Chapter 302: Deus Ex Machina (Patreon)

(Damn it! Why did she have to provoke a monster like that?)

(...Damn. Good thing it wasn't me.)

(No more ice cream for me, ever!)

(This world really is a mess.)

The Tomies reacted in different ways: some panicked, some gloated, some sighed with genuine feeling.

Nobody had expected that a simple outing to the circus would run them into a demon who held the rules of death in his hands. She ate one ice cream cone, and in the end she became the ice cream herself.

A god-demon who could treat an immortal body as nothing, and he'd turned up this cheaply?

(Let me try.)

Mara Tomie's thought slipped in quietly, without any excess emotion.

She closed her eyes.

Her consciousness sank to a deeper level. She visualized the melting body shedding its skin, shedding its flesh, shedding every false outward appearance, until only the most essential framework remained.

It was the White Skeleton Visualization that Amamiya Rin had cultivated for many years in the Illusory Dream Realm. Though she walked a path completely opposite to Amamiya Rin's, her mastery of this Buddhist practice was no less than his.

The skin fell away. The sinews peeled off.

Kawakami Tomie's bones had a translucent sheen like rock candy. They weren't bone, but sugar frosting.

Deeper still. In the marrow, the wellspring of life that should have surged crimson was fading, layer by layer, to milky white. It wasn't death, and it wasn't injury. It was transformation.

Deeper. Past matter, past cells, past every name and form.

She saw it: emptiness!

Not the emptiness of Buddhist teaching, but a true void, where there was nothing at all.

No curse, no spiritual power, no cause and effect. There was only a naked, unreasoning suchness. Things were simply as they were. Ice cream was thus; Tomie was thus.

As if, since beginningless kalpas, she had always been ice cream.

Mara Tomie opened her eyes.

(I can't make it out.)

After a moment, Mara Tomie finally spoke.

(It isn't any power I can understand. There's no logic to it and no pattern to follow. It's as if someone wrote the concept of 'ice cream' straight into every one of her cells. This is power at the level of rules, and it can't be reversed.)

The dimension the demon occupied was clearly higher than that of the being called Kawakami Tomie. Even without a hierarchy of rank, a power of material transformation was enough to counter an immortal body at the cellular level.

For a moment, the [Tomie Network] fell dead silent. Only relief spread through it.

It was lucky that a scapegoat had been hit first. Otherwise, who knew whether one of them might someday carelessly eat that shop's ice cream and lose her life?

Inside the tent, most of Kawakami Tomie's body had already melted.

Her left arm had come away at the shoulder joint and turned into a puddle of milky-white liquid, trickling down the seat. Her right leg was gone below the knee, exposing flesh that was melting just the same.

"Rin...!"

She looked at Amamiya Rin. For the first time, there was no scheming in those beautiful eyes, no mockery, none of that condescending arrogance.

Only fear!

For the first time, the being known as Kawakami Tomie felt the fear of death.

Amamiya Rin heard her voice.

His eardrums were ruined, and violent pain surged through him like ocean waves, rolling up from every inch of his body.

But his spirit had never wavered, and his steady will let him clearly take in Kawakami Tomie's plea for help.

The Ripple Breathing Method was running at its limit, and his inexhaustible life force circulated slowly through his severed meridians.

The strength it produced wasn't enough to lift an arm, to move a foot, or even to open his eyes.

But it was enough to let him turn his head slightly and point his ear toward the direction of the sound.

His blood-caked eyelids trembled faintly as he gazed at Kawakami Tomie's face, still melting away.

From across the distance, Kawakami Tomie looked at Amamiya Rin, battered and covered in wounds, and the panic and helplessness in her expression slowly calmed.

Their eyes met in silence, with no words between them.

Kawakami Tomie slowly closed her eyes. What remained of her body flowed and dissolved, bit by bit turning into a cold, milky-white syrup that spread slowly and vanished into the dim corner of the stage.

"You can still move?"

Babirus looked at Amamiya Rin, and a flash of genuine surprise crossed his eyes.

That body no longer met any physical condition for staying alive. Any living being would have been a heap of dead meat by now.

"Truly... remarkable."

Babirus murmured, and the greed in his eyes surged up again.

But when his gaze swept over the ice cream truck, the greed turned at once into frustration.

With that fellow around, he couldn't easily take this beautiful soul for himself.

The air in the tent congealed into invisible amber.

Babirus stood at center stage, his gaze drifting between the two ruined bodies. One was melting; the other should long since have been unable to stand.

The corner of his mouth twitched. It was an emotion even more foreign to him than anger: hesitation.

The ice cream truck sat at the edge of the torn tent. The white-haired demon sat upright in the driver's seat, his Uzumaki-patterned eyes reflecting everything on the stage. He made no move, and he didn't leave. He was waiting.

In the instant the three sides stood locked in a standoff—

"BOOM—"

The canvas at the top of the tent was torn open from outside by an invisible force. A huge shadow swept across the sky above, and the sound of beating wings rolled like muffled thunder.

Everyone looked up at the same moment.

A giant bird, black from head to tail, blotted out the rip in the tent's roof with its wingspan. Its feathers gleamed with an eerie metallic luster in the dim light.

Its eyes were the amber of molten gold, and the ruined stage below was reflected deep in its pupils.

The bird folded its wings and dove.

In midair its enormous body began to shrink and change shape. Its bones rearranged themselves and its feathers receded into skin.

The moment it landed, it had become a slender female figure.

Her long black hair fell to her waist, and her features were identical to Kawakami Tomie's, yet her air was entirely different. Her gaze was calm and profound, as if worn smooth by long ages, stripped of all restlessness and sharpness, leaving only the composure that comes after weathering many hardships.

Blackbird's gaze swept across the stage, pausing for a moment each on Babirus and the white-haired man, without any change in emotion.

Then she looked at Amamiya Rin.

With a flip of her wrist, a thumb-sized gemstone slid from her palm, and she tossed it through the air toward Amamiya Rin.

The gem was deep blue and translucent, with a faint light flowing inside it like a frozen nebula.

The instant the gem landed on Amamiya Rin's body, its light bloomed.

A deep-blue halo spread outward from the gem's center like ripples, flowing along Amamiya Rin's arm and across his whole body.

Wherever the stream of light passed, his tattered clothes were torn away and replaced by precisely fitted pieces of armor.

A red breastplate emerged over his chest, its edges traced with silver-gray lines.

Pauldrons extended outward, sharply angled.

Arm guards, leg guards, bracers, combat boots... each piece of armor solidified in the glow and sealed over his body without a gap.

The helmet formed last, its visor dropping down to hide his blood-stained face.

Silver and red, a full suit of arms: the Seven Armor, fully donned.