The preparatory phase was over. Now came the pain.
The moment the pressurization training began, time seemed to stretch to ten times its normal length.
By the time it ended, every last inch of Amamiya Rin's muscles was trembling violently. For a stretch of time he could barely feel his own limbs — he didn't have the strength to so much as twitch a finger.
His vision blurred at the edges. His ears rang with a low, persistent drone. Only his heart still moved, beating heavily and slowly in his chest, each pump sending a dull, distended ache radiating through every blood vessel in his body.
"Hey. Are you even going to make it?"
The words — humiliating, by any man's measure — sounded close to his ear. A pair of strong, capable arms slid in beneath him, one under his armpits and one under his knees, and Amamiya Rin was lifted clean off the ground.
Kawakami Tomie had already been through five rounds of pressurization. With her absurd regenerative power and a tolerance for pain that ranked among the best in the world, she had adapted to the after-effects with casual ease.
Amamiya Rin had no strength left to argue. Thinking was difficult enough on its own.
His face was pale, his lips drained of color. His eyelids drooped half-shut. It was willpower alone keeping him from surrendering to the exhaustion and the pain and simply blacking out.
In full view of everyone present, Kawakami Tomie carried Amamiya Rin toward the gym exit with a sure, unhurried stride. The other members still catching their breath couldn't help but look over — and what crossed their faces was unmistakably envy.
"I'm so jealous!"
"She still has the energy to carry the new guy out of here? That's insane!"
"Her muscles are gorgeous!"
"When am I ever going to build strength like that?"
"Her physical talent is something else entirely!"
The members murmured among themselves, their admiring gazes drifting over the arms and calves Kawakami Tomie was using to carry Amamiya Rin.
Even the Coach and the senior members wore looks of genuine surprise. Tomie hadn't been here long — but the ability she had already put on display surpassed every other member of the Drink Sports Club.
"She might be the one who lasts longest under my training philosophy," the Coach said to no one in particular.
He stood with his arms folded across his chest, watching Kawakami Tomie carry her charge steadily out the door, a grin splitting his face to reveal teeth stained tobacco-yellow, his eyes lit with a fierce, hungry excitement.
Kawakami Tomie paid no attention to the stares at her back. She carried Amamiya Rin out of the gym and into the unfiltered blaze of the afternoon sun, which hit him hard enough that he instinctively squeezed his eyes shut — but free of the gym's layered atmosphere of metal, ozone, and invisible pressure, his body felt, if only fractionally, lighter.
Tomie walked straight to the jeep parked at the roadside and fished the keys from Amamiya Rin's pocket. She freed one hand to pull open the rear door, then laid him down across the back seat, flat on his back.
The moment he made contact with the relative softness of the car seat, the taut wire holding Amamiya Rin's nerves together slackened — just slightly.
A deeper, heavier exhaustion came flooding in, threatening to swallow him whole.
Amamiya Rin bit down on the tip of his tongue. The taste of iron spread through his mouth. He used the sharp sting to keep himself conscious.
Tomie shut the rear door, then walked around and dropped into the driver's seat. She buckled her seatbelt, started the engine — all of it practiced and smooth. The engine turned over, and cool air began to flow from the vents.
The jeep pulled out steadily into the traffic of the early afternoon, merging into the flow of cars heading toward the upscale apartment building in the Setagaya area.
A short while later, Kawakami Tomie carried Amamiya Rin up and into the apartment.
She pushed open the door to find the living room already fairly lively.
On the sofa sat the Tomie who had set her sights on becoming a Vampire, legs crossed, leafing through a thick hardcover book. Its cover bore faded gilt Latin lettering — the black magic grimoire seized from Kawahara Miyuki. At the sound of the door, she looked up, her gaze swept across Amamiya Rin, and then landed on Kawakami Tomie carrying him in. Her mouth immediately pulled into a scowl.
Spread across the carpet was a large piece of dark waterproof tarpaulin, covered in an assortment of strange objects.
The most conspicuous was a brutish-looking rifle.
It appeared to have been assembled by force from various salvaged components: a seamless steel pipe serving as the barrel, wrapped tightly on the outside with coils of rough copper wire that connected to several capacitor banks bundled together with electrical tape and cable, trailing two thick wires at the rear that led to a pair of car batteries set side by side.
The entire device was bare metal and exposed coil, without a single piece of casing, radiating the unmistakable danger of something that could detonate at any moment.
Beside it lay a shotgun that was also clearly hand-assembled, several glass bottles filled with murky liquid, a few irregularly-shaped improvised explosive devices, and some loose ammunition.
Another Tomie sat nearby, polishing a handgun with a soft cloth. At the sound of the door opening, she snatched up the rifle and leveled the muzzle directly at Kawakami Tomie. Her finger rested on the trigger. A cold, provocative smirk curved her lips.
Kawakami Tomie looked right through the hostility of these two impostors. The one pointing the rifle at her received nothing but contempt.
She set Amamiya Rin down against the wall, making sure he was steady, then turned to face the armed Tomie. Her voice carried the absolute certainty of someone who had already calculated the outcome.
"Beyond seven paces, the gun wins. Within seven paces, I guarantee you won't get that trigger pulled in time."
"Wrong! Within seven paces, the gun is both fast and accurate!"
HMMM——!
The moment Armaments Tomie's words left her mouth, a low, urgent electrical hum tore through the air. The capacitor banks along the rifle's body blazed to life with arcs of dangerous electric blue. The coils wrapped around the barrel flared bright!
BANG!!!
Not the crack of gunpowder. Something sharper — the sound of a high-velocity object ripping through the air itself.
A blurred grey streak exploded from the muzzle and screamed toward Flesh-Mod Tomie's face.
In the space between lightning and thunder, Flesh-Mod Tomie moved.
Her center of gravity dropped in an instant. Knees bent. Her entire upper body swung like a pendulum — pivoting on her spine — and snapped violently to the lower left.
The steel ball screamed past, grazing the tips of her whipping hair. The shockwave raked across her temple, even shearing through a single strand, leaving a thin red line across her earlobe.
And she didn't pause for even a fraction of a second.
The momentum of the dodge hadn't even finished before the right foot she'd planted into the floor detonated with full force.
The solid muscle of her calf bulged violently, straining the fabric of her athletic shorts taut.
The carpet beneath her feet let out a sound like something tearing under unbearable strain — and Flesh-Mod Tomie's figure became a cannonball, the distance between them erased in an instant.
Armaments Tomie's pupils contracted to pinpoints. She tried to react. Too late.
Flesh-Mod Tomie was already in front of her. The ball of her front foot hit the ground, killing her momentum. Her rear foot slammed down immediately after, locking her center of gravity solid as bedrock.
More terrifying still: throughout all of this, her right fist — her entire right arm — had begun a transformation that was horrifying to witness with the naked eye.
The bicep and forearm muscles, already sharply defined, inflated like something was being pumped inside them — or more accurately, layered. Stacked. The muscle fibers beneath the skin writhed and churned, the color deepening rapidly, the texture hardening until it resembled the dense, knotted heartwood of an ancient tree. Across the surface of the fist, a layer of grey-white dense keratinous material proliferated wildly.
In the span of a single breath, it had formed a bone-armored fist — twice the size of a normal human's, all jagged angles, brutal geometry — a battering ram of flesh and bone.
____
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