Chapter 303: The Power of the Future (Patreon)

Amamiya Rin's consciousness was drawn out of his body by a gentle force and sank into the gem set in the center of the breastplate.

Inside the gem lay a boundless, deep-blue void. His consciousness floated within it, clear, calm, and utterly unhindered.

Through the gem, he could sense every inch of the armor's structure and feel the movement of the air outside. He could even feel the frozen expression on Babirus's face.

His body still stood where it had been. The flesh was still ruined and the bones still shattered, but those wounds no longer mattered. The armor enclosing him held his body together and kept its shape.

This is…

In the instant the question rose, a flood of memories poured into Amamiya Rin's mind along the nerve threads of the [Tomie Network].

They were Blackbird's memories, memories from five years in the future, spanning several hundred years.

One day in the future, Amamiya Rin had found Blackbird.

Yes, that Blackbird: the bird from Junji Ito's manga "Blackbird" that can travel through time.

In the story of "Blackbird," the protagonist falls off a cliff and breaks his leg, unable to move. The black bird feeds him from its beak every day so he can hold out until rescue arrives. But the food it feeds him is flesh the future bird tore from the protagonist's own body, carried back through time to feed his past self.

The future Amamiya Rin had captured that bird and assimilated it into a Kawakami Tomie. As a Kawakami Tomie in Blackbird's form, she gained the power to travel the river of time.

Kawakami Tomie has always been willful. Given an ability like that, of course she ran back and forth between past and future, and that was where things went wrong.

After all, this world has the Cthulhu pantheon in it.

The reckless Blackbird Tomie had long since been marked by the Hounds of Tindalos. That was exactly why she had been so slow to return to this timeline.

Of course, it was also because Amamiya Rin hadn't yet been cornered. Now that disaster had struck him, Blackbird Tomie naturally rushed over and delivered equipment from the future: the Soul Gem and the Seven Armor.

They were creations from twenty years on. The Soul Gem was a solidified soul excavated from the Underworld, taken from "Black Paradox." When struck, the burst of soul power grants whoever touches it a personalized supernatural ability.

The Seven Armor was a product from fifty years on, refined through ten generations of upgrades. After finding the Soul Gem matched to Amamiya Rin, she had also seized the technology for excavating and using Underworld energy from "Village of Ether," and built a magical girl transformation device with nearly limitless magic power.

Amamiya Rin was still reading Blackbird Tomie's memories, but she didn't linger. As if sensing something, she dropped the Soul Gem, then abruptly turned her head toward some unseen direction beyond the tent. Her molten-gold pupils contracted sharply.

"Tch! They're on me tight! Damn mangy mutts!"

Before the words had faded, her form began to blur. The crack of bones reassembling in reverse rattled out like popping beans. Black feathers rose in patterns across her skin, and her shoulders stretched out to either side into an enormous wingspan.

From human form to giant bird took no more than a breath.

Blackbird beat her wings, and a gale exploded through the tent, flinging scattered debris and melted ice cream high into the air. The black shape shot skyward, and her talons tore through the space before her, revealing a chaotic, twisted rift in space-time.

"Rin, this is as far as I can help you! Don't die—!"

Her shrill cry pierced the tent as the giant bird dove into the rift. Only a few black feathers were left drifting down, and they crumbled into ash in midair.

The rift slowly closed, and the cold malice from beyond time faded with it.

Babirus looked up at the shrinking black silhouette, then lowered his gaze to Amamiya Rin at the center of the stage.

Silver-and-red armor covered Rin from head to toe. The gem in his chest glowed with a faint deep-blue light, like a sleeping heart beating slowly.

"What is this?"

The greed in Babirus's eyes gave way to confusion. He could sense that something he couldn't comprehend was happening inside the husk before him.

Put most plainly, he could no longer sense any probability of death on Amamiya Rin.

"Interesting."

Babirus bared two rows of unnaturally even teeth. It looked like a smile, but there was no mirth in his eyes, only resolute killing intent.

He badly wanted that brilliant soul, but too much had gone wrong. If he didn't reap it now, he would probably face serious trouble.

If he reaped it now, then even if he couldn't claim that brilliant soul, he could at least harvest the value Amamiya Rin would bloom with in the face of death.

He raised a hand and flicked a fingertip lightly through the air. The invisible threads of causality trembled once more.

"Cardiac arrest!"

The heart in Amamiya Rin's chest stopped beating without warning, and the blood in his vessels congealed into stagnant water.

He should have been dead. At that moment, Amamiya Rin was no different from a corpse.

Yet Amamiya Rin moved.

He flexed his fingers. The armor's joints gave off fine mechanical clicks, smooth and unimpeded.

His right hand reached for his waist and drew the Spacium Sword.

The blade was slender, with the slight curve of a Japanese katana. Pale blue light particles flowed slowly along the edge like a frozen stream. The hilt fit the curve of his palm, solid in the grip and free of any needless ornament.

The sound of the blade leaving its sheath was not the sharp scrape of metal but a low hum, like some ancient energy awakening.

Amamiya Rin raised the point of the sword and aimed it at Babirus.

The ruined tent fell abruptly silent. Even the drifting dust and the flowing currents of air froze in place.

Amamiya Rin stood motionless. His flesh was already thoroughly dead, but the soul's will, freed from that decaying body, had taken over everything.

The aether in the gem ran through both the Seven Armor and Amamiya Rin's husk and fused them into one. Every movement was driven purely by aether and directed by the will of his soul.

The instant the Spacium Sword was held steady, its point leveled at the distance ahead, the balance of heaven and earth overturned.

Pale blue light particles flowed slowly down the spine of the blade. There was no blinding glare, yet it worked like a cold lodestone, drawing in every sound, every breath of wind, and every drifting mote of dust in the tent.

The smells that had filled the air, blood, ice cream, gunpowder smoke, and rust, were all pressed down to the ground by the Sword Force and could not rise.

The air turned thick as asphalt. That was the Sword Force blanketing the entire domain.

In an instant, the world of Babirus's spiritual perception shattered.

No one swung a sword, yet countless blade-lights and sword-shadows lay across the void.

A matchless, lightning-fast iai draw grazed his throat, and its biting sharpness stung him faintly.

A heavy, crushing downward cleave bore down on his shoulders like a landslide, and the malice around him collapsed layer upon layer under its weight.

A cunning, vicious thrust locked onto the center of his brow and sealed off every thought he had.

Ceaselessly turning Hassō stance closed in layer by layer, and dense Slash intent locked down every inch of space around him.

To outside eyes, Amamiya Rin hadn't moved at all. But in Babirus's perception, he was already being cut at in turns by hundreds of the finest sword techniques, illusion and reality interwoven until real and false were indistinguishable. Every Slash intent felt utterly real, and even Babirus's thoughts slowed for an instant.

And in that instant, Amamiya Rin moved.