"Did you, really?"
Amamiya Rin thought back carefully over his past, then shook his head.
"No, nothing like that. Both times — the Vampire and Kayako — I only found out what I was dealing with after the fact. If I'd known ahead of time I was about to run into a Vampire or Kayako, I absolutely would not have gotten involved."
Facing Tomie's gaze — thick with suspicion, indignation, and wounded pride — Amamiya Rin cradled her head in his left hand, pressed his right hand to his chest, and swore it on his life.
"Really?" Tomie asked, still skeptical.
"Scout's honor."
Amamiya Rin held her gaze with an expression of pure, earnest sincerity. That focused, guileless look slowly dissolved the suspicion in Tomie's eyes.
"Fine. You're a bit of an idiot, but you're not a complete moron, I suppose."
Tomie conceded the point, though her tongue remained as sharp as ever.
Her eyes drifted to her own body. The severed edge of her neck had already begun to knit flesh — at most another hour, and a new head would have fully grown back.
The thought did nothing to improve her mood.
Amamiya Rin didn't bother arguing with her. He weighed the still-fuming head in his hand, then glanced over at the headless body beside him — which had already hauled itself upright and was now lurching around like a chicken with its head cut off. He made a decision: he gathered Tomie's long black hair and looped it once around his own neck, tying it off in a loose knot.
Within moments, Tomie's head was hanging against Amamiya Rin's chest like an uncannily lifelike human-head prop.
Then, steadying Tomie's headless body with one hand, he walked back the way they had come, at an unhurried pace.
The Kawabe family's front door was ajar, left open a crack.
Amamiya Rin shouldered it open and maneuvered himself inside with some difficulty.
In the living room, Kawabe Mayo was sitting on the sofa, holding a cup of barley tea that had long since gone cold, staring at nothing, a shadow of unshakeable melancholy settled across her brow.
"Amamiya-kun…?"
At the sound of movement, Kawabe Mayo instinctively turned her head.
Her gaze landed on Amamiya Rin first, then drifted naturally toward the figure beside him — and…hm?
She stared. Standing next to Amamiya Rin appeared to be a woman with a very fine figure, but…where was her head?
Kawabe Mayo blinked, and her eyes traveled to Amamiya Rin's chest — where a beautiful face looked back at her, eyes bright and alive, wearing an expression of effortless superiority.
"Oh right, the head is — right there——! Why is the head there?"
Kawabe Mayo murmured it to herself in dawning realization, and then, midway through the sentence, her pupils blew wide.
She had assumed she was simply exhausted from everything surrounding her sister, combined with the late hour playing tricks on her eyes — a double image, a hallucination. She scrubbed at her dry, tired eyes and looked again.
Nothing had changed.
Not a double image. Not a hallucination.
There was, without question, a headless female body standing beside Amamiya Rin. And hanging from his chest was, without question, a living, breathing human head. Its long black hair was wound around Amamiya Rin's neck.
Even having lived through something as far beyond the pale as having her own skin peeled off and replaced, the sheer visceral shock of the scene in front of her blanked Kawabe Mayo's mind for a full second.
She sucked in a sharp breath. Her body jerked backward instinctively, slamming into the sofa cushions. The cup in her hand nearly flew free — tea sloshed out and soaked the front of her clothes.
"Wh — what is — ?"
Kawabe Mayo's voice wavered. Her eyes moved back and forth between Amamiya Rin, the headless body, and the severed head, completely unable to make sense of what she was seeing.
Even if she wanted to reach for the simple explanation that Amamiya Rin had gone out and dismembered someone, the bodiless head and the headless body both radiated a vitality that was difficult to describe — like a chicken that keeps flopping around after the axe comes down. There was clearly something very much alive going on.
"She's a friend of mine. She came to help and got her head cut off by the enemy. I'm going to leave her here to rest for a bit while I go out and look for Mrs. Kawabe."
Amamiya Rin said it plainly.
Kawabe Mayo stared at him blankly.
What kind of answer was that?
It sounded like he'd explained everything and yet explained absolutely nothing. Wasn't a more thorough clarification in order?
Amamiya Rin didn't think so.
Kawabe Mayo had had her own skin peeled off and lived without it, going about her life normally. Living with one's head separated from one's body seemed, in the grand scheme of things, not so different. She wasn't going to make a big scene over Tomie's condition, so there was no need to spell it all out.
He left Kawakami Tomie's head and body behind and turned to go, first retrieving the sword bag and two canes he'd abandoned against the wall earlier.
Then, following the instinct that had tugged at him during his pursuit of the Slit-Mouthed Woman — a sense that something had been off — he circled into the narrow alley beside the building.
At the far end of the alley, deep in the pooled shadows, Amamiya Rin saw it in the moonlight: a wash of red.
He walked quickly toward it. It was a body in a coat, the front hanging wide open, headless and skinless — what lay exposed to Amamiya Rin's eyes was raw red muscle, stripped so clean there wasn't even a trace of fat.
"…The Slit-Mouthed Woman's work?"
Amamiya Rin crouched down to examine it.
Apart from the lethal wound at the neck, the body bore no other obvious injuries. The clean, straight cut at the neck was unmistakably the work of the Slit-Mouthed Woman's scissors.
"What a…pointless way to go."
Amamiya Rin exhaled a quiet sigh.
He hadn't expected the flesh-toned monster to meet such a grim end.
Still…for Kawabe Mayo and little Riki, their mother's death was not the best possible outcome. But it wasn't the worst, either.
---
Kawabe residence. Living room.
Kawabe Mayo stood awkwardly in front of the sofa, staring at Tomie's head, which Amamiya Rin had set on the coffee table.
"Hey. You."
Tomie's beautiful eyes slid sideways to fix on Kawabe Mayo, her tone carrying the absolute authority of someone who had never once questioned their right to give orders.
"Pick me up and put me on the sofa, then bring me some decent snacks and tea. What are you standing there spacing out for? Don't you know the first thing about hospitality?"
"Ah — yes, I'm so sorry!"
Kawabe Mayo snapped out of her daze and scrambled to comply, lifting Tomie's head from the coffee table to the sofa, then hurrying to the kitchen. She came back with a plate of dorayaki and a freshly brewed pot of plain hojicha, which she set on the coffee table.
"Here you are."
Tomie's critical gaze swept over the dorayaki and the teacup. Her beautiful brows drew together immediately, and a look of undisguised disgust spread across her face.
"Excuse me? This is what you're serving me? Convenience store trash? Is this a joke? Is this how little you think of me? I came here to help! I got my head cut off for you! And this is what I get — you shameless, plain-faced little wretch!"
Tomie's voice went sharp and cutting.
"I want Toraya's finest yokan! And the tea had better be gyokuro at minimum! Move it!"
Kawabe Mayo's cheeks burned under Tomie's merciless tongue-lashing. She stood there frozen, mortified and utterly at a loss for what to do.
____
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