Amamiya Rin stepped onto the stairs and arrived at the second floor.
The corridor on the second floor was dim and lightless; nothing could be seen clearly.
However, he could hear.
The friction sound of heavy objects being dragged, and the dull thuds of collisions ringing out from time to time, came from the deepest part of the corridor.
Amamiya Rin walked over and stood outside a room door.
The sounds were coming from right inside here.
Amamiya Rin's left hand rested on the door handle.
However, it seemed to be locked from the inside; the door wouldn't open.
Amamiya Rin turned around, went downstairs, and returned to the entryway.
Takagi was still lying there. That single strike to the chin—had Amamiya Rin not controlled his force well—would have killed him thoroughly.
Rummaging through Takagi's clothes pockets, he quickly found a ring of keys.
Taking the keys, Amamiya Rin didn't immediately head to the second floor. Instead, he returned to the kitchen and found a spare lighter, as well as cooking wine and cooking oil.
Only then did he return to the second floor.
Placing the cooking wine and cooking oil at the top of the stairs, Amamiya Rin strode to the room at the deepest end of the corridor and tried the keys one by one.
Finally, the door opened.
The sight inside the room caused Amamiya Rin's pupils to shrink involuntarily, despite his mental preparation.
In the center of the room, two indescribable things were coiled up!
Their trunks were like meat worms magnified countless times, presenting uncomfortable spiral segments. The gray-white, mottled skin was covered in festering traces, and turbid liquid oozed from inside every fold.
At the very top of the trunk was a gigantic head. One could tell the head belonged to a female, but that was about all one could tell. The face had almost completely collapsed, covered everywhere with pitted sores and scars. The bulging eyeballs were like the dead eyes of a soaked fish, completely devoid of spirit.
What made one's scalp tingle the most was that the section between the meat-worm-like trunk and the gigantic head was composed of individual Tomie heads!
It was a body made of human heads, densely inlaid with countless faces—all of them were Kawakami Tomie!
Those faces varied in size; some were intact, some twisted, but all bore Tomie's characteristic beauty.
However, at this moment, they were solidified on the wriggling meat lump like reliefs. The expressions on those faces held a sense of numbness, lacking the rich emotions of a normal Tomie.
From both sides of the trunk, pairs of female arms and legs also protruded in malformed shapes!
The two monsters occupied most of the room's space. They slowly shifted their fat trunks, rubbing against the floor and emitting the sounds Amamiya Rin had heard from downstairs.
(...So ugly.)
Even within the [Tomie Network], a rare, brief silence occurred before thoughts carrying disgust rang out.
(Don't dawdle! Hurry up and burn that ugly monster!)
(That thing isn't something as simple as an imposter anymore. That kind of distorted freak can't even grow a normal body completely.)
(What is Teacher Takagi doing?)
(Although I don't care about experiments or whatever, isn't this too terrible?)
...
The Tomies ridiculed, complained, and urged. Faced with these two colossal Tomie aberrations, none of the Tomies could stand watching it.
"That face... seems not to be Kawakami Tomie. A victim used as an experimental subject?"
Amamiya Rin raised his head, gazing at that gigantic head. Although its original appearance could no longer be discerned, he could judge from the facial contours that it was not Tomie.
Males were skinned and placed in the refrigerator in the kitchen, while females were manufactured into monsters like this?
Just as Amamiya Rin was observing it, the pair of dead-fish-like eyes on the giant head rotated slightly. The turbid pupils seemed to focus on Amamiya Rin.
In the next moment, the fleshy torso beneath the giant head trembled violently. All the inlaid Tomie faces looked at Amamiya Rin simultaneously; though expressionless, the faces radiated a certain malice.
"I will set you all free."
Meeting the gaze of that gigantic head, a look of sorrow flowed through Amamiya Rin's eyes.
However, before his voice had even faded, that fat trunk slammed toward Amamiya Rin with extreme speed. Its posture was like a python, with countless arms and legs dancing madly, yet also like a giant wave of meat.
There was no reason for Amamiya Rin to clash head-on. His left foot retreated half a step, and his body leaned to the back-right with the momentum, narrowly letting the frontal charge pass.
The monster's trunk grazed past his sportswear, bringing a wind that rushed at his face.
In the instant they crossed paths, Amamiya Rin's left thumb had already pushed the sword guard forward slightly, while his right hand gripped the hilt simultaneously.
"Iaijutsu: Suigetsu!"
The sound of the wooden sword leaving the sheath was hurried and piercing. A sharp blade-light flashed past, chopping down onto a Tomie head on the side of the monster's trunk.
"Pfft!"
An accurate and ruthless strike sliced open the Tomie's face, a smear of blood dividing the visage in two.
The monster let out a howl of pain mixed with numerous female voices. It appeared that the perception of every Tomie was shared.
The dancing arms grabbed at Amamiya Rin. Having succeeded in one strike, Amamiya Rin did not linger in battle; he borrowed the force of drawing the blade to spin and retreat.
At the same time, the scabbard held in his left hand swept horizontally, using the sheath's body to parry a pale arm. The arm collided with the scabbard, making a dull sound. Although this monster's size was huge, the strength of the arm was not very great, allowing Amamiya Rin to easily block it with the scabbard.
The other monster also launched an assault. A slender arm struck from the side, grabbing at Amamiya Rin's neck.
Amamiya Rin's footsteps did not stop; he continued to retreat. The wooden sword in his right hand changed direction mid-withdrawal, the blade slamming fiercely onto that wrist.
"Crack!"
Accompanied by the crisp sound of bone cracking, that arm hung down limply.
Both monsters had been wounded in succession. They twisted their massive bodies in pain, their movements clumsy yet ferocious, crashing toward Amamiya Rin in a pincer attack from left and right. Their massive sizes almost blocked off all space available for dodging.
Amamiya Rin's gaze sharpened, and he immediately entered a deeper combat state. The synchronization of the Crimson Lotus Breathing pulled all the other Tomies in. The power transmitted through the neural lines drastically boosted Amamiya Rin's neural reaction speed, and his senses became even keener.
He could clearly hear the sound of mucus dripping from the monsters, smell that odor mixed with rot and blood, and see the wriggling of every muscle on the monsters' bodies even more clearly.
At the moment the two monsters were about to crash over, Amamiya Rin advanced instead of retreating. He suddenly ducked and slid forward, drilling through the gap between the monsters' trunks—a gap so narrow it couldn't be narrower.
The foul stench filled Amamiya Rin's nasal cavity as countless pale arms grabbed at him from both sides.
His right hand slashed horizontally with the wooden sword, cleaving the wrist grabbing at his face from the right, while his left hand parried with the scabbard, jarring away the arm attacking from the left.
____
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