Chapter 299: Super Final Destination! (Patreon)

"Final Destination, huh? To think it could go this far…"

Amamiya Rin's heart sank.

With his physical conditioning, the odds of a joint dislocating while he walked were no higher than one in ten thousand. And yet that one in ten thousand had actually happened!

He glanced toward the exit.

Kawakami Tomie and Azawa Tomie were still sitting in the audience. One had her legs crossed and was idly twirling her hair, the other was licking an ice cream and swinging her calves. Neither showed any sign of moving.

They couldn't die. He could. He had always resisted the erosion of the Tomie cells, so all he had was ordinary self-healing, not an immortal body.

"Dear guest, the show has already begun~ Please, look forward to it!"

With one hand behind his back and the other over his chest, Babirus bowed to Amamiya Rin. His loud voice carried a deliberate, feverish excitement.

As though he'd been shocked by a current, Amamiya Rin felt a faint numbness crawl across his skin. An inexplicable dread gnawed at his brain.

A single thought had calmed his mind, but a calm mind couldn't make reality settle down with it. The dangerous atmosphere around him hadn't eased at all. Thanks to his brief hesitation, it had only grown thicker.

He had to act!

His right foot stamped down and the stage burst apart beneath it. Amamiya Rin turned into an afterimage, ten meters compressed into 0.01 seconds. His right fist clenched, knuckles cracking like popping beans, and the wind of the punch tore the air apart as it drove at Babirus's face with enough force to punch through steel plate.

Absolute strength and speed, joined with flawless technique, gave the blow ten times its power. But with the fist still half a meter from Babirus's face—

"Crack."

A sound that shouldn't have been there came from his right shoulder blade.

At the instant the muscle fired, a deep tendon tore a small piece away from the bone in a way that should never have happened.

The chain of force broke at its last link. The fist veered off course and skimmed past Babirus's ear, and the wind of the blow shredded the top hat on the demon's head.

Thrown off balance, Amamiya Rin pitched forward. Within 0.01 seconds he twisted his waist and turned, hauling his center of gravity back by sheer force. The torn tendon knit together at once under the regenerative power of the Tomie cells, and the fragment that had peeled off the bone was wrapped up and absorbed by the surrounding tissue.

In less than half a second, his right shoulder was as good as new.

But Babirus was no longer where he'd been. He had strolled off one leisurely step, and in that very moment a faint ripping sound came from above.

The canvas at the top of the tent split open. A steel pipe as thick as a fist worked loose from the frame, one end still dangling half of a broken weld, the other pointing straight down at Amamiya Rin's head.

The pipe's shriek cut past his ear. Amamiya Rin tilted his neck, and a deadly trajectory that should have missed him cleanly was nudged at the last instant by a dangling nylon rope.

The pipe deflected. Its jagged end drove precisely into his head.

"Schk."

The sound of metal tearing scalp was perfectly clear. A thin gash opened at Amamiya Rin's temple, and a few drops of blood seeped out.

To Amamiya Rin, a wound like that was barely worth noticing. But Babirus had somehow already shifted to the other side of the stage. With his top hat shredded, sparse gray hair showed beneath it, yet the not-quite-smile at the corners of his mouth hadn't changed in the slightest. He even raised a hand to straighten his bow tie, as composed as if he'd just finished some polite social chat.

Amamiya Rin didn't hesitate. He kicked off the ground and charged!

But in that same moment, seven planks of the stage floor shattered at once. They gave way like timber that had been worm-eaten for years and had finally found its last straw. His right foot plunged into the broken boards, and his ankle was forced to twist under his own momentum.

The sound of tearing ligaments was drowned out by the crack of bone. A sharp shard of bone pierced the skin and jutted out from the side. Amamiya Rin tilted to the right, his weight crashing onto the broken leg, and with his balance gone he fell forward.

His right hand reached down on instinct, but the ground under his palm crumbled like flaky pastry. Chunks fell away in a cloud of dust, leaving no foothold to push against.

In that instant, Amamiya Rin drove power through his waist and abdomen. His spine whipped around like the tip of a lash, and his forward-falling body folded sideways in midair, a full one hundred and eighty degrees.

His left hand shot out like lightning and hooked the exposed rebar at the stage's edge. His fingertips sank half an inch into the steel, and using that sliver of leverage he flipped over and landed like a cat.

His broken right leg struck the ground as he landed, yet he didn't so much as frown. He quickly snapped off the protruding bone shard, and the muscle and bone beneath the skin rapidly healed.

Then, without a trace of hesitation, he vaulted back onto the stage and rushed at Babirus.

This time, however, his charge was extremely slow. It wasn't a straight line or an arc, but a jagged, patternless zigzag.

His footwork blended boxing's slip-steps, kendo's stamping advance, and Muay Thai's three-step rush. Every change of direction came without warning, and every burst of force was timed to the critical edge of his center of gravity. It was a way of moving that stripped any prediction of meaning.

It was the best answer he could think of in so short a time. If the demon's power turned possible accidents into inevitable ones, then what he had to do was make the possibilities, before any accident could happen, infinite, infinitely fragmented, and infinitely unpredictable.

The twisting steps and path actually took place within 0.1 seconds. In the blink of an eye, Amamiya Rin appeared right in front of Babirus. His hand became a blade, fingers pressed together like an edge, fingertips tearing the air with a sharp whistle as they thrust at Babirus's throat.

He had no sword, but Amamiya Rin's knife-hand was no worse than any real blade, and this thrust showed off the technique of the stab to the fullest.

Moreover, the strike didn't depend on a tendon burst. Its power came from the rotation of his hips and the transmission through his spine, so even if some accident struck midway, the path of the blade-hand wouldn't be easily thrown off.

Yet an accident happened anyway.

Just as the tip of his hand came within thirty centimeters of Babirus's Adam's apple.

A sour rush of air surged in through his nasal passage without warning, straight up to his eyes and the crown of his skull.

"Achoo!"

A completely unforeseeable sneeze.

The agony of his intracranial pressure suddenly spiking turned his vision black and made his body sway. His blade-hand strayed from its course, skimmed past Babirus's collar, and chopped into the pillar behind him. The bowl-thick steel pillar buckled with a harsh shriek of twisting metal.

At the same time, his retinas tore completely away from the choroid, and the world turned into a murky blood-red.

But the agony of detached retinas didn't make Amamiya Rin's assault pause for even a moment.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and in an instant his breathing shifted to a different rhythm. The rise and fall of his chest vanished completely, and the tips of his ears twitched slightly, catching the faintest movements in the air.

The rustle of Babirus's clothes, the steady beat of his heart, even the soft sound of his hair falling into place built a clear three-dimensional image in Amamiya Rin's mind.

Instead of retreating, he advanced. His left toes tapped the ground and his body spun a full three hundred and sixty degrees, and his right leg swept out with a tearing howl, all his strength gathered at the front of the shin, enough to snap a stone pillar.

But just as his shin was about to reach Babirus's waist—

"Crunch."

His right knee's meniscus shattered into pieces without warning.

The heavy, forceful kick lost all its power at once, and the knee bent inward at a grotesque angle.

The corner of Amamiya Rin's eye twitched. He sank his body with the motion, shifted his weight onto his left leg, and, hand curled into a claw, followed the momentum of the spin to grab at Babirus's wrist.

But the instant his fingertips were about to touch skin, his trigeminal nerve erupted, without warning, in a level-ten electric shock of pain.

It felt as if countless red-hot steel needles had been driven into his brain at once. Amamiya Rin's body jolted violently, his claw veered off, and it grazed past Babirus's wrist.

Even so, he still didn't back away. Instead he used the force of that shudder to slam forward, his left shoulder ramming into Babirus's chest like a battering ram.

"Thud."

Only then did a dull impact ring out.

Amamiya Rin's expression changed sharply.

His fifth rib had fractured spontaneously at the moment he exerted force.

The broken edge pierced the pleura and stabbed into the lung. Air rushed into his chest cavity and set off violent coughing, each cough bringing up scalding bloody foam. He staggered back, his left hand clutching his chest, as the broken rib slowly mended under the Tomie cells.

But before the wound in his lung could even close, his heart suddenly stopped beating, without warning.

The world plunged into darkness.

The suffocating feeling of blood no longer circulating clamped around his throat. Without hesitation, Amamiya Rin raised his right hand, made a fist, and smashed it into his own chest.

"Boom!"

His heart began beating again under the blow.

But the moment the blood flowed once more, every sweat gland in his body secreted sweat at once. It wasn't ordinary sweat, but a red liquid mixed with blood plasma.

Capillaries all over his body burst at the same time, and blood seeped from every pore, dyeing him entirely red.

"Clap! Clap! Clap!"

Applause rang out.

"What a splendid performance! Very few people can last this long, dear guest. Your tenacity is simply beyond imagination."

Babirus was still standing in place, without having moved a single step. He applauded Amamiya Rin in admiration, a trace of surprise on his face.

Reduced to such a state, and still able to keep attacking him. The willpower of this human was too strong to imagine.

But this was wonderful!

"Ahahahahahaha!"

Babirus's lips split into a savage curve. He burst into delighted laughter, his eyes fixed on Amamiya Rin, brimming with greed.

"That's it! That's it! Wonderful! What a beautiful soul! It shines with a golden radiance! You have a spirit like gold! Your one soul is worth more than ten thousand human souls!"

Babirus raised both hands and cried out in exultation.

Compared with the man before him, the guests who had left were nothing. The fellow selling ice cream could take them all if he wanted. This one soul was enough for him!