.
They still held assault rifles loaded with anti-Gastrea rounds, but the barrels were shaking.
Faced with a mob flooding toward them like a zombie apocalypse, these n — who in normal tis strutted around like they owned the place — broke.
"Captain... what do we do?"
A young guard's voice trembled as he looked toward his superior — Guard Captain Hoyake Takuto, a man who had made a hobby of brutalizing Cursed Children for sport.
Hoyake Takuto glanced at the Holy Emperor — still standing in the center of the plaza, shielding the Cursed Children — then glanced at the insane crowd bearing down on them, and imdiately ca to a decision.
"Damn it."
"That crazy woman brought this on herself. She's not dragging down with her."
With that, Hoyake Takuto was the first to drop his gun, spin on his heel, and sprint for the side door of the Holy Residence.
With the captain setting the example, the rest of the guard unit scattered in seconds like startled birds.
The mob crashed through the broken cordon and poured into the plaza.
Nobody wanted to be the one standing in the wrong place at the wrong ti.
Projectiles rained in from every direction.
But.
The Holy Emperor did not flinch.
She simply turned around — quietly, without hurry — and placed her own back, narrow as it was, between the storm of incoming debris and the cluster of shaking, terrified Cursed Children huddled behind her.
"Don't be afraid."
"This is the price I deserve to pay."
"Kami-sama is watching. He will protect you."
The Holy Emperor's head was bowed, her chin resting against the tangled hair of the girl in front of her, her voice quiet and absolutely steady.
Even though her body was shaking.
Smack!
A leather shoe connected solidly with the back of the Holy Emperor's head.
The delicate silver hairpin was knocked flying — hit the ground with a sharp clink and snapped cleanly in two.
A cascade of silver hair ca spilling loose, falling over half her face.
The image of the untouchable, sacred, inviolable ruler — gone, in an instant.
What was left was a woman with her hair in her face, battered and undone.
But sohow, the sight of her like this only ignited the crowd further.
The great and lofty had bled.
A perverse thrill rippled through the mob like a current.
As if drawing her blood proved they were right. As if making her suffer could wash away the fear eating through their chests.
"Got her!"
"Keep going!"
"Kill the monsters!"
Stones, rotting vegetables, thermoses — all of it rained down on the Holy Emperor in a relentless barrage.
Crack.
A sharp-edged brick caught her on the temple.
Skin split instantly.
Bright red blood ran down her pale forehead — tracing across the corner of her eye, down her cheek — and dripped onto her filthy white gown, blooming into vivid red flowers against the white.
The Holy Emperor staggered.
The pain sent black spots exploding across her vision.
Warm blood pattered onto the face of the girl in the flat cap.
The girl looked up. Her red eyes were wide and wild with shock — staring at this big sister she had only ever seen on television, who was now bleeding freely over her head just to keep her safe.
"Holy Emperor..."
The girl in the flat cap cried out, voice cracking.
"Don't be scared..."
The Holy Emperor forced the semblance of a smile — blood-streaked and bleak as it was.
And so.
The violence on the Holy Residence plaza continued.
A man in a business suit charged to the front of the crowd, face contorted with rage, a jagged brick torn from a flower planter raised in both fists.
"Die, witch!"
He scread.
And with every last ounce of strength he had, he brought the brick down toward the top of the Holy Emperor's skull.
If it connected, there would be nothing left to save.
But the Holy Emperor only pulled the children in her arms a little tighter — and closed her eyes.
Waiting for death to arrive.
And yet.
The anticipated agony never ca.
The plaza — which had been a deafening wall of screaming and battle cries just a mont before — went silent.
Completely. Instantaneously. Silent.
The man's arms stopped in mid-swing.
Not just him.
It was as if every single person in the crowd had been hit by a mute button simultaneously.
Even the police sirens wailing in the distance — gone.
The silence arrived so suddenly, so absolutely, that it seed to physically press on the eardrums.
The Holy Emperor opened her eyes in confusion.
She looked.
Everyone around her was frozen in the exact position they'd been in a mont before — rocks mid-throw, mouths open, fists raised.
But their faces.
Every single face had locked up.
And in those eyes that had been burning with bloodlust and madness just monts ago — only one thing remained.
— Fear.
Absolute, undiluted terror.
Pupils quivering. Lips shaking. Every gaze locked upward, unblinking.
Sowhere in the crowd, a stone slipped from a hand — clatter — bounced off the cobblestones and rolled over the owner's own foot. The man didn't make a sound.
The Holy Emperor hesitated.
Slowly, she raised her own head.
Followed their gaze up into the sky.
And in the very next instant.
The Holy Emperor herself went still.
Behind the rolling layers of heavy cloud —
That dark-crimson Eye had returned.
Clearer this ti than it had been at night. Larger. So imnse it consud nearly half the visible sky.
Its dark-red pupil gazed down, cold and absolute, upon the tiny, squirming insects below.
And beneath that Eye —
The sky that had been empty before.
Was empty no longer.
At so point — no one had noticed when — it had filled.
Black dots. Countless of them. Dense as a sar of ink across the heavens.
At first they looked like a migration of birds.
But as they descended — dropping lower, lower, lower —
Their true forms ca into view at last, revealed before every pair of eyes watching from below.
Now everyone could see what they were.
— Gastrea.
Tens of thousands of winged Gastrea.
Massive dragonfly-type Gastrea. Giant avian-type Gastrea. And countless more bizarre aerial variants that defied any existing classification.
They blotted out the sky.
____
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