Not a single room could be skipped.
Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki headed for the restrooms on the first floor. They checked both the women's and the men's bathrooms. Since there was no one else in this paranormal space besides the two of them, there was no need to bother following certain rules.
As they passed the sinks, the chainsaw spirit suddenly crawled out of one of the mirrors. Fortunately, Red Hood arrived in time. Ice-blue mana gathered in her palm, and with the spell [Frozen Magic Bullet], she sealed the ambushing spirit inside a block of ice.
Taira no Masakado followed right behind her and smashed the ice imprisoning the chainsaw spirit to pieces with a single punch.
Watching Taira no Masakado shove the frozen chainsaw spirit into his mouth and crunch away at it in huge bites, Xu Fu could not help wondering... Were his teeth really that good? Did he not mind getting them chipped or frozen?
Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki searched the first-floor restrooms thoroughly, but found nothing. Still, neither of them felt discouraged. The police station was huge. They had never expected to find what they were after that quickly in the first place. There was also the chainsaw spirit, which kept jumping out to attack them from time to time.
After finishing with the bathrooms, the two of them headed for a nearby staircase to go up to the second floor. Suddenly, a hand shot up through the floor and grabbed Yayoi Hozuki by the ankle. In the next instant, the chainsaw spirit hoisted her upside down, with her feet in the air and her head hanging below.
Taira no Masakado burst out of the doll in an instant. His thick, knotted arms clamped down like iron vises on the arm the chainsaw spirit was using to hold Yayoi, and with a sickening rip, he tore it clean in two, flesh and bone alike, sending foul blood spraying everywhere.
Yayoi Hozuki hit the ground, but did not stop moving and immediately kept running forward. Taira no Masakado swallowed the chainsaw spirit's severed arm, roared, and threw himself into battle with it.
"You really can't let your guard down for even a second, can you?" Seeing Yayoi Hozuki catch up again so quickly, Xu Fu smiled as she said it.
At the turn in the stairwell, the spirit holding the chainsaw suddenly appeared in Xu Fu's blind spot and brought the bloodstained saw down.
At the critical moment, a bang rang out. Red Hood kicked through the window from outside and charged in, the Vorpal Sword in her hand carving six ultrafast flashes of sword-light that shredded the spirit's body in an instant.
Trusting Red Hood to handle things there, Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki passed through the stairwell and reached the second floor, continuing their search from room to room.
After the second floor came the third, then the fourth.
While searching the conference room on the fourth floor, they found that the chainsaw spirit had been hiding under the meeting table. And he had even been smart enough not to go after Xu Fu, whose senses were sharper, and instead targeted Yayoi Hozuki, who was relying on her eyes.
As a result, Yayoi Hozuki was caught off guard, and the chainsaw that suddenly shot out from beneath the table struck her feet.
Yayoi Hozuki's feet were perfectly fine.
But the feet of the alien doll had been severed.
Which meant that the alien doll serving as her katashiro, along with Taira no Masakado, had taken all the damage from that sneak attack in her place.
The Drake Sword came down and pierced straight through the meeting table, pinning the chainsaw spirit hidden underneath it in place and stopping him from continuing after Yayoi Hozuki.
At the same time, Red Hood activated [Helbreath Sword]. Blazing flames engulfed the conference table and the evil spirit under it alike. Creatures like these feared fire and lightning more than anything.
The conference room yielded nothing either. Xu Fu grabbed Yayoi Hozuki by the hand and hurried to the next location.
The two of them arrived at the interrogation room.
This time, Xu Fu did not start searching right away like before. Instead, she turned to look at Yayoi Hozuki.
"Are you tired? Do you need to rest a bit?"
The two of them had been dodging the spirit's pursuit while searching for the condition to clear the game, combing their way from the first floor all the way to the fourth without daring to stop for even a moment. If it had been Keitaro Gentoga and Eiko Hozuki, they would have been exhausted long ago. But Yayoi Hozuki merely shook her head expressionlessly.
"I'm not tired yet. We need to find a way out of this space as quickly as possible."
Yayoi Hozuki might be young, but her strength was downright inhuman. She could drag off Keitaro Gentoga, who was already a university student, with ease. She could even go into full windmill mode on a horizontal bar—once she scared an old man's dentures clean out of his mouth doing it.
Sometimes, when dealing with weaker evil spirits, Yayoi Hozuki did not even have the spirits she had subdued fight in her place. She would pick up a crowbar or a baseball bat and get into close combat herself. Anyone who underestimated her because of her appearance would pay dearly for it.
Even Xu Fu still could not quite understand why, once Yayoi Hozuki awakened her spiritual eyes, it was as if her mind and body had awakened too. Her thinking had sharpened, she had already taught herself everything up through middle school at such a young age, and her physical abilities had grown strong enough to overpower most adults.
Perhaps there was something extraordinary about Yayoi Hozuki's family to begin with. Otherwise, why would that "Kuubou" have chosen Yayoi Hozuki's mother in particular as the womb through which to be born?
They had already been to the interrogation room once. The moment the four of them arrived at the police station, the officers had taken them there to ask a few questions, and Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki had been let out early because their appearances were simply too deceptive.
"Found it~!"
Xu Fu happily pointed at the table in the interrogation room. Yayoi Hozuki saw it too—the bloodstained chainsaw sitting there on the tabletop.
Thick black qi, dense as spilled ink, was bubbling out between the chainsaw's teeth, like pus seeping from a festering wound. That resentment twisted and spread through the air, gradually staining the whole room. There was no telling how many living people and dead spirits this chainsaw had killed as a murder weapon.
"What do we do now?" Staring at the murder weapon on the table, Yayoi Hozuki found herself at a loss for a moment. "Are we supposed to destroy it?"
"Don't tell me we have to use this chainsaw to kill another person before we can get out? Thinking it was going to be It Takes Two, only to find out it's actually a betrayal game where only one person gets to leave? That'd be way too tasteless..."
Xu Fu studied the chainsaw on the table for a long while, then looked at Yayoi Hozuki.
"Want to try it?"
The instant she saw the look in Yayoi Hozuki's eyes turn strange, Xu Fu realized she had misunderstood.
"I meant try your idea—destroying this thing—not try my idea. I was just talking nonsense off the top of my head..."
Before Xu Fu could finish speaking, her eyes suddenly sharpened and swung back toward the chainsaw on the table.
The murder weapon had abruptly stopped spewing black qi. Instead, its teeth began spinning furiously in reverse, swallowing every bit of resentment that filled the room. Thick black qi gathered into a vortex above the saw's body, greedily sucking in all that sinister aura like a black hole.
Then an even more horrifying change followed.
Distorted flesh burst through the chainsaw's metal casing and grew outward, forming a torso and limbs. By the time the last thread of black qi had been devoured, the thing standing atop the table was a monster.
Its upper body was bare, showing compact, hardened muscle. It had a human shape, but its head and both hands were chainsaws spinning madly, every tooth smeared with blood that would never dry.
Looking at it, Xu Fu had the odd feeling she was staring at Chainsaw Man...
But the real Chainsaw Man was a devil, while the monster in front of her was an evil spirit. They were obviously not the same thing.
"....."
The chainsaw-shaped head muttered something under its breath, but with the engine roaring, Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki could not hear it clearly.
"Kill... kill you... kill every... last one of you...!"
There was no question about it—this "Chainsaw Man" was the same chainsaw spirit Red Hood and Taira no Masakado had already killed several times over.
Perhaps because it had been killed too many times, the spirit's fury had finally boiled over. Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki could both feel the monstrous hatred crashing over them.
As though it had no bones at all, its arms bent backward into a grotesque posture no living human could ever imitate. Its joints gave off a series of grating, teeth-setting sounds, while the chainsaw speed climbed even higher within that twisted pose.
The moment the movement finished, the dangerous aura around the evil spirit blasted past its limit like a volcano on the verge of eruption. Even the darkness in the room began trembling violently under that overwhelming pressure.
Realizing something, Xu Fu's pupils suddenly contracted.
"Oh no!"
The shriek of the spinning chainsaw reached its limit.
In an instant, the tables and chairs in the interrogation room, the iron door, the desk lamp—along with the windows in the corridor outside, the floors, walls, ceilings, the neighboring rooms, and the floors above and below—were all torn apart like paper. The roaring shockwave blasted straight through the police station.
Xu Fu grabbed Yayoi Hozuki's hand tightly, and the two of them fell from the fourth floor to the first together with the collapsing wreckage, only to be buried beneath the avalanche of broken concrete and steel bars that came pouring down after them.
And just like that, the protagonist was crushed to death under the rubble, and the novel came to an abrupt end...
As if that were ever going to happen.
Gritting her teeth against the pain that made it feel as though every bone in her body had been broken apart, Yayoi Hozuki forced her eyes open.
What she saw was Xu Fu's most treasured Yu Mei-ren Doll lifting the rubble above them with its slender little arms. It was impossible to understand by what logic something so tiny could move boulders so much larger than itself.
And then she saw Xu Fu herself.
One of Xu Fu's arms was gone, and a vicious wound ran from her right waist to her left ribs, nearly splitting her in two. Only the last scraps of flesh kept her body together. The blood-slicked wound was painful just to look at.
An injury like that would have killed anyone else several times over. But the one who was hurt was Xu Fu, which made all the difference. Before the Yu Mei-ren Doll above them had even finished clearing away the rubble, every wound on Xu Fu's body had already vanished. Even her clothes had returned to normal, as if she had never been hurt at all.
"Even though this kind of little injury is easy to heal, there's no getting around the pain... But if you couldn't feel pain at all, that would cause even bigger problems."
Muttering to herself, Xu Fu suddenly thought of Red Hood, who suffered from sensory loss, and Fujino Asagami, who could not feel pain.
Even though Xu Fu had protected her on the way down, Yayoi Hozuki had still been injured a little in the fall from that height. Xu Fu used Taoism Arts to heal her so it would not affect what came next.
"The way that evil spirit fights changed way too suddenly. It sped up so much I couldn't adjust in time..."
Xu Fu flexed the arm that had just been cut off, then touched the waist that had nearly been split open, her brows full of irritation.
That sudden shift in the spirit's fighting pattern had thrown off Xu Fu's rhythm. And Xu Fu's own Agility was only E-rank, the lowest rating. Without using magecraft or [Taoism Arts] to support herself, she had a hard time adapting to high-speed combat. On top of that, in that kind of chaos, she had to keep part of her attention on protecting Yayoi Hozuki. That was why she herself had taken several hits in that instant.
"But this time I'm ready for it. What happened before is absolutely not happening again!"
Xu Fu said that loudly enough that it was hard to tell whether she was saying it for Yayoi Hozuki's sake or her own.
Her voice echoed through the empty space—until it was drowned out by another, far more frenzied sound.
VRRRRRRRR—!!
The stench of blood spread through the air, and the atmosphere grew thick, as though they had sunk into a pool made entirely of blood.
The source of that revolting smell.
The source of that maddening chainsaw roar.
Both were above them.
The chainsaw spirit stood at the edge of the second floor. Through the huge hole torn open by the collapsed flooring, those blood-red, murderous eyes locked onto Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki amid the rubble below. The chainsaw engine thundered deafeningly, every jump in its revolutions sounding like a howl of bloodlust.
The wildly spinning teeth were its most primal language, the scream of metal on metal voicing its desire to tear its prey to pieces.
Before Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki's eyes, it slowly bent its knees, sinking lower. The muscles in its gray-blue legs tightened like twisted steel cables, veins bulging and throbbing beneath them... like a brutal leopard poised to rip out its prey's throat, gathering annihilating force in that last instant of stillness before it struck.
BOOM!
The sheer force of its kick shattered part of the second floor. The chainsaw spirit shot upward like a cannonball, hung for the briefest instant in midair with the chainsaws on its head and hands locked onto the target below—
then came hurtling down toward the rubble pile where Xu Fu and Yayoi Hozuki stood, trailing a shriek sharp enough to rip the air itself apart.
For some reason, Xu Fu suddenly remembered Afu's move from when he beat up Jackie Chan—"Meteor Destruction."
Instead of fleeing with Yayoi Hozuki, Xu Fu drew a breath and shouted at the top of her lungs,
"Help me, Red Hood!"
The instant the words left her mouth, a dazzling blade-light like a bolt of white silk tore open the darkness. The Vorpal Sword slammed head-on into the roaring chainsaw, and blinding sparks sprayed where the whirling teeth ground against the blade that had slaughtered evil dragons, lighting up Red Hood's cold face.
"Get away from Xu Fu!"