Volume 1, Chapter 11: She Walked Out of the Flowing Fire
Two of the lights in the emergency stairwell were broken.
Shuichi climbed the stairs all the way up, and by the time he pushed open the gymnasium's side door, the sky outside had completely changed.
It was still afternoon, yet the whole sky over East District seemed to have been sealed under a thin dark-red membrane. The sunlight passing through the flesh-and-blood tissue that kept gathering toward the city center had turned into a murky color close to dusk.
The high-rises that had still been visible in the distance were vanishing one after another, blocked by enormous walls of flesh rising from underground. Dozens of thick dark-red masses of tissue twisted around each other and finally closed up around the outskirts of Old Town, forming a sealed area nearly a kilometer across.
His phone had no signal.
The Girl Hero Observatory had gone completely offline too.
Good.
At least that part was nice.
Shuichi didn't take the main road. He turned into the alley behind the gymnasium and climbed over an abandoned fence before stopping.
No one around.
There was a camera, though.
He looked up at the utility pole.
The lens was pointed right at him.
"..."
Shuichi walked a few steps to the side.
It could still see him.
He moved again.
Still in frame.
In the end, he simply ducked into a building where construction had stopped.
"Why are there so many cameras these days."
There were no workers inside.
Once the alarms had gone off, everyone in this area had long since evacuated.
Shuichi climbed the bare concrete stairs to the third floor and pushed open a window frame that had never had glass installed, which gave him a view of the enormous Hive Domain in the distance.
The dark-red walls of flesh were closing in.
The last gap through which the streets inside could be seen sealed completely a few seconds later.
People outside couldn't get in.
And the thing inside couldn't get out.
Of course.
At least, that was true for ordinary people.
Shuichi stood at the window and raised his right hand.
His palm was clean.
But something he hadn't reached for in a very long time had already woken up deep inside his body.
So familiar it was irritating.
He looked down at it for a while.
"Last time."
After saying it, he fell silent first.
He seemed to have said that exact line a long time ago too.
Forget it.
Nobody was listening anyway.
Shuichi closed his eyes.
The next instant.
The wind in the whole abandoned building stopped.
The dust floating in the air hung suspended, the plastic sheeting whipped up by the wind outside the window held its billowed shape, and even the flesh-and-blood tissue writhing endlessly in the distance faltered for that one moment.
A single point of sakura-colored firelight lit up at Shuichi's feet.
It had no heat.
Yet it turned the dim concrete floor a pale red.
Then, a second point.
A third.
More and more.
The flames quietly flowed upward around his body.
His short black hair was the first thing the firelight swallowed.
In the sakura fire the strands rapidly lengthened, past his shoulders, past his waist, until they finally spread out behind him.
Their color wouldn't settle either. Near the roots it was still an almost pure silver-white, but toward the ends it was steeped more and more in a pale sakura-pink, and flowing firelight threaded through it, shedding a few petal-like flecks of light with every slight sway.
The man's once thin, gaunt body began to change.
The line of the shoulders narrowed.
The waist drew in.
In the white flowing light, the contours of chest and hips were reshaped into curves that belonged entirely to a woman. The height of nearly 1.8 meters dropped slightly, yet the sense of presence that had come from height alone grew even heavier once the change was complete.
White silken battle attire formed from the sides of the neck downward.
The first thing to close was a pure-white high collar at the throat, its edges running with thin sakura light, while the main body hugged the chest and waist below, forming a seamless pure-white high-cut one-piece battle attire.
There were no heavy armor plates along the sides of the waist or the legs, only a very few lines of sakura-pink flowing fire slowly roaming along the body.
A loose pure-white coat unfurled from behind the shoulders right after.
It wasn't fully worn.
It just hung loosely off both arms, baring the shoulders and collarbones, its overlong hem lifted by a wind with no source, flashes of faint light like burning cherry blossoms flickering inside it now and then.
The left arm changed the most.
From the forearm down, fair skin was gradually covered by thick snow-white dragon scales. The five fingers lengthened, the fingertips became sharp white dragon claws, and sakura firelight glowed through the seams between the scales.
The right hand stayed human.
Only, from fingertips to wrist, small streams of flowing fire wound around it ring after ring.
Then.
Two huge white dragon horns slowly grew backward from within the long silver-white hair.
Each horn was half a meter long, a white so lustrous it was nearly jade, with quiet sakura-pink flames burning along its ridges.
The flames flowed slowly down the horns like liquid, and turned into drifting petals at the tips.
Behind her, a two-meter dragon tail covered in fine pure-white scales extended out from beneath the coat. When the tip lightly swept the floor, sakura-pink flames flared up all the way along its spine.
The legs were mostly clad in white silk garter stockings, their surface shimmering faintly with sakura-pink flowing light.
The last things to appear were the boots.
Pure-white flowing light gathered upward from the toes, wrapping the ankles and calves, until it finally took the shape of a pair of pure-white high-heeled long boots, their edges traced with a line of the palest sakura-pink.
And along the outer sides of the boots, two streams of sakura-pink flowing fire with no physical source burned from the ankles all the way up to the tops, trailing a very short tail of flame behind with every step she took.
The woman opened her eyes.
Her sakura-pink pupils held no highlights; her expression was very faint, very quiet.
In that single instant, all the dust hanging around her fell to the floor at once.
BOOM.
A muffled rumble came up from deep in the foundations of the entire building.
Behind her, the first pure-white energy ring unfolded.
Then the second.
The third.
Three rings of different sizes hovered at completely different angles around her lower back and her dragon tail, slowly turning.
Countless flecks of sakura fire were held aloft by the ring-shaped force field; seen from far away, it looked like a sky full of cherry blossoms falling in reverse around a single person.
She reached out.
A white straight sword dropped into her right hand out of thin air.
It was still in its sheath.
The snow-white scabbard was engraved only with very fine sakura patterns, and a small, almost transparent tuft of flowing fire burned near the guard.
The woman slung the sword crosswise at the small of her back.
Shuichi, or rather the white-haired woman who no longer looked anything like "Shuichi," stood before the glassless third-floor window, facing the enormous Hive Domain that blanketed the district from several kilometers away.
A few seconds later.
She took a step forward.
A pure-white high-heeled boot came down on the windowsill.
Sakura fire streamed silently down from either side of the heel.
The next instant.
She was gone.
All that remained where she had stood was a pure-white ring suddenly spreading outward.
A second late, every window frame in the building rattled at once.
***
Inside the Hive Domain.
For the first time, Yusei felt that breathing was this hard.
Because the air was nearly gone.
Every street around them had been completely sealed by dark-red tissue. Buildings, cars, the road surface, even the sky were covered by endlessly growing structures of flesh and blood, which finally joined dozens of meters overhead to form a gigantic hemispherical cavity.
There was no sunlight inside.
The only sources of light were the dark-red crystals in the Cocoon Princess's chest and head.
And the gold-and-blue glow of Asakawa Mio.
BANG!
A bone blade came down.
Yusei rolled aside.
The car behind him was sliced clean in half down the middle.
Before he could even get his footing, a second bony limb was already stabbing at him from above at an angle.
"Yusei!"
Mio's lance slammed sideways into the bone blade.
CLANG—!
Gold-and-blue sparks scattered.
The wound at her shoulder tore open once more, and blood ran down her pale arm onto the shaft of the lance.
Mio clenched her teeth.
She didn't retreat.
"Go!"
"Go where?"
Yusei reached up and grabbed another white bone spike thrusting out of the ground; the sharp surface cut his palm open instantly, and blood welled out.
But he forcibly wrenched the nearly two-meter spike aside, so that it grazed past Mio's flank and drove into the ground.
"Everything outside is sealed!"
"Then don't stand in front of it either!"
"Aren't you standing there too?"
"I'm a transformer!"
"Then can you beat it right now?!"
Mio wanted to swear.
But she couldn't argue.
She had already tried almost everything.
Her usual thrusts, it knew.
Her feints, it knew.
Using the length of the lance to create blind spots, it knew that too.
Even the way she instinctively favored protecting her left side once her stamina dropped, the Cocoon Princess seemed to have recorded in advance; every attack pressed precisely there.
Worse still—
It was still learning.
At first, Yusei's complete lack of combat experience had caused the Cocoon Princess to misjudge a few times.
That didn't work anymore.
The third clash.
The fourth.
After the fifth, those misjudgments were rapidly disappearing.
And their stamina couldn't last forever.
"Behind you!"
Yusei shouted.
Mio didn't look back.
She drove the lance straight back under her arm.
It hit nothing.
Mio's pupils shrank sharply.
Something was wrong.
Had Yusei judged wrong this time?
The next second, she suddenly realized.
It wasn't that Yusei was wrong.
The Cocoon Princess had deliberately made him "sense" something behind her.
The dark-red crystal on its head flared bright.
A bony limb that hadn't taken part in a single attack the entire time stabbed out from the front.
The target wasn't Mio.
It was Yusei.
"Move!"
Mio had no time to pull back her lance.
She simply threw herself sideways in front of it.
SHUNK.
The bone blade ran through one side of her abdomen.
Time seemed to stop for a moment.
The color drained from Yusei's face in an instant.
"Asakawa—!"
Mio grabbed the bone blade with both hands.
"Don't come over here!"
Blood quickly ran down the white surface of the bone.
But the Cocoon Princess didn't stop at all.
A second bony limb rose from above.
Yusei looked up.
The bone blade was already aimed at him.
Mio wanted to move.
But the one through her body pinned her in place.
Her lance lay on the ground beside her.
The blue light grew weaker and weaker.
"Yusei!"
The white blade came down.
Yusei threw up both arms on instinct.
He couldn't block it.
That thought was perfectly clear.
His body really had long surpassed an ordinary person's.
But it still wasn't strong enough to catch this bare-handed.
The bone blade was already less than half a meter above his head.
And then—
It stopped.
It never touched him.
It hadn't even been blocked by anything.
It just stopped there.
Yusei froze.
So did Mio.
For the first time, the Cocoon Princess showed obvious hesitation.
Its six-petaled bone face slowly turned to one side.
The next second.
CRACK.
An extremely thin sakura-pink line of fire lit up along the surface of the white bone blade.
Without a sound.
The line of fire ran from the tip all the way up.
And then the entire bony limb, several meters long, slid apart cleanly down the middle.
The upper half slid off.
And crashed to the ground.
BOOM!
Yusei's head snapped up.
Only now did he notice.
At some point, a hole dozens of meters across had appeared in the top of the Hive Domain.
The outer layer of flesh, the bone shell, the energy membrane, every structure that should have kept out the outside world, seemed to have been completely erased in the same instant.
Beyond the round gap.
The sky was bright.
And in the center of the only beam of sunlight shining into the Hive Domain—
Someone was slowly descending.
Long silver-white hair, lit almost transparent by the light above, yet running with sakura-pink at the ends. Huge pure-white dragon horns swept back from the hair, and sakura fire burned quietly along both of them like water.
A loose white coat spread out behind her.
A dragon tail covered in white scales hung down from beneath the hem, the flowing fire at its tip drawing a faint sakura-pink trail through the air.
Three pure-white energy rings slowly revolved around her.
Then.
The high-heeled boots touched the ground.
TAP.
The sound was very soft.
Yet every writhing mass of flesh and blood in the entire Hive Domain went rigid at the same time.
Yusei even had the illusion.
That they were afraid.
The pure-white high-heeled boots stepped onto a street covered in black blood and rubble, yet not a speck of filth clung to them.
She walked forward.
She didn't look at Yusei.
She didn't look at Mio.
She only looked at the Cocoon Princess.
One step.
Two steps.
Three steps.
There was no killing intent.
At least, not that Yusei could sense.
And yet the hair on his arms slowly stood on end.
It wasn't like the pressure the Cocoon Princess had just given off, the pressure of enormous power and the threat of death.
That kind of thing was direct.
Danger.
Fear.
The urge to run.
But the woman in front of him was different.
She wasn't doing anything.
She was just standing there.
Yet an utterly absurd feeling welled up in Yusei for no reason.
Mio didn't say anything either.
She even forgot the pain in her abdomen for a moment.
Her eyes were locked on that back.
White.
Sakura-pink.
Dragon horns.
Dragon tail.
That pure-white battle attire with almost none of the structure of traditional armor, and the loose coat swaying lightly with each step.
And the sword slung across the small of her back.
Mio had never seen her before.
She wasn't any hero Mio knew.
She definitely wasn't on the Girl Hero Observatory either.
If someone like this had ever appeared, there was no way nobody would remember.
The Cocoon Princess moved.
It clearly had no intention of waiting any longer.
All eight bony limbs spread at once.
The dark-red crystal on its head blazed blindingly bright in an instant.
A shrill shriek erupted.
It was the sound that had been able to directly jam Mio's transformation earlier.
The air even visibly warped.
But the white-haired woman kept walking forward.
She didn't stop.
Not even her hair was affected.
The jamming wave that had been enough to throw Mio's power structure out of control passed through her body as if nothing had happened.
For the first time, the Cocoon Princess took a step back.
Yusei saw it.
So did Mio.
"..."
It was afraid.
All eight bony limbs on the Cocoon Princess's back stabbed out at once.
From different angles.
At different speeds.
Two of them even drilled straight into the ground and burst up out of the earth right beneath the white-haired woman's feet.
She finally moved.
She only raised her left hand.
The snow-white dragon claw swept lightly forward.
HUMMM—
A ring of sakura-pink flowing fire spread outward from her fingertips.
All eight bony limbs stopped in midair.
The next moment.
The firelight swept past.
Every limb was severed at the same time.
The cuts were perfectly smooth.
The Cocoon Princess lurched back.
The dark-red tissue in its chest began to pulse wildly, and a mass of structures that had appeared before all grew out of the surface of its body at once.
Thick armor.
Parasitic tendrils.
An energy-absorbing layer.
High-speed bone spikes.
It even mimicked Mio's favorite lance thrust with a bone spear extending from its body.
As if it were throwing every bit of combat data it had collected over the past few days at her all at once.
The white-haired woman stopped.
Mio clenched her fists.
Because that thing was imitating her.
But the next second.
The woman only tilted her head slightly.
Then reached behind her waist with her right hand.
And gripped the hilt.
The Cocoon Princess attacked at almost the same instant.
Dozens of attacks filled the street.
White, dark red, black.
They covered their entire field of vision.
Yusei instinctively wanted to shout.
But the sound of a sword leaving its sheath came first.
SHING.
Just once.
The next second.
The world turned sakura-pink.
Countless extremely fine sakura-pink sword lines lit up throughout the space at the same time.
One.
A hundred.
A thousand.
They crisscrossed through every attack, through the ruined buildings, through the ground, yet harmed nothing that shouldn't have been harmed.
The bone spikes flying at her came apart in midair.
The dark-red tendrils were cut into countless tiny fragments, burned to ash by the sakura fire before they even hit the ground.
The armor layer that could absorb Mio's energy didn't even have time to deploy before hundreds of cracks, so thin they were almost invisible, appeared on its surface.
And the Cocoon Princess—
Was still standing.
Until the white-haired woman slid the sword back into its sheath.
CLICK.
The guard tapped lightly against the mouth of the scabbard.
Dense sakura-pink lines lit up all over the Cocoon Princess's body at once.
BOOM!
This time.
The fire finally caught.
Sakura-pink flowing fire gushed out from inside its body.
It didn't even have time to struggle.
The pale carapace covering its whole body shattered layer by layer. Every combat organ it had made specifically to counter Mio, every structure built to jam transformers, every bit of data gathered over several days, did nothing at all in those flames.
Yusei stood there.
He completely forgot that he had nearly died a moment ago.
Mio didn't move either.
She could only watch.
Watch the enemy she hadn't been able to truly touch, even giving it everything she had, get casually taken apart by that woman.
The dark-red crystal in the Cocoon Princess's chest suddenly tore free of its body.
It flew upward.
It still wanted to escape.
The white-haired woman raised her eyes.
Her sakura-pink pupils merely glanced at it.
The three white energy rings hovering behind her stopped at the same time.
The next instant.
A pure-white pillar of light shot out from the center of the smallest ring.
The crystal vanished in an instant, hundreds of meters up.
The sky went quiet again.
The flesh-and-blood tissue all around began to wither.
The walls sealing the Hive Domain lost their support too, crumbling in great swaths into gray-black residue.
Sunlight shone in through more and more cracks.
It was over.
It had really ended just like that.
The white-haired woman didn't dismiss her battle attire.
Nor did she walk toward them.
She stood before the burned-out remains of the Cocoon Princess, confirming that the thing had completely lost all signs of life.
Then she turned around.
Yusei finally saw her face clearly.
In that instant, his mind went blank.
Beautiful.
That was the first word that came to him.
But he immediately felt it wasn't enough.
Her features didn't have that deliberately sharp, aggressive edge; she even looked younger than he'd imagined. Long hair woven of silver-white and sakura-pink fell beside her face, and the huge dragon horns only made that exquisitely delicate face seem even more unreal.
She had no expression.
She didn't speak either.
She only turned slightly.
And glanced at them.
First Mio.
Then Yusei.
It was that one glance.
BOOM—
Something suddenly exploded inside Yusei's head.
A long, long time ago.
A memory so blurred he had nearly forgotten it himself.
Rain.
Very heavy rain.
He was lying on cold ground.
All he could hear was the rain pounding down.
It seemed someone was crying, too.
Something was burning.
It was clearly raining.
Yet those sakura-colored flames didn't go out.
A white figure stood very far away.
Her long hair was soaked by the rain.
She seemed to be about to leave.
And then—
She looked back.
The same pair of eyes.
The same sakura-pink.
The image from his memory appeared for only an instant.
The next second, it shattered again.
Yusei's pupils contracted sharply.
"You..."
The word had barely come out.
The white-haired woman had already looked away.
She didn't answer.
She had no intention whatsoever of speaking with them.
She simply turned back around.
Pure-white high-heeled boots stepped across the broken street.
The flowing fire at either side trailed back with her steps.
Mio finally came to her senses from the shock.
"Wait—"
The woman's steps paused for an instant.
She didn't look back.
The next second.
All three energy rings unfolded at once.
Sakura-pink flames swept upward from the ground.
There was only a sky full of petal-like flowing fire bursting apart in the sunlight.
By the time those flecks of light settled.
She was gone.
All that remained at the scene was the rapidly disintegrating Mother Hive.
And two people who hadn't fully come back to their senses.
Yusei stood where he was.
He didn't speak for a long time.
Mio clutched the wound in her abdomen, her face pale, yet the first thing she did was look at him.
"You know her?"
Yusei didn't answer.
He was still looking at the place where the woman had vanished.
That one glance kept replaying in his head.
Rain.
Sakura fire.
White.
And a face time had worn almost to nothing.
After a long while.
Yusei finally spoke, his voice low.
"I don't know."
Mio frowned.
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
Yusei raised a hand and pressed it to his forehead.
"I think..."
He paused.
Even he didn't dare be sure.
"I saw her once, a long time ago."
Mio was stunned.
And at that same moment.
On the roof of an empty building several streets away from the battlefield.
Sakura-pink flowing fire suddenly flared.
White high-heeled boots touched down.
The woman's steps wavered slightly.
She reached out and braced herself against the wall.
She lowered her head.
Her long hair fell forward, hiding most of her face.
"..."
Her chest hurt.
Worse than any time before.
Shuichi stood there with his eyes closed for a while.
The white dragon claw slowly clenched.
The fingertips left five deep gouges in the concrete wall.
A few seconds later.
He finally let out a very soft breath.
And raised his head to look at the Hive Domain disintegrating in the distance.
"I already said..."
His voice was very low.
With a trace of helplessness in it.
"It was the last time."
No one answered.
Only the sakura-pink flowing fire on the dragon horns went on burning quietly.